Ever had one of those moments where a random song playing on the radio is the perfect soundtrack for your life in that instant? Director Edgar Wright calls that a #babydrivermoment.
“I think so many times you have things in life where music syncs up with the world,” he says. “You’re sitting there and the windscreen wipers are going in time with the music and you think, ‘Isn’t life great? The world is bending to my music choices.’”
He had one of those moments 22 years ago when the idea for Baby Driver flooded into his brain after listening to The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion track Bellbottoms on repeat. In that instant he imagined the song’s choppy rhythm as the soundtrack to a car chase, filing the idea away for future consideration.
“In 2002 I felt I had potentially squandered the idea by using it for a music video (Blue Song by Mint Royale) and I was mad at myself for doing that,” he says. “Later, after Hot Fuzz I thought, ‘I still have to do something with this idea.’”
With the opening already mapped out, Wright spent years creating the film’s story of a get-away driver named Baby (Ansel Elgort) who wants out of his life of crime and into the arms of a diner waitress played by Lily James. But before they can run off to the happily-ever-after, the driver must square his debt with gang boss Doc (Kevin Spacey).
“It was a slow building up of what the movie and the structure was and finding the main theme of the main character’s relationship with music; this getaway driver who can’t drive unless he has the right music. Then it became, ‘Why is he obsessed with music?’ OK. He has tinnitus and he has to listen to music. What was an escape for him becomes an obsession.”
“A hum in the drum” is how Doc refers to Baby’s tinnitus. In real life it’s a hearing condition that causes an internal, loud ringing or clicking. As the sound can interfere with concentration, Baby plays music to drown it out.
Although it contains more music than most tuneful movies, Baby Driver isn’t a musical in the West Side Story, Sound of Music sense. Wallpapered with 35 rock ‘n’ roll songs on the soundtrack, it’s a hard-driving heist flick that can best be called an action musical.
“The strange thing is people say it is a departure from the other films,” says the Poole, Dorset, England-born Wright, whose other movies include cult favourites Shaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, “and it is but it is also my oldest idea. I couldn’t have made it 10 years ago. I had to live in North America a bit more. I have lived in Los Angeles and Toronto. I drove across the States twice. I also did lots of research. That all factored into bringing this dream I had when I was 21 to vivid life.”
This weekend Wright will see that dream hit theatres. “I don’t know whether to feel like a proud father or whether it is like my kid is leaving home,” he says. “I feel like when the film is out I may get empty nest syndrome. It has been with me for so long and now it is out. It is a beautiful thing and I don’t know how to describe it.”
Although it contains more music than most tuneful of movies “Baby Driver,” the new film from director Edgar Wright, isn’t a musical in the “West Side Story,” “Sound of Music” sense. Wallpapered with 35 rock ‘n roll songs on the soundtrack it’s a hard driving heist flick that can best be called an action musical.
Long before he made “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz” Wright conjured up the idea for the wild ride while he listening to the John Spencer Explosion track “Bellbottoms” on repeat. He visualized a car chase to the song’s choppy beat and the idea of a young getaway driver on a doomed caper was born. Question is, does Wright keep the pedal to the metal or is “Baby Driver” out of gas?
“The Fault in Our Stars” star Ansel Elgort is the title character, an orphaned get-a-way driver with tinnitus who owes gang boss Doc (Kevin Spacey) a favour. Baby wants out of the life of crime and into the arms of diner waitress Debora (Lily James). Before they can run off to the happily-ever-after, however, he must square his debt with the older gangster.
The gangster uses different crews for every robbery, but Baby is always the driver because he’s “Mozart in a Go Cart. “He had an accident when he was a kid,” says Doc. “Still has a hum in the drum. Plays music to drown it out. And that’s what makes him the best.”
With his debt cleared after a wild and woolly robbery, Doc makes Baby an offer he can’t refuse, a gig doing another get-a-way job. It’s a job he can’t turn down. “What’s it going to be?” Doc asks, “behind the wheel or in a wheelchair?”
“One more job and we’re straight,” says Doc. “Now I don’t think I need to give you the speech about what would happen if you say no, how I could break your legs and kill everyone you love because you already know that, don’t you?”
Teaming up with an unhinged band of baddies, Buddy (Jon Hamm), Darling (Eiza Gonzalez) and loose cannon Bats (Jamie Foxx), Baby soon discovers this heist is not like any that came before. Perhaps it’s because he now has Deborah on his mind, or perhaps it’s because his partners-in-crime are a few spark plugs short of an engine block.
Even when there are no cars on screen (which isn’t very often) “Baby Driver” is in motion. Working with Sia choreographer Ryan Heffington, Wright has created a stylized dance between his camera and actors. It’s frenetic, melodic and just a dance step or two away from being the world’s first car chase musical.
Elgort is the engine that drives the movie. With dark Ray Bans and tousled hair he recalls Tom Cruise in “Risky Business.” His character has suffered great loss and copes by thrill chasing set to a soundtrack provided by stolen iPods. Baby doesn’t say much—“You know why they call him Baby, right?” says Buddy. “Still waiting on his first words.”—but the character takes a journey, physical and metaphysical. He has a wide arc summed up by the old cliché action speak louder than words.
Spacey is more verbose. He plays Doc as a gangster who talks like a character out of a Raymond Chandler movie. Instead of “get rid of the car,” Doc instructs Baby to “sunset that car.” It’s a small but important role that adds flair and some laughs to the film.
James is all sweetness and light as Debora, a woman whose life is changed in the space of just a few days. Hamm, Foxx and González, meanwhile, bring various levels of badassery to contrast Baby’s ever-developing sense of morality. The movie’s tone is light, but this isn’t an outright comedy like Wright’s other films. Hamm and Foxx toss off the odd funny line but both bring the fire when necessary, bringing a kinetic undertone of danger to every scene they’re in.
“Baby Driver” succumbs to cliché near the end but for most of its running time is an exhilarating ride, fuelled by a tank full of adrenaline.
Quvenzhané Wallis, the eleven-year-old Academy Award nominee, kicks the old “Annie” to the curb in the opening minutes of the reimagined story of a spunky little orphan and her foster father.
The movie begins with a curly haired red head making a presentation in class. With a flourish, she finishes her show-and-tell with a few snappy tap dance moves. Next up is Annie (Wallis) who erases the old image of the Broadway waif with a spirited “Stomp” style opening number.
It doesn’t all work, but the update does make the old “Annie” seem as au courant as “Downton Abbey.”
Set in modern day New York City, “Annie” drops the “orphan” in favor of “foster child.” Abandoned by her parents, her only connection to them is a note scribbled on the back of a restaurant bill. That scrap of paper and her scrappy attitude sustain her as she lives with a group of plucky kids at failed singer Miss Hannigan’s (Cameron Diaz) Dickensian Harlem apartment.
Her ticket out of Hannigan’s hell hole comes in the form of a viral video shot by a citizen journalist. Chasing a stray dog down the street Annie is rescued by the city’s richest citizen and mayoral candidate Will Stacks (Jamie Foxx). Unscrupulous campaign manager Guy (Bobby Cannavale) sees an opportunity to humanize his candidate and asks Annie over for a photo op.
“It’s good PR for my campaign to be seen with you,” Stacks explains to the little girl.
“If I came to live with you, you could become president,” she shoots back.
And thus Annie is invited to live in Stacks’s deluxe apartment in the sky. They form a bond and… blah, blah, blah. You can guess the rest.
Aside from a handful of songs, an overload of cute and shards of a storyline, the new “Annie” has little in common with the original musical. Director and co-screenwriter Will Gluck takes pains to make an “Annie” for a new generation but loses the spirit that made Broadway “Annie” so iconic.
“People love musicals,” he has Miss Hannigan say at one point. “Bursting into song for no apparent reason.” Except in good musicals there is always a reason for characters to burst into song. Annie doesn’t miss any opportunity to sing and dance—it even manages to turn taking out the recycling into a percussive event—but Gluck handles the transitions from dialogue to verse awkwardly. “Are you going to sing to me?” Hannigan asks Guy. “Is this happening?”
Worse, the music isn’t particularly memorable and bland, beat-heavy new school arrangements obscure the lyrics. The music is big, but the voices aren’t. Wallis has a much more natural singing style than he Broadway trained predecessors and gets lost in the mix. Ethel Merman she ain’t. The show was filled with showstoppers—“It’s the Hard-Knock Life” and “Tomorrow” among others—that are reduced in the film to aural wallpaper with choreography that could charitably be described as curious.
Wallis does plucky very well, but is rather one note, not just musically but personality wise as well. Foxx can sing but is saddled with the film’s second worst number, “I Don’t Need Anything But You,” (the “winner” is Diaz’s “Little Girls”) and Cannavale appears to be acting in a Christmas pantomime nobody told the rest of the cast about.
“Annie” is an attempt to recreate an icon for a new age but falls flatter than Miss Hannigan’s high notes.
At two-and-a-half hours the new Spider-Man movie is almost equal parts action and story. The first fifteen minutes contains not one, but two wild action sequences that’ll make your eyeballs dance. If you haven’t had your fill of special effects for the week your thirst will be quenched early on. Then the onslaught of story begins. Jammed packed with plot, bad guys and lots and lots of moony-eyed love, it’s the busiest superhero movie in recent memory.
Fresh out of high school Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) is being pulled in two different directions. He loves Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) but is troubled by a promise he made to her late father (Dennis Leary) that he would never let anything bad happen to her.
Meanwhile, Peter’s old friend Harry Osborn (Dane De Haan), heir to the OsCorp fortune, is battling a hereditary genetic disease he thinks can be cured with a dose of Spider-Man’s blood and Max Dillon (Jamie Foxx), a low level OsCorp electrical engineer, has an accident that rewires him into Electro, a highly charged villain with the power to control electricity.
“The Amazing Spider-Man 2” is this is a movie with several well-crafted dramatic moments. Too bad most of them feel like they’re lifted from another movie and dropped into this one as placeholders for the action sequences. Peter Parker is shedding tears over his love life one minute, swinging on webby vines through the streets the next. Both tones are well executed, but they often feel forced together.
Garfield works to distance himself from Tobey McGuire’s Spider-Man. First thing you notice is that he’s not as mopey as McGuire; as Parker Garfield is nerdy and angsty, not downcast and ennui ridden.
Secondly, he’s witty when playing the web slinger. The Sam Raimi “Spider-Man” movies didn’t use Spidey’s comic book sarcasm but Garfield’s Mach 2 version isn’t shy to let loose with some entertaining trash talking.
His portrayal is bright, punchy and more akin to the comic books than anything McGuire or Raimi put on film.
Emma Stone’s football-sized eyes and smart smile rescue Gwen from the simply fulfilling the girlfriend role. She brings some spark to the character and shares some good chemistry with (real life boyfriend) Garfield.
Speaking of sparks, Foxx could have used a few more as Electro. A bundle of neurosis before his electro charged accident, Max becomes one of the rare villains who was more interesting before he got his powers.
De Haan, who was so good in “Chronicle,” is interesting as Harry / Green Goblin. His obsession with finding a cure for his disease is a springboard for his transformation into the Goblin and Da Haan embraces a malevolence that makes the character memorable.
“The Amazing Spider-Man 2” has good actors—plus a fun cameo from Paul Giamatti—a love story and some good action—you will believe a man can swing above the streets of New York—so why does it feel somewhat unsatisfying?
Maybe it’s the two-and-a-half-hour running time, or the something-for-everyone mix of action, heartbreak and comedy, or perhaps it’s the fact that it feels like a well made copy of the first Garfield “Spider-Man” movie, which itself was a riff on the McGuire movies.
Hollywood’s two most famous birds must be Donald Duck and Woody Woodpecker. Between them they’ve starred in almost three hundred films.
This weekend Donald and Woody are joined by Tyler Blu Gunderson, a rare male Spix’s macaw, voiced by Jesse Eisenberg making his second big screen appearance in Rio 2. He’s joined by a cast of fine feathered friends, including a Yellow Canary (Jamie Foxx), a rapping Red-crested Cardinal (will.i.am) and a sulphur-crested Cockatoo (Jemaine Clement), as they leave their home in Rio de Janeiro for the Amazon rainforest.
The colorful co-stars in Rio 2 are animated which makes them a much more agreeable lot than Tippi Hedren’s cast mates in her most famous movie. In the Alfred Hitchcock film The Birds she plays a wealthy socialite visiting Bodega Bay in Northern California when hundreds of ravens, seagulls and pigeons begin viciously attacking the townsfolk.
Some of the birds were props, but many of them were all too real. Actors with ground meat and anchovies daubed on them to entice the birds escaped with nips and scratches but Hedren took the worst of it during the shooting of the movie’s famous attic scene.
She had been told mechanical birds would be used to in the sequence that sees her trapped in a small room while birds attack her. When she arrived at the shoot she saw a cage built around the set and realized the plan had changed. For a week real birds were thrown at her by stagehands. Pecked and scratched by birds attached to her by elastic bands she screamed and sobbed as one of them gouged her eye. It was such a traumatic sight Cary Grant, who dropped by the set to say hello, said, “You’re one brave lady.
It’s no wonder Hedren chose Marnie, and not The Birds, as her favorite Hitchcock leading role.
As distressing as the shoot for The Birds might have been, the movie is now considered a classic.
That can’t be said for a film inspired by Hitchcock’s avian terror.
Birdemic: Shock and Terror director James Nguyen says the inspiration for his movie dates back to 2006 when he saw a flock of seagulls flying toward him at Half Moon Bay south of San Francisco. The sight reminded him of Hitchcock’s film, but he thought, “What if I make a movie where instead of seagulls and crows, it’s birds of prey? There’s nothing more shocking than eagles and vultures.”
The self-financed film took four years to finish and laid an egg in theatres before it became a cult hit as one of the worst film ever made.
When asked what Hitchcock would have thought of Birdemic Nguyen told Empireonline.com, “I think Mr. Hitchcock would forgive a lot of its imperfections and say, ‘James, you did what you could. Do another one and try to do it better.’”
Bring ear plugs and sun screen to The Kingdom. So many things blow up that you’ll need ear protection from the sound and tanning lotion to prevent getting a sun burn from the glare off the giant fireballs that light up screen.
Academy Award winner Jamie Foxx is Ronald Fleury, an FBI special agent who leads a rogue band of investigators—Chris Cooper’s explosives expert, an intelligence analyst played by Jason Bateman and a forensics specialist in the form of Jennifer Garner—to Saudi Arabia to track down and arrest the terrorists behind a brutal attack on a compound housing American oil company workers and their families. They have just five days to sift through the evidence and find the evildoers.
The Kingdom has a jittery, over-amped feel that suggests the director, Peter Berg, may have chugged one too many Red Bulls between takes. He stages the action scenes well, and creates a fair bit of tension—particularly in the film’s chaotic final twenty minutes—but I found myself occasionally wishing that the camera would stop flying around so we could focus and actually clearly see what was happening on screen.
Berg’s decision to keep the camera in almost constant motion mostly suits the action oriented tone of the film, unfortunately he doesn’t fare as well at creating compelling, fully rounded characters.
Foxx displays his usual charisma as the FBI team leader and has some nice moments, both tender and butt-kicking but the other members of his team are reduced to stereotypes—Bateman’s smart alec analyst, Cooper’s wise old investigator and Garner’s cute but steely forensics genius—that wouldn’t seem out of place on any of the CSI shows on television. The movie’s top character and best performance comes from Ashraf Barhom as the compassionate but deadly Arab colonel.
Aside from a masterful montage at the beginning of the film which traces the history of U.S.—Saudi involvement from the 1930s onwards, The Kingdom isn’t going to shed light on the conflict in the Middle East. It is essentially a western. They are the good guys and the bad guys and no shades of grey. Not every movie about the Middle East needs to dig deep into the politics of region, but The Kingdom’s take on the way to deal with terrorism, although crowd pleasing, turns the FBI into vigilantes and anyone in a caftan or a kepi into bad guys.
Director F. Gary Gray doesn’t waste any precious time getting to “Law Abiding Citizen’s” action. About thirty seconds into the movie there is a scene of striking ultra-violence that sets up the revenge story which is to follow. It’s just too bad that he allows the pace to go downhill after the opening scene. It’s a thriller without many thrills.
Gerard Butler and his finely carved abdominal muscles play Clyde Shelton the law abiding citizen referred to in the title. His life is changed forever after a home invasion leaves his wife and small child dead. When Assistant DA Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx), a slick up-and-coming lawyer at the DA’s office, makes a deal with one of the killers to testify against his partner in return for a reduced sentence it doesn’t sit well with Clyde. Cut to ten years later. Bad things start happening to everyone involved in the case, starting with the bad guys who both perish in excruciating ways. Clyde is arrested and confesses. That should be the end of it, but very bad things continue to happen. By the time Nick figures out how Clyde is doling out his own form of cruel and unusual punishment from jail it may be too late to save his own life.
There are a lot of words that could be used to describe “Law Abiding Citizen.” Here are some of them: goofy, implausible, ludicrous, inane, far-fetched, daft, nonsensical, illogical, preposterous, outlandish… I could go on, but you get the point. The story is a little silly, but that’s OK. It’s a revenge flick and if it was loaded with wall-to-wall action and some fun dialogue I could deal with the silliness. Look at “Taken” from earlier this year. Silly, silly, silly but fun in a check your brain at the door kind of way.
Unfortunately “Law Abiding Citizen” doesn’t have that kind of verve. There’s too much lag time between the big action set pieces. Every time the movie works up a head of steam the momentum evaporates into talky and mostly badly written dialogue sequences.
A red pencil could have made this script much more palatable but it’s likely that if you removed every line where a characters states the obvious and mundane there’s be very little left, dialogue wise. It’s the kind of movie that shows you a bomb with a cell phone trigger. Comments on it and then, for good measure, has another character say something like, “Do you mean to tell me that if that cell phone rings the bomb will go off?” Anyone who’s ever watched “Mission Impossible” or any other thriller involving bad guys and bombs knows that yes, if the cell phone rings the bomb will go off. It’s movie watching 101. You know it just like you know that the guy in the red shirt will always be the first to die on any given episode of “Star Trek.”
When the characters aren’t speaking in clichés they’re trying to comment on the state of a broken justice system that could let a child killer off with a light sentence. It’s an interesting premise for a revenge film, but again, Wimmer overplays his hand, putting sentences like, “I’m going to bring the whole diseased, corrupt temple down on your head! It’s going to be biblical” into Butler’s mouth.
Too bad the action isn’t as over-the-top as the dialogue. If so “Law Abiding Citizen” might have had a chance to be a great bad movie, as it is, it’s just a bad movie.
First here’s all the stuff from the Miami Vice television show that you won’t see or hear in the movie version: pastel jackets with t-shirts underneath, Elvis the alligator, Jan Hammer’s distinctive theme song, or Phil Collins. In short, all of the stuff that made the “MTV cop” show a hit.
This isn’t your Dad’s Miami Vice. Director Michael Mann, who created, executive produced, wrote and directed the original series has turfed everything except the two main characters in his attempt to update the 1980s classic for the big screen. Sonny Crockett, now played by Colin Farrell still hasn’t figured out how to use a razor, but aside from that it’s a whole new game. In fact, only about half the movie actually takes place in Miami.
In Mann’s new version of Miami it’s always night and danger seems to lurk around every corner. Shooting in grainy digital video, the director transforms the Sunshine State’s biggest city into a menacing paradise where both life and drugs are cheap. It is a world where the good guys don’t always win and the bad guys don’t completely lose.
Mann has loosely based the film on one of the television show’s most famous episodes, Smuggler’s Blues. The story begins with a sting operation gone bad which costs two federal agents their lives. It appears there’s an information leak in either the FBI or DEA or ATF and it’s up to Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) to put a plug in it. Working deep undercover, posing as drug transporters they begin by infiltrating the network of a mid-level trafficker called Yero. Yero will be able to hook them up with the drug kingpin, Montoya, and from there they should be able to bring down his entire empire.
It’s not exactly the most original story we’ve seen at the movies this year, but the beauty is in the telling of the story, not the story itself. Mann has a way with this kind of material. Miami Vice, like his best work in the crime genre—movies like Thief and Heat—is dripping with cool atmosphere, enough to make up for the by-the-book story.
Less successful is the casting. Jamie Foxx and Mann have worked together three times now—on Ali, Collateral, which nabbed an Oscar nomination for Foxx—but this has to be their least inspiring outing. Foxx and Farrell don’t seem to have much chemistry, which is crucial to their roles as partners who would do anything for one another, but worse than that, Foxx isn’t given much to do. The character of Tubbs is so stoic and no nonsense that all he is required to do is stand there and look good. He does that well, but it feels like he is holding back.
Not so for Farrell who gives a performance of mock seriousness that sometimes borders on camp. He barks his tough-guy lines in a way that would knock the pastel off the original Crockett, Don Johnson. Johnson’s Crockett was unhappy and angry, but in the movie seems to have turned his life around. Now he’s angry and unhappy.
Miami Vice on the big screen isn’t a remake of the television series; it’s more than that. It’s the maturation of it. Mann has made a demanding but interesting film that reflects where he is now, not where he was when he created the television series.
The Soloist is the great award hope from last year that never happened. Originally slated to open in late November, just in time for Academy Award balloteering, the film sounds like sure fire Oscar bait—between them co-stars Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr have two nominations and one Best Actor win and director Joe Wright a BAFTA contender—but at the last minute the movie was shuffled to an April release, and very likely, out of Oscar consideration.
The film is based on the true story of Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx), a musical prodigy who developed schizophrenia during his second year at Juilliard School, and wound up living on the streets of downtown Los Angeles. Robert Downey Jr. plays Steve Lopez, a disenchanted Los Angeles Times columnist who discovers Ayers and bases a series of columns on Ayers and his life. Over time they form a friendship based on the liberating power of music.
On paper this sounds like a sure Oscar bet. The Academy loves redemption stories, bio pics and big names in dramas, but, as any bookie can tell you, there’s no such thing as a sure bet. The Soloist is a non-traditional biography that suffers from Wright’s focus on style over story.
It’s a great looking film. Wright loads the screen with artful pictures and stylish flourishes such as a symphony of color that fills the screen when Nathaniel listens to a live symphony orchestra, but it often feels like more thought was given to the movie’s technique than to the story. Wright is clearly in love with the film’s style, I just wish he had loved the characters as much.
Although it’s based on a complex and interesting relationship between these two very different men, the movie feels padded. It’s not trite, it just doesn’t get very far past the main thrust that music has the power to transform everyone, no matter what your station in life. It is one idea stretched to 105 minutes.
That’s not to say it doesn’t have some nice, interesting moments. There’s good interplay between Downey Jr and Catherine Keener as his ex-wife and current boss and Foxx has thrown vanity out the window in an unpredictable performance that veers between sweet and menacing. It’s a brave, but not completely successful performance. Ditto Downey Jr. Both actors are riding the razor’s edge of emotion here, and both occasionally go overboard, as if they are fighting to be noticed amid the movie’s overwhelming stylistic affectations.
The Soloist is an art film disguised as an uplifting drama, and is only partially successful on both counts.
By Richard Crouse – Metro In Focus
