Now on Screen: Larry Crowne, Transformers 3, The Trip

By John Semley

Because Toronto’s more movie obsessed than a Quentin Tarantino screenplay (yuk yuk), Torontoist brings you Now on Screen, a weekly roundup of new releases.
This week, Tom Hanks brings us his most Hanksian, bubble-gummy version of America yet, Michael Bay continues cinema’s downward slog into shit, and Michael Winterbottom returns to form by re-teaming with yuk-’em-ups Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. Also opening this week is Janus Metz’s great embedded Afghanistan war doc, Armadillo, which we reviewed at TIFF last year.

Larry Crowne Directed by Tom Hanks

Transformers: Dark of the Moon Directed by Michael Bay

The Trip Directed by Michael Winterbottom

Good ol’ Tom Hanks, eh? What would we do without him? A barrage of neutron bombs could blanket the entire American continent and out from the rubble would rise Hanks, sprightly navigating the collapsed heart of the United States, whistlin’ “Dixie” and greeting fellow survivors, and the inevitable Omega Man–style mutants, with a pat on the back and a hearty “How are ya?” He’s nice, Tom Hanks. And, for all its many, many faults, that’s what Larry Crowne is. Nice.
Hanks plays Larry Crowne (“with an e,” as he so often clarifies), an impossibly chummy veteran of a big-box store whose lack of a post-secondary education lands him on the downsizing chopping block. With a wife who took off on him (clearly for nothing Larry did, because shy of Tom Hanks, Larry’s probably the nicest guy in the whole world) and a mortgage to pay down, Larry enrolls in a local community college. We see him sign up for three classes, but he only ever shows up for two: an Intro to Economics course lorded over by an exacting prof (George Takei, gleefully mugging for the camera) and a public speaking class taught by the disinterested, terminally hungover Mercedes Tainot (Julia Roberts).
Larry also falls in with a band of would-be misfits, who are just nice kids who ride around on scooters and give each other stupid nicknames, because in the mind of Tom Hanks (and co-writer Nia Vardalos), this is what kids do. One of these kids is Wilmer Valderrama who, along with turns by Takei, Ian Gomez, Cedric the Entertainer (as Larry’s best friend), and Bryan Cranston (as Ms. Tainot’s slacker husband with a fetish for cartoonishly big breasts), helps make Larry Crowne feel like an overlong sitcom. Which is good. Because this is Tom Hanks’ Mayberry.
Larry Crowne’s an aw-shucks version of the U.S. of A. where every white person has a black best friend (Hanks and Entertainer, Roberts and fellow prof Pam Grier), where motorcycle gangs look like the Mickey Mouse Club, where college classes run like summer camps (in Ms. Tainot’s class, Larry delivers and is graded on a speech about how to make french toast), and where pornography is G-rated. Even Larry’s cutesy catchphrase, a mispronounced “spectackalur!” (for “spectacular”), allays the worry that he may be a moron with a speech impediment and makes it goddamn adorable. It’d be a thoroughly Rockwellian portrait of middle-age in Middle America, were it not Hanksian from stem to stern. If male-pattern baldness and menopause went out on a date, it’d be salad and sticks at the Olive Garden, a late show of Larry Crowne, then back to the bachelor pad for some spiritless but mutually satisfying missionary sex.
Granted, Larry Crowne is a total trifle. Its hermetic fantasy of life is unruffled by anything like reality: an unwanted husband is chucked like so much of his crap onto the lawn, a strategic bankruptcy and a move to a bachelor apartment is the quick fix to the mortgage problem, daiquiri-alcoholism can be cured by throwing away the blender. Sapless? Sure. But nice. Neat. Nifty. If not quite spectackalur.
Larry Crowne opens Friday, July 1, in wide release. Click here for showtimes.

In Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) cannot shoot a human, flesh-and-blood bad guy (Patrick Dempsey) in the face with a gun because that would be wrong. Because sentient, free-thinking, motivated humans can’t do that. Meanwhile, however, it’s entirely a-okay for sentient, free-thinking, motivated alien-car-robots, whose characterizations often exceed that of their beefy counterparts, to freely take one anothers’ lives (spilled Penzoil, split spark plugs, and all) without consequence. That Michael Bay does not understand the difference between what a person is and what humanity is—and that he renders even the bit-player people (usually welcome thespers like John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, and Ken Jeong) nasty, shrill, and unlikeable—is only one in this film’s messy, clunky junkyard of problems. But it surely is its biggest.
To Bay’s minimal credit, Transformers 3 is brighter than the last one, Revenge of the Fallen, which was widely lambasted for its visual incoherence. This time around, you can actually make out all the dumb bullshit that is designed to make you not care about it. Great. But legibility does not equal intelligibility. Things still whiz around pointlessly, cranking and shifting and buckling over on themselves with an improbable fluidity. Blades clash and tendrils whip-snap and huge robots wear dusty capes, like they’re wizened desert exiles or something. Human beings communicate strictly by yelling exposition at each other. Megan Fox has been replaced by some just-as-pointless British version of Megan Fox, whose chassis and curves are framed, almost exclusively, from below, as if Bay is training the 10-year-old boys in the audience to be able to recognize a pantie-shot, while further cock-teasing the twenty-somethings whose sexual appetites have been sated by the pantie-shot since they were 10. It’s gross and pointless and bloated and I hate, hate, hate it more than I can remember hating anything. But, boyo, it’s bright.
Oh, yeah, the movie is about some robots fighting some other robots, with the bad robots this time led by a robot who used to be a good robot but is now a bad robot and who is voiced by Leonard Nimoy (cue vacant Wrath of Khan “nods” that effectively work to retroactively ruin that film, too) who is trying to use robo-tech from a downed robot space shuttle on the moon to bring the home world of the robots, a planet called Cybertron, to Earth and enslave humanity. It is approximately nine billion times stupider than it sounds and takes two hours and five days to get it all over with.
Transformers: Dark of the Moon opened Wednesday, June 29, in wide release on a gajillion screens. Again, we implore you, please don’t see it. But, if you must, click here for showtimes.

With 2006’s A Cock and Bull Story, Michael Winterbottom fashioned his most accomplished film to date. Though indulging various meta-narrative gestures in its depiction of the making of a movie about the meta-fictional novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, the film’s real charm emerged in the interplay between stars Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. After kicking around for a half-decade since, churning out what seems like nine lousy films a year, Winterbottom returns to form with The Trip, which re-teams Coogan and Brydon, again playing puffed-up versions of themselves.
Compressed from a six-part British series, The Trip plunks Coogan and Brydon together on a food tour of Northern England. Scenes are split between the pair cracking wise over dinner (gently taking the piss out of each other, or one-upping the other’s Christopher Lee impression) or rolling through the moors of England in an ostentatious Land Rover, where similar hijinx ensue. Their comic back-and-forths are marvelous and just riding along in the car with Coogan and Brydon would seem like film enough. (Or, if not a film, then some sort of radical comedy installation piece or something.)
Elsewhere, though, when Steve and Rob part ways, The Trip traverses into some weird territory. Much of the film is spent wallowing in Coogan’s melancholia, poking at his mid-life crisis, his desire to be taken seriously as an actor, and his reputation as a formidable asshole. He’s already snagged a BAFTA for his turn in the Trip’s televised run, but Winterbottom’s attempt to absolve Coogan from the depths of his assholery proves dicier. Still, when the production pops itself out of Coogan’s ass long enough to enjoy the scenery, The Trip emerges as a wonderfully funny, and passably clever, take on the buddy comedy.
The Trip opens Friday, July 1, in select cinemas. Click here for showtimes.