“Sinister,” the 2012 Ethan Hawke horror film, was a good old-fashioned spooky movie where it was misty at night, things went bump in the night, and every door in the house needed to be oiled. It was also the rare kind of modern scarefest that created mythology about a new malevolent force—no sparkling vampires or sexy werewolves in sight!—to drive the story. Unfortunately the largely Hawke-less (he only appears in a photo) sequel “Sinister 2” drives that malevolent force off a cliff.
Shannyn Sossamon is Courtney, a mother on the run to protect her 9-year-old twins Dylan and Zach (Robert and Dartanian Sloan) from their abusive father (Lea Coco). Their refuge is an abandoned home and church in a remote community. Trouble is, the place comes with a past. “It would be better if I didn’t live were so many people got killed,” says Dylan.
Dylan has been troubled by bad dreams and visions, like blood seeping from the floor and soon is hanging out with some undead devil kids in the basement of the rambling house. There, at the behest of a ghoul named Bughuul, they watch torture porn home movies with terrible endings, like giant alligators eating people popsicles and folks being buried alive. One of the dead kids tells Dylan, “Once you watch all of them you and you’ll never have a bad dream again.” That seems unlikely as the films are meant to unlock Dylan’s dark side.
Enter James Ransone (if they ever remake “Psycho” he’d be a good alternative universe Norman Bates) as the jokingly named Deputy So-and-So, a friend of Hawke’s character form the first film. No longer with the police, he now travels around, trying to locate and burn down all the houses infected by the spirit of Bughuul. His mission leads him to Courtney and the kids, and soon shadowy figures appear in doorways, bloody pop-ups appear on computer screens and still pictures come to life as Deputy So-and-So finds himself in the middle of a life and death battle between an angry ex husband, some malevolent kids and the grand ghoul himself.
Silly rather than sinister, this sequel squanders the promise of the first film with soap opera acting, clumsy pacing and worst of all, a complete lack of scares. There are some mildly eerie moments but the spine-chilling atmosphere that shrouded the first film is missing, replaced with garden-variety ghouls and “Goosebumps” level scares that don’t actually raise goosebumps.
Ransone, who provided some welcome comic relief in the first movie, doesn’t feel like someone who should be doing battle with demons, or whatever it is, exactly, that Bughuul is. Bruce Campbell could have pulled it off, bringing a mix of comedic heroism to the role but Ransone falls somewhere in the mushy middle, not quite funny, not quite plucky enough.
Like Ransone’s performance “Sinister 2” exists in the mushy middle. Not scary enough to be called a horror film, it isn’t funny enough, intentionally anyway, to be a comedy.
“Hitman: Agent 47” is about murder, mayhem, car chases and bullets but really, at the core of its dark little heart, it’s about family.
Based on the videogame series of the same name, the story begins in 1967 with the establishment of a top-secret government program to create the perfect killing machine agents with no fear, no remorse or humanity.
Cut to many years later.
A trio of three people are on the hunt. Katia (Hannah Ware) is searching for a man she sees in haunting, strange visions, while the genetically modified Agent 47 (“Homeland’s” Rupert Friend) and John Smith (Zachary Quinto) are looking for Katia. As it turns out, all are interested in the same end game, locating the father of the Agent program, Dr. Litvenko (Ciarán Hinds in a paycheque role). As their paths and allegiances crisscross the trio fight their way through a convoluted plot to contribute to cinema’s body count and come to a bloody climax
“Hitman: Agent 47” has all the assets you expect from a videogame movie. It’s the kind of film where the “hero” fights against seemingly insurmountable odds and walks away without breaking a sweat. It’s also the kind of movie where it is not enough for someone to get shot, they must also fall from a great height hitting things on the way down. There is stylized action and bad guys with sub dermal body armour.
Unfortunately there’s also enough bad dialogue for any two Ed Wood Jr. movies—it’s the kind of movie were people say, “What the bleep is happening?” as an excuse to forward the story with exposition—a non-twist—(BLAZINGLY OBVIOUS SPOILER) Litvenko is Katia’s father! OMG!—and a main character that makes Jason Voorhees seem like a barrel of laughs.
The whole idea of Agent 47 is that he’s a cipher, a relentless and lethal killer—imagine a human Terminator without the accent or bulging muscles and you get the idea—and the ironically named Friend pulls that off, but that is a big part of the problem here. It’s difficult to build a movie around a personality-free title character. It’s been done—think anything starring Taylor Lautner—but first time director Aleksander Bach doesn’t have the chops to keep a movie based on a blank slate interesting. “Hitman: Agent 47” has a few stylish moments and some big action scenes, but not enough to add enough personality to push this dull affair over the top.
What’s better than watching a classic movie on the big screen? Watching it on the big screen free of charge!
Be sure to mark Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window on your calendar this September as part of the 5th Anniversary of our Classic Film Series.
The 1954 stars Jimmy Stewart as a wheelchair bound photographer who spies on his neighbors from his apartment window… when he becomes convinced one of them has committed a murder he… Find out about the rest on on the big screen at a Cineplex near you!
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Rear Window (1954) – TWO FREE SCREENINGS!
Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock Cast: James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Wendell Corey Plot: Directed by the Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window is an edge-of-your-seat classic starring two of Hollywood’s most popular stars. When a professional photographer (James Stewart) is confined to a wheelchair with a broken leg, he becomes obsessed with watching the private dramas of his neighbors play out across the courtyard. When he suspects his neighbor of murdering his nagging wife, he enlists his socialite girlfriend (Grace Kelly) to help investigate the suspicious chain of events, leading to one of the most memorable and gripping endings in all of film history. Honored in AFI’s 100 Years … 100 Movies for excellence in film, Rear Window has also been hailed as “one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most stylish thrillers” (Leonard Maltin’s Classic Movie Guide).
Admission (taxes included): Tickets available at the box office only starting August 14. Showtimes Sunday, September 13, 2015
Monday, September 21, 2015
Richard’s “Canada AM” interview with “Man from UNCLE” stars Henry Cavill and Army Hammer. They discuss their characters, accents and starting with a “blank canvas.”
Claridge’s Hotel in London is the kind of place you might expect a secret agent to call home. An unassuming entranceway leads into an opulent lobby with lots of quiet corners perfect for clandestine meetings. It’s the kind of place where Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin could do highly classified business over a martini, shaken or stirred. So, it’s appropriate I’m meeting Henry Cavill and Army Hammer here. They’re the stars of the Man from U.N.C.L.E. reboot and the latest actors, after Robert Vaughn and David McCallum, to play super spies Solo and Kuriatkin.
The TV show, which was equal parts camp and classic action, ran from 1964 to 68, made stars of its leads and established high-flying spy cool for a generation of television watchers. Cavill, who plays the suave Solo, however, says he has never seen the show.
“I prefer to operate as a blank canvas,” says Cavill, who will next be seen as the Man of Steel in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. “If you’re trying to make something your own you’re concentrating on the wrong thing. You should be concentrating on the story and evolving the story with your fellow actors and or director. That’s what we did.”
His co-star Hammer referred to the show to partially to craft his portrayal of the hothead KGB spy Kuryakin and partially “out of motivation of fear.”
“If I do this movie and someone asked me about the show I wanted to have an answer to give them,” he says. “I basically spent the weekend binge watching the whole show.”
He says the new movie incorporates elements of the original show, “so people who grew up with that will love and appreciate it but it is also a completely fresh take on it. That’s what we were going for, to make everybody happy.”
Like many spies (and actors who have played spies) before them, both utilized accents and costumes to disguise themselves and disappear into their roles.
Cavill, notes that the bespoke Saville Road suits he wore were the “final pieces of the puzzle” in creating the character. “The accent informs the way you physically interact with everybody and the suit the contains that.”
Hammer learned his accent listening to “old recordings of native Russian speakers trying to speak English, or barely speaking English and picking up little bits of both. At a certain point with the accent, I’d say after a week or two, it feels natural. You’re not spending your time making sure your words sound laboured. It starts to flow out as an accent.”
Blaine Thurier’s parents are OK with his day job as synthesizer player with the indie supergroup The New Pornographers but they probably won’t go be seeing his new movie.
“I had an evangelical upbringing,” he says, “so anything sexual you weren’t allowed to talk about and you certainly weren’t allowed to do anything about it. It can be very frustrating for a kid. The trauma of that has inextricably linked sex and religion in my brain. Everything I write these days seems to be about that.”
His new film, Teen Lust, is an homage to the teen comedies of the 1980s. The main character Neil (Jesse Carere) is determined to lose his virginity on the eve of his eighteenth birthday. The surprise is that he’s desperate to have sex, not just because of any natural desires, but because his parents are part of a Satanist cult led by John (Cary Elwes) and his wife Mary (True Blood’s Kristin Bauer van Straten) who plan on sacrificing Neil to prevent 1000 years of peace on earth. Imagine Porky’s with a dollop of Rosemary’s Baby.
“I won’t even tell them what it is about,” he says, adding, “It’s weird, but it is me trying to be normal.”
“I wanted to make a teen sex comedy but there are so many of them out there I felt it needed higher stakes and a little twist. I also wanted it to be a funny adventure, like Ferris Bueller, Back to the Future or Risky Business. They were touchstones. Stylistically it doesn’t look like any of those films but story wise, I wanted to have a big night of comedic adventure.”
The Manitoba-shot movie debuted at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival in the Contemporary World Cinema program. It was Thurier’s fourth visit to the fest and he was pleased with the response he received.
“If they laugh,” he says, “I’m happy. You wait for that first laugh. Once you get the first laugh it’s like, ‘OK, I can relax now,’ because if they found that funny they’ll probably find something else funny too.”
As for his parents, while Teen Lust would be too shocking for them, they seem at ease with the name of his band The New Pornographers.
“They think it is kind of edgy and out there,” he says. “I feel bad because my mom can brag to her friends at church that her son was on David Letterman but then they ask, ‘What’s the name of his band?’”
“It’s impossible to talk about N.W.A without talking about South Central LA in the late 1980s.”
Straight Outta Compton is the legendary album by gangsta rap group N.W.A, released Aug. 8, 1988. It’s a sonic blast that plays, as Rolling Stone said, like a “bombastic, cacophonous car ride through Los Angeles’ burnt-out and ignored hoods.” It became the first platinum album to reach that status with no airplay or major tours and now it’s also the title of a biopic that documents the group’s beginnings and turbulent history.
Writing for theverge.com, Lizzie Plaugic observed, “It’s impossible to talk about N.W.A without talking about South Central LA in the late 1980s.” Infected by crack and gang violence, the area was so rough the LAPD created a special unit known as CRASH — Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums — and it was these surroundings that helped birth the ferocious beats of Straight Outta Compton and a genre known as gangsta rap.
Music is unavoidably influenced by the surroundings of those who make it and music biopics have always been quick to use location as a shorthand to help the audience understand how and why musicians produced the music they did.
Just as South Central sets the scene for Straight Outta Compton, Manchester’s drug-fuelled “Madchester” club scene of the late 1980s and early ’90s informs 24 Hour Party People and the mean streets of Brooklyn set the stage for the meteoric rise of rapper Notorious B.I.G. in the 2009 film Notorious.
There is no shortage of John Lennon or his birthplace on celluloid. There are five official Beatles movies, documentaries like The U.S. vs. John Lennon, a 2006 movie that focuses on Lennon’s transformation from musician into antiwar activist, and even experimental short films like the John and Yoko shorts Two Virgins and Apotheosis.
Portrayed by everyone from Paul Rudd (in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story) to Monty Python’s Eric Idle, rarely has any actor captured both Lennon’s rebelliousness and vulnerability as Aaron Taylor-Johnson does in Nowhere Boy, the story of the musician’s formative years.
Taylor-Johnson, recently seen in blockbusters like Avengers: Age of Ultron and Godzilla, is aided in his performance by a gritty portrait of Lennon’s lower-working-class neighbourhood in Liverpool, England. You can almost smell the bangers and mash coming off the screen and the vivid Merseyside backdrop provides subtle clues about the man Lennon would become.
Set back when you could still drink a bottle of stolen booze in the shade of the Hollywood sign without being arrested for trespassing, The Runaways focuses on two glue-sniffing, glam-rock obsessed tough girls named Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart) and Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning). Disaffected SoCal teens, they see an exit from their mundane suburban lives through rock ’n’ roll.
Unfortunately their ticket out comes in the form of impresario Kim Fowley, a record producer and self proclaimed “King Hysteria.” He cobbles together the band, trains them to be rock stars, convinced that they will “be bigger than the Beatles.” Before they can play Shea Stadium, however, the band breaks up — knee deep in ego, drug abuse and bad management. Set in and around the Sunset Strip’s late 1970s seedy underbelly, the movie perfectly captures the sun-dappled decadence that illuminated the time.
In the movies, like real life, it’s about Location! Location! Location!
“Sinister,” the 2012 Ethan Hawke horror film, was a good old-fashioned spooky movie where it was misty at night, things went bump in the night, and every door in the house needed to be oiled. It was also the rare kind of modern scarefest that created mythology about a new malevolent force—no sparkling vampires or sexy werewolves in sight!—to drive the story. Unfortunately the largely Hawke-less (he only appears in a photo) sequel “Sinister 2” drives that malevolent force off a cliff.
