One of the most used film chestnuts is the “one last job” cliché. As a plot device we’ve seen it in everything from “The Sting” to “The Wild Bunch” to “Sexy Beast” to “Inception.” It usually involves a character’s search for redemption; a release that can only come after doing their usual job/gig/illegal activity one more time. Usually things don’t work out as planned but rarely have the consequences been as biblical as the climax of the aptly titled new thriller “The Last Exorcism.”
Staged like a documentary “The Last Exorcism” follows the exploits of Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian), a fundamentalist preacher and exorcist. I say exploits because Marcus makes a habit of exploiting the beliefs of his followers for money. He is, more or less, a God fearing man, but despite his fire and brimstone sermons, he doesn’t buy into the existence of demons. He’s like a slick salesman who doesn’t really believe in his product. He does however think the process of exorcism helps people who have faith He’s happy to take their money and business is good. “The Vatican gets the press,” he says, “because they have ‘the movie’” but he is called on to do dozens of exorcisms a year. After reading about a botched exorcism in which a young boy is killed, however, he decides to hang up his cross. He’ll do the fabled one last job for the benefit of the documentary cameras but that’s it. Of course, the demonic doings on the farm of Louis Sweetzer (Louis Herthum) in rural Louisiana test his faith—or lack thereof—more than he anticipated.
“The Last Exorcism” is part “Blair Witch Project” and part “Wicker Man” with a taste of “Rosemary’s Baby” thrown in for good measure. Despite some gaping credulity gaps—like a documentary crew who stays well past the point when any sane person would have run for the hills—it’s filled with enjoyably cheap and nasty b-movie thrills. By and large there are no special effects, just old school frights like eerie shadowy figures walking down hallways. The scares come from the situation, the characters and the layer of tension that director Daniel Stamm allows to build slowly as he nears the fiery climax.
As I said earlier, along the way credulity is stretched paper thin, and hardcore horror fans will likely see some of the twists coming, but Stamm compensates for that in the casting. One of the worst aspects of these “found footage” faux documentaries is the acting. Too often amateurish performances stand out like sore thumbs in these films, but with very few exceptions “The Last Exorcism” pulls it off acting wise. Particularly strong are Patrick Fabian as the sardonic know-it-all preacher and Ashley Bell as the 16-year-old demon child. Fabian brings some unexpected charm and humor to the role and Bell impresses as she careens from innocent to evil in the blink of an eye.
“The Last Exorcism” isn’t the most startling or original horror film to come along recently, but it is suitably creepy and should make you gobble your popcorn just a bit faster during the scary scenes.
M. Night Shyamalan has said “The Last Airbender,” in theatres this weekend, will be the first of a trilogy. A mix of action and spiritualism it will be, he says, his “Lord of the Rings.” I’m here to tell you, this ain’t no “LOTR.” It’s barely “Police Academy” standard let alone anything that could be compared to Peter Jackson’s richly layered epic.
The story begins with the discovery of Aang (Noah Ringer) a young boy with a distinctive tattoo marking his head and back. He’s been frozen in a block of ice for one hundred years and is unaware that the evil Fire Nation has waged a war on his home, the Earth Kingdom. Along with his new companions, Katara (Nicola Peltz), her brother Sokka (Jackson Rathbone), he flies around on a large creature that looks like a “Where the Wild Things Are” reject, fighting for the land and trying to stay one step ahead of Prince Zuko (Dev Patel) a disgraced royal who thinks capturing the boy will restore his honor. You see, Aang is the last of his kind. He’s the Avatar, the only person alive with the ability to “bend” all four elements. Unfrozen Avatar boy would be an asset to the Fire Nation army, but it is his destiny to supply order to his war torn world.
Based on an animated television series, “The Last Airbender” struggles to wedge three seasons worth of “bender” mythology into a ninety minute movie. To bring the audience up to speed Shyamalan provides endless exposition. In fact, there is very little dialogue in the first hour that isn’t setting up the history, motives and abilities of the characters. Conversational it isn’t. It’s a lot of “What is the spirit world grandma?” and “Aren’t there spirits here?” followed by long winded explanations delivered with a gravitas that wouldn’t be out of place in a community theatre production of “Sweeney Todd.” Add some narration and location intertitles to the questions and exposition and it’s obvious Shyamalan has broken the golden rule of filmmaking—show me don’t tell me. He shows us plenty, but unfortunately tells us even more.
He isn’t aided in the storytelling by a wooden cast of young actors who seem to have been hired more for their athletic ability than their acting chops. Even Dev Patel, such a winning presence in “Slumdog Millionaire,” is reduced to spending most of the movie simply screeching and glowering. When the other acrobatic actors aren’t over emoting they spend their time engaged in an elaborate game of Rock, Paper, Scissors battling with earth, wind and fire, the elements, not the funk band, to win control of the Earth Kingdom.
Even the murky 3D doesn’t add much, once again proving that stereoscopic images cannot rescue a weak story or mask poor acting.
“The Last Airbender” is my first seat belt movie of the season—that’s a movie so misguided, so off the mark you need a seat belt to keep you in your chair for the entire movie. Shyamalan really should have released the movie at Thanksgiving because it’s a turkey—but you won’t want a second helping.
If Nicholas Sparks ever wrote a romantic comedy it might be something like “Letters to Juliet.” Mixing an “it’s never too late to find true love” motif and other Spark’s standards like unopened letters and long lost love with some light comedy combines the best of what passes for romance on screen these days. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not exactly “Doctor Zhivago,” or even “When Harry Met Sally,” but it ain’t “Leap Year” either, and that’s a good thing.
“Mama Mia’s” Amanda Seyfried is Sophie, a pretty young fact checker at The New Yorker with secret ambitions to become a writer. She’s engaged to a workaholic chef (Gael García Bernal) who says he wants to “reinvent the noodle.” Taking a pre-honeymoon in Verona, Italy—he’ll be too busy to go after they tie the knot—they drift apart. He becomes engrossed in the food culture of Italy, she with The Secretaries of Juliet, a group of women who answer letters from the lovelorn left at the Juliet Balcony. When Sophie discovers a letter from 1957 her reply to Claire (Vanessa Redgrave) prompts the now grandmother to return to Italy after fifty years to search for her long lost love Lorenzo. Sensing a story Sophie tags along with Claire and her obnoxious grandson (Christopher Egan) as they search for Claire’s soul mate in the Tuscan countryside.
“Letters to Juliet” is essentially a romantic road trip through Tuscany which is lovely and takes your mind off the predictable story that is playing out in front of the luscious scenery. The love stories, (That’s right! SPOILER! There’s two of them!), move along pretty much as you expect they are going to, but while the progression of the narrative may be a tad stale the movie has more to offer than, to paraphrase Paul McCartney, silly love stories.
Beautiful scenery aside the movie is anchored by two very different performances. As Claire—described by her cheeky grandson as “Churchill in a dress”—Vanessa Redgrave does a nice job at showing steely determination, vulnerability and a lovely frailness. She is playing someone with a lifetime of experience and isn’t afraid to allow disappointment and sorrow as well as wisdom and joy shine through in her luminous performance.
On the other end of the scale is Amanda Seyfried, as the fresh-faced Sophie, a young person with hardly any experience. Seyfried is refreshingly natural and believable as a person experiencing their first life altering event.
As for the supporting cast, Egan doesn’t add much more than an iffy English accent and a strong jawline, Bernal is a caricature and Nero isn’t on screen long enough to make that much of an impression, but no matter, the movie works best when Seyfried and Redgrave are on screen together.
You’ll know how “Letters to Juliet” is going to end before the opening credits have rolled but in its quiet moments—as in a scene where Claire brushes Sophie’s hair—it transcend the clichés of the script and unearths some genuine heart.
Everything about “The Losers” is exaggerated. Things don’t explode, they burst into fiery mushroom clouds. The body count is in the triple digits and why use a machine gun when you can use a bazooka? It has all the elements of a regular action flick, just more and, as an added bonus, one of the bad guys is from Quebec.
At the beginning of the film The Losers are five highly trained special ops soldiers (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Chris Evans, Idris Elba, Columbus Short, and Oscar Jaenada)—calling them losers is like calling a tall guy Shorty—on a mission in Bolivia. Their job is to locate and mark a terrorist’s den so the air force can swoop in and lay down a heap of shock and awe. Minutes before bombs are scheduled to drop a busload of underage children arrive at the compound. The Losers try and call off the raid, but the high command—a man named Max (Jason Patrick)—refuses. Several very loud noises later The Losers are forced to fake their own deaths and go rogue. When a mysterious stranger (Zoe Saldana) shows up with a proposition they see a way to reenter the United States and get their revenge on Max.
Of course there’s more to the story than that. There’s next generation weapons, more international locations than a James Bond movie and an internationally wanted bazooka toting bad girl who dresses like a Guess model. This is a comic book movie—it’s based on a Vertigo DC series—with comic book characters and a silly premise. The bad guy is engineering a global conflict to bring peace to the US. Huh? Duct tape saves the day (Red Green would be so proud). Double huh?
It’s all a bit silly but since the movie doesn’t take itself seriously neither should we. It’s a fun ride that while bigger isn’t necessarily better. There’s a bit too much slo mo—I think it’s time we finally put an end to the “Reservoir Dogs” slo motion shot of the team walking toward the camera—the ending is clearly set up for a sequel and the supposed good guys seem to take a bit too much pleasure in killing.
On the upside, however, the cast seems to be having a good time alternately delivering tough guy lines—“You’re going to die very badly”—and typical action movie one liners—“Everybody except for PETA wants her dead” with loads of enthusiasm.
Actor wise as Clay Jeffrey Dean Morgan picks up where his character in “Watchmen” left off, and Zoe Saldana adds to her action movie reputation in a highly physical role that proves that Hit Girl isn’t the most lethal female in the theatres this week. Idris Elba provides the closest thing to a fully rounded character, mostly because he isn’t saddled with the one-liners the other guys have to spout.
“The Losers” is an action packed comic book romp that would make a better Saturday afternoon matinee than date night movie.
“The Last Song” has all the trademarks of a Nicholas Sparks romance. There’s a love story between rich and poor, disease, divorce, unopened letters and a character who’s just “trying to feel something again.” And it has Miley Cyrus sans her blonde Hannah Montana wig. This time out she’s an angry musical prodigy spending a summer vacation with her father, a man she barely knows.
Cyrus is Ronnie Miller, a troubled teen—“Her grades are in the toilet and she doesn’t have a friend without a pierced something,” says her mother—sent to stay with her estranged father for the summer in a small Southern beach town. She’s angry at her dad, and despite being a gifted pianist and a earning a scholarship to Julliard, she hasn’t played the piano for ages. She mopes around the small town until she meets Will, a chiseled volleyball player who helps her rescue a nest of sea turtle eggs. (I’m not kidding.) Through wildlife and mud fights they form an on-again-off-again relationship despite their differences. Enter into the mix a terminal illness, a burned church and a jealous ex and you have a story worthy of the Nicholas Sparks Story Generator™.
“The Last Song” features Miley Cyrus in the kind of role Kristen Stewart excels in. The brooding, moody teenager act that Stewart has down pat doesn’t come as easily to Cyrus who pitches her performance somewhere between an episode of “Hannah Montana” and a TV disease-of-the-week movie. Given the pre-hype for the film I assumed this would be her adult debut, but given the tone of her performance the transition from child star to grown-up actress continues at a glacial pace. She has several emotional scenes here, and sheds a tear or two, but mostly her performance relies on tricks learned on the Disney stage—eye rolling, running her hands through her hair and flashing her toothy smile. She has a movie star’s charisma and warmth, but not the acting chops.
Greg Kinnear is there for support, but even he looks mildly bewildered at the Sparkisms in the script. It’s a mixed bag of every romance cliché known to man, except, the Fabulous Gay Confidant™. In his / her place is the wise little brother played by Bobby Coleman.
But, having said all that, a movie like “The Last Song” isn’t about the plot or the acting or the clichés. It’s like an Elvis movie. It’s about the phenomenon that is Miley. Disney is very carefully easing her from TV star to movie star, and if the projects don’t exactly radiate an adult sensibility, who cares? They are counting on the long term success. There is plenty of time for her to mature along with her fans, who, I’m sure, Disney hopes are in the Miley game for the long term.
If the latest film from “Lord of the Rings” director Peter Jackson is to be believed the afterlife looks a lot like a Pink Floyd album cover from the late 1970s. In “The Lovely Bones,” a loose adaptation of the bestselling book by Alice Sebold, he goes heavy on the computer generated imagery to create a slick looking world, which despite the best efforts of the cast, is almost bereft of emotion.
In case you’re not a member of Oprah’s book club, who chose “The Lovely Bones” and propelled it up the best seller charts like a rocket, it is the story of Susie Salmon (“like the fish”) a 14 year old girl murdered in suburban Pennsylvania in 1973. Susie, however, didn’t go quietly into the long goodnight. From a place somewhere between Heaven and Earth she watches over her distraught family and tries to guide them through their time of despair.
Some of the now controversial CGI—early trade reviews called the film indulgent and “evocative of “The Sound of Music” or “The Wizard of Oz” one moment, “The Little Prince” or “Teletubbies” the next”—is quite beautiful and some of it is overkill. When Susie is making her arrival in “her heaven” it is a beautiful representation of a spirit floating away. Hugh shots of her never-to-be boyfriend Ray, reflected in a body of water that separates them and Ray again on a gazebo, surrounded by an undulating landscape, are a bit heavy handed. Jackson is the real deal, a skilled filmmaker and visualist, but he has to learn to trust the story and not let the technology do the talking.
Performance wise Jackson has cast well and gets good, solid work from his actors, particularly Rachel Weisz as the grieving mother, Susan Sarandon as the boozy grandmother and Rose McIver as the spunky sister Lindsey but it is the two central roles that the whole movie hinges on.
As the murderous Mr. Harvey Stanley Tucci is creepy; all twitchy movements and squeaky voiced. He’s Norman Bates without the overbearing Mom and wonderfully cast. Tucci, it appears can do anything. Earlier this year he played Julia Child’s loving diplomat husband in “Julie & Julia” and held his own opposite Meryl Streep. Now he’s the creepiest bad guy this year since Hans Landa drank a glass of milk with a French farmer in “Inglourious Basterds.”
At the heart of the film, however, is an arresting central performance by Saoirse Ronan as Susie, the little girl who never got to kiss a boy or see her fifteenth birthday. Her luminous presence gives the film whatever soul it has and her generous screen presence is a good tonic for the effects heavy scenes she plays in the “in between,” the blue horizon between heaven and earth.
“The Lovely Bones” should have been a better movie. It’s not terrible, mind you; it just doesn’t push the emotional buttons that a story about the murder of a young person should. Jackson is still in epic “LOTR” mode, taking a small, intimate movie and needlessly cluttering it up with bigger than life images that get in the way of the feeling of the piece.
“Leap Year”, a new opposites-attract-romantic-comedy, stars Amy Adams and Matthew Goode as the metaphoric oil and water. She’s a perfectionist, he isn’t. She pushy, he’s laid back. She doesn’t do quaint very well, he’s… well, quaint. It’s the standard rom com set up, but instead of the usual New York setting director Anand Tucker places the action in the picturesque Irish country side.
The action begins in Boston where uptight Anna (Adams) has become tired of waiting for her yuppie-scum cardiologist boyfriend of four years to propose. Taking matter into her own hands and citing an obscure Irish tradition that declares it impossible for a man to refuse a woman’s proposal on Leap Day she decides to ambush him on February 29 while he is in Dublin on business. Delayed by bad weather she lands in a remote Irish village and begins the long road trip to Dublin accompanied by Declan (Goode), a rough hewn local who agrees to take her to the big city in return for enough money to save his failing pub.
Rom coms are predictable beasts. We know who is going to end up with who, because if we don’t, I guess it would be a romantic suspense movie and who would pay to see that? The trick to making an effective rom com is to keep the ride interesting all the up to the final, and inevitable, loving embrace between the two leads. At this “Leap Year” is only partially successful.
Adams and Goode have the lion’s share of screen time and while they are both charming, good actors, neither is doing their best work here. Where is the interesting Adams of “Sunshine Cleaning”? Or “Enchanted’s” lovable Adams? For that matter as a love interest Goode was far more effective with one-tenth of the screen time in “A Single Man, “ and generated way more heat as Charles Ryder in the generally restrained “Brideshead Revisited” from a couple of years ago. Both put up a good fight but are beaten by material that is beneath them. Amy Adams deserves better than to share a scene with a herd of unresponsive cows.
Worst of all, for actors of Adams and Goode’s stature, neither really makes the material her or his own. I could imagine any number of actors playing these parts and for this movie to really work I shouldn’t have been able to imagine that the movie would have pretty much the same if it had starred Renee Zellweger and Gerard Butler.
“Leap Year” isn’t absolutely terrible, in fact for a January rom com it’s a step up from “New in Town” or “27 Dresses”, but it is really average; just another mildly amusing, predictable entry in a generally mindless genre that badly needs a shot in the arm. If only Quentin Tarantino would make a romantic comedy…
Director F. Gary Gray doesn’t waste any precious time getting to “Law Abiding Citizen’s” action. About thirty seconds into the movie there is a scene of striking ultra-violence that sets up the revenge story which is to follow. It’s just too bad that he allows the pace to go downhill after the opening scene. It’s a thriller without many thrills.
Gerard Butler and his finely carved abdominal muscles play Clyde Shelton the law abiding citizen referred to in the title. His life is changed forever after a home invasion leaves his wife and small child dead. When Assistant DA Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx), a slick up-and-coming lawyer at the DA’s office, makes a deal with one of the killers to testify against his partner in return for a reduced sentence it doesn’t sit well with Clyde. Cut to ten years later. Bad things start happening to everyone involved in the case, starting with the bad guys who both perish in excruciating ways. Clyde is arrested and confesses. That should be the end of it, but very bad things continue to happen. By the time Nick figures out how Clyde is doling out his own form of cruel and unusual punishment from jail it may be too late to save his own life.
There are a lot of words that could be used to describe “Law Abiding Citizen.” Here are some of them: goofy, implausible, ludicrous, inane, far-fetched, daft, nonsensical, illogical, preposterous, outlandish… I could go on, but you get the point. The story is a little silly, but that’s OK. It’s a revenge flick and if it was loaded with wall-to-wall action and some fun dialogue I could deal with the silliness. Look at “Taken” from earlier this year. Silly, silly, silly but fun in a check your brain at the door kind of way.
Unfortunately “Law Abiding Citizen” doesn’t have that kind of verve. There’s too much lag time between the big action set pieces. Every time the movie works up a head of steam the momentum evaporates into talky and mostly badly written dialogue sequences.
A red pencil could have made this script much more palatable but it’s likely that if you removed every line where a characters states the obvious and mundane there’s be very little left, dialogue wise. It’s the kind of movie that shows you a bomb with a cell phone trigger. Comments on it and then, for good measure, has another character say something like, “Do you mean to tell me that if that cell phone rings the bomb will go off?” Anyone who’s ever watched “Mission Impossible” or any other thriller involving bad guys and bombs knows that yes, if the cell phone rings the bomb will go off. It’s movie watching 101. You know it just like you know that the guy in the red shirt will always be the first to die on any given episode of “Star Trek.”
When the characters aren’t speaking in clichés they’re trying to comment on the state of a broken justice system that could let a child killer off with a light sentence. It’s an interesting premise for a revenge film, but again, Wimmer overplays his hand, putting sentences like, “I’m going to bring the whole diseased, corrupt temple down on your head! It’s going to be biblical” into Butler’s mouth.
Too bad the action isn’t as over-the-top as the dialogue. If so “Law Abiding Citizen” might have had a chance to be a great bad movie, as it is, it’s just a bad movie.
If not for the success of kiddie vampire flick Twilight you would likely NOT be reading this review for a movie about the unrequited love affair between poet Federico García Lorca (Javier Beltran) and superstar surrealist Salvador Dalí (Robert Pattinson). Little Ashes was shot long before star Robert Pattison became the Twilight heart throb du jour and his presence saved this movie from languishing on a shelf or becoming a budget art house DVD release. Just as Madonna’s popularity created a thirst for her pre-fame film A Certain Sacrifice, Pattison’s popularity ensures that this unremarkable film will find an audience.
When the story begins it is 1922. Dalí, Lorca and future filmmaker Luis Buñuel (Matthew McNulty) are schoolmates at an art school in Madrid. They are an intense bunch; artists who are looking to find the passion that will inform their later and greater work.
Dalí is already a young fop, dressed head to toe in ruffles topped with a Theda Bara hair do. At age 18 he is confronting the conventions of the day and given to pronouncements like, “I am the savior of modern art.” Lorca and Buñuel are less flamboyant, but just as driven. Over time an attraction develops between Dalí and Lorca but their mutual feelings are made difficult by a fascist law that forbids homosexuality, the disapproval of Buñuel and Dalí’s growing ambition to conquer the art world.
As young, idealistic artists the three school mates adopt an artistic manifesto of “no limits” as their code for pushing the edges of creative expression and life experience but for a movie about exploring new ideas Little Ashes is remarkably limited. The set-up is standard biopic. Characters meet, fall in love, there’s some conflict and bang, credits roll. It’s all very straightforward despite the character’s lip service to surrealism, Dada and anarchy. The real Dalí would roll over in his grave to be portrayed in such a standard film.
Pattison, at least, brings a certain strangeness to his portrayal of Dalí. It is, however, an unforgiving part to play. He throws himself into the role, but because Dalí was a flamboyant peacock whose eccentricities manifested themselves in physical affectations Pattison ends up playing the surface Dalí, popping his eyes and speaking strangely. His mimicry resembles a pretentious youngster not a true iconoclast.
Dalí is one of the most important and outrageous figures of recent art history and yet here he looks silly when he should be imposing. Pattison simply isn’t a seasoned enough actor to really breathe life into a character based on a larger than life man. Dalí once said “every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí” but Pattison isn’t able to convey that “supreme pleasure.”
Little Ashes is an admirable effort but is sunk by an overly long running time, some awkward performances and bland direction. There is an interesting story to be told about Dalí and the “construction of his genius” but this isn’t it.
