Remember Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot? How about Junior featuring a pregnant Arnold Schwarzenegger? What these films have in common is they represent action stars—men who made their names in movies bashing heads and shooting guns—trying to prove that they are more than just a muscle mass that got lucky in pictures and that they have the range to make us laugh. The latest to switch from cracking ribs to tickling funny bones is Vin Diesel. You’ll likely remember the bald, brooding actor from movies with macho names like XXX, Pitch Black or The Fast and the Furious, but after a couple of failed action flicks, he followed in the career rejuvenating footsteps of Schwarzenegger and Stallone and made a comedy—The Pacifier. In this film the six foot muscle man plays a Navy Seal assigned to protect a house full of out of control kids. It’s an amusing—but not particularly new—idea to cast the tough as nails army guy with these kids, but the movie never veers into laugh-out-loud funny. It works better on DVD than it did on the big screen, and I think kids under ten might enjoy it, but parents may want to watch something else.
For the second time in as many months comes a film set around the world of classical music, with powerhouse performances from an a-list, ensemble cast but despite the similarity of names between “A Late Quartet” and “Quartet” they are actually very different movies.
Both are heartfelt examinations of growing old, but “Quartet,” from 74-year-old director Dustin Hoffman, has more in common with the easy sentiment of “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” than “A Late Quartet.”
The action centers around Beechham House, a luxurious retirement home for aging musicians. Three quarters of a once famous vocal quartet, Reginald (Tom Courtenay), Cissy (Pauline Collins), and Wilfred (Billy Connolly), live there quietly until their former diva, Jean (Dame Maggie Smith), arrives. Her presence stirs up old feelings from ex-husband Reggie but might also be the key to changing the fortunes of the cash-strapped retirement home.
Based on a play by Ronald “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” Harwood, “Quartet” could have gone one of two ways. It could’ve been a depressing look at the difficulties of growing old, or it could have turned into one of those “loveable old coot” movies. While both those aspects are present, so are unexpected laughs, elegance and warmth.
Like “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” it confronts the vagaries of old age head on, tackling them with equal parts humor and pathos. It treats its elderly characters like vibrant, real people, even though they use walkers and have lapses of memory. Medical conditions aside, emotionally they are as rich—if not richer—than 90% of the characters we see in any Katherine Heigl romantic comedy.
From Jean’s insecurities (“I can’t insult the memory of who I once was.”) to Cissy’s diminishing mental state to Reggie’s attempts to connect with some young students to Wilf’s roguishness, the movie is an intimate look at courage, fragility and Cissy’s favorite saying, “Old age is not for sissies.”
By times it is also, unfortunately, predictable, just this side of twee and don’t get me started about the unsatisfying ending. Luckily it’s a crowd pleaser due to the chemistry of the cast and Hoffman’s sure, but underplayed directorial hand.
In the first five minutes of Quantum of Solace, the twenty-second official James Bond picture and the second to star Daniel Craig in the iconic role, hundreds of bullets are fired, a building is destroyed, a truck totaled and several cars trashed and one blown up in spectacular fashion. By the time the opening credits roll the body count is already in the double digits and any thoughts that first-time Bond director, Mark Monster’s Ball Forster would make a ponderous, slow-moving movie are erased.
The story of Quantum of Solace combines elements of the Jason Bourne movies, Chinatown and, of course Ian Fleming’s novels to create one compelling, but slightly confusing plot line. As we meet Bond (Craig) he is grief stricken from the death of his girlfriend Vesper Lynd. His quest for revenge in her death leads him to Dominic Greene (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’s Mathieu Amalric), CEO of Greene Planet, an environmental company that is actually a front for much more nefarious activities (think John Huston’s character in Chinatown only on a massive scale). Bond’s single-minded search brings him into conflict with his biggest ally—M (Judi Dench)—and brings him an unlikely partner (Olga Kurylenko).
Forster does his best to keep the action moving along at a feverish pace. At 106 minutes this is the shortest ever Bond picture and it flies by in a flash of fists and fast edits. There are Bourne style battle scenes—brutal, up-close-and-personal fist fights—wild chases and huge explosions, nothing exactly new for the Bond franchise, but here is where the film is earning its harshest criticism.
Forster sets up the action scenes nicely, and in several cases pulls off some exciting, breathless work, but too often his sense of screen geography gets away from him and the actors get lost amid the shaky, hand held camera work and frenetic fight choreography. Several times I wondered who was punching who and there is an extended plane chase that is a bit too sloppy to be truly exciting. The sheer spectacle of it all will entertain the eye well enough, but the action doesn’t have the high octane bite it could have had.
Forster is much more at home with the more personal elements of the movie. He keeps the tension in the dangerous character triangle between Bond, his boss M and the villain Dominic as taut as a bowstring. This tension gives us the most conflicted Bond ever.
Torn between his lust for revenge and his duty Bond goes rogue and is more dangerous than ever. Craig, when he’s not performing stunts of daring do—he was injured several times while making the film—is cold, emotionless, a killer who will stop at nothing until his bloodlust is satisfied. This is a much more serious Bond than your father’s 007.
The funny lines and puns of the Moore and Brosnan years have pretty much evaporated, replaced by much darker humor. When M asks Bond about the whereabouts of Mr. Slate, an informant he has just dispatched, he says with no hint of a smile, “Slate was a dead end.” Later M tries to end his killing spree with, “If you could avoid killing every possible lead that would be much appreciated.”
Quantum of Solace is a tough movie, the good guys do bad things and the bad guys do even worse things, and in the end the morality of right and wrong is left twisting in the wind.
Queen Elizabeth II has been a constant presence in most of our lives for sixty years, her stern, but comforting face staring up at us from our money and official portraits in government buildings. She talks to us at Christmas and even the Sex Pistols wrote a song about her. But even though she’s been more documented than Paris Hilton in the press, I still never really felt a connection to her. Perhaps it is her regal remoteness, or that she doesn’t show up at award shows or go to nightclubs, that has made her something of an enigma in our celebrity obsessed culture.
A new Stephen Frears movie, The Queen, focuses on a week in September 1997, the time between Princess Diana’s death in Paris and her funeral in London. The newly elected Prime Minister Tony Blair sees his popularity skyrocket after he coins the term, The People’s Princess, in a speech shortly after Diana’s death, while support for Buckingham Palace falls to an all time low when it appears that the Queen doesn’t share the country’s grief.
What emerges is a complex portrait of a woman caught in the shifting tides of change. As portrayed by Helen Mirren, QEII comes across as a woman with a deep sense of duty, of right and wrong and dignity, but out of touch with her subjects. Her reaction to Diana’s death is to grieve quietly, protect the young princes, Harry and William, and hold a discrete and dignified memorial. That her wishes run counter to the public and Prime Minister’s ideas of a proper memorial shows how out of touch she is.
Using news footage director Stephen Frears skillfully demonstrates the fissure between the Queen and her subjects. Just hours after Diana’s death is announced he shows us shots of the first bouquets of flowers left in tribute at the gate of Buckingham Palace. He comes back to this image several more times, and by the time we go back for the last time there is what seems to be acres of flowers, a tangible symbol of England’s grief and the Queen’s mishandling of the circumstances.
Privately we see the Queen’s confusion and sadness as she realizes the public is no longer on her side. It isn’t until Blair persists that she bends and makes a public statement and allows a public funeral. Despite his frustration with the Queen’s decisions Blair comes to respect the woman who has given her life in service to her people.
Supporting actors turn in stellar performances. Alex Jennings as Prince Charles shows a rarely seen vulnerable side of the Prince, while James Cromwell’s stuffy Prince Phillip is played for comic relief. At the heart of the film, however, is Mirren’s performance.
Like many of the great on-screen portrayals of real people in recent years—Jamie Foxx’s Ray Charles, Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s Truman Capote—Helen Mirren takes a subject who would have been easy to mimic and given her a rich inner life. Just as Hoffman dug deeper to get beyond Capote’s lisp and affected speech and show us a real person, Mirren breaks through the inscrutable royal façade to present a fully rounded character. Despite the famous line, “she ain’t no human being,” so memorably snarled by Johnny Rotten on God Save the Queen, Mirren’s QEII is very much flesh and blood. The Queen does something that no other movie or television show has been able to do—it humanizes Queen Elizabeth.
Why try and condense two thick books into one slim motion picture? Queen of the Damned is based on Anne Rice’s novel of the same name, and The Vampire Lestat a 481 page behemoth of a book. Either story would have provided more than enough material for a film, instead we’re given only a taste of each, and a pretty bland one at that. In the title role is late R&B singer Aailyah in her final film performance. Too pretty to be truly evil, she undulates her way through her scant scenes, (she’s only in the movie for about 12 minutes) looking more like The Queen of the Darned, the sovereign of pesky.
In the film “Sharkwater” eco warrior Rob Stewart explored the important role sharks play in maintaining a hearty and healthy world ecosystem.
In his new documentary Stewart is focusing on humans. “Revolution,” which shot in fifteen countries and took four years to make, points the finger of blame at the people destroying forests and oceans.
Stewart is an earnest tour guide, walking us through a litany of eco evils, including the tar sands, deforestation, pollution and food scarcity, with no less a goal than to stop the destruction of the planet.
His secret to world salvation? Empowering youth by exposing them to the conservation movement.
There is no denying Stewart’s passion for his mission, and he does make a fetching spokesperson for the cause, but the film is so loaded with ideas it’s about to burst at the seams. There is a lot wrong with the world to be sure, too much for one movie to adequately cover it all and one can’t help but think that conserving some of the ideas for another movie might have given “Revolution” more punch.
“Rise of the Guardians” takes familiar characters and transports them into a modern 3D fairy tale, complete with superhero nicknames. Santa becomes North, the Boogeymen is Pitch and the Sandman is Andy. OK the last one doesn’t sound all that superhero-ish, but the nap maker is the most mysterious and capable of the bunch of them. He’s definitely not sleeping on the job.
North (voice of Alec Baldwin) is the leader of the Guardians, a group of childhood fantasies come to life, whose job it is to protect the kids of the world—when they aren’t busy providing wonder and awe by exchanging quarters for teeth, ensuring good dreams and organizing Easter egg hunts, that is. When old enemy Pitch, (voice of Jude Law) reemerges, the Guardians put aside their daily duties and reunite.
Assigned a new recruit, Jack Frost (Chris Pine), by Manny (or the Man in the Moon as he is more formally known), some of the Guardians find it hard to accept a new member. “All he does is freeze pipes,” says the Easter Bunny, but despite the icy mayhem Jack seems to inspire everywhere he goes, he has a warm heart. He is search for meaning in his life, “I’ve tried everything but no one can see me,” he says. He’s on a quest for identity, to be recognized, and soon discovers the Guardians–and Pitch–hold may hold the key to his locked down memories.
“Rise of the Guardians” is beautifully animated. From the ethereal unicorns that lull Sandman’s kids to sleep to the darker vision of the Boogeyman’s horses–the personification of fear and bad dreams–it is guaranteed to spin your eyeballs around in their sockets. The details are lush, the character work beautiful even for the minor characters—if there is a sequel expect North’s army of Yetis and clumsy elves to become major characters—and there is a good message about believing in yourself as you believe in others.
But there is also some grim in this fairy tale. Despite the presence of the Easter Bunny and the lovable and delicate Tooth Fairy the movie contains some images that may upset younger viewers. Pitch’s dark legion of wild-eyed horses may have the intended trick—to inspire nightmares in kids–and a detail in Jack’s backstory is intense, so judge your child’s ability to process the scares before shelling out for tickets for the whole family.
“Rise of the Guardians” is about keeping the wonder of kid’s lives intact, but the animators have also done a good job of transferring some of that wonder onto the screen.
“Red Dawn,” starring Chris Hemsworth, Josh “The Hunger Games” Hutcherson and Connor Anthony Kidman Cruise (yes, he’s their son!), is contrived, silly and even just this side of racist–just like the original–but is it, like its fore-bearer, also so bad it’s good? Or is it just bad?
The new movie has a new set of bad guys and an updated cast of chisel jawed stars, but boiled down to its basics it’s a faithful remake of the 1984 film. The Russian communist hoards have been replaced by North Korean invaders and Chris “Thor” Hemsworth steps in for Patrick Swayze.
Set in Spokane, Washington the movie sees a ragtag group of rebels fight off the North Korean Army who have somehow managed to launch a surprise attack on the entire United States. “We inherited our freedom,” says Jed (Hemsworth), “now it’s up to us to fight for it.”
Released at the tail end of the Cold War, the first film was a fist-pumping all-American freak out; a violent tour de force guaranteed to make patriotic hearts swell with pride. A Red, White and Blue Dawn.
The new film wants to be the same kind of crowd pleaser, but it’s too talky-talky and not enough boom-boomy.
For a small militia up against a well organized, ruthless army they seem to spend a lot of time reminiscing and bonding. They talk and laugh, I suppose to give the audience a chance to get to know them, trouble is, not one of them is terribly interesting unless they ‘re shooting at or blowing up the enemy. When they’re not getting mushy they state the obvious, like, “We can’t just call 911,” which doesn’t even qualify as unintentionally funny. Worse, to say they are cardboard characters is an insult to the pulp and paper industry.
The fun of these kind of movies lies in the action scenes and the cheese-ball dialogue, and, to its credit the movie gets going in its last forty minutes. New characters are introduced, the North Koreans say things like “The vicious rodents are attacking!” and the relationship nonsense that bogged down the first half is replaced with the stuff you expect from a movie like this–explosions and good triumphing over evil.
By then, however, you almost hope the North Koreans take over, because they might be more interesting than the bland American stars.
Like the undead fleshbags who have populated the last four “Resident Evil” movies, you can’t seem to kill this franchise. Five episodes in the stories have been whittled down to shards of expository dialogue followed by wild action with loads of slo-mo shots of star Milla Jovovich flipping and spinning through the air like a top that’s spun off its axis.
But just because “Resident Evil: Retribution” isn’t Shakespeare doesn’t mean we can’t learn something from it. Here’s what I took away from Jovovich and Company:
1.) The undead have really, really bad aim.
2.) No matter what stunt she has just performed, whether it’s plummeting nineteen stories down an abandoned mine shaft, or battling legions of bad guys, Mila’s hair will, at most, only look slightly tousled, as if Vidal Sassoon had just finished running his magic fingers through her locks.
3.) The amount of rainfall in the future makes Vancouver look arid.
4.) To act in one of these movies you must perfect one of two facial expressions: a.) steely determination, or b.) uncontrolled rage (which can be alternated with a sadistic smile if necessary).
5.) Characters will say, “What the hell is going on here?” when it is quite clear what the heck is going on.
6.) Most of the people to survive the deadly plague that destroyed most of humanity look like Abercrombie & Fitch pinups.
7.) Why take the stairs when you can drive a Rolls Royce down an escalator?
Lessons learned.
Despite legendary director Jean-Luc Godard’s claim that, “All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl,” both of which are amply on display in “Resident Evil: Retribution,” this sequel still feels more like a videogame projected on a big screen than a movie.
