“Lucy” is a different style of movie–the philosophical action movie. Imagine a mix of “Limitless,” “La Femme Nikita,” “The Matrix” and a Philosophy 101 textbook with half the pages torn out and you’ll get an idea of the film’s loopy feel.
Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) begins the story “just like you, vulnerable, uncertain, frightened of death,” but when the bag of drugs some very bad people “slipped into her lower tummy” bursts her life is changed forever. She doesn’t overdose, instead the drug expands her mind to ten times the usual capacity. She becomes a turbo-charged human who can “do things I’ve never done before, and can control the elements around me,” change her appearance and move objects with her mind. With great power comes great responsibility, so she contacts a world famous neuroscientist (Morgan Freeman) to pass along her newfound knowledge, but not before unleashing the power of her mind on the drug dealing baddies who got her into this mess.
The metaphysical aspects of the story are about as deep as a lunch tray, but director Luc Besson sure knows how to weave enough action through his absurd stories to keep things entertaining. If you can wade through the silly scientific theories there are some great scenes that are more fun than a barrel of neuroscientists. In one fight scene all the bad guys have knives and guns while Johansson taps into her inner Jedi Knight to defeat them without raising her hand. That sequence alone is worth sitting through the entire 80 minute running time.
Morgan Freeman fans might find less to be enthused about. He is a lot device, a character who provides some much needed context and scientific gravitas–does anyone have more gravitas than Freeman?–and while he is one of two top billed stars in this movie, his part could’ve been played by almost anyone. The movie really belongs to Johansson who starts off as a bubbly party girl and ends the movie as the keeper of the secrets of the universe. It’s a bit of a stretch but her performance shifts as she becomes less and less human–“All the things that make me human are fading away,” she says–and more and more a flesh computer, capable of understanding the very essence of life.
That’s right, this is an action film with a higher purpose. It even comes with its own Terrence-Malick-by-way-of-Stanley-Kubrick tribute. I don’t want to give away anything, but with a movie as loopy as is one, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that there is some wild time travel back to the beginning of time. I guess it’s an attempt to add some profundity to the story but it plays more like a Philosophy 101 student on an acid trip.
“Lucy” isn’t as smart as it thinks it is, but it is a cleverly made summer diversion.
“And so it goes,” sang Nick Lowe in the chorus of his first hit, “and where it’s going, no one knows.” If only the same could be said for “And So It Goes,” a new comedy starring Michael Douglas and Diane Keaton. Predictable as joint pain after an Active Aging workout, you’ll know exactly where it’s going.
Douglas plays Oren, a widowed Connecticut real estate agent with more than a few personality tics. He’s a broke Gordon Gekko, relying on one last real estate score to secure his retirement. His next-door neighbor is Leah (Keaton), a lounge singer who bursts into tears at the mere thought of her late husband. They are polar opposites brought together when a granddaughter (Sterling Jerins) Oren didn’t know about turns up on their shared doorstep. Cue the Geritol inspired giggles (“I’ve sold houses older than you,” says Oren to Leah, “and in worse condition!”).
Douglas and Keaton aren’t straying far from their collective wheelhouses here. Both have played these kind of characters before—he in “Wonder Boys,” she in “Something’s Gotta Give”—and while both are skilled, the material lets them down. There are sweet moments and a few funny scenes, but virtually every plot point is telegraphed in extra large print so everyone can see them coming a mile away.
Director Rob Reiner lets the leads do what they do best—win the audience over with sheer strength of will—and had the good sense to hire Frances Sternhagen as Oren’s quick-witted associate. Her performance, full of wit and charm and even a bit of edge, exposes the movie’s main problem. If Reiner had allowed his other characters to have as much fun as Sternhagen it might not feel so fuddy duddy.
“And So It Goes” is clearly made for an older audience but panders to easy sentiment rather than offering the over fifty crowd any kind of refined look at romance and family. It’s about as interesting as a Blue Plate Special when it could be, considering the talent involved, as richly textured as a fine, aged wine.
“A Most Wanted Man” is one of the trio of movies Philip Seymour Hoffman had in the can when he passed away last February. The spy thriller, based on a novel by John le Carré, is his final leading role and it is difficult to watch the film without a sense of dark foreboding.
One throwaway moment that has more resonance now takes place in a bar. Günther Bachmann (Hoffman) offers Annabel (Rachel McAdams) a cigarette.
“It’s OK,” she says. “I’ve given up.”
“Good luck with that,” he replies with the sardonic tone of someone who has tried and failed to let go of their vices. Blink and you’ll miss it, but taken in context his reaction is chilling, as is CIA agent Martha Sullivan’s (Robin Wright) line, “Even good men have a little bit of bad in them… and that little bit could kill you.”
Hindsight is twenty-twenty, of course, but these references to addiction and mortality, no matter how subtle, add pathos to an already poignant performance.
Hoffman plays Bachman, the head an anti-terrorism unit working in Hamburg, Germany. “Not many people know about it,” he says, “even less like it.” He works deep undercover with a small team, but this is no high flying spy style adventure. Instead, it’s a spy story about money transfers, private bankers (Willem Dafoe), a human-rights attorney (who Günther “a social worker for terrorists,” played by McAdams), a respected Muslim academic and philanthropist (Homayoun Ershadi), and Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin) a half-Chechen, half-Russian refugee who might be worth $10 million. As he follows the money Bachman must untangle the web of intrigue in just 72 hours or the German police will upend his plans.
Looking like an unmade bed, Hoffman plays Günther as a hard drinking, chain smoking, heavy-breathing anti-James Bond. His one action scene involves walking across a bar ton punch someone in the face. The thrills here come from his methodical piecing together of the clues and his manipulation of the personalities involved. It’s a terrific performance in which you can feel the weight of the world in every decision he makes, every step he takes. It’s just a shame that the movie seems to value the minutiae over its characters.
Hoffman shines, but others aren’t given the opportunity. Wright has a handful of scenes but is primarily a plot point and not a rounded character. Dobrygin succeeds in looking mournful and Dafoe, while believable as a shady banker, isn’t given enough to do. Only McAdams as the idealistic but conflicted lawyer and the city of Hamburg—whose suitably seedy underbelly is as well developed a character as is on display here—keeps up with Hoffman.
“A Most Wanted Man” features a measured but intense performance from Hoffman, but the film itself isn’t as interesting as he is.
“I Origins” is many things. It’s a love story, a sci fi spiritual mystery with a hint of “Frankenstein” thrown in.
Michael Pitt stars as Dr. Ian Grey, a molecular biologist specializing in the evolution of the eye. He’s an atheist, a scientist trying to disprove the idea of intelligent design by creating, from scratch, an eye in a sightless creature. Two women in his life represent the polar opposites of his existence, the sensual, exotic Sophia (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey) and his lab partner, scientist Karen (Brit Marling). A strange discovery brings both his worlds together, the scientific and the spiritual, but is it a random event or a sign that there is more to iris biometrics than hard data and research?
Director Mike Cahill’s last film, “Another Earth,” was a low-fi, sci fi film that valued ideas over the kind of razzmatazz we’ve come to associate with speculative fiction. The same goes with “I Origins.” It’s a small movie about big ideas. Are the eyes a mechanical device or truly a window to the soul? Can science be used to prove or disprove the presence of God? Can faith and science live side-by-side (Hello Mary Shelly!)?
In that sense the movie is a cypher, which is OK, people have been arguing about these concepts for as long as there have been bibles and test tubes, but while “I Origins” is ambitious in its tackling of life’s great mysteries, the story occasionally goes off track. There are some awkward moents that get on the way of smooth storytelling but overall Cahill keeps things chugging along with sheer audacious and ambitious filmmaking.
Pitt, Marling and Bergès-Frisbey hand in magnetic performances that deepen as the film goes on. With this much metaphysics in the air the actors need to ground the story in humanity and they do.
By the time the end credits roll (and stay through the to the very end for a surprise and surprising scene) the metaphysical love story may have asked many more questions than it could ever hope to answer but answers aren’t the point of the film. Ideas are, and the film has those in spades.
Synopsis: Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) begins the story “just like you: vulnerable, uncertain, frightened of death,” but when the bag of drugs some very bad people “slipped into her lower tummy” bursts, her life is changed forever. She doesn’t overdose. Instead the drug expands her mind to 10 times the usual capacity. She becomes a turbocharged human who can change her appearance and move objects with her mind. She contacts a world-famous neuroscientist (Morgan Freeman) to pass along her newfound knowledge, but not before unleashing the power of her mind on the baddies who got her into this mess.
Richard: 3/5 Mark: 3/5
Richard: Mark, Lucy is a different style of movie, the philosophical action movie. The philosophy is all mumbo-jumbo but that doesn’t matter because the film is filled with many enjoyable scenes. Imagine a mix of Limitless, La Femme Nikita and The Matrix run through Luc Besson’s absurd style of moviemaking and you get the idea of what this movie is all about. What did you make of it?
Mark: The movie is great when it remembers it’s a thriller but when the pseudoscience and dime-store spirituality takes over, it becomes oppressive. I always can depend on Besson for brisk pacing but he slows it all down for a series of lectures — literally, with Morgan Freeman narrating his part as seems to be his custom now.
RC: Freeman is one of two top-billed stars in this movie, but his part could have been played by almost anyone. The movie really belongs to Scarlett Johansson, who starts off as a bubbly party girl and ends the movie as the keeper of the secrets of the universe. It’s a bit of a stretch, but if you can wade through the silly scientific theories, there are some great scenes that are more fun than a barrel of neuroscientists. In one fight scene, all the bad guys have knives and guns while Johansson taps into her inner Jedi Knight to defeat them without raising her hand. That sequence alone is worth sitting through the entire 80-minute running time.
MB: I liked lots of scenes in the movie, especially at the beginning when Johansson realizes how much trouble she’s in. Afterward she’s a bit of an automaton but a very hot one. And what did you think of the trippy psychedelic visuals and time travel revelations toward the end?
RC: You mean the Terrence-Malick-by-way-of-Stanley-Kubrick tribute? I don’t want to give away anything, but with a movie as loopy as this one, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that there is some wild time travel back to the beginning of time. I guess it’s an attempt to add some profundity to the story, but it plays more like a Philosophy 101 student on an acid trip.
MB: Loopy is right, Richard, maybe even crazy. But at least Besson cribs from the best.
“Canada AM” film critic Richard Crouse discusses how the Toronto International Film Festival has become one of the most prestigious events of its kind.
Pam Grier walks into a bar. Sounds like the beginning of a joke, but it’s actually the setup for one of the great fight scenes of the 1970s.
Grier played the title character in 1974’s Foxy Brown, a woman who poses as a high-end escort to get revenge on the gangsters who killed her G-Man boyfriend. When her undercover work brings her to a seedy bar, she confronts Bobbie, a tough-talking patron (played by Jeannie Epper who was also Lynda Carter’s stunt double on Wonder Woman).
“Listen, skinny,” says Bobbie, “before you start talking tough, I better warn you. I got a black belt in karate. So why don’t you get out of here quietly, while you still have some teeth left in that ugly face?”
Before you can say, “You go, girl,” Foxy clobbers Bobbie with a wooden stool, slamming her in the face then shattering it across her back.
“And I got my black belt in bar stools!” says Foxy.
Grier could deliver a line and a punch, attributes that allowed her to cut a swathe in the male-dominated action movie market of the 1970s.
This weekend Scarlett Johansson adds to Grier’s kick- butt legacy on the big screen with Lucy, an all-out actioner about a woman who becomes a superhuman when a drug allows her to use 100 per cent of her brain capacity. “I’m able to do things I’ve never done before,” she says. “I feel everything and can control the elements around me.”
Johansson joins a list of dangerous distaff action stars like Michelle Yeoh (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), Jenette Goldstein (Aliens), Angelina Jolie (Wanted, Salt, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider) and Uma Thurman (Kill Bill, Parts 1 & 2) who have given Schwarzenegger and Stallone a run for their money.
Perhaps the wildest female action movie of all time is 1965’s “ode to female violence,” Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! starring Tura Satana as the thrill-seeking go-go dancer Varla.
Experienced in martial arts, Satana did her own stunts and brought her unique style — black leather gloves, Germaine Monteil eyeliner and layers of Max Factor pancake makeup — to the film. She even supplied some of the movie’s most memorable lines.
When a gas station attendant ogles her cleavage while extolling the virtues of being on the open road and seeing America, Satana ad libbed, “You won’t find it down there, Columbus!”
Time critic Richard Corliss called Satana’s performance “the most honest, maybe the one honest portrayal in the [director Russ] Meyer canon and certainly the scariest.”
“I took a lot of my anger that had been stored inside of me for many years and let it loose,” Satana said of her most famous role.
“I helped to create the character Varla and helped to make her someone that many women would love to be like.”
Actor Dwayne Johnson, better known as ‘The Rock’, talks to “Canada AM” film critic Richard Crouse about his role as ‘Hercules’, and passion to create something different.
“When I was a kid I remember being visually captivated by the Steve Reeves poster,” says Johnson. “He’s breaking free of this pillar and chains. I didn’t know the mythology back then but I knew the image. That image captivated me. When I was a kid I was always drawn to men who were able to accomplish things, whether they were big things or little things, but men who took care of business physically.”
Here’s Richard in a CTV National News report from Saturday July 19, 2014. “Hollywood relies on making huge profits from summer blockbusters,” they say, “but something’s gone wrong with this year’s script.”
“Lucy” is a different style of movie–the philosophical action movie. Imagine a mix of “Limitless,” “La Femme Nikita,” “The Matrix” and a Philosophy 101 textbook with half the pages torn out and you’ll get an idea of the film’s loopy feel.
