Christopher Schroeder

Category: community and culture

  • Perhaps It Pays

    CRIME 101, which has received generally positive reviews, is a search for meaning story confined within a crime caper.

    Serial jewelry thief Mike / James Davis (Chris Hemsworth) has rules for his robberies, which he hopes will enable him to amass a predetermined amount of money to compensate for his childhood poverty. He is pursued by Lou Lebesnick (Mark Ruffalo), a seasoned detective who cannot convince his colleagues of the connections among the robberies he is investigating.

    These rules explain why Mike cancels his next planned heist, which his fence Money (Nick Nolte) then shares with Ormon (Barry Keoghan). For his next job, Mike needs the assistance of a high-end insurance broker named Sharon (Halle Berry), who feels unappreciated by her boss, especially as she ages.

    Mike proposes a dinner date about to Maya (Monica Barbaro) after she crashes her boss’s car at a stoplight into his. Meanwhile, Lou, who has separated from his wife Angie (Jennifer Jason Leigh), is suspended after he refuses to support the false account of another officer’s shooting of an unarmed suspect.

    Sharon agrees give Mike insider information but after being assaulted by Ormon turns to Lou, whom she has encountered as a part of his investigation. Lou disrupts Mike’s latest robbery but is surprised by the unexpected arrival of Ormon, who shoots one victim and threatens to shoot Lou, and is then shot and killed by Mike.

    Lou offers Mike a cover story, and convinces him to run and the victims to cooperate, and he swaps fake diamonds from one of Mike’s previous robberies for the real ones, which he gives to Sharon for a new life. Lou later discovers the vintage car he has been left by Mike before audiences then learn Maya receives one of Mike’s childhood photos, which seems to be his way of asking for a second chance.

    Adapter and director Bart Layton more or less manages the crime thriller conventions and conveys a complicated plot although he needs a lengthy run time to do so. His efforts are supported by mostly convincing performances from the lead actors.

    The more impressive accomplishment would have been succeeding at the search for meaning story at the center of this movie. This story, in a more compelling script, could have clarified the connection between Mike and Lou and even them to Sharon and perhaps even Lou’s wife Angie.

    The biggest obstacle seems to be the character development. Lou seems underdeveloped, but Sharon is probably too two-dimensional. More development of both could have tipped the balance, and shifted the focus from remunerative illegal activity to the challenges of finding meaning in life.

    Lou and Sharon attempted to work within established norms but ultimately reject these, and Mike, who had rejected these norm and manages to escape, only does so at Lou’s mercy. Lou’s moral maturation also benefits Sharon directly, and indirectly even himself.

    Such an interpretation suggests that Lou is the center of the underlying story. As it is, the focus is somewhat unclear, and makes this movie at most a semi-satisfying crime caper.

    The challenges are an already long running time, which has previously been mentioned, and the limits of Hemsworth’s capacity. Would audiences have engaged even longer? Could he contribute to a more emotionally complex story?

    These unanswered questions mean that audiences cannot answer the one suggested by the title — does crime in fact pay? An affirmative answer, which this movie seems to suggest, could require a crime introduction course, or least make it an appealing elective.

  • More Than That Please

    I saw Send Help, which is more aptly titled than I realized.

    Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams), who is a useful and reliable if also awkward employee, has been promised a VP promotion by the CEO who has recently deceased. This promise, which was known to other senior employees, is broken by the CEO’s son Bradly Preston (Dylan O’Brien), who assumes his father’s position.

    The company needs help however with a merger, so Linda is asked to accompany these senior employees and the new CEO on a trip to Bangkok. She can according to Bradley teach his former frat bro Donovan (Xavier Samuel) what she knows and then be reassigned from their corporate headquarters to a satellite location.

    Linda is drafting a merger memo on the flight while Donovan plays her survivalist reality show video application for the rest of the group. She eventually realizes why they’re laughing and then deletes her draft just before the plane in an unexpectedly graphic scene begins to disintegrate after an explosion and crashes, and sinks, into the ocean.

    The only other survivor besides Linda is an injured Bradley, whom Linda rescues and helps recover. Her survivalist hobby obviously becomes relevant, and affords her an advantage, as does later her former marriage to an abusive husband whose death she stopped preventing.

    Linda, who cannot save Bradley from a two-dimensional caricature, ostensibly develops her heretofore type character with this account of her part in her late husband’s demise, which could influence the last third of the movie but remains underdeveloped at best. As a result, it seems like an add-on, or an empty gesture in this survivalist horror thriller, which is how it is described.

    Linda’s motivation remains a mess even at its end. Why would she sabotage their rescue even if she was relying on the resort home she had discovered? And could the conclusion reinforce an impression that she has parlayed her time stranded on this island into the self-serving career that she despised, and we presumably are to despise, in Bradley and his bros?

    Critical consensus nonetheless is quite positive. More than 260 offer sufficiently positive reviews for example to earn it a Rotten Tomatoes certified fresh film status. Those who recommend it consistently cite the director Sam Raimi, the entertainment value of this movie, and its professional validation for those with bad bosses in their generally positive reviews.

    Surely these reviewers, and the industry, think more of audiences. Or maybe that explains why the movie menu is so often filled with so little appealing.

    We need more than that.

  • No Holiday For Me

    Chicago theater critics seem more entertained by Holiday, which has been extended reportedly by popular demand than I was.

    This Goodman Theatre production is a “contemporary adaptation” of a 1928 “classic play” by Philip Berry that had also been twice adapted into movies, including a second in 1938 with Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant. This version, which was adapted by the late Richard Greenberg and is directed by Robert Falls, has been billed as a romantic comedy but is neither passionate nor amusing.

    Julia Kincaid (Molly Griggs) and Johnny Case (Luigi Sottile), two otherwise cautious people who meet at a no-cell phone retreat, decide to marry allegedly before Johnny realizes that Julia is a wealthy Seton, and that he already knows her siblings Linda (Bryce Gangel) and Ned (Wesley Taylor). Julia’s widower father Ed (Jordan Lage) after having Johnny investigated invites him into the family banking business.

    Julia, who is like her father, is intent upon becoming a successful businessperson and launching her own product line. Linda in contrast is still mourning their mother’s death, and Ned’s self-destructive behavior, whom she hopes to rescue.

    Julia thinks she is marrying a similarly committed professional, yet discovers that her fiancé is searching for meaning. Meanwhile, Linda and he connect, and when he cannot compromise his plan run off together once Ned has convinced her to chase her own happiness and leave him in their family home.

    The plot has all the conventions of a romantic comedy. The characters however are unconvincing in their attraction, and the performances are rarely more than amusing. The problem in part is the script although the actors seemed to be still searching for their characters.

    The set (Walt Spangler) and costumes (Kaye Voyce) were appealing but not noteworthy, especially given the budget. Other elements, such as the more current music selections and even a virtual assistant appearance, seemed jarring and out of place.

    Chicago critics generally praise production primarily in terms of the adaptation as if it alone is sufficient reason to see it. This version might have shifted the focus as one critic suggests from Johnny to the siblings, but it never sells the central romances among Julia, Linda, and him, which even this critic acknowledges.

    Moreover, it cannot get to its central themes, which are worthwhile, if it does not offer a plausible premise, Why would these characters, who otherwise conduct online searches for other information or even speak smart speakers into streaming music, not in fact know more about the people to whom they’ve pledged to devote their lives, and their fortunes, for the foreseeable future?

    I’m not suggesting that attending this performance was an awful experience, and actually did want to see more of the central question. This same critic thinks it’s the “essential paradox” of “the adult children of the American urban rich.” I however believe that it’s the amount of money that is too little, too much, and just right.

    In this, Julia and Johnny disagree. Johnny wants enough, but Linda wants as much as she can get. As such, these two characters represent a challenge within the dominant economic in the West, and most of the world, a system that has never achieved its potential for most and yet is ruining the environment for all.

    This debate is lost in the muddled mess that is this production at least when I saw it. As a result, its extension surprised me until I wondered whether it might be a way of eliciting desire in more people to see it.

    Chicago theater might be struggling in ways that are different now than usual. Still, its critics aren’t helping matters when they won’t offer more forthright accounts even when they’re writing about a late playwright, an accomplished director, and a mainstage of this scene.