If you’re an armchair adventurer like me the hardships the characters in the new snowsuit drama “Everest” put themselves through—and pay handsomely for—seem extreme. Paying $65,000 to climb to the summit of Earth’s highest mountain seems a high price to risk life and limb and when I say life and limb, I mean it. If the altitude and avalanches don’t get you, frostbite may well take an arm or a leg.
Based on the real events of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, Jason Clark plays Rob Hall, experienced climber and leader of commercial expeditions up the mountain. His group, Adventure Consultants, is one of several making the trip. Another, led by party boy Scott Fischer (Jake Gyllenhaal) leaves at the same time, and agrees to share resources on the trek. Climbers include Beck Weathers (Josh Brolin), Doug Hansen (John Hawkes), Yasuko Namba (Naoko Mori) and journalist Jon Krakauer (Michael Kelly). Some reach the summit, others do not, but the trick isn’t getting to the top, it’s getting back down again, and that’s where the drama really begins.
Director Baltasar Kormákur delivers a screen full of beautiful—and occasionally vertigo inducing–“You are there 3-D shots” to give the viewer a sense of the dangers Hall and Company are up against and you will want to take a hot bath after the frostbite scenes, but the human element is lacking.
Kormákur tries to set the stakes before much actual climbing happens. Back home marriages are crumbling and wives are expecting babies but that’s about as far as we get with any real character work. Sure, Hall is a principled and skilled climber, heroic even, but the movie gets beyond the broad strokes with the cast. When they start falling and freezing to death it’s hard to muster much emotion, given that we never really get to know the characters. The fact they’re all bundled up in snow gear and mostly unrecognizable most of the time doesn’t help. Remind me again, was Doug wearing the blue or the yellow suit?
(SPOILER ALERT) There are some unexpected turns. Suffice to say that marquee value does not guarantee survival.
We never get a palpable, passionate answer as to why the climbers are so driven to hike up the side of a mountain to the approximate cruising altitude of a Boeing 747. It’s not enough to say, “It’s not altitude, it’s the attitude.” A little more depth would have helped the movie scale new heights and given us a reason to embrace the characters.
If George Mallory, the English mountaineer who took part in the first three British expeditions to Mount Everest in the early 1920s, was a film critic he might suggest you go see “Everest” “Because it’s there,” but his famous line doesn’t apply here. Instead, go for the scenery, but don’t expect great drama.
Twenty years ago “A Walk in the Woods” would have starred Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon as grumpy old men in a movie that plays like “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” with a dash of the finding-yourself-in-the-woods movie “Wild” thrown in. Matthau and Lemmon are long gone, but in their place are weathered icons Nick Nolte and Robert Redford as old (literally and figuratively) friends hiking the twenty-two hundred mile Appalachian Trail.
Based on Bill Bryson’s 1998 memoir of the same name, the movie sees Redford as Bryson, a travel writer grappling with growing older. In an effort to clear his head and feel alive again he ignores his wife’s (Emma Thompson) objections—“I don’t think you’re too old,” she says. “You ARE too old! Can’t you just do this in the Volvo?”—and embarks on the Georgia-to-Maine trail.
None of his friends are interested in making the five month, five million step trip with him. “Next time asked me to do something fun… “like a colonoscopy,” says one, until Stephen Katz (Nolte), an estranged friend who owes Bryson money from their last adventure, volunteers to go. Is he up for the trip? “I walk everywhere these days,” he says, “especially since they took away my license.”
Despite their age, their differences and the fact that less than 10% of the people who start the trail, finish it, the pair set off on a journey that will give them a deeper appreciation of home.
“A Walk in the Woods” brings Redford back to the light comedy of his early career but he spends much of the film playing straight man to Nolte’s disagreeable Santa routine. Nolte lurches through this movie with all the subtlety of a drunken elephant, filtering his lines through a voice that sounds like a broken whiskey glass. He has most of the laugh lines and displays good comic timing, dropping well placed swear words and gags with precision.
The movie itself is episodic. Every step takes them closer to a new opportunity for a gag whether it’s a collapsing bunk bed or a bit of mild slapstick in a river. While many scenes are left hanging with no resolution and, occasionally, no real purpose, it’s so amiable watching these two (and their stunt doubles) walking through the woods that you’ll forgive the randomness of several of their adventures.
The guys are the focus, to the detriment of Emma Thompson and Mary Steenburgen who aren’t given near enough to do. Only Kristen Schaal as an annoying over confident hiker makes an impression.
“A Walk in the Woods” won’t ever be mentioned in the same breath as any of Redford or Nolte’s classic films—it’s too silly and the message of leaving home to appreciate home is too obvious—but watching these two charismatic actors onscreen it’s not hard to remember what we liked about them in the first place.
One question hangs heavy over “The Transporter: Refueled” (sic), Can the franchise survive and thrive without its former star Jason Statham? The action hero drove off into the sunset after three instalments, leaving it up to “Game of Thrones” actor Ed Skrein to take his place. Can Skrein put the pedal to the metal or is the series headed to the junkyard?
Skrein is the Transporter. No names please, it only complicates things. He is a skilled driver who delivers packages for anyone who agrees with his rather stringent demands—no lateness, detailed weight restrictions and once the deal is made if the deal changes, he walks away.
Against the backdrop of the French Riviera the Transporter and his newly retired spy father Frank Martin Sr. (Ray Stevenson) soon finds themselves involved in a dangerous revenge plot against a vicious Russian pimp (Radivoje Bukvic) staged by Junior’s newest clients, four prostitutes willing to die to get away from their old lives.
“The Transporter: Refueled” is a slick looking movie that substitutes squealing tires for story. It adheres to the fight scene/car chase formula that drove the Statham’s “Transporter” triptych but the dark humour and the wink of the older films is missing. Skrein is all business, a grim-faced chauffeur who can take a punch and throw a kick with a wild style that would make Jackie Chan proud, but it all seems rather joyless. Stevenson has the charm to pull this off but is a secondary character, mostly left in the background.
Then there are the female revenge plot masterminds (Loan Chabanol, Tatiana Pajkovic and Gabriella Wright), the supposedly strong female characters at the heart of the movie. They are capable of pulling off a major heist and going-head-to-head with Russian bad guys but, for some reason, become freaked out squealing school girls at the prospect of driving through a gate secured only with a flimsy chain. Skrein simply frowns and gets on with the job but the women react as though they’re about to jump off a cliff and later, jump into bed with their rescuers as a sign of gratitude.
Some grrrl power.
But what did I expect? Ten minutes in it’s clear why “The Transporter: Refueled” isn’t in 3D. It’s because the characters are so one-dimensional they simply couldn’t exist in three dimensions. Instead they are cartoons, existing in a world where you’re shot, near dead one day, wearing a tight dress and kicking butt the next.
“The Transporter: Refueled” is a silly movie, and that’s OK, lots of silly movies are entertaining and worth your money. Unfortunately “The Transporter: Refueled” isn’t one of them.
East meets West in “Dragon Blade,” an epic new film starring Jackie Chan, John Cusack and Adrien Brody. The story of a showdown between Roman armies and the tribes of Western China is the most expensive film ever produced in China and after a successful run overseas the $65 million movie is now opening in North America as one of the top grossing Asian films of all time.
Very loosely based on the true story of a legion of Roman soldiers who went missing along China’s Silk Road, the action takes place in a flashback to 48 BC after Roman ruins are found in China. The convoluted story boils down to this: After a corruption charge Chinese captain Huo An (Jackie Chan) is banished to reconstruct Goose Gate, a ruined fortress. When a Roman legion, led by general Lucius (Cusack), shows up in need of supplies Huo An makes a truce, teaming with the general in advance of the approach of the vicious Roman leader Tiberius (Brody) and his army of 100,000 men. The murderous Tiberius plans on taking control of the Silk Road, the country’s main artery for trade and culture.
“Dragon Blade” has the grand feel of “Gladiator” and “300’s” respect for the past, which is to say it is a large scale humanistic epic with virtually no regard for the history books. It’s a sword and sandal spectacle with hundreds of extras, big battle scenes, pure hearted good guys and an over-the-top villain. Add in a culture clash, some bizarro casting—Lloyd Dobler as a Roman general? Really?—and you’re left with a loud-and-proud movie that puts the ‘O Man!’ in Roman. It occasionally sags under the weight of the story, but a charming performance from Chan and Brody’s pantomime villain keep things interesting.
“We Are Your Friends,” the first studio movie set in the world of electronic dance music, can be looked at two ways.
In its most basic form it’s a romance about a young, ambitious DJ trying to make a name for himself but a closer look reveals more.
Cole, played by Zac Efron, learns the hard way that real art, something that comes from the heart and really means something, doesn’t come in shiny happy packages but is the result of life experience.
Like Cole, it’s not hard to imagine that the former teen heartthrob has learned a thing or two in his twenty-eight years. In a search for more interesting roles he’s tried his best to alienate the audience who first fell in love with his High School Musical good looks and charm. I’m not saying that “We Are Your Friends” is great art, but Efron’s involvement suggests that this coming of age story might be his first truly adult role.
The film begins in the San Fernando Valley, a metaphor for the disconnect its characters—Cole, Mason (Jonny Weston), Ollie (Shiloh Fernandez) and Squirrel (Alex Shaffer)—feel to the glamorous life of Hollywood. Bright lights, fame and fortune are literally just around the corner but may as well be a thousand miles away. The quartet has a plan, however. They promote a Thursday club show and have dreams of stardom.
Cole gets a leg up from superstar DJ James Reed (Wes Bentley), a troubled guy who teaches the younger man about finding his true path and making music that reflects his life. Complications arise when Cole jumps into bed with James’s girlfriend / assistant Sophie (Emily Ratajkowski).
“We Are Your Friends” is a simple story about aspirational behaviour that effectively speaks to millennial angst with one repeated chorus: “Are we ever going to be better than this?” The message is wrapped in a slickly made movie with an interesting dynamic between Cole and James—Bentley absolutely nails James’s world-weary narcissism—and an energetic relationship between the four friends.
On the downside, the romance, which is the catalyst for much of the action, is the least interesting thing about the film. Ratajkowski is a slinky presence, a whirlwind on the dance floor, but aside from pillowy lips doesn’t bring much excitement to the role. Like many of the plot devices used here Cole and Sophie’s fling is a given. The movie telegraphs many of its twists and you know form the moment they meet that something will happen between the two.
What is less expected is the powerful climax. This is a no spoiler zone, but I will say “We Are Your Friends” concludes with a sequence that not only speaks to Cole’s ambitions but makes a larger statement about his generation. “Are we ever going to be better than this?” It’s a potent question and by asking it Efron speaks to a legion of cut adrift twentysomethings whose lives will be much different than the lives of their parents.
In many ways “We Are Your Friends” is a teen movie but Cole’s coming-of-age and Efron’s performance feels very grown up.
The are driving lessons in “Learning to Drive,” a new film starring Patricia Clarkson and Sir Ben Kingsley, but learning how to parallel park or merge into traffic isn’t the point of the story.
Clarkson is literary critic Wendy, a recent divorcee who hires Darwan (Kingsley) to teach her how to drive so she can travel to upstate New York to visit her daughter (Grace Gummer). Still stinging from the separation she learns to navigate Manhattan’s mean streets, as the unlikely pair form a bond, teaching one another about life and love.
“Learning to Drive” is a Prius hybrid, a well-meaning movie that isn’t as flashy as other contemporary models. It is, however, a smooth ride, fuelled by the lead performances. The lessons learned aren’t revelatory—“It doesn’t matter what is going on in your life out there,” says Darwan, “you must shut it out. When you are at the wheel of a car, that is all there is. Your life right now.”—but because the characters are so compelling the simple metaphors kick into gear.
Clarkson is a live wire, a fiery woman torn between a lust for life and the shattering realization that in the wake of the divorce her life is unalterably changed. Kingsley brings warmth, vulnerability and charm that nicely mirrors her heartbreak.
“Learning to Drive” is a touching movie that isn’t so much about the destination—frankly that part is a mild let down—but about the journey and the words. The pleasure of the film is taking the trip and listening in to these two professionals deliver them.
“The End of the Tour” breaks the cardinal rule of movie making—show me, don’t tell mew. It is, essentially, a ninety-minute interview that plays out between author David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel) and his profiler, Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg). Based on Lipsky’s five days spent bantering with the “Infinite Jest” writer, the film shows very little but tells us much.
“To read David Foster Wallace was to feel your eyelids pulled wide open,” says Lipsky, a frustrated novelist who pays the bills writing five hundred word profiles of boy bands for Rolling Stone. A rave review of “Infinite Jest,” Wallace’s satirical 1000 page epic on the pursuit of happiness, prompts Lipsky to set aside his own literary ambitions and arrange an extended interview at the end of Wallace’s three-week promotional book tour.
Travelling to Wallace’s home in Bloomington, Illinois the New York journalist finds one of the most famous writers on the planet trying to balance fame and success with his “regular guyness.” “I don’t mind appearing in Rolling Stone,” Wallace says, “but I don’t want to appear as someone who wants to be in Rolling Stone.”
For the next five days they eat candy, smoke cigarettes, listen to Alanis Morissette, talk and argue. A woman briefly comes between them as ego, insecurity and intellectual curiosity color the relationship between the two men.
“The End of the Tour” works both as a portrait of Wallace and an observation on the interview process. In what is essentially an extended Q&A Wallace comments on the artificiality of the situation—”This is not real,” he says.—acknowledging that an interview cannot capture the essence of a person. It’s a comment on the celebrity culture of self-revelation from a reporter who digs for a scoop and a reluctant subject. Lipsky sees Wallace’s secrecy as a problem—“You’re not willing to risk giving the real you,” he says.—Wallace prefers to let his work speak for him, calling himself a shy exhibitionist. It’s a cat and mouse game between hunter and hunted as Lipsky cozies up to Wallace, then snoops through his medicine cabinet looking for clues to a long rumoured heroin habit.
It’s also a portrait of a writer who is often compared to Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Pynchon, a once in a generation talent who didn’t live long enough—he committed suicide at age 46—to fulfill his destiny. Segel plays him as an unmade bed of a man, a mercurial 34-year-old struggling with the fame that comes along with sudden success. He doesn’t quite trust Lipsky or the process or why anyone would want to interview him—“You can stay around and write a story about my dogs, it might be more interesting.”—but understands the relationship between celebrity and the press.
It’s a quiet performance, tinged with loneliness and brilliance that draws attention to itself by avoiding tortured artist clichés. Occasionally it feels like an excuse for introspective comments from the David Foster Wallace Book of Wisdom, but Segel finds the humanity in him, playing him as a man who lived inside his head even as his world expanded to include a public hungry to know more about him.
Eisenberg’ s Lipsky rides the line between reporter asking tough questions and trying to be a friend. His relationship with Wallace is split between admiration, jealousy—both professional and personal—and self interest. He resents Wallace’s genius and success and his frustration is broadcast in tersely delivered lines like, “Not everyone can be as brilliant as you.”
The two men really aren’t that different, but Wallace, having hit heights Lipsky could only dream of, understands you have to be careful what you wish for.
“The End of the Tour” is an interesting movie that, unsurprisingly, doesn’t peel back the layers of Wallace’s psyche. As good as the performances are, the script is based on the actual 1996 interviews between Lipsky and Wallace, leaving contemporary audience’s with the same vague dissatisfaction the reporter felt at his subject’s reluctance to strip himself bare.
“Cop Car” is as lean and mean as its name. An unabashed b-movie, it’s a down-and-dirty story about two kids, a desperate con and a cop who really wants his car back. It’s back to basics but loaded with tension and some unexpected moments.
Kevin Bacon plays the kind of corrupt cop who locks people in his trunk and says things like, “Tell me the truth or I will shoot you.” When two ten-year-old boys steal his police vehicle for a joy ride—“What if somebody sees us?” asks one of the kids. “We’ll just say we’re cops.”—they set into motion a deadly game of cat and mouse that will change their lives forever.
“Cop Car” is a smartly made but simple movie that doesn’t rely on fancy tricks to tell its story. Stripped down, it instead assumes its audience are good and moral enough to understand how fraught with danger it is to have two children playing with a loaded gun in the backseat of the titular locked cop car. Desperate to get out they first try and shoot out the window, which doesn’t work. Then they pound on the glass with the butt of the gun, literally inviting the weapon to misfire and injure one of them. There will be no spoilers here, but I can tell you that the sight of these young hands handling the gun is unsettling in the extreme, which, I imagine is exactly what director Jon Watts had in mind.
Bacon is at his white trash best in a role short on dialogue but long on menace and both the young guys James Freedson-Jackson and Hays Wellford hand in naturalistic performances.
“Cop Car” begins as a joyride becomes anything but joyful, and while the story is bleak, it is a bleakly beautiful coming of age story that packs a punch.
As nature-bound modes of death go there are few grimmer ways to go than being eaten by a bear. As Werner Herzog says after listening to audio of Timothy Treadwell being mauled by a grizzly in the a-bear-made-me-his-lunch documentary “Grizzly Man,” “it’s the most terrifying thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” Sure, being licked to death by puppies would be horrifying, as would a deadly nip from a shark, but for sheer primal terror a deadly bear bite rates in the top two.
In “Backcountry” Alex (Jeff Roop) convinces his girlfriend Jenn (Missy Peregrym) to join him on a woodsy adventure in a provincial park on the remote Blackfoot Trail. He knows his way around the forest and while she is more comfortable practising law in the city she agrees to go along for the ride. The romantic camping trip is disrupted almost before it has a chance to begin by Brad (Eric Balfour), a mysterious and possibly dangerous stranger. Eager to put some space between them and Brad, Alex pushes on, getting deeper into the trail. Soon they get lost and with supplies running low the pressure of wandering aimlessly gets to them. Worse, the trip soon becomes an exercise in survival when an uninvited bear crashes their tent looking for more than porridge.
Call it “Goldilocks and the Hungry Bear” if you like, but “Backcountry” plays on a basic fear, the idea of being consumed and it does it well. Director Adam MacDonald has an obvious love for genre movies, and has clearly studied movies like “Grizzly Rage” and learned his lessons well. He gives us a long build-up, creating tension—Is that Brad in the woods or an animal?—before introducing the fangs and claws. When he does, it’s worth the wait. His grizzly is a vicious, snarling beast, a Forest OG and a force to be dealt with.
Questions linger about why Alex, presented as an experienced camper would set out on a trip like this without the proper supplies and tool—My kingdom for a GPS!—and while “Backcountry’s” nicely constructed tale doesn’t answer them, it renders them moot when the bear brings a dose of life and death to the tale.
