The Miles Teller boxing film “Bleed for This,” like most sports movies, isn’t really about the sport. Sure there are TKOs and the smack of glove against skin, but really it’s about the indomitable human spirit with one of the greatest real life comebacks in sports history as a backdrop.
Teller plays Vincenzo Pazienza, a.k.a. Vinny Paz a.k.a. the Pazmanian Devil, a championship boxer in lightweight, light middleweight and super middleweight categories. At the beginning of the film he is a wild card, a talented pugilist, but an undisciplined one. The night before a big fight he hits the town, gambling. The next day Roger Mayweather (Peter ‘Kid Chocolate’ Quillin) pummels him in the ring, soundly thrashing the former champ.
Despite his manager insistence that he retire, Vinny lumbers on, working out with Kevin Rooney (Aaron Eckhart), Mike Tyson’s former trainer. Pumped up, he jumps two weight classes and becomes a champion in the light middleweight category before tragedy strikes.
Flush with cash after his win, he buys a sports car. Within hours of owning it he’s involved in an accident that leaves him with a broken neck. “How much time till I can fight again?” he asks his doctor. “I can’t say with certainty you’ll ever walk again,” comes the grim response. His doctor wants to fuse the bone, Vinny instead opts for a halo procedure that involves screwing a circular metal brace into his head for six months to stabilize the injury. During his recuperation Vin secretly works out, preparing himself for a return to the ring. Within thirteen months the halo is gone, and he’s on the comeback trail.
“Bleed For This” aims to be a bigger-than-life tale of resilience and perseverance over adversity but plays like a gritty television movie. Pazienza overcame great odds and proved a lot of people—including his doctors and trainers wrong—but he’s not a particularly likeable champ. Teller emphasizes the character’s never-say-die spirit, but instead of wining us over his cockiness comes off a caricature of chutzpah. Ditto the portrait of Pazienza’s hard-scrapple family. They fight, they argue and worship at a home altar so loaded with Catholic iconography it looks like a page out of the Italian Stereotypes 101 textbook. If the Order Sons of Italy in America were outraged by “The Sopranos” wait till they get a load of this bunch.
Writer-director Ben Younger is a muscular filmmaker, all macho posturing and turbo-charged momentum which may not do his characters any favours but works well when the movie is in the boxing ring.
The final fight scene hits hard with stylish flourishes, like dropping out all the sound safe for the smack of clubs against skin and a pep speech with flashbacks, but it is more compelling than anything that came before it.
As a retelling of one of the most unlikely comebacks in sports history “Bleed for This” succeeds in getting across its predictable ‘never-say-die’ lesson. It’s a shame Younger settle for a made-for-TV-movie sentiment instead of digging deeper to dins a subtext that would really knock the audience out.
On January 15, 2009 Sully Sullenberger was an airplane captain with forty-two years experience piloting a plane on a routine run from New York’s LaGuardia Airport to a stopover at Charlotte Douglas International Airport. The next day he was a worldwide hero, an instant celebrity.
Shortly after take-off his plane was disabled by a flock of Canadian Geese who flew into the engines, knocking out the plane’s navigating system. In just under four minutes Sullenberger assessed the situation and, realizing there was no time to turn back, made the decision to land the craft on the Hudson River. The risky landing was successful and all 155 passengers and crew survived with only minor injuries.
To this day the now-retired pilot says when he flies “other passengers often tell me, ‘I feel so much safer now that you’re on the airplane with us.’ I’m not quite sure why they do, but I’m just glad they do.”
The Miracle on the Hudson, as the New York press dubbed it, is now the subject of Sully, a biopic from director Clint Eastwood and star Tom Hanks.
The pilot says, “Watching the film, especially in the IMAX format makes you feel like you’re on that flight with us,” but doesn’t bring back the anxiety of the day for him.
“Enough time has passed,” he says, “and I’ve had enough time to process this and make it a part of me and not something that just happened to me. I don’t have quite the same emotions I had during that day, that flight, but the very first time I saw this film with my family it was a very emotional experience for all of us. The second time I watched the film I was able to take it in as more of a usual movie going experience and see some of the things I wasn’t able to see the first time.”
As for having Oscar winner Hanks portraying him Sullenberger says, “We talked in some detail about the script and the obligation he felt to get it right because after the film was completed I would be going back to living my life and would have to live with however he portrayed me on screen.”
Now that the movie is finished he laughs, “It is a weird experience to see someone else onscreen portraying you and speaking words you actually spoke.”
Sullenberger’s story doesn’t end with the landing. In the years since he has been named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential Heroes and Icons, written bestselling books and become a spokesman for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. It’s a whirlwind that changed his life forever.
“My family and I think of this story in two phases. There was the trauma of that flight itself and then the trauma of suddenly becoming a world recognized public figure. Once my name had been discovered by the press an onslaught, a tsunami of attention happened very quickly. Within a few months we had received 50,000 communications. Emails, letters, requests. The press was camped outside our house for ten days. It was just overwhelming. It very quickly required finding a new way of living this life as public figures. We had to become more complete versions of ourselves to be able to do that.”
“Life is easier in the air,” sighs First Officer Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart). Easy? Not when the plane you are piloting is subject to a bird strike that disables two of the engines. That’s the story told in “Sully,” Clint Eastwood’s real-life account of ‘Sully’ Sullenberger’s miraculous landing of a disabled plane on New York’s Hudson River.
Tom Hanks plays the title character, a pilot with 42 years experience. “It’s been my life,” he says of aviation, “my whole life.” January 15, 2009 started off as a routine day for the seasoned pilot. As the captain of US Airways Flight 1549 he left New York’s LaGuardia Airport for a stopover at Charlotte Douglas International Airport when his plane was disabled by a flock of birds who flew into the engines, knocking out the plane’s navigating system. In just under four minutes Sully assessed the situation and, realizing there was no time to turn back, made the decision to land the craft on the Hudson River. “I’ve delivered one million passengers over 40 years,” he says later, “but will be charged on 208 seconds.” The risky landing was successful and all 155 passengers and crew survived with only minor injuries. “It’s been a while since New York had news this good,” says one airline official, “particularly with an airplane in it.”
The film dramatizes the landing but spends most of its time in the aftermath, the resultant onslaught of publicity and some very difficult questions from a National Transport Safety Board investigative panel.
“Sully” is a slight but entertaining movie. Because we know how it ends Eastwood’s attempts to create tension by and large don’t work. Its you-are-there recreation of the landing is exciting when it places the viewer in the plummeting metal tube—the mantra “Brace for impact” will forever be branded on your brain—melodramatic when it hits the water. It’s the centerpiece of an otherwise movie talky movie.
The ditching of the plane may get your pulse racing but it is the personal story that will stay with you. As Sully Hanks is dignity personified. Questions gnaw at him in the days leading up to the inquiry, causing sleepless nights and mild friction with his wife Lorraine (Laura Linney) but he remains steadfast. It’s old school heroism and it looks good on Hanks.
As a function of the story, but also, I suspect, as a preference of the filmmaker, technology is downplayed throughout. When the NTSB uses computer simulations to attack Sully, Skiles, who has most of the good lines in the film, says, “They’re playing Pac-Man while we’re the ones flying the plane.” The point being made is that computers lack the human touch but it does feel a bit like Grandpa complaining that the new fangled television remote is too complicated.
“Sully” is a well-constructed, occasionally exciting old-fashioned story of heroism in the face of modern cynicism.
Broad vocabulary, grammar and syntax are the domain of humans, but science tells us millions of species communicate by using body language and intuitive calls. Chimps can be taught to sign simple phrases and elephants have individual sounds to signify danger and emotions, but complex storytelling is left to us humans.
Unless you’re at the movies. This year, theatres have been overrun by hordes of anthropomorphic animals. From Zootopia and Nine Lives to The Secret Lives of Pets and The Jungle Book, animals have been talking up a storm.
This weekend The Wild Life becomes the latest animated film to tell a story from the point of view of wildlife. A riff on Daniel Defoe’s classic tale of survival, Robinson Crusoe, the film’s narrator is a bright red parrot named Mak (David Howard).
In this version, Crusoe crash lands on an island where animals rule and must work with the chatty Mak, a tapir named Rosie and Kiki the kingfisher to save their home from an invasion by some savage felines.
Disney has the grandest tradition of talking animals — Mickey Mouse to The Little Mermaid’s Sebastian the Crab and Jiminy Cricket to name just a few — but they are not the only ones putting words into our pet’s mouths.
Flushed Away comes from Aardman, the animation company behind Wallace and Gromit.
The story of an upper class pet mouse flushed down the loo by a bullying rat features great animation, an all-star British voice cast and something that all kids love — toilet humour. It swirls along at quite a clip, effortlessly mixing literate verbal and visual jokes — we glimpse a cockroach reading Kafka’s Metamorphosis — with potty humour that’ll appeal to the kids.
G-Force’s talking crime fighting guinea pigs come courtesy of über-producer Jerry Bruckheimer. The voice cast includes not one, but two Oscar winners, which may be an indication that the recession has finally taken root in Hollywood.
When the best gig Penelope Cruz can get involves saying lines like “Oh, I have to save his fur again?” you know times are tight for A-listers.
Pixar’s Ratatouille is an unusual cross between America’s Next Top Chef and Willard. Remy (voiced by Patton Oswalt) is a sophisticated rodent with a highly developed sense of smell and a wicked sense of humour.
While his rat brothers and sisters are happy to simply survive by scavenging through the garbage, Remy aspires to culinary greatness. Ratatouille does something no other film has been able to — not that a lot of have tried — it makes rats cute, lovable even.
On the live action front, Zookeeper, or as any Kevin James movie could be called, “Fat Guy Falling Down… A Lot,” plays like Dr. Doolittle if Dr. Doolittle was a romantic comedy for kids. Luckily the animals come to the rescue. Luckily the monkey from The Hangover 2 has some of the film’s best lines. Adam Sandler provides the monkey voice, but also listen for the beastly vocal work of Cher, Nick Nolte, Don Rickles and Sylvester Stallone.
Last week as I fought traffic en route to a London Has Fallen screening, I tweeted from the back of a cab, “Out of my way people! I’m running late for a Gerard Butler movie!” It was a silly little joke, a comment to kill time as we idled in the morning rush hour.
The first response came in right away: “said no one, ever,” followed by a torrent of unexpected Butler hate.
One person called him a “bouncer actor,” whatever that means.
Another questioned his ability to effectively disguise his native Scottish accent and many people offered me their condolences.
Why the Butler bashing?
It’s true he is a frustrating movie star. He shares the usual leading man traits that have made Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio superstars.
He’s handsome, talented and built like an action star but he’s been done in time after time by poor choices.
Pitt makes Fight Club, Butler makes Law Abiding Citizen. Leo stars in The Departed, Gerard does Machine Gun Preacher. Years ago the website Gawker placed Butler on movie star probation, calling him a “professional bad decision maker” alongside notable career fritterers Cuba Gooding Jr. and John Travolta. A look at his IMDB page suggests they were on to something.
He’s a utility player, comfortable switching genres the way most of us change our socks. One minute he’s a romantic comedy star, the next he’s choking out bad guys on screen. He’s flirted with Shakespeare and provided voices for cartoons. He’s done sci-fi flicks, musicals and even a rendering of the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf.
It’s not like he hasn’t enjoyed some very big hits. In 300 he (and his meticulously crafted six-pack) played King Leonidas, a Spartan who led 300 soldiers against the might of the Persian army. It’s the film equivalent of a heavy metal concert — loud, brutal and completely uncompromising — and it made him an action hero.
People have a soft spot for Dear Frankie, his breakout film and the one that turned him into a heartthrob with serious dramatic chops. The four-hankie U.K. tear-jerker about a single mother who resorts to trickery to keep the memory of her late husband alive in her son’s mind put Butler on the world stage.
Other box office bonanzas include playing a charming mobster in the violent Guy Ritchie flick RocknRolla and voicing Viking Stoick the Vast in How to Train Your Dragon.
It’s the other stuff that seems to rub people the wrong way. As a movie reviewer I can attest there are few English language words more terrifying than “New Gerard Butler Romantic Comedy” and I think it is those films that turned my Twitter followers against him.
He’s a good actor but his track record in the rom-com department is particularly grim. Critics hate these movies, calling the handsome Scottish actor’s attempts at mixing love and comedy, “instantly grating,” and “embarrassingly limited.”
But I come to praise Butler, not to bury him. Let’s give him another chance.
I made it to the London Has Fallen screening and can tell you it’s a pretty good action movie. Perhaps even good enough to erase the memory of The Ugly Truth or Playing for Keeps from our collective memories.
Fans of 1980s action will recognize “London Has Fallen’s” set up. A veteran Secret Service agent (Gerard Butler) is about to hang up their holster but gets sucked in for one last, dangerous job. It’s a heady mix of “Lethal Weapon” and “Die Hard” where characters say things right out of the tough guy playbook like “Do me a favour… Stay alive,” and ethnic stereotypes never die.
After saving POTUS from a terrorist attack inside the White House in “Olympus Has Fallen,” Butler is back for a second go round as Mike Banning, secret service agent extraordinaire. He’s about to become a father and wants to leave his old life behind. In fact, he’s typing out a letter of resignation when he gets a call from the Oval Office. The British Prime Minister has died suddenly and President Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart) has to go to England for the state funeral.
With only twenty-four hours to plan the trip Banning is nervous about security but is assured that this will be “the most protected event on earth.” Of course the funeral is not protected enough or the movie would be called “London Has Not Fallen.” A massive terrorist attack kills several world leaders, hundreds of innocent bystanders and decimates most of the landmarks in the British capital. Turns out the man responsible for the attack, an arms dealer named Barkawi (Alon Aboutboul), has a personal grudge against Asher and doesn’t care how many people he has to kill to get his vengeance. Banning is a formidable one-man army—his Spidey senses are always tingling—but will he be able to keep the President safe and prevent the what’s left of London from collapsing into the Thames?
“London Has Fallen” is terror-porn of the highest order, but while half of London is covered in CGI ashes, there is an inherent lack of stakes because you know in your heart that nothing is going to happen to the President. He may be bloodied but by the time the end credits roll it is a guarantee he will be unbowed.
So, with no real tension, what’s left? Plenty of 80s inspired action, that’s what. Like a lost relic from John McClane’s heyday the movie presents a main character who could be a case study in ‘Hero or Psychopath’ 101. He causes carnage with a twinkle in his eye, torturing and killing people in the name of protecting the Prez. It’s all action, all the time, feeling like a throwback to a time when grim faced heroes took on impossible odds—“There’s nearly 100 terrorists in there,” Banning is told before entering a terror hive alone. “They should’ve brought more men,” he grunts.—spouted one liners and the bad guys were anyone with an exotic accent. It’s not particularly enlightened in its world outlook and dismisses the female members of the cast—all of Oscar winner Melissa Leo’s lines could be written on the head of a pin—but if you choose not to think about it much, it’s good, high-octane fun.
Just as dangerous as the bullets and bombs on display is the minefield of tough guy clichés Butler navigates. “I never thought you’d outlive me…” BOOM! “The only person you trust right now is me!” BANG! Like an endlessly looping GIF the banalities never stop. Butler delivers them with gusto, but don’t go to “London Has Fallen” looking for witty or original dialogue. Very little has been done to update the story from its 80s roots. Now the bad guys broadcast on the internet—“It’s on social media!” screams a near hysterical Deputy Chief Mason (Jackie Earle Haley)—but that’s about it for new ideas.
To sum it up: You’ve seen “London Has Fallen” before, but you’ve never seen it quite like this.
Two hundred years after Henry Frankenstein strung “a dozen used parts from eight different corpses” together and brought them to life with a bolt of electricity and the cry of, “Look! It’s moving. It’s alive. It’s alive…” the creature is back for a new adventure based on the graphic novel called “I, Frankenstein” by Kevin Grevioux.
This time around his green parlor and neck bolts are gone, replaced by a chin cleft Igor could hide in and scars lining his unusually fit body. He’s a tormented soul, or rather, it is his lack of a soul that torments him. “I care not for the world of men,” he says, “I go my own way.”
For hundreds of years instead of terrifying villagers Dr. Frankenstein’s creature, now dubbed Adam (Aaron Eckhart) has hidden himself in the most remote places where he thought no human, demon or Gargoyle could find him. But he was wrong.
It seems a legion of 666 fiends, led by a demon prince named Naberius (Bill Nighy) are desperate to find Adam so they can learn the secret of reanimating corpses. Naberius plans on inserting demon souls into dead bodies to create an unstoppable army and “unravel the mortal coil of life.”
On the other side are the Gargoyles, commanded by Leonore (Miranda Otto), an archangel determined to help Adam find his humanity and save the human race.
An unholy mix of religion, martial arts (Adam has some slick Bruce Lee moves) and Mary Shelley, “I, Frankenstein” should have been called “Aye, yi, yi, Frankenstein.”
There is some cool gothic Gargoyle imagery on display and a variety of posh English accents to class to the joint, but it seems only Nighy realizes that this would have played better as a campy comedy.
In amongst the over earing narration, dropped storylines—for instance, a bride for Adam is mentioned and then never mentioned again—and shots of Adam peering around corners, every now and again someone will say, “I think your boss is a demon prince.”
Mel Brooks would have known how to stage that line. For all its atmosphere—i.e.: darkly shot scenes—“I, Frankenstein” would have been a lot more fun if it embraced its silly side just as Adam must embrace his humanity. With humanity comes a sense of humor, right? Not in this case. The movie plays like a satire of bad horror movies that forgot it was a satire.
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.
