When the Reel Guys aren’t at the movies, one of their favourite things to do is talk about going to the movies. This week Richard and Mark have a look at talking apes, a vengeful Scarlett Johansson, and a singer with a papier-mâché head and a talking raccoon. So throw some popcorn on the BBQ, crank up the air conditioning and enjoy the Reel Guys’ most anticipated films of the summer season.
Richard: Mark, I was a huge Planet of the Apes fan as a kid. Loved the rubber masks, the twisty endings and the “YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP!” scene still blows my mind. Saw them over and over, and even enjoyed the bad ones like Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. Today, as an adult, I have a full-sized Cornelius bust with faux chimpanzee hair in my office. So, given my obsession with simian cinema, my inner 14-year-old goes a bit ape every time I see the Dawn of the Planet of the Apes trailer. What’s got you excited this summer?
Mark: I’m a Planet of the Apes fan, too, Richard. The idea of animals acting like humans is a welcome change from my life in show business, where humans act like animals. I’m really looking forward to Lucy, starring Scarlett Johansson in a Luc Besson revenge/action flick. This is Scarlett’s moment, and this is going to be the movie to make her a megastar. The trailer made me spill my popcorn!
RC: Johansson is doing interesting work these days, splitting her time between rock ’em, sock ’em movies like Captain America: The Winter Soldier and smaller movies like Chef and Under the Skin. Michael Fassbender has a similar career arc. We last saw him in X-Men: Days of Future Past. Next up he’s in Frank, a strange indie based on the life of Frank Sidebottom, a real-life English musician who wore a giant papier-mâché head complete with painted-on eyes, ruby red lips and slicked-back hair.
I love Fassbender for still taking chances on movies like this when he could easily cash big Hollywood paycheques time after time.
MB: Sounds like one strange biopic, Richard! A more commercial variant I’m looking forward to is Get On Up, the James Brown story starring Chadwick Boseman. The Godfather of Soul never wore a papier-mâché head, but he was big on ermine capes and tantrums, so this should be a lot of fun. And what a soundtrack it will be!
For life lessons and laughs, there’s And So It Goes, a mature rom-com starring Michael Douglas and Diane Keaton. Bring your CARP card for discounts on soft-chew treats from the concession stand.
RC: I don’t have a CARP card …. yet. I do like soft chew candies, however. As far as movies go, I’m curious about Guardians of the Galaxy. So many of the summer’s blockbusters have been oh-so-serious affairs that I think this one promises some good laughs and action.
MB: The cast suggests it might be more than your typical sci-fi adventure. But it’s Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz in Sex Tape that gets me hot. Big laughs, lots of action, at least of the horizontal variety.
“The Other Woman,” a new madcap comedy from “The Notebook” director Nick Cassavetes, features a character who tries to push infidelity to Tiger Woodsian heights. There have been philanderers on film before, but rarely has one cinematic cheater spread himself so thin, carrying on simultaneously with Leslie Mann, Cameron Diaz and Sports Illustrated cover girl Kate Upton.
That man, Mark King (Game of Thrones’s Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), is cheating on his wife (Mann) with multiple mistresses, including Carly and Amber (Diaz and Upton).
“We got played by the same guy,” says Carly. “I call it a tie.”
The three women form an unlikely bond—“We are the weirdest friends ever,” says Carly—drowning their sorrows in a sea of tequila shots before hatching a plan to humiliate and financially ruin the three timer. “The three of us can be just as shady as he can.”
With “The Notebook” Cassavetes made one of the most romantic movies of recent years. With “The Other Woman” the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. This is an anti-romance flick about sex, lies and adultery but it is ripe with laughs and some fun performances.
Mann goes all in as a Lucille Ball-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown type, Diaz has great comic timing and even the voluptuous Kate “She’s a clichéd version of every wife’s nightmare” Upton, who will never be confused with Meryl Streep, is charming and funny. Singer Nicki Minaj, who darts in and out of the film in an extended cameo, manages to get a couple of zingers in there as well.
Coster-Waldau doesn’t fare as well. He’s fine as the oily Casanova but is more “Game of Thrones” (he’s Jaime Lannister on the HBO show) when it comes to playing comedy. In other words he’s better at sword swinging than slapstick.
The film is slightly mean spirited and not terribly subtle in its examination of the dynamics between men and women, or in its soundtrack. The “Mission Impossible” theme blares over a scene where Diaz and Mann spy on Coster-Waldau, and you can bet your bottom dollar “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” will play at some point.
It may not be refined but it does get the girl power stuff right, and that’s more the point of the film. This isn’t a movie about the men, they are flesh props, simply the McGuffins that forward the plot. This is a movie about female bonding rather than female blaming and on that level it scores. The comedy material is often elevated and enhanced by the performer’s skill, but the film has its (broken) heart in the right place.
“The Other Woman” is a chick flick that isn’t “Bridemaids” funny, but you will laugh out loud quite a few times.
SYNOPSIS: Married man Mark King (Game of Thrones’s Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) tries to push infidelity to Tiger Woodsian heights by cheating on his wife (Leslie Mann) with multiple mistresses, including Carly and Amber (Cameron Diaz and Kate Upton). “We got played by the same guy,” says Carly.” The three women form an unlikely bond—“We are the weirdest friends ever,” says Carly—drowning their sorrows in a sea of tequila shots before hatching a plan to humiliate and financially ruin the three timer. “The three of us can be just as shady as he can.”
STAR RATINGS:
Richard: 3 ½ Stars
Mark: 2 Stars
Richard: Mark, with The Notebook director Nick Cassavetes made one of the most romantic movies of recent years. With The Other Woman his pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. This is an anti-romance flick about sex, lies and adultery but it is ripe with laughs and some fun performances. Mann goes all in as a Lucille Ball-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown type, Diaz has great comic timing and even Kate Upton, who will never be accused of giving Meryl Streep a run for her money, is charming and funny. It’s not Bridemaids funny, but I laughed out loud quite a few times. You?
Mark: Is it possible to like a movie but hate its sexual politics? Because that’s how I felt about it. I laughed, especially when Leslie Mann was onscreen. This movie is certainly her personal best. She’s amazingly loose and funny, especially in the first third of the film. But the revenge plot against the cheating husband left me feeling queasy. He’s set up as such a cardboard lothario that he made the Kate Upton character look deep. There’s a positive male role model in the film—Mann’s brother—but he’s so anodyne and threat less that I couldn’t take him seriously as a character. The movie is interesting as a series of Rorschach about how women must view men—either cads or eunuchs—but I had to banish these thoughts or I couldn’t enjoy the comedy.
RC: I see what you’re saying, and I suppose the film is a bit mean spirited and not terribly subtle in its examination of the dynamics between men and women, but it does get the girl power stuff right, and I think that’s more the point of the film. This isn’t a movie about the men, they are simply the McGuffins that forward the plot. This is a movie about female bonding rather than female blaming.
MB: Anyway, at least it’s a good-looking movie, and the women’s outfits are chic. Don Johnson is given a part that’s more than a cameo, but less than a role. I think he could have been onscreen more with a beefed-up part. But Nicki Minaj, as Diaz’ assistant, steals every scene she’s in. I thought she was a hoot. Richard, did the soundtrack bother you? Such obvious choices, like “New York, New York” when the husband enters the city, or the Mission: Impossible theme when the three women tail the husband to find out what he’s up to.
RC: Absolutely. The soundtrack is as subtle as Coster-Waldau’s cheesy pick up lines. Five minutes in I was willing to bet “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun would play… and I would have won that bet.
MB: And I bet the women will cheer and the men will groan at this flick.
In the new movie The Other Woman Mark King (Game of Thrones’s Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) tries to push infidelity to Tiger Woodsian heights by cheating on his wife (Leslie Mann) with multiple mistresses, including Carly and Amber (Cameron Diaz and Kate Upton). “We got played by the same guy,” says Carly.
“Getting played” in Hollywood movies dates back further than the invention of the ashleymadison website.
In 1960 the Jack Lemmon movie The Apartment tackled the subject of adultery. The film, about a lonely insurance company lackey who allows his bosses to use his apartment as a trysting spot in hopes that they will promote him, was a big hit, but also a controversial one. The Saturday Review called it “a dirty fairy tale” and co-star Fred McMurray says a woman on the street hit him with her purse, taking to him to task for making “a dirty, filthy movie.”
2005’s Derailed, stars Clive Owen as a married man who hooks up with Lucinda (Jennifer Aniston) after meeting her on a commuter train. In a hormone induced rush they decide to consummate their illicit affair at a seedy hotel, only to be interrupted by a burglar who robs them and sexually assaults Lucinda. Things spiral out of control as the robber blackmails the couple and seems to have an unquenchable thirst for Owen’s money.
Derailed is a cautionary tale about staying faithful to your spouse and never, ever renting rooms in sleazy hotels. Part Fatal Attraction, part Hitchcock thriller the movie stays on track through the set-up of the story, but as soon as the going gets rough the story, well… derails.
The most famous infidelity movie has to be 1987’s Fatal Attraction. It begins with Michael “I’m a married man!” Douglas having a fling with Glenn “I’m not gonna be ignored!” Close. When he tries to break off their affair, she becomes a lesson in why not to cheat on your wife.
The film was a sensation on release, inspiring a number of imitators including The Crush, Single White Female and a spoof called Fatal Instinct, and its most famous clip, the rabbit boiling on the stove, even inspired a phrase in the Urban Dictionary. According to the website, cook your rabbit “refers to the moment when someone goes over the edge in their obsession with another person.”
In an interview twenty year after the film’s release Close said, “”Men still come up to me and say, ‘You scared the [crap] out of me.’ Sometimes they say, ‘You saved my marriage.'”
Cormac McCarthy may not be a household name around your place, unless you live with the Coen Brothers or maybe with the Pitt’s.
Literary critic Harold Bloom called the writer one of the four major American novelists of his time, and he has two all-star movies set for release, which may make his name a little more commonplace.
Later in 2013 James Franco directs, scripts and stars in Child of God, an adaptation of Cormac’s 1973 novel about, “a dispossessed, violent man whose life is a disastrous attempt to exist outside the social order.”
This weekend a star-studded cast lead by Brad Pitt, Cameron Diaz and Michael Fassbender headline The Counselor, directed by Ridley Scott.
Producer Steve Schwartz says the story of a lawyer in over his head after dipping his toe into the drug trade, “may be one of McCarthy’s most disturbing and powerful works.”
And that’s saying something about the writer who gave us a character like No Country for Old Men’s killing machine Anton Chigurh. Empire.com warned that when, “McCarthy throws “a dark character at you, it’s a safe assumption that you’re not going to be able to get them out of your head for a good, long while—if ever.”
As written by McCarthy and played by Javier Bardem, who earned an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the part, Chigurh is merciless, a murderer who makes life and death decisions with the flip of a coin.
The Road—a 2007 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction—is another disturbing McCarthy novel adapted for the big screen.
The story is simple. A man and his son (Viggo Mortenson and Kodi Smit-McPhee) try to survive in a dystopian world. Armed with only a gun and two bullets they must scavenge for food amid the ruins and protect themselves from cannibals who roam the desolate land.
The Road is a movie based on small moments set against a big backdrop. No parent will be able to forget the stark image of seeing a young boy who doesn’t know what a can of Coke is or a father teaching his son how to commit suicide.
It’s tough, no nonsense work from a writer who says he’s “not that big a fan of exotic foreign films,” especially movie with magical realism. “You know, it’s hard enough to get people to believe what you’re telling them without making it impossible,” he says. “It has to be vaguely plausible.”
Superhero movies don’t generally get January releases. Typically they’re summer fare, warm weather entertainments catering to teens looking for something cool to pass the school break. But “The Green Hornet” isn’t a typical superhero movie. Directed by French art house favourite Michel Gondry and starring Canadian comedian Seth Rogen, it adds something new to the masked crime fighter genre — whimsy.
An all-star cast, including Rogen, Oscar winner Christoph Waltz, Cameron Diaz and Taiwanese superstar Jay Chou, headline the updated adventures of the Green Hornet. In this version Britt Reid (Rogen), heir to his late father’s publishing company, enlists martial arts wiz Kato (Jay Chou) to form a masked crime fighting duo. Together they hatch an unusual strategy to help Britt get over his serious daddy issues and take on the leader of the city’s underworld, Russian criminal Benjamin Chudnofsky (Waltz).
“The Green Hornet” has all the elements usually associated with superhero movies — cool gadgets like a car that would make “Knight Rider’s” Kit green with envy, wild action and a dastardly villain — but it also, for better and for worse, has Seth Rogen. Rogen fans will likely take to his slacker party-boy interpretation of Britt Reid — imagine Paris Hilton with chest hair and you get the idea — but I’ll guess there will be more than one “Green Hornet” purist who will find his take on the character somewhat sacrilegious.
He neither really looks like or behaves like the crime fighters we’ve become used to in “Batman” and the like, and if you can get past that there is much to enjoy here. If not, maybe stay home and rent “The Dark Knight.” Again.
On the other hand Jay Chou over-compensates in the hero department. As sidekick and chauffer Kato he’s a cool character with great moves and some of the movie’s best lines, and even pays sly tribute to Bruce Lee, who played the role in the TV series.
Christoph Waltz, the very definition of evil in “Inglorious Basterds,” is suitably evil and seems to be having some fun, but seems to be calibrating his performance more toward the cartoony “Batman” television series villains than his finely crafted (and award winning) Colonel Landa.
Cameron Diaz is fine in the Gwyneth Paltrow “Iron Man” role but is given little to do.
“The Green Hornet” is a more a comedy than action movie — although there are some nice action sequences — brave enough to pay tribute to the original while bringing the story and the characters into Rogen and Gondry’s strange universe.
Shivers go up and down my spine when holiday movies use words like “heartwarming” in their ads. I’ve seen enough of them to know what that really means. Usually “heartwarming” actually translates to saccharine. Now combine heartwarming AKA saccharine, with a romantic comedy set during the holidays; Add in one dancing for joy scene, usually in a kitchen or just after receiving some good news on the phone, and you have The Holiday, the latest romantic comedy from evil genius Nancy Meyers.
The Holiday combines all manner of romantic comedy stereotypes. There is the fish-out-of-water routine as English Rose Kate Winslett and California cutie Cameron Diaz decide to trade homes (and countries) for the holidays to help themselves heal from failed relationships. There’s the above-mentioned dancing, the odd pairings—could it ever really work out between Winslett and Jack Black?—the predictable pairings—why wouldn’t it work out between Diaz and Jude Law?—and lots of beautiful homes, great scenery and even some cute kids.
Why then did this movie bug me so much? I think it probably has something to do with its inherent misogyny. At the heart of The Holiday, lurking just under the glitzy surface is the idea that a woman isn’t complete unless she has a man in her life. Both female leads are successful women with careers and lives and yet both only really feel complete in the company of men.
The Holiday is formulaic, too long by half an hour and if all holidays were like this I would never leave my house again.
By Richard Crouse & Mark Breslin – Reel Guys Metro Canada
