Where have all the movie stars gone? Once upon a time big names on even bigger marquees were as close to a guarantee of good box office as one gets in the movie biz, but no more.
This weekend The Divergent Series: Allegiant, the third part of the young adult series, hit theatres. Based on a series of successful books, it stars Shailene Woodley and Theo James in a teen epic about dystopia, guilt and artfully tossed pixie haircuts. In the new film the pair risk it all to go beyond the walls of their shattered city to discover the truth about their troubled world.
Woodley and James are appealing performers and despite having chiselled cheekbones, a Golden Globe nomination and a Teen Choice Award for Choice Movie: Liplock between them no one is going to see Allegiant because they’re in it. Why? Because they’re not movie stars, they’re brand ambassadors. The movie’s brand is bigger than they are and that’s the draw.
Young adult movies like Twilight made Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart famous and superhero films reignited Robert Downey Jr.’s career and turned Chris Hemsworth into a sex symbol, but none of these actors have scored recent hits outside of their best-known brands.
These days the marketing is more important than the movie star.
It’s almost a throwback to the very early days of cinema when actors weren’t given billing or publicized for the films they made. Fearing performers would demand larger paycheques if they became popular the studios gave them nicknames instead. Hamilton, Ontario born Florence Lawrence was known as the Biograph Girl, named after the studio that produced her films, but with the release of The Broken Oath in 1910 became the first entertainer to have her name appear in the credits of a film.
Floodgates opened, soon names like Mary Pickford (another Biograph Girl), Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin festooned not only movie credits but posters as well, usually above the title. The studios seized the marketing value of their actors and for years the star system was a money-spinner.
These stars were so powerful they not only sold tickets by the fistful but also influenced contemporary trends. For instance, it’s rumoured that sales of men’s undershirts plummeted in 1934 when The King of Hollywood, Clark Gable, was seen without one in It Happened One Night. As the legend goes, sales took such a hit several underwear manufacturers tried, unsuccessfully, to sue Columbia Pictures for damages.
For decades stars ruled supreme at the box office, but the business has changed. I’m guessing the movie studios love it because no film brand ever asked for more money or a bigger trailer.
Certainly Tom Cruise can still sell a ticket or three, but only if his movie has the words Mission Impossible in the title and Matt Damon was brought back in to add star sparkle to the new Jason Bourne movie after a lackluster reboot with Jeremy Renner. Jennifer Lawrence is a movie star. Her latest film Joy, the empowering story of a woman and her mop, wasn’t a big hit but without her star power would likely never have been made at all.
It’s not just the movie business’s attitude toward fame that has changed, it’s also ours. Today a proliferation of YouTube superstars and social media has democratized fame and in a world and business where everyone is famous, no one truly is, not even the stars of a blockbuster like The Divergent Series: Allegiant.
“The Divergent Series,” the film franchise birthed from the Veronica Roth’s teen dystopian novels, have always seemed like “Hunger Games” wannabes but the new one, “Allegiant,” will leave no one hungry for more.
The backstory: In “Divergent” a Big Brother style government has divided the post-apocalyptic Chicago into five factions: the altruistic Abnegation sect, the peace loving Amity, the “I cannot tell a lie” Candor group, the militaristic arm Dauntless and the smarty-pants Erudites.
At age sixteen all citizens must submit to a personality test that will help them decide which faction they will join. Beatrice Prior (Shailene Woodley) is from an Abnegation family, but chooses to join Dauntless, the warrior faction charged with protecting the city. During her training it’s discovered she is divergent, a person who cannot be pigeonholed into just one designation.
The second film “Insurgent” saw Tris, her brother Caleb (Ansel Elgort) and boyfriend Four (Theo James) escape the world of factions and live off the grid. They are fugitives from Jeanine Matthews (Kate Winslet), the head of the Erudite faction and an evil brainiac who desperately wants to get her hands on Tris. As a 100% divergent Tris is one of the few who can unlock the secrets of a mysterious box that holds the key to the future of humanity. As revolution brews against Janine, and the fascism of the factions, Tris does the only thing she can do to stop the bloodshed.
That’s the story so far. If you’re still interested and with us, you’re up to speed.
The new film continues Tris’s quest to find out what the heck’s going on. For the first time the core players—Tris, Four, Caleb and a handful of others—go beyond the wall that separates Chicago from the rest of the world. “It’s time to break from the past,” they say in their quest to find a peaceful resolution to the chaos that has characterized their young lives. What they discover is a barren, red-stained place where it rains crimson—“Great! The sky is bleeding!”—and the ground is toxic. Luckily folks who welcome them to the future rescue them. (On a side note, isn’t the future their own present? When does the future become the present and vice versa?) The Chicagoans are detoxified and taken to an oasis built in the former O’Hare Airport to meet a new leader, the charismatic David (Jeff Daniels). Soon, however, they must ask themselves if this new, seemingly utopian society is that much different from the one they left behind? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
“The Divergent Series: Allegiant” is as interesting as you would imagine a movie largely set in an airport would be. Opening up the story to include the world beyond the walls should have presented opportunities to expand the story in interesting ways, but in this case more is less. The story limps along, ripe with dialogue exchanges that wouldn’t be other place in a 1980s Jean-Claude Van Damme flick—“ It’s impossible.” “So?” “So… I’ll make it happen.”—talk of genetic tampering and social commentary about how building walls to separate people won’t work (Are you listening Mr. Trump?). Instead of deepening the story the extra stuff muddles whatever point the movie was trying to make in the first place. Like an overcrowded freeway, the amount of traffic, story wise in the film, slows everything down to a stop.
Perhaps it’s because “The Divergent Series: Allegiant – Part 1” is one book cleaved into two movies or maybe it’s because director Robert Schwentke treats this film as a long set up to a finale but none of the new material makes much of an impact. Add to that generic special effects and you’re left with a story that isn’t as divergent from the rest of the YA pack as it would like to be.
Richard’s reviews Michael Fassbender as iCon Steve Jobs in the movie of the same name, Ellen Page and Julianne Moore as LGBT trailblazers in “Freeheld,” Deepa Mehta’s “Beeba Boys” and the Alison Brie rom com “Sleeping with Other People.”
“Steve Jobs” is a portrait of a person who sought perfection in his work but admits that personally he is “poorly made.”
The film, directed by Danny Boyle, isn’t a biopic but rather an impressionistic look at a man told through three vignettes pulled from crucial moments in his career. The vast bulk of the movie takes place backstage at the launches of the Macintosh in 1984, the Nextcube in 1988 and the iMac in 1998. It’s a three act play populated with characters from Jobs’s life, like his daughter Lisa, her mother (Katherine Waterston), the visionaries’ “work wife,” marketing chief Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet), Apple CEO John Scully (Jeff Daniels) and computer geeks Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogan) and Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg).
What follows is a flurry of words and ideas from screenwriter Aaron Sorkin that don’t act as a traditional biography but as a tool to peel away the layers of the man’s personality to provide a an intimate glimpse into his psyche. Jobs’s life has been the subject of features, documentaries, books and much speculation but the new film is the first attempt to truly turn the camera on the man and really see what was going on behind his steely gaze.
Michael Fassbender is on screen virtually every second of the film, anchoring the action by allowing Sorkin’s crackerjack script to take center stage. This is a movie whose special effects are the performances and the actor’s facility with the dialogue. Fassbender spits out vast blocks of words, nailing the cadence of Sorkin’s voice, milking every line for maximum effect. As nimble as that performance is Jeff Daniels appears to have been born to speak Sorkin’s rat-a-tat dialogue.
Sorkin, who after pending “The Social Network” has cornered the market on writing vivid portraits of troubled computer nerds, is the real star here. His script is kinetic, complicated, unrelenting and yet accessible. Whether it’s historically accurate may be up for debate, but this isn’t a documentary, it’s a sketch of a man that’s not concerned with the details–iPods and iPhones don’t even rate a mention–and certainly doesn’t play as an ad for Apple. Instead it Steve Jobs as an almost Shakespearean character, a man with a vision but who remained a “closed system” even for those who knew him best.
Steve Jobs changed the world. His unrelenting perfectionism changed the way we communicate with one another but Sorkin and Boyle were astute enough not to try and reinvent the biopic. This is a bold film that thinks differently about its subject, but at it’s heart it is about a typical movie subject. Think Charles Foster Kane, a person who wasn’t a nice man, but was a great man.
Twenty years ago Roger Ebert wrote that a moment in Dumb and Dumber, “made me laugh so loudly I embarrassed myself.”
The movie, starring Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels as the chicken-brained Lloyd and Harry, made 250 million dollars at the box office and seemed likely to spawn a sequel but nothing happened for almost twenty years. There was a prequel, Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd, but it was a Carrey-and-Daniel-less exercise in futility I called, “one of the least funny and ineptly made movies to ever play at your local multi-plex,” on its 2003 release.
So why did it take 19 years and 333 days to release a Dumb and Dumber follow-up? Carrey says he wasn’t into doing sequels but softened because everyone kept hounding him, he joked, “even dead people.”
Fans had to wait ages for Dumb and Dumber’s return, but two decades is a mere drop in the bucket when compared to the gap between the 1942 Disney classic Bambi and it’s sequel Bambi II. A ten-year-old who saw the original would have been old enough to send their grandkids to get popcorn refills when the sequel hit theatres overseas (it went direct to DVD in North America) almost sixty-four years later.
Thirty years after Alfred Hitchcock made seagulls menacing in The Birds a made-for television-movie called The Birds II: Land’s End revisited the killer avian story. Tippi Hedren, star of the original, signed on and it was shot in the house from the first film, but that’s where the similarities between the two end. The New York Times called the film “feeble,” and Hedren said, “It’s absolutely horrible, it embarrasses me horribly.”
29 years and 343 days after 1968’s The Odd Couple hit the big screen, writer Neil Simon and stars Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau reunited for The Odd Couple II. “We always had bad chemistry,” says Oscar Madison (Matthau). “We mix like oil and frozen yogurt.” It marked the last starring roles for each of its leads and the final collaboration between Lemmon and Matthau after making ten movies together.
These days Hollywood seems obsessed with sequels and next year will be no different. Mad Max: Fury Road, starring Tom Hardy in the role that made Mel Gibson famous, returns thirty years after Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and Jurassic World revisits Jurassic Park III thirteen years later. The biggest sequel news of the year—maybe of the decade—is the December 2015 release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. In the official Starr Wars chronology the new film follows 1983’s Return of the Jedi after a space of 32 years and 207 days.
Twenty years ago, in a simpler and sillier time, “Dumb and Dumber’s” Harry Dunne (Jeff Daniels) shrieked at Lloyd Christmas (Jim Carrey), “Just when I thought you couldn’t possibly be any dumber, you go and do something like this… and totally redeem yourself!”
It’s a line that echoes through the sequel, “Dumb and Dumber To.” Can the Farrelly Brothers find redemption after a string of flops by resurrecting their most famous characters and out dumb and out funny the modern sultans of silly, Seth McFarlane and Judd Apatow?
The new film begins in present day. Lloyd has spent two decades at a Baldy View Psychiatric Hospital, traumatized by the loss of his love Mary Swanson. Or is he traumatized? On one of his weekly visits Harry discovers Lloyd has been faking his comatose state for twenty years as a gag. “That’s awesome,” he says. “I feel for it hook, line and sphincter.” Reunited, they hit the road, this time in search of a daughter (Rachel Melvin) Harry never knew he had. She’s the “fruit of his loom” but could also be the kidney donor he needs to save his life.
The experience of watching “Dumb and Dumber To” is like spending the weekend with your hamster brained nephews. It’s super fun to see tem when they first arrive, but by Saturday night their antics have started to grow thin. By Sunday you’re wondering how you can miss them if they won’t go away.
Twenty years later Harry and Lloyd haven’t gotten any wiser but they haven’t gotten much funnier either. There are some astoundingly unPC gags—and I mean that literally—here, but none that reach the otherworldly vulgarity of the original’s laxative overdose scene. Instead it’s wall-to-wall jokes and one-liners, some hit, most don’t and nothing, save for the “Did you hide them in this turkey?” scene reach the level of McFarlane or Apatow outrageousness.
Carrey, however, is on overdrive. When he isn’t flailing about he’s mouthing malapropisms like, “That’s water under the fridge,” and what the material lacks in actual funny lines, Carrey makes up in sheer enthusiasm. For his part, Daniels leaves the dignity of “The Newsroom” behind, showing his behind more times than is comfortable for anyone.
“Dumb and Dumber To” is predictably silly, amiable stuff, which, I suppose, explains why it isn’t called “Dumb and Dumber Quantum Entanglement.”
The Lookout is the strangest crime drama to come along so far this year. At the beginning of the film Chris Pratt, played by former Third Rock from the Sun star Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is the guy you love to hate—he has a rich father, a beautiful girlfriend, good-looking friends and a fast car. Life is perfect until he causes a car accident that claims his friends and leaves him with severe brain damage.
Years later Chris’ mangled mind leaves him confused and filled with anger. Simple tasks throw him and he longs for his past life, even though he can’t quite remember what it was like. Working as a night janitor at a local bank he muddles through his job with the aid of an ever-present notebook in which he makes the reminder notes that help him cope. When a charismatic former friend (Matthew Goode) maneuvers him into taking part in robbing the bank, Chris thinks he is taking steps toward controlling his life. He doesn’t realize he’s being manipulated until it is too late.
The shadow of Christopher Nolan’s Memento hangs heavy over The Lookout. The lack of short-term memory is a central plot device in both films. Memento’s hero using upside down tattoos and Polaroids to jog his memory while The Lookout uses a more practical, (although cinematically less exciting) solution: a notebook. The difference in the way the two characters jog their shattered memories is much like the difference between the movies. Memento is a much showier film. The Lookout is more low-key relying on the performances to propel the story rather than theatrics.
Gordon-Levitt has transformed from sit-com star to one of the best actors of his generation. Recent turns in Mysterious Skin and Brick show a young actor taking chances. In The Lookout, he goes further, deepening his work, creating a person whose character has been shattered. It’s a subtle, well-crafted performance that is always interesting.
Also interesting are Jeff Daniels as Chris’ out-spoken blind roommate, Isla Fissher as the moll with the unlikely name of Luvlee Lemons and British actor Matthew Goode as the charismatic baddie who lures Chris into hot water.
The Lookout isn’t, however, quite as good as the sum of its parts. The great acting and atmospheric cinematography aren’t enough to elevate a story that starts off promisingly but slowly works its way through to a hackneyed and labored ending.
The Squid and the Whale, a coming-of-age story about a teenager whose writer parents are divorcing, gets my vote for the most over-looked movie of 2005. Before the Oscar nominations were announced I thought that Jeff Daniels’ performance as the self-centered failure-of-a-father-figure was a lock for a Best Actor nod. Daniels is an actor who is so natural a performer that I think we often forget how good he is. I’d lump him in the same category with another Jeff—Jeff Bridges—who is also often overlooked.
The film is a semi-autobiographical story by former New Yorker writer Noah Baumbach and avoids the pitfalls that so many family dramas that deal with divorce fall into. It’s poignant, funny and in a movie filled with great performances and scenes one sequence stands out as one of the best not only from the movie, but one of the best of the year. There is a scene in a doorway between Daniels and his ex-wife, played by Laura Linney, where in just a couple of minutes we learn all we need to know about their relationship—the tenderness that once existed and the bitterness that now touches every moment of their lives.
The Squid and the Whale is one of the best movies of last year, and if you missed it at the theatre check it out on DVD.
By Richard Crouse – Metro In Focus
