The spooky new supernatural thriller Deliver Us From Evil sees Eric Bana play a jaded NYC police officer. “I’ve seen some horrible things,” he says, “but nothing that can’t be explained by human nature.”
That changes when he meets a renegade priest (Édgar Ramírez) who convinces him a plague of demonic possession has infected the Big Apple. Working together, they combat the evil forces with exorcism and faith.
Deliver Us From Evil is based on a nonfiction book of the same name authored by Ralph Sarchie (with Lisa Collier Cool), a sixteen-year NYPD veteran who investigates “cases of demonic possession and (assists) in the exorcisms of humanity’s most ancient—and most dangerous—foes,” in his spare time.
“Before going out on a case,” he writes, “I put aside my gun and police badge and arm myself with holy water and a relic of the True Cross.”
Sarchie’s story joins a long list of exorcism movies with roots in true events.
The Exorcist, the granddaddy of all demon possession movies, is based in part on the 1949 case of an anonymous Maryland teenager dubbed Roland Doe. He was determined by the Catholic Church to be under a diabolical spell when strange things started happening — levitating furniture and holy water vials crashing to the ground — after he played with a Ouija board.
Exorcist author William Peter Blatty first heard about Doe’s story when he was a student at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. in 1950. He drew from newspaper reports and a diary kept by the attending priest, Fr. Raymond Bishop, as the backbone of his novel.
The character of Father Lankester Merrin, the elderly priest and archeologist played by Max von Sydow in the movie, was based on British archaeologist Gerald Lankester Harding. Blatty said Harding “was the physical model in my mind when I created the character, whose first name, please note, is Lankester.”
In recent years hits like The Rite, starring Anthony Hopkins as a real life exorcist tutor, and The Exorcism of Emily Rose with Tom Wilkinson as a priest accused of murder when a young woman died during an exorcism, are based on true events.
Finally in The Possession, a haunted antique carved “Dybbuk” box — containing an evil, restless spirit — turns the behaviour of a young girl (Natasha Calis) from angelic to animalistic. The owner of the real-life box offered to send it to producer Sam Raimi but the filmmaker declined. “I didn’t want anything to do with it,” he said. “I’m scared of the thing.”
Director Michael Bay once said he doesn’t make movies for critics. The auteur behind such hits as The Rock, Armageddon, Bad Boys 1 and 2 and the Transformers movies is best known for making big, loud films that rake it in at the box office but leave critics reaching for the Advil.
Bay acknowledged the adversarial relationship in a 2005 article by Rene Rodriguez.
“They castrate me,” he told Rodriguez. “They call me the devil and all that crap.”
It’s not hard to see why reviewers have a hard time with his films. He never met a building or car or city he didn’t want to blow up in spectacular fashion and critics often feel like they have to slather on SPF 70 to avoid getting get a tan from the glare off the giant fireballs that light up screen in Bay’s films.
Audiences, however, have flocked to his flicks. According to boxofficemojo.com his ten features have grossed $1,898,048,525, or an average of $189,804,853. That’s a lot of beans.
The release this weekend of Transformers: Age of Extinction promises to add to those totals. The fourth installment of the franchise stars Mark Wahlberg as a single father and struggling inventor who discovers the deactivated Autobots leader Optimus Prime.
The movie promises a whole new raft of Transformers, including bounty hunter Lockdown and the rough and tumble Dinobot Grimlock. Bay promises we’ll also see an “angry Optimus Prime.”
Will the critics like Age of Extinction? Who knows? It probably won’t matter, the Transformers movies are as close to guaranteed hits as Hollywood has these days, so reviews most likely won’t matter to the box office.
Not all of Bay’s films have been critically reviled. “The critics were very nice to me when I first began with Bad Boys,” he says and his last movie, the crime drama Pain and Gain was called “the best movie Michael Bay’s ever made,” by the Newark Star-Ledger.
It has a few things going for it. First, there isn’t a robot in sight. Secondly, a great cast—including Wahlberg, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson and Anthony Mackie—who bring serious star power and third, it doesn’t really feel like a Michael Bay film. And by that I mean there’s only one shot of the three leads walking away from a slow motion explosion.
Years ago I wrote this about his trademarked aural and optical onslaught: “The former commercial director has a knack for making everything look shiny but having great taste doesn’t make a great film director any more than great taste makes a Snicker’s bar a gourmet meal.” I even coined a word for his style: Hullabayloo, but nothing that any critic or I write matters to the director.
“I’ve actually stopped reading (reviews),” he told Rodriguez.
“There is nothing that bonds a cast more than being in the back of a truck with live pigs,” says John Lloyd Young.
Young, who won a Tony for his performance of Frankie Valli on Broadway, plays the singer in the big screen adaptation of Jersey Boys. Teamed with Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza) and Nick Massi (Michael Lomenda) Valli rose from the streets to the studio and with the addition of songwriter and keyboardist Bob Gaudio (Erich Bergen), from clubs to concert halls as the Four Seasons, one of the biggest selling acts in rock history. Hits like Big Girls Don’t Cry, Walk Like A Man and Can’t Take My Eyes Off You kept them at the top of the charts but ego, in-fighting and money troubles blew them apart.
Young, Lomenda and Piazza bonded on the third day of the shoot. “We were shooting a scene where we were in the middle of the desert and our car breaks down,” Young says. “We end up having to hitch a ride with a farmer and the back of the truck is filled with pigs. The three of us guys were actually in the back of this truck with a bunch of pigs, doing take after take, and every time the truck started it was like a lesson in pig execratory systems.
“It was a sequence that’s been cut from the movie,” he says, “but it proved to be a real bonding experience for us.”
Young, Lomenda and Bergen are all veterans of the stage show, which they say was a benefit when making the movie.
“Knowledge of that audience reaction is in our head and in every single thing we do as these characters on stage. You cannot forget that when you’re doing the same character onscreen. You know how the audience responds, and even though it is just crew guys, (director) Clint (Eastwood) and your fellow actors, you have those instincts in there. The audience is there with you.”
Frankie Valli was also with them. In fact, the singer has been a presence since before the show hit the stage.
“He showed up unannounced at a rehearsal before I had even completed my work building the character,” says Young of the Broadway show. “That was nerve wracking but by the time we got to the set I think he and I were both enjoying watching his life be immortalized by Clint Eastwood.”
“If you don’t write a good review for this I guarantee Frankie Valli will show up at your door,” chimes in Bergen. “He knows some people who know some people,” adds Young with a laugh.
Rock ’n’ roll and the movies have always had an uneasy relationship. For every film that hits all the right notes, like Quadrophenia or A Hard Day’s Night, there’s a host of tone-deaf films like Light of Day, featuring Michael J. Fox and Joan Jett as musical siblings, or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a glam-rock-and-disco re-imagining of the Beatles classic.
Rock ’n’ roll biographies are equally hit-and-miss. In The Buddy Holly Story, the toothy Gary Busey earned an Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of the rock legend, but Roger Ebert sneered that Dennis Quaid played Jerry Lee Lewis in Great Balls of Fire “as a grinning simpleton with a crazy streak.”
This weekend, Jersey Boys — directed by Clint Eastwood, and based on the Tony Award-winning musical — tells the story of ’60s hitmakers The Four Seasons. Songs like Big Girls Don’t Cry, Walk Like A Man and Can’t Take My Eyes Off You made them one of the biggest-selling rock acts of all time.
Lesser known than the Four Seasons but louder, faster and dirtier were The Runaways, the subject of a rambunctious 2010 movie. Set back when you could still drink a bottle of stolen booze in the shade of the Hollywood sign, The Runaways focuses on two glue-sniffing, tough girls named Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart) and Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning) who formed the underage all-girl band. The music of The Runaways was described as the “sound of hormones raging,” and this film captures that.
I’m Not There is a hard movie to describe. It’s a metaphoric retelling of Bob Dylan’s life, but none of the characters in it are called Bob Dylan. Most of them don’t look like Dylan, and the one who most looks like Dylan is a woman. Unlike Walk the Line or Ray, which were both standard-issue Hollywood biopics, there is nothing linear here, but then there is nothing straightforward about the man, so there should be nothing straightforward about the movie.
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll is the title of eccentric English singer Ian Dury’s biggest hit and the 2010 biopic about his eventful life. Starring Andy Serkis, the film is as high voltage as one of Dury’s legendary live performances.
Finally, the film Control details the short life of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis (Sam Riley). After seeing the film at Cannes, Curtis’s bass player Peter Hook said he knew the movie “would be very well received because, even though it’s two hours long, only two people went to the toilet the whole time. In fact, one of them was (Joy Division founding member) Bernard (Sumner). The other one was a 70-year-old woman.”
The Hobbit author J.R.R. Tolkien described dragon Smaug as “a most specially greedy, strong and wicked worm.” The Flight of the Conchords have a song called Albi the Racist Dragon, and on Dragon Day at Cornell University, an effigy of one of the giant beasts is burned while students shout and dance.
They can be fiery, fearsome creatures. “Noble dragons don’t have friends,” writes Terry Pratchett in Guards! Guards! “The nearest they can get to the idea is an enemy who is still alive.”
It’s not hard to understand why the folks on Game of Thrones are wary of Daenerys Targaryen’s (Emilia Clarke) brood of the beasts when she spouts off lines like, “When my dragons are grown, we will take back what was stolen from me and destroy those who wronged me! We will lay waste to armies and burn cities to the ground!” Then there’s Bryagh, the serpentine villain of The Flight of Dragons who not only insults the movie’s heroes before dispatching them, he also gobbles up the eggs of other dragons!
Maybe if characters in movies paid more heed to the advice given by author Steven Brust — “Always speak politely to an enraged dragon” — then movies and TV wouldn’t have to offer up such a wide array of ways to rid the world of dragons. Look on IMDb, there are dozens of titles containing the phrase “dragon slayer.”
The 2010 animated hit How to Train Your Dragon begins in a remote Viking village where killing a dragon is “everything.” It focuses on Hiccup (Jay Baruchel), a kind- hearted boy who captures one of the flying behemoths and discovers two things: One, he can’t bring himself to kill it, and two, that dragons aren’t the fearful monsters everyone thinks they are. He becomes a Dragon Whisperer and the movie shows the serpentine creatures in a different light than the abysmal brutes usually seen on screen.
This weekend, How to Train Your Dragon 2 adds to the list of cinematic dragons who are more misunderstood than actually evil.
The 1941 Disney flick The Reluctant Dragon features a dragon that would rather recite poetry than cause havoc. “You’ve got to be mad to breathe fire,” he says, “but I’m not mad at anybody.”
In the live-action DragonHeart, a fire-breather must team with a dragon-slaying knight (Dennis Quaid) to end an evil king’s rule. When the giant serpent is accused of eating an adversary, he is indignant. “I merely chewed in self-defense, but I never swallowed.”
Eddie Murphy lent some comedic relief to the 1998 animated movie Mulan as the tiny, blue-horned Mushu. He may be the size of the Geico gecko, but don’t mention it. “I’m a dragon, not lizard. I don’t do that tongue thing.”
The tagline for Tom Cruise’s latest film is “Live. Die. Repeat.”
“How many times have we been here,” asks Rita (Emily Blunt). “For me, it’s been an eternity,” replies William (Cruise) as he relives the same day of an alien invasion over and over.
Edge of Tomorrow is a time-loop movie that can best be described as War of the Worlds meets Groundhog Day.
In Groundhog Day, Bill Murray says, “Every morning I wake up without a scratch on me, not a dent in the fender. I am an immortal.” His take on a drunk, suicide-prone weatherman who discovers the beauty of life by living the same day endlessly may be the granddaddy of all
Hollywood déjà vu stories, but many other movie characters have been caught in cinematic time circles.
The DVD cover for 2006’s Salvage asks the question, “What if every day you relived your own murder?” Originally called Gruesome for the festival circuit, the movie is as grim as Bill Murray’s film is life-affirming. Called a “digital video hell — spawn of Psycho, Eyes Without a Face and Groundhog Day,” by Variety, Salvage is the story of Claire (Lauren Currie Lewis), a convenience store worker who undergoes her murder over and over. Despite its extremely low budget — star Lewis doubled as the film’s make-up artist — Salvage was an official selection of the 2006 Sundance Festival.
The horror genre lends itself to time-bending tales. Camp Slaughter is a 2005 throwback to the slasher films of the 1980s. In this one, a group of modern teens stumble across Camp Hiawatha, a dangerous place where not-so-happy-campers are trapped in 1981 and forced to re-experience the night a maniacal murderer went on a killing spree. Labelled “Groundhog Day meets Friday the 13th (part 2,3,4,5,6,7,8… every one of them!),” by one critic, it’s gory good fun.
Not into gory? The Yuletide provides a less bloody backdrop for time-looping. The title Christmas Every Day is self-explanatory but 12 Dates of Christmas is better than the name suggests. Us Weekly called this Amy Smart romantic comedy about a woman stuck in an endless Christmas Eve, a sweet “nicely woven journey.”
Finally, the aptly named Repeaters is a Canadian film written by Arne Olsen, scribe of Power Rangers: The Movie. Repeaters is about a trio of recovering addicts who find themselves in “an impossible time labyrinth” after being electrocuted in a storm. Like most time-bending films, Repeaters is about learning from your mistakes. What sets it apart from some of the others are three unlikeable leads who use their situation to raise hell and break the law. It’s only when Kyle (Dustin Milligan) realizes they could be in big trouble if time suddenly unfreezes for them that familiar time-loop themes of redemption and self-reflection arise.
Hear the name Disney, and your first thoughts are likely about Mickey Mouse ears, Mary Poppins or the song Let it Go. Uplifting notions born from a company that brags it owns the Happiest Place on Earth.
But for all the cheery feelings the Mouse House has given us over the years, Disney villains have also inspired a nightmare or two.
This weekend, Maleficent creeps into theatres. Starring Angelina Jolie, it is the story of how the Sleeping Beauty villainess became evil after being betrayed by a child. With plumped up cheekbones and headgear with demonic horns, Jolie looks like something from a hellish Hieronymus Bosch painting.
“She isn’t the pretty princess,” says the actress. “She isn’t a beautiful queen. She’s a very awkward, pointy, slightly scary-looking horned creature who goes through a lot in her life.”
Maleficent joins a long list of dastardly Disney villains to inspire sleepless nights.
Scar
In The Lion King, Scar (voice of Jeremy Irons) is the brother of the king, Mufasa (James Earl Jones). In a Shakespearean twist, Scar murders his brother and banishes his nephew to gain control of Pride Rock.
Most evil line? “Long live the King.” — Scar to Mufasa before killing him.
Cruella De Vil
In the 1961 animated film and the 1996 live-action film, 101 Dalmatians, Cruella De Vil (voice of Betty Lou Gerson in the cartoon, Glenn Close in the flesh) is a diabolical fashionista who wants to incorporate puppy pelts into her wardrobe.
Most evil line? “Darling, I live for fur. I worship fur!”
Queen Grimhilde
Vanity pushes Queen Grimhilde (Lucille La Verne in the 1937 animated version) to try and destroy the life of her stepdaughter (Adriana Caselotti) in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The evil queen can’t bear the thought that there is someone more beautiful than she, so she first orders her huntsman to kill Snow White and cut her heart out and when that doesn’t work, she feeds the pretty girl a poisoned apple.
Most evil line? “Mirror, Mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?”
Chernabog
Hands down, the scariest vision in any Disney film has to be Chernabog, the winged demon who briefly appears in the Night on Bald Mountain sequence of Fantasia. He is the essence of evil and according to Villians Wiki, his hobby is bringing the dead back to life so he can kill them again. Discussing the character in an interview, Walt Disney referred to him as Satan.
Most evil line? Chernabog doesn’t have any lines. When you’re this bad, you don’t need any lines.
The Brady Bunch is pop culture’s most famous blended family.
The story of a “lovely lady who was bringing up three very lovely girls,” and a “man named Brady with three boys of his own,” who “would somehow form a family,” ran for fives seasons on TV, endlessly in reruns and even spawned two movies.
“The Brady Bunch is a live-action modern fairy tale of family,” says Christopher Knight who played Peter Brady on the original show. “In this context it’s less odd that it’s lasted for over 30 years; and why it may last in some respects as long as Mother Goose!”
He may be optimistic on the eternal appeal of his show, but he’s not wrong to imply that the idea of blended families could remain the subject of stories and movies for years to come.
This weekend “cinematic soulmates” Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler reunite for a third time, following The Wedding Singer and 50 First Dates, for Blended, a romantic comedy about the mixing and mingling of two families.
Hollywood has been blending screen families for years. The grandfather of these blended family stories has to be Yours, Mine and Ours.
Based on the memoir Who Gets the Drumstick? by Helen Beardsley, this 1968 Lucille Ball, Henry Fonda film sees a widow with eight kids and a widower with 10 children (including Mike, played by Tim Matheson 10 years before he found fame in Animal House) become one big (almost) happy family.
The film was produced by Ball, who became so friendly with the Beardsleys she treated all 20 of them to a trip to Disneyland. ABC and Paramount Studios were so impressed with the film they gave the green light to the similarly themed The Brady Bunch show.
The same year, movie legend Doris Day made her final big-screen appearance in With Six You Get Egg Roll, a blended family story about a widow with three sons who marries a man with a daughter. The kids don’t see eye to eye, but soon figure out a way to live together. Released so soon after Yours, Mine and Ours, Eggroll got good reviews, but, as Roger Ebert wrote at the time, “would probably seem funnier if it didn’t suffer by comparison.”
Finally, Step Brothers is an R-rated look at extreme Peter Pan Syndrome. Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly play 40ish men who become bunkmates and reluctant stepbrothers when their parents (Mary Steenburgen and Richard Jenkins) marry. The familiar reprimand “Grow up and act your age” fell on deaf ears with these guys. It’s like watching two overweight, foul-mouthed 10-year-olds with thinning hair going at each other, but it is good vulgar fun.
“I still get such a bang out of it,” says Buck Weaver (John Cusack) in Eight Men Out, “playing ball.”
Given the number of sports movies that have been released in the last 30 years, apparently audiences also get a bang out of watching films about baseball.
This weekend, Jon Hamm stars in a new ball picture, Million Dollar Arm. The Mad Men star plays real-life sports agent J.B. Bernstein who recruited Indian cricket players Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel for the Pittsburgh Pirates.
It’s an unconventional baseball movie, but there seems to be something about the sport that lends itself to fantastic stories and fables.
Roger Ebert called Field of Dreams, “a religious picture,” then added, “but the religion is baseball.” In this 1989 hit Kevin Costner plays an Iowa corn farmer who hears a mysterious voice. “If you build it, he will come.” The “it” is a baseball diamond and the “he” is Shoeless Joe Jackson, the legendary outfielder for the disgraced 1919 Chicago White Sox.
The movie uses a baseball theme as a backdrop for a story about following your dreams, believing in the impossible and the idea that baseball was “a symbol of all that was once good in America.”
The film struck a chord with audiences and tourists alike. Since its release, the field built for the film in Dubuque County, Iowa has attracted hundreds of thousands of people, and spawned new restaurants, shops, a hotel, all in a town of only 4,000 people.
Robert Redford’s film The Natural looks to Arthurian legends for its story. Redford plays Roy Hobbs, a young pitcher with natural ability. Cut down in his prime by a tragic accident, he disappears, only to return many years later to become a star at an age when most players are hanging up their gloves. “It took me 16 years to get here,” he says. “You play me, and I’ll give you the best I got.”
The Holy Grail of baseball
Based on a novel by Bernard Malamud, the characters in The Natural each represent a person from ancient literature.
There are elements of Round Table Knight Percival’s pursuit of the Holy Grail present in Hobbs’ story. He’s a Knight (literally, his team is called The Knights) who must bring back the Grail, or pennant, to team manager Pop Fisher, whose name is an alias for the Fisher King, keeper of the Grail.
If you think that is reading too much into the story, perhaps Woody Allen in Zelig is more your speed. “I love baseball. You know it doesn’t have to mean anything, it’s just beautiful to watch.”
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada 
