SYNOPSIS: Set ten years after Rise of the Planet of the Apes saw Caesar (Andy Serkis) break free from a San Fransisco primate sanctuary and start an ape uprising, the middle-aged chimpanzee is the leader of a large population of genetically evolved apes. Most of humankind was wiped out by a pandemic of ALZ-113—a “simian flu” virus that speeds up the rebuilding of brain cells in apes but is deadly to humans—but when a small band of humans scout a water source near the ape camp a monkey wrench is thrown into the fragile peace between homo sapiens and simians is threatened. “Apes do not want war,” says Caesar, but a battle—gorilla warfare?—for control is inevitable.
STAR RATINGS:
Richard: 4 ½ Stars
Mark: 4 Stars
Richard: Mark, to riff off of the old Superman tagline, “You will believe an ape can speak.” The special effects are amazing, but beyond the pixel manipulation that brings Caesar and company to vivid life, there are remarkable performances that, for lack of a better phrase, humanize the apes. These aren’t the erudite apes of the Roddy McDowell era, with vocabularies that would impress even Conrad Black, but simian characters that behave somewhere midway between pure instinct and higher intelligence. I went bananas for the apes. You?
Mark: The apes may have limited vocabularies but they’re a lot more interesting than the humans in the picture. This is a very sophisticated blockbuster that deals with our queasy relationship to the animal world and also acts as a metaphor for our need for civilized diplomacy. The post-apocalyptic world of a verdant but decaying San Francisco is visually plausible, and there are plot points worthy of a Greek tragedy. But enough about that. The apes are rad, man!
RC: It sure is a different kind of blockbuster. It has all the elements of the usual summer fare—it’s a sequel, things blow up and, if that wasn’t enough, also features an ape —but it takes risks. About half of it is done in ape sign language (with subtitles) and it’s not chock-a-block with action. Instead it takes time building characters and motivations so when the wild ape-on-human action begins it feels earned and it feels epic.
MB: Ape-on-human? What about the fabulous ape-on-ape action? Havent seen this kind of gritty action since the Bumfight videos of the Nineties. When these apes go at each other, it’s feral and primitive. WWF, take note! And the ape sign language forces them to act with their eyes, which reminded me of the power of old silent films. I didn’t need a bunch of clunky dialogue to know what these gorillas were thinking.
RC: I agree. I think this is the kind of performance that could convince the Academy to consider “motion capture” acting for inclusion in the Oscar acting categories. Beyond the performances though, is a thought-provoking movie about race, gun usage and xenophobia. Its masked in allegory and, well, a story about talking apes, but it touches on those hot button topics in an interesting way.
MB: What is missing from the movie is James Franco, who brought some lightness and offhand charm to the last Apes movie. The apes are so strong in these films that the movie needs some star charisma to balance it out. Nevertheless, we’ve come a long way away from Bedtime for Bonzo.
When the Reel Guys aren’t at the movies, one of their favourite things to do is talk about going to the movies. This week Richard and Mark have a look at talking apes, a vengeful Scarlett Johansson, and a singer with a papier-mâché head and a talking raccoon. So throw some popcorn on the BBQ, crank up the air conditioning and enjoy the Reel Guys’ most anticipated films of the summer season.
Richard: Mark, I was a huge Planet of the Apes fan as a kid. Loved the rubber masks, the twisty endings and the “YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP!” scene still blows my mind. Saw them over and over, and even enjoyed the bad ones like Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. Today, as an adult, I have a full-sized Cornelius bust with faux chimpanzee hair in my office. So, given my obsession with simian cinema, my inner 14-year-old goes a bit ape every time I see the Dawn of the Planet of the Apes trailer. What’s got you excited this summer?
Mark: I’m a Planet of the Apes fan, too, Richard. The idea of animals acting like humans is a welcome change from my life in show business, where humans act like animals. I’m really looking forward to Lucy, starring Scarlett Johansson in a Luc Besson revenge/action flick. This is Scarlett’s moment, and this is going to be the movie to make her a megastar. The trailer made me spill my popcorn!
RC: Johansson is doing interesting work these days, splitting her time between rock ’em, sock ’em movies like Captain America: The Winter Soldier and smaller movies like Chef and Under the Skin. Michael Fassbender has a similar career arc. We last saw him in X-Men: Days of Future Past. Next up he’s in Frank, a strange indie based on the life of Frank Sidebottom, a real-life English musician who wore a giant papier-mâché head complete with painted-on eyes, ruby red lips and slicked-back hair.
I love Fassbender for still taking chances on movies like this when he could easily cash big Hollywood paycheques time after time.
MB: Sounds like one strange biopic, Richard! A more commercial variant I’m looking forward to is Get On Up, the James Brown story starring Chadwick Boseman. The Godfather of Soul never wore a papier-mâché head, but he was big on ermine capes and tantrums, so this should be a lot of fun. And what a soundtrack it will be!
For life lessons and laughs, there’s And So It Goes, a mature rom-com starring Michael Douglas and Diane Keaton. Bring your CARP card for discounts on soft-chew treats from the concession stand.
RC: I don’t have a CARP card …. yet. I do like soft chew candies, however. As far as movies go, I’m curious about Guardians of the Galaxy. So many of the summer’s blockbusters have been oh-so-serious affairs that I think this one promises some good laughs and action.
MB: The cast suggests it might be more than your typical sci-fi adventure. But it’s Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz in Sex Tape that gets me hot. Big laughs, lots of action, at least of the horizontal variety.
SYNOPSIS: Picking up four years after the invasion of Chicago seen in the last Transformers film, “Dark of the Moon,” the action begins when unemployed robotic engineer Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) and daughter Tessa (Nicola Peltz) uncover deactivated Autobot, Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) hidden under a pile of junk. Their discovery puts them under the microscope of CIA agent Harold Attinger (Kelsey Grammer) and tech tycoon Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci). The two are hatching a plan, fueled by equal parts paranoia and genius, to build man made second generation Transformers to seek out and destroy the Autobots. Complicating matters is Lockdown, a ruthless Transformer bounty hunter with no allegiance to Autobots or Decepticons.
STAR RATINGS:
Richard: 3 Stars
Mark: 2 Stars
Richard: Mark, everybody loves spectacle. The Romans had the Coliseum and we have the Transformers movies. Like the gladiatorial shows of yore, in Michael Bay’s movies it doesn’t matter who lives or dies— the films don’t care about their human characters and neither do we—all that matters is the spectacle of the whole thing and at almost frenetic three hours Age of Extinction certainly delivers on that score. For many, getting value per minute for their movie dollar will be enough, but do you, like the old Roman emperors, give this a thumbs up or down?
Mark: Richard, I was glued to my seat throughout! You see, some idiot had spilled epoxy on the seat before I sat down and it took the full two and three quarter hours to wriggle out of my jeans. I have never been able to sit through a Transformers movie, but epoxy aside, at least this one had a coherent story, some decent acting thanks to Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci and Kelsey Grammer, and some exciting chase sequences. I just can’t wrap my head around watching a bunch of Swiss Army knives on steroids bashing each other. But then again, I’m not a twelve-year-old boy.
RC: No one can accuse Bay of skimping on… well anything. “Age of Extinction” is a wide ranging action orgy that plays off of Bush era Homeland Security paranoia and also explains why dinosaurs became extinct. It comments on the ethics of unarmed warfare and blows up most of Hong Kong. Bay doesn’t do anything by half measures but I found myself wishing the movie was about half as long as it is with half the bombast. It’s stylish—“Why run when you can run in slow motion,” Bay seems to be asking—not unlike a car commercial, but is excessive on almost every level. I don’t expect or want “My Dinner with Optimus Prime,” but in this case I think less would have been more.
MB: My feelings here are complicated. I used to take it for granted that this kind of direction was evidence of a hack sensibility, which assumes that quantity makes viewers forget quality—a real cynic’s position. But watching this installment, I’m no longer so sure. I think Bay really believes that these grand excesses are heroic, even Shakespearean—its running time is equal to Hamlet. The movie is cheesy and schlocky, for sure, but the one possible grace note is Bay’s commitment to the drive of the film. Too long, for sure, but at least this movie moves.
RC: Shakespeare never wrote a play about a giant alien robot playing bucking bronco with a humungous dinobot. That’s all Bay.
MB: Or had a billion dollar grossing movie. That’s all Bay St.
“We were happy to do whatever was asked of us whenever it was asked of us,” says Transformers: Age of Extinction star Jack Reynor.
The Colorado-born, Irish-raised actor proved he was game for anything when he was given just twenty minutes to prepare for a wild scene that brought him face-to-face with real explosions.
“It is an incredibly intimidating experience in many ways,” he said, “but at the end of the day you have to trust the people around you, that they know what they’re doing that they’re prepared and that you’re safe. We had a great stunt team who worked on this film with us. Those guys really put us at ease.”
Sharing the explosive scene with Reynor were his co-stars Nicola Peltz and Mark Wahlberg.
“They worked so hard to make this huge explosion,” says Peltz, best known for her role as Bradley Martin on Bates Motel. “I think it took a week but we didn’t know about it. We were kind of confused when we got on set and saw ten cameras. (Director) Michael (Bay) told us a few minutes before, ‘You’re going to do this huge stunt. It’s not going to be stunt doubles, it’s going to be you guys and you have to run from here to here in 4.6 seconds.’
“There’s not much acting when there are real explosions behind you,” she says. “You just have to run.”
The experience of sprinting away from live blasts wasn’t exactly what Peltz expected when she signed on for the role in the fourth Transformers film.
“I thought there was going to be more green screen than there actually was but Michael wants everything to be as real as possible so the car chases and the explosions are all real.”
“You can really tell the difference,” says Reynor. “You can tell when a movie is really heavy on CG. It doesn’t really look real. As far as we’ve come with effects and all the advancements we’ve made—some of them are really great—at the end of the day to do it practically and do it for real always looks best on screen. That’s why Michael tries to make it that way. On top of that it makes everything more tangible for us; a lot easier to relate to and react off. That’s why I think these movies have been as incredibly successful as they have because the audience really does feel it.”
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.
SYNOPSIS: Based on the Broadway hit of the same name, Jersey Boys begins in 1951 Belleville, New Jersey and follows childhood friends Frankie Valli (John Lloyd Young who won a Tony for his performance of Valli on stage), Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza) and Nick Massi (Michael Lomenda) 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.
STAR RATINGS:
Richard: 2 Stars
Mark: 3 Stars
Richard: Mark, I thought director Clint Eastwood set up the story of the band well enough. From their hard scrapple beginnings to the height of their success, it’s a rags-to-riches story and when it focuses on the four band members it works. Unfortunately it takes a cast of characters to tell the tale and Eastwood seems content to allow his supporting actors to go off-the-charts theatrical. By the time the end credits roll it’s clear that the movie is a caricature of a real life story. Nothing feels completely genuine, as if the theatricality of the stage version bled into the film.
Mark: Richard, I think I know when the film goes off the rails. When the band breaks up two thirds of the way through, everything that follows feels forced, cheesy, and the emotions play a bit phony. But I still enjoyed the movie. I saw the theatrical version twice and I’m a big fan of the group. The music makes a bigger impact in the stage version, but some of the characters play better in the film. None of the acting is stellar, but it’s always fun to watch Christopher Walken do his “good mobster” schtick, and Erich Bergen as Bob Gaudio, the brains of the group, really stood out for me.
RC: The songs are undeniably catchy and well performed by a cast, three quarters of which come from the various incarnations of the stage show. They are earworms that sound authentic, by and large thanks to Young who perfectly mimics Valli’s soaring multi-octave falsetto voice. The bulk of the movie, unfortunately, doesn’t soar as high as Young’s voice. The Broadway show is basically a rock concert with a story. The big screen treatment requires more.
MB: I thought it did-in places. The feuding between the members of the group worked better in the movie, but the opening scenes of Italian boys in da hood has been done many times before and went on way too long. Note that it takes one full hour before they sing their first hit, Sherry. The movie filled in a lot of texture about the Jersey mob and life on the road that wasn’t in the play, but you know, Richard, it’s about a rock group in the Sixties, so I don’t even have to like it to like it.
RC: I liked the style, the songs but I wanted more from the characters. The songs will stay in your head, the characters won’t.
MB: And after Valli got his name upfront of the group, shouldn’t it technically have been “Frankie Valli and the Three Seasons?”
“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.”
SYNOPSIS: The 21 Jump Street high school undercover cops Schmidt and Jenko (Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum) are back, but this time they’re narco cops. That is until they botch an investigation into drug lord Ghost’s (Peter Stormare) operation. Their failure gets them demoted back to the 22 Jump Street (they moved across the road) program. Jump Street’s Captain Dickson (Ice Cube) sends them undercover, as unlikely brothers Brad and Doug McQuaid, to college to arrest the supplier of a drug named WHYPHY (WiFi). The bumbling, but self-confident duo infiltrates the college, but campus life—frat house parties, football and girls—threaten to blow apart their partnership.
STAR RATINGS:
Richard: 3 ½ Stars
Mark: 3 Stars
Richard: Mark, Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum are producers on the new Jump Street film, which, I guess, explains all the jokes about how much everything cost. At one point Hill actually says, “It’s way more expensive for no reason at all.” I don’t know how much the movie cost to make, but the self-aware jokes did make me laugh even though it is essentially a remake of the first film, with a few more Laurel and Hardy slapstick gags and amped up explosions. What was your take?
Mark: Richard, I liked this installment way more than the previous outing. I loved all the self-referential gags, including the brilliant end-credits that hilariously make fun of the inevitable sequels that will follow. I credit the directors, Phil Lord and Chris Miller, for the knowing pop culture sophistication they brought to the film. They directed the first one too, but they’ve grown more confident since their Lego Movie hit, which also tweaked the audience’s expectations in a similar way.
RC: The end credit sequence, which maps out the next sequels from number 3 to installment 43—they go to Beauty School and Magic School among other places of higher learning— is probably the funniest part of the movie. The stuff that comes before is amiable, relying on the Mutt and Jeff chemistry of Hill and Tatum for laughs. It’s boisterous and aims to please, but best of all are the self-referential jokes. By clowning around about the difficulty in making the sequel better than the original they’re winking at the audience, acknowledging that this is basically a spoof of Hollywood sequels. It’s subversive, meta and kind of brilliant.
MB: Yep. Because I can see explosions and pratfalls in any “action comedy”; it’s the subversive stuff that makes this movie stand apart. The intergender fight sequence between Jonah Hill and Jillian Bell (who is incredible throughout the film) is as subversive a take on sexual politics and “rape culture” that you will ever find. It’s these kinds of scenes that kept me laughing through the picture. The black stoner twins, played expertly by The Lucas Bros, were a masterpiece of writing and comic timing.
RC: I agree, but ill-timed jokes about Maya Angelou and Tracy Morgan were sore thumbs for me, but that’s more co-incidence, I guess than bad taste.
MB: I don’t think those jokes were deliberate, but they sure broke the spell for me. But then Ice Cube’s comic rants got me back.
SYNOPSIS: Set ten years after Rise of the Planet of the Apes saw Caesar (Andy Serkis) break free from a San Fransisco primate sanctuary and start an ape uprising, the middle-aged chimpanzee is the leader of a large population of genetically evolved apes. Most of humankind was wiped out by a pandemic of ALZ-113—a “simian flu” virus that speeds up the rebuilding of brain cells in apes but is deadly to humans—but when a small band of humans scout a water source near the ape camp a monkey wrench is thrown into the fragile peace between homo sapiens and simians is threatened. “Apes do not want war,” says Caesar, but a battle—gorilla warfare?—for control is inevitable.
