Patrick White’s novel “The Eye of the Storm” is the only Australian book honored with a Nobel Prize for literature, and it is perhaps the novel’s intimidating reputation—and dense prose—that has kept filmmakers away for almost forty years.
The action centers around socialite Elizabeth (Charlotte Rampling), the terminally ill matriarch of the Hunter family. On her deathbed she lives life as she always has, controlling and manipulating everyone around her. That includes her nurses (one of whom is played by the director Fred Schepisi’s daughter, Alexandra), a flamboyant housekeeper and her two sycophantic kids, the lecherous stage star Sir Basil (Geoffrey Rush) and down-on-her-luck princess Dorothy (Judy Davis). Elizabeth has decided to dictate the terms of her passing, Basil has decided to try and bed younger women and Dorothy wants to et her hands on some much needed cash.
There’s a taste of “King Lear” in “The Eye of the Storm.” The similarities in the family dynamic are obvious, but beyond that, there is a theatricality to the movie which works well for the material. Normally I would find the movie’s monologues and posturing distracting, but it is a pleasure to watch Rush, Davis and Rampling clearly relishing the opportunity to immerse themselves in Patrick White’s world.
“The Eagle,” a new “Gladiator-lite” movie from Academy Award winner Kevin MacDonald, plays more like a B.C. buddy picture than a brutal Roman centurion drama.
Based on the legend of the Legio IX Hispana (Ninth Spanish Legion)—a group of 5000 warriors thought to have disappeared in Britain in AD 117—the film sees emotive former fashion model Channing Tatum as centurion Marcus Aquila, the son of the leader of the Ninth Legion. His mission is to discover what really happened to his father’s battalion and recover the lost golden Eagle statue. Along for the ride is his slave Esca (Jamie Bell), who helps navigate the treacherous lands beyond Hadrian’s Wall (modern day Scotland).
Channing Tatum, an actor poised on the edge of becoming the next big thing, is the central character here. He’s in 99% of the film, and it is his story that drives the action. It’s too bad then, that he is so wildly miscast. Channing is not without his physical charms—think Brad Pitt in “Thelma and Louise”—and is a credible movie star but perhaps a modern day setting would better suit him. Frankly, he’s more San Diego than sword and sandal. In short, even though he gives the role a heroic try, “The Eagle” will not be his “Gladiator.”
Tatum aside, the movie feels lackluster despite its beautiful photography and interesting design. It’s a well made but poorly paced film that puts WAY too much emphasis on the retrieval of the golden eagle, a small statue we’re told is the symbol of Rome. For much of the movie the golden idol is a McGuffin, little more than a device to get the action started, but by the time the story really gets underway we’re supposed to care whether or not Aquila recovers it.
Unfortunately we don’t. It’s a central premise that doesn’t engage the viewer. Also, wouldn’t a large golden eagle weigh at least 100 pounds? The way these actors toss the thing around it seems lighter than a real life sparrow.
Better is the connection between Aquila and Esca. Their slave vs. master bond doesn’t hold much promise as a warm and fuzzy relationship and yet the movie demonstrates how friendship can slice through political divides.
“The Eagle” is a strange hybrid of history and pop culture—a mix of period and anachronistic dialogue with a modern buddy story grafted onto a Roman backdrop—that, despite its title, never really takes flight.
At one point in “Easy A” Olive (Emma Stone) says “John Hughes did not direct my life.” True enough, but he could have directed this movie. The story of a girl who takes the saying “let’s not and say we did” to a whole new level has echoes of Hughes and is the best high school comedy to come along since “Mean Girls” and “Superbad.”
The movie begins with the voiceover, “The rumours of my promiscuity have been greatly exaggerated.” It’s the voice of Olive (Stone), a clean cut high school senior who tells a little white lie about losing her virginity. As soon as the gossip mill gets a hold of the info, however, her life takes a parallel course to the heroine of the book she is studying in English class—The Scarlet Letter. At first she embraces her newfound notoriety; after all she had been all but invisible at the beginning of the school year. “Google Earth couldn’t find me even if I was dressed as a ten story building,” she says. It isn’t until the lies and gossip start to spin out of control that she has to assert her virginity.
“Easy A” is funny. Laugh out loud until your face hurts funny. Even the product placement—Quiznos—is funny. It’s filled with great one liners—“I fake rocked your world!”—and the best non-sex, sex scene ever but as good as the script is, it is enhanced by terrific comedic performances that elevate the movie from clever teen romp to something special.
Leading the cast is Emma Stone, the typical movie not-so-plain, plain girl, as the spunky Olive. Her past work in “Superbad” and “Zombieland” hinted at her ability to be funny and hold the screen, but here she turns a corner into full on Lucille Ball mode, mixing pratfalls with wit while pulling faces and cracking jokes. Smart and funny, she’s the film’s centerpiece and this should be her breakout movie.
Supporting her, as her parents, are Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson. Tucci, who recently creeped out everyone who paid twelve bucks to see “The Lovely Bones” unleashes his silly side here, proving, once again, that he is one of our most versatile actors. Clarkson, as his freewheeling wife (and Olive’s mom) brings bucket loads of charm and comic timing. When they are together sparks fly.
Uniformly strong are Amanda Bynes, in what was supposed to be her last role before her retirement from acting, and Dan Byrd (from The Hills Have Eyes) as Brandon, a gay teen who turns to Olive for help. His plaintive plea for her to help put an end to the teasing he takes at school is heartfelt and touching and real.
“Easy A” is the most fun I’ve had in the theatre in a long time.
You’ve read the book or know someone who has. Oprah endorsed it and it spent more than three years on the New York Times Bestseller List before Brad Pitt snapped up the rights, hired Julia Roberts and turned it into one of the most anticipated movies of the summer. “Eat Pray Love,” the picturesque story of one woman’s search for enlightenment, is part road trip movie, part self help guide and part food porn. By the movie’s end you may have reservations about her journey, but you’ll also want to make reservations—for a trip and a visit to a great Italian restaurant.
Julia Roberts plays Liz Gilbert, a New York City writer with a seemingly perfect life. Career wise she’s in demand, she has a loving husband (Billy Crudup) and a beautiful home. Under the surface, however, she’s unhappy and one day makes the shocking decision to leave it all behind and spend a year travelling, first to Italy, then India and finally Bali. Along the way she learns to build meaningful relationships, how to forgive herself and how to nourish not only her body but her soul as well.
“Eat Pray Love” is a big expensive movie about introspection. The film’s style is sweeping and bold—ie: lots of crane shots and clever editing—but director Ryan Murphy keeps the focus of the story where it should be, on Liz’s internal search. He has found smart ways to illustrate her various epiphanies, visualizing her mental breakthroughs. For instance on the Indian ashram where she learns to forgive herself for breaking her ex-husband’s heart, Murphy stages the scene between Roberts and Crudup as a conversation during the wedding dance they never had. It’s magic realism, which unless you’re Terry Gilliam, is very hard to pull off, but the scene works remarkably well. It’s both cinematic and intimate, all set to the tune of Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon.”
At the heart of the film is Roberts. She brings her movie star likability to a character that could easily be written-off as self centered in her single minded search to figure out her life. Her presence helps separate “Eat Pray Love” from the run-of-the-mill big screen romance. This would have been a much different movie if Jennifer Aniston or Kate Hudson had signed on to play the lead, but Roberts brings with her a light-gravitas. I know it’s a contradiction, but she knows how to play the comedy aspects of the story but also wades in knee deep for the dramatic scenes. She’s in every scene—almost every frame—of the picture providing an anchor for the film’s flighty story.
She’s working opposite some heavyweight performances. Richard Jenkins as the plain talking Texan searching for enlightenment in India is a lock for a Best Supporting Actor nomination and Javier Bardem oozes charisma and vulnerability as Felipe, the love interest. He says the words “It’s time,” with more romance there than in any ten rom coms we’ve seen recently.
At one point during the film a character says, “Americans know entertainment but they don’t know pleasure.” “Eat Pray Love” proves that the two aren’t mutually exclusive.
“The Expendables,” the new film starring every action star known to man, including Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham and Arnold Schwarzenegger (and that’s just the Ss!), is a nostalgia fest celebrating those cinematic days of yore when gangs of mercenaries led by action heroes like Dolph Lundgren could bring down governments and spread the American way of life armed only with an arsenal of guns, knives, grenades and one liners. That the heyday of this kind of movie, and most of the actors in it, was twenty-five years ago is not going to prevent “The Expendables” from kicking butt and lots of it.
In this blood and testosterone splattered story Stallone leads a group of freelance soldiers—knife tosser Lee Christmas (Jason Statham) hand-to-hand expert Ying Yang (Jet Li), sniper Gunner (Dolph Lundgren), big gun toter Terry Crews and MMA superstar Randy Couture—whose motto is “if the money’s right we don’t care where the job is.” When they take a job to bring down a dictator (David Zayas who plays Angel on “Dexter”) and American drug lord (Eric Roberts, whose sister Julia has a very different kind of movie opening on the same day as this one) on the South American Isle of Vilena, however, they may have finally found one hotspot worse than Bosnia, Sierra Leone and all the other hellish places they’ve fought for pay, combined. The only thing than can get them to go back there is—you guessed it—a woman. Cue the explosions.
Not that there aren’t some retina scorching action scenes. Stallone (who also directed) uses each of the individual talents of his actors well—it’s always a pleasure to see Jet Li in action—and several things blow up real good, but when the movie tries to go deep it stumbles. When Mickey Rourke, who plays Tool, a former soldier of fortune who now sets up their engagements—think Charlie on “Charlie’s Angels”—drones on about trying to “save what was left of my soul” it grinds the movie to a near halt.
“Exit Through the Gift Shop” is either a fascinating portrait of the growth of street art or an elaborate hoax. Documentary or visual art art project? Either way it is an engrossing movie about the creation of art, the exploitation of art and the meaning of art.
Directed by the acclaimed but unidentified street artist Banksy, a British pioneer of street art, blending graffiti, pop art with a satirical edge, it is allegedly the story of Thierry Guetta, a French videographer turned world famous artist. The film apparently blossomed from Guetta’s twin obsessions with videotaping everything in his day-to-day life and street art. He captured thousands of hours of graffiti artists in their natural habitat—painting on buildings and running from the police—as they created their own DIY art shows. Using consumer grade equipment he filmed some of the superstars of the field, Shepard Fairey (whose Barack Obama portrait later became the iconic image of the president’s campaign), France’s Space Invader and Banksy, the daring artist who once brazenly decorated the Israeli West Bank barrier. At Banksy’s suggestion Guetta put down his camera and reinvented himself as Mr. Brainwash, a street artist who hired a staff to create his art and threw one of the largest art shows Los Angeles had ever seen, grossing over one million dollars in two weeks. Not bad for an artist no one had ever heard of.
Banksy is by far and away the best known artist to emerge from the street art movement, but despite earning a world wide reputation (and the resulting pay cheques) he is an enigma. Never photographed (in the movie his voice is distorted and he is only shot form behind) he is a mystery and that’s why I use words like allegedly and apparently when I talk about this movie.
There is a rumor that given the movie’s strange provenance—it ostensibly began as Guetta’s home videos, turned into a doc on Banksy and then a movie about Guetta, because, as Banksy said, “Thierry is more interesting than me”—that Guetta is actually Banksy and the entire film is the artist’s provocative and beguiling comment on the art world.
Billed as “the world’s first street art disaster movie” it effectively documents how hype and a bit of nerve can be as important in the creation of an artistic movement as the art itself. Banksy, through carefully placed talking head segments (although his face is obscured by a black mask and hoodie) inserts some tantalizing insights into his world. “The reaction to the art is the most important thing,” he says of his street art, which, by its temporary nature is meant to provoke a response above all else. “I used to encourage everyone to make art,” he says later. “I don’t really do that so much anymore.” Is that a comment on the sudden rush of artists claiming street art as their own, or on Guetta or is it a joke, the punch line to Banksy’s 90 minute gag?
I don’t know, but I do know that “Exit Through the Gift Shop” is one of the most thought provoking and entertaining docs to come down the pike in some time.
Movies like “Extraordinary Measures” are what happens when other films like “Lorenzo’s Oil” and “Patch Adams” sneak away for a dirty weekend. Starring former hunks Harrison Ford and Brendan Fraser, this red-haired step child of a movie, born, probably, out of passion, is, however, destined to be ignored in favor of other, more legitimate films in the Ford / Fraser family.
Based on a true story “Extraordinary Measures” centers on John (Fraser) and Aileen (Keri Russell) Crowley, parents of three young children, two of which have a deadly form of muscular dystrophy called Pompe. Desperate to prolong the lives of their afflicted kids they seek out the help of Dr. Robert Stonehill (Harrison Ford), a researcher with a viable theory about enzyme treatment for the rare genetic disorder. Together the ego-centric scientist and the earnest, yet determined father go into business, first building a private lab in Nebraska, then merging with big pharma, to create a cure for the disease.
We have “The Mummy” and “Indiana Jones” to thank (or not) for “Extraordinary Measures.” Without the success of those two franchises there is no way Ford and Fraser could have gotten this cliché ridden clunker off the ground. It’s also further proof that the world has gone crazy. How strange a place is our culture when someone can raise 30 million dollars to make a movie like this, but the real life Crowleys had trouble raising even seed money to find a cure for their kid’s disease? Seems like skewed priorities.
At its best “Extraordinary Measures” comes off as an overwrought TV movie-of-the-week. At its worst (which is most of the time) it plays like a parody of a “Disease-of-the-Week” television movie.
Ford skates through much of the muck unscathed—although there could be a drinking game involving how many times he unnecessarily mentions going to the bathroom—but Fraser really gets conked on the head by the Cliché-O-Tron.
It’s bad enough he has to say lines like, “I want to find a miracle as much as you do,” and “perform” the standard slumping-to-the-floor-in-uncontrollable-sobs scene, but the height of ridiculousness comes when director Tom Vaughan stages a scene where Fraser tries to get Ford’s attention by shimmying up a wall to bang on a small window even though there is a HUGE glass door located a few feet away.
“Extraordinary Measures” is a movie that was likely made with the best of intentions, but clearly no extraordinary measures were made to make the script coherent or the performances big-screen worthy.
Despite the title of the new Robert DeNiro family dramedy, “Everybody’s Fine,” everybody is most certainly not fine. In fact, the kids in the Goode family have a variety of problems—some big, some small. The only thing that binds them is a desire not to worry their father with the details of their family woes.
DeNiro plays Frank Goode, a recent widower planning a family reunion—complete with “fancy wine and filet mignons” cooked on an expensive new BBQ—with his four adult kids. His plans are scuttled when, one by one, his kids cancel. It’s like a Harry Chapin song come to life. His late wife had kept the family in touch, but with her gone he’s missing the connection to his kids so he decides, instead of “spending more time in the garden” as his doctor suggests, to make a cross country trip to see his kids in person.
“Everybody’s Fine” is De Niro’s “About Schmidt.” He’s the man who spent his life trying to give his kids the best life he could but despite his best intentions (and high expectations) they turned out to be less than perfect. In other words, they’re human. This is a movie about expectations and the pressure of having to live up to them.
The road trip format offers up lots of opportunities to introduce new characters and give each of the kids their own unique space and situation. Director and screenwriter Kirk Jones makes full use of the medium, introducing Frank to people along the way—random people on a train, a dangerous homeless man in a bus station, Melissa Leo as a plain talking truck driver—and for the most part the movie makes the most of these opportunities. A visual metaphor involving telephone wires—Frank was a factory worker who coated “a million feet of wire” with PVC coating to get his kids “where they are today”—gets a little old and at one point storm clouds literally come rolling in when the going gets tough, but its heart is in the right place.
Unfortunately too much heart puts a damper on the ending of the story, wrapping things up in the kind of tidy bow that never exists in real life. It’s too bad Jones takes the easy path to wrapping the story up because up until the feel good ending (which follows a not-so-feel-good climax) the movie has been true to the emotional journey that many families take. Jones does a good job at showing the kind of little tensions that arise when families get together while exposing the white lies that people tell to spare the feelings of those close to them. It’s good work that is blunted by a corn-ball ending, but good work nonetheless.
At the heart of it all is De Niro. I don’t know how many people I’ve seen get shot, punched, stabbed or generally abused by him over the years—it’s a considerable number when you think back to all the bad guys he’s played—so it is amazing how quickly the image of Bad Bobby is replaced by Frank, a caring, if somewhat bumbling father. De Niro makes Frank an everyman, a totally relatable character that keeps the movie interesting even when it takes a turn for cheesy sentiment.
“Everybody’s Fine” isn’t as good a film as “About Schmidt” but it does get much right about the family dynamic.
Director Mike Judge understands crappy jobs. “Office Space,” his 1998 cult comedy, is not only a very funny look into minimum wage but an insightful one as well. Ditto his new work place comedy “Extract,” except for the funny part. It nails the workplace dynamic but unfortunately it isn’t nearly as laugh out loud as you would expect from the creator of “Beavis and Butthead.”
“Extract” stars Jason Bateman as Joel, the owner of Reynolds’s Extract Company. He’s an unhappy, sexually frustrated former bartender and chemistry major obsessed with flavor extracts; pure, mostly colorless, concentrated flavors used in baking. Looking for a way out of his business and marriage complicates his life. Taking bad advice from his friend Dean (Ben Affleck), a bartender and self proclaimed spiritualist and healer he hires a dimwitted gigolo to test his wife’s fidelity, tries to stave off a lawsuit from an injured employee and falls for Cindy (Mila Kunis) a beautiful kleptomaniac who almost costs him everything.
“Extract” has some funny moments. David Koechner as the neighbor from hell is as amusing a character as we’re likely to see this year and there is a bong scene that gives Cheech and Chong a run for their money, but by and large it’s a great example of the trailer giving away all the best moments. The film is a bit of a comedy flat line but you’d never know it from the trailer which showcases at least four solid laughs. Too bad the movie only has six or seven in total.
Having said that, “Extract” is a likeable movie. The story plays well enough without nonstop laughs and the main and supporting casts are interesting.
Jason Bateman brings a low key charm to Joel. As his life spins out of control Bateman slowly ratchets up the anxiety level and even though the situation is unbelievable—I can’t imagine too many men hiring a gigolo to tempt their better half—he grounds the role in realism. The beauty of the performance is that the viewer feels for him even though he’s making every mistake in the book.
Mila Kunis smolders as Cindy the manipulative con woman and Ben Affleck continues his career rehabilitation with a supporting role that plays against the leading man type roles that nearly sunk him a few years ago.
When the movie shifts away from the main characters the casting is just as strong. The odd cast of losers, loners and nonconformists that populate the factory are a colorful addition to a film already ripe with strong characters.
“Extract” is billing itself as a comedy which does it a disservice. It isn’t funny enough to compete against “The Hangovers” and the “Brunos” of the summer season, but it does succeed as an engaging character study.
