“The Clouds of Sils Maria” contains fine performances from its leads, Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart and Chloë Grace Moretz, some delicious irony, and some razor sharp commentary on the state of modern celebrity. What it’s missing is entertainment value.
French director Olivier Assayas has made an art house “Birdman,” with stunt casting but allows it to get weighed down by its ideas and melodrama.
Binoche is actress Maria Enders, an international star who got her start decades ago on stage playing the alluring Sigrid in “Maloja Snake,” a young woman who drove her boss Helena to suicide. When she is offered the role of the older woman in an all-star remounting of the play opposite Jo-Anne Ellis (Moretz), a scandal-prone Hollywood starlet, she retreats to the relative calm of Sils Maria, a rural town in the Alps, to rehearse with her assistant Val (Stewart) while contemplating aging, her past and her place in show business.
“The Clouds of Sils Maria” is as self absorbed as the people it portrays. The most interesting tangents, from a pop culture point of view, concern the character Val, who seems to be piercing the fourth wall by allowing Stewart to seemingly comment on her “Twilight” success and subsequent career. “I love her,” she says of Ellis, “she not completely antiseptic like the rest of Hollywood.” In fact, it’s more likely she’s referring to herself and her descent from Tween Queen to serious working actor.
“Clouds” is very much Binoche’s film—she’s in almost every scene and the action revolves around her—but thematically it’s not a stretch to see it as Stewart’s comment on her own career. “She’s brave enough to be herself,” Val says admiringly of Ellis, throwing down the gauntlet to critics who might questions her less than mainstream choices of late.
As interesting as that glimpse into Stewarts ID may be coupled with Maria’s fears of losing credibility, “The Clouds of Sils Maria’s” art vs. life premise takes pains to make the discovery of these points as obtuse as possible. Plot shards hang, interrupted by jarring scene transitions and needless narrative machinations. It’s the rare kind of movie that is undone by the very same cultural elitism it celebrates.
Teen angst has been good to the movies. “Blackboard Jungle” and “Rebel Without a Cause” defined that common collision of hormones and school stress for the 19560s and every decade since has offered up its own example of misunderstood, troubled youth. Heck, Kristen Stewart has made a career of playing dead-eyed teens.
“Laggies” fits the mold of a teen angst film, except the main character Megan (Keira Knightley) is a clever twenty-something who never completely grew out of her angst. “I had a good feeling about you,” says one her friends. “That makes one of us,” she replies.
In the film’s opening minutes we meet Megan and her friends on prom night. They sneak cocktails, dance and go skinny-dipping. Cut to today, the four girls (Ellie Kemper) are still in touch, some married to their high school sweethearts, some, like Megan, living with her prom date Anthony (Mark Webber).
Megan is surrounded by a strong support system; adoring parents, a devoted boyfriend and friends who love her enough to ask her to be their child’s godmother.
Still, she is unsettled. That feeling intensifies when Anthony tries to propose on the night of her best friend’s wedding. A chance encounter with a group of teens, including Annika (Chloë Grace Moretz) and her sarcastic friend Misty (Kaitlyn Dever), forces Megan to reexamine her life and relationship.
Megan says she became a psychologist because she wanted to have real conversations with people and Knightly, in a lissome performance, brings forthrightness to the character… even when she is lying. It’s something different from Knightley. She’s more off hand here than we’re used to, and even though she looks like a fashion model even when she is dressed down in her teen friend’s clothes, she still radiates the teen ennui that defines her character. We see her working through it, trying to figure out what she wants, but for now she is an unemployed woman with a degree who still flops herself on parents’ couch demanding pizza night.
Moretz and Dever also impress. In some ways Annika is more grown up, yet more confused than Megan. They mentor one another, and Moretz brings real vulnerability to the role. Less vulnerable but way sassier is Dever’s Kaitlyn who embodies the eye rolling best friend in every teen movie.
The role of the grumpy father, and this case also love interest, is ably taken by Sam Rockwell. He’s stern but funny—he says Annika and Kaitlyn are “like gerbils; they have no sense of time.”—but never feels like a caricature. None of the characters do. The story may have some questionable moments but the characters don’t.
“Laggies” director Lynn Shelton has a deft touch with characters—as witnessed in her other films “Humpday” and “Your Sister’s Sister”—but has relied a bit too heavily on rom-com conventions. It’s a satisfying movie, it’s too bad it settles for a standard ending.
At the beginning of “The Equalizer,” a remake of the cult 1980s television show, Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) pontificates on “The Old Man and the Sea,” summing up Hemingway’s take on human nature.
“The old man gotta be the old man,” he says. “The fish gotta be the fish. Got to be who you are in this world no matter what.”
Of course this is a movie, so he’s actually talking about himself and not Ernest’s adversarial fisherman.
Washington plays a home improvement store worker by day, righter of wrongs by night. He’s a former black ops commando trying to leave his violent ways in the past but just when he thought that part of his life was over, the Russian mob leans on him because he tried to protect a young woman (Chloë Grace Moretz) from her violent pimp.
When he singlehandedly wipes out the east coast wing of the Russian mob Teddy (Marton Csokas), an enforcer from Moscow arrives to put an end to McCall’s one man search for justice.
“The Equalizer” is more elegant than Liam Neeson’s recent action movies but less viscerally satisfying. All the elements of Neeson’s Euro-trash thrillers are in place—tattooed bad guys and the “seasoned” hero with a “special set of skills”—but the pace is much slower.
The point of the story is that McCall equalizes situations, using his talents to help the down trodden but it takes about thirty minutes before any settling of scores happens. We meet McCall, learn about his orderly life—his shirts are immaculately pressed, he likes to read the classics and is particular about the placement of cutlery at his local diner—but we don’t learn anything about his past. He’s Denzel and ergo, a badass, but the first thirty minutes of this movie could have snapped things up a bit by illuminating his past.
The slow burn does build some tension, and by the time McCall unleashes hell on the Russia mobsters it comes as a bit of a catharsis. Now the movie is rolling! Except that it isn’t. It takes ages for McCall to open another can of whoop ass. Instead director Antoine Fuqua has elected to gradually build up to a wild showdown in a massive hardware store. Who knew those places were so dangerous? The climax is tense and inventive, apparently there is no home improvement device that cannot be turned into a WMD, but it is a more standard blockbuster-movie ending than you might expect from a movie so stingy with the action in the first hour.
It’s a good movie and Denzel is, as always, charismatic and interesting, but if “the old man gotta be the old man,” then “The Equalizer” gotta be more of an action movie to be completely satisfying.
In 2001 Denzel Washington won his first Best Actor Academy Award. The movie was Training Day and Washington’s performance as the corrupt Los Angeles Police Department narcotics officer Alonzo Harris established the actor’s propensity for playing ambiguous antiheroes.
Is there another A-list leading man who explores the dark side of his characters as often as Washington? Will Smith and Tom Cruise occasionally let the heroic side of their on-screen personas take a back seat, but Washington revels in mucking around in the mud. From Training Day to American Gangster, Safe House to Flight, he has crafted complex characters you wouldn’t want to sit next to on the bus.
This weekend he’s back as Robert McCall, home improvement store manager by day, equalizer of odds by night. Based on the cult 1980s television show The Equalizer starring Edward Woodward, the film begins with the former black ops commando trying to leave his violent ways in the past. He meets his greatest adversary just when he thought that part of his life was over. Namely, the Russian mob leans on him after he tries to protect a young woman (Chloë Grace Moretz) from her pimp.
No other superstar seems as comfortable with moral haziness as Washington. In American Gangster, for instance, he was Frank Lucas, the one-time driver for a Harlem mob boss who rose to the top of the drug world by flooding the streets of Manhattan with cheap, high-grade heroin smuggled into the United States in the coffins of dead soldiers returning from Vietnam. He’s a dichotomy — bloodthirsty and ruthless, but he also attends church every Sunday with his mother.
In Flight, he played troubled pilot Whip Whitaker, an anti-hero who is functional in day-to-day life despite his predilection for wine, women and cocaine. He’s charming one minute, enraged the next and passed out on the floor the minute after that. Washington manages to subtly capture the ego and hubris that allows Whitaker to present a sober face to the public while bringing us into the messy world of addiction.
The actor has played his share of assorted good guys over the years — Ricochet’s cop-turned-attorney and Don Pedro of Aragon in Much Ado About Nothing — but it is his willingness to mine the heroism of the nasty men he plays that makes him one of the most interesting A-listers.
In Chloë Grace Moretz ‘s new film “If I Stay,” she plays Mia, a gifted teenage cellist from a family of musicians. When a catastrophic accident throws her into a coma she has an out-of-body experience. The rest of the story is told from the perspective of her memories before the accident and in the present, as she observes, ghostlike, the aftermath of the car crash.
Based on bestselling novel by Gayle Forman “If I Stay” is a romance, a coming-of-age story and a supernatural family drama. That’s a whole lotta genres bumping heads, but director R.J. Cutler does an admirable job at balancing the elements. Using the book as the movie’s backbone, his approach is almost literary, as he treats each component like a chapter in a novel. He turns the pages, introducing each new twist, giving the audience time to adjust. What could have been a muddle is, instead, a living breathing thing, a story unafraid to wear its heart on its sleeve.
Juggling genres aside, the movie has a complicated flashback structure. When it’s not reflecting on the past the tale is told through Mia’s eyes, a young girl halfway between life and turning into a ghost. She must piece together the events of her day and decide whether she wants to go on or slip into a permanent sleep.
At the center of all this is Moretz, an actress who, over the course of a short but eventful career, has made a habit of playing introverted characters with rich lives swirling around them, and here, she delivers what may be her best performance yet. As Mia she is a talented teen just discovering a life beyond the cello that has been her constant companion since she was young. It’s a simple and uncluttered performance with a lot going on behind the eyes.
“If I Stay,” but its nature is melodramatic. It’s a study of life and loss, leaning heavily on the regret of building relationships only to see them disappear in the wink of an eye. Luckily Moretz’s subtle performance prevents the movie from becoming a soap opera of despair.
Seventeen-year-old Chloë Grace Moretz has played a young vampire in Let Me In, a would-be superhero in Kick Ass and cinema’s most famous telekinetic, Carrie. It’s a diverse group of roles, but Moretz says she can draw a straight line from character to character.
“They’re linear,” she says, “in the sense that they’re all strong characters. A lot of them are like me, the basis of them. They all have a big mountain in front of them but they are going to climb it and fight as hard as they can. The weakest character, but also the strongest character, I’ve played is Carrie. She is two different characters in one, so diverse and so dark. There is so much to learn from her.”
In her new film If I Stay, she plays Mia, a gifted teenage cellist from a family of musicians. When a catastrophic accident throws her into a coma, she has an out-of-body experience.
The rest of the story is told from the perspective of her memories before the accident and in the present, as she observes, ghostlike, the aftermath of the car crash.
The character appealed to her because she saw some of herself in Mia.
“She’s an introvert until she plays the cello and the cello brings her alive. It’s how I am. I’m pretty shy, unless I’m speaking about my job. I’m really shy around teenagers my age. Sometimes it’s because they judge me and it kind of scares me. Crowds scare me, teenagers scare me, new people. I get really quiet and awkward.”
With that insight, she hoped to make Mia true to the character created by author Gayle Forman in the bestselling book that inspired the movie.
“My biggest thing was making her honest to the book,” she says.
“I have been a fan of book series, and then I’ll see the movie and think, ‘That was such a let-down.’ I hate that feeling because for me, I want to be able to be a fan of my own work.”
The movie is a tear jerker, but Moretz says she doesn’t like it “when people chalk up a movie to being all about crying. I like to walk out of a movie feeling like I have learned something, that something’s changed.”
After seeing If I Stay, she hopes audiences “leave feeling they felt something. It is a really beautiful movie about life and death and happiness and sadness and music.
“It is a beautiful story — a moment in time that doesn’t really have any boundaries.”
People have been asking me about this movie for months but they haven’t been asking, ‘Is it good?, they’ve been asking me why anyone would remake the 1976 classic.
After seeing it, I’m not sure.
The new version is a perfectly serviceable adaptation of Stephen King’s famous book but it doesn’t have the vulnerability or frailty that made Sissy Spacek so memorable in the title role.
The third adaptation of Stephen King’s 1974 novel stars Chloë Grace Moretz as Maine high school outcast Carrie White, a lonely girl teased by classmates and abused by her deeply religious mother (Julianne Moore). Despite the best efforts of gym teacher Miss Desjardin (Judy Greer) to help Carrie fit in, a clique of mean girls led by Chris (Portia Doubleday) make it their mission to ensure that Carrie has a rough time at school. After being humiliated at her senior prom—pig’s blood will really ruin a taffeta dress apparently—she unleashes a terrible telekinetic vengeance on those who wronged her.
Director Kimberly ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ Pierce has been more or less faithful to the flow of the book and Brian De Palma’s movie, but there are differences.
Where Spacek was a true outsider, an abused, naïve girl, Moretz plays her with a bit more pluck and I’m not sure it services the character. Carrie 2.0 still has a sullen look for the ages but she has more backbone than her predecessor and for me that eroded some of the tragedy of the story. Both are Ugly Ducklings transformed into swans and then monsters, unwitting and undeserving victims of horrible abuse, but Spacek’s take on the character brought more vulnerability to the character and that, for me, better underlined her deeply sad story.
Moretz’s best scene happens before the bloody revenge rampage. There is a sweetness to her in the prom scenes (pre pig’s blood) that makes the anticipation of what is to come all the more tense. Too bad the rest of the movie doesn’t hold that tension. Also a mother and daughter knife battle made me shift to the front of my seat mostly because it felt more organic and less computer generated than some of the other displays of Carrie’s mad telekinetic skillz. It felt dangerous in a way that the rest of the violence didn’t.
Despite a slower-than-necessary pace, I liked Julianne Moore’s head thumping self-punishment scenes and Portia Doubleday’s take on the lead mean girl who takes just a bit too much delight in tormenting Carrie.
“Carrie” works in those moments, but generally there’s too much CGI—the floating books are silly—and since when can Carrie fly?
This weekend actress Chloë Grace Moretz will recreate one of the most famous sequences from 1970s cinema.
Years after the release of the 1976 Brian De Palma-directed Carrie, the movie’s impact was summed up by Esquire who wrote, “Like any top-tier, truly unforgettable scene in cinema [it’s] so well-known that you don’t even have to see it to know it.”
The image of the teenaged Carrie (Sissy Spacek), the victim of a cruel practical joke, dressed in her best Prom Queen outfit, wide eyed as pig’s blood covers her, dripping from the fake jewels on her tiara, has been referenced in everything from the sitcom Roseanne—daughter Darlene says the only way she would go to the prom is if she was the one sitting in the rafters with a bucket of pig’s blood—to the X-Files, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Scream, Gilmore Girls and even Veronica Mars.
The gore soaked scene also provided the inspiration for a sequel called The Rage: Carrie 2. In this unintentionally funny b-movie Rachel (Emily Bergl) is another high-schooler with the ability to make objects fly and explode with her mind. “Do not attempt to sit through this movie without a hefty supply of psychopharmaceutical drugs,” warned one critic.
Marginally better was Carrie, a 2002 television film meant to serve as a pilot for a proposed series. But that involved making some sweeping changes to the plot, including having Carrie survive the high school carnage and final run-in with her unstable mother. Bad reviews and poor ratings doomed this to the DVD delete bins.
From the screen to the stage Carrie provided the source material for an ill-conceived 1988 Broadway musical and several spoofs, including Scarrie! The Musical and Carrie’s Facts of Life, a mash-up of Stephen King’s story and the sitcom The Facts of Life.
All singing, all dancing versions of Carrie’s humiliation aside, the original film remains a horror touchstone, but don’t expect the new remake to be a carbon copy.
“The script is totally different from the [original],” Moretz told ET OnLine. “It’s more like the book. It’s a more Black Swan version – it messes with your mind.”
One thing is for sure, there will be blood—pig’s blood. Judy Greer, who plays Miss Desjardin in the new film, says the prom scene is “amazeballs,” adding, “It’s really totally jarring and creepy but also in a strange way gorgeous.”
Three years ago I described the original “Kick-Ass” movie as what it would be like, “If Quentin Tarantino made a kid’s coming-of-age movie… It has most of his trademarks—clever dialogue, good soundtrack and some high-octane violence—but there’s a twist. The bloodiest, most cut throat purveyor of ultra violence in the film is an eleven year old girl.”
It was most certainly not your average superhero flick. Instead it was a subversive story that allowed superheroes to leap off the pages of comic books and unto the streets of the real (ish) world.
Question is, does the sequel, well, kick ass as much as the original?
In the new film begins just weeks after the last one ended. Wannabe crime fighters Dave/Kick-Ass (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Monday/Hit Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) have hung up their capes but for different reasons. “It was way to dangerous,” says Dave. The only problem? Now he’s bored.
Mindy only quits when her guardian Detective Marcus Williams (Morris Chestnut) makes her promise she’ll stop wearing her Hit Girl suit and beating the tar out of bad guys.
They soon discover straight life isn’t for them when Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) turns supervillain—and gives himself a new name I can’t print here and a costume that resembles a glam rock getup circa 1973—vowing to take his revenge on Kick-Ass for the death of his father. Mindy mostly keeps her promise but Dave dons his suit and teams with Colonel Stars and Stripes (Jim Carrey), an ex-mobster who leads a gang of Kick-Ass inspired vigilantes.
Following a blood soaked climax superhero Dr. Gravity (“Scrubs’” Donald Faison) says, “You know, we can never do that again,” to his crime fighting colleagues as police sirens blare. By that point in the movie, however, one secretly hopes he was talking to director Jeff Wadlow, who took interesting source material and shaped it into a violent, nasty and mean spirited sequel.
The satirical shock value of the first movie is spent, replaced by less-than-subtle observations on life inside and out of a high school clique, loyalty and a heaping of teenage drama. Oh, and don’t forget the gallons of fake blood.
Moretz is still entertaining and Taylor-Johnson has clearly been spending some time at the gym, but unfortunately their movie, despite the name, does not kick ass.
