ARTS & CULTURE
12 Obiter Dicta
Film reviews
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it can be our best hope for resuscitation.
Top Five tells the story of New York City comedian-turned-film star Andre Allen (Chris Rock,
Madagascar), who tries to make it as a serious
actor when his reality-TV star fiancée (Gabrielle
Union, Cadillac Records) talks him into broadcasting their wedding on her show. His unexpected
encounter with a journalist (Rosario Dawson, Sin
City, Unstoppable) forces him to confront the career
– and the past – that he’s left behind.
Screened in the Special Presentations section at
TIFF, Top Five is the nearest we’ve come to hearing
writer-director-star Chris Rock’s authentic comic
voice on film. It’s a career highlight for its creator, as
good as Rock’s best standup work. Top Five bridges
the gap between his on-screen and stage personas,
and Rock is killer: enormously appealing, balancing his patented abrasiveness with a real tenderness,
proving that his comic groove is stronger than ever.
Dawson also makes the most of her lay therapist
love interest character, transcending caricature and
achieving a charming, intriguing mix of vulnerability and poise. Most filmmakers bungle the opportunity to capitalize on Dawson’s talents, other than
filling up the screen with her goddess-like beauty.
In Rock’s hands, she’s stubborn and endearing and
a force to be reckoned with.
Raucous, raunchy, and relentlessly filthy, Top
Five is also semi-autobiographical and buoyantly
self-sustaining. Like an airdrop of candy over the
city, it mixes the sweet with the salty, the naughty
with the remarkably kind. Genial, energetic, and
sharp-eyed, it feels freshly minted because the man
who made it has such a lively mind and fearless style.
It’s one of the comedy standouts of 2014.
Top Five strikes one like a revenant from
Hollywood’s golden age, when entertainment’s
highest function was not to bully or educate or discourage or overwhelm, but to entertain. The best
surprises are a hotel room reversal with Cedric
the Entertainer, a sexual act of revenge involving
a tampon and a liberal dousing of hot sauce, and a
behind-bars, croaking rendition of Charlie Chaplin’s
anthem “Smile” from a notorious gangsta rapper
with a long history of arrests.
It’s disorganized, undisciplined storytelling saddled by a conventional plot and contrived settings
– the celebrity cameos, including the “jokester trifecta” of Adam Sandler, Whoopi Goldberg, and Jerry
Seinfeld, yield as many laughs as a five-car pileup
ê Photo credit: thegaurdian.com
– and it doesn’t go deep with its smirks and scowls,
but the wry screenplay is loaded with topicality as
it pokes fun at subjects ranging from Tyler Perry to
Angry Birds. Skillfully dancing the line between
harsh and hopeful, Rock delivers his medicine with
a spoonful of honey.
Top Five finds Rock in elevated form. Ragged
around the edges and haphazardly hilarious, it’s
like dropping in on a party full of funny people, and
leaving before the evening fades. Sometimes things
change for the better. For better or worse, Top Five
is the Chris Rock movie we’ve been waiting for.
Two Days, One Night (2014) 3/4
ê Photo credit: nytimes.com
t humbs down
Tim Horton’s job cuts.
Nourishing, plain-spoken, and impossibly resonant,
Two Days, One Night is a pared-down, socialist epic
in miniature; a triumphant drama about workplace
injustice, bullyboy tactics, and rallying self-worth
that saddens as it informs. Scruffy, scrappy, and
socially aware, it’s a working-class tale that’s as
straightforward as a fired bullet with an exit wound
the size of a grapefruit.
After a medical leave during which she was
treated for depression, Sandra (Marion Cotillard,
Midnight in Paris, Contagion, Rust and Bone) has
returned to work to discover that the company has
offered her co-workers a choice: if she is laid off,
they will receive the €1,000 bonuses they have long
been promised; if they give them up, she can keep
her job. A vote has already been held among the 16
members of Sandra’s work team, but her boss agrees
to a second ballot, giving Sandra a weekend – two
days, one night – to persuade a majority of her colleagues to make a painful sacrifice on her behalf.
Two Days, One Night is a gravitational showcase for one of Cotillard’s finest performances.
Desperate, downtrodden, grasping at each shred
of hope, Cotillard oozes sadness from the seams,
looking dwindled and drained, leached of allure
by the unkind pallor of the lighting. Her shoulders
slumped, her gait heavy, her eyes weary, Cotillard
– who won an Oscar playing Edith Piaf in 2007’s La