For the most The Expendables movies have been met part with critical disdain. The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane christened the first film, “breathtakingly sleazy in its lack of imagination,” while reviewer James Kendrick said the second installment, was “a better concept than it is a movie.”
Both films star a who’s who of 1980s actions movies—Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger and more—and have exterminated the competition, collecting an average of $289.9 million at the worldwide box office.
The new movie, inventively titled The Expendables 3, adds vintage action stars Wesley Snipes, Antonio Banderas, Mel Gibson and Harrison Ford to the mix and doubtless will add big bucks to the franchise’s overall gross, whether the critics embrace it or not.
The Expendables movies appear to be bulletproof to critical missiles but they aren’t the first films to be lambasted by reviewers and then clean up at the box office.
Meet the Spartans, a parody of sword and sandal epics from the creators of Scary Movie, currently sits at a 2% Tomatometer rating at Rotten Tomatoes, but that didn’t stop it from taking the top spot at the box office, narrowly edging out Stallone’s Rambo reboot, on its 2008 opening weekend. In the end it made $84,646,831 worldwide despite being called “one of the most painfully bad comedies I’ve ever had to endure,” by Garth Franklin of Dark Horizons.
Finally, Adam Sandler is a fan favorite, but finds little love from the critics. Jack and Jill, a 2011 comedy that saw him play twin brother and sister, earned a whopping $149,673,788 worldwide, but was dubbed “relentlessly witless” by the Daily Star while New Zealand critic Liam Maguren wrote, “Burn this. This cannot be seen. By anyone.”
The Guardians of the Galaxy, who made their first appearance in print in 1969, bear very little resemblance to the team of superheroes who will grace the big screen this weekend.
Conspiculous by his absence in the original book is Rocket Raccoon, the heroic character voiced by Bradley Cooper in the film. The feisty raccoon appeared years later, created by writer Bill Mantlo and illustrator Keith Giffen, who named the masked creature in tribute to the Beatles’ tune Rocky Raccoon.
They confirmed the Beatle’s influence in 1982 with a story that paraphrased John and Paul’s lyrics for the title. Called Now Somewhere In the Black Holes of Sirius Major There Lived a Young Boy Named Rocket Raccoon, the book saw the Hulk and Rocket Raccoon stop a villain from stealing Gideon’s Bible.
Rocket is latest raccoon, but not the only, to become a mammalian movie star.
Recently Liam Neeson starred in the animated movie The Nut Job, playing the imaginatively named Raccoon, the patriarch of a park, who might not have the best interests of the other animals top of mind.
The sixty-two year old Irish actor says he had never seen a raccoon until he was in his thirties, shooting an episode of Miami Vice in Florida. “Seeing this thing use his little paws and actually lifting a lid of a garbage can, peering in,” he says, “was quite sinister because it almost had a human quality to it, quite sneaky. I just had never seen a raccoon in my life before and the impression stayed with me.”
Other animated raccoons have worked steadily. Meeko, the raccoon from Disney’s Pocahontas and Pocahontas ll: Journey to a New World cartoon also makes appearances in Mickey’s Magical Christmas: Snowed in at the House of Mouse and in the Pocahontas video game. Then there’s RJ from Over the Hedge, a lovable raccoon voiced by Bruce Willis. “The rascally charm Bruce Willis brought to Moonlighting makes RJ a lovable rogue, or at least a likable one,” said director Karey Kirkpatrick.
Real-life raccoons are also getting work—in films like Rascal and The Details—but according to director Steve Carr they can present some problems. Tough guy actor Michael Rappaport voiced Joey, the consigliere raccoon, in Dr. Dolittle 2. The film featured over-250 four-legged cast members—including wolves, giraffes, bears, possums, raccoons, dogs, and owls—so Carr says, “A huge percentage of our work was waiting for the animals to do what they’re trained to do. And the patience that was needed well, it felt at times as if it were Herculean.”
1. Controversial Twerking! In April no one knew what “twerking” was. Unfortunately now we all do.
2. Amanda Bynes threw a bong out the window of her 36th floor apartment. It was “just a vase,” she said.
3. After calling Bruce Willis “greedy and lazy” Sylvester Stallone charged $395 per autograph at NY Comic-Con
4. Tom Cruise said Katie Holmes filed divorced because of Scientology
6. Michael Douglas admitted he didn’t get that he got throat cancer after engaging in oral sex.
7. Kat Von D not so cleverly named her new lipstick “Celebutard.” Sephora pulled the plug amid complaints from Down Syndrome Uprising, Family Member, Inclusion BC and All About Developmental Disabilities.
8. Ke$ha says she drank her urine and, “It tasted kind of like candy.”
9. Banksy stall sells art works worth up to $30,000 for $60 each in New York’s Central Park.
10. Justin Bieber’s pet Capuchin monkey, Mally, was confiscated at a German airport after the singer tried to smuggle it into the country.
Top TV moments
1. Two words: Tentacle porn. – Anthony Bourdain’s Tokyo Parts Unknown episode.
2. Zombies falling through the ceiling of a department store in The Walking Dead
3. “I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really… I was alive.” – Walt (Bryan Cranston) on the Breaking Bad finale
4. Orphan Black Clones!
5. Cooking lessons from Hannibal Lector on Hannibal.
6. The bisected cow on Under the Dome.
7. Nick and Jess’ first kiss on The New Girl. So passionate, Jess says the kiss made her see “through space and time for a minute.”
8. Orange is the New Black’s duct-tape sandals.
9. The “Red Wedding” massacre on Games Of Thrones. “My King has married and I owe my new Queen a wedding gift.” ― Lord Walder (David Bradley)
10. The car crash death of Downton Abbey’s Matthew in the final minute of the period drama’s 3rd season.
Top General Entertainment Stories
1. Lou Reed Dead at 71
2. James Gandolfini Dead at 51
3. Angelina Jolie announced double mastectomy
4. Paula Deen gets fired for using the N word
5. Kanye West declared himself the “number one rock star on the planet” in a BBC interview.
6. The last movie ever rented at a Blockbuster? This is the End.
7. Sinead O’Connor accused Miley Cyrus of “behaving like a prostitute and calling it feminism.”
8. Born! The Royal Baby, Prince George Alexander Louis of Cambridge.
9. Cory Monteith R.I.P.
10. Star Wars: Episode VII release date announced. The Force will return to theatres on December 18, 2015.
Top Online Moments
1. The prank video showing the baffled and terrified reactions of customers in a NYC coffee shop reacting to a woman with telekinesis tearing up the place.
2. Grumpy Cat vs Tommy Lee Jones meme. A side-by-side comparison of Jones at the Golden Globes and Grumpy Cat reveals that they might be long lost relatives.
3. Wisest tweet of the year: Always remember! Many of the people on the Internet telling you what’s what are not old enough to rent a car. – @KenJennings
4. M.I.A.’s Psychedelic Dance Party at the YouTube Music Awards
5. Raven-Symone came out on Twitter after the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn The Defense of Marriage Act. “I can finally get married! Yay government! So proud of you.”
6. Andrew Huang’s video of his rap song without using the letter “E” and it’s about NOT using the letter “E”!
7. Swedish Chef Ramsay meme. “Why did the bork bork? Because you borked the bork!”
8. “I want Drake to murder my vagina.” – Amanda Bynes on Twitter
9. Best web series: The Booth at the End starring Xander Berkelely as a mysterious man who grants wishes… for a price.
10. Homeless Army Veteran Turns Life Around in Amazing Time Lapse Video
I saw Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” on its opening day in Toronto. I sat through it once, transfixed and while everyone else stayed glued to their seats for the credits, discussing the movie and picking up their jaws from the floor, I rushed out and bought another ticket for the next screening and sat through it once more. Not sure how many times I’ve seen it since then, but I was reminded of that first screening when I looked at “Pulp Fiction: The Complete Story of Quentin Tarantino’s Masterpiece,” Jason Bailey’s book on the making of the film.
From amazon.ca: ”
When Pulp Fiction was released in theaters in 1994, it was immediately hailed as a masterpiece. The New York Times called it a “triumphant, cleverly disorienting journey,” and thirty-one-year-old Quentin Tarantino, with just three feature films to his name, became a sensation: the next great American director.
“Nearly twenty years later, those who proclaimed Pulp Fiction an instant classic have been proven irrefutably right. In Pulp Fiction: The Complete Story of Quentin Tarantino’s Masterpiece, film expert Jason Bailey explores why Pulp Fiction is such a brilliant and influential film. He discusses how the movie was revolutionary in its use of dialogue (“You can get a steak here, daddy-o,” “Correct-amundo”), time structure, and cinematography—and how it completely transformed the industry and artistry of independent cinema. He examines Tarantino’s influences, illuminates the film’s pop culture references, and describes its phenomenal legacy. Unforgettable characters like Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson), Vincent Vega (John Travolta), Butch Coolidge (Bruce Willis), and Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) are scrutinized from all-new angles, and memorable scenes—Christopher Walken’s gold watch monologue, Vince’s explanation of French cuisine—are analyzed and celebrated.
“Much like the contents of Marcellus Wallace’s briefcase, Pulp Fiction is mysterious and spectacular. This book explains why. Illustrated throughout with original art inspired by the film, with sidebars and special features on everything from casting close calls to deleted scenes, this is the most comprehensive, in-depth book on Pulp Fiction ever published.”
Playing Odin, the one-eyed king of Asgard and father to the main character in Thor: The Dark World, was a part time job for Oscar winner Anthony Hopkins.
“I was doing another movie at the same time, Red 2 with Bruce Willis,” he says. “So I didn’t know where I was. Sometimes, while I was waiting for the pick up I’d wonder what I was doing that morning. Today I’m with Bruce until 4 o’clock in the afternoon and then go do a little bit of Thor.”
Although he says Thor’s Marvel comic book roots “is a world that is alien to me” he relished the chance to play Odin for one simple reason. “I love acting,” he says.
“It’s interesting, you go from one actor in a different kind of movie to playing a god in another. I love it.
“People always ask me this, ‘What drew you to the part?’ I say, ‘Well, they offered it to me.’
“The generic answer is, I just like to work. I can’t analyze why a part is good or not. Dress me in the armor and cloak and it makes me look handsome, I guess. I hope.”
He adds the new film “feels different, in a good way,” from the original 2011 installment. “No better, no worse, just different. More earthbound because we filmed in England and the weather is always very dreary and grey there. That’s why I live in California.”
When Amanda Peet was just three years old she made her on-stage debut, by rushing the stage from the audience during a play. “I was a big show off,” she says. Even so, the native New Yorker had a hard time convincing her family she was destined for a career in Hollywood.
With no performers in her family tree the 36 year-old actress says she was considered “a little bit of a freak show” by the rest of her family.
Parents Charles, a lawyer and Penny, a social worker looked down their noses at her show biz aspirations. “It was something too intangible,” she says, “too tied up with charisma and presence.”
Her mother was concerned about Amanda’s career choices from the get go—”Don’t you know what happens to people who rely on their looks?” she asked the 14-year-old when she decided to pursue modeling—but both parents softened when she was taken on by legendary acting coach Uta Hagen, the Tony award winning actress who also trained Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. “Finally, the stamp of approval!” Peet said.
Even then, Amanda says, it took the elder Peets “a long time” to accept that she “wasn’t just going to be a drug addict person cavorting around in parties in a very short dress or something.”
Even as early success came her way—like co-starring as a ditzy but kind hearted hit-woman opposite superstar Bruce Willis in The Whole Nine Yards and its sequel The Whole Ten Yards—the rents were still not impressed.
“My mom is like, ‘Who’s Bruce Willis?’” she says of her two time co-star. “I remember when I got Seinfeld and she literally didn’t know who Seinfeld was. It was kind of like, ‘Guys! I’m getting famous!’”
Chances are family dinners are now a little more relaxed. Amanda’s days of doing Skittles commercials—her first TV gig—or guest shots on episodic television and direct-to-the-bargain-bin indies, or small roles in big movies—like playing Jennifer Aniston’s sister in She’s the One— are over.
“You’re always hearing stories about people who do an indie that goes to Sundance and you become famous overnight,” she says, “but somehow, I managed to do 12 indies that never made it to the video store, to the Quad or even to the Buffalo Film Festival.”
Somebody was paying attention, though, and she began mixing larger studio pictures in amongst the independent films that were her mainstay. Being voted one of the 50 Most Beautiful People in the World by People in 2000 further raised her mainstream profile. Since then she has been featured in everything from the great, but doomed TV series, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and the micro budgeted Please Give to 2012, the $200 million end-of-the-world epic which airs on TMN and Movie Central this month.
The big budget movie was a challenge for her. Director Roland “Master of Disaster” Emmerich, a filmmaker best known for making epic special effects movies, told USA Today that 2012 would be his last disaster movie, “so I packed everything in,” which made for an occasionally uncomfortable shooting experience.
Amanda called the shoot “grueling in an athletic way.” Her character Kate, ex-wife of hero John Cusack, spends much of the movie on the run from encroaching natural disasters.
She sprints away from a massive earthquake, does aerial tricks in a Cessna and spent far too long submerged in a water tank “with costumes over our wet suits,” she says. “Remind me never to do a water movie ever.”
Worse than that was the uncomfortable feeling of acting in the key of chroma, which she describes as one of the two worst things about her job (the other being auditioning).
“It’s really hard to do blue screen and part of it is combating the feeling of being a jackass,” she says. “You respond to nothing in front of a lot of people. If you’re alone in a room, it’s less embarrassing but here you have a bunch of people you don’t know who are watching you so it’s embarrassing and you have to get over it really quickly.”
These days Peet balances acting with her new role, as mother. “The truth is I’m quite lucky because I can be a real diva and demand that [daughters Frances and Molly June] come to the trailer and hang out so I really can’t complain.”
Peet will next be seen in December’s Gulliver’s Travels, a reworking of Jonathan Swift’s classic story. She plays the magazine editor (and potential love interest) who assigns Lemuel Gulliver (her Saving Silverman co-star Jack Black) to write a travel piece on the Bermuda Triangle where he uncovers a race of miniature people.
Best of all? It’s based on a classic, one that even her mother probably has heard of.
Pretty much all you need to know to understand the labyrinthine plot of “G.I. Joe: Retaliation” is that “Joes” rhymes with “heroes.” Everything else is window dressing. Well, window dressing that explodes, but you know what I mean.
Based on Hasbro’s G.I. Joe toys and comics, “Retaliation” sees the GI Joe squad—Duke (Channing Tatum). Roadblock (Dwayne Johnson), Flint (D.J. Cotrona) and Lady Jaye (Adrianne Palicki)—framed for treason. Shut down by order of the President (Jonathan Pryce) they team with a retired general, Joseph Colton (Bruce Willis), to battle venomous international terrorist organization Cobra and super villain Zartan (Arnold Vosloo).
There are bombastic fireworks galore in “GI Joe: Retaliation,”—which you expect from a movie about G.I. Joes and power hungry madmen—but it isn’t the movie you might expect from the people who wrote “Zombieland.” With that pedigree you’d expect a high laugh to body count ratio; maybe not “Zero Dark Funny” or anything, but every now and again it teases with a line like, “They call it a water board, but I never got bored,” that’ll make you wish for more belly laughs and fewer bullets.
The tone of the film feels skewed. It’s all about the action, although the fighting scenes, while plentiful, are shot so that it is often difficult to tell who was beating the tar out of whom.
There are laughs buried amid the bombs but more often than not the action gets in the way of the giggles and the plot.
It’s not a complicated story, exactly, but the movie makes the assumption that the audience has read the comics and knows the mythology surrounding the Joes (Navy Seals on steroids with an extra dose of attitude), Cobra (the bad guys) and the various ninjas.
That’s where this movie wanders.
You’ll be glad the ninjas are there—there’s a wild ninja chase in the middle of the movie—but their backstory and shifting alliances muddy things up. Remind me again, is Storm Shadow a good guy or a bad guy?
If you are content to sit back and allow explosions to scorch your eyeballs—the little flying bug bombs are cool—and watch The Rock flex his muscles, then “G.I. Joe: Retaliation” may hit the sweet spot for you. But if it’s a good mix of action, laughs and story you’re after, maybe skip this one and cross your fingers that the inevitable sequel finds a better balance.
This one is being marketed all wrong. MGM is selling this as a Bruce Willis action film, which isn’t exactly accurate. This is more like Hogan’s Heroes without the laughs or The Great Escape without the action. Hart’s War takes place in a German POW camp and revolves around a court martial case. Although Bruce Willis’ (who actually manages to keep the smirks down to a minimum) photo is front and center on the movie poster, he doesn’t have that much screen time, this is really Colin Farrell’s piece. As the spoiled Yale trained officer he is intense and winning. There is more character growth here, particularly with Farrell and nasty Nazi Colonel Visser played by Marcel Iures, than in ten John Wayne war flicks. Hart’s War is an interesting film, one that examines racism, honour and heroics.
The movie “Looper” looks at what happens when the older and younger versions of the same person end up in the same time? Of course, anyone who has seen an episode of “Star Trek” can tell you it is bad for the space–time continuum mojo.
In the twisty-turny world of “Looper” time travel doesn’t exist. At least not yet. Set just a few years from now, the film is the story of “loopers,” people who execute criminals from the future. What?! Told you it was mind-bendy.
Thirty years in the future time travel is illegal. The only people who use it are criminal organizations when they need to get rid of someone. Chip implanting has made getting rid of bodies difficult, so they send undesirables back to the past to be disposed of. Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is an experienced looper—or present day trigger-man—slowly stashing his pay so one day he can retire and live in France. He doesn’t count on a crime lord from the future, the Rainmaker, ordering his loop be closed. That is sending his future self, Old Joe (Bruce Willis), to present day to be executed. When Joe hesitates Old Joe gets away and sets in motion a chase to determine the fate of not just one, but both Joes.
It’s two, two Joes in one. As the younger Joe Gordon-Levitt has a fake nose and an uncanny knack for the cadences of Willis’s voice. Willis is Willis, but a world-weary one, who wears each and every of the thirty-year age gap on his face and in his bearing. Both hand in solid performances, as does Emily Blunt as a protective mother whose son (Pierce Gagnon) is on Old Joe’s hit list. Ditto Jeff Daniels who takes a break from “The Newsroom” to play the looper boss.
But the actor’s aren’t the star of the movie, the ideas are. ”Looper” harkens back to sci fi that is about concepts rather than space ships. Is it airtight? No, but that time travel movie is? The crime bosses of the future could have saved a lot of trouble by doing the killing themselves and sending the bodies back to be disposed of, but where’s the fun in that? We need the two Joes in one place to get the story revved. It’s what happens after that is interesting.
Director and writer Rian Johnson uses the sci fi premise to allow the character of Joe in both forms to examine his life, past, present and future, and discover what’s really important to him. It’s humanist science fiction that values the person (or persons) over special effects.
It’s also a wildly entertaining chase movie, with enough sci fi to keep the left side of your brain engaged while the right brain will thrill to the chase.
By Richard Crouse – Metro In Focus
