“Transformer” director Michael Bay’s movies are so distinctive the internet has coined a new term to describe his pedal-to-the-metal action style: Bayhem. His latest, the chase flick “Ambulance” starring Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Jake Gyllenhaal, and now playing in theatres, falls in line. It keeps the foot on the gas in true Bayhem fashion.
Decorated veteran Will (Abdul-Mateen II) is desperate for money. His wife needs surgery but the coffers are dry. To raise the cash, he reluctantly asks his adoptive brother and career criminal Danny (Gyllenhaal) if he can help.
Turns out Danny can help, if Will is willing to bend the rules to get the money.
A lot of money.
Danny is planning a bank heist with an estimated bounty of $32 million. “I need an extra man,” Danny says. Will isn’t sure, but Danny is persuasive. “Have I ever gotten you in anything that I couldn’t get you out of?”
The bank heist goes off without a hitch, but the getaway is rough. With things falling apart, they hijack an ambulance. Trouble is, the ambulance is transporting a wounded policeman (Jackson White) and a paramedic (Eiza González). With police in hot pursuit, they take the ambulance on a high-speed chase through the streets of Los Angeles. “We’re not the bad guys,” Danny says. “We’re just trying to get home.”
The stakes are life and death. Cue the Bayhem.
“Ambulance” isn’t a heist movie. Bay milks excitement out of the setup and execution of the sequence but this is a getaway flick with an interesting family dynamic between Danny and Will.
Gyllenhaal’s performance as the charismatic sociopath older brother is as amped up as the movie itself. Which is to say it’s pedal to the metal all the way.
Bay’s relentless camera is in constant motion. It zooms, caresses the actor’s faces in extreme closeups, flies up and down the sides of buildings, and, of course cruises alongside the ambulance as it careens through the streets of Los Angeles. The camerawork and the editing are so fast it’s as though Bay has his finger on the fast forward button the entire time.
If you get motion sickness you might want to take some Gravol along with your popcorn.
If “Ambulance” was music, it would be a Yngwie Malmsteen guitar solo. Fast and heavy, it bowls you over with technical skill but doesn’t engage much more than that. There’s no sense of pacing, it’s all forward momentum. As Danny and Will say several times, “We’re a locomotive. We don’t stop,” but occasionally tapping the brake might give the viewers and the actors a chance to catch out collective breath.
“Ambulance” is raw, unadulterated Bayhem. From the frenetic editing to the characters, who all speak like they are in a Michael Bay action movie, and the anxiety inducing soundtrack, it is frantic Bayhem with all the good and bad that implies.
“Songbird,” a new film produced by Michael Bay and now on premium VOD, feels ripped from the headlines.
Like, today’s headlines.
The first film to shoot in Los Angeles during the lockdown details life during COVID.
Set in 2024, during the fourth year of pandemic, COVID has mutated, leaving the United States under martial law were infected citizens are forcibly removed from their homes. Treated like walking, talking biohazards they are housed in concentration camps called Q-Zones.
Meanwhile, motorcycle courier Nico (KJ Apa) is immune. A recovered COVID patient, he has the antibodies to fight off the disease. When his locked-down girlfriend Sarah (Sofia Carson) is suspected of contracting the virus, Nico springs into action to save her from being taken away.
There are side characters galore, like Bradley Whitford’s sex-crazed record producer, a lovelorn veteran played by Paul Walter Hauser, Demi Moore’s protective mom and an over-the-top Peter Stormare as the evil head of the Los Angeles’ “sanitation” department–but most of them exist only to heighten the grim desperation of the situation.
“Songbird” isn’t a politicized screed about masks or the virus’ origin. Instead, it’s a star-crossed style romance—”You’ve never been in the same room,” says Sara’s mother, “but he loves you.”—set against the backdrop of the worst world event in decades.
It would be one thing if “Songbird” had something to add the conversation about COVID, but it doesn’t. Instead, it plays off our worst collective fears in clumsy and exploitative ways.
It’s likely to appeal to conspiracy enthusiasts who may finger their tinfoil hats in excitement at the mention of bracelets for “munies”—the immune—an unchecked department of sanitation who arrest at will, apps that will report you if your temperature is above normal and ever-present surveillance.
For those not inclined toward dystopian extremes, “Songbird” is a crass reminder of the real-life death, sickness, unemployment and heartache COVID has wrought. It feels tone deaf, and worse, it’s a bad movie.
John Krasinski didn’t just direct and star in the thriller A Quiet Place — he and wife Emily Blunt actually lived it. Sort of.
“One night she said, ‘Living silently would be hard,’” he says. “As the weeks went by we would constantly make note of it. It wasn’t even just getting silverware to make the kid’s lunch. It was more like you’re putting the kids to bed and the bed creaks. You think, we are legitimately surrounded by sound.”
The famous couple star as parents fighting for the survival of their kids in a world invaded by monsters that use sound to hunt human prey. The family must live in silence, use sign language and eat off leaves to avoid the clinking of cutlery on china but what happens when their newborn baby cries? Can life go on?
Krasinski, who starred as Jim Halpert on The Office for eight years, calls the spec script “truly one of the best ideas I’d ever heard,” but admits worrying “that a lack of dialogue would be a thing.”
“Then on about Day 2 or 3 was, ‘Wait a minute. Maybe the thing I am most scared of is our superpower. This is actually super engaging.’ The fact that people are going to be able to experience sound in a completely different way was really fun.”
The silence of the first half of A Quiet Place is deafening. In the way that many filmmakers use bombast to grab your attention Krasinski uses the absence of sound to focus the audience on the situation.
“One of my favourite things about this whole experience has been listening to audiences understand what’s happening,” he says. “Usually the first thirty seconds of the movie you hear people shifting in their seats. Maybe they take a couple bites of popcorn. Then you realise collectively in the room people say, ‘I can’t do this.’ I love that.”
Krasinski and Blunt have been married since 2010 and have two children, Hazel and Violet, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t nervous to ask her to co-star in the film.
“I always wanted Emily to do it but the two versions of this in my head were going to go really wrong. I ask her to do it and she says no, which makes dinner really awkward. Or she says yes, ‘For you I’ll do it.’ I didn’t want her to choose this for me and have it be a weird experience. I’ve seen how good a career she has because of what she’s chosen to do. I needed her to come to it on her own.
“When she asked me to read the script I didn’t think she’d say yes. She was doing Mary Poppins and we had our second child, so she was busy. Then she said, ‘You can’t let anybody else do this role.’ I know it sounds corny but it is true. It is still the greatest compliment of my career because I know what it takes for her to say yes.”
As director, writer, star and executive producer Krasinski has had a hand in all aspects of A Quiet Place. How does he feel now that the film is winning critical raves? “It goes back to that primal thing of the kids at school thinking what you think is cool, is cool.”
Imagine living in complete silence. Never raising your voice over the level of a faint whisper. No music. No heavy footsteps. You can’t even sneeze. Silence. Then imagine your life depends on staying completely noiseless. That’s the situation for the Abbott family—and the rest of the world—in the effective new thriller “A Quiet Place.”
Real life couple John Krasinski (who also wrote, produced and directed) and Emily Blunt are Lee and Evelyn, a mother and father fighting for the survival of their kids Beau (Cade Woodward), Regan (Millicent Simmonds) and Marcus (Noah Jupe) in a world where making a sound, any sound, can be deadly. Deadly blind aliens who hunt their prey through sound have invaded the world turning noisy people into human cold cuts. The family lives in silence, using sign language and eating off leaves to avoid the clinking of cutlery on china but what happens when a newborn baby cries? Can life go on?
The silence of the first half of “A Quiet Place” is deafening. There is no spoken dialogue for forty minutes, just dead air. In the way that many filmmakers use bombast to grab your attention Krasinski uses the absence of sound to focus the audience on the situation. Very little information is passed along. We don’t know where the aliens came from, why they’re terrorizing earth or how many there are. Ditto the Abbotts. We know nothing about them. The connection the family feels is transmitted through looks and actions, not words. This isn’t a story where character development is important, it’s a tale of survival pure and simple.
Tension grows in the first, artier half and pays dividends in the second more genre-based half. Set up out of the way Krasinski raises the stakes, putting the family directly in the way of the creatures. Like all good genre movies as the story escalates it becomes not simply about predatory monsters, all teeth and giant ears, but about a universal truth. In this case it is about a parent’s primal need to protect their kids at any cost. Krasinski nails this, providing both the b-movie thrills and chills necessary to the genre and a deep undercurrent of humanity.
He’s aided by the actors. Blunt is all poignancy and strength. Krasinski brings stoicism while the kids make us care about the family.
“A Quiet Place” is a nervy little film. Other filmmakers might have tried to find a way to wedge in more dialogue or spell things out more clearly but the beauty of Krasinski’s approach is its simplicity. Uncluttered and low key, it’s a unique and unsettling horror film.
Familiar but fresh. If you are a Hollywood executive you probably say these words a hundred times a day. In pitch meetings and story conferences those f-words are a mantra in a town that never met an idea it couldn’t recycle.
Convinced that audiences will only respond to variations on brands they are already familiar with, this summer the studios are offering freshened up versions of The Mummy, Amityville Horror and Spider-Man among others. Hollywood, the Nation’s Blue Bin. The biggest and loudest of the bunch will likely be Transformers: The Last Knight, the fifth film based on the toys created by Hasbro and Tomy.
Once again directed by Michael Bay, the movie reportedly cost a budget-busting $260 million. The special effects-laden story of humans vs. Transformers and a mysterious artifact is on track to make multi-millions domestically and worldwide, one of the few aging tentpole films to beat audience blockbuster fatigue.
It’s familiar but fresh.
In the familiar department you have Mark Wahlberg as star, the return of heroic Autobot leader Optimus Prime and director Bay’s trademarked bombast. He makes action orgy movies for audiences who crave a rumbling theatre seat. His Transformers films engage three of the five senses — only smell and taste are exempt — that leave viewers with scorched eyes and ringing ears and his audience eat up his gladiatorial sense of spectacle.
Freshening up the story is the addition of screen legend (and Marvel Cinematic Universe actor) Anthony Hopkins as an astronomer and historian knowledgeable in the history of the Transformers on Earth and a healthy dose of Arthurian myth woven into the story.
It sounds like the perfect mix of familiar and fresh but there are no guarantees in the blockbuster business. Recently, despite the presence of Tom Cruise and two — count ’em, two — classic horror characters, critics, audiences and the box office met The Mummy with a collective yawn. Although it has done better business overseas one pundit suggested the movie’s poor showing “stems from being an antiquated property paired with an antiquated star.”
Now there’s a statement that’ll send the collective shivers that were so sorely missing from The Mummy down the backs of studio executives. Perhaps the revamped story of an ancient malevolent evil wasn’t familiar or fresh enough for audiences. Or perhaps it’s because potential moviegoers sensed the cynicism in The Mummy. Bundling Cruise and legendary monsters in the movie with a few laughs, some typical blockbuster action and a CGI climax that wouldn’t be out of place in an Avengers movie, felt like a carefully constructed exercise in marketing first and a movie second.
The blockbuster business is a big one with high risk and reward. It didn’t work for Cruise and Co.’s The Mummy or Dwayne Johnson’s raunchy Baywatch reboot, but the Autobots have been good producers for Hollywood. Transformers: The Last Knight, wedged into a summer packed to the gills with big-budget blockbusters, likely won’t make the coin of its predecessors but Michael Bay doesn’t seem worried.
Although The Last Knight will be his last Transformers as director, he says the film lays the groundwork and backstory for 14 upcoming movies. At the rate they’re going, that’s almost 30 more years of Bumblebee and Megatron. That’s a lot of bot battles, and a lot of freshening up.
Audiences complain that Hollywood has no new ideas, that everything is a rebrand, reboot or remake. “They don’t make ‘em like they used to!” they say.
The “Transformers” franchise should encapsulate everything that is wrong with summer blockbusters. It’s a story based on a line of toys, it values spectacle over story and the paper thin characters feel more like place holders for the action than real people and yet, here we are on episode five, with (according to director Michael Bay) fourteen more in the pipeline.
In fact, they do make ‘em like they used to. You could be forgiven for experiencing déjà vu while watching “Transformers: The Last Knight.” The “Transformers” movies are remarkably consistent. They are heavy metal filmmaking, all bluster and retina roasting visuals and people eat them up.
People go see “Transformers” for the robots—their transformation scenes remain the coolest thing about the series—and the new movie doesn’t disappoint, creating a new backstory for its mechanical stars. According to the new movie the Transformers were friendly with King Arthur and the Knights of the Roundtable and fought the Nazis during World War II.
A decade into Bay’s franchise good guy leader of the Autobots Optimus Prime has high tailed it back to his home planet Cybertron. Humans are at war with the Transformers—“Two species at war, one flesh, one metal.”—and the future of the world is at stake. As a short prologue with King Arthur suggests, the key to Earth’s survival lies in the secret history of the Transformers and a 1600-year-old secret artefact. To unlock this mystery enter Autobot ally, inventor and single father Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg), Transformers historian and English lord Sir Edmund Exposition (Anthony Hopkins)—he’s got some mansplainin’ to do!—Oxford University Professor of English Literature (and descendant of the most famous wizard of all time other than Harry Potter) Viviane Wembly (Laura Haddock) and Autobot Bumblebee (voice of Erik Aadahi).
Director Michael Bay has finally taken the Transformers where they always should’ve been, to the Realm of the Ridiculous. Any movie based on a line of toys is bound to be silly but this may be one of the silliest films ever made. From a prologue set in the Middle Ages and robots hanging out on Cuban beaches to a wisecracking Merlin the Magician and a 700-year-old opera singing robot, this is wacky stuff.
Is it good stuff, you may ask? It doesn’t take itself as seriously as some of the other entries in the series, so that’s good but like the other “Transformers” movies, it’s too long and gets lost in an orgy of action and gravity defying stunts.
Hopkins seems to be having fun cavorting with his sassy C-3PO wannabe Cogman (Jim Carter) but it’s a thankless job. He’s there mostly to provide the convoluted backstory. As a member of the secret society to protect the history of Transformers, which also includes suck luminaries as Harriet Tubman and Stephen Hawking among others, he’s the keeper of the info and boy, does he over share. He scrolls through hundreds of years of nonsensical Transformers history but at least he does says thing like, “It was alien power or as they knew it in those days, magic,” in his distinctive Hannibal Lecter voice.
It’s all a bit much. With a story this convoluted why bother with the story at all? Those who want to see the Transformers battle will not be disappointed. The chunks of metal are cooler and than ever before and when Hopkins isn’t explaining what’s going on the robots are going at it.
“Transformers: The Last Knight” is Bay’s farewell to the franchise as director (he’ll stay on as a producer) and he has not held back. It’s heavy metal filmmaking, loud and proud, like a drum solo that goes on for just a hair too long.
For almost 100 years Ouija Boards have caused trouble on the big screen. From the 1920 movie Ouija Board to this weekend’s Ouija: Origin of Evil, characters have used witchboards to communicate with the dead to disastrous results.
The most famous Ouija design features the alphabet, numbers from 0 to 9, and the words yes, no and goodbye printed on the board in an elaborate font. The spirits use a wooden heart-shaped planchette or a pointer to answer the living’s questions from beyond.
Changes have been made to the basic design over the years. There have been glow-un-the-dark versions, a pink board marketed to teen girls and one with a light up planchette that illuminates the board’s hidden messages.
Whatever the look, the spirit board has also been a springboard for many movies.
The 1960 film 13 Ghosts begins when a wealthy occultist bequeaths his home to his nephew. In a scene that almost plays like a commercial for Ouija, the home’s new residents soon discover a spirit board. “Ouija, the mystifying oracle, “says Medea (Jo Morrow), “the most modern method of fortune telling. Anyone want to try it?” They gather round the board and ask, “Are there any ghosts in this house?” The answer is yes and soon the spirits make their presence known.
The kitschy movie was a hit and helped spark the Ouija craze of the 1960s, which hit a high in 1967 when sales of the talking boards surpassed Monopoly. “In the late 1800s continuing all the way into the 1960s, the Ouija board was considered good, clean, family fun,” says designer Roman Mars. Then in 1973, along came a movie that scared audiences and consumers alike.
The Exorcist, the most famous of all demon possession movies, is based in part on the 1949 case of an anonymous Maryland teenager. The Catholic Church declared the boy to be under a diabolical spell when strange things started happening — levitating furniture and holy water vials crashing to the ground — after he played with a Ouija board.
In the famous film a teenage girl is possessed by a demon after she finds an old Ouija Board in a closet. Playing with the board, she encounters Captain Howdy, a.k.a. Pazuzu, king of the demons of the wind. “I ask the questions and he gives the answers!” she says before her head starts spinning.
Ouija historian Robert Murch compares The Exorcist’s effect on the decline in popularity of the boards to a famous thriller’s influence on everyday hygiene.
“It’s kind of like Psycho,” he says. “No one was afraid of showers until that scene.”
Immediately following the release of The Exorcist witchboards were suddenly perceived as an instrument of the devil, a conduit between demons and regular folks.
Sales of the boards took a hit but filmmakers were quick to respond. The Turkish movie Seytan and Spain’s Escalofrío were first out of the gate, opening the floodgates for dozens of films like Witchboard, What Lies Beneath and the wildly popular Paranormal Activity who all used the boards as a tool of terror.
Not everyone is afraid of the boards, however. “People have told me ‘Betty, Facebook is a great way to keep in touch with old friends,’” joked ninety-four-year-old actress Betty White. “At my age, if I wanted to keep in touch with old friends, I’d need a Ouija board.”
Ever since a Ouija Board connected Captain Howdy to Regan MacNeil in “The Exorcist” filmmakers have used the spirit boards as a way to plunge their characters into deep demonic trouble.
In 2014 a group of friends uncorked some supernatural woes in “Ouija.” Now comes a prequel (insert spooky Theremin music here), “Ouija: Origin of Evil.” Set almost fifty years before the events of the first film, the action takes place in 1967 Los Angeles.
Looking for a way to freshen up their sham séance business Alice Zander (Elizabeth Reaser) a.k.a. Madame Zander Fortune Teller and her daughters Paulina (Annalise Basso) and Doris (Lulu Wilson) run a home séance business, specializing in parlour tricks to comfort the living relatives of the recently deceased. “We give them closure,” says Alice. “We heal their hearts and you can’t do that without some showmanship.”
To freshen up their act and attract new customers Alice adds in a Ouija Board. “What this?” asks Doris. “A new prop for work,” replies Alice cheerily. What she doesn’t know is that the harmless looking board is also a gateway for demons and all manner of unspeakable supernatural strife.
When young Doris uses the witchboard to contact her dear, departed father she becomes possessed by a most unwelcome spirit. “I believe she is channelling powers,” says Father Tom Hogan (Henry Thomas), “we cannot understand.”
Is “Ouija: Origin of Evil” a vast improvement on the 2014 original? The planchette (the Ouija’s triangular cursor) points to Yes. “Ouija” was one of the lamest mainstream horror films of recent memory, its prequel is one of the best.
Director Mike Flanagan provides jumps scares, creepy visions and a suitably spooky visualization of the demonic possession but brings generally more atmosphere than actual thrills. Instead he builds tension throughout, slowly working up to a ghost story climax that delivers solid scares.
He’s aided greatly by the youngest member of his cast, Lulu Wilson, who has a face that switches instantly from endearing to eerie. As the spirits possess her she takes on a creepy kid face that could win her an award for weirdest kid since “Children of the Corn.”
Add in some Nazi doctors, spirits nosier than whoever is spying on you through your iPhone right now and a mysterious hole in the basement wall and you have a welcome addition to the Ouija Board genre.
Making a war movie is hard work with long hours and tough conditions. According to 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi star Pablo Schreiber making a war movie with Michael Bay is extra difficult.
“Everyone who has worked with Michael Bay has told me the set can be a challenging place to work,” he says of the Transformers director. “I got all these stories to prepare but ultimately nothing anybody says can prepare you for that experience. He works faster than any director working. We do about 75 set ups a day, which is massive especially when each of them is like its own action sequence. It’s an insane amount of work. He demands a lot from you. It’s very necessary that you come prepared, that you are ready to perform any piece of the movie at any given time.”
The Canadian born actor and winner of the We Love to Hate You Award at the 2014 Young Hollywood Awards for his work as George “Pornstache” Mendez on Orange Is the New Black, says Bay took him by surprise during the 2015 shoot in Malta.
“There’s a scene at the end where a convoy is rolling in and we don’t know if they are friendly or bad,” he says, “and it is one of the emotional peaks of the movie. For me it was a scene I had checked off as an actor as one I had to be ready and prepared for. Then he shot it a week before we were supposed to shoot it. I had about five minutes to prepare. He said, ‘Let’s go on the roof and get that last sequence.’ He started setting up cranes. To be ready at any moment for whatever he’s going to throw at you is very important. As actors all six of us ended leaving there feeling like if we had gotten through that experience we could deal with anything.”
When I ask if the chaotic set conditions were Bay’s way of not so subtly exposing his actors to the same kind of unpredictable situations their characters were dealing with, he laughed.
“I’m not sure how much forethought was put into that vibe, but it was definitely effective and it works. As actors we were constantly disoriented and didn’t quite know where we were and didn’t know where we were going to be on any given day.”
Schreiber plays Kris “Tanto” Paronto, a former U.S. Army Ranger who was one of six CIA security contractors working in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012 when when well-armed Libyan militants—using weapons pilfered from former Prime Minister Muammar Gaddafi’s abandoned arsenals—invaded the American embassy. Their attempt to rescue ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and Foreign Service Information officer Sean Smith led to a harrowing thirteen-hour battle.
The thirty-seven year old actor met Tanto and says he felt a great responsibility in playing a real person who was on set and would eventually see the film but adds that director Bay tried to keep show the humanity of the story’s heroes.
“Michael Bay made this movie and he normally make these big extravaganzas but this is not a superhero movie,” he says. “This is a movie about very, very real human beings who behaved extraordinarily under the most difficult circumstances.”
