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THAT EVENING SUN Like the Jeff Bridges vehicle Crazy Heart, That Evening Sun is one of those films that generates nearly all of its goodwill from a smashing central performance by a long-established veteran. Here, it's Hal Holbrook who shows up to demonstrate to Hollywood's young pups how it's done. Holbrook plays Abner Meecham, an elderly Tennessee farmer who's been dumped into a nursing home by his well-meaning but insensitive son (Walt Goggins). Having none of it, Abner bolts from the facility and returns to the property that he's owned forever -- only to discover that his son has rented it to Lonzo Choat (Ray McKinnon), a loutish redneck Abner has long abhorred. Of course, Lonzo and his family -- meek wife Ludie (Carrie Preston) and restless daughter Pamela (Mia Wasikowska, soon to be seen as Tim Burton's Alice) -- have no intention of leaving, setting up a prickly, potentially violent feud between Abner and Lonzo. Adapting William Gay's story "I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down," writer-director Scott Teems gives his actors plenty of room to roam: McKinnon manages to provide his boorish character with flashes of civility, while Barry Corbin is memorable in his few scenes as Abner's longtime friend. Yet this is first and foremost a showcase for Holbrook, and it's a shame that he has to contend with some poor late-inning plotting -- specifically, an obvious climax and a cop-out coda. These flaws aren't enough to detract from his tough-minded performance, but I hate to see That Evening Sun go down in a burst of timidity. ***
2012 The perfect follow-up for those moviegoers who were simply crushed when Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen wrapped up at a too-brief 142 minutes, 2012 contributes another 158 minutes to the cause of wham-bam-thank-you-man cinema. No effect is too preposterous, no sound too deafening, and no cliché too enormous to be left out of the latest end-of-the-world effort from director Roland Emmerich, who there but for the grace of God goes Michael Bay. 2012 brushes through the fuzzy science -- basically, the sun is responsible for Earth's impending doom, predicted by the Mayans way back when -- in order to devote more of its time to its inane assortment of stock characters and the CGI effects that will wow some but fail to impress others (they alternate between impressive and obvious). John Cusack is the all-American protagonist, a stock underachiever who must rise from Everyman to Superman in order to save not only himself but his fractured family unit (ex-wife, distant son, chipper daughter). There's also the well-meaning scientist (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the duplicitous politician (Oliver Platt), the self-sacrificing U.S. president (Danny Glover), the conspiracy-theory nut (Woody Harrelson, whose zealotry was a lot more fun to watch in Zombieland), and so on. Even "master of disaster" Irwin Allen liked to shake up the status quo in such films as The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, but Emmerich has no imagination: His A-listers live, his support players die. Worse, he subscribes to a rigid ethical code usually reserved for slasher films and fundamentalist diatribes: Likable characters tempted by the flesh suffer mean-spirited ends, as does anyone who dares to stand in the way of traditional family values. Such sermonizing takes a back seat, of course, to action sequences which run on the same loop: A vehicle misses getting crushed by only this much. It's marginally exciting the first 20 times it happens, less so the subsequent 30 times it's shown. Then again, practically everything about the picture is lazy and uninspired, making 2012 just one more blockbuster that's strictly by the numbers. *1/2
UP IN THE AIR In the cinema of 2009, Ryan Bingham should by all accounts emerge as the Protagonist Least Likely To Be Embraced By The Nation's Moviegoers. That's because Ryan works as a downsizing expert, hired to come in and dismiss employees that their own bosses are too gutless to fire face to face. Ryan is excellent at his job, which would make him the antagonist in virtually any other film. But because he's played by charismatic George Clooney, Ryan becomes less a villain and more a representative of the modern American, a tech-age person trying to reconcile his buried humanity with what he or she believes is necessary to survive in this increasingly disconnected world. That's the starting point for this superb adaptation of Walter Kirn's novel, but the film covers a lot more territory -- both literally and figuratively -- before it reaches the finish line. As Ryan jets all over the country doing his job, he makes the acquaintance of a fellow frequent flyer (Vera Farmiga), and they strike up a romance that's among the sexiest and most adult placed on screen in some time. Yet Ryan's carefully constructed life threatens to crash and burn when his company's latest hire (Anna Kendrick), a whiz kid just out of college, implements a plan that will require the grounding of all employees, including Ryan. Penning the script with Sheldon Turner, director Jason Reitman (now 3-for-3 following Juno and Thank You for Smoking) has created a timely seriocomic work that manages to be breezy without once diminishing the sobering realities that constantly hover around the picture's edges (for starters, the fired employees interviewed in the film are not actors but real workers who were let go from their jobs). Farmiga and Kendrick are excellent as the two women who unexpectedly alter the direction of Ryan's life, yet it's Clooney, in his best screen work to date, who's most responsible for earning this magnificent movie its wings. ****
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