“Red Lights,” a new paranormal thriller starring Signorney Weaver, Robert DeNiro and Cillian Murphy, is review proof. I saw this because I can’t tell you the plot twist that pushes this movie from the realm of the ridiculous into the land of the ludicrous without spoiling the whole premise.
Dr. Margaret Matheson (Sigourney Weaver, who knows a thing or two about ghostbusting) and Dr. Tom Buckley (Cillian Murphy) are college professors who specialize in debunking psychic phenomenon. Faith healers are sent to prison and séances are demystified but their orderly, science based world is turned upside down when celebrity psychic Simon Silver (Robert DeNiro) comes out of retirement. Imagine Uri Gellar with dark side and you get the picture. Silver was a huge star in the 70s but retired when it was suggested his powers caused a massive heart that killed one of his harshest critics. Matheson wants nothing to do with Silver but Buckley becomes obsessed with getting to the truth of the matter and discovering, once and for all, if Silver has extraordinary powers or is simply a talented magician who takes advantage of the gullible.
“Red Lights” doesn’t make much sense. Writer/director Rodrigo Cortés tries to play both sides of the psychic debate, simultaneously debunking and supporting the idea of extrasensory ability to an extent where the film loses any point of view it might have had. Straddling the fence on the subject at the heart of the story only serves to impale the tale on a mushy middle fence post, nullifying the story’s power.
You’ll only notice the wishy-washy statement of purpose, however, if you can get past the uneven performances. Murphy, a talented actor who delivered a powerhouse performance in “The Wind That Shakes the Barley,” flounders here. His off-balance performance simmers one second and boils the next. It’s strange, (and largely ineffective), work, which I suppose, was meant to add to the otherworldly feel of the film but instead only seems as nonsensical as the story.
Weaver and Elzabeth Olsen emerge largely unscathed because their roles are underwritten and underplayed, but DeNiro has the opposite problem. Theatrical and pretentious, the only uncanny thing about his portrayal of psychic Silver is that he took the role at all.
With its reliance on old-school narrative tricks—explaining the story through news broadcasts—and a muddy point-of-view “Red Lights” is a movie that is as confounding as the subject it portrays.
“Ruby Sparks,” a new fantasy from indie darlings Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan uses an ancient story—the Greek myth of Pygmalion who fell in love with one of his creations, only to have her to come to life—as inspiration to explore an the even older issue of how men and women relate to one another.
How would you react if you could create the perfect woman? That’s a question Calvin (Paul Dano) must debate in this gentle romantic comedy. He is a blocked writer who peaked with his first book, a novel he wrote at the age of nineteen. Socially awkward and uncomfortable with his fame he creates a relationship with one of his characters, Ruby Sparks (Zoe Kazan). He falls in love with his quirky character–“It’s almost like I’m writing to spend time with her,” he says—spending days writing about her until slowly fiction becomes reality. “You manifested a woman in your mind?” his brother (Chris Messina) says incredulously, “Mom’s gonna freak!”
Written by star Zoe Kazan and directed by “Little Miss Sunshine” directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, “Ruby Sparks” is a refreshing wisp of fantasy that grounds itself in reality as much as possible. It asks questions—how do you react when you can control every move your creation makes?—and builds a real relationship between a lonely writer and his “creation.”
Dano and Kazan, a couple in real life, bring great chemistry along with acting chops, and elevate a story that might have become a grungy male fantasy in the hands of Judd Apatow or the like, into a sweetly observed look at the nature of loneness and love.
The theatre near you where “Rock of Ages” is playing isn’t simply a movie theatre showing a new musical, it’s actually the place where real rock and roll went to die. Despite the title, the popular Broadway karaoke musical doesn’t rock, although it does go on for ages.
The framework on which the Greatest Hits of Hair Metal hangs is a typical small town girl moves to Hollywood story. (Oh) Sherrie Christian (Julianne Hough) is a naïve dyed-in-the-wool rock fan who arrives in Los Angeles, circa 1987, with a suitcase full of LPs, a gallon of Aqua Net and a dream to become a singer. She lands a job at the coolest bar on the Sunset Strip, the Bourbon Room, run by Dennis Dupree (Alex Baldwin) and falls for Drew, a handsome rock star wannabe (Diego Boneta). On the night of the biggest show of the year—a showcase by Stace Jaxx (Tom Cruise)—dreams come true for some and shatter for others.
“Rock of Ages” contains a couple things I never thought I’d see—a rear view close-up of Tom Cruise’s bottomless chaps and Alec Baldwin diving into a mosh pit—and one thing I’ve dreamed of for years—a monkey butler who fetches bottles of scotch and looks good in a suit. It’s that kind of movie, and if you surrender yourself to the over-the-top feel of the movie you may have a good time.
Cruise, who plays superstar Jaxx, the “most unreliable man in the music business,” pours some sugar on it. He’s Robert Plant with Axl Rose’s attitude and Prince’s trademarked revealing chaps. On stage he moves like an alien Iggy Pop, off stage he staggers through life searching for “the perfect song, the perfect sound,” (which, apparently sounds a lot like Journey). It’s still not real rock and roll, but the movie does rock a little harder when he’s on screen.
Paul Giamatti, as a slimy music manager who says things like, “I wish the true part was falser,” and Baldwin supply some lighter moments while Catherine Zeta-Jones as the Tipper Goresque wife of the mayor who wants to end Stacee Jaxx’s “filthy little music sex ride” stops the show with We’re Not Gonna Take It.
The 1984 hit is given a full scale 80’s video treatment, complete with teased hair and syncopated choreography. It’s more musical theatre than Twister Sister but it has the energy that other parts of the movie lack.
No amount of frenetic editing can spice up some of the numbers and the two leads, Hough and Boneta, are as bland as the rock ballads they sing.
“Rock of Ages” has some of the most enthusiastic pole dancing ever seen on screen, an unexpectedly fun performance from Cruise, and songs you’ll recognize, but is essentially only exists as an excuse to string a bunch of familiar songs together. It feels like a new twist on the oldies station you listen to on the way to work.
“Red Tails” feels like a 1940s war movie. It has soldiers who utter liens like, “Take that Mr. Hitler!” as they blow up ammunition ship and amazing aerial photography. The only difference is the color of the soldier’s skin. A study of the classic war films shows no indication of the contribution of African-American soldiers. By telling the heroic story of the Tuskegee airmen “Red Tails” hopes to right that wrong.
Based on true events (though dramatized for film) the movie focuses on a group African American WWII pilots, the top guns of the 332nd Fighter Group, the Tuskegee Airmen. Fighting the racial discrimination of the US military they prove their mettle by taking on dangerous assignments in active combat.
You can’t accuse Red Tails of being subtle. It plays like a Saturday morning matinee with a social conscious; unabashedly patriotic, unapologetically melodramatic and an unashamed throwback to the propaganda movies of yesteryear. The mix and match of those elements works for the first hour, but the time one of the pilots whoops, “Let’s give those newspapers something to write about!” the once charming tone of the movie starts to wear thin.
George Lucas produced this—although “Treme’s” Anthony Hemingway directed—and it is a Lucas movie with all the good and bad that implies. It’s corny, over-the-top, wildly uneven and episodic but when it takes flight, literally, it soars.
The aerial scenes (aided by Lucas’s computer tweaking) are breathtaking. I do wish, however, there was less dialogue during the dogfights. I think fighter pilots in attack mode have better things to concentrate on than making wisecracks or talking about girls.
“Red Tails” mostly suffers from a poorly told story. Just as it seems to be working up to an important point or climatic moment, it shies away, instead focusing on a superfluous love story or melodramatic moment (“My head, it hurts… I must have passed out”).
The actors do what they can with what they’re given—Nate Parker as Martin “Easy” Julian and David Oyelowo as Joe “Lightning” Little are the standouts—but the stars here are the planes and the historical context, not the actors.
Hunter S. Thompson wrote “The Rum Diary” in 1961 before he became the revered gonzo journalist who penned “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” It’s very loosely based on a period of time he spent in San Juan, Puerto Rico in the early days of his writing career, before, as his alter ego Paul Kemp (Johnny Depp) says in the film, he knew “who to write like me.”
So don’t expect the surreal poetry of “Fear and Loathing” or the disjointed charm of “Where the Buffalo Roam.” This is an origin story, the roots of gonzo, but the gonzo spirit of its creator is sadly missing.
Depp plays Kemp using a slight variation on the clipped Thompson accent he made famous in “Fear and Loathing.” He’s a hard drinking, failed novelist who thought he’d try his hand at selling some “words for money” to a newspaper in Puerto Rico. His plan to “lift the stone on the American Dream,” however, is kiboshed by an editor (Richard Jenkins) more interested maintaining the status quo than exposing the country’s ills. Assigned to writing an astrology column Kemp peers into the bottoms of lots of glasses of rum and becomes obsessed with Chenault (Amber Heard), the girlfriend of a shady PR man (Aaron Eckhart).
Kemp is a struggling writer, an artist still struggling to find his voice, which echoes the main failing of the film. Despite a director, Bruce Robinson, who made one of the funniest and best films about boozing (“Withnail and I”) and Depp’s close friendship with Thompson, the movie feels as if it is searching for a purpose. A voice. Despite the presence of a Hermaphrodite Oracle of the Dead, countless ounces of rum, one drug trip and some major movie star mojo from Depp, the movie falls flat.
It’s a story about perception—Eckhart’s PR man is selling one vision of the island, Kemp wants to reveal another—and how gazing into that chasm helped Kemp discover his voice and integrity but in the end it is neither the savage indictment of lazy journalism it should be, or (because of an ambiguous non-ending) the celebration of the power of the written word it couldn’t have been.
As the main curator of Thompson’s cinematic legacy Depp breathes some life into Kemp, although by times the broad performance feels at odds with the tone of the rest o the story.
As for the rest of the cast, Michael Rispoli embodies the boozy spirit of the piece. Giovanni Ribisi goes one swig over the line and will someone please give Amber Heard a job on “Mad Men?” Her face screams 1965.
Of course the film’s main character’s name is Paul Kemp and it takes place before the finely crafted persona of Hunter S. Thompson came into being but a healthier dose of the writer’s “ink and rage” might have given “The Run Diary” the spark it needed to really ignite.
Part Rock’em Sock’em Robots, part “Rocky” with a dollop of “Transformers,” “Real Steel” is a family drama about redemption, romance and robots.
Hugh Jackman is Charlie Kenton, a former boxer left behind when the game changed. To keep up with audience demand for more action promoters axed human fighters, replacing them with behemoth thousand pound battling bots. Kenton and his broken down robots barely eke out a living on the circuit, but he sees a chance at making some quick cash when his estranged son reenters his life.
Kenton makes a deal to sell his son for $100,000 to a wealthy relative. The glitch is the adoptive couple will be out of town for the summer, so he’ll have to spend three months with young Max (Dakota Goyo) until he can collect his cash. The kid turns out to be a chip off the old block—stubborn and cocky—but he loves boxing almost as much as Kenton does. When they uncover a robot named Atom at a junkyard they bond in ways neither could have imagined.
“Real Steel” is a strange movie. It’s a father-and-his-son-underdog-romance-redemption-road-trip movie with robots. The funny part is almost all the individual elements work well enough, but when they are slapped together something seems wonky.
The father and son bonding aspect works well enough, although I think if this was real life, child protective services might disagree with me on that one.
The underdog story is predictable, but who doesn’t like a bit of redemption?
The romance and the road trip aspects are played down, but are both important to the story.
Trouble is the movie is so thick with syrup—even the robot Atom has a heart of gold—that it feels like director Shawn Levy has a tendency to let his inner Spielberg get the better of him. By the time little Max says to his estranged father and boxing coach, “I just want you to fight for me… it’s all I’ve ever wanted,” the metaphors are flying thick and fast.
The movie tries to be all things to all potential audiences, and, as a result, feels like less than the sum of its parts.
Sports movies are never about the sports, they’re always about the subtext but here you have boxing robots! That’s something new—they’re not exactly Transformers—but the story insists on ignoring the cool characters—like the robot Zeus, the mechanical Mike Tyson—and focus on the more predictable aspects of the story instead.
Earlier this year a documentary called “Project Nim” detailed the life and sad times of Nim Chimpsky, who was taken from his mother and taught sign language before being abandoned once he outlived his usefulness as a laboratory experiment. It would make a good double bill with “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” a big budget prequel to the famous sci fi films. Man does ape wrong in “Project Nim,” and in “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” the chimps get even.
The time is modern day San Francisco. James Franco plays Will Rodman, a scientist working to create a drug that will slow, or even reverse the effects of Alzheimer’s disease. When one of his chimp test subjects goes berserk the project is shut down and the remaining apes are ordered euthanized “in the most cost effective way possible” by Rodman’s boss, the ruthless CEO Steven Jacobs (David Oyelowo). The scientist rescues a baby chimp, the son of one of his test subjects. Soon he discovers that the drug given to the baby’s mother has filtered through his system, giving him extraordinary intelligence. Raised completely by humans the chimp, named Caesar (after the emperor, not the salad), doesn’t realize he has simian cousins until he is removed from his comfortable home and placed in an ape sanctuary. Soon Caesar becomes like Chimp Guevara, organizing a revolution against his human captors. This ape is mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore.
The original “Planet of the Apes” movie was an allegory for racism and nuclear war topped off with Charlton Heston’s hairy chest and some cool monkey masks. “Rise,” on the other hand is a generic action movie with state-of-the-art primates and the occasional moment that elevates it above Tim Burton’s remake, but it doesn’t come close to the emotional realism that made the first movie a classic.
Andy Serkis’s performance-capture work as alpha ape Ceasar is one of the movie’s strengths and weaknesses. There is no doubt that his facial expressions, particularly the use of his eyes, add much to the character of the chimp but the computer generated imagery used to bring Caesar to life, while impressive, lacks an organic feel. It seems fake even though much has been done to ensure a lifelike visage. The Roddy McDowell era apes were obviously fake—sometimes painfully so—but somehow they had more soul.
Emotional apes aside, the movie plays it a bit too cute in the beginning, but when the revolution begins—Caesar uses cookies to bribe his fellow apes into joining him, proving once and for all that an army does indeed march on its stomach—the movie kicks into gear. Some of the action is a bit too showy—since when can apes do martial arts?—but the scene of Caesar on horseback leading the charge against the heavily fortified cops is a real crowd pleaser.
“Rise of the Planet of the Apes” plays fast and loose with the mythology established in the previous movies and takes a bit too long to get to the movie’s exciting monkey business, but delivers an exciting finale that would make Nim proud.
In “Rio” nerd actor du jour Jesse Eisenberg plays, what else, a nerdy birdy—a domesticated macaw—small-town Minnesota named Blu. He’s never learned to fly, but enjoys a happy and healthy life with his owner and BFF Linda (Leslie Mann). When they discover the last remaining ladybird blue macaw (voice of Anne Hathaway) in the world lives in Rio de Janeiro they make the journey to find her, but their plan lays an egg. Instead they encounter kidnappers and an evil cockatoo named Nigel (Jemaine Clement). On the upside perhaps Blu will finally learn to fly.
Let’s get the 800 pound elephant—or in this case, the big blue bird—out of the way right away. Let me say that “Rio” has an OK story and sparkling animation but it really lacks the depth of a Pixar film. Maybe I’m spoiled, but when I watch animated movies, whether they are Dreamworks, or, like this one, from Fox, I can’t help but think, “What would the wizards at Pixar have done with this story?”
Don’t get me wrong, “Rio” is perfectly serviceable. It’s colorful and filled with nice little touches like a little bird who warms himself against a traffic light, flitting back-and-forth between the red and green lights, in snowy Minnesota, but for all the nice little touches and exciting flying scenes the movie isn’t particularly memorable. It’ll keep the little ones occupied in the theatre—although very little kids may find some of the action a bit too intense—and has a good enviro message about wild animals and their treatment, but there’s no real sticky content here.
The lead voice work is adequate, nothing special from the above the title stars, but will.i.am, Jamie Foxx, Tracy Morgan—as a drooling bulldog in a Carmen Miranda fruit salad hat—and particularly Jemaine Clement—who has a show stopping song—help the movie take flight with fun supporting vocal work.
“Rio” is a good enough Saturday afternoon matinee with the kids, unfortunately for me it lacks the zip I have come to expect from animated entertainment. Sorry “Rio” but I can only imagine Pixar could come up with a more imaginative name for a blue macaw than Blu.
“Rubber” is an odd movie. It’s become fanboy-fashionable to rave about the story of a killer tire—yes, you read that right—with psychokinetic powers—think “Carrie” with treads—who terrorizes the American southwest and I’ll throw my hat in the ring, but only to a certain point. Writer/director Quentin Dupieux begins the film with an existential manifesto, an ode to the “no reason” element he says is crucial to the success of any movie.
“In the Steven Spielberg movie E.T, why is the alien brown? No reason,” says Lieutenant Chad (Stephen Spinella) in the film’s opening minutes. “I could go on for hours with more examples. The list is endless. You probably never gave it a thought… but all great films, without exception, contain an important element of no reason.”
The speech, while entertaining, is a dodge that allows the director to present all the story’s bizarre twists with a straight face but it is kind of disingenuous. Of course there is a reason why the tire comes to life and kills people. Just like there is a reason why there is a group of people in the desert watching the tire’s killing spree through binoculars as though they are watching a movie. I could go on for hours with more examples, to quote Lieutenant Chad, but you get the point.
It’s an absurdist tract on how and why we watch movies, what entertainment is and the movie business, among other things. But frankly, mostly it’s about a tire rolling around the desert and while there is something kind of hypnotic about watching the tire on its murderous journey—think “Natural Born Killer” but round and rubbery—that doesn’t mean “Rubber” is a good movie. For all its subtext, style and audacious storytelling it is still essentially a cool short film idea stretched beyond comfort to 82 minutes (with credits).
