“I didn’t just want to play a girly spy who depends on her flirty ways,” Charlize Theron told W Magazine. Mission accomplished. Based on the wild ‘n woolly graphic novel “The Coldest City” by Antony Johnston and Sam Hart “Atomic Blonde” is a Cold War thriller that sees Theron dropkick Daniel Craig or Matt Damon out of the space they’ve occupied as film’s go-to super spies.
Set in 1989, just days before the fall of the Berlin wall, the film starts with the KGB assassination of an undercover MI6 operative in East Berlin. Theron plays Agent Lorraine Broughton, a high-ranking MI6 spy sent to the communist side of the wall to retrieve a dossier containing the names of other vulnerable British intelligence assets. “It’s an atomic bomb of information that could set the Cold War back 40 years!”
Toby Jones and John Goodman as MI6 and CIA head honchos respectively urge her not to trust anyone but she sparks up a personal and professional relationship with an inexperienced French agent Delphine Lasalle (Sofia Boutella). Because everybody wants the dossier she is teamed with shady Berlin station chief David Percival (James McAvoy)—a “feral” man who moonlights selling bootlegged Jack Daniels to tourists—to beat the US, UK, USSR and France to the punch. How? By folding, spindling, mutilating, punching, kicking and head butting. There’s death by cork screw, fist and bullet and everything in between in some of the most dynamic fight scenes we’re likely to see on screen this year (and that includes “John Wick 2).
The trailers make “Atomic Bomb” look like wall-to-wall action. It isn’t. It’s a cold war spy movie with intermittent wild and woolly fisticuffs. And that’s OK. The fight scenes definite highlights and get the pulse racing but to be truly effective all movies must have hills and valleys.
If it was all action it would be like a Jason Statham movie. All talking it would be “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.” As it is it hits the sweet spot between the two.
It’s a stylish film with visceral action scenes connected by an original cold war story, compelling characters and German versions of 80s pop hits.
This isn’t a Michael Bay style spectacular, it’s up-close-and-personal bare-knuckled warfare. Theron and her victims grunt and groan as fists hits faces and all manner of mayhem is unleashed. One particularly intense fight scene mixes and matches the above-mentioned grunts and groans with the catchy pop of George Michaels’ “Father Figure.” An even more effective sequence gets rid of the music completely.
The tour de force six-minute fight scene looks like a one-shot wonder. It’s hard to believe there isn’t some trickery involved but the sequence is dazzling nonetheless.
As Broughton, Theron is not a superhero. She comes out on top of most fights but emerges bruised and battered, which lends an air of unpredictability to the =storytelling.
“Atomic Blonde” is a violent, arty spy flick that doesn’t just open the door for Charlize Theron to create an effective spy franchise; it kicks it off its hinges.
A movie star is someone who can carry a movie, a person audiences will line up to see no matter what the film. There’s no formula, just equal parts talent, charisma and staying power.
For years Tom Cruise and Will Smith ruled the Hollywood roost, but Cruise’s couch jumping tarnished his star (unless he’s headlining a movie with the words Mission Impossible in the title) and Smith has hit a box office rough patch.
These days Hollywood’s biggest movie star—both physically and metaphysically—is a former wrestler who made his acting debut playing his own father on an episode of That ’70s Show. Since then Dwayne Johnson’s paycheques have blossomed along with his popularity and in 2016 he was the world’s highest-paid actor, in part due to his reputation as “franchise Viagra.”
It’s a simple formula. Take a flagging franchise; add Johnson and flaccid box office numbers suddenly grow. Case in point, the Fast and Furious series. Johnson signed on for the fifth instalment, playing Diplomatic Security Service agent Luke Hobbs, helping that movie make north of six-hundred million dollars. His over-the-top presence—who else could remove a cast from his broken arm simply by flexing his oversized biceps?—drove the grosses of the next two F&F movies to the stratosphere. This weekend’s The Fate of the Furious is poised to shatter even more records.
His is a varied filmography—a resume containing everything from the hi brow, abstract sci fi of Southland Tales and the bloody b-movie Walking Tall to the family friendly Tooth Fairy and the pedal-to-the-metal Fast & Furious flicks—bound together by one thing, his innate star power.
Haters, like a recent commenter at Variety.com, who complained that Johnson, “has never done a compelling complex character, only mindless good vs evil roles,” miss his populist appeal. Despite his Greek God physique, he’s an everyman, a charismatic crowd-pleaser with a cocked eyebrow.
His appeal continues off screen as well. He’s a big deal now but that wasn’t always the case and he’s positioned himself as an inspirational figure, a muscle bound Tony Robbins. “I started w/ $7 bucks. If I can overcome, so can you,” he tweeted when he was crowned the World’s Highest-Paid Actor.
“I have enjoyed a good amount of success and I’m very grateful for everything I have,” the bulky actor told me a few years ago.
“I’m very grateful for being who I am. I make sure to approach every project and everything I do as if it is going to be my last.
“There was a time when I was in Canada, playing for the CFL and sleeping on a mattress that I got from the garbage of a sex motel. I’ll never forget it. True story. So, for me, those times are kind of in the forefront of my mind. The wolf is always scratching at the door. It’s good to remember that. It’s important.”
Johnson is Hollywood’s biggest earner but a recent viral video shows his core connection to his fans. Dressed as mascots of themselves Jimmy Fallon and the artist formerly known as The Rock photobombed folks at Universal Studios in Orlando. One man, with a tattoo of Johnson on his leg, was brought to tears when meeting the hulking actor. “Stuff like this will always be the best part of fame,” said Johnson.
Preposterous is not a word most filmmakers would like to have applied to their work but in the case of the “Fast and Furious” franchise I think it is what they are going for. Somewhere along the way the down-‘n’-dirty car chase flicks veered from sublimely silly to simply silly.
Perhaps it was the wild train heist in “Fast Five,” or the entirety of “Tokyo Drift” or the skyscraper-to-skyscraper jump from “Fast and Furious 7.” What ever it was, at some point in the sixteen years someone decided more is really more. Bigger stunts, more stars and more pedal-to-the-metal action, which leads us to “The Fate of the Furious.”
This latest slab of preposterous bombastity begins in Havana. Dom (Vin Diesel) and Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) are honeymooning when, surprise, surprise and unexpected car race breaks out. Although clearly out gunned (SPOILER ALERT ONLY IF THE OUTCOME WASN’T SO PREDICTABLE) Dom wins, his car speeding backwards and engulfed in flames.
As if that wouldn’t be enough for most movies, we’re then introduced to criminal mastermind Ciper (Charlize Theron). As her name implies, she’s a tricky one, and soon Dom has turned his back on his crew—Letty, Roman (Tyrese Gibson), ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) and Tej (Ludacris)—to work for her. Why? Not sure. She shows him something on a mobile phone screen that changes his once unbending loyalty to his peeps. “You’re going to abandon your crew and shatter your family,” Cipher snarls. “Your team is about to go against the only thing they can’t handle—you.” She has highfalutin ideas about holding the world accountable for it’s sins ands who better to help her than a grease monkey with a raspy voice and a can-do attitude?
In another part of the story covert ops team leader, the excellently named Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell) convinces Dom’s old crew to work for him again. The plan this time involves tossing Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) in prison to aid the escape of assassin Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham).
Throw in a series of exotic locations—he movie zips from Cuba to New York City to Russia and every where in between as Hobbs and crew try to understand Dom’s defection while at the same time stop him from amassing an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. That’s right, a series once satisfied with fast cars and socket wrenches now concerns itself with WMDs.
“The Fate of the Furious” is fast, furious but it’s not much fun. It’s an unholy mashup of James Bond and the Marvel Universe, a movie bogged down by outrageous stunts and too many characters. Someone really should tell Diesel and Company that more is not always more.
The love of family is the subtext that that bonds the all the movies together is given lip service but little else. Despite aspiring to be “The Brothers Karamazov” with muscle cars, the movie is little more than a preposterous demolition derby that values vehicular wham bam thank you ma’am over anything else.
In the classic sense it does prove the old theory that for every action there’s a reaction… and a one liner. “They’re going to flank us!” “No they ain’t,” yelps Hobbs as he punts a military vehicle into outerspace. It’s a catchphrase-a-looza where the characters don’t actually talk to one another, they trade quips.
“If you must blink, do it now!” So says Kubo (voice of Art Parkinson), a young street performer in his village. He doesn’t want anyone to miss a moment of his show, but he might have been talking to the theatre audience watching “Kubo and the Two Strings.” The fourth feature from stop motion animators Laika the others are is a marvellously engaging tale that sits comfortably on the shelf beside their other films “Coraline,” “ParaNorman” and “The Boxtrolls.”
An original fantasy masquerading as an ancient Japanese myth “Kubo and the Two Strings” centers on Kubo, a one-eyed boy who lives with his mother in a cave. By day he performs in the local fishing village, spinning fantastical musical stories about a samurai warrior, but, whether the tale is done or not, when night falls he must hurry home so as not to reveal his location to his grandfather, the mystic and evil Moon King (Ralph Fiennes, once again playing a supernatural baddie) who has pursued the boy from birth.
Running late one evening he gives away his position. To protect himself and friends he goes on a Joseph Campbell-esque mission to assemble a magical suit of armour. The suit has been dispersed because, as legend has it, “any man who finds the magic armour would be too powerful.” With the help of Monkey (Charlize Theron), a wooden toy come to life, and a goofy bug warrior named Beetle (Matthew McConaughey), he goes on a quest and discovers his true nature. “Do you ever say anything encouraging?” Kubo asks the irascible Monkey. “I encourage you not to die,” she says.
“Kubo and the Two Strings” is a mix of the sublime, the surreal and the silly. The beautiful stop motion animation (with some computer generated images) perfectly compliments the film’s fanciful elements—like a giant skeleton monster—while bringing with it a handmade, organic feel that compliments the film’s use of exotic, DIY origami creations as characters. It’s a wonderful blend of form and subject that allows director Travis Knight to indulge in wonderful visual artistry. It’ll make your eyeballs dance, but some scenes may be too intense for very young viewers.
Big lug Beetle is the film with comic relief, mainly providing the silly when things get intense.
This story of magic, monsters and memories works on two levels. Visually it will engage and impress, but it doesn’t skimp on the emotional content. Kubo’s journey is ripe with primal energy. Betrayal, melancholy, greed and evil are touched on in a new story that already feels like a classic.
In polite society no one would dare ask a stranger about his or her father’s violent death, but celebrity culture is not polite society.
Over the years I’ve heard interviewers ask questions ranging from the innocuous — “What are you wearing?” — to the silly — “How do you keep your bum in such great shape?” — but rarely have I heard anything as unnecessarily meddling as the query aimed at Charlize Theron during a press conference I hosted several years ago.
A reporter asked the actress about seeing her mother shoot her abusive, alcoholic father dead when she was a teenager. But instead of breaking down Theron said, “I’m not talking about that,” with an icy finality that made everyone freeze.
I admired her for not over sharing, not spilling the intimate details of her life à la the Kardashian Klan. She’s careful what she says to the press, avoids scandal and damage controls the ones that inevitably pop up in every celeb’s life. For instance, recently she said, short and sweetly, “We both decided to separate,” when accused of “ghosting” on her romance with Sean Penn.
She understands some things should only be spoken about when and where she chooses and not at the behest of an aggressive reporter looking to dredge up painful memories for the sake of “good television.” Theron is media savvy so I was surprised a few weeks ago when she caused a media hurly burly with comments about the burden of being beautiful.
Chatting up her new film The Huntsman: Winter’s War with British GQ she said, “How many roles are out there for the gorgeous, BLEEPINGing, gown-wearing eight-foot model? When meaty roles come through, I’ve been in the room and pretty people get turned away first.”
She is a beautiful woman, that is as clear as the perfectly positioned nose on her face, but is she intimating that being beautiful has harmed her career?
Turns out she wasn’t, or so she claims. Alleging a misquote, she later apologized, saying that playing “deconstructed characters” appeals because, “how many characters really are there out there for a woman wearing a gown? You have to play real people.
The mea culpa was unnecessary. She works in a business where beauty is a commodity.
The problem with her earlier statement is that publicly acknowledging one’s own looks carries with it a hint of arrogance, a suggestion that winning the genetic lottery somehow makes you superior, but she simply said something others already have.
Keira Knightley claims she almost lost the role in Pride and Prejudice because the director thought she was too pretty and Jessica Biel says being Esquire’s 2005 Sexiest Woman cost her work.
Theron may have missed out on a job or two because of her looks, but it’s also an element of what made her a star.
That and talent, and just as you wouldn’t apologize for skin colour or having red hair or being tall or short, she doesn’t need to say sorry for being beautiful.
Once upon a time there was a movie called “Snow White and the Huntsman.” Starring Hollywood princesses Kristen Stewart and Charlize Theron, it was a dark reimagining of the classic story that played like the love child of the Brothers Grimm and “The Hobbit” with two compelling characters, warrior Snow White and the villainous Ravenna.
Another film was inevitable, but how do you make a sequel when KStew busy making art films and Ravenna didn’t make it to the end credits? Easy, you rehire Theron, play mix and match “Frozen” and “Game of Thrones” and hope for the best.
“The Huntsman: Winter’s War“ begins its confusing journey as a prequel. Ravenna (Theron) is alive and well, a Grand Guiginol vision of a fairy tale Queen. Despite her best efforts sister Freya (Emily Blunt) refuses to embrace their evil birthright, choosing instead to start a family. When tragedy strikes the formerly good-natured princess finds her wicked power, morphing into the Winter Queen, whose icy glare can freeze kingdoms. The only things missing are Olaf and a show tune or two.
In her frigid northern empire she raises a child army of orphans called the Huntsmen (even though they’re not all boys or men). Elsa’s… er… Freya’s warriors are forbidden to love. They must let it go. “In my kingdom there is one rule do not love,” she says. “It is in a sin I will not forgive.” When Eric (Chris Hemsworth) and Sara (Jessica Chastain) fall hard for one another and plan to elope, Freya goes to extraordinary and cruel lengths to ensure they live happily never after.
Cut to seven years later. The movie is now into sequel territory. Snow White (who is glimpsed only briefly) has defeated Ravenna and now needs Eric to locate the Magic Mirror and ensure it is never used for evil. Cue the goblins, a few hi ho hi ho’s provided by Nick Frost, Rob Brydon, Sheridan Smith and Alexandra Roach and more CGI than you can throw an enchanted mirror at.
I’m not sure what to call “The Huntsman: Winter’s War.“ It’s not a sequel or a prequel and yet it is both. Officially I suppose we’re supposed to call it a “sprequel”; I call it bloated, confusing and worst of all, dull. You would think that any movie featuring Emily Blunt riding a polar bear would be great fun but you’d be wrong. From the half hour of narration that opens the story to the cavalcade of CGI and bad accents—Hemsworth and Chastain easily beat Kevin Costner for worst-ever cinematic British Isles burrs—to sloppy storytelling, this is a grim, not Brothers Grimm tale.
Bad accent aside Hemsworth brings some swagger to the role of Eric, Chastain tries to keep a straight face and sidekicks Frost, Brydon, Smith and Roach create a badly needed sense of fun to the proceedings. Blunt isn’t given much to do, aside from her rather stunning entrance in the polar bear but Theron actually disappoints. In the first film she’s a hoot, a bundle of bad intentions gathered up in one pretty package. Here she’s not the same figure of malicious amusement but oddly disconnected and not nearly as much fun.
Over long “The Huntsman: Winter’s War“ drones on for almost two hours until the narrator (Liam Neeson) reappears. As his dulcet tones close the movie with something to the effect of the story may be over “but fairy talks never end,” it doesn’t seem so much like an ending as it does a threat that they might make a sequel to this mess.
George Miller has made pigs talk and penguins tap dance. He’s been a doctor and a film director. Among the bold faced names on his resume are the titles Babe: A Pig in the City, The Witches of Eastwood, Happy Feet 1 and 2 and Lorenzo’s Oil. One name, however, looms larger than the rest.
Mad Max. Over the course of three films—Mad Max, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome—he introduced the world to post apocalyptic warrior Max Rockatansky, made Mel Gibson a superstar, defined dystopian cinema for a generation or two and created the phrase, “Two men enter, one man leaves.”
This weekend, thirty years after the release of the last Mad Max movie, Miller revisits the character in Mad Max: Fury Road, a reboot starring Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron.
The seventy-year-old director, who raised money to make the first film by working as an Emergency Room Doctor, says the goal of the new movie was to make it “uniquely familiar.”
After years of “following the CG evolution,” using computer generated images to create beautiful animated films, he was keen to go back to “old school” filmmaking “with real cars and real people and real desert.” That means, unlike the Avengers and their ilk, respecting the laws of physics by using practical effects and keeping the action earthbound. In other words, in a call back to the original films, when a car blows up it doesn’t rocket into space. Instead it explodes spectacularly but organically. The wild action you see in Fury Road are actual stunts performed by stunt men and women and not generated by a clever computer operator in a studio.
“It was like going back to your old home town and looking at it anew,” he says.
Miller reveals he originally created Max’s wasteland world while practising medicine.
“I worked for two and half years in a big city hospital. I stayed registered right up past Mad Max 2: Road Warrior. I never even thought there’d be a career. I stayed as a doctor on the first Mad Max because we kept running out of money in postproduction. Then I stayed through to the second Mad Max because if you are doing stunts you are obliged to have a doctor on set. There weren’t big budgets so I ended up running a clinic during lunch time tending to cuts, sunburns, scrapes and all that.”
His two careers have much in common, he says, adding he was “was privileged with a unique point of view as a doctor.”
“I don’t think I’d be the filmmaker I am unless I had that medical education, in two very direct ways. Both of them have a lot of problem solving in there. But the most important way is that as a doctor you are looking at people in extremis from many points of view. You look inside of people. You see people during birth and death and so on. Through microscopes; a lens. So you’re looking from many, many points of view. That’s exactly what you do in cinema. Huge wide shots with massive crowds or you’re looking right down inside someone’s brain, someone’s head.”
As for plans to make another Mad Max right away, he says, “That’s a bit like asking a woman who’s just given birth if she’s going to have another baby.”
The ghostly War Boys of “Mad Max: Fury Road” have a catchy mantra they recite as they go into battle. “I live. I die. I live again!” In some ways it could be the refrain for the series. Begun as a down-and-dirty punk rock vision of a post-apocalyptic Australia, the 1979 no-budget movie made a star out of Mel Gibson and spawned a mini-franchise of two more films, “The Road Warrior” and “Beyond Thunderdome.”
The George Miller films lived, died and now live again courtesy of “Mad Max: Fury Road,” an out-of-control reboot that recreates Max Rockatansky’s dystopian world and then races like hell through it, laying rubber all the way.
Set in an arid, inhospitable world where a snack of raw lizard constitutes a meal, Max (Tom Hardy) is a man who has lost everything, Haunted by “those he could not protect” he is now “a man reduced to a single instinct—survival.” Captured by henchmen of Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne, who played Toecutter in the original “Mad Max”), a despot who hoards precious natural resources and only sparingly shares water with his subjects—Don’t take too much water, he says, you will only come to resent it when it isn’t there.—Max is turned into a blood bank for an ailing war boy named Nux (Nicholas Hoult). Subjected to a life of confinement and drained of his own natural resources, Max sees a chance for freedom when Nux and others do battle against Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), a former warrior turned rogue. She’s driving the imposing War Rig—imagine a Monster Truck with an attitude—across the wasteland. With her are Immortan Joe’s five wives—Splendid (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley), Capable (Riley Keough), Toast (Zoë Kravitz), The Dag (Abbey Lee Kershaw) and Fragile (Courtney Eaton)—a natural resource he desperately wants back. Max and Furiosa form an uncomfortable alliance to battle the forces of evil and make it across the desert to Furiosa’s childhood home, a green oasis.
It’s been thirty years since there was a new “Mad Max” movie but “Fury Road” was worth the wait. The years have not stilled Miller’s restless camera or his outrageous way with steampunk influenced design or character names. If Imperator Furiosa isn’t the best character name of the year, I don’t know what is. Her title, however, might as well have been Mad Maxine as she is more the focus of the story than the titular character.
It is a chase movie where characters chase immortality, a new life in a better place, love and one another across a vivid landscape. Gone are the grey tones of dystopian movies like “The Road.” In its place is a dusty but vibrant backdrop that frames the non-stop action. Miller keeps the pedal to the metal but unlike the recent “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” which had a similar angle of attack, he keeps the action earthbound. The laws of physics are respected—when a car blows up it doesn’t rocket into space for instance—by the director’s use of practical effects. Most everything you see on screen are actual stunts performed by real people and not generated by a clever computer operator in a studio later on. The organic nature of most of (but not quite all) the visuals gives the movie extra torque, adding a sense of danger and realism (no matter how unreal the situation) to the large set pieces that make up the bulk of the film.
Hardy pulls his weight as Max. His powerful physicality mixed with a haunted look—maybe we should call him Passive Aggressive Max—and gearbox permanently shifted to survival makes him an imposing center of the film, but it is Theron who dominates.
As Furiosa she lives up to her name as a force to be reckoned with. She’s a one-armed bandit (literally) who not only provides much of the action in the film, but its heart as well.
The real star, however, is Miller. Thirty years after he last played in Mad Max’s world he revisits it with a film that doesn’t feel like a sequel or a reboot, but a fresh look at an familiar character. His off-the-wall sensibility and demented Hot Wheels style designs give the movie a look and feel that no other director could replicate.
I was hoping to be more offended by “A Million Ways to Die in the West.”
Each week on his show Family Guy, Seth McFarlane manages at least one joke that makes me cringe. It is as edgy a television show as there is on network television and many times I have muttered, “That’s not right,” under my breath even as I am laughing.
I expected McFarlane to push the envelope even further for the big screen as writer, director and star of the “Blazing Saddles-esque” “A Million Ways to Die in the West,” and for sure there are some wild and crazy gags—some may literally make you gag—but it feels safe. Like Judd Apatow, not McFarlane.
Set in Arizona’s wild west, McFarlane is Albert, a mild mannered sheep farmer who hates the frontier. “It’s a disgusting dirty place,” he says, “a cesspool of despair.” The despair of his day-to-day life is compounded when his girlfriend Louise (Amanda Seyfried) dumps him and takes up with a wealthy owner of a moustache grooming shop (Neil Patrick Harris). He finds love again with a mysterious stranger Anna (Charlize Theron), who helps him cope with dangerous frontier life and grow a backbone. His newfound courage is tested when Anna’s husband, outlaw Clinch (Liam Neeson) rides into town.
Despite the similarities to “Blazing Saddles,” “A Million Ways to Die in the West” doesn’t have the satiric subtext that made Mel Brooks’ movie great. McFarlane takes stabs at racism and the social morays of 1880s—only he could create a prostitute character (Sarah Silverman) who loves her work but is saving herself for marriage—but here he comes off as Brooks Lite.
As the star he is funny by times, but his part is basically one joke. He’s the fish-out-of-water who speaks like a twenty first century smart aleck. For instance, as people around him are killed in increasingly wild ways—hence the movie’s title—he observes, “We should all just wear coffins for clothes.” It’s a good line, but his overall performance is more Bob Hope (with more than a hint of Peter Griffin in his voice) than John Wayne.
“A Million Ways to Die In the West” relies on anachronisms and shock value jokes to raise a smile, and spends too much time on the love story. Brooks went for the jugular, and forty years on it’s still funny and edgy. McFarlane’s movie does have at least one classic moment that will appeal to Generation Xers and the most undignified duel ever, but it doesn’t have much sardonic resonance.
