Angry corrupt cops who “bleed blue” and speak with heavy Brooklyn accents are nothing new at the movies. We’ve seen them for years, decades even, in everything from Serpico to last year’s We Own the Night. The trick to keeping audience interest is to add in some new elements to shake up the old formula. Pride and Glory, written by the son of a cop and starring Edward Norton and Colin Farrell, attempts this by telling a multi-generational story of a family of policemen.
Ray and Francis Tierney (Noah Emmerich and Norton respectively) are New York police officers at very different stages of their careers. Francis, like his father and namesake (Jon Voight) before him, is a well thought of commanding officer, while Ray, a former hotshot, now a traumatized ex-street cop, is currently riding a desk at Missing Persons. At the urging of his father Ray is lured away from the relative safety of his desk to investigate the murder of four cops at a failed drug bust. When Ray’s investigation leads him to believe that his brother and brother-in-law (Colin Farrell) may be involved he is forced to choose between his family and his brothers in blue.
Pride and Glory doesn’t reinvent the wheel, and even the intergenerational twist isn’t that new—just ask James Gray, the director and screenwriter for We Own the Night—but it does a good job of presenting the moral quandary that arises when telling the truth is going to have serious consequences for the ones you love.
Ed Norton convincingly portrays Ray’s conundrum. He’s a bubbling caldron of bile that threatens to boil over at any moment, and if you’re Colin Farrell you might not like him when he’s angry. Norton expertly conveys anger, confusion and remorse often in the same scene. It’s a nicely calibrated performance that is better than the rest of the movie.
If you could describe Norton’s performance as finely tuned then only the opposite can be said of Farrell’s work. As dirty cop Jimmy Egan he is kind of one note, but it’s a good note. He plays the out-of-control cop as a delightfully unhinged man who will do anything—including menacing a baby with a piping hot iron—to get what he wants. It’s a performance that borders on camp, but Farrell keeps it on the right side of the line and his passion adds some much needed gusto to the film’s slower scenes.
Jon Voight, Noah Emmerich and the rest of the cast hand in solid performances, although there’s nothing nearly as memorable as Farrell’s wild ride.
In many ways Pride and Glory is little more than a slightly above average cop drama, but its willingness to splash around in the grey areas of cop morality and loyalty plus the commanding performances of Norton and Farrell earn it a recommendation.
There have been many movies about writer’s block. Screenwriters love to write about the affliction that affects everyone who puts fingers to keyboard for a living. So Martin McDonagh, the writer director of “Seven Psychopaths,” isn’t treading new ground here, but he does it entertainingly and with way more guns than you usually find in movies about writers.
Colin Farrell is Marty, an alcoholic screenwriter whose mental state hovers somewhere between depression and suicide. Blocked, he can’t seem to get past the title of his latest screenplay, “Seven Psychopaths.” Trying to pull him out of his funk, his (not always) helpful friend Billy (Sam Rockwell) places an ad in the newspaper asking for certified psychopaths to contact Marty. In exchange for their stories, he might make them famous in the movie. Meantime Billy is working a side job with Hans (Christopher Walken), stealing dogs only to “rescue” them for the reward money. The scheme puts all of them in contact with Charlie (Woody Harrelson), a sensitive psychopath who cries at the thought of his lost dog, but doesn’t mind killing people to get it returned.
As you might imagine from a movie titled “Seven Psychopaths,” there is a great deal of antisocial behavior on display. It’s occasionally gruesome—heads are detached from their bodies, throats are cut—but it is the performance style that you’ll notice. Rockwell has rarely been this twitchy, but it mostly works, and Farrell and Harrelson bring considerable charisma to their roles, but it is Walken who is memorable.
Everybody loves Walken, and there’s no denying he fills the screen, but his idiosyncratic vocal mannerisms are so exaggerated here it’s almost as if you are watching someone do an impression of the actor, rather than the real thing. He’s entertaining, but his performance here is just inches away from self-parody.
In a way that’s appropriate for a film that is so inward looking. McDonagh has taken all the bits and pieces of thriller and turned them on their heads. Early on Marty says he doesn’t want his screenplay to be “about guys with guns in their hands,” sending an indication that the film-idea-within-the-film may be telegraphing the action (or lack thereof) that we’re about to see.
The film subverts its own story to make ironic comments on the collaborative nature of filmmaking when not all the creative agree on the story’s direction, plot structure and role of women in action movies, (“You can’t let the animals die in movies, just the women.”). It almost works except that the cleverness of the idea—making an anti-movie—feels a bit labored in the final third of the film.
“Seven Psychopaths” gets lost in its own idea, but only temporarily. What’s left is solid fun.
For years philosophers have contemplated the question, “Who am I?” “Total Recall,” a remake of the 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie starring the less muscled Colin Farrell, asks the same thing, but does so with guns, three breasted women and explosions galore.
Set in a dystopian world where most of the world is uninhabitable, Farrell plays a troubled factory worker desperate to escape a life of grinding drudgery. Without telling his wife (Kate Beckinsale) he goes to Rekall Corp. to have a virtual vacation. They sell implanted memories, like videogames for the mind. But something goes wrong and soon our hero is thrown into a deadly world of intrigue where he can’t be sure what is real and what isn’t.
The original “Total Recall” was simultaneously beaten up on release for its level of violence and praised for its complex story. The same can’t be said for the remake. The body count is still high, but the story plays more like a high tech version of “The Fugitive” than a sci fi mind bender.
It’s a bit obvious in its set-up. Characters say things like, “Are you actually happy with the way your life turned out?” as Farrell grimaces and mulls over a memory implant and the scene breakdown goes something like this: exposition – action – more exposition – EXPLOSION! – gobbledygook – action – action – kiss – action – stare into the camera – kiss #2 – closing credits.
But having said that it works pretty well as a chase movie set against a “Blade Runner” backdrop. Farrell is much more of an everyman than the cartoony Arnold, but is convincing as he runs and jumps, shoots and stabs. Which is good because that’s essentially all this movie is. The sci fi falls flat, but the afore mentioned running, jumping, shooting and stabbing attempts to keep the eye occupied, even if the brain isn’t.
Your humor center won’t be stimulated either. Between scenes of carnage the original had some funny moments to break the tension. The legendary three-breasted hooker raised a smile, for instance, but this movie is more po-faced, taking itself a bit too seriously while intoning standard action movie lines like, “You really know how to pick ‘em.”
You can also tell this is a big American action movie when the camera luxuriates over people getting blown up, innocent bystanders being mowed down and explosions! explosions! explosions! while the one glimpse of nudity is dispensed of within 2 seconds. This movie clearly values bullets over breasts.
One thing the new movie does better is hand over roles to women. The original reduced its female characters to set decoration, whereas Kate Beckinsale and Jessica Biel are given meaty, action packed parts. Beckinsale uses all he tricks she learned on the “Underworld” movies, kicking butt and taking names in very scene she’s in, and while Biel won’t need to wake up early on Academy Award day, she hands a physically energetic performance.
What this reimagining of “Total Recall” lacks—that would be imagination—it more than makes up in visceral thrills and action.
“Dead Man Down,” the new film from WWE Studio, has something for everyone. It’s a new genre that mixes a revenge drama with a romantic subplot—complete with sweeping violin accompaniment. I suppose it is an action flick for the guys with just enough romance to make it a date movie as well, but a revenge drama from WWE Studios should be about violence, not violins.
Niels Arden Oplev, the director of the original “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” blends together these two unlikely genres—is this a romrev; a romantic revenge?—to tell the story of Victor (Colin Farrell), the right hand man to Alphonse Hoyt, a notorious crime lord played by Terence Howard. For months Hoyt has been receiving strange, threatening letters. When a close associate turns up dead with a note clenched in his fist and part of a picture stuffed in his mouth, Hoyt lashes out, leading his men on the first of the film’s wild shoot outs.
Thus begins a twisty-turny story of revenge involving Victor, Alphonse, a group of Albanian thugs and Beatrice (Noomi Rapace), a former beautician whose face was disfigured in a drunk driving accident.
To tell you anything about the nature of the revenge would take some of the punch away from the movie. Characters are driven to extremes by the kind of dark forces that only seem to happen in movies, as they concoct elaborate plots to get even with those who did them wrong. Just a hint, rat-o-phobes might want to avoid a late plot development.
Farrell brings his usual brooding intensity to the role of Victor, Rapace’s exotic, otherworldly presence nicely compliments the film’s off-kilter feel—you wouldn’t expect the girl with the dragon tattoo to play a passive girlfriend role and she doesn’t, up to a point—and Oplev supplies atmospherics to burn, but the movie’s tale of revenge simply isn’t sturdy enough to hold the whole thing together.
Plot holes big enough for Andre the Giant to walk through (this is, after all produced by World Wrestling Entertainment) are hard to swallow and the romantic elements sand some of the edge off the gritty story.
“Dead Man Down” is a genre movie with one too many genres to fully succeed.
Quentin Tarantino has said the sign of a good film is that it makes you want to go home, eat some pie and talk about it. With that in mind, our Popcorn Panel features film buffs feuding in this space each week.
THIS WEEK’S PANEL:
– Craig Courtice, a short filmmaker who isn’t very tall
– Richard Crouse, host of Rogers Television’s Reel to Real, Canada’s longest-running movie review show, and the author of The 100 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen (ECW Press, 2003). His Web site is www.richardcrouse.ca
– Jason Chow, a TV columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and axe man for pop rockers The Good Soldiers (www.myspace.com/thegoodsoldiers)
THIS WEEK’S PIE: Key Lime
THIS WEEK’S SUBJECT: Miami Vice
CRAIG: Vice is like a drug bust gone wrong. That’s not to say it’s not an interesting picture; all the parts are here, it’s just that they don’t add up. Literally, there is no way Michael Mann’s latest will make back its US$125-million budget at the box office. Sure, it opened in first place last weekend with just over US$25-million. But that’s about the same number Collateral, Mann’s previous effort, opened at during the summer of 2004. That movie ended up with just over US$100-million in ticket sales, but cost only US$65-million to make. Vice won’t even make it that high, and here’s why.
1) Collateral featured studio golden boy Tom Cruise playing against type as a villain. People wanted to see Scientology’s mouthpiece get killed, even if it was only his character. Vice stars Colin Farrell, who has never proved himself as a big draw. The most popular film he was in was Minority Report (US$132-million), in which he played second fiddle to Cruise.
2) Jamie Foxx is in both pictures, but while he played a cab driver with a heart of gold forced into action in Collateral, here he plays Ricardo Tubbs, a mean mutha vice cop who already got the girl.
3) Collateral was a high-concept movie with a Crash-like ending in which everything ties up neatly. Vice drops you immediately into the headspace of a south Florida undercover police officer, which means lots of adrenaline, but also lots of disorientation and tedium.
RICHARD: Wow, Craig, I’m guessing you were disappointed by the movie. I agree with you that the individual parts of Vice don’t seem to add up to much — the lead actors have little chemistry, the story is unoriginal, convoluted and borders on not making much sense — but the beauty of the movie is in the telling, not the story itself. Mann makes cool-looking movies. Unlike the television show, the movie is dark, grainy and jumpy. He has turned the Sunshine State’s emblematic city into a dark, menacing paradise where the good guys don’t always win and the bad guys don’t completely lose.
JASON: Dark and menacing, sure, but you can’t just categorically exclude sunshine and heat when you’re in Florida. The film is stylish, indeed, but Mann’s relentless intent on making a noirish antithesis to the TV series made the movie so one-dimensional that things got left by the wayside, like, as Craig said, character and story. To that list, I’d add location — the film could have been shot anywhere (e.g. Los Angeles). I expected an in-depth look at Miami-as-faux-paradise, but instead all I learned is that the town’s an hour’s speedboat ride away from Havana. Chico, Scarface is more Miami than Vice.
CRAIG: Like Alonzo, the informant played with harrowing elan by Deadwood’s John Hawkes, you two have been set up. I actually thought the picture was an excellent piece of art. I was just pointing out that it will be a bitter disappointment for fans expecting an easy blockbuster. The International Movie Database user rating, for example, is only 6.3 out of ten.
But on to a new topic. Scott Holleran of Boxofficemojo.com writes of Vice: “this dark, grainy picture needs subtitles to be understood. That’s not just because actress Gong Li (Crockett’s love interest) struggles with the English language in each scene, though that is a problem. As an Asian stereotype, she juts her head like a 16-year-old gangbanger flashing signs at the mall.” Normally, I’d just ignore this as the ramblings of some hack, but the criticism shows up in many reviews. News to the English-speaking press: Most people in the world don’t speak your language as their mother tongue. Is Mann trying to say something with this casting choice or was it a mistake?
RICHARD: Was casting a beautiful, talented actress in a major role a mistake? I don’t think so. Her performance oozes sensuality and the obvious age difference between Gong and Farrell makes their relationship even more interesting. Usually Hollywood tries to sell the idea that it’s perfectly normal for ancient, wrinkled men to date young women, but casting Gong turns that idea on its head, although she is far from ancient and wrinkled.
My issue is not with the casting, but with the underuse of other actors. Mann has assembled a great cast — Foxx, Ciaran Hinds, Justin Theroux, to name a few –and given them very little to do other than brood. Farrell shines, in an unshaven kind of way, because at least his character has some spunk. He gives a performance of mock seriousness that sometimes borders on camp, barking his tough-guy lines in a way that would knock the pastel off the original Crockett. Don Johnson’s Crockett was unhappy and angry, but in this movie seems to have turned his life around. Now he’s angry and unhappy.
JASON: The problem isn’t Gong; the problem is the premise of her character: A pseudo-femme fatale who is the child of a diplomatic translator from Angola who somehow is hooked up with a Castro look-alike drug mogul with whom she communicates in stilted English while reading the business sections of Spanish newspapers? I admit I made the same comments about subtitles after I left the theatre. I had to strain to hear some of the lines uttered by the ESL actors. That said, Mann deserves credit for attempting to cast a global village for his movie — not because I believe in affirmative action but because he’s breaking out of the regular Hollywood racial cliches. Crockett and Tubbs aren’t the only multi-ethnic working couple in play here; bad guys can be racially cool, too.
Unpopped kernels
National Post
Published: Friday, August 04, 2006
First Tom Arnold in McHale’s Navy now Miami Vice. The boys broach the best and worst of movie adaptations of TV shows and make the case for programs that haven’t been given the big-screen treatment. (Hint: Mr. T, we’re ready for your closeup)
Craig: It appears for better or worse that movie adaptations of TV show are here to stay. Compared to such winners as Bewitched, and the Tom Arnold-in-a-sea-captain’s-outfit McHale’s Navy, Miami Vice looks like a masterpiece. Are there any other adaptations you would make the case for that worked (Starsky & Hutch?)? More importantly what shows haven’t been done that you would like to see? My choice is The A Team — and pronto while Mr. T can still reprise his role as B.A. Baracus. In lieu of the deceased George Peppard I suggest another suave George for Colonel “Hannibal” Smith. “If you have a problem and no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the Clooney…” Cue the best theme song in TV history!
Richard: The leap from the small to big screen is usually quite painful, although when the people involved in the television show are left in the loop the results can be OK. I thought the South Park movie worked well and the recent sci-fi film Serenity was actually better than the show it was based on, Firefly. In both cases the guiding hands on the movies had also created and directed the television shows. The most prolific of the television based movies, the Star Trek series, really has only two winners out of the bunch — Wrath of Khan and First Contact, both of which were based on stories that originated on the small screen (Space Seed, and Best of Both Worlds). But for every Untouchables that works, there’s a S*W*A*T that sucks the life out of its source material. For every Fugitive, there’s a Dragnet — you get the idea. They are the ying and yang of television-to-film adaptations.
Craig wants to see The A-Team revived. I’m not so sure. I survived that one as a youth and I’m not sure I’m up to it again. I’d rather see Bosom Buddies, starring Eddie Izzard and the guy that played Angel in Rent. Or maybe WKRP with Paris Hilton as Jennifer Marlowe, Bart the Bear as Mr. Carlson and an IKEA swivel chair as Johnny Fever. Actually I’d rather see someone in Hollywood flick off the TV and come up with an original idea.
Chow: The studios are apparently working on a movie adaptation of Knight Rider with David Hasselhoff reprising his character, Michael Knight, and KITT, once again, as the rational talking car. According to IMDb.com, it’s slated for 2008 release, but keep in mind this project has been in the making for four years and no script has been agreed upon just yet, so sit tight, boys. As for past remakes, I thought the Brady Bunch was fantastic and Starsky & Hutch was pure turkey. My vote for a movie adaptation: Rockford Files. Starring, of course, George Clooney.
“The Walk Back,” a new drama from “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World’ director Peter Weir, is a sprawling epic with a very personal focus. Set against the backdrop of war, inhumanity and an almost insurmountable challenge, it is about that most personal of things, survival.
Based on a controversial memoir written by Slavomir Rawicz, “The Way Back” begins with Polish solider Janusz (Jim Sturgess) sent to a hellish Siberian gulag in 1941 on trumped up charges. Sentenced to ten years—a term he knows he won’t survive—he and a group of prisoners, including a grizzled American soldier (Ed Harris) and a violent Russian criminal (Colin Farrell) make a break for it. Their goal? Freedom. The obstacle? A 4000 kilometer walk through the harsh terrain of Mongolia, China and Tibet on the way to India and a new life. Along the way they pick up one more traveler, a young girl (Saoirse Ronan) whose camaraderie helps bond the ragtag band of escapees.
Visually Weir and cinematographer Russell Boyd have created a film in which the surroundings really become as much a part of the fabric of the story as the characters. The breathtaking shots of the terrain the travelers pass through add much to the story, emphasizing the isolation and hardship of the journey. Their choice to showcase the backgrounds echoes David Lean and gives the film an epic feel as the story narrows and focuses on the characters.
The acting is uniformly excellent, with Ed Harris and Colin Farrell handing in tremendous work, but the most memorable performance belongs to Saoirse Ronan, the sixteen-year-old Irish actress. Here she plays an orphan whose enthusiasm and spirit gives the men the will to go on. She brings heart to a film that occasionally is a bit dour for its own good.
“The Way Back” is compelling stuff, a nicely painted portrait of the will to outwit, outlast and outplay against all odds.
In “Crazy Heart” Bad Blake, played by Jeff Bridges in what will likely become his fifth Oscar nomination, is Willie Nelson if the IRS had their way with him, or Kris Kristofferson if he hadn’t written “Me and Bobby McGee.” “I used to be somebody,” he sings at one point, “but now I’m somebody else.” That someone else is a broke, drunk country music has-been whose idea of a great gig is playing a bowling alley where he isn’t even allowed to run a bar tab.
In a story that echoes “The Wrestler” “Crazy Heart” follows the tail end of the career of a man who once had everything but threw it away. Bad Blake was a big country music star whose life seems ripped from the lyrics of a hurtin’ Hank Williams song. On the road he’s so lonely he could die, so he fills his time with groupies; women who follow him back to his seedy hotel room, remembering the star he once was and not the sweaty, drunk wreck he has become. His downward spiral is slowed when he meets Jean Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a journalist and single mother who becomes his anchor.
“Crazy Heart” is an average movie buoyed by a great central performance. We’ve seen stories like this before but Bridges’s performance and the film’s details make this a recommend.
First the details. As a general rule most movies about fictional musicians get the most basic thing wrong—the music. Forgettable songs have ruined many a music movie but “Crazy Heart” and composers T-Bone Burnett and Stephen Bruton (who died of cancer before the film was released) nail an authentic country sound. The songs sound Grand Ole Opry ready and once filtered through Bridges’s weathered vocal chords could be echoes from any small town honky tonk or dive bar. It’s hurtin’ music and is spot on.
Beyond the music there are the small details that add so much to the film. There are the nice shards of dialogue like Bad’s flirty remark to Jean as they do an interview in a dingy motel room, “I want to talk about how bad you make this room look” and the accurate portrayal of small town bars and bowling alleys.
It all helps to elevate the predictable story, but none of it would matter a whit if Jeff Bridges wasn’t firmly in control. His Bad Blake is pure outlaw country, a hard drinking and cigarette smoking poet who breathes the same air as Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggart. Bridges throws his vanity out the window, allowing his gut to peak out from behind his guitar and wrinkles to peer out from the sides of his aviators. More than that, however, he nails the troubled charm that made Bad a star and then brought him to his knees. It’s complex work but Bridges, with his smooth, relaxed way with a character makes it look easy. Don’t be fooled; this is the work of a master who is often underrated.
“Crazy Heart” has some major flaws but is worth a look for the performances from Bridges, Gyllenhaal (although she seems a tad young for the part) and Colin Farrell in a small un-credited part as Bad’s former protégé.
This weekend a remake of the 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger sci fi favorite Total Recall hits screens with Colin Farrell replacing the Governator. Unlike the original, Farrell is more mental than muscles, but like its predecessor it is a story about memories, some real, some implanted. The movie asks the question, Is anything real, or are we watching the memory Farrell ordered?
Memory is an intangible, a mental process to attain, amass, remember and retrieve information. Not exactly the most cinematic subject, but nonetheless filmmakers have used memory as the backbone for movies for decades.
Most memory movies use amnesia as a starting point. The loss of memory propels the plot of the Hitchcock classic Spellbound. Gregory Peck plays a man whose guilt at the death of his younger brother causes amnesia. The movie broke box office records when it opened but Hitchcock dismissed it as “just another manhunt wrapped up in pseudo-psychoanalysis.”
Who could forget Matt Damon as one of the most popular (and violent) amnesiacs of recent years? In the Bourne Identity he is Jason Bourne, a CIA operative who loses his memory while on a mission. As he tries to regain his memory, he discovers he has a unique and deadly skill set. As he brings his past into focus, he doesn’t like what he discovers. “Everything I found out,” her says, “I want to forget.”
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind presented a different take on memory loss. In this strange and romantic Jim Carrey (he also once played an amnesic in The Majestic) movie people pay to have painful memories erased from their minds.
Short-term memory loss has provided the backdrop for comedies like the world’s only brain-damage-rom-com, 50 First Dates—Adam Sandler woos Drew Barrymore even tough she forgets who he is everyday—and complex thrillers like Memento.
Directed by Christopher Nolan, Memento stars Guy Pearce as a man with short-term memory loss, who uses notes and tattoos to hunt the person he’s convinced killed his wife. “Facts, not memories,” he says, “that’s how you investigate.” This brain-teasing film is deliberately disorienting and cannot be forgotten once seen.
Finally, two romantic and sad movies explore Alzheimer’s disease. The Notebook pairs James Garner and Gena Rowland in a heartbreaking study of love and memory loss while Away From Her sees Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent long term marriage torn apart by the disease.
