Like “All the President’s Men,” the new Michael Keaton drama is a story about newspaper reporters taking on the establishment. Instead of going after the highest office in the land, as Woodward and Bernstein did in their Watergate exposé, in “Spotlight” Keaton, Mark Ruffalo and Rachel McAdams play Boston Globe reporters delving into the Catholic Church’s cover-up of abusive priests.
Following a buyout the Boston Globe has a new editor, Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber), who assigns the investigative Spotlight bureau to look into a delicate subject, a priest accused of molesting 80 kids. It’s a hot button story in the city of 1500 priests, where 53% of Globe subscribers are Catholic. The plan is to examine sealed documents, which requires legal action. The Bostonians view it as suing the church, a sacrilege in their city, whereas the outsider Baron sees it as simply making sealed documents public.
As the investigation plods along—“ The church thinks in centuries,” says lawyer Mitchell Garabedian (Stanley Tucci), “does your paper have the resources to take that on?”—the story becomes much larger than originally thought, uncovering a far reaching conspiracy that includes not only the church but lawyers and possibly newspapermen as well.
“Spotlight” is set just fourteen years ago, but feels of another age. The internet has, by and large, rendered this kind of methodical reporting obsolete. The door knocking, working-the-phones investigation with months to form and write stories is now the kind of thing that exists only in the movies. We see it all here in detail and much of it is very interesting. The reporter’s investigation allows for huge loads of exposition in the form of interviews with witnesses and victims and exports and while there’s a bit too much, “Are you telling me..?” the slow and steady unveiling of details is compelling stuff.
Director and co-writer Tom McCarthy keeps it simple and straightforward, allowing the occasional “gotcha!” revelations speak for themselves. Clues and information are uncovered slowly, with a minimum of red herrings. The result is portrait of the kind of grunt work the Spotlight team used to break the story, not nearly as flashy or verbose as Aaron Sorkin’s overwritten and over sentimentalized look at news gathering, “The Newsroom.”
Keaton has dialled it down a few notches from his recent turn in “Birdman” while Ruffalo kicks out the jams, all jittery energy and Hulk-like anger.
“Spotlight” is a refreshingly barebones movie that allows the story to provide the fireworks.
There was a time when one of the best-known sportsmen in the world didn’t wear a uniform, cleats or throw a ball. As unlikely as it seems in the summer of 1972 chess master Bobby Fischer held the world transfixed, battling against Soviet grandmaster Boris Spassky.
Tobey McGuire is Fischer, a child chess prodigy determined to be recognized as the best player in the world. As a young, cocky player he easily decimates his opponents, earning national ranking and the opportunity to play the best players in the world.
At Fischer’s side are Paul Marshall (Michael Stuhlbarg) as a shadowy government figure who sees Fischer’s triumph over the Russians as a Cold War triumph for all of America and a chess whiz priest (Peter Sarsgaard) who provides guidance, both personal and professional.
Between Fischer and his goal is Spassky (Liev Schreiber), a stately Russian genius who thoroughly unnerves the American, highlighting his descent into mental illness and paranoia. By the time to two face off at the 1972 World Chess Championship in Reykjavík, Iceland, Fischer’s obsessions—anti-Semitism (even though he himself is Jewish) and a deep seeded distrust of his Russian opponents—threaten to incapacitate him.
Considering Fischer’s ability to think several steps ahead of his opponents, “Pawn Sacrifice” is surprisingly straightforward. Fischer’s life is divided into major events laid out end to end, from prodigy to world champion to eccentric recluse. McGuire transcends the basic biopic structure with a nuanced performance that breathes life into Fischer’s brilliance and demons. The reason for his torments aren’t examined as deeply as it might have been—his issues with identity seem to only stem from his mother’s taunts about his absent father—which may have deepened the character but McGuire plays him with confidence and vulnerability.
Also strong is Schreiber, performing here in Russian, as the august but human grandmaster.
“Pawn Sacrifice” kicks into gear in its final third as Fischer and Spassky go mano e mano over a chess board as the world watches.
“The Last Days on Mars” is the kind of movie that used to play the bottom -of-the-bill at drive-ins. Set on the red planet, it’s a sci fi thriller that b-movie king Roger Corman would have called “Space Zombies,” with at least two exclamation marks. As it stands, “The Last Days on Mars” might have been more fun if director Ruairi Robinson had embraced drive-in quality of the story and left any illusions of becoming the next Ridley Scott at the concession stand.
An adaptation of Sydney J. Bounds’ short story “The Animators,” the film begins near the end of a long mission on Mars. The exhausted crew—Liev Schreiber, Elias Koteas, Romola Garai, Olivia Williams, Johnny Harris, Goran Kostic, Tom Cullen and Yusra Warsama—is tired of being cooped up and itching to get back to earth. Days before their exit a mysterious algae is found growing on an underground supply of H2O. What should be an exciting discovery turns nasty when the two astronauts who perished making the discovery come back to terrorize the remaining crew with some bloody zombie carnage.
It all seems familiar, and it is, so the trick for Robinson was to create characters that we’d care about if they happen to get infected with alien germs and turn into bloodthirsty virus carriers. By and large he manages to up the emotional ante by casting good actors. Schreiber, Koteas, Garai and Williams elevate the b-movie story to something approaching a b-plus-movie, the plus being some real human interact during the scenes where they aren’t turning tail and fleeing hungry zombies.
There is the standard “I’ll-do-anything-to-survive-including-leaving-you-to-be-devoured” character, the hardnosed scientist type, but there’s also an interesting relationship between Schreiber and Garai that brings one of the movie’s best climatic moments.
“The Last Days on Mars” spends a bit too much time in faux Kubrick Mode before switching to full-on Corman style exploitation, but once it clicks over it’ll make your pulse race. The zombies are appropriately angry, there’s some good shocks and by the time the crew is whittled down to the essentials—that’s not a spoiler, this is a total Who’s Gonna Get It Next flick—a good hero and a nasty bad guy, it’s a bit of drive-in style fun.
In this era of product placement one very obvious bit of marketing was overlooked in The Omen, the remake of the spooky 1976 film starring Gregory Peck. It seems to me that Trojan condoms should have sponsored this movie because after seeing it if the prospect of giving birth to the anti-Christ isn’t an incentive for birth control I don’t know what is.
In the reworking Liev Schreiber plays Robert Thorn, aide to the American ambassador to Italy. His wife, Kate (Julia Stiles) is pregnant but there are complications. At the hospital he is told by a mysterious priest that their baby has been born dead, but another child, born at virtually the same time, whose mother died in childbirth is available. The priest convinces the grieving father not to tell his wife of the switch and the couple raise the child, named Damien, as their own. Five years later when Thorn is made ambassador to Great Britain strange things start to happen in their new mansion. The rest of the movie can be summed up thusly: Big creepy house, little creepy kid.
As the leads Schreiber brings a square-jawed determination to his role, while Stiles copes as best as one can when raising the child of the Devil. In a smallish supporting role Mia Farrow returns to the devil-child genre almost 40 years after Rosemary’s Baby made her a star, as Mrs. Blaylock, a demonic wet-nurse with the movie’s only funny lines.
With the multitude of sequels and remakes hitting the theatres this summer everything old is new again, but that saying is especially true in the case of The Omen, which is more than a remake, it’s a cover version of the old film. Line for line and shot for the shot this new version of the film simply replaces the original cast with current actors, updates the technology—e-mail replaces snail mail—and dismisses some of the outdated 70s mores of the first one to recycle the story for a new generation. The movie is hair-raising enough and the mysterious murders are a little more graphic and disturbing than the original, but the only reason I can see for remounting this movie is the once-in-a-century chance to open it on the demonic date June 6, 2006—6/6/06.
In Goon Liev Schreiber embodies one of the great hockey traditions. As Ross Rhea he’s a bruiser, the kind of hockey player that makes Don Cherry grin from ear to ear. Whether he’s gliding down the ice or trading blows with another player, he looks like a natural. Like someone who grew up on skates.
“I could never play hockey,” he admits, but adds, growing up on New York’s Lower East Side gave him the chance to catch Rangers games from time to time.
How then did he manage the professional level hockey he plays in the movie?
“Easy,” he says, “I had a fantastic double. But I also went to hockey camp for six weeks and polished up my skills and now I play. I love it. We played almost every night on set and now I’m looking for a league in the city to join. A very elderly gentleman’s league. The problem is I’m no good with the puck. All I’m good at is hitting and unfortunately it’s not nice to do that in these leagues.”
For the Yale educated actor the trick to creating a believable character was research. At six-foot-three, with broad shoulders and a Wendel Clark handlebar moustache he looks the part, but he dug deeper to humanize a man who beats people up for a living.
“I don’t know how to approach anything than from the beginning,” he says. “What is an enforcer? Who can I talk to? And I quickly hooked on to Bob Probert (one half of the Red Wings’s “Bruise Brothers”). I wouldn’t say the character is based on him but I would say he was in my heart when I was playing this role.”
Added to the on-ice action is his character’s impending retirement from the game.
“You take somebody like Ross Rhea who’s probably been skating and playing hockey since he could walk. That’s all his life was ever about and at the tender age of thirty-nine or forty it is suddenly over and there is nothing else. There are no more fans. There are no more teammates. No more games. That is a hard transition for a guy to make.
“I’m not so sure that some of these tragedies that have occurred with these enforcers didn’t have something to do with that. What you’re left with is a battered body, a battered spirit and a habit, maybe, of taking things to control pain, and doing things to control pain.
“Goon is a love letter to those guys. It is saying to them, You’re not undervalued, you’re not underappreciated. We know what you went through and how much of your body, mind and spirit you gave to this game in the course of your life and we’re grateful you did.”
One thing Schreiber didn’t do to prepare was revisit a classic hockey movie.
“I had seen Slap Shot years ago and loved it,” he says, “but I put it out of my head because I wanted to start with a clean slate.”
If “Goon,” the new film about Canada’s favourite sport starring Jay Baruchel and Seann William Scott, could be summed up in one image it would be of a tooth soaring through the air in slow motion.
The airborne bloody Chiclet is as significant a symbol to “Goon” as Mona Lisa’s smirk was to High Renaissance painting and open “g” tuning is to Keith Richards’s guitar. The tooth, and the punch that dislodged it, are celebrated by the film as an essential part of the game.
Like its main character the movie is violent, sweet and a little dimwitted. Unlike other sports films “Goon” doesn’t use the game as a metaphor for, or a microcosm of, real life. The flying tooth is just that, a tooth dislodged by a mighty punch to the mouth, but beyond the broken teeth and smelly jock straps, the film does have philosophical messages: Loyalty matters, doing the right thing is crucial and understanding your purpose and place makes for a happy life.
In some ways the messages are very Zen, except for the bloody mouths, scabby fingers and the aforementioned flying tooth.
But rather than focus on the philosophical it chooses to romanticize its subject. Enforcers are glorified — “You’ve been touched by the fist of god.” They are compared to soldiers — “Everybody loves soldiers,” says LS, “until they stop fighting and come home.” They are men whose job it is to lay their personal safety on the line for the benefit of others.
In the world created by the movie, I suppose it’s true, but that sentiment might ring more clearly if Doug wasn’t such a dolt. Perhaps if he thought before he threw a punch we as an audience might see his actions as more of a statement of personal beliefs and less as a simple gladiatorial display.
“Goon” does capture the rough and rowdy feel of minor league hockey. It’s profane enough to make the Hanson Brothers blush and violent enough to convince Paul Henderson to buy a helmet. Fun stuff, particularly if you’re a hockey fan.
In this era of product placement one very obvious bit of marketing was overlooked in The Omen, the remake of the spooky 1976 film starring Gregory Peck. It seems to me that Trojan condoms should have sponsored this movie because after seeing it if the prospect of giving birth to the anti-Christ isn’t an incentive for birth control I don’t know what is.
In the reworking Liev Schreiber plays Robert Thorn, aide to the American ambassador to Italy. His wife, Kate (Julia Stiles) is pregnant but there are complications. At the hospital he is told by a mysterious priest that their baby has been born dead, but another child, born at virtually the same time, whose mother died in childbirth is available. The priest convinces the grieving father not to tell his wife of the switch and the couple raise the child, named Damien, as their own. Five years later when Thorn is made ambassador to Great Britain strange things start to happen in their new mansion. The rest of the movie can be summed up thusly: Big creepy house, little creepy kid.
As the leads Schreiber brings a square-jawed determination to his role, while Stiles copes as best as one can when raising the child of the Devil. In a smallish supporting role Mia Farrow returns to the devil-child genre almost 40 years after Rosemary’s Baby made her a star, as Mrs. Blaylock, a demonic wet-nurse with the movie’s only funny lines.
With the multitude of sequels and remakes hitting the theatres this summer everything old is new again, but that saying is especially true in the case of The Omen, which is more than a remake, it’s a cover version of the old film. Line for line and shot for the shot this new version of the film simply replaces the original cast with current actors, updates the technology—e-mail replaces snail mail—and dismisses some of the outdated 70s mores of the first one to recycle the story for a new generation. The movie is hair-raising enough and the mysterious murders are a little more graphic and disturbing than the original, but the only reason I can see for remounting this movie is the once-in-a-century chance to open it on the demonic date June 6, 2006—6/6/06.
Defiance is the story of three brothers who fought back. It’s the little known history of a community of Warsaw Ghetto refugees who survived in the Belarusian forests despite the constant threat of the Nazis. Based on the true story of the Bielski partisans, Defiance stars Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell as the three Jewish brothers who escaped the Nazis in Poland and fought to rescue 1200 Jews.
Defiance is two-thirds of a good movie. It’s hard to fault the idea of shedding some light on the brave men and women who fought back against the Nazis, but I think that simply because the movie tells an important story doesn’t necessarily mean it is good storytelling. Director Ed Zwick has most of the elements of a good story—compelling true premise, well known actors, dramatic conflict—but he puts it all together with all the spark of a wet match.
He’s done better in the past with similar material. Glory, the untold story of the US Civil War’s first all-black volunteer company was a masterful blend of historical fact and entertainment. Defiance, on the other hand, tries too hard to create unnecessary story elements. The basic premise of three brothers saving large groups of people is compelling enough, why muddy it up with superfluous romantic tangents? The peripheral plotlines add nothing to the overall movie, in fact, often they distract from the main focus. Add to that some clunky dialogue and the film’s 137 minute running time seems much longer.
Also, Zwick doesn’t take the time to show us how the brothers managed to build a giant village in the forest and yet go undetected by the Nazis. We are told several times that the woods are vast and dangerous, but they always seem to be near a roadway or farm, close to civilization. Surely someone would have spotted the smoke from their camp fires. Perhaps more time spent on showing us how isolated the refugees were and less time spent on romance would have given this movie more of a ring of authenticity.
When the movie sticks to the basic elements of the story—freedom, faith, protection against persecution—it works. When Craig says, “Every day of freedom is an act of faith, and if we should die, at least we die like human beings,” he gets to the meat of the story, only to be sidelined later by a rambling script.
Craig brings the same kind of physicality to the role of Tuvia as he dose to the James Bond movies, but here he is overshadowed by Schreiber who is ferocious as brother Zus. He’s a powerful presence on screen and almost out-Bonds James Bond.
Defiance is a remarkable story of courage, unfortunately, unremarkably told.
Other than Captain Canuck Wolverine is the best known superhero to hail from the Great White North. According to his comic book backstory he was born in 19th century Canada—Northern Alberta to be exact—and served in the First Canadian Parachute Battalion before being recruited by Team X, a CIA black ops group. When movie fans first encountered the character, however, little was known about him. At the beginning of the original X-Men movie he was suffering from memory loss and couldn’t remember how he became a superhero with retractable bone claws, the near indestructible metal alloy adamantium bonded to his skeleton and claws and a healing ability that allows him to quickly recover from virtually any wound, disease or toxin. The new movie, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, aims to clear up any questions about the hirsute hero’s lineage in a 107 minute CGI-fest that tells us everything we ever wanted to know about Wolverine, but were afraid to ask.
It’s quite a story. When X-Men Origins: Wolverine—written by David Benioff (The Kite Runner, Troy)—begins it’s 1845 and James Howlett (that’s the young, pre-superhero Wolverine) has just discovered his superhuman abilities. As an adult he (Hugh Jackman in his fourth turn as the character) and half brother Victor ‘Sabretooth’ Creed (Liev Schreiber) become elaborately facially coiffed soldiers, using their mutant powers in every conflict from the Civil War to Vietnam. In Nam the brothers get thrown into the brig but are rescued by General William Stryker (Danny Huston), a warmonger who recognizes their special set of skills and recruits them for his team of mercenaries. And that’s all in the first five minutes. Later when James Howlett, now called Logan leaves the group he is branded a traitor and Victor is sent to retrieve him. On Stryker’s orders Victor kills Logan’s girlfriend setting Logan on a path of revenge. Meanwhile Stryker hatches a plan to create a super mutant and persuades Logan to undergo an operation to make him virtually indestructible.
Since this film, in its unfinished form, was leaked on the internet the world wide web has been ablaze with fanboy opinion. Judgments on the film’s merits have ranged from “a lesson in mediocrity” to “It’s a movie that should be judged against such greats as The Godfather and Citizen Kane.” I fall somewhere between the two.
This may be my own bias, but I don’t go see movies based on comic books expecting air tight stories. I know that in comic book land the best books have well developed narratives but, rightly or wrongly, I give movies like The Hulk and Wolverine a pass in the complex story department. I go for the fun stuff—explosions, incredible fights, cool characters and wild CGI. With that in mind X-Men Origins: Wolverine earns a passing grade from me. It has plot holes you could drive a Brink’s adamantium truck through, but boy, they blow up stuff real good!
Richard Donner, the veteran director of 1978’s Superman was brought in to assist official director Gavin Hood in creating an audience-friendly back story based on Wolverine’s thirst for blood and revenge and his fingerprints are all overt the film. The mix of action, character and comedy feels very much like the first Superman.
Nothing here will come as much of a surprise to anyone familiar with the story or the endless blogging that’s been all over the web. X-Men Origins: Wolverine has the obligatory shots of Jackman walking away in slo mo from a giant explosion; some good acting from good actors like Danny Huston, Liev Schreiber and Jackman; some attempts at humor—a morbidly obese man wears a “Save the Whales” t-shirt and some camp moments—how many times can Wolverine howl at the sky?—that add some over-the-top energy to the picture.
On the downside the script is riddled with clichéd dialogue—“Whose side are you on anyway?”—and doesn’t come close to the elegant perfection of the first two Bryan Singer X-Men movies, but as an early summer popcorn flick it’s good fun.
