(Very) Short Take: "Haywire", "American Reunion" and "The Vow".

Time and time again, Steven Soderbergh should be commended for being perhaps the only mainstream American director who refuses to stop experimenting with the medium. Not all of his experiments are successful but it's his willingness to keep trying that makes him such a valuable filmmaker, for example see Haywire, by hiring MMA star Gina Carano to play the lead in a movie about a female spy, instantly recalls his The Girlfriend Experience in which he hired a porn star to play an escort. To say that none of the ladies were outstanding actresses would be to say too little, but what Soderbergh achieves is to concoct a movie that feels like a documentary combined with exaggerated fiction. Sure, Carano doesn't hold a candle to the effortless way in which Michael Fassbender or Ewan McGregor move onscreen (Channing Tatum gets no such defense) but watching her fight stock actors has the urgency that matches any of their greatest performances. Other Soderbergh flourishes like stopping the score when there's a fight make for a unique experience that sadly doesn't become more than an exciting experiment.  

American Reunion is nothing more than a sad reminder that the more things change the more they stay the same. The entire gang is back (including Mena Suvari!) for their high school reunion and they have silly realizations like how "first loves are forever", "home is where the heart is" etc.

The thing that remains constant is that the film seems to gloat in the fact that these men-children refuse to grow up and celebrates them for it. The notorious Stifler (Seann William Scott) becoming nothing more than a clown who holds any inkling of a grown up life to be completely contemptible. Sure, adult life may not be all fun and games, but there is a larger problem at bay when a movie character is loved because he chooses to exist in complete denial. The movie therefore is never funny or touching - in the way the original was - instead it becomes somewhat of a horror film that like Carrie reminds us that high school can seriously mess up some people.

Pretty people having love problems has become the staple of all Nicholas Sparks movie adaptations...oh wait, what? This isn't based on a Nicholas Sparks book? Could've fooled anyone. This was a much, much better movie when it was called 50 First Dates.

Grades
Haywire **½
The Vow **
American Reunion *

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call-New Orleans ***

Director: Werner Herzog
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes
Val Kilmer, Jennifer Coolidge, Fairuza Balk, Brad Dourif
Michael Shannon, Shawn Hatosy, Denzel Whitaker, Xzibit
Shea Wigham, Irma P. Hall, Tom Bower

Lieutenant Terence McDonagh (Cage) is the kind of man that would drive a car from New Orleans to Biloxi, to deliver his father's (Bower) dog to his prostitute girlfriend Frankie (Mendes) while taking care of a young crime witness (Whitaker) and snorting cocaine.
He is also the kind of man who gives Nicolas Cage the opportunity to ensue in the kind of deranged brilliance few actors can achieve like he does, when he's given the chance.
His performance is an exercise in excess and contradiction: while investigating a massacre Terence seems more frightened of a couple of iguanas than drug dealing thugs armed to their teeth.
He roams the Big Easy with a hunch (due to a spinal condition that keeps him in constant pain) and tells everyone to fuck themselves if they come in between him and his plans, which usually involve getting drugs or money to pay his bookies.
At one point his superior reminds him "you can not get away with that cowboy shit anymore", emphasis on the anymore as Herzog contemplates how the always decadent, but once glorious city fell under the wrath of Katrina and became a boiling pot for crime and corruption.
He's not talking about New Orleans exclusively but about a whole world that is becoming known for the evils that lurk in unexpected places always pushing the boundaries.
A world that's saying to us "think I can't get away with this?".
It's because of this world that an authority figure like Terence can get away with raping a girl while threatening her boyfriend with a gun and a drug lord (Xzibit) is suspected of trafficking but not murder.
Herzog fills his movie with red herrings that hook us as we become fascinated by Terence's behavior.
With Cage, the German iconoclast creates one of the funniest characters to come out in the past decade, all while paying tribute to a genre that's dying precisely because we know now that the good guys and heroes rarely come in uniforms.
Their vision of the world might not be optimistic, but sometimes we just have to take them in whatever shape they come in.