The title character of “Albert Nobbs” is described as “the strangest an I ever met,” which makes sense because he’s actually a woman. Glenn Close, in an Academy Award nominated role, plays a woman who escaped a life of poverty by dressing as a man and taking a job at Morrison’s Hotel in 19th century Dublin.
When Albert meets the house painter Hubert Page (Janet McTeer), another woman living in drag and married to a woman, he is encouraged to escape the shackles of conservative Ireland and live a happy life. Her fatal attraction is Helen () a young maid who has eyes for the handsome new handy-man Joe Macken (Aaron Johnson).
Close played the part of the fastidious butler Nobbs on stage thirty years ago and one can only imagine that the intervening years have deepened the performance. She embodies not only the physicality of the man, but the spirit as well. It’s a stunner of a performance, equally ingrained with repression, gentleness and secrecy.
Unfortunately the towering performances from Close and McTeer are blunted somewhat by a script that isn’t as interesting as the character study that is at the center of it.
It stumbles when it tries to address the larger issue of female poverty in a male dominated society and simply takes too long to make any point at all.
“Albert Nobbs” is a noble failure, a movie with great performances that wants to be important, but is done in by a shallow script.
Any movie made with the cooperation of the US army and six real-life Navy SEALS is bound to have a certain moral slant to it. But “Act of Valor” completely throws nuance out the window in favour of good and evil stereotypes unseen since John Wayne waved the flag on the big screen.
Inspired by true events, the real life Navy SEALS of Bandito Platoon rescue a kidnapped CIA agent and uncover a terrorist plot to kill thousands of Americans in coordinated attacks.
The chasm between the good and bad guys is wide and deep, almost as gaping as the ideological stance of the main players. The heroes are good-looking warriors who hold “honour, justice, freedom and family” as sacred. One of the good characters, a kidnapped CIA agent, even appears to have stigmata at one point. The bad guys, on the other hand, are bug-eyed
This movie isn’t subtle. It’s an advertisement for the war on terror that could be mistaken for a 1940s vintage propaganda film, were it not for the colour film and inclusion of suicide bombers.
As propaganda films go, this is a pretty good one. It’s clear the Navy SEALS didn’t go to drama school. But aside from some stilted scenes of camaraderie and family life, they deliver where it counts on the battlefield. The action scenes work because of the ease of execution these men bring to the movie. These well-trained soldiers portray something that can’t be taught in drama class — the immediacy of battle. Those scenes crackle with excitement and tension and are worth the price admission.
The rest of the movie doesn’t have the same excitement and is too heavy-handed — these guys are so tough one actually survives a rocket blast to the chest. Even so, “Act of Valor” does have a visceral authenticity often missing from war films.
“A Thousand Words” is billed as a comedy but I see it as something else entirely. I see it as a tragedy—a tragic waste of Eddie Murphy’s talent. He’s in virtually every scene but his wide eyed mugging for the camera—there hasn’t been this on-screen mugging since the first “Death Wish” movie (only movie geeks will get that joke)—isn’t funny, it’s annoying.
Reteaming with “Norbet” director Brian Robins, Eddie Murphy plays Jack McCall, a fast talking literary agent who doesn’t read and who double-crosses new age guru Dr. Sinja (Cliff Curtis) on a book deal. Soon after, a magical Bodhi tree erupts through the ground in Jack’s backyard. The tree will shed one leaf for every word McCall says, and after one thousand leaves have fallen, the true nature of the tree’s curse will be revealed.
“A Thousand Words” is such an unpleasant movie going experience that the loud fire alarm that rang intermittently in the theatre during the film was a welcome relief to what was happening on screen. At least the fire alarm had some element of urgency to it, unlike the film, which seemed to think that allowing Murphy to pull faces at the camera for ninety minutes was enough to flesh out the story.
When the best joke in the movie is “I’m going to the ashram and ram this up his a**,” you begin to understand why this movie has been sitting on a shelf for four years awaiting a release date.
I can sum up my thoughts on “A Thousand Words” in far less than a thousand words: Don’t go. Save your money.
In the latest installment of the “American Pie” franchise it’s the thirteenth high school reunion for some very recognizable characters—Jim, Oz, Kevin, Stifler, Finch, Vicky (Tara Reid) and Michelle. The question is, Will their 13th anniversary be bad luck for them, the movie’s viewers, or both?
Since graduation in 1999 the old gang has gone their separate ways. Jim (Jason Biggs) and Michelle (Alyson Hannigan) are married with a son. Oz (Chris Klein) is an LA based sportscaster who once appeared on a a reality dance show, Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas) is a stay-at-home dad, Stifler (Seann William Scott) is an office temp and Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) is a man of mystery.
Their weekend back in East Great Falls, Michigan brings back old memories, creates some new ones and uncovers some long held secrets.
As you may have guessed from my synopsis, plot is not one of “’s” strong points. I expected something more from “Harold and Kumar” helmers Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, who also wrote and directed “Reunion.” None of the surreal feel of their best-known comedy seeped into this movie.
Instead we get a by-the-numbers high school reunion flick with enough “we’re not as young as we used to be” shtick to fill a textbook on how not to write a high school reunion comedy.
Luckily Eugene Levy is along for the ride. He rescues every scene he’s in, adding in some touches of real humor. Ditto Seann William Scott as Stifler. He’s a classic moron character, but there is something about the commitment Scott shows to Stifler’s idiocy that makes the shameless mugging and language one of the movie’s pleasures.
Aside from that only one set piece really works—an extended sequence with a drunken girl young enough to call the Spice Girls “classic rock.”
As for the cast, everyone is in full-blown “American Pie” mode, à la 1999. No surprises there, although the movie could easily have been subtitled, “What Ever Happened to Tara Reid?” She has a small supporting role that plays more like a cautionary tale of faded success than a comeback role in a Hollywood movie.
At almost two hours it feels longer than my old history teacher Mr. Parker’s lectures, but may appeal to fans of the series who have a built in connection with the characters and Eugene Levy aficionados. Otherwise, this is a direct to DVD level movie with not enough laughs to qualify for theatrical release.
“The Avengers,” the new all-superhero-all-the-time Marvel movie, was going to go one of two ways. Either it would be a Frankenstein of the movie; a stitched together monstrosity that cannibalized the remains of the successful movies that came before.
Or it could have been a state-of-the-art geek fest that wove together the separate backstories of its lead characters—Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner)—into one seamless super-cool spectacle.
Luckily it’s the former. Director and co-writer Joss Whedon was up to the unenviable task of mixing and matching mythologies, combining them into one epic film that sets a new benchmark for superhero movies (at least until “The Dark knight Rises” comes out).
At stake is nothing less than the freedom of every man, woman and child on earth. The trouble starts when Thor’s brother, exiled god Loki (Tom Hiddleston), steps through a portal into the super secret S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters. Confronted by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) Loki explains his intention steal S.H.I.E.L.D.’s most coveted possession, the Tesseract, a glowing cube that holds the key to unlimited sustainable energy. Of course Loki isn’t interested in creating green energy, he wants to rule the world. Fury knows that he is “hopelessly and hilariously out-gunned,” but if there is a chance to save the planet it lies in the skills of a disparate group of superheroes– Iron Man, Captain America, The Hulk, Thor–and their helpers–Black Widow and Hawkeye.
“The Avengers” has everything you expect from a superhero—or should that be superheri?—movie and more. All the usual clichés are in place—the earth is in peril, there’s giant action set pieces, a super villain with super powers and special effects galore, including the now-standard-for-every-superhero-movie lightening beam from earth to sky—but the best special effect is Joss Whedon’s expert juggling of the major characters.
Each if the lead heroes are stars in their own right, and each has already had their own movie. Whedon’s job was to bring them together, allow each time to shine, but also work together as an ensemble. He succeeds. As the nominal lead Downey Jr. smarms his way through his now trademarked “Iron Man” one liners, Evans emerges as a thoughtful symbol of patriotism, and Hemsworth flexes his muscles in a most impressive way. This olio of heroism gives us what we want from the characters but also freshens the formula.
It’s Ruffalo, however, who really impresses.
The Hulk has had a tough time on the big screen. Ang Lee’s version flopped. The Ed Norton adaptation didn’t really work, but Ruffalo and Whedon have finally figured out how to balance the Hulk’s humanity with his fury. You’ll like him when he gets angry.
“The Avengers” embraces the high-octane tradition of superhero movie—although this movie is by no means wall-to-wall action—but tempers it with sparkling dialogue, geek wit and the silly pleasure of seeing grown men in costumes spouting one-liners as they try and save the planet.
“Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” throws a crimson stain on American history, but for a movie about vampires “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” has very little bite. You have to expect a movie about a president offing vampires to be silly, and this movie is, but you also hope it will have some scares, and those are as rare as beard trimmer in Lincoln’s travel kit.
The story of Abraham Lincoln’s bloodsucker battles begins in 1818 when his mother is killed by a vengeful vampire. His hatred of his mother’s killer grows for years, but when he finally has the chance to even the score, he is bitten by the urge to hunt vampires. Teaming up with a Van Helsing-esque warrior named Henry Sturgess (Dominic Cooper), he uses a silver tipped axe to make sure America remains “a nation of men and not monsters.”
There are a couple of big action set pieces and bloodsuckers get killed by the dozen, but the over reliance on computer generated effects reduces the vampire battles–and that’s what we’re paying to see!– to a bloody synthetic spray of binary code, and little more.
This isn’t a history lesson, it’s a movie about killing vampires in slow motion and on that level it only works in the film’s OTT action sequences. Give me more of Honest Abe jumping from horse to horse during a stampede, and less of everything else. Although, having said that, I have to have a soft spot for a movie that wraps up (MILD SPOILER) with Mary Todd Lincoln (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) saying, “Abraham! Hurry, we’re late for the theatre!”
The vampires do have cool shark fangs, there’s an unexpected horse-drawn-carriage rescue and the head vamp is 5000 years old, but there’s no real atmosphere to go along with the flowery language and petticoats. It’s neither historical or horror. It’s not fish, but it is occasionally foul. The acting ranges from good–Benjamin Walker beards-up nicely as the elder Abe–to the bland–Anthony Mackie as Will, Abe’s forgettable friend–to the bad–Rufus Sewell as the “first vampire” Adam is not nearly megalomaniacal enough–and everyone seems to be struggling to find the right tone to tell the story.
“Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” director Timur Bekmambetov knows his way around an action scene but despite the gallons of gore on display has made a bloodless vampire movie. Abe would hate it, honestly.
Any movie brazen enough to put the word “amazing” in the title really should go the extra mile to ensure that the movie is, in act, amazing. Otherwise filmmakers run the risk of opening themselves up to reviews that begin like this: “Amazing Spider-Man,” more like “So-So Spider-Man.” There’s nothing that much wrong with the reboot of the Sam Raimi series, but it doesn’t have the oomph I would have expected from a talented director—the ironically named Marc Webb—hitting the reset button.
Like first Raimi film—which was released just ten years ago—“The Amazing Spider-Man” is an origin film. Peter Parker (“The Social Network’s” Andrew Garfield) is a misfit teen who develops superhuman powers after being bitten by a radioactive spider. His spidey-senses tingle when danger is about and, as the song goes, he can “do whatever a spider can.” His new powers put him in the path of his scientist father’s old partner Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans), an amputee doctor experimenting with cross genetic engineering to find a way to regrow his arm, and into the arms of Gwen Stacey (Emma Stone), the cute daughter of a hardboiled police captain (Denis Leary).
There are differences between Raimi’s take on the story and the new film. He no longer organically shoots webs, they now come out of a mechanical webslinger. There’s a new romantic interest—Gwen replaces Mary-Jane Watson (played by Kirsten Dunst in the older movies) as Parker’s paramour– a new villain—Curt Connors appeared in the other movies as Peter’s professor—who morphs from human to giant lizard determined to infect everyone with lizard juice and J. Jonah Jameson, the Daily Bugle’s Editor-in-Chief is absent.
The biggest change, however, comes in the character. Spider-Man Mach 1, Tobey McGuire, played the webbed wonder’s human counter-part as a sweet, but awkward and bullied loner. Garfield takes a different approach. His Parker is rebellious, angst-ridden who taunts his enemies with wisecracks and gleefully yells, “I’m swingin’ here!” as he zigzags trough the air supported by his newfangled super webs.
It’s an interesting, fresh take on Parker, which Garfield, despite being eleven years older than his character, pulls off with aplomb. He’s made the character his own, balancing Parker’s nervous energy with Spider-Man’s cockiness.
Emma Stone’s Gwen and Martin Sheen and Sally Field as Peter’s Uncle Ben and Aunt May bring some necessary heart to the story, but this is a summer blockbuster, so the emphasis is on the other stuff; nine-foot long lizards and fight scenes, but despite the large scope of the film it seems on a smaller scale than Raimi’s movies. Or at last as small a scale as a movie about a giant reptile and a radioactive superhero can be.
The visionary rethink that Christopher Nolan brought to Batman isn’t here. It does have the best Stan Lee cameo to date, beautiful photography and more humor than the previous films, but coming just five years after the last Raimi film it doesn’t feel as “amazing” as it should.
Brandon Cronenberg is a new filmmaker with a famous last name. While he may have taken the celebrated Cronenberg family fascination with body horror to a genetic level in “Antiviral,” he also proves himself to be an exciting new voice in dark cinema.
“Antiviral” is the story of Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones), a technician at Lucas Clinic, a lab that sells celebrity diseases to obsessed fans. For a price devotees of Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon) and others can become infected with actual cells from their idols. Herpes, skin flaps, the flu. You name it. Syd also supplies an underground market by smuggling copyrighted viruses out of the clinic in his own body. Soon, however, his bug bootlegging catches up with him when he ingests a deadly disease.
“Antiviral” works both as speculative fiction and satire.
Cronenberg creates a strange world that looks much like ours, but exists only in his imagination… for now. It’s a fame-obsessed world where celebrity operations are top news stories and people know the intimate details of their favorite star’s lives. It’s taken to extremes, but just to the other side of extreme. “Celebrities are not people,” the movie tells us, “they are mass hallucinations.” Tellingly we’re never told why the movie’s celebrities are famous, we’re just meant to accept that they are; that the hallucination of fame is enough. Rings true today. Just ask Kim Kardashian.
Satire blends with horror to create some of the film’s lasting images. There’s a butcher shop that literally feeds the public’s need to consume their favorite stars. The Sweeney Todd-esque butcher even has a celebrity cell garden where he grows “celebrity cell steaks.” Imagine a New and Improved Soylent Green with 50% More Celebrity! There are some grotesque images blended into these sequences, but the most horrifying is its plausibility; that this reflects our increasingly rabid celebrity culture, just tilted 180 degrees.
There is a cold, clinical feel to “Antiviral,” that recalls Cronenberg senior. It is, I guess, Brandon’s birthright, but it occasionally obscures the more humorous aspects of the story—celebrity ringworm for your dog, anyone?
“Antiviral” is strange speculative fiction, but it proves one thing—the apple doesn’t fall far form the tree, in either subject matter or filmmaking talent.
In “Argo” director and star Ben Affleck has the job of creating edge-of-your-seat tension even though most viewers already know the ending of the story. Based on the Canadian Caper, a covert operation to free six American diplomats after the seizure of the their embassy in Tehran, the movie fleshes out the story with the addition of recently declassified details.
The action begins on November 4, 1979 as Iranian militants invade the US embassy in Tehran, taking fifty-two of the fifty-eight diplomats hostages. Six managed to escape, making their way to refuge at the home of Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor (Victor Garber). In the United States the CIA hire Tony Mendez (Ben Afleck), an “exfiltration” expert to smuggle the six out of Iran to safety. With time ticking he concocts a plan that sounds like something from a bad spy movie. Creating false identities for the six he has them pose as a film crew scouting locations for a fake sci fi flick called “Argo.” Armed with fake Canadian passports, forged documents and movie storyboards they attempt the daring escape.
From the old school warner Brothers logo that pops up before the credits to the beards, clothes and 80’s vintage footage of Canadian politician Flora MacDonald, “Argo” gets the period details right, which goes a long way to forgive the inauthentic feel of much of the espionage.
Despite being based in truth, the spy story has the kind of Hollywood feel that reduces the agents to stereotypes—the world-weary spymaster, the by-the-book boss wielding the “Clipboard of Authority” and hotheaded supervisor—and the mission to a series of set pieces involving split second timing and imminent danger.
But this isn’t “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” with that movie’s nuanced, pensive take on the intelligence racket. It’s “Argo,” a Ben Affleck directed Hollywood construct, and despite its overreliance on well-worn theatrics, a pretty good one.
Affleck and John Goodman, (as real-life make-up artist John Chambers, and part time CIA operative), impress but it is Alan Arkin as Hollywood mogul Lester Siegel who steals the show. Siegle and Chambers anchored the Argo plot by lending the Tinsel Town credibility to the project, and Arkin, as the more flamboyant of the two, injects some needed energy into stateside scenes.
“Argo” doesn’t have the dark energy of Affleck’s directorial debut “Gone Baby Gone,” or the thrills of “The Town,” but it is a competently told tale about a real-life event that sounds like it could only happen in the movies.
