Blu-ray Review: Parkland (2013)

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When Parkland Hospital received word that President John F. Kennedy was being transported to their ER on November 22, 1963 – less than an hour after he’d arrived in Dallas, Texas – their first assumption was that the commander-in-chief had become the victim of flu season.

It was only after they were greeted by the sight of the First Lady’s blood-spattered pink suit, frenzied Secret Service agents and the near lifeless body of the nation’s leader that the young residents and nurses covering the ER’s lunch shift realized that the president was the victim of an assassin’s bullet rather than a virus.

 

Reliving that traumatic day from the points-of-view of the men and women who were there, we’re given a thorough docudrama styled account of one of the most covered events in United States history.

Pushing aside conspiracy theories of Oliver Stone proportion along with the melodramatic approaches often utilized in small screen miniseries biopic treatments of the Kennedy family in favor of a heavily researched, fact-based account, writer/director Peter Landesman adapted the ambitious Parkland from Four Days in November, the shorter publication of Vincent Bugliosi’s Edgar Award winning nonfiction work, Reclaiming History.

 

And in doing so, Landesman manages to put us right in the midst of the chaos, taking advantage of the ensemble drama’s natural tendency to draw us into the action like flies-on-the-wall while we listen in, weighing the moral, ethical and humanistic dilemmas faced by the characters onscreen.

In addition to the bravura, emotionally exhausting opener that transports us to the titular trauma room as the young doctors on staff struggle to revive the president, we’re placed in the shoes of Dallas businessman Abraham Zapruder (Paul Giamatti), who unwittingly captures the shocking murder on his 8mm film camera and is then placed in the unenviable position of deciding what to do with the footage.

 

While adding up the facts to identify who pulled the trigger, we’re brought to FBI’s local office where Special Agent James Hosty (Ron Livingston) is horrified by the realization that the man he’d been personally tracking for eighteen months on a hunch – Lee Harvey Oswald (Jeremy Strong) – may indeed have been the one who fired the fatal shot.

Never judging its characters' actions directly, Landesman leaves the viewer to decide right from wrong, painting an admirably objective portrait of four shocking days in November, bringing us into the confidences and conversations of citizens that hadn’t yet been captured onscreen in other accounts.

And perhaps this is most effective in the characterization of the hardworking family man Robert Lee Oswald (James Badge Dale), who is utterly appalled and taken aback to learn that his very own brother is responsible for the death of the beloved figure.

 

Thoroughly engrossing despite its surprisingly short running time of just eighty-seven minutes, while admittedly a few of the G-men and Secret Service agents blur together without the benefit of adequate screen-time to separate the sea of suits and set them apart in order for their words and actions to have the maximum dramatic impact, it’s a minor flaw in an otherwise mostly faultless film.

Though it’s light on bonus features save for deleted scenes and filmmaker commentary, the work, which is reminiscent of an HBO original movie and fittingly produced by Playtone’s "Band of Brothers" in the form of Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman and Bill Paxton, is transferred with razor-sharp clarity for its Blu-ray debut to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.

Emotionally charged and endlessly eye-opening with the benefit of excellent casting to make some of the underwritten individuals instantly more three-dimensional, Parkland depicts unexpected profiles of courage of otherwise ordinary men and women over the course of four extraordinary days.   

Text ©2013, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Blu-ray Review: Planes (2013)

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Related Review:
Planes: Fire and Rescue (2014)

Alternate Title: World of Cars: Disney's Planes; Disney's Planes

Infusing the film with personal touches to honor the wartime heroics of his long-passed Navy flyer father, it’s safe to say that director Klay Hall’s “World of Cars” spin-off Planes is a labor of love.

And in easily the strongest bonus feature included in the Blu-ray Combo Pack of Disney’s latest new release, Hall’s infectious enthusiasm, vast knowledge of the subject and obvious passion for planes shines through. It’s just a shame that the movie itself isn’t nearly as engrossing as the anecdotes he shares onscreen while touring a plane museum with his sons.

 

Originally slated to revolve around trains and make its cinematic debut as a direct-to-disc feature before it was transferred into 3D and released on the big screen to cash in on the blockbuster summer box-office, Planes’s overwhelming familiarity and strict adherence to the underdog formula employed in so many of the studio’s features ensures a bumpy ride.

The first of a planned trilogy, while fortunately it can only improve as the series continues, unfortunately the first impression we’re left with for Planes is that it’s a virtually recycled retread of the Pixar smash which inspired it – Cars.

 

Additionally hindered by the fact that it bowed onscreen mere months after the release of DreamWorks Animation and Twentieth Century Fox’s vastly superior, topically similar underdog racer movie Turbo While the allure of Disney ensured a much bigger success given the company’s amazing track record, the novelty of Planes’s plot was lost on those who’d already seen Turbo.

Centering on a likable crop duster aptly named Dusty (voiced by Dane Cook) who longs to compete in the Wings Around the World Rally despite a serious fear of heights, Planes benefits from the top-notch vocal cast that diverts us from the predictable paradigm while bringing the scene-stealing supporting “ladies and gentle-planes” to life.

Taking a cue from the recent trend of color and ethnic-blind international casting to appeal to the hearts (and wallets) of a global box office, Cook’s predictable Rocky-inspired “vehicle interest story” themed character pales in comparison to the charm and comedic attention-commanding characterizations of Carlos Alazraqui’s cape-swishing El Chupacabra and Roger Craig Smith’s cocky champion Ripslinger.

Also featuring John Cleese, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Teri Hatcher, Stacy Keach and Priyanka Chopra, Planes makes a play for the children of the ‘80s now dragging their own children to the theater with cameos from Top Gun leads Anthony Edwards and Val Kilmer.

 

Though we can only hope that the next installment will move one of these supporting planes to the front of the runway so the series can really take off and keep us engaged, ultimately what we’re left with is a somewhat entertaining but mostly unimaginative hodge-podge of Pixar and Disney hits from years past.

While some would see fit to blame the small-screen ambitions of Planes’s origin, as its screenwriter Jeffrey M. Howard has proven in the past with his stellar work on Disney’s direct-to-disc Tinker Bell series (including its strongest sequel Great Fairy Rescue), there’s no room for narrow minds regarding which audience the project was originally intended.

 

Simply put, the only criterion for success (particularly when dealing with this market) should be whether or not you’re entertained from start to finish. And despite the cheerfully crisp, colorful animation that particularly dazzles whenever Dusty finds himself in new surroundings from the Far East or America’s east coast, most viewers big and small will find their minds begin to wander long before we’ve reached the second act.

Forgetful by the time you’ve made it to the final credits, while toddlers will probably happily fly along (at least for a little while), for slightly older race fans, the best bet is to go with Turbo or perhaps hitch yet another ride with Pixar’s transporting original people-mover Cars.    

Referenced and Related Reviews:

All Reviewed Disney Titles

All Reviewed Pixar Titles

Tinker Bell

Tinker Bell and The Lost Treasure

Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue

Rocky: The Undisputed Collection

Text ©2013, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Blu-ray Review: Violet & Daisy (2011)

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There’s an old adage warning writers that there are no original plots – Shakespeare did ‘em all. Of course, this in itself is a bit of a joke based on how much of the Bard’s output was inspired by previously published works, not to mention the whole debate over whether or not he actually wrote any of his own material or was simply the man who got the credit.

Obviously it’s up to a great writer to make even the oldest and most familiar storylines about love, death, revenge and all of the emotional shades in between seem new again. But with so much content released in so many different ways over the years, authors not only have to contend with stories that have been told a million times before but also with an audience that’s heard ‘em all before as well.

 

And unfortunately in the case of Precious screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher’s feature filmmaking debut as both writer and director, anything new that Violet & Daisy tries to serve up is bogged down by the weight of everything that came before it.

What feels like the cinematic emptying of a pop culture recycling bin, Fletcher dreams up an uneasy blend of fairy tales and graphic novels, using hardboiled pulp fiction from the ‘30s and ‘40s to bridge the two genres together and the result is as mind-boggling as you would expect.

The World of Henry Orient by way of The Professional (aka Leon), Fletcher’s introduces us to our two titular teenage assassins doing a Pulp Fiction style walk-and-talk before bringing down men twice their size in a hail of gunfire.

 

It aims for too-cool-for-school but ultimately leaves us cold, shivering at the emotionally detached celebration of style or substance without giving us any sense as to who the young women behind the bullets actually are and wondering if we’re watching something closer to surrealism or satire than a straightforward storyline.

Unfortunately, it’s a question that never really gets answered, as Fletcher hints at a great number of things and tries to incorporate too many big picture ideas about absentee-parentism, empty consumerism and celebrity worship than he can actually address in the guise of a hit-man (or hit girl) film throughout Violet's intriguing but ultimately unsuccessful eighty-eight minute running time.

 

Determined to complete their latest kill in order to purchase a signature dress by their favorite singer, the girls (played by Alexis Bledel and Saoirse Ronan) are caught off guard when they interact with their mark (James Gandolfini) and begin to see him as a human rather than a hit.

Augmented by the performances of its leads, Violet is temporarily saved by the late great Gandolfini as a surprisingly friendly would-be victim, who not only seems eager to be assassinated but has made the girls cookies for precisely this occasion.

 

Though it isn’t too hard to guess why he’s glad death kindly stopped for him, Gandolfini makes the most of his character’s admittedly goofy actions, elevating the simple script with more tenderness than we’ve seen throughout, sublimating the disconnect he has with his own daughter into his final day with the fatherless gum-snapping, gun-toting lost girls that show up at his apartment.

Yet it’s the inauthentic, overly-cutesy characterization of the girls that baffles throughout, interrupting bursts of jarring ultra-violence including jumping on top of bullet-strewn bad guys by awkwardly infantilizing them with tricycle rides and pat-a-cake games that makes Violet & Daisy border on fetishistic camp.

 

Nowhere near as darkly cynical as Kick Ass to warrant the same level of controversy nor as good at blending quirk with coming-of-age angst as Ghost World – just to name two more films that enter your mind as you watch – though it strives very hard for originality, ultimately Violet feels as synthetic as a pop song sampled from past hits we know by heart.

 

While The Bling Ring did vapid consumerism among bored teens much better this year, perhaps the greatest tragedy of Violet & Daisy is that buried beneath all of the kitschy madness and self-conscious parody is enough of an idea to have generated a much better movie.

The only thing stopping Fletcher was Fletcher in paring down the script a few more times until he carved out a storyline that could have adequately supported one of his endless ideas… and perhaps a pop culture moratorium that lasted until Violet & Daisy transitioned from script to screen.    


Text ©2013, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

DVD Review: Therese (2012)

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Alternate Title: Therese Desqueyroux

Life didn’t offer many options for young women in the 1920s. And a future as a housewife was particularly less than thrilling for the eponymous character in Claude Miller’s final film Therese, which centers on a young woman (played by Audrey Tautou) growing up in the southwest of France with all of her power and potential wrapped up in pine-tree laden property and a head that she admits is too full of ideas.

 

Though she’d hoped the marriage would finally bring her some peace of mind, sure enough, it’s precisely this wandering mind filled with longing and ideas that brings about her downfall. In Therese’s case in fact, things are set into a downward spiral shortly after she’s said “I do” to Bernard (Gilles Lellouche), the older brother of Anne (Anais Demoustier), her best friend and young neighbor.

 

Upon discovering that the joining of property and life engaging in polite small talk about the weather with a man whom in all reality she has very little in common does not equal the same type of all-encompassing Anne herself has just experienced and eagerly written her about, Therese begins to feel an impending sense of doom as early as her honeymoon.

 

Tasked with the role of breaking up Anne and her true love by Bernard’s family who are appalled at the match of their daughter with a Jewish man of Portuguese descent, Therese finds herself not only envious of the romantic passion experienced by her childhood friend but also jealous of the liberated mind and spirit of freedom embodied by her handsome love (Stanley Weber).

 

Unfortunately, we’re left to infer most of this by Tautou’s anguished, unsmiling face, the long stretches of silence that pass on the film’s soundtrack and the sparse dialogue that goes from awkward to downright rude (usually on Therese’s end) shared by Lellouche and Tautou.

For although Tautou is a remarkable actress, there’s little for us to empathize with during the film as she mostly comes off as a cold, calculating bitch. Whereas perhaps unintentionally Lellouche’s Bernard becomes the character we’re in turn most fascinated by as he stands by his wife, putting family above all else even after her behavior has gone so off the rails that she’s threatened everything.

 

Based on the 1927 novel by the Nobel Prize winning author Francois Mauriac, Therese suffers in translation by leaving far too much on the page, failing to keep us interested – let alone riveted – without giving us more to connect to whether in terms of our leading lady or by building up the other characters to make the adaptation succeed as a film in its own right.

A veritable museum piece with some exquisitely beautiful images, while it would undoubtedly have benefited from a narrator or intimate knowledge of the source material, unfortunately as it stands, there’s nothing in this portrait of a miserable lady that we haven’t seen executed much better before in a Henry James or Edith Wharton adaptation.

     

Text ©2013, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

DVD Review: Scholastic Storybook Treasures -- Merry Christmas, Splat... and More Winter Stories

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Using the original artwork that made the pages of the four selected stories come so vividly to life for young readers strengthens the authenticity of the short film adaptations considerable in another fine child’s read-along compilation title from Scholastic.

While you can just choose to lose yourself in the stories, in order to help kids work on their reading skills in the guise of watching a movie, the disc relies on the same format made popular in sing-along DVDs or onscreen karaoke.

Giving viewers the option to turn on or off the light up text and follow along with the narration as color fills each word makes Scholastic’s Storybook Treasures DVD series an ingenious and invaluable asset of reading is fundamental technology as an inexpensive alternative to overpriced, over-complicated tablets and computers.

Nicely timed to the holiday season, Merry Christmas, Splat… and More Winter Stories features the eponymous work along with Fletcher and the Snowflake Christmas, Snowflake Bentley and Owl Moon.

Though Splat is instantly likable in a cartoon character sort of way, the tale of the spoiled cat longing for a really big gift isn’t nearly as narratively appealing as the three stronger stories that follow.

We learn about empathy and looking out for your neighbors in the sweet-natured Fletcher and in are treated to a gorgeously rendered historical tale about a young boy who grew up longing to study snowflakes in the Sean Astin narrated standout Bentley.

Saving the most poetic tale for last, Owl Moon manages to lose you in the evocative use of language and subtle repetition employed throughout author Jane Yolen’s classic book, which is read aloud by Yolen herself.

Light on bonus features save for a brief but fascinating behind-the-scenes tutorial on how the animators brought the images on the page to life onscreen, Splat nonetheless makes up for what it lacks in extras in stellar feature content.

A fine stocking stuffer idea, the disc works well both as simply quality entertainment and also to augment home study in linguistics, supplementing school work and helping out busy moms and dads who – particularly in this busy day and age – may not have time to drop everything and read four storybooks in one sitting multiple times a day. 

Stories Included:
Merry Christmas, Splat by Rob Scotton
Fletcher and the Snowflake Christmas by Julia Rawlinson
Snowflake Bentley by Jacqueline Briggs Martin
Owl Moon by Jane Yolen
   

Text ©2013, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

TV on DVD Review: When Calls the Heart (2013)

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Related Review:
When Calls the Heart: Lost and Found

As if author Janette Oke or the Hallmark network that brought her novels to life on the small screen didn’t have enough of a fan base, their most recent adaptive collaboration When Calls the Heart about a refined young woman who leaves her privileged wife to teach out west, is sure to attract devotees of 1994’s thematically and topically similar series Christy starring Kellie Martin.

And much like Christy, which also began its run as a made-for-TV-movie to best acquaint viewers with the heroine and main plotline based on Christian author Catherine Marshall’s novel, Hallmark’s Heart is similarly spinning off into a series in its own right, which is slated to air shortly after the new year.

 

Directed by longtime Oke director Michael Landon Jr., When Calls the Heart easily entices viewers familiar with her popular Love Comes Softly series, by keeping its plot-points consistent and delivering on the same paradigm made popular in the blockbuster adaptations of her work witnessed on the network so far.

 

Having graduated Summa Cum Laude and served as her college’s valedictorian, the fiercely independent-minded Elizabeth (Poppy Drayton) is eager to mold young minds and embark on a teaching career wherever she can do the most good. But when the post she’s assigned turns out to be located in a western coal-mining town still reeling from overwhelming tragedy months earlier thanks to a catastrophic accident, Elizabeth’s will is put to the test.

Determined to find solace in knowledge, she looks to the one place she’s always found answers before by combing through the books on her family’s shelves. Stunned to stumble on an ancestral diary belonging to her namesake – that of her father’s younger sister Elizabeth Thatcher (Maggie Grace) who’d also gone out west to teach decades earlier – our young heroine spends a week testing herself to live in rustic surroundings without creature comforts, save for the life lessons offered up by a woman who’d done the same and so much more.

Moving back and forth in time between the two narratives, while the more contemporary plotline is initially no match for the increasingly intriguing tales of the past, oddly enough, there’s a shift in pacing and originality once Aunt Elizabeth’s words inspire the younger woman to act as strangely, the film can’t manage to hold our attention equally between the two time periods.

While it’s reminiscent of past Oke works and corresponds to the same formula of gentle romance and character building hardships, using two narratives to break up some of the most predictable plot points aids in its success greatly along with the uniformly excellent work by a fine cast.

Though it’s sure to generate interest from fans of TV’s Arrow for its inclusion of Stephen Amell as the aunt’s love interest, the strongest performance in the movie comes from actress Maggie Grace. Often under-utilized in big screen action movies, Grace is ideally cast as the inspiring aunt whose pioneering sense of adventure for the sake of education and integrity helps keep the film’s girl power message going strong in a way that’ll make it appeal to today’s audiences.

While it’s nothing we haven’t seen before, When Calls the Heart makes a nice change of pace from crime scene dramas and ultimately – by depositing our heroine in new surroundings – ends in a way that makes it successful as a standalone work but also sets up a promise of exciting things to come in the 2014 series.

Referenced and Related 

     

Text ©2013, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Blu-ray Review: The World's End (2013)

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A postmodern version of an epic Arthurian quest lays just below the surface of as you like it hilarity in The World's End, the third and final installment of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's Three Flavors Cornetto trilogy of sorts.

Wright's own junk food hangover cure he referenced along with co-writer Simon Pegg in their slacker vs. zombie cult classic Shaun of the Dead and then devoured onscreen in their Midsomer-like village set Michael Bay actioner Hot Fuzz, it's only fitting that the hangover cure come full circle for use in a film about the ultimate pub crawl.

 

Yet just like an inebriated man with beer goggles, it's safe to say that a good many will watch The World's End drunk on the overflowing humor and only begin to peel back the layers after it's finished. And not only do Wright and Pegg seem fine with that but they damn near count on it, building a vastly intoxicating behind-the-scenes Blu-ray experience that's almost as enjoyable as the film itself.

Guiding you through every aspect of the moviemaking process in more than three hours worth of footage, the two walk you through the insanely detailed, screenplay blueprint flip-chart, pointing out all of the signs and omens audibly and visually, before giving every department and/or topic its due.

With the benefit of knowledge meeting you halfway with your sense of humor already engaged -- it's safe to say that just like the film's main character, you're sure to want to go on the pub crawl a second time with fresh eyes as opposed to solely under the influence of beer (or humor) goggles.

Centering the onscreen quest on a very different King than Arthur, we're introduced to Pegg's irresponsible, overgrown adolescence in arrested development Gary King, who first brings us up to speed wearing rose colored glasses.

 

Reliving the greatest night of his life embarking on The Golden Mile pub crawl with his four best mates after graduating high school, Gary happily idealizes the past before a comment from a fellow addiction anonymous group member plants the seed of dissatisfaction in his middle-aged life.

Having failed to make it to all twelve of the pubs that make up the Mile in the past, Gary sets off -- determined to get the old band back together... well, not literally since he'd sold their instruments to buy drugs ages ago and all of the other men are in respectable careers now.

 

Manipulating each man with various tales until they bend to his will, the five knights embark not on horseback but via his vintage car nicknamed the Beast complete with a killer late '80s/early '90s mix-tape blasting away mile after mile.

While it doesn't seem to have a lot to offer in the way of plot -- at least initially -- things start going from strange to worse shortly into their Mile journey from one Tarot-card like symbolized, ominously named pub to the next all the way through to the titular World's End.

 

From the corporations that have taken over the pubs so that they've all begun to look the same to the bizarre behavior of the locals (moving in concert -- conformity and group-think gone haywire), our heroes begin to realize things aren't like they used to be.

And even though there's always the question of whether or not you can really go home again, the widening gap between us vs. them (or the heroes vs. the "blanks" as they come to be called) come to the forefront shortly after they begin slamming down pints as embodied in an apocalyptic twist midway through the movie.

 

Realizing they must come together to save the town from annihilation one pub patron at a time, Gary's pub crawl takes on a far more epic meaning as he and the others struggle to make it to the final destination of The World's End alive.

Actually, "blanks" turns out to be a great word as issues of any prejudice can be used to literally fill-in-the-blank if you want to read deeper into the movie (and indeed, are teased in a tongue-in-cheek conclusion as well). However, just like appreciating the humor first and the layers later, the apocalyptic comedic horror smackdown soon takes center stage over anything else, dominating your brain-space for the rest of the film.

 

An enjoyable romp that intriguingly pays off on the previous two films as we discover the way the blanks multiplied has zombie-ish similarities and reveling in the same type of over-the-top action we witnessed in Fuzz, The World's End marks a surprisingly soulful conclusion to the trilogy-in-jest.

 

While I still have a special place in my heart for Fuzz, in a year over-crowded with topically similar movies of every genre, comically speaking it's The World's End rather than This is the End that I think I'd sooner grab hold of a second time for a night of apocalyptical hilarity ever after.

Related Review

Hot Fuzz

     

Text ©2013, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Blu-ray Review: All Is Bright (2013)

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Alternate Title: Almost Christmas

Similar to the way that ornaments and lights brighten up a Christmas tree, casting likable stars to play Christmas tree salesmen in Junebug helmer Phil Morrison’s melancholic holiday feature lightens up the tone of the otherwise darkly downbeat dramedy All Is Bright.

 

As two Canadian ex-crooks trying to go straight hustling trees for the month of December on a New York street corner, the pair of Pauls – Rudd and Giamatti – do some serious internal heavy-lifting, using their witty delivery and natural charisma to keep you invested in at times admittedly difficult-to-like script from TV’s Americans staff writer Melissa James Gibson.

But because they can’t be expected to make up for every flaw in the tonally uneven film, All Is Bright delivers extra star wattage in the form of scene-stealer Sally Hawkins who not only steals every viewers’ heart but nearly walks away with the entire film as Olga, a no-nonsense Russian who first befriends Giamatti’s Dennis while negotiating a tree purchase and delivery.

Having spent the last four years in jail, upon his release, veteran thief Dennis is crushed to discover that not only has his ex-wife (Amy Landecker) told his beloved daughter Michi that he’s dead but also that his family has moved on with someone else… in the form of his old partner-in-crime, Rene (Rudd).

Determined to get his daughter a present and with no other prospects in a dire economy, Dennis forms an uneasy alliance with Rene on the right side of the law after Rene confesses his plan to spend his half of the money marrying Dennis’s ex.

Facing stiff competition from Vermont tree farmers with gentle manners and a more professional display complete with music and decorations, Rene and Dennis rely on their old skill-sets to intimidate other sellers and fast-talk customers with money to burn.

Relying on his comedy background as a Judd Apatow MVP in films such as Anchorman and This is 40, Rudd shines in his role, improvising complete with a Quebecois accent to schmooze passersby and generate sales. Yet as fun as those moments are, unfortunately, scenes of levity are all too fleeting as his character too gets bogged down with Dennis in the overwhelming depression of the struggling first half.

Unbalanced and uneven at best, growing stronger as it builds on its characters to generate conflict, All Is Bright threatens to bore contemporary audiences completely and nearly does until Hawkins appears on the scene.

While she befriends the two and Dennis in particular, what she gets from him exactly is unknown as he never does make a single, uninvited kind gesture towards her, which is one of the major problems with the script. Namely, we just don't like our leading men all that much.

However, like Amy Adams in Junebug, Phil Morrison shoes that he knows how to let his leading ladies shine with some of Sally Hawkins’s best work since Happy-Go-Lucky.

Intriguingly relying on accents – at least initially to generate humor – from Rudd’s French Canadian cookie-cutter stereotype to Olga’s blunt Russian, the two use accents to comedic advantage as part of their weaponry of charm, winning us over more due to their performances than the film does as a whole.

Moving uneasily and manically in tone from gritty to sentimental -- while anyone familiar with basic plotting will be able to figure out how it will all end for Dennis’s Christmas present wish, ultimately the inspired whimsy of the final act’s Big Deal On Madonna Street twist on the film’s Gift of the Magi origin is just clever enough to make it worthy of a recommendation.

Nicely transferred to Blu-ray by Anchor Bay and boasting an Ultraviolet digital copy of the film you can stream or download on multiple devices, while Giamatti and Rudd’s turns as men on Santa’s naughty list hoping to create their own version of nice is strong indeed, it’s too bad that the film couldn’t meet them halfway without making us wait halfway through it for things to start getting interesting.

A strange blend of old-fashioned and new, although All Is Bright had the potential to be a modern day version of the type of film that was made so effectively well by Ernst Lubitsch or Preston Sturges in the ‘30s or ‘40s in the tale of an ex-con father trying to do right by a daughter who doesn’t even know he’s alive, the final result is a mixed bag at best.    

Text ©2013, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.