The critics won’t have Uwe Boll to kick around anymore.
The German filmmaker, who once played Adolph Hitler in an action comedy film called Blubberella, is best known for adapting video games like House of the Dead, BloodRayne and Dungeon Siege into movies. He’s never had an easy ride with reviewers—the San Francisco Chronicle’s Peter Hartlaub called Alone in the Dark, “a film so mind-blowingly horrible that it teeters on the edge of cinematic immortality.”—and earned the nickname The Raging Boll after challenging his worst critics a “put up or shut up” boxing match.
He knocked out each of his four opponents, landing a blow for anyone who has ever suffered a bad review.
Now he’s done. The release of Rampage: President Down is his swan song, the final film he will direct he says, in part, because his politically charged movies have “no impact.”
“Rampage 3 will be watched on Netflix, DVD or iTunes or whatever,” he says. “They’ll say, ‘That wonderful movie! I liked it blah, blah, blah,’ then watch Avengers. With streaming everywhere there is just a big wave of movies flooding around and you have no impact.”
“The market is dead,” he adds, “you don’t make any money anymore on movies because the DVD and Blu Ray market worldwide has dropped eighty percent in the last three years. That is the real reason; I just cannot afford to make movies.”
“I can’t go back to student filmmaking because I have made so many movies in my life, and I can’t make cheaper and cheaper movies at my age. It’s a shame. I would be happy to make movies but it is just not financially profitable.”
Boll says he’s been self-financing his films for over a decade.
“I never had people giving me money,” he says. “I’ve been using my money since 2005 and if I hadn’t made the stupid video game based movies I would never have amalgamated the capital so I could say, ‘Let’s make the Darfur movie.’ I don’t need a Ferrari, I don’t need a yacht. I invested in my own movies and I lost money.”
He may have gone in the hole on films like Attack on Darfur and Assault on Wall Street—“It’s way better than Wall Street 2 by Oliver Stone,” he boasts. “It’s better researched, it’s better written, it’s better, but it doesn’t have Michael Douglas.”—but he’s proud of their grit and realism.
“My movies are concrete,” he says, “talking with the real names about the real issues. It’s not Jason Bourne or any b******t movie where they make stuff up. My movies are real.”
With Rampage: President Down hitting iTunes Boll will now spend his time attending to his film distribution business and his Vancouver restaurant Bauhaus (which the food critics love, by the way). As for his critics he hopes they’ll take time to watch his movies.
“Now when I don’t make any more movies,” he says, “maybe they’ll find the time to actually watch the movies, starting with Postal in 2005, the movies of the last ten years. They will see they were a lot of very interesting movies and a lot of movies that I think made sense and said a point about things. They deserve to be discussed bigger than they were.”
Cobie Smulders has been in action movies a plenty, but she’s rarely part of the action. That changes in Jack Reacher: Never Go Back.
Opposite Tom Cruise, Smulders plays Major Susan Turner, a decorated solider accused of espionage. To prove her innocence she teams with Jack Reacher in a battle for the truth.
“I was really excited about doing some action scenes,” says the Canadian born actress who played former director of the planetary intelligence service S.H.I.E.L.D. Maria Hill in various Avengers movies as well on television.
“I’d done some quote, unquote action movies before, through The Avengers and the Marvel Universe. I’d be part of some of their stuff but I missed out on most of the fun fight sequences. Jumping on this, I knew I would get to do more fighting, hands on, rather than standing next to the superheroes while they do all the fighting.”
She has more than her share of up-close-and-personal battle sequences, bare knuckling her way through the story at a breakneck pace, but were the scenes as fun to shoot as she thought they would?
“That’s a great question because sometimes they are not,” she laughs. “They are quite technical and they can drag on. When it is fast and intense, they’re really fun because it’s like an adrenaline rush. It’s like doing a choreographed dance with somebody. But when they drag on and it becomes about the minutia of like, ‘We have to do the insert of the picking up of the meat tenderizer and we have to do it from this angle and that angle,’ it takes the magic out of it.”
A magical experience or not, Smulders, who will next be seen in the action comedy Why We’re Killing Gunther opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger, says the scenes helped her performance.
“For me all the training and all the fighting helped me get into the character,” she says. “There were days when I would push past breaking points and think, I can’t take this anymore, and then I would go further. It got easier and easier. It was really painful at first but I always kept that in the back of my mind, what this woman would have had to go through, and what women and men in the military have to go through.
“I think anybody who decides to enlist in the military and do all the work it takes to become a major is somebody who is much stronger than I will ever be.
“She’s a woman we say has graduated Ranger School. When we started shooting the movie that hadn’t happened yet; no women had graduated from Ranger School. Then during the shoot the first two women graduated. If I am playing a woman who can endure that type of training, then this should be like a piece of cake, what I’m doing on set.”
Cruise and Smulders play a sort of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, a deadly duo who never allow romance to get in the way of their appetite for bodily destruction. Their relationship is a mix of Roadhouse style fighting and humorous rom com dialogue.
“To not have these characters get together romantically,” Smulders says, “was more interesting to watch than having a love scene in the middle of the movie.”
Who exactly is Jack Reacher? If you are a reader, he’s the protagonist of twenty books by British author Lee Child. If you’re a moviegoer, he’s a bone crunching former Major in the United States Army Military Police Corps who looks a lot like Tom Cruise. According to the new movie “Jack Reacher: Never Go Back,” he’s “the guy you didn’t count on.”
When we first see Reacher it’s four years after his exploits in his eponymous debut film. With the help of Major Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders) he has just broken up—and beaten up—a ring of smugglers. When he arrives in Washington to thank her, and possibly wine and dine her, he is shocked to discover she’s been court-martialled, accused of espionage. His efforts to get to the bottom of the case suggest she was arrested because she had a hard drive with sensitive info. “What did you expect,” he’s asked, “a picture of her in a Burka and having drinks with the Taliban?” After a daring prison break, he and Turner hit the road, trading quips and punching faces with a deadly ex-military hit man (Patrick Heusinger) hot on their trail. Their efforts to clear her name and uncover a far-reaching conspiracy are complicated by the presence of Samantha (Danika Yarosh), a fifteen year old who may or may not be Reacher’s daughter.
The addition of a kid changes the dynamic of the film. The first Reacher movie was a fun but violent ride, designed to keep fans of Cruise’s actionman persona happy until the next “Mission Impossible” instalment came along. It was an old fashioned movie, the kind of flick that Steven Seagal might have starred in circa 1992. It was a bare-bones action movie and predictable but Van Dammit, taken for what it was, it was also a bit of fun.
The movie rips along at a fast pace, bareknuckling its way through the story at a breakneck pace. Cruise and Smulders are sort of a Mr. & Mrs. Smith, a deadly duo who never allow romance to get in the way of their appetite for bodily destruction. Their relationship is a mix of “Roadhouse” style fighting and cutesy rom com dialogue.
It all adds up to an action movie for those who like a dose of sentimentality with their spinal injuries.
Ever since a Ouija Board connected Captain Howdy to Regan MacNeil in “The Exorcist” filmmakers have used the spirit boards as a way to plunge their characters into deep demonic trouble.
In 2014 a group of friends uncorked some supernatural woes in “Ouija.” Now comes a prequel (insert spooky Theremin music here), “Ouija: Origin of Evil.” Set almost fifty years before the events of the first film, the action takes place in 1967 Los Angeles.
Looking for a way to freshen up their sham séance business Alice Zander (Elizabeth Reaser) a.k.a. Madame Zander Fortune Teller and her daughters Paulina (Annalise Basso) and Doris (Lulu Wilson) run a home séance business, specializing in parlour tricks to comfort the living relatives of the recently deceased. “We give them closure,” says Alice. “We heal their hearts and you can’t do that without some showmanship.”
To freshen up their act and attract new customers Alice adds in a Ouija Board. “What this?” asks Doris. “A new prop for work,” replies Alice cheerily. What she doesn’t know is that the harmless looking board is also a gateway for demons and all manner of unspeakable supernatural strife.
When young Doris uses the witchboard to contact her dear, departed father she becomes possessed by a most unwelcome spirit. “I believe she is channelling powers,” says Father Tom Hogan (Henry Thomas), “we cannot understand.”
Is “Ouija: Origin of Evil” a vast improvement on the 2014 original? The planchette (the Ouija’s triangular cursor) points to Yes. “Ouija” was one of the lamest mainstream horror films of recent memory, its prequel is one of the best.
Director Mike Flanagan provides jumps scares, creepy visions and a suitably spooky visualization of the demonic possession but brings generally more atmosphere than actual thrills. Instead he builds tension throughout, slowly working up to a ghost story climax that delivers solid scares.
He’s aided greatly by the youngest member of his cast, Lulu Wilson, who has a face that switches instantly from endearing to eerie. As the spirits possess her she takes on a creepy kid face that could win her an award for weirdest kid since “Children of the Corn.”
Add in some Nazi doctors, spirits nosier than whoever is spying on you through your iPhone right now and a mysterious hole in the basement wall and you have a welcome addition to the Ouija Board genre.
It’s hard to know how to classify “Keeping Up with the Joneses,” a new film starring Jon Hamm, Gal Gadot, Isla Fisher and Zach Galifianakis. Billed as an action comedy, it contains as many laughs as your average Jason Bourne movie, and as much action as your typical comedy. If anything, it’s a study of quietly desperate suburban life. Now that’s a barrel of laughs!
Karen and Jeff Gaffney (Fisher and Galifianakis) live a quiet life on a quiet Atlanta residential cul-de-sac. He’s a people person, a sensitive HR head at tech giant MBI, she’s a designer and neighbourhood busybody. He doesn’t like spicy food, she doesn’t like the new, impossibly good looking couple, Natalie and Tim Jones (Gal Gadot and Jon Hamm), who have moved in across the street.
Tim is a travel writer who speaks many languages, Natalie devotes time to charity and does a food blog. The couples seem to have nothing in common—the Gaffney’s idea of travelling is going to Epcot. “You can do every country in like three blocks.”—and yet a friendship is struck until some snooping reveals the neighbourhood newbies are actually spies working on a case. Seems the cul-de-sac is a hotbed of international intrigue and the Gaffneys may be involved.
“Keeping Up with the Joneses” is an odd couples movie with so few laughs its hard to believe it was directed by the Greg Mottola, who also gave us “Superbad” and the ET comedy “Paul.” The ‘they’re not who they seem to be’ premise is either a classic or a tired bit, depending on your point of view. Either way a twist or two could have freshened the screwball idea up but instead Mottola shrugs off the heavy lifting to Galifianakis and Fisher. Both can be funny and both will do almost anything to get a laugh but no amount of slapstick and face pulling can inject yuks into what is a sitcom idea stretched thin.
But at least there’s some action, right? Not so fast. There are a handful of tame action sequences synced to lame music that appears lifted from 1980s action adventure TV show.
So, with few laughs and lame action what’s left? Hamm’s rugged good looks? Gadot’s cheekbones? Check and check, both are on display but their genetic gifts are not enough to make their characters interesting.
“Keeping Up with the Joneses” will make you jones for laughs and action.
The word hardscrabble comes to mind while watching “Mean Dreams,” a new thriller from director Nathan Morlando. The two lead characters, star-crossed teenagers Casey (Sophie Nelisse) and Jonas (Josh Wiggins), don’t have any easy go of it. Her father Wayne (Bill Paxton) is a physically abusive drunk, while Jonas’s dad treats the fifteen-year-old like an adult. It’s a hard knock life, one that forces the two to mature quickly and make grown-up decisions.
Casey and Wayne are new to town. Wayne divides his time between drinking and looking for ways out of their new podunk town. He’s a lawman with little respect for the law, anything or anyone, including his daughter. When Wayne almost kills Jonas, Casey’s new neighbour and love interest, and local law enforcement (Colm Feore) doesn’t seem interested in helping, the young man takes it on himself to put some space between his new girlfriend and her abusive father. Their new life begins with the theft of $1 million in drug money, an action that brings serious consequences.
Echoes of “Badlands,” Terrence Malick’s tale of young love on the run, hang heavy over “Mean Dreams.“ Casey and Jonas are more innocent than Holly Sargis (Sissy Spacek) and Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen) but their journey into antisocial behaviour rings a bell. Director Morlando may not be treading new ground here, but emotionally he veers off the beaten track, adding elements of innocence among the wolves that lends the story a welcome human aspect and motivation for their actions.
The villains—Paxton and Feore (SPOILER ALERT) are suitably villainous, amoral and sleazy excuses for human beings, but it’s too bad they feel like they just stepped out of Central Casting. Paxton is undeniably entertaining as the ruthless and vicious father figure, but he’s a mish-mash of every redneck creep we’ve seen before. Feore is given even less dimension, but is an imposing figure nonetheless.
The real heart and soul of “Mean Dreams” lies with Nelisse and Wiggins. If we don’t care about them, we don’t care about the movie and the two young leads are appealing even when they are pushed to extremes.
“The Hotel Dieu” is an earnest coming-of-age story about the emotional aftermath of a serious car accident. Teenager Luke (Andrew Rotilio) and brother Travis (Charlie Hamilton) survive, but the younger man is left with permanent damage to his eyes. As his treatment at the Hotel Dieu progresses, so do his chances of regaining his sight but his recovery brings with it sobering realizations about his life. Therapist Dr. Lawrence (Bob Douglas) and fellow patient Jade (Jessica Siegner) aid Luke in his physical and emotional recovery. First time feature director Adrian Thiessen makes the most of a micro-budget, presenting a handsome looking movie that occasionally drifts into melodrama but stays on track by virtue of solid performances.
These days Sasha Lane is waiting for her next big film role but not so long ago the twenty-one-year-old American Honey star was waiting tables at a Mexican restaurant in Texas. After a talent scout told her, “You have a face for movies,” she left the eatery to embark on what she calls “the biggest blessing of my life.”
With acting on her mind she answered an ad looking for people who were “wild, physical, fearless and ready for adventure. No acting experience required.” Her natural charisma impressed British director Andrea Arnold, who cast her in the lead role of a two-hour-and-forty-minute faux cinema vérité road movie that sees her play Star, an eighteen-year-old from a troubled home. Her character’s ticket out of the dysfunction she has grown up with is a travelling band of magazine sellers led by the charismatic Jake (Shia LaBeouf) and Krystal (Riley Keough).
For two months Lane hit the highway, travelling the dusty back roads of the American Midwest shooting a movie that was part scripted, part improvisation.
“We got sides the day before and the day of,” Lane says. “The scenes between Krystal and me were more scripted. This is the word, these are the lines. Some of the scenes where I’m in the van with the kids were more like, ‘I need you to mention that. Get from point ‘a’ to point ‘b.’ Go with it. Fill it out a little bit.”
It was a process of discovery for the first time actress as she learned about her character as the shoot wove its way across country.
“I didn’t know much about my character or much about what was happening,” Lane says, “but Andrea would say to me stuff like, ‘Sasha, you’re representing all the girls who go through this.’
“I was thinking, don’t being scared. You get to do this and in a way it’s what you’ve always wanted to do. I was studying psychology and social work in college. This is an artistic way to do what I wanted to do. I was excited and very much nervous because I had never done it before and people were going to be watching it. I knew it was a movie but it didn’t really hit me until I saw the trailer.”
Life on the shoot was all encompassing—“You’re in this bubble,” she says. “I didn’t have outside thoughts.”—but not always exciting. “There was a lot of sitting in parking lots,” she laughs.
Nonetheless she threw herself at the role.
“I remember when there were times I would go to Andrea and be like, ‘I can’t [bleeping] tell what the difference is between my life in this movie and my real life.’ It was insane.”
All the work paid off—“A Star is born,” raved The Guardian—and she’s now weighing multiple offers. Rumours suggest she’ll either star in Hunting Lila, based on the popular YA books by Sarah Alderson or Shoplifters of the World, a true-life drama about the night The Smiths announced they were calling it quits.
Wherever she lands it’s certain the shoot will be much different from the singular American Honey shoot.
“I just did a short,” she told me in September, “and I was like, ‘Oh, I get to go back home?’ Nothing is like this experience.”
Ben Affleck plays the title role in the thriller The Accountant. “Like, a CPA accountant?” asks a Treasury Department worker. “Not quite,” replies agent Ray King (J. K. Simmons) in what might be the understatement of the year.
Affleck is a pocket-protector-wearing forensic accountant who “risks his life cooking the books for some of the scariest people on the planet; drug cartels, arms brokers, money launderers, assassins.” An autistic math genius with a violent side, he survives his dangerous world through dual facilities for math and mayhem.
“He’s a very distinct and unusual character,” Affleck told Entertainment Weekly. “A little bit different than your average, everyday person in the way he processes information and social thinking, and the way he sees numbers and logic, and that he’s trapped a little bit in his own mind.”
Affleck joins a long list of actors who have looked for loopholes, legal, financial and otherwise, on the big screen.
The late, great Gene Wilder became a star playing bookkeeper Leo Bloom in The Producers. “I spend my life counting other people’s money. People I’m smarter than.” It’s Bloom who comes up with the get rich quick scheme to mount a terrible Broadway musical and make off with the investor’s cash when the show flops. His plan falls apart when Springtime for Hitler becomes a hit but his business partner still has good things to say. “You’re an accountant,” raves Max Bialystock. “You’re in a noble profession! The word ‘count’ is part of your title!”
Rick Moranis played Louis Tully, an accountant possessed by an ancient spirit in Ghostbusters. Before he goes all supernatural Louis throws a bash to celebrate his fourth anniversary as an auditor at his swanky Central Park West apartment. “I’m givin’ this whole thing as a promotional expense,” he says, “that’s why I invited clients instead of friends.” The scene was shot in one continuous take with Moranis making his way through the party, improvising perfectly nerdy CPA dialogue—“This is real smoked salmon from Nova Scotia, Canada, $24.95 a pound! It only cost me $14.12 after tax, though.”—throughout.
In The Untouchables Charles Martin Smith plays Oscar Wallace, the bespectacled book balancer who puts together the tax evasion case against notorious mobster Al Capone. The character was largely based on Frank Wilson, the IRS Criminal Investigator who spent years keeping tabs on Capone’s financial dealings before laying charges. A self-penned article on his exploits, He Trapped Capone, inspired the 1949 Glenn Ford film The Undercover Man.
Cher initially turned down the Oscar winning role of Loretta Castorini, the widowed accountant in Moonstruck who falls for a one-handed baker. Though exhausted from one of the busiest years of her career, she ultimately took the part, showing up on set just one day after wrapping The Witches of Eastwick. When Moonstruck was done she took a week off before shooting the courtroom drama Suspect. The singer-turned-actress later called making the film, “too silly, too much fun to be work,” and became only the second female performer, alongside Barbra Streisand, to have a #1 hit and an Oscar.
Bloom, Tully, Wallace and Castorini are reel life bookkeepers, but in real life several actors almost chose figures over fame. Bob Newhart worked the ledger books for United States Gypsum and Eddie Izzard studied accountancy at the University of Sheffield.
