By default “Our Kind of Traitor” will probably be listed under the “thriller” section on Netflix and elsewhere simply because it was written by spymaster John le Carré but don’t be fooled. Labelling this Ewan McGregor film a thriller simply because of le Carré’s involvement is like calling “One Hour Photo” because Robin Williams took the lead.
McGregor and Naomie Harris are Perry Makepeace and Gail Perkins, an English couple on romantic holiday in Marrakesh. When she leaves him alone in a restaurant Perry meets flamboyant Russian oligarch Dima (Stellan Skarsgård) who takes the uptight poetry professor to a wild party resembling something out of a Fellini film. Inside a large mansion half naked women ride horseback and there’s enough drugs and booze to make Keith Richard do a double take. It’s a wild night that goes on until the sun rises, followed by a tennis match at Dima’s expansive villa.
Perry and Gail meet Dima’s family and nothing seems too odd until later that night at a cocktail party when the Russian asks Perry to smuggle a flash drive filled with very sensitive banking information to London. Turns out Dima is a money launderer whose usefulness to the mob has come to an end. He fears they may kill him and his family and his way out is to get the flash drive to the MI6 in return for safe passage to England.
Sounds like a plan until MI6 agent Hector (Damian Lewis) is less than entirely enthusiastic about the whole situation. Thus begins the intrigue, what little there is of it here, with Perry channelling his inner James Bond to become a Citizen Spy.
From buttoned down poetry professor to le Carré hero in a matter of days. It’s a leap, a gaping chasm even, which requires a well-oiled suspension of disbelief. The main problem is that the movie doesn’t offer up many clues as to why this couple would risk everything to come to the aid of a man they barely know. It’s a well-worn cinematic staple, the everyman as hero, but here it falls flat.
“I’ve BLEEPED up your life Professor,” says Dima. “Why are you still here?”
This would have been a good time for screenwriter Hossein Amini to offer up some kind of rational explanation as to why Perry has laid it all on the line. Instead we get this: “I’ve no idea.”
The rest of “Our Kind of Traitor” is about as riveting as that answer. Skarsgård’s boisterous performance is worth a look and Lewis is multi-layered enough to carry the whole thing but they are inexplicably pushed to the background behind the bland leads.
“I was born. I went to New York. I made some music. Did some dope and made some more music and you showed up at my door,” says Miles Davis (Don Cheadle) to journalist Dave Brill (Ewan McGregor). Of course, if that were all there was to the story “Miles Ahead” wouldn’t be much of a film. Luckily director, co-writer and star Cheadle fleshes out the story of one of the twentieth century’s greatest but most troubled musicians in a biopic that defies expectations. Expected: drug use and sublime music. Less expected: a car chase and shoot out.
We meet Davis as he seems to have reached the “more profitable dead than alive” stretch of his career. At the end of the five-year hiatus from music, and the world, the trumpeter is holding new session tapes hostage until his record company Columbia pays him $20,000.
Brill hopes to get the inside scoop on the Howard Hughes of jazz but isn’t above making a deal with Columbia to steal the tapes from Davis’s home. Instead the tapes or stolen by an enterprising music manager (Michael Stuhlbarg) who seizes the opportunity to make some cash off of Davis notoriety. This sets off a string of events that underscores the movie’s central theme, the idea that Miles cared more about music than his life.
Woven throughout are flashbacks to Davis’s early life, how he found fame and Frances (Emayatzy Corinealdi), the woman who would change his life. The tortured artist scenes that make up the bulk of the film are the most interesting for obvious reasons, but the backstory fill in the gaps, explaining why and how he became the man he did. Undone by police brutality, long-lost love, drugs, ego, women, infidelities and health issues Davis emerges as a textbook example of an artist who channelled his restless, self destructive personality into beautiful, ground breaking music.
“If you’re going to tell the story tell it was some attitude,” says Davis. “Don’t be coy.”
“Miles Ahead” is anything but coy. It’s not quite as wild as Davis or his music, but Cheadle mixes and matches various periods from Davis’s life to paint an impressionistic portrait of the man, warts and all. He builds a complete picture, showing Davis on his highest highs and lowest lows. There isn’t much insight into the nuts and bolts of how Davis actually created his music. The creative process remains a mystery but we do get the biographical details that shed light on a troubled life.
There are dozens of biographies on Johnny Depp and a surprising amount of them use the word “rebel” in the title. There’s the Passionate Rebel, the Modern Rebel and even Hollywood’s Best-Loved Rebel.
There can be no argument that Depp is a fearless actor, unafraid to tackle tough, challenging roles, but it’s hard to accept the rebel title these days. For 20 years, he wildly threw darts at the wall, making exciting movies with interesting directors.
With Tim Burton, he created the off-kilter Eds — Wood and Scissorhands. With John Waters, he produced Wade Walker, the greaser love interest in Cry-baby. And, with Lasse Hallström, he came up with Gilbert Grape, caregiver to his brother and morbidly obese mother.
Along the way, he was also Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the world’s most successful drug dealer in Blow, and the depraved poet at the dark heart of The Libertine.
Few actors could have pulled off Ed Wood and no one does debauched like Johnny, but the carefully cultivated hip outsider image was never truly accurate. Shrouded in a cloud of Gauloise smoke, he was one of Hollywood’s too-cool-for-school kids, emitting an outsider’s aura, while astutely playing the Hollywood game.
But any remaining traces of Depp’s bohemian status were wiped away with Captain Jack Sparrow’s colourful scarves in the tetralogy of Pirates of the Caribbean movies. They made him a superstar, and wealthy enough to buy Bahamian islands, but also ushered in the damaging wig and makeup era of his career.
The pale makeup of Dark Shadows, Alice in Wonderland’s crazy oversized hat, and the raven headdress of The Lone Ranger overshadowed Depp’s performances, obscuring his character work with props and flash.
This weekend, he hides behind a moustache in the comedy Mortdecai.
As the title character, he’s pompous, bumbling — imagine Inspector Clouseau with an English accent and an attitude — and on a worldwide hunt for a painting said to contain the code to a lost bank account.
Will people be attracted to Mortdecai? Hard to know. Depp’s showy performances have, by-and-large, garnered big box office but profitability, while important to the suits who green light projects like this, is exactly what’s killing Depp’s credibility as a serious actor.
He’s not in Nicolas Cage territory yet — there’s an actor whose Western Kabuki style of acting redefines idiosyncratic — but with Pirates of the Caribbean 5 coming soon, perhaps it’s time to put Depp’s rebel actor image or reliance on props to bed.
Beware The Quirk! The Killer of Careers! The fearful beast is known to inhabit Southern California and frequently seen lurking in the Hollywood Hills. Easily recognizable by its overuse of make-up, strange facial hair and flamboyant dress, The Quirk lives off schtick and frequently speaks in a funny voice, seducing its victims—usually actors—with a siren song of bad jokes and vocal tics.
Johnny Depp has been outrunning The Quirk for years, narrowly missing the beast’s bony grip. Until now. The Quirk has finally claimed Depp, leaving behind a mass of exaggerated accents, silly walks, gapped teeth and lurid lip hair known as “Mortdecai.”
Based on “The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery” by Kyril Bonfiglioli, the movie stars Depp in the title role as a wealthy art dealer with a taste for the finer things in life, an obsessive habit of grooming his facial hair and a nearly empty bank account. He’s pompous, bumbling—imagine a jet-setting Inspector Clouseau with an English accent and an attitude—and on a worldwide hunt for a rare Goya painting said to contain the code to a lost bank account filled with Nazi gold. Along for the ride are Mortdecai’s his trusty cockney manservant Jock Strapp (Paul Bettany), Gwyneth Paltrow as Lady Johanna Mortdecai, Ewan McGregor as an MI5 agent and Jeff Goldblum as a “thick-fingered vulgarian.”
“Mortdecai” breathes the same air as “The Pink Panther” movies, with an added nod to the 1967 “Casino Royale,” an all-star heist movie most notable for featuring both Woody Allen and Orson Welles on the same marquee, but gets lightheaded when it comes to replicating the easy-breezy tone of those films. Capers flicks of a bygone era had a swingin’, hip feel of controlled chaos not overplayed farce but Depp is pedal-to-the-metal, quirking-it-up in a display completely without charm and worse, without wit. He sets the mood for the film—daft, overly mannered, arch and unfunny—and his preening feeds The Quirk, but leaves the audience hungry for laughs.
“Haywire,” a new action film from “Ocean’s 11” director Steven Soderbergh isn’t so much a movie as it is a showcase for the lithe athleticism of its star Gina Carano. Imagine an MMA match with a storyline and you get the idea.
Carano, the former champion mixed martial arts fighter, plays Mallory Kane, a mercenary who specializes in the dirty jobs that governments like to freelance out. Her idea of relaxation is “a glass of wine and gun maintenance.” Following a successful hostage rescue in Barcelona her handler Kenneth (Ewan McGregor) dispatches her to Dublin. There she teams with an MI5 operative (Michael Fassbender) only to discover she has been double-crossed. Angry, she Muay Thai’s herself back to the United States searching for clues and revenge.
Does the story mater? Nope. Not one bit. It’s the usual medium to complicated undercover spy tale—the kind that wraps up all the loose ends with a bit of exposition and some well chosen flashbacks at the end—but you don’t go to see “Haywire” for the story.
The movie is at it’s best when Carano is on the move, running, jumping, and kicking the snot out of her opponents. Soderbergh tosses in an action scene every ten minutes or so, but the violence here feels different. Sure necks get broken and people get shot in the face but unlike most action flicks Soderbergh doesn’t amp up the sound to go along with the punches, kicks and gunshots. Many films exaggerate the combat noises to add excitement, “Haywire” doesn’t. It trusts the fight choreography and because the violence isn’t particularly cartoony it doesn’t need to be juiced up.
The fights feel authentic—no CGI, few stunt people—a testament to Carano’s obvious fighting skills and Soderbergh’s wise decision to underplay the violence.
“Haywire” feels like a grrrl power version of a mid-80s Jean-Claude Van Damme movie. Of course it is elevated by the presence of actors like Fassbender, Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas and Bill Paxton but at its heart it is a scrappy action movie that would play best in drive-ins and grindhouses.
Naomi Watts has battled Japanese spirits and domesticated a twenty-five foot tall ape, but in “The Impossible” she confronts a natural disaster she can’t tame—the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami which devastated fourteen countries bordering the Indian Ocean, claiming 230,000 lives.
Watts and Ewan McGregor are Henry and Maria, Japan-based-Brits who travel to Thailand for Christmas with their three kids Lucas (Tom Holland), Simon (Oaklee Pendergast) and Thomas (Samuel Joslin). Relaxing at a tony beachside resort, mom is lounging by the pool reading a book while dad splashes around with the kids. Suddenly a wave the height of an office building comes inland, destroying everything in its path and separating the family who float in different directions during the melee.
The first hour focuses on Maria and Lucas as they try and reach safety before switching gears to henry’s search for his wife and son.
In the immediate aftermath of the wave there isn’t much dialogue, just intense scenes of survival. Director Juan Antonio Bayona takes his time, really showing the immense power of the wave as it sweeps people, cars and even houses aside. It is harrowing stuff that hammers home the absolute helplessness of being in a situation governed by Mother Nature.
The second part of the story is more conventional, though still potent. Henry’s search for his wife is the stuff of action films, but McGregor brings some highly charged emotion to what could have been a standard against-all-odds scenario.
McGregor is good, but it is the kids and Watts that stick. As a mother who presses through injury to get her son to safety Watts is raw and real. It’s a great performance that will likely get recognized in award season.
The kids, particularly Holland as eldest Lucas, are naturals, and guaranteed to tug at your heartstrings. Bring a towel to soak up the tears.
“The Impossible” is more than simply the story of the tsunami or the family, it is about humanity’s ability to pull together in times of crisis; of those moments when a small gesture, like a hug or a fresh shirt can make a world of difference. It’s about people at their best in the worst of situations, and even though the ending is a bit pat, it makes you believe that there can be happy coincidences even in chaos.
“The Men Who Stare at Goats” is the best movie with the worst name that we’ll likely see this year. Despite its silly title—which makes perfect sense in context of the movie, but will be a mystery to anyone unfamiliar with the story—this screwball George Clooney film has many serious points to make about the state of modern warfare, but does so with a healthy dose of satire.
Based on a story that is “more true than you think” it begins when journalist Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) uncovers a story about the New Earth Army, a secret psychic battalion of super soldiers sponsored by the US government in hopes of finding a new way to fight wars. The Pentagon wants to be the first super power to develop super powers. Teaming up with Lyn Cassidy (Clooney), a veteran psychic soldier, Wilton tracks down Cassidy’s mentor Bill Django (Jeff Bridges), an eccentric New Age shaman now working at a prison camp in Iraq run by Kevin Spacey’s character, Larry Hooper. Hooper is a former psychic soldier who lived in Cassidy’s shadow until he managed to subvert the original purpose of the New Earth’s Army and take control.
Directed by hyphenate actor-turned-George Clooney’s best friend-turned-writer-turned-director Grant Heslov, the pen behind “Good Night and Good Luck” the movie has a wonky feel right from the get go. Its dizzying blend of slapstick, satire and drama is a hard thing to pull off, but Heslov with the help of his lead actors and a strong supporting cast including Coen Brothers regular Stephen Root, find just the right tone for the first hour.
In fact, the first sixty minutes of “The Men Who Stare Sat Goats” is giddy good fun; as fun a ride as there is in theatres this year. Its absurdist, filled with memorable images—Clooney staring down a goat, enlisted men doing the Watusi and a montage of Jeff Bridges embarking on a journey of enlightenment—and no joke is too broad. It’s as if Crosby and Hope had gone to Iraq instead of Singapore or Utopia. Then along comes Kevin Spacey who ruins all the fun.
It’s as if the filmmakers were afraid to stick to their guns and make a surreal free form movie so they added Spacey’s sniveling character to add in some conflict. It’s meant to up the drama of the piece but it’s the point at which the movie loses much of its zip. The conflict Spacey brings is simply not as interesting as the rest of the film. The final third of the film suffers for it, but it remains an unpredictable romp with some nice performances and pointed comments on the absurdity of war. I couldn’t help but think that if someone like Robert Altman had made this film in 1974 the message and the madness would have been intact without the spoiler of Spacey.
Beatrix Potter wrote dozens of books with titles like The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Appley Dapply’s Nursery Rhymes. Released at the turn of the last century, these stories about mischievous animals illustrated with Potter’s charming watercolors were as incredibly popular with kids as Harry Potter is today.
Miss Potter, a new movie starring Oscar winner Renee Zellweger as the author, focuses on Potter’s personal life, which was tumultuous as her books were placid. Buckling against 19th century mores the headstrong writer chose not to marry until age 47, preferring the company of her imaginary friends to real life. The movie leads us through the publishing of her first book, her battles with overbearing social climbing parents, an engagement to her first fiancé, played by Ewan McGregor, and her subsequent retreat to the English countryside. What emerges is an interesting, but incomplete portrait of the legendary writer.
Zellweger is a ringer for Potter, pulls off a convincing English accent, and succeeds in making Potter’s eccentricities seem plausible, but for all the technical aspects of the performance there isn’t much warmth here. Zellweger’s stiff upper lip hides any real emotion, and the few flashes of personality that find their way past her stern façade only hint at the reservoir of emotion underneath.
Overall the movie is well constructed, if a little incomplete. Director Chris Noonan, whose last film, Babe, was eleven years ago, shows us the major events in Potter’s life, but lacking is the passion. It makes for a decent family film, although I doubt that kids will be too taken with the love story and the English reserve, but feels like less than the sum of its parts. Potter was a 19th century rebel who championed the ecology and used her vast wealth to preserve 4000 acres of farmland. She was an active and shrewd marketer of her own books and even did some scientific research on lichens that, one hundred years after she wrote it, was given credence by the British Linnean Society. Only mildly engaging, this stiff Masterpiece Theatre treatment of her life doesn’t do justice to Beatrix Potter or her legacy.
As tittles go “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen” is a mouthful. It’s quirky enough to catch your eye, I suppose, and it isn’t a cute metaphor for something else. This movie is indeed about salmon fishing in the Yemen, but it’s also about faith as much as fishing.
Ewan McGregor is Dr. Alfred Jones a rigid scientist at the British government department of fisheries. He studies spawning habits of fish, writes scientific papers and lives a life of quiet desperation. When he is approached by Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Emily Blunt), a consultant for Yemeni Sheikh Mohammed (Amr Waked), to create a fly fishing reserve in the Yemen, he balks at first but soon not only dives in headfirst to the project, but, since this is a light romanic comedy, also discovers an interest in a life form without gills.
“Salmon Fishing in the Yemen” should do for fly-fishing what “The Big Year” did for bird watching. That is to say, not much. The mix of science, faith–fishing is a mystical past time, apparently—and romance has some charm, mostly due to the engaging performances of McGregor, Blunt and Waked, but other plot threads—like an assassination attempt–feel forced and out of place.
Popping in and out of the story is Kristin Scott Thomas as the aggressive spokesperson for he Prime Minister. She’s used for comedic relief and pulls off the part with aplomb. If the rest of the film had the spark she brings to her scenes we might have been better able to forgive its plot transgressions.
