The upcoming wedding between reality-show star Erica Long (Gabrielle Union) and Andre Allen (Chris Rock) is more demanding than the comedian expects in TOP FIVE.
TOP FIVE (Chris Rock, 2014)
Opened December 12
www.topfivemovie.com
Comedian Chris Rock finds his cinematic groove in Top Five, which serves as his own Stardust Memories. The South Carolina-born, Brooklyn-raised superstar comedian wrote, directed, and stars in the film, about a superstar New York comedian who wants to be taken seriously. The film opens with Andre Allen (a very solid Rock) being interviewed by Charlie Rose about his latest movie, Uprize!, a Haitian slave-revolt epic in which Allen plays the heroic Dutty Boukman. Allen is not afraid that his portrayal of Boukman, who helps kill tens of thousands of white people, will alienate his fan base, who adore him because of his outrageous Hammy the Bear series of cop comedies. Allen then meets up with New York Times journalist Chelsea Brown (Rosario Dawson), who is profiling him for the paper, following him around on Uprize!’s opening day. She goes with Allen as he does radio promos and visits with friends and family, including his father (Ben Vereen), ex-girlfriend Vanessa (Sherri Shepherd), and old neighborhood friends Lisa (Leslie Jones) and Fred (Tracy Morgan). Always at his side is his trusted best friend and bodyguard, Silk (a riotous J. B. Smoove), who watches out for the star when he’s not looking for some tail for himself. Meanwhile, Allen is getting ready to marry Erica Long (Gabrielle Union), a reality-show star, which means their relationship and upcoming wedding has become a spectacle for all the world to see. At first Allen is hesitant to talk to journalist Brown, but soon he is opening up to her, including discussing his alcoholism and his low point, a hysterical flashback to a drug-and-booze-crazed stop in Houston with Jazzy Dee (Cedric the Entertainer), a boisterous dude who claims to be the man to know in the city. But as Allen continues trudging through his past and imagining his future, he has some heavy thinking to do.
Andre Allen (Chris Rock) and journalist Chelsea Brown (Rosario Dawson) look for the real thing in TOP FIVE
Rock takes a huge step forward with Top Five, following 2003’s Head of State and 2005’s I Think I Love My Wife, which he also directed and starred in and cowrote. Top Five is a well-paced mix of comedy and drama, smoothly transitioning from serious moments to outrageous hilarity, particularly when Brown relates a Borat-worthy story about sex with her boyfriend (Anders Holm). New York City native Dawson (Kids, Sin City) gives a career-redefining performance as Brown, displaying a broader range than ever before, while Pootie Tang survivor Smoove proves a worthy sidekick to Rock. The film features a constant stream of comedy cameos, reaching its apex with a surprise trio in a strip club, and has a killer soundtrack, which should come as no surprise since Jay Z and Kanye West are among the producers and Questlove served as the executive music producer and co-composer. (The title itself relates to music, as throughout the film Allen asks people to name their top five favorite musicians.) At the center of it all is Rock, who ably walks that fine line between fiction and reality so often trod by writer, director, actor, and stand-up comedian Woody Allen. (Is Rock’s choice of last name in the film merely coincidental? And, like the Woodman, Rock’s personal life is hitting the tabloids, as he just announced he and his wife of nearly twenty years are divorcing.) Rock, who boosted his acting chops while starring on Broadway in Stephen Adly Guirgis’s The Motherf**cker with the Hat a few years ago, is excellent as Andre Allen, smiling that sly Guy Fawkes smile while reaching deep to evoke heartbreak and sadness. It’s a poignant performance in a film that is not afraid to take chances, much like its creator.
Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida is one of the most gorgeously photographed, beautifully told films of the young century. The international festival favorite and shortlisted Foreign Language Oscar contender is set in Poland in 1962, as eighteen-year-old novitiate Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) is preparing to become a nun and dedicate her life to Christ. But the Mother Superior (Halina Skoczyńska) tells Anna, an orphan who was raised in the convent, that she actually has a living relative, an aunt whom she should visit before taking her vows. So Anna sets off by herself to see her aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza), a drinking, smoking, sexually promiscuous, and deeply bitter woman who explains to Ida that her real name is Ida Lebenstein and that she is in fact Jewish — and then reveals what happened to her family. Soon Ida, Wanda, and hitchhiking jazz saxophonist Dawid Ogrodnik are on their way to discovering some unsettling truths about the past.
The most infamous film of 2014 was released in theaters on Christmas after all, following the embarrassing hacking of Sony’s servers and George Clooney and the president sharing their opinions about violent threats from North Korea over a movie — and a stupid movie, at that. But as it turns out, The Interview is stupid fun, even if it does lose its way amid the bizarre absurdity of its final scenes. James Franco — we’re sorry, but we still can’t get enough of him — stars as superbly sycophantic celebrity talk show host Dave Skylark, who just happens to be one of reclusive North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un’s (Randall Park) personal favorites. So Skylark’s best friend and producer, Aaron Rapoport (Rogen), sets up a live interview with Kim, agreeing to the leader’s rigidly controlled set of conditions delivered by his gorgeous security chief, Sook (Diana Bang). When the CIA hears about the interview, they send agent Lacey (Lizzy Caplan) to convince Skylark and Rapoport that they must assassinate Kim for the good of the world. But their best-laid plans go awry when Kim charms Skylark as they embark on a brief bromance that threatens the bromance that already exists between Dave and Aaron. Codirected by Rogen and Goldberg, whose collaborations have also included Superbad, Pineapple Express, This Is the End, and other hits and misses, and written by first-time screenwriter Dan Sterling (The Office, King of the Hill), The Interview is, for the most part, a very funny, extremely juvenile comedy that never misses a chance to make a butt joke. With a little bit of Stripes here, a splash of Spies Like Us there, it follows in the tradition of crazy lowbrow military comedies that eventually go off the deep end but contain more than their fair share of laugh-out-loud silliness. Franco and Rogen, who have been working together since the days of the great Freaks and Geeks, are so much fun to watch as a duo that things don’t completely fall apart even when the script lets them down. Oh, and meanwhile, Eminem comes out of the closet, Rob Lowe reveals a frightening secret, and other celebrities show up as themselves in this bromantic comedy that nearly started WWIII.
Unbroken, Angelina Jolie’s second film as director (following In the Land of Blood and Honey), attempts to set itself apart from other real-life dramas right from the start; while other movies claim to be “based on a true story” or “inspired by actual events,” Unbroken boldly, and very clearly, declares itself to be “a true story.” The old-fashioned WWII movie tells the story of Louis “Louie” Zamperini, a troubled kid (first C. J. Valleroy, then Jack O’Connell) who drinks, smokes, and gets in trouble with the law until his life turns around when his brother, Pete (first John D’Leo, then Alex Russell), helps train him to become an Olympic runner. But duty calls, and Louie enlists in the air force. His plane is shot down over the Pacific Ocean, leaving him, Russell “Phil” Phillips (Anna Karenina’s Domhnall Gleeson), and Francis “Mac” McNamara (American Horror Story’s Finn Wittrock) adrift on a pair of life rafts, surrounded by sharks. Later, Zamperini is captured and taken to a POW camp run by the sadistic Mutsuhiro “the Bird” Watanabe (Japanese rock star Miyavi), who decides to make the Olympian his personal punching bag, brutalizing him every chance he gets, daring him to give up, but Zamperini isn’t about to give him the satisfaction.