It’s Los Angeles, 1949. Ruthless gangster Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn in over-the-top-mode) has taken over the city—there’s brothels, booze and bad news all over. “I’m building a new city out of the ruins of Los Angeles,” says Cohen.
Corruption is the name of the game for everyone except Sgt. John O’Mara (Josh Brolin), a honest cop in a crooked town. When LAPD Chief William Henry Parker (Nick Nolte) asks him to create a special undercover team to bring Cohen and his thugs to justice, O’Mara assembles the Gangster Squad, a group of cops who don’t mind getting their hands dirty.
“The Gangster Squad” will likely suffer from the inevitable comparisons to “The Untouchables” and “LA Confidential.” It grabs the atmosphere of post war LA from the latter and the storyline, almost beat for beat, from the former. There’s even a shoot out on a stairway, but this is a far more blunt object than either of it’s forbearers. In the first twenty minutes people are drawn and quartered, incinerated—apparently Cohen prefers medieval techniques—and there’s a vicious fistfight. Then it gets violent.
The film is possibly best known, not for its cast, which also includes Ryan Gostling, Emma Stone, Michael Peña and Giovanni Ribisi, but as the movie pulled from release following the Aurora, Colorado Century 13 massacre. Originally featuring a scene of gangsters randomly firing into a movie theatre, it was deemed inappropriate for release at the time. I’m not sure what they have replaced that scene with, but trust me, its removal hasn’t made the film any less violent in tone.
It’s a gorgeous looking film, with a pretty picture of LA’s glamorous nightlife and features dialogue by Will Beall who has clearly spent some time watching Raymond Chandler movies like “The Big Sleep.” Lines like “The whole city is underwater and you’re grabbing a bucket when you should be grabbing a bathing suit,” have more finesse than the story as a whole.
“The gangster Squad” is a period piece that spends a bit too much time exploring the down-and-dirty side of the story, but is an stylish look at a violent time.
My motto is “I watch bad movies so you don’t have to” and rarely has that ever been as true as it was when I watched, nay, endured “Jonah Hex.” Clocking in at a brief 80 minutes—73 without the end credits—“Jonah Hex” isn’t just painfully short, it’s also painful to watch for about 70 of those 73 minutes. The story of a supernatural bounty hunter set on revenge against the man who killed his family is as disfigured as its main character’s face.
Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin) wasn’t always the pizza-faced avenger we meet in the movie. Once he was a war hero, a confederate soldier whose refusal to obey a direct order from his commander Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich, grabbing a paycheque) led to the death of Turnbull’s son. Drummed out of the military he settles down with his wife and son; settles down that is, until Turnbull tracks him down, makes him watch his family be killed and scars his face with a branding iron. Left for dead he survives, but just barely. He has one foot in the human world, one foot on “the other side.” He can “talk” to the dead, which is convenient because most everyone around him winds up six feet under. His only companions are his horse, his dog and a courtesan named Lilah (Megan Fox) who clearly does not judge Jonah’s book by its cover. Hex gets his chance at revenge when he is hired by the government to stop Turnball from using his “super weapon” to destabilize the government and achieve what the civil war couldn’t—succession.
“Jonah Hex” is silly, but so are a lot of movies based on comic books. Its sins are way worse than a dose of silliness. It’s not just poorly made, it’s inept, with little idea of how to tell the story and even less of an idea of how to stage a cool action scene. There are odd flashes here and there—a surreal resurrection sequence must be seen to be believed and Jonah does have some cool moves—but by and large it looks cheap and feels incomplete, as though the cutting room floor is littered with the connective tissue that would have fleshed out the story to something that made sense. The production company responsible for this mess is called Weed Road so perhaps it shouldn’t be a shock the story has a drug induced, hallucinatory feel.
Josh Brolin brings his real-life swagger to the role and has fun with some of the tongue-in-what’s-left-of-his-cheek lines, but because of the heavy make-up he’s wearing it is often hard to understand what he is saying.
Former It-Girl Megan Fox brings a tight corset, wasp waist and little else to her brief role and others, like Will Arnett and Wes Bentley, are given even less to do.
The best thing about “Jonah Hex” is that at 73 minutes, it isn’t longer.
I was six when Apollo 11 happened and was incredibly bored by the whole thing. I couldn’t understand why the shows I liked were being preempted for moon launch coverage. The Cape Canaveral takeoff plays a big part in “MIB3” and I felt like I was six again. Not filled with wonder but wishing I was watching something else.
As the third installment opens Boris the Animal (Jemaine Clement), a notorious intergalactic serial killer is 40 years into a life sentence. He’s locked away in the only place that will hold him, a super-high security prison on the moon. After a daring escape he plans a full-scale invasion of earth, but first he wants revenge on the man who put him in jail: MIB agent K (Tommy Lee Jones). The only way to thwart Boris’s evil plan is for Agent J (Will Smith) to go back in time to 1969 and stop Boris.
Once every decade or so Will Smith makes a big-budget mistake. He’s the biggest movie star in the world and his charisma is usually enough to save almost any movie he chooses to do. But every now and again he makes a “Wild Wild West” or, this season, “MIB3.” Smith’s got a good track record, but you can’t always hit it out of the park.
There is some good stuff here. If this acting thing doesn’t work out for Brolin he does have a future as a Tommy Lee Jones impersonator. He could do weddings and Bar Mitzvahs and make a fortune. He’s that good.
I also enjoyed Smith literally hurtling through time, Bill Hader’s take on Andy Warhol, the idea that Mick Jagger is an alien sent to the planet to breed with Earth women, Michael Stuhlbarg’s unusual performance as an alien psychic and the battle in the Chinese restaurant. All of these elements were cool, but despite a good bad guy, some cool creatures and Brolin the movie didn’t have the charm or the energy of the first two films.
The magic of the first film is gone. Even the fun stuff in this film seems to evaporate as soon the next scene starts and don’t even get me started about the ending. The attempt at adding in some heart to what should be an oversized sci-fi romp fails miserably.
“Men in Black 3” brings something to the franchise that was missing from the great first film and not even present in the second, lamentable entry in the series. Unfortunately that element is blandness.
The Coen Brothers have spent most of their careers as critical darlings, the favorites of people like me who love the offbeat sensibility they bring to their films. Their classic work, which includes O Brother Where Art Thou, Barton Fink and of course, the Oscar winning Fargo dates back to the early eighties with their breathtaking debut Blood Simple.
The new millennium, however, hasn’t been kind to the brothers or their fans. An attempt at romantic comedy, Intolerable Cruelty, lacked both romance and comedy and The Ladykillers was an ill advised remake of an Ealing Studios classic. Happily, they found their footing with their new film, an adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel No Country for Old Men, featuring a serial killer with a Beatles haircut, a title borrowed from the first line of W. B. Yeats’ poem Sailing to Byzantium and some of their best work in years.
The story begins when down-on-his-luck Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), hunting near the Rio Grande, stumbles across the site of a drug deal gone wrong. Bullet-ridden dead men litter the landscape, and a several kilos of heroin and a suitcase stuffed with two million dollars in cash have been abandoned. When Moss makes off with the money his life and the lives of those around him are changed forever.
In hot pursuit of the runaway and the cash are disillusioned Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) who vainly tries to contain the situation, a cocky bounty hunter played by Woody Harrelson and an enigmatic killer named Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem).
Bardem’s performance as Chigurh (ironically pronounced “Sugar”) is the film’s secret weapon. The movie is top heavy with good performances—Jones is at his world-weary best while Brolin continues his comeback winning streak with another strong outing—but it is the quiet menace that Spanish actor Bardem brings to the film that gives it is oomph. His diabolical killer cavalierly flips coins for people’s lives, speaks in a monotone when he does speak, but usually he just lets his weapons—like a pressurized air gun usually used to stun and kill cattle—do the talking for him. His near catatonic countenance, Prince Valiant haircut and seeming indestructibility make him the best and strangest on-screen villain of the year.
The Coens have faithfully adapted McCarthy’s novel, keeping the dark humor, unbearable suspense and high body count—the ultra-violence would make David Cronenberg proud—while at the same time tightening up their notoriously loose narrative style. This is muscular filmmaking, highly structured but not predictable; it’s well paced and suspenseful. Couple the terrific story with great performances and beautiful New Mexico photography and the result is not only their best film since 1996’s Fargo, but also one of the best of the year.
Early on in the shoot for You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Woody Allen’s latest exploration of love and neurosis, star Josh Brolin told the director he wouldn’t try and play a thinly disguised version of Woody Allen in the movie, like Kenneth Branagh in Celebrity or even Scarlett Johansson in Scoop.
“I know some people have tried to (play the Woody Allen character),” he says. “I don’t understand why. Everybody writes from who they are, but I think because Woody has acted in his films, and is choosing not to act in this film, therefore you are taking his place. I didn’t see it that way.”
The director was fine with that, in fact, he told Brolin to make the role his own. “Then I’d do a take,” says Brolin, “and he’d say, ‘You changed a word. You said cannot. The script says can’t.’ I’d say, ‘You’re not serious are you?’ and he’d say, ‘Yes, you broke the contraction.’ I said, ‘I thought you just said to make the part my own.’ He said, ‘I know. But the script says can’t.’”
Such is life on set with a genius.
Brolin, however, does have what most people would consider the Woody Allen role in the film; the part Woody might have played if he was 30 years younger. As a novelist with writer’s block and a taste for women, the Roy has the bulk of the film’s funny lines and best scenes, but Brolin says he couldn’t play Allen if he tried.
“Woody and I both said, ‘I could never pretend to be you nor could you possibly pretend to be me.’ If there are two more opposite people on this planet it is me and Woody Allen. For various reasons; which is why I think we come together and work together as well as we do, because we have the same sensibilities. We just have different structures.”
Brolin, who has made two films with Allen, says when he watched You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, he wanted to slap Roy. “To me he is pathetic. He’s not the most redeeming character out there. The grass is greener on the other side and he is constantly looking over there for notoriety and fame and all that. It’s a strange character and when he asked me to play it, I was like, ‘Why? Why me?’ But I’m very happy I got to do it.”
W. isn’t the first warts and all presidential biography to hit ever the big screen. In fact, it isn’t even the first Oliver Stone directed warts and all White House portrait to enter theatres. Nor is it the first time George W. Bush has been given the Hollywood treatment—among others Timothy Bottoms played him on the sit-com That’s My Bush and in 2006 British director Gabriel Range stirred things up with Death of a President about the fictional assassination of Bush—but it is the first time Stone has immortalized a sitting president.
Josh Brolin plays Bush from his frat days at Yale through to his time as a mostly unemployed good old boy, through to becoming the born-again governor of Texas to answering a call from God to run for President. Along the way the character is arrested and bailed out by his powerful Dad, signs up for AA, gets married, starts wars and uses lots of Bushisms like “misunderestimate.”
It’s a jam packed life, ripe for a full-on biographical treatment, but it is also a well documented one. As audiences we all know the story. We’ve seen it on television, read about it in the dozens of books written about the man and his presidency, so Stone’s job was to come up with new material, or at least a new spin on old material to keep the story compelling. Unfortunately as far as bios go it is same-old. Stone doesn’t dredge up much new material, and save for a few scenes deep inside the White House’s war rooms, there isn’t much here that will come as a surprise to anyone with even a passing knowledge of Bush and his troubled presidency.
Luckily for Stone he has a top flight cast of actors breathing life into characters that are most frequently seen standing behind a White House podium giving carefully prepared answers to a scrum of reporters. Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Condoleezza Rice, General Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld all make appearances. Richard Dreyfuss nails the commonly held idea of Cheney as puppet master, the White House master of Doublethink and Newspeak. Toby Jones, a British actor best known for voicing Dobby, the house-elf, in the Harry Potter films plays power architect, or “Bush’s Brain,” as he’s sometimes called, Karl Rove as a ruthless political animal, convinced of both his moral superiority and his king-making ability. Thandie Newton, using a nasal, flat voice brings out the humor of the toadying Condoleeza Rice while Jeffrey Wright and Scott Glenn seem to be channeling Powel and Rumsfeld respectively.
Leading the cast is Brolin who, despite a career downturn that spanned most of the 1990s, has been moving from strength to strength of late starring in movies like No Country for Old Men and upcoming Milk with Sean Penn. Here as Bush he nails the president’s beady-eyed squint, the malapropisms—he’s the decider!—and the over confidence. It’s a remarkable performance that goes well beyond mimicry; at once filled with swagger but plagued by self-doubt. In Brolin’s hands George “don’t call me Jr.” Bush is portrayed as a simple man so determined to prove his mettle—to his father as much as the country—that he makes some dubious decisions in an attempt to appear decisive and powerful.
It’s a showy performance, but one that doesn’t stoop to parody. Bush is a larger than life character and Brolin’s take on him is big and brassy. It’s also almost guaranteed to be nominated for Best Actor come awards time.
So Stone has delivered an unexpectedly even handed portrait of one of the most polarizing figures of recent history. I’m pleased was able to put aside partisan politics but my major complaint of the film, aside from some obvious omissions—there isn’t a hanging chad in sight—is that it isn’t tough enough. Stone, in an attempt to be empathetic has played it too safe with the story of America’s worst president ever. Perhaps it would have been a different movie had he waited ten or fifteen years to make it, but as it is W. feels overly restrained and straightforward.
Buried director Rodrigo Cortés on his admiration for Ryan Reynolds
“I hope that all Canadians are not like Ryan Reynolds because that embarrasses the world. People like him should be forbidden.”
Woody Allen on aging
“I’ll be 75 in another couple of months and I do see myself as becoming waning and decrepit.”
Jacob Tierney on working with a cat in Good Neighbours:
“He starred in 300. That’s the cat from 300. Do you know how many times the trainer told me that? I was like, ‘Awesome. Shall I talk to his agent?’”
Paul Giamatti on the famous “merlot” line in Sideways:
“The funniest thing about that line is the only reason it is merlot is that we tried all these different wines and that was the only one that was funny… was the word merlot. For some reason that sounded funnier than chardonnay.”
Josh Brolin on Diane Lane:
“If you look at my wife’s boobs you’ll see that she doesn’t need a boob job.”
The first glimpse of Josh Brolin as scarred comic book bounty hunter Jonah Hex reveals it is a role he was born to play. His natural bad boy swagger shines through the character’s heavy make up but Brolin wasn’t the first choice to play the character, or even the second. As is so often the case in Hollywood many other actors were first considered for the part.
California surf boy Matthew McConaughey was approached, as was indie film darling Emile Hirsch.
Thomas Jane even went as far as submitting photos in full Jonah Hex drag, scars and all.
In the end, Brolin brought that extra something special that made the role his, and joined a long list of actors who weren’t the first choice to headline big movies.
Many actors have played James Bond but a recent JamesBondwiki.com poll anoints Sean Connery as the two-to-one people’s favourite.
Guess what? He wasn’t the first choice.
Author Ian Fleming partially modelled the Bond character on Cary Grant, so the suave actor was top-of-the-list when the first Bond film, Dr. No, was cast. Grant, however, sent his regrets, saying he was too old to play the spy.
When Connery was cast, the writer was less than pleased.
“He’s not exactly what I had in mind,” said Fleming, who felt Connery was too “unrefined” for the role. He later changed his mind and Connery went on to play Bond in six movies.
Connery was the first choice to play Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings series but said no.
“I didn’t understand the script when they sent it to me,” he said. “Bobbits? Hobbits?”
New Line apparently wanted him so badly they offered him a huge chunk of the of worldwide box office receipts. That “no” cost him almost $400 million.
Many other movies have “settled” for second choices. Pretty Woman director Garry Marshall courted Molly Ringwald and Daryl Hannah, who said no because she felt it denigrated women, before casting Julia Roberts.
Can you imagine The Matrix without Keanu Reeves? Apparently the Wachowski Brothers could as they offered the role of Neo to Will Smith first. Smith declined, opting to make the box office disaster Wild Wild West instead, but says he has no regrets.
“I would have absolutely messed up The Matrix. At that point I wasn’t smart enough as an actor to let the movie be — whereas Keanu was.”
