Despite citing everything from “Apocalypse Now” and “Blade Runner” to “District 9” and “Paper Moon” as influences for his new sci fi epic “The Creator,” director Gareth Edwards has made a strikingly original film that doesn’t feel derivative.
Set in 2065, a decade long war between humans and artificial intelligence continues unabated.
“Ten years ago today, the artificial intelligence, created to protect us, detonated a nuclear warhead in Los Angeles. For as long as AI is a threat, we will never stop hunting them. This is a fight for our very existence.”
When the architect of AI, The Creator, builds an unstoppable weapon that could control all technology, recently widowed special forces agent Joshua (John David Washington) and his team are brought in to find and retrieve the weapon.
“Our mission is to find the weapon designated Alpha O,” says Colonel Howell (Allison Janney). “You are authorized to kill on sight.”
Behind enemy lines on occupied AI territory, they discover the deadly weapon is actually an AI in the form of a small child named Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles).
“We are close to winning the war,” says General Williams. “Execute her, or we go extinct.”
There is a lot happening in “The Creator.” It is an ambitious allegory for oppressed minorities and American imperialism, but above all it is soulful sci fi.
Visually, director Edwards looks to “District 9” and “Apocalypse Now” for inspiration to create a unique looking slice of speculative fiction. Shot in Thailand, the film takes advantage of that country’s other-worldly, old-world locations, juxtaposed against the high-tech AI robots and sleek, futuristic aircraft and weapons. The mix of old and new, of nature and technology, make for a grand backdrop to a story that thrives on intimate moments.
Big action scenes do light up the screen, but Edwards appears to value emotional fireworks more than spectacle.
At its heart, “The Creator” is a love story. Joshua, still hurting from the disappearance of his wife (Gemma Chan), is driven by heartache. The discovery of Alphie, played with heartrending innocence by Voyles, shifts the story to a father-daughter dynamic, à la “Paper Moon,” but maintains the film’s emotional core as the young robot looks at humanity filtered through AI eyes.
“The Creator” builds a dystopian world that feels unique, and it is certainly nice to have a new sci fi tale not based on existing IP, even if it feels like a pastiche. But for all the admirable ambition and emotion, Edwards occasionally runs off in all directions all at once, leaving nuance and subtlety behind.
Like Rodney Dangerfield, Sue Buttons (Alison Janney) gets no respect. In the new dark comedy “Breaking News in Yuba County,” now available on VOD, she discovers that with respect and unwanted attention comer hand in hand.
A help-desk operator, Sue is verbally abused by random callers, her half-sister Nancy (Mila Kunis) doesn’t remember her birthday and even shopkeepers talk down to her. “You’re important. You’re strong. You matter,” she says into the mirror, despite all the evidence to the contrary. When her husband Karl (Matthew Modine), who has been laundering money for crime boss Mina (Awkwafina), goes missing after a tryst with his mistress (on Sue’s birthday no less), people begin to take notice of Sue. Elevated to local celebrity status, Sue weaves a web of lies to keep policewoman (Regina Hall), deadbeat brother-in-law (Jimmi Simpson) and reporter Nancy from discovering what really happened to Karl.
“Breaking News in Yuba County” is part suburban satire, part character study. As a satire it aims to peel back the soft underbelly of big box stores, small town attitudes and middle-age angst.
As a character study, it follows Sue as she blossoms from wallflower into the anxious center of attention.
In a well-oiled machine, these two elements would sit comfortably side-by-side but here the satire doesn’t cut and the characters don’t compel.
The performances, particularly from Janney, tap every ounce of interest from the script, but the underwritten story from Amanda Idoko doesn’t dig deep enough for the satire. Mean spirited instead of insightful, it attempts the kind of juggling act Joel and Ethan Coen perform in films like “Fargo,” where crime, character and satire blend to unveil a more universal truth. Here, Sue’s search for acknowledgement and fame is as uninspired as her oft-repeated mantra, “You’re important. You’re strong. You matter.”
“Bombshell,” the new film starring Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman and a cast of thousands, is set at a time when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The T-Rex in the room in this story is Roger Ailes (John Lithgow), the chairman and CEO of Fox News. Much of the action is set in 2016 but the attitudes on display are positively prehistoric.
Ailes died on May 18, 2017, aged 77, but when we first meet him, he reigns supreme. He helped elected presidents, walked the halls of power with confidence and, most importantly for the purposes of this story, created the conservative cable news juggernaut Fox News. Specializing in covering stories that, according to producer Jess Carr (Kate McKinnon), “will scare your grandmother and piss off your grandfather,” Fox became Ailes’s mouthpiece to counter “liberal” CNN.
Ailes altered how Americans consumed the news, making stars out of Greta Van Susteren, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and the two women at the heart of “Bombshell’s” story, Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman) and Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron). Kelly is one of the network’s biggest stars, an outspoken lawyer engaged in a war of words with then candidate Donald Trump. The feud was good for ratings, so despite his pro-Trump stance, Ailes allowed it to continue. Not as good for the ratings was Carlson, a former prime time anchor demoted to midafternoons following disagreements with her boss.
Eventually fired, Carlson levelled accusations of sexual misconduct against her former boss, alleging she had been fired for rebuffing Ailes’ advances. When the expected support from other women inside Fox who had been auditioned by Ailes with the words, “stand up and give me a twirl,” or “lift your skirt up higher so I can see your legs,” Carlson fears her allegations will fall on deaf ears.
On the insider Kelly weighs her options. Despite a “Support Roger” campaign from colleague Jeanine Pirro (Alanna Ubach) she bides her time before opening up about her own experiences.
The title “Bombshells” is a double entendre, referring to Ailes’ objectification of his on-air talent and to the accusations leveled against him, which sent ripples throughout the male dominated corporate world of news.
“Bombshell” echoes the story recently told in the mini-series “The Loudest Voice.” Both tell of a toxic workplace where one man ruled by intimidation, sexual harassment and micromanagement. “We have two, three and four donut days,” says Ailes’ executive assistant (Holland Taylor). “These aren’t donuts he eats. They’re donuts he throws.” His, “if you want to play with the big boys you have to lay with the big boys,” credo is dramatized in his interactions with Kayla Pospisil, a composite of several Fox employees, played by Margot Robbie. It was the days before #MeToo and the film does a good job of showing the apprehension some of the abused women feel about revealing their lurid treatment by Ailes.
At the film’s helm is Theron, with the aid of an incredible make up job, disappears into the role of Megyn. She pierces the icy demeanor of Kelly’s on-air persona to reveal a heroine torn between loyalty to a man she knows has done terrible things and doing the right thing. It’s tremendous work that humanizes a character often portrayed in the real-life press as a divisive figure.
“Bombshell” is a torn-from-the-headlines story about the people behind the headlines that serves as a reminder of the importance of the #MeToo movement in shining a light on the kind of inappropriate behavior that placed women in peril in the workplace. Good performances, aided by makeup and prosthetics bring the story to vivid life.
“I, Tonya” explores the seedy underbelly of a sport you didn’t think had a seedy underbelly. A darkly humorous look at the defining moment of figure skater Tonya Harding’s career, it’s a tale of death threats, broken blades and attempted hobbling.
Margot Robbie is Harding, an elite athlete who sums up her career with, “I was loved for a minute. Then I was hated. Then I was a punch line.” As a young child all she wanted to do was skate. A rink rat from age four, she began winning figure skating awards at a time when her friends were still learning cursive. Her embittered mother LaVona Golden (Allison Janney), the kind of person who stubs out her cigarette out in her mashed potatoes, is a punishing presence, pushing her relentlessly to be the best. “You’re not here to make friends,” she screeches when young Tonya pauses to say hello to a fellow skater. “That girl is your enemy.”
With the help of trainer Diane Rawlinson (Julianne Nicholson) Harding rises through the ranks, developing an aggressive and athletic style that sees her out skate most of her competitors to become the first skater to complete a triple axel combination with the double toe loop. Trouble is, her homemade costumes, Trashy Tonya nickname and hair trigger temper are not accepted by the skating establishment. “You’re not the image we want to portray,” she’s told. “You’re representing our country and we want a wholesome American family.”
To even the playing field husband Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan) hatches a plan to unnerve Tonya’s biggest threat on the ice—Nancy Kerrigan (Caitlin Carver). What starts off as psychological warfare against a competitor snowballs into “The Incident,” a scandalous affair vaults Harding’s name into the headlines. On January 6, 1994, just six weeks before the Lillehammer Olympics, unbeknownst to Harding, a thug, hired by Gillooly’s friend and co-conspirator Shawn Eckardt (Paul Walter Hauser), broke Kerrigan’s knee as she walked through a corridor at Cobo Arena immediately after a practice session. “The Incident” made front page news and eventually saw Harding ousted from the sport she loved.
Director Craig Gillespie keeps the tone light and lively but presents Harding in a light never before seen. Framing her as an abused woman, first by her mother, then Gillooly and finally, devastatingly, by the press and the public—“You’re all my abusers,” she says directly to camera.—creates sympathy for a woman who has been widely vilified and mocked.
Robbie dons blue nail polish, perms her hair, chants her “It wasn’t my fault” mantra and hits a career high as the self-described redneck skater who had a shot at the big time. Bold and brassy, it’s a fourth wall breaking performance that could have slid into caricature but doesn’t. It’s a warts and all portrayal that doesn’t try and pull on your heart-strings or pander to easy theatrics. In Robbie’s hands Harding is still rough around the edges—“Nancy gets hit one time,” she complains, “and it’s life altering event.”—but “I, Tonya” looks beyond the Trashy Tonya image so often portrayed in the press to transform the punch line into a person.
In a movie full of showy roles Janney shines brightly. As the chain-smoking LaVona she’s a foulmouthed force of nature that belittles her daughter at every turn. “She skates better when she’s enraged,” she hacks. When its own style occasionally bogs the movie down Janney shows up like a bad penny to keep things interesting.
“I, Tonya” is “based on irony free, often contradictory interviews” with the main players in Harding’s life. As a result it’s messy, but this is a messy story about a woman who paid a heavy price for daring to be herself. Not conforming cost her everything but you get a sense, by the end of the film, it’s a price she was willing to pay.
The first time most of us noticed Emily Blunt she was “’on-the-edge of sickness thin.” To play Emily Chalton, the prickly first assistant to the editor in The Devil Wears Prada, Blunt dropped pounds from her already slight frame. “It wasn’t like doughnuts were snatched out of my hand,” laughs the 5’ 7½’’ actress, but she was encouraged to slim down. So much so she would occasionally cry from hunger during the shoot. Luckily, though rake thin, she still had the energy to steal the movie from her more seasoned co-stars, Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci.
Although the character fell directly into the love-to-hate-her category, audiences found Blunt irresistible. Her mix of vulnerability and fork-tongued charm—crowned by crystal clear blue eyes and a face anchored with a cleft chin that would make Kirk Douglas envious—earned the title Best Female Scene-Stealer from Entertainment Weekly and nominations for everything from a Teen Choice Award to a Golden Globe.
This weekend she plays a much different character in the much-anticipated thriller The Girl on the Train. Based on the Paula Hawkins bestseller—11 million copies sold and counting—it’s a dark cinematic journey into a missing person’s case. The thirty-three year old actress says playing an alcoholic divorcée who witnesses a crime from a train window, “the most challenging thing I’ve ever done.”
Early reviews are strong. Variety raved she “excels as the broken-down heroine.” Those kind of kudos are an echo of her much-admired, though lesser seen work, in the UK.
After dabbling in drama at age 12 to help conquer a stutter she jumped to the small screen with praised performances in British television period pieces. It was, however, only when she left the lace-bonnets behind and took on a role in the critically-acclaimed My Summer of Love that she really made a splash. The story of a teenage infatuation between Mona (Nathalie Press) and the manipulative and cynical Tamsin (Blunt) earned both Press and Blunt equal shares in an Evening Standard British Film Award for Most Promising Newcomer.
Since then we’ve seen her as an oversexed young women opposite Tom Hanks in Charlie Wilson’s War, warbling Stephen Sondheim’s rich Into the Woods score, riding a polar bear in The Huntsman: Winter’s War and dressed as Princess Diana in the quirky rom com Five-Year Engagement.
She’s done action in both Sicario and Edge of Tomorrow (later renamed Live. Die. Repeat. for home release). Big budget blockbusters don’t usually make room for female characters unless they are sidekicks or girlfriends. In Edge of Tomorrow Blunt avoids being objectified and is as strong, if not stronger than co-star Tom Cruise.
In Sicario she’s part of an elite task force stemming the flow of drugs between Mexico and the US. A multifarious mix of vulnerability, stone cold confidence and outrage, she delivered the most interesting female action star since Mad Max: Fury Road’s Imperator Furiosa.
Next up her diverse career is the lead in Mary Poppins Returns. She says she’s nervous because the flying nanny is “such an important character in people’s childhood,” but has been given the thumbs up by the original Mary, Julie Andrews. “It was lovely to get her stamp of approval. That took the edge off it, for sure.”
In recent years we’ve seen Emily Blunt warbling Stephen Sondheim’s rich “Into the Woods” score, riding a polar bear in “The Huntsman: Winter’s War” and dressed as Princess Diana in the quirky rom com “Five-Year Engagement.” She’s done big budget action, sci fi, period dramas and now she adds Hitchcockian thriller to her list of conquered genres.
In the much-anticipated thriller “The Girl on the Train” she is Rachel a woman whose life has taken a downward dive since her divorce from Tom (Justin Theroux). Alcoholic, unemployed and despondent, she obsesses about Tom, Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), his new girlfriend—and former mistress—and their new baby.
To pass the time on her extended Lost Weekend she drinks vodka and rides a commuter train from the suburbs into Manhattan, even though she lost her high paying PR jobs ages before. Sitting in the third car from the front affords her the perfect view of her favourite house. It’s the home of Megan and Scott Hipwell (Haley Bennett and Luke Evans), a good looking couple with a seemingly perfect life to match their optimistic last name. “She’s everything I want to be,” says Rachel of Megan.
One afternoon as Rachel looks out the train window at the Hipwells she is enraged what she sees. A blur of booze later, she wakes up the next day, hungover and foggy, covered in bruises, to discover Megan has gone missing. Brain beating, blocking memories of the night before, she tries to piece together the events of the night before. Enter Mr. Hitchcock.
Based on the Paula Hawkins bestseller—11 million copies sold and counting—“The Girl on the Train” is not so much a psychological drama as much as it is a boozological one. Rachel is hammered for much of the first half of the film, making her an extremely unreliable narrator. What’s true and what’s not? That would involve giving away plot details that are best left unspoiled, but suffice to say that while there are ups and downs, they are more red herrings and misremembered clues filtered through a haze of booze. There are no “Gone Girl” flourishes here, just straightforward thriller elements banged together to point to an inevitable conclusion.
“Girl on the Train” has some elegant moments, and aspires to be an art house thriller/morality tale—no action, lots of internal dialogue—but to properly tell the story of infidelity and murder it should have embraced its down-and-dirty summertime beach reading origins.
Rising above the languid pacing and uneventful storyline is Blunt whose gut-wrenching, vanity-free performance carries the movie through its slow patches. She’s a raw nerve and if the movie had followed her lead and been just a bit more bleary eyed and blotchy, it may have been a more effective thriller.
From director Tim Burton comes “Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children,” another story of outsiders trying to find place in the world where they belong. Or in this case a place in time.
Teen years are for making friends and having fun but for Jake Portman (Asa Butterfield) they are a hardship. He’s the weird kid in class, friendless except for his grandfather Abraham (Terence Stamp) who keeps the boy entertained with wild stories about a life spent travelling the world and the Home for Peculiar Children where he was raised. He grew up side-by-side with a boy made of bees, a teacher who could turn into a bird, and a balloon girl, lighter than air who had to wear lead shoes so as not to float away.
When his Abe is attacked Jake arrives in time to catch his last, strange words. “I know you think I’m crazy but the bird will explain everything,” he says before urging the youngster to venture off to find out who, what, he really is. “I should have told you years ago. I thought I could protect you.”
Thus begins Jake’s adventure, a journey that leads him to a small island where Miss Alma LeFay Perigrine (Eva Green) a.k.a. The Bird Lady, attends to her brood of peculiar child. She has created a time loop, reset every day, to keep her peculiar safe and protect them from growing old. Every day is September 3, 1943 all day. An attack by Hollows (Samuel L. Jackson and others), evil creatures who steal the eyeballs of peculiar children, upsets Perigrine’s orderly time loop and gives Jake a chance to learn why he was sent to the island.
The first hour of “Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children” is pure Tim Burton. He creates a fanciful world—imagine quirkier “X-Men”—with all his trademarks—mid-century kitsch, topiary sculptures, weird creatures and characters straight out of the outer regions of the imagination—and a mythology all its own. World building is a fantasy director’s strongest asset, and Burton paints a pretty picture, it’s just too bad he gets bogged down in the story in the second half.
The mushy second half erases the charm of the first sixty minutes as fanciful dreaminess and unique stop motion effects give way to CGI overload. The film’s long climax seems to go on forever—as though the audience is in one of Miss. Perigrine’s endless time loops—in an orgy of digital trickery that betrays the feel of the piece. An army of skeletons is a cool homage to Ray Harryhausen and setting its macabre sequence to weird amusement park dance music is a nice Burton touch, but it pales by comparison to the smaller, more intimate touches that give the movie much of its personality.
“Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children” has some beautiful images—like Emma Bloom (Ella Purnell), tethered to Jake like a balloon as he walks and she floats through an amusement park—but like many of Burton’s recent films the story feels like an afterthought.
One writer called the director of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetle Juice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands and this weekend’s Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children, “the most widely embraced loner in contemporary cinema.”
“I always try to at least spend time, as much as I can everyday, staring out into space; staring out a window,” the director says. “I find that sometimes you get the most ideas and the most feelings when you’re not involved in things you have to do everyday; especially these days when technology is such that you can be reached any time. I try and avoid that.”
Unsurprisingly as a filmmaker the characters he champions tend to echo his sensibility. From warped Mad Hatter in his Alice in Wonderland to the grieving child in Frankenweenie who reanimated a dog’s corpse, Burton’s heroes are often misfits and outsiders.
From his debut, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Burton has showcased people on the fringes of society. “You don’t wanna get mixed up with a guy like me,” says man-child Pee-Wee (Paul Reubens), “I’m a loner. A rebel.” Loosely based Vittorio De Sica’s classic film The Bicycle Thief, Burton’s story sees Pee-Wee on a mission to retrieve his stolen fire engine-red customized 1940s Schwinn. David Letterman was a fan, describing the anti-social character as having, “the external structure of a bratty little precocious kid, but you know it’s being controlled by the incubus, the manifestation of evil itself.”
In his next film Burton breathed life into Betelgeuse‘s rancid lungs. In the haunted-house comedy Beetlejuice Michael Keaton plays a “bio-exorcist” with crazy hair, giant teeth and an attitude, hired by two ghosts to scare away the insufferable new owners of their old house.
“I think Beetlejuice shows the complete positive side of being misperceived and being categorized as something different,” Burton says. “He can do whatever he wants! He’s horrible and everybody knows it, so he’s a complete fantasy of all of that.”
Burton’s two greatest misfits, his most intrepid folks on the outside looking in, are the off-kilter Eds—Wood and Scissorhands.
Edward Scissorhands is the strange-but-sweet story of a man with scissors for hands. The first collaboration of Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, the movie is a funny, romantic and moving fantasy was inspired by a sketch Burton created as a teenager. “One look at that drawing was all I needed to understand what Edward was about,” says Depp. “I felt very tortured as a teenager,” says Burton. “That’s where Edward Scissorhands came from. I was probably clinically depressed and didn’t know it.”
Ed Wood, played by Depp in the film of the same name, is the story of one of Hollywood’s great outcasts. Wood wrote, produced and directed low-budget anti-classics like Plan 9 from Outer Space and Glen or Glenda. Burton says he was a fan of Wood’s films and after reading some of the director’s letters was touched by how Wood, “wrote about his films as if he was making Citizen Kane, you know, whereas other people perceived them as, like, the worst movies ever.”
Burton links his best-known creations, labelling them as “semi-antisocial, [having] difficulty communicating or relating, slightly out of touch,” and adds, “I feel very close to those characters. I really do. I feel like they are mutated children.”
The last time Susan Sarandon went on a cinematic road trip she was teamed with Geena Davis in a film that reinvented the buddy picture and earned praise from critics who called it a “neo-feminist road movie.”
This time out the Sarandon shares the front seat with Melissa McCarthy. Where “Thelma & Louise” learned about loyalty and sisterhood, Tammy and Pearl only pick up tips about drinking and driving, how to rob restaurants and how to destroy a jet ski.
Tammy (McCarthy) is down on her luck. She hit a deer with her car—“Oh man,” she says, “not another one.”—got fired from Topper Jack’s, and discovered her husband (Nat Faxon) is having an affair with the neighbor (Toni Collette). And it’s not even dinnertime.
Like so many before her, Tammy decides to hit the road to clear her head. Trouble is, she doesn’t have a car or any money. Luckily Grandma Pearl (Sarandon) has both and is keen on taking a trip. “You’re not getting the car unless I go,” she says. “At this point you’re the best chance I have to get out of this house.”
The pair head off for Niagara Falls (going the wrong way naturally), stopping along the way just long enough to cause trouble as Pearl picks up a man in a bar (Gary Cole) before hiding out with Pearl’s cousin Lenore (Kathy Bates) and her girlfriend Suzanne (Sandra Oh). After a blow out with grandma at Lenore’s July fourth party Tammy finally has a close, hard look at her life.
Road movies are episodic by nature. Their stories move from place to place, from character to character, all bound by a theme. Unfortunately “Tammy” simply moves slowly from scene to scene, content to rely on McCarthy’s comedic appeal at the sacrifice of anything more than pratfalls and awkward humor.
In other words “Tammy” earns a laugh or two when McCarthy falls down, less so when she is standing upright, which is most of the movie.
McCarthy is a charming performer, but it’s beginning to feel like she doesn’t do anything than play the obnoxious loser with a heart of gold buried beneath a thick shell of one liners and non sequiturs. What worked so well in “Bridesmaids” now feels been-there-done-that.
She isn’t aided by the supporting cast, because despite the cumulative comedy cred of actors like Allison Janney, Dan Aykroyd and Toni Collette are all saddled with thankless roles that give them very little to do. Kathy Bates is more of a live wire, but shame on director Ben Falcone (who is also McCarthy’s husband and the film’s co-writer) for not giving her costar Sandra Oh more to do. She is essentially set dressing, a flesh prop with a nice wardrobe.
By the end of the credits “Tammy” doesn’t feel like a comedy—although there are several giggles sprinkled throughout—as much as it does a waste of talent. Sarandon isn’t a gifted comedian but McCarthy is, but neither is working to their strengths.
