“Self/less,” a new sci fi thriller starring Ben Kingsley and Ryan Reynolds, asks a simple question. What could geniuses like Edison, Einstein or Steve Jobs have done with another fifty years?
The story begins with New York real estate mogul Damian (Kingsley) living out his last days. He’s been enormously successful but not even his great wealth can stop the cancer that is eating him from inside. Or can it? A shadowy figure named Dr. Albright (Matthew Goode) sees him as a candidate for an expensive and exclusive process known as shedding—changing an old worn out body for a new one. The new bodies are grown in a lab and should provide decades more life for the intelligence and personality of the patients. On other words, one day you look like Ben Kingsley and after a short nap you wake up looking like Ryan Reynolds.
Along with the new body comes a new identity and a vow of secrecy. You have your old personality but a new life.
What could possibly go wrong?
There are some side effects. Hallucinations, which, it turns out are echoes from the new body’s former life. (MILD SPOILER) The carcasses aren’t test tube babies but bodies harvested from living donors. Damian is having flashbacks to a former life and his investigation leads to a large conspiracy that threatens not only his new life but the lives of everyone he knows.
“Self/less” is the kind of movie where the main character says things like, “I know you don’t have any reason to… but you have to trust me right now.” It’s the kind of standard thriller scripting that prevents “Self/less” from being a truly thought provoking story about identity and the ethics of playing God. Instead it’s a by-the-numbers psychological thriller that never gets more than skin deep.
Reynolds doesn’t disappear into the role. He’s not Damien, he’s not his host body, he’s Reynolds. Charming, yes, good looking yes, but never convincing as a man who feels trapped inside another person’s body. Because the center of the film doesn’t hold the rest of the drama flops around, unable to take hold.
“Self/less” is a handsomely shot movie—director Tarsem Singh also made the extraordinary looking “The Cell”—but suffers from a generic approach.
Unless the movie is called “Planet of the Apes” its faint praise to say the monkey is the best thing about a picture. Such is the case with “Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb,” the third outing in the popular Ben Stiller kid’s franchise. Crystal the Monkey as Dexter a Capuchin monkey, gets the most laughs and is the only member of the top-of-the-line cast who doesn’t feel like they’re only in it for the big holiday movie paycheque.
On the third visit to the New York Natural History Museum we discover the Tablet of Ahkmenrah, the magical Egyptian plaque that gives its life force to the museum’s statues, allowing them to come to life after the sun goes down, is losing its power. Soon the tablet will die and so will animated exhibits Theodore Roosevelt (Robin Williams in one of his last movies), miniature men Jedediah and Octavius (Owen Wilson and Steve Coogan), and a Neanderthal named Laa (Ben Stiller). To save them night guard Larry Daley (Ben Stiller again) travels to the British Museum to find the secret to restoring the artifact’s power.
“Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb” beats the original premise into submission, blowing up the idea of a secret nightlife at the museum into the best example this year of how franchise filmmaking can go horribly wrong. Like the dimming tablet that slows down the wax exhibits, this movie sucks the life out of once interesting characters, placing them in a plot that is essentially an excuse to showcase more characters (like Dan Stevens as Sir Lancelot and a surprising and rather charming cameo from a very big star) and bigger special effects than in parts one and two.
There’s plenty of kid friendly slapstick and computer generated effects but a short action scene inside M. C. Escher’s topsy turvy staircase painting shows more imagination than the rest of the movie’s big set pieces put together.
It all feels old hat and despite the nostalgic rush of seeing the late Mickey Rooney and Robin Williams on the big screen, it’s less exciting to see Sir Ben Kingsley as Ahkmenrah’s father delivering bad double entendres like, “I am a pharaoh. Kiss my staff.” Andrea Martin has a fun blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo and the above mentioned cameo will raise a laugh, but as I left the theatre I couldn’t help but think my feelings about the film were best summed up by a line Octavius speaks just after a monkey urinates on him. “We must never speak of what happened here.”
Not many children’s movies would feature someone voicing the fear that the title characters would “kidnap me and slurp up my intestines like noodles,” but then again, “The Boxtrolls” is not like most other kid flicks.
Based on Alan Snow’s illustrated novel “Here Be Monsters!,” and from the folks who brought us the dark visions of “Coraline” and “ParaNorman,” “The Boxtrolls” is the most original film for young’uns to come out this year.
According to town father Lord Portley-Rind (voice of Jared Harris) of the Victorian-age town of Cheesebridge, the Boxtrolls are evil beasts that steal children, eat their faces and live underground among mountains of bones and rivers of blood. They’re so hideous there are even popular songs written about their dastardly deeds. To rid the community of these vile creatures Rind brings in a social-climbing exterminator named Archibald Snatcher (Ben Kingsley), who guarantees the complete annihilation of the trolls in return for a coveted White Hat and a place at the town’s exclusive cheese table.
The Boxtrolls, of course, aren’t evil. They are good-natured, green-skinned trolls who use cardboard boxes as camouflage, speak gibberish and get into mischief, like smelly Minions. Sure, they eat live bugs and live underground in a Rube Goldberg-esque steampunk world of machines made from parts salvaged from the garbage but they also love music and have raised a human child, Eggs (Isaac Hempstead Wright), as one of their own. If the Boxtrolls are to survive, Eggs will have to go head-to-head with Snatcher and his henchmen Mr. Pickles (Richard Ayoade), Mr. Trout (Nick Frost) and Mr. Gristle (Tracy Morgan).
Combining the atmosphere of Hammer horror films with slapstick humour, a deranged story, a “be who you are” message and morbidly marvelous attention to every stop-motion detail, “The Boxtrolls” is a trick and a treat.
Unabashedly weird and wonderful, the movie may be too scary for the little ones, but any child who has spent time with the “Goosebumps” series or “Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events” shouldn’t be kept up at night by either the story or the visuals.
Instead they’ll likely be drawn in by the beautiful set decoration, the ingenious character design—the baddies all have the worst teeth since Austin Powers—and fun voice work. As the lactose intolerant Snatcher Kingsley has the most fun. It’s a flamboyant performance, inventive and eccentric, that will entertain kids and their parents.
“The Boxtrolls” is Pixar on drugs, a wild ride that isn’t afraid to mix a scare or two in with the kid stuff.
Outside the Elgin Theatre premier for his new film Learning to Drive, Sir Ben Kingsley caused quite a stir. He signed autographs, posed for pictures with fans, one of which gushed effusively after he walked away. “He’s my favorite,” she told your reporter excitedly.
When I tell Sir Ben about the enthusiastic fan he smiles broadly.
“If it means that she’s heard the story and it touched her, then I’m delighted,” he says. “The important thing for me is to tell the story. I’m sure I am a storyteller. I’m sure that is the right place for my DNA to be.
“Something happened to me and it stayed with me forever. I was playing Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company and I was walking in open field just outside Stratford Upon Avon. A lovely young woman was on the opposite side of the field and seemed to be walking towards me, so I decided to tack to my right to avoid her feeling that I was intruding on her space. She tacked to her left. In other words, she mirrored me. Then I went the other way and she mirrored me. She was determined to meet me in the middle of this field. Then face-to-face, she said, ‘I saw Hamlet last night. How did you know about me?’ Something [I did] must have gone right in there [he points to his heart], straight through the sternum and I said, ‘I know.’ That’s the connection.
“It never left me. If it means that through storytelling something has been shifted, healed, touched in her, great. Good.”
In the TIFF film Learning to Drive he reunites with his Elegy co-star Patricia Clarkson. She plays Wendy, a divorcee who hires Darwan (Kingsley) to teach her how to drive so she can travel to upstate New York to visit her daughter. As she learns to navigate Manhattan’s mean streets, the pair form a bond, teaching one another about life and love.
“I think in a really beautifully fashioned play or screenplay you have a feeling that the gods look down and say, ‘I’m going to bring you two together,’” says Kingsley. “I love that idea in mythology that the gods look down and send somebody to somebody. It is only through very unfortunate, heartbreaking circumstances that Wendy finds herself in a taxi. Heartbroken. I am driving a heartbroken woman. And I loved in the way, as in all great stories, the little coincidences are the gods guiding and bringing people together for some purpose. Here it is not for a great romance, it is to heal.”
Darwan is the latest in a long list of characters, like Mohandas Gandhi, Itzhak Stern in Schindler’s List and Sexy Beasts’ Don Logan that have surprised Kingsley.
“I don’t know where they are,” Kingsley says about his characters, “if they’re inside me waiting to come out or whether they are outside of me. Are they hunting me or am I hunting them? I don’t know. I love to be surprised by a script and I was very pleased and delighted by the opportunity to play what Patricia Clarkson’s character coins as a ‘good man.’”
“Ender’s Game” is jam packed with boffo special effects that bring its epic battle scenes to life, but the film isn’t really about that. It’s about empathy in a world that is in dire need of compassion and as such its best effect is in the clear blue eyes of its teenaged star Asa Butterfield.
The young actor—best known as the lead in “Hugo”—is physically slight to be playing a leader of men, but his piercing eyes suggest he has the strength and determination to be all he can be.
Based on a bestselling 1985 novel by Orson Scott Card, the story begins fifty years after Earth was almost annihilated by alien invaders called the Formics. Only the efforts of a brave fighter pilot named Mazer Rackham saved the planet, and in the subsequent years the army has been training recruits to take his place.
The program, lead by the hard-as-vanadium Colonel Graff (Harrison Ford), focuses on videogame playing kids with lightening fast reactions and cognitive skills. Ender Wiggins (Butterfield) is a superstar among the best and the brightest, a young man who thinks tactically but has a complicated relationship with authority.
Through a series of ever escalating simulations the ruthless Graff trains Ender and his team—Hailee Steinfeld, Aramis Knight, Suraj Partha and Conor Carroll—to become the last line of defense against the Formics and in doing so prevent all future wars.
There are obvious bloodlines connecting “Harry Potter” and “The Hunger Games” to “Ender’s Game”—warrior kids with special powers—but a crucial element is missing. For as much time as they spend setting up Ender’s backstory, the cold father and violent brother that feed his problem with authority, by the time we get to the huge battle scenes (with villains we never meet) there doesn’t seem to be that much at stake.
We’re told the future of the human race depends on Ender’s actions, but the film doesn’t have the urgency to pull off its bombastic finale.
What it does have, however, is a complicated and timely view of the importance of honor, the value of state sanctioned violence and its desensitizing effect on Ender. That complexity is reflected in Butterfield’s eyes.
“Ender’s Game” has an old school feel to it, valuing the ideas of tolerance and diversity over the flash of the effects, but doesn’t quite find the balance necessary to truly succeed as a sci fi epic, although it’s almost worth the price of admission to see Harrison Ford float, Sandra Bullock style, through a space shuttle.
In it’s core cast the movie presents a diverse vision of the future, interesting given the troubling anti-gay politics of its author Orson Scott Card—he suggests gay rights is a “collective delusion” and gay marriage shouldn’t be legal—that more fits the Gene Roddenberry’s utopian cultural image of the future than you would expect from someone who also wrote an essay titled The Hypocrites of Homosexuality.
So, for me, “Ender’s Game” is a judge the art and not the artist situation. The movie works well. There’s a bit too much repetition in the early scenes—we get the backstory of the original Formic assault three times in the first twenty minutes—but perhaps the film’s positive messages of tolerance, compassion and understanding will drown out the less open-minded views of Card’s other work.
The Slevin of the title is an unfortunate guy played by Josh Hartnett who happens to find himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and winds up involved with some very bad men. With the help of a curious neighbor, a world-weary hit man and two warring crime bosses he tries to extricate himself from this messy situation.
This is a hard-boiled crime drama in the vein of The Usual Suspects and Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, which means that it is bloody, darkly funny and will keep you guessing. The film is a bit of a roller coaster ride of mistaken identities and convoluted plotlines, but near the end when the labyrinthine story starts to fall into place, revealing surprising connections and unlikely alliances the movie pays off.
The script sometimes veers off in Tarantino land with too many clever pop culture references to comic books and old movies, and over-written unusually articulate gangsters, but the actors here rise above the script. Ben Kingsley and Morgan Freeman both play mafia kingpins with gusto, chewing the scenery so much I feared that Kingsley might actually bite through the screen. Bruce Willis makes the best of his usual cool-guy persona, this time as a hit man, and Josh Hartnett, an actor who seems to have been teetering on the edge of stardom for a while now, gives the most likeable and best performance of his career so far.
Lucky Number Slevin isn’t destined to become a classic genre picture in the way that The Usual Suspects of Memento have, but it is a cool movie with really fun performances.
Oscar winning director Roman Polanski’s vision for Oliver Twist is just as dark as you would expect it to be. The pink parasols and stylized costumes from the musical version have been replaced with rotten teeth, muddy streets and starving kids. Polanski roots the classic story in reality—Victorian London was a rugged place to be poor in—and in doing so presents an interesting backdrop for the little boy who asked for more.
Topping the list of good performances here is Sir Ben Kingsley who, as Fagin, the criminal who schools Oliver and the other urchins in the way of grifting and pick pocketing. Kingsley reinvents the character, eliminating the anti-Semitic caricature that marred other versions of the story—most notably David Lean’s 1948 version that was banned in many places for its outrageous portrayal of the character. Kingsley’s take on Fagin is more pathetic than hateful and it could be argued that by offering these boys a life of crime he was, at least, offering them some kind of life other than starving to death on the streets. Look for Kingsley to be nominated for Best Supporting actor come Oscar time.
Fans of kid’s entertainment may be a little take aback at the latest role for Josh Peck. The former star of the Nickelodeon comedy for kids Drake & Josh has shed the goofiness of the TV series, but not all of his teen angst for his big screen starring role.
Set in New York in 1994 The Wackness focuses on an unpopular and troubled high school student named Luke Shapiro (Peck). To make ends meet Luke sells pot to a ragtag bunch of regular clients, including Dr. Jeffrey Squires (Ben Kingsley), a psychiatrist who trades therapy sessions for weed. At their meetings the pair realize that despite the great gap in their ages their lives are running a parallel course. Their relationship becomes strained when Dr. Squires’ marriage runs into trouble and Luke starts dating the doctor’s step-daughter (Juno’s Olivia Thirlby).
The Wackness is a coming of age story, the kind of thing we have seen many times before, but despite some familiar situations the movie is much more satisfying than many others in the genre.
Using a great deal of personality in his direction Jonathan Levine creates a sense of time and place. From the sultry summer heat of Union Square as Luke makes his rounds to the cool reserve of the doctor’s Upper West Side office to Luke’s crack-pot customers he skillfully incorporates New York City as a character in the piece. As a result The Wackness presents a universal story—without the sugary sweet tone of many coming-of-age stories—that could only have happened in this very specific place.
Best of all though are the performances. Lately Ben Kingsley has turned into one of those British actors who will accept almost any role offered to him. Like Michael Caine, another actor who never met a role he wouldn’t take, Kingsley is a masterful actor who often wastes his gifts on projects that are beneath him. For every Sexy Beast on his resume there’s a BloodRayne or Thunderbirds movie. Any more roles like The Love Guru and old Sir Ben just might be asked to renounce his knighthood.
Happily in The Wackness he essays a role equal to his abilty. His Dr. Squires is a complicated character, one part randy old hippie, one part wise health care professional and one part over-the-top neurotic. The beauty of the performance is that Kingsley pushes each element of Squires’ personality to the limit but keeps him completely believable and by the end, even sympathetic.
Josh Peck, in his first serious young adult role, does something remarkable; he doesn’t let Kingsley steal the show. In a low key performance he radiates charisma as a guy who, as his kind-of girlfriend Liz says, only sees the “wackness” (the downside) in everything and not the “dopeness.” His take on Luke is believable and empathetic and should connect with teen and young adult audiences.
The Wackness covers ground we’ve seen before—the heartbreak of first love—but does so in a surprisingly fresh and interesting way.
For someone who became famous playing Gandhi, one of the 20th century’s great pacifists, Ben Kingsley has certainly played his share of villains.
His latest character, The Mandarin in Iron Man 3, is one of the great comic book baddies. He’s Iron Man’s oldest foe, a scientific genius and an unbeatable martial artist, who draws his power from 10 finger rings he created using alien technology.
How bad is this guy? This bad: “Some people call me a terrorist. I consider myself a teacher,” he says. “Lesson number one: Heroes — there is no such thing.”
The filmmakers say Mandarin is partially based on Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now and another character Kingsley made famous.
In Sexy Beast, Kingsley played Don Logan, a vile English gangster who intimidates an old colleague into coming out of retirement for one last job. How bad is this guy? This bad: He starts a brawl on an airplane because he was asked to stub out a cigarette.
“I do know that Shane Black, our writer-director, loved Sexy Beast,” said Kingsley, “and was very influenced in his choice of me playing The Mandarin.”
Logan isn’t the only villain Kingsley has brought to life on the big screen, however.
In BloodRayne, the Oscar winner plays king of the vampires Kagan, a vicious character who must quell a rebellion led by his daughter. When asked why he would appear in a movie that ranked in Rotten Tomatoes’ list of the 100 worst reviewed films of the 2000s, he said, “I have always wanted to play a vampire, with the teeth and the long black cape. Let’s say that my motives were somewhat immature for doing it.”
As The Hood in Thunderbirds, Kingsley uses his mental powers — telekinesis and hypnosis — to take over the International Rescue headquarters. He took the role in the big screen treatment of the 1960s British children’s marionette show at the urging of his kids. “My son has a Thunderbirds alarm clock. That’s how big a fan he is of the TV series.”
He’s also played villains in War Inc, Prince of Persia and Oliver Twist and says, “as an actor, I have to push the word ‘villain’ right to the back of my mind and bring forward their distorted sense of righteousness and destiny. Because I think classic villains like The Mandarin have to have a profound sense of right.”
