As World Middleweight Boxing Champion Billy Hope in the new film Southpaw Jake Gyllenhaal learned a thing or two about anger. He plays a man ruled by fury who must learn to fight with his head, not just his fists.
“That journey was really interesting for me,” says Gyllenhaal, “the idea that I could explore that in my own anger. Sometimes things pop up, things that could be very destructive in my own life, like my own anger and I think, ‘Man, if I was only curious about this feeling instead of letting it kind of control me. If I could only stop and say, ‘What is that?’
“I saw this Australian comedian talking about gun control and he was saying, ‘Everyone should own a musket because by the time you finish putting the powder in and everything it takes a minute-and-a-half and by the time a minute-and-a-half has passed [the anger is gone] and you’re like, ‘You’re not a bad guy. It’s fine.’
Gyllenhaal says studying the character set him on a “journey about being curious about myself,” which seems counterintuitive. Doesn’t the actor inform the character?
“I think the experience of preparing for a role, meeting people along the way while you’re preparing for a role and the experience of that is what I learn from. It is really that that teaches me. The people I spend time with, the accumulation, that’s what I learn from. I don’t think I bring my own experience yet to a role. Right now my life is about learning from other people.”
One revelation from his time inhabiting Billy Hope’s persona was insight to what made Billy tick—fear.
“Billy is a really scared character who is fronting in some ways to present himself in a certain way. I think fear is a great motivator for him. That was a big thing. I think the idea of being tough is also about admitting your fears.”
The thirty-four-year-old actor certainly has no fear when choosing roles. From the extreme weight loss of Nightcrawler to Southpaw’s physical transformation—he gained 15 lbs of sheer muscle—Gyllenhaal is curating a challenging and interesting resume.
“I think the people I admire as artists are the people who really listen to themselves even if it is to the detriment of what people might consider success. I’d rather be myself and do what I love than listen to someone else and follow that role and be unhappy.”
I guess it shouldn’t be that surprising that a movie about a boxer’s fall from grace and subsequent redemption are handled in a heavy handed way. “Southpaw,” starring an almost impossibly pumped up Jake Gyllenhaal as a pugilist who goes from rags to riches to rages to… well, there will be no spoilers here, but in terms of the plot there are fewer surprises here than in a Mike Tyson first round knock out.
Gyllenhaal is Billy Hope, a World Middleweight Boxing Champion with a 43 to 0 undefeated record. He’s wealthy, has a daughter (Oona Laurence) he dotes on and a loving wife (Rachel McAdams) who has been with him all the way, from the Hell’s Kitchen orphanage they grew up in to ringside at Madison Square Gardens on the night of his biggest success. As one ringside announcer says, “it’s only a few blocks, but it’s really a million miles.”
Billy is the prototypical inarticulate brute with a heart of gold, who falls apart when tragedy KO’s his life, personally and professionally. Newspapers call him The Great White Dope but with everything gone—his friends, trainer, money and even his daughter—he pulls himself together the only way he knows how—in the ring. At his side is Tick Willis (Forest Whitaker), the Zen master owner of a run down gym, who teaches him boxing is not about fists, its about the mind.
“Southpaw” doesn’t have the epic feel of “Raging Bull.” Like the Martin Scorsese classic it has elements of human tragedy, but unlike Jake LaMotta’s story it is primarily interested in the more uplifting underdog and redemptive aspects of the story. The fall from grace is so extreme—one day he’s king of the world, the next he’s MC Hammer—that elements of melodrama are bound to sneak in, undermining what could have been a serious look at what happens when life throws a few below the belt punches your way.
Like it’s main character, the story is lightweight, but still packs a punch mainly thanks to Gyllenhaal’s gritty performance. Physically he’s a beast, jacked to an inch of his life, muscles bulging and veins popping. Mentally he’s volatile, a man who grew up fists first but who must learn to use his head and not just his body. Gyllenhaal does a great job of walking us through Billy’s rehabilitation, and while he’s still a bruiser at the end of the film, he’s an evolved one, much different than the person we met at the beginning of the film.
McAdams brings strength and warmth to the role of Billy’s soulmate Maureen. In the early part of the film she is Billy’s humanity, a living, breathing monument to all that is good in him and her. It’s a big weight to carry and McAdams nails it. Giving the film heart is Laurence. As the daughter who feels the severe repercussions of Billy’s ups and downs she is neither precious or just there to be the kid sidekick.
Whitaker, as the cosmic fight trainer, stretches credulity from scene to scene. He’s a fine actor but lines like, “You gotta let her go through her thing and not think your thing is her thing,” are a mouthful.
“Southpaw” is a solid sports redemption movie but lacks the punching power to be taken as seriously as “Raging Bull.”
In “Taken 3” Liam Neeson returns as Bryan Mills a former “preventer” for the US government. A specialist in black ops, he was an undercover agent who contained volatile situations before they got out of control. The first film saw him use his “particular set of skills” to rescue his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) from some very nasty kidnappers.
Then he did it again in “Taken 2.”
The third time is a charm—for the daughter, anyway. She’s fine, it’s audiences that get brutalized in “Taken 3.”
This time around Mills has to save himself and his family when he is wrongly accused of murder.
“If you go down this road,” says Detective Franck Dotzler (Forest Whitaker), “the LAPD, the FBI, the CIA are all going to come for you. They’ll find you and they will stop you.”
“Good luck,” grunts Mills, before going all medieval to protect everything dear to him.
Reports say “Taken 3” will be the final film in the franchise. Reviews will say they should have stopped at “Taken 2.”
The new movie is called “Taken 3,” because it is the third part of the “Taken” series, but I think it is also because director Olivier Megaton has “taken” everything away that made the first two movies so much fun. Gone are the trashily exotic locales of Paris and Istanbul, most of the in-your-face action and catchphrases about “special skills.”
Instead the film takes place in a generic looking Los Angeles, features only a car chase or two, a couple of lame fight scenes, a bit of bullet spray near the end and Yawn-O-Meter lines like, “I don’t know why. I don’t know who… but I’m gonna find out.”
Worse, it’s fairly clear from the onset who is responsible for the film’s murder McGuffin. I know you don’t come to the Liamnator’s movies for the intrigue—you come to see the big man in action—but when the action is this scant some intrigue would have helped pass the time.
Mills does find out who tried to frame him (NOT A SPOILER), but not before leaving a trail of chaos and destruction in his wake. He’s the most violent hero in years. The one crime he doesn’t commit is the one he is accused of. Other than that he proves his innocence by breaking every rule in the book. At the very least he should be charged with disturbing the peace on a nuclear scale.
Or perhaps the movie police could charge the script with crimes against cinema. Like a bad episode of “Murder She Wrote,” in the film’s closing minutes Mills details the minutia of the scheme to frame him, recapping every plot device we have just spent the last hundred minutes watching. Show me, or tell me, Mr. Neeson, please don’t show and then tell me.
We don’t go to the “Taken” movies to see great art, we go to have a good time at the movies. Unfortunately, this time around, that pleasure has been “taken” from us.
“You hear nothing. You see nothing. You only serve.”
Those are the words of advice given to former planation worker Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker), on his first day as a butler at the White House. For the next three decades he was a witness to history, serving eight presidents from Truman to Reagan, during the stormiest days of America’s history.
His job is to be invisible and leave ideology at home—“We have no tolerance for politics at the White House,” he’s told—but in his subsequent years of service he became a quietly potent force within the halls of power, touching the hearts of the Kennedy’s and fighting for wage equality for African-American workers in the nation’s Executive Mansion.
Very loosely based on the life of Eugene Allen, the movie is an intergenerational story of big moments from a time filled with big moments.
The overall timeline will be familiar to anyone who’s ever watched the History Channel, but “The Butler” recounts the turbulent times through one man’s deeply divided family, bringing the story home with simple, first person storytelling.
Gaines sees nothing and hears nothing at work, but his son Louis (David Oyelowo) is a socially engaged student, who first becomes involved with the Freedom Riders and later with the Black Panthers. Father and son don’t see eye-to-eye despite mother Gloria’s (Oprah Winfrey) best efforts to unite them.
At the center of “the Butler” are two remarkable performances that temper the film’s tendency to veer into melodrama.
Forest Whitaker is a dignified presence throughout in a quiet performance that allows the character’s inner life to shine through. It’s all about the details. The way he strokes the tie Jackie Kennedy gave him after JFK’s assassination. The pained looked in his eye as he kicks his son out of the White House. They are small moments that cut through the movie’s sweeping story, keeping the whole thing grounded.
As Louis English actor David Oyelowo plays every scene with intensity, but never goes over the edge. His Louis is a committed man, a thinker who deeply believes in the Civil Rights movement, but refuses to blindly accept dogma.
Much of the casting of the presidents—Robin Williams as President Dwight D. Eisenhower, James Marsden as President John F. Kennedy, Liev Schreiber as President Lyndon B. Johnson, John Cusack as President Richard Nixon and Alan Rickman as President Ronald Reagan—feels like stunt casting, but the story isn’t their to tell. Director Lee “Precious” Daniels wisely keeps the focus on Gaines and family to tell the tale.
“Lee Daniels’ The Butler” (the name was changed from “The Butler” when Warner Bros. sued, claiming they already owned the name) is a handsome movie, the kind that gets the attention of the Academy, which serves as a poignant reminder of the difficult and rocky road so many walked in the search of racial equality.
You can always tell its awards season when the biopics start hitting the theatres. Biographies are powerful Oscar magnets. The Academy has always been a sucker for a true-to-life story. Since the beginning of the Academy’s history 1 in 7 films nominated for Best Picture have been life stories and once designated, 1 in 5 go on to win. In the last two years alone Oscars went to actors portraying Ray Charles, Truman Capote and June Carter Cash. Next in line for Oscar consideration, in the Best Actor category at least, should be Forest Whitaker’s true-to-life look at Ugandan dictator Idi Amin’s rise to power in The Last King of Scotland.
The story begins with a young Scottish doctor who travels to Uganda to do charity work and winds up as the newly minted dictator Amin’s personal physician. Based upon the novel by Giles Foden, The Last King of Scotland places the fictional MD into a historical setting.
James McAvoy, who people will remember as Tumnnus in The Chronicles of Narnia last year, plays a doctor who starts out with the best of intentions but soon finds himself implicit in Amin’s madness as the body count around him grows. Director Kevin MacDonald takes us into Amin’s inner circle, allowing us to see the dictator’s descent into madness from the point-of-view of an objective observer. The doctor acts as a filter through which the viewer learns about the evil of Amin.
We meet the larger- than-life Amin just as he has come to power. He is a captivating figure, a man of the people, whose speechifying can whip a crowd into a frenzy. The doctor, swept away by Amin’s charisma, agrees to work with him to create a new health care system for Uganda. Soon the cracks in Amin’s personality reveal the cruelty of his reign.
McAvoy may be the leading man, but Forest Whitaker’s brilliant performance as Amin is at the heart of this film. He shows us the duality of Amin, the man who on one hand was a magnetic, charismatic leader and on the other a cold-blooded killer who ordered the deaths of 300,000 people during his reign of terror. It is a complex and richly realized performance that elevates the movie from standard biopic to Oscar caliber film.
Once again Keanu Reeves is battling evil. This time though instead of fighting foes in the underworld or in the Matrix he’s on the more mortal plane of LA’s mean streets. He’s Tom Ludlow a veteran LAPD cop who isn’t above bending or actually twisting and mutilating the rules to get his own brand of vigilante justice. His boss, Captain Jack Wander (Forest Whitaker), calls him “the tip of the spear,” the only man on the force who can “hold back the animals.” A more objective observer might call him a sociopath with a badge.
In a violent story thick with double-crosses and deep-rooted duplicity Reeves, the alcoholic trigger-happy cop, is the closest thing to a hero the movie offers up. He begins his journey into the abyss when evidence implicates him in the execution of his former partner. To get to clear his name he goes head-to-head with the cop culture he’s been a part of his entire career.
Street Kings returns to a favorite topic of screenwriter James Ellroy and director by David Ayer—police corruption in Los Angeles. They’ve both examined the topic before. Ellroy most notably in LA Confidential and the novel White Jazz, set to hit the screen in 2009, and Ayer’s dirty-cop screenplay for Training Day earned Denzel Washington a Best Actor Oscar, but rarely has the subject been so savagely presented. The corruption on display here is pervasive. It’s everywhere and everyone has dirty hands.
Bleak though the story may be, the film rockets along, bounding from one violent scene to the next, rarely pausing to catch its breath. That’s probably a good thing because there are logic holes in the story big enough to drive a squad car through. It’s what Alfred Hitchcock used to call a “refrigerator movie.” It seems to make sense while you’re watching it, but later, when you’re at home in front of the fridge looking for a snack and thinking about the story you realize it doesn’t really hold together.
Better than the improbable plot twists (and melodramatic ending) are the characters that populate the story. Writers Ellroy, Kurt Wimmer and Jamie Moss circle around the usual cop clichés but manage to avoid repeating too many of the same crooked cop chestnuts we’ve seen before. Their “shoot first, ask questions later” cop characters are well written, with sharp dialogue and swagger to spare. The same can’t be said about the female characters who are relegated to the girlfriend and weepy widow roles.
Street Kings shows the side of Los Angeles you don’t see in movies very often. It’s the LA of the Rodney King video and the Rampart Scandal. It’s a gritty, violent film that succeeds despite a lack of logic and touches of melodrama because of its colorful characters and adrenaline fueled pacing.
