Much of the fun of 2008s Taken was watching beloved thespian Liam Neeson go all Chuck Norris in a dirty little Euro trash thriller.
In the action adventure movie Neeson played a former “preventer” for the US government. A specialist in black ops, he was an undercover agent who contained volatile situations before they got out of control. Retired, he lived in Los Angeles near his estranged seventeen-year-old daughter Kim (Maggie Grace). When she is kidnapped by a child slavery ring he has only 96 hours to use his “particular set of skills” to get her back. His rescue mission takes him on a wild rampage through the soft underbelly of Paris. “I’ll tear down the Eiffel Tower if I have to,” he says.
It’s a down-and-dirty little flick, classed up somewhat by the presence of Neeson in the lead role and it became an unexpected lightening-in-a-bottle hit. It also redefined Neeson’s recent career.
At an age when many actors are staring down the barrel of character parts and cameos, the sixty-one year old has made an unlikely U-turn into action movies. “I was a tiny bit embarrassed by it, “ he says of Taken, “but then people started sending me action scripts.”
Arguably best known for his Best Actor Oscar nomination as the charismatic but humble German businessman Oskar Schindler in Schindler’s List, the Irish actor has fully embraced his new career path. Vanity Fair even acknowledged the twist in an article called, “Wham! Bam! Thank You, Liam!”
His latest actioner is Non-Stop, a high-flying thriller that takes place on an international crossing from New York to London. Neeson is an air marshal who must prevent a crazed killer from murdering passengers in flight.
The actor’s rebirth as a gun-toting, neck snapping gravel-voiced Stallonite™—aging action star—works not only because he has the physical presence to be taken seriously as a hard man, but also because he has the acting chops to make us believe him as a ruthless and efficient killing machine.
Taken and Taken 2 (which were essentially the same movie) worked not just because the action sequences were out of control, but because audiences had some empathy for Neeson’s character as he kicked butt across Europe. It was a personal mission; he was trying to get his daughter back.
Action movies like Wrath of the Titans, The Grey and Unknown may not burnish Neeson’s rep as a great thespian, but when asked why he keeps making them, he has a solid reason: “Because they’re dumb enough to offer them to me!”
It’s said the people of Pompeii regarded the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D. with “a response more of curiosity than of alarm.” The volcano had burped and belched as many as 50 times over the years, so most of the city’s 20,000 citizens didn’t pay attention when Vesuvius started to gurgle.
Perhaps they were too busy visiting one of the city’s many brothels — like a proto-Las Vegas, this was the richest city of ancient times, ripe with amenities and vice — or enjoying their lunches of broad beans, olives, dormice (plumped up by chefs in terracotta jars) or even garum, made from the first blood of a still-gasping mackerel, to detect the cloud of deadly volcanic ash headed their way.
By the end of the day the dust “poured across the land,” claiming 2,000 lives. Buried beneath, “a darkness… like the black of closed and unlighted rooms.” The remains of Pompeii and its people were preserved, left untouched for two millennia.
Today the ancient city of Pompeii is one of the most popular attractions in Italy, drawing almost three million tourists annually. But if you can’t make it to the Italian region of Campania, a new movie aims to recreate the experience for you.
Pompeii stars Kit Harington, Carrie-Anne Moss, Emily Browning and Kiefer Sutherland in a love story about a slave-turned-gladiator (Harington) who must rescue his beloved, Cassia (Browning), before a rolling mountain of lava and ash dooms her to the ages.
The big action adventure take on the story directed by Resident Evil helmer Paul W.S. Anderson has an ancestor in The Last Days of Pompeii, a 1913 silent sword-and-sandal movie based on the Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton novel of the same name. That book has been remade eight times.
The most famous version came in 1959. The big budget CinemaScope production was to have been directed by Mario Bonnard, but when he fell ill on the first day of shooting, screenwriter Sergio Leone (who would go on to make classics like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) stepped in. It’s big on pageantry, just as the advertising taglines would suggest. It’s a “Fiery Summit of Spectacle,” the posters screamed, promising an inside look at, “the City that Lived in Sin and Died in Flame!”
Certainly it’s more puffed-up than Up Pompeii, a 1971 Frankie Howerd comedy that featured a speech by emperor Ludicrus Sextus during Vesuvius’ eruption.
“I say, Lurcio, how did my speech go?” he asks his servant as the city crumbles.
If the original RoboCop movie is any indication, sometimes life does imitate art.
The 1987 film shows a crime-ridden and financially ruined Detroit turning to a part-human, part-robot cop to police the streets. As far as I know, no cyborgs have ever patrolled the neighbourhoods of Motor City, but 27 years after the movie hit theatres, Michigan’s most populous city declared Chapter Nine, becoming the largest municipal bankruptcy filing in U.S. history.
Prescient? Perhaps.
Fosterwealth.com wrote, “With Detroit’s bankruptcy, we’ve seen much of RoboCop come to pass,” while screenwriter Ed Neumeier remembers a note written in the margin of his copy of the script, “The future left Detroit behind.”
The writer also told CNN, “We are now living in the world that I was proposing in RoboCop.”
The original Peter Weller movie lived at the centre of popular culture when it came out, spawning two sequels, a television series, two animated shows, a mini-series, video games and several comic books.
And today RoboCop is still a going concern.
Later this year a 10-foot-tall tribute statue will be unveiled in Detroit and this week a remake will become the first RoboCop movie to be released in IMAX.
The new RoboCop is an all-star affair, with Swedish star Joel Kinnaman as the title character and appearances from Gary Oldman, Michael Keaton, Samuel L. Jackson and Jay Baruchel. Just don’t expect a straight-up copy. “I’m not trying to remake RoboCop,” says director José Padilha, “because I don’t think RoboCop is remake-able.”
Instead, Kinnaman says, the new film will be “realistic,” and “will have a satirical quality… It’s going to have that wink in the eye, but we’re not looking to replicate the [original director Paul] Verhoeven tone.”
The one thing the two films have in common for sure is that while both are set in Detroit, neither used the city as the principal shooting location. Verhoeven filmed his movie in Pennsylvania and Texas whereas the new movie was lensed mainly in Toronto and Vancouver.
Even criminals love RoboCop
Another incident illustrates how the film aided real life law enforcement… at least once.
A robbery suspect/movie fan in Sacramento, Calif., tried to elude police by hiding out in a movie theatre showing RoboCop. He became so immersed in the film he didn’t notice the cops evacuating the audience, leaving him alone and busted when the lights came on.
Alfred Hitchcock said, “Ideas come from everything,” and certainly Hollywood proves his point.
Just this year we’ve had films inspired by everything from Norse mythology by way of comic books (Thor: The Dark World), real life (Captain Phillips, American Hustle to name a couple) and literature (The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug to name one).
Like Hitch says, story ideas can come from anywhere. Even the board games and toys we played with as kids.
This weekend Hollywood has built a movie around a set of building blocks. The most famous building blocks in the world. The Lego Movie features the all-star voices of Will Ferrell, Liam Neeson, Elizabeth Banks and Morgan Freeman in a story about an ordinary Lego minifigure recruited to stop the evil tyrant Lord Business from gluing the universe together.
Lego’s colourful interlocking plastic blocks are the latest toy to inspire a movie, but they aren’t the first.
The 1977 animated film Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure has the distinction of being the first theatrical motion picture based on a consumer toy. In the movie the rag dolls go on a journey to rescue Babette, a beautiful French doll kidnapped by a pirate. Described as “tedious” and “lacking in pace and humor” by many critics, the movie has also been mentioned as an unofficial inspiration for the Toy Story series.
A few years later came an action figure that would inspire several movies. Roger Sweet, lead designer for Mattel’s Preliminary Design Department, says he wanted “a powerful figure that could be taken anywhere and dropped into any context because he had a generic name.” That character was He-Man, defender of the realm of Eternia from the evil forces of Skeletor.
The job of bringing that bigger-than-life character from the toy box to the screen fell to Dolph Lundgren in the 1987 film Masters of the Universe. The original story wasn’t a hit at the box office and isn’t one of Lundgren’s favourite films.
“How much could I do as an actor,” he asked, “when I was running around in swim trunks and chest armor?”
More successful was Clue, based on the crime mystery board game. Starring Eileen Brennan and Martin Mull as murder suspects Mrs. Peacock and Colonel Mustard, the movie was released with three possible endings. The various endings were split up between theatres, so no two prints were the same, but the DVD release features all three conclusions.
In my review for the recent remake of Oldboy I wrote, “There is no more manly-man actor in the mold of Lee Marvin or Lee Van Cleef working today.”
I guess that shouldn’t be a surprise given that he was named after the rough-and-tumble character Josh Randall played by Steve McQueen in TV’s Wanted: Dead or Alive.
In Oldboy he’s so tough he’s a practically indestructible force of nature; able to withstand physical punishment that would make Grigori Rasputin look like a wimp.
The tough guy angle is one Brolin plays in a number of films, including his latest Labor Day. He plays an escaped convict who hides out in the home of a depressed, widowed agoraphobic, played by Kate Winslet. Over the course of one long holiday weekend she learns of his dangerous past and before you can say the words Stockholm Syndrome has fallen for the ruggedly handsome stranger.
It’s the kind of role that Brolin has mastered; the multi-layered tough guy but according to him, he doesn’t seek out those roles.
He says he wracks his “brain like crazy trying to figure out which films I wanted to be in.”
Some of those films include No Country for Old Men and Jonah Hex.
In the Oscar nominated No Country he plays down-on-his-luck Llewelyn Moss, who stumbles across the site of a drug deal gone wrong. Bullet-ridden dead men litter the landscape along with several kilos of heroin and a suitcase stuffed with two million dollars in cash. When he makes off with the money his life and the lives of those around him are changed forever.
Jonah Hex didn’t earn any Oscar nods, but did get some Razzie attention in the form of nominations for Worst Screen Couple for Brolin and co-star Megan Fox. The story of a supernatural bounty hunter set on revenge against the man who killed his family is as disfigured as its main character’s face but Brolin brings his real-life swagger to the role and has fun with some of the tongue-in-what’s-left-of-his-cheek lines.
One tough guy role got away from him however. On-line speculation had it that he would be cast as the Caped Crusader in the upcoming Batman vs. Superman. Although he would have been perfect for the part he lost out to Ben Affleck. Contrary to his bruiser persona he was gracious in defeat. “I’m happy for Ben,” he said.
The eight-foot-tall, gruesomely ugly creation of Victor Frankenstein has been called many things. In the original Mary Shelley novel he is named The Ogre. In the credits of the Boris Karloff film he is referred to as The Monster. He’s also been called a fiend, the thing and the demon.
All those terms are apt for a creature born of dead body parts but a new movie adds a different name to the list—Adam. As in Adam Frankenstein.
I, Frankenstein, stars Aaron Eckhart as Adam, the prefab man. He’s now an immortal martial arts expert battling a war between rival clans in an ancient city. The character takes the name from the Shelley book. Sort of.
Shelley never gave the monster a name—people often mistakenly refer to him as Frankenstein—but in the novel the creature says to Victor, “I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel.”
Whatever you want to call him, Frankenstein’s Monster has always been a popular character in the movies.
The most famous film featuring the creature has to be Boris Karloff’s 1931 classic, but it wasn’t the first. Five silent films, one with the dramatic title Life Without Soul and another that featured the brute emerging from a cauldron of fiery chemicals, all played to packed houses.
From those dramatic beginnings dozens of movies followed.
Robert De Niro played the beast in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. On the set director Kenneth Branagh banned the word “monster,” insisting instead that everyone refer to the creature the same way he is billed in the credits, as “The Sharp Featured Man.”
Frankenstein: The College Years is basically an unlikely mix of Shelley’s story and Encino Man. Directed by Tom Ace Ventura: Pet Detective Shadyac, this 1991 comedy sees college student Mark (William Ragsdale) reanimate Dr. Frankenstein’s creature who then becomes a football star and a big man on campus known as Frank N. Stein (Vincent Hammond). “He blends right in,” says Mark of the six-foot-nine Frank, “he’s a regular invisible man.”
The movie The Bride, a 1985 remake of The Bride of Frankenstein starring Sting and Jennifer Beals, gave the fiend yet another name. He was dubbed Viktor but not in tribute to his creator Victor Frankenstein. In this retelling the good doctor is known as Baron Charles Frankenstein. The name Viktor was chosen in tribute to the film’s producer Victor Drai.
In your mind’s eye when you picture ex-Marine turned CIA analyst Jack Ryan, who do you see?
Is he a dark-haired, suave six-foot movie star with a hot temper and a racy Twitter account? Or maybe a world-weary fellow with a scar on his chin and a resemblance to Indiana Jones? Or how about the Red Sox fan formerly known as Bennifer?
Created by writer Tom Clancy, Jack Ryan is the lead character in nine novels and the star of five films. This weekend we’ll see him uncover a Russian plot to destroy the U.S. economy with a terrorist attack in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit.
Chris Pine, best known as Captain Kirk in the recently rebooted Star Trek series, is the newest member of the Ryanverse, and hopes to bring something new to the character.
“I can’t be Alec Baldwin,” he told Empire. “I can’t be Harrison Ford. I can only really do my own thing and stay true to the pillars of this character.”
Baldwin originated Ryan on screen in the 1990 high-tech thriller The Hunt for Red October.
The movie could have been the beginning of a James Bond-esque franchise for Baldwin, but he left the series after just one outing despite the film being one of the top grossing movies of the year. In a Huffington Post blog he says he was pushed aside for another actor “with much greater strength at the box office.”
Baldwin doesn’t name names, but Harrison Ford soon signed on, playing Ryan in Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger.
Author Clancy, who passed away in 2013, was not a fan of the Ford years. He thought the two movies dumbed down his original stories and thought Ford was too old to play the role. “Giving your book to Hollywood is like turning your daughter over to a pimp,” he said.
Next up was Ben Affleck, who took over in the 2002 prequel The Sum of All Fears.
“The day I received the offer to play Jack Ryan,” said Affleck, “I was filming a Pearl Harbor scene with Alec Baldwin. He was very sweet and said I should do it.”
The part’s originator has become the go-to guy with actors who sign up to play Ryan. When he was offered the part, Pine was shooting Guardians of the Galaxy with Baldwin. “He urged me to hold onto it,” said Pine, “and to attack it.”
Hollywood is full of hyphenates, the kind of people who introduce themselves as a model-actor-writer-waiter-personal-trainer-dog-walker.
Lately there is one Tinsel Town citizen, however, who has actually earned every word in his hyphenated title.
Tracy Letts is an actor-writer-producer-Pulitzer-Prize-winner who is going to have to get longer business cards if he gets any more successful. You may not recognize the name unless you pay attention to the end credits of Homeland (he plays Senator Andrew Lockhart on the popular show) or if you know who won the 2013 Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.
He’s a multi-talent with a shelf of awards, some heavyweight acting credits and a new movie screenplay on his resume.
His latest project, the script for August: Osage County, puts words into the mouths of some of the biggest stars in Hollywood. The film brings together the Weston sisters, Barbara (Julia Roberts), Karen (Juliette Lewis) and Ivy (Julianne Nicholson) with their pill-popping mommy-dearest Violet (Meryl Streep).
As a writer Letts says inspiration came from Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner and Jim Thompson, which might explain the dark vein that runs through his work.
How twisted are his plays? “Everybody in Tracy’s stories gets naked or dead,” says his mom, author Billie Letts.
Tracy jokingly says that his mother is “a liar” for saying that, pointing out that “not all of the people in my plays wind up naked or dead.”
Still there is no denying that his screenplay for Killer Joe, the 2011 Matthew McConaughey thriller, is written with what Roger Ebert called, “merciless black humor.” The story of a corrupt cop and a bad insurance claim earned critical praise even if the Women Film Critics Circle cited the film for its presentation of what they called “the worst female and male images” of the year.
According to Entertainment Weekly his script for Bug, starring Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon as a lonely woman and unhinged war veteran trapped in a bug infested Oklahoma motel room, contains an “enjoyably icky heart.”
Tracy Letts seems willing to take on any challenge to add to his hyphenate status. There’s just one thing you can’t ask him to do. “I don’t act in the stuff that I write,” he says. “I have no interest in doing that.”
Synopsis: From January to December 2013, hundreds of movies opened on our screens. We saw everything from American Hustle to Zero Charisma, from the ridiculous — 30 Nights of Paranormal Activity with the Devil Inside the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — to the sublime — 12 Years a Slave. The Reel Guys watched a lot of bad movies this year so you don’t have to and saw many great ones to recommend. But some of the good flicks slipped by without finding an audience. This week they revisit some movies you may have missed but should take a look at.
Richard: Mark, Pain and Gain seemed to me like it couldn’t lose. Starring Dwayne Johnson, who was recently named 2013’s biggest money-making star, Mark Wahlberg and directed by Michael “big bucks” Bay, it was the funny-but-true story about a trio of greedy dumb criminals who kidnap a rich guy. It plays like an episode of CSI: Miami performed by the Three Stooges and should have done boffo box office, but for some reason it didn’t. What did you like that slipped through the cracks?
Mark: I loved Pain and Gain, and if anyone told me one of the best movies of the year would be directed by schlockmeister Michael Bay, I would take it as a sign of the upcoming apocalypse. Another overlooked gem to me was Trance, Danny Boyle’s genre buster. Is it about an art heist? Mind control? Sexual obsession? Revenge? Best to ask James McAvoy and Rosario Dawson, both in fine form, and in the case of Dawson, I do mean — ahem — fine form.
RC: Also in fine form were the giant robots and sea monsters in Pacific Rim. I know they always say about Hollywood that “nobody knows anything,” that you never know what will be a hit, but I thought the combo of Guillermo Del Toro, colossal sea beasts with an appetite for destruction and humungous rock ‘em, sock ‘em robots was a winner. It’s a supersize geek freak out that transports you back in time to wherever you were when you were lucky enough to see your first Godzilla movie.
MB: Sorry, Richard, to me, actual rock-em, sock-em robots are more interesting, and are better actors. Another undiscovered gem for me was Side Effects, Steven Soderbergh’s Hitchcockian mindbender from early winter. Starting off as a condemnation of the pharmaceutical industry, it turns a lot of corners and becomes a thrilling cerebral murder mystery. And Jude Law, no longer acting with his looks, is magnificent.
RC: Warm Bodies was essentially one joke — the zombie as a metaphor for awkward teenage love — but it’s a pretty good one and well performed. Too bad more people didn’t see it. The movie doesn’t exactly make sense, particularly if you’re a zombie fan of either the Romero or Walking Dead schools, but no matter how fast and loose it plays with the established mythology of the undead it’s still a new twist on an old form.
MB: Warm Bodies reminded me of Ricky Gervais’ Ghost Town in mood and had the same limitations of premise. A foreign film I thought was brilliant was China’s A Touch Of Sin, which interwove four stories Pulp-Fiction style about the new economy in China and its victims, often ending in sad violent episodes. Brilliant Richard.
By Richard Crouse – In Focus Metro Canada
