CHIPs: It’s a remake, a comedy and an action film and yet it doesn’t quite measure up to any of those descriptors. It’s a remake in the sense that writer-director-star Dax Shepard has lifted the title, character names and general situation from the classic TV show but they are simply pegs to hang his crude jokes on.
The Circle: While it is a pleasure to see Bill Paxton in his last big screen performance, “The Circle” often feels like an Exposition-A-Thon, a message in search of a story.
The Fate of the Furious: Preposterous is not a word most filmmakers would like to have applied to their work but in the case of the “Fast and Furious” franchise I think it is what they are going for. Somewhere along the way the down-‘n’-dirty car chase flicks veered from sublimely silly to simply silly. “The Fate of the Furious” is fast, furious but it’s not much fun. It’s an unholy mash-up of James Bond and the Marvel Universe, a movie bogged down by outrageous stunts and too many characters. Someone really should tell Vin Diesel and Company that more is not always more.
Fifty Shades Darker: Depending on your point of view “Fifty Shades of Grey” either made you want to gag or want to wear a gag. It’s a softcore look at hardcore BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism) that spanked the competition on its opening weekend in 2015. Question is, will audiences still care about Grey’s proclivities and Ana’s misgivings or is it time to use our collective safeword? “Fifty Shades Darker” is a cold shower of a movie. “It’s all wrong,” Ana says at one point. “All of this is wrong.” Truer words have never been spoken.
The Mountain Between Us: Mountain survival movies usually end up with someone eating someone else to stay alive. “The Mountain Between Us” features the usual mountain survival tropes—there’s a plane crash, a showdown with a cougar and broken bones—but luckily for fans of stars Idris Elba and Kate Winslet cannibalism is not on the menu. Days pass and then weeks pass and soon they begin their trek to safety. “Where are we going?” she asks. “We’re alive,” he says. “That’s where were going.” There will be no spoilers here but I will say the crash and story of survival changes them in ways that couldn’t imagine… but ways the audience will see coming 100 miles away. It’s all a bit silly—three weeks in and unwashed they still are a fetching couple—but at least there’s no cannibalism and no, they don’t eat the dog.
The Mummy: As a horror film it’s a meh action film. As an action film it’s little more than a formulaic excuse to trot out some brand names in the kind of film Hollywood mistakenly thinks is a crowd pleaser.
The Shack: Bad things in life may be God’s will but I lay the blame for this bad movie directly on the shoulders of director Stuart Hazeldine who infuses this story with all the depth and insight of a “Davey and Goliath” cartoon.
The Snowman: We’ve seen this Nordic Noir before and better. Mix a curious lack of Oslo accents—the real mystery here is why these Norwegians speak as though they just graduated RADA—Val Kilmer in a Razzie worthy performance and you’re left with a movie that left me as cold as the snowman‘s grin.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets: Movies like the high gloss crime thriller “La Femme Nikita,” the assassin mentor flick “Léon: The Professional” and outré sci fi opera “The Fifth Element” have come to define director Luc Besson’s outrageous style. Kinetic blasts of energy, his films are turbo charged fantasies that make eyeballs dance even if they don’t always engage the brain. His latest, “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets,” not only has one of the longest titles of the year but is also one of the most over-the-top, retina-frying movies of the year. Your eyes will beg for mercy.
Wonder Wheel: At the beginning of the film Mickey (Justin Timberlake) warns us that what we are about to see will be filtered through his playwright’s point of view. Keeping that promise, writer, director Woody Allen uses every amount of artifice at his disposal—including cinematographer Vittorio Storaro’s admittedly sumptuous photography—to create a film that is not only unreal but also unpleasant. “Oh God,” Ginny (Kate Winslet) cries out at one point. “Spare me the bad drama.” Amen to that.
THE UGLY
Song to Song: I think it’s time Terrence Malick and I called it quits. I used to look forward to his infrequent visits. Sure, sometimes he was a little obtuse and over stayed his welcome, but more often than not he was alluringly enigmatic. Then he started coming around more often and, well, maybe the old saying about familiarity breeding contempt is true. In “Song to Song” there’s a quick shot of a tattoo that sums up my feelings toward my relationship with Malick. Written in flowery script, the words “Empty Promises” fill the screen, reminding us of the promise of the director’s early work and amplifying the disappointment we feel today. This is the straw that broke the camel’s back, the Terrence Malick movie that put me off Terrence Malick movies. I’ll be nice though and say, it’s not him, it’s me.
EXTRA! EXTRRA! MOST COUNFOUNDING
mother!: Your interest in seeing “mother!,” the psychological thriller from “Black Swan” director Darren Aronofsky, may be judged on your keenness to watch American sweetheart Jenifer Lawrence flush a beating heart down a toilet. Aronofsky’s story of uninvited guests disrupting the serene lives of a poet and his wife refuses to cater to audience expectations. “mother!” is an uncomfortable watch, an off-kilter experience that revels in its own madness. As the weight of the weirdness and religious symbolism begins to feel crushing, you may wonder what the hell is going on. Are these people guilty of being the worst houseguests ever or is there something bigger, something biblical going on?
Aronofsky is generous with the biblical allusions—the house is a paradise, the stranger’s sons are clearly echoes of Cain and Abel, and there is a long sequence that can only be described as the Home-style Revelation—and builds toward a crescendo of wild action that has to be seen to be believed, but his characters are ciphers. Charismatic and appealing to a member, they feel like puppets in the director’s apocalyptic roadshow rather than characters we care about. Visually and thematically he doesn’t push button so much as he pokes the audience daring them to take the trip with him, it’s just too bad we didn’t have better company for the journey.
“mother!” is a deliberately opaque movie. Like looking into a self-reflective mirror you will take away whatever you put into it. The only thing sure about it is that it is most confounding studio movie of the year.
From 1977 to 1983 California Highway Patrol officers Jon Baker and “Ponch” Poncherello kept the highways and byways of Los Angeles safe with a mix of motorcycles, Brut cologne and wholesome machismo. “CHiPS” was a big TV hit and is now a big screen movie starring Michael Peña and Dax Shepard as unorthodox motorcycles cops. The Brut and the wholesomeness are gone in this raunchy update but the motorcycles and machismo survived.
Shepard, who also wrote and directed, stars as Jon Baker, a free spirited ex-motorcycle daredevil. His marriage is on the rocks, but he hopes if he becomes a police officer his wife will fall back in love with him.
Baker is teamed up with a seasoned FBI agent working undercover as Frank ‘Ponch’ Poncherello (Peña). Seems the feds needed two outsiders to infiltrate the California Highway Patrol and bust some dirty cops who robbed 12 million dollars in a daring daylight robbery.
The unlikely duo don’t hit it off right away, but Baker’s skills on the hog and Ponch’s experience make them an effective, if untraditional team. Cue the chase scenes and sex jokes.
In Shepard’s hands “CHIPS” is a mix of motorcycles and masturbation, homophobic jokes and gratuitous nudity. It’s hard to know exactly how to categorize “CHIPS.” It is a remake of a TV show although Erik Estrada, star of the original series and who also appears in the film, took to twitter to blast the remake as “demeaning” to long time “CHiPS” fans.
It could also be filed under the comedy category although I’d suggest the action sequences are more successful than the attempts at humour.
To recap: It’s a remake, a comedy and an action film and yet it doesn’t quite measure up to any of those descriptors. It’s a remake in the sense that Shepard has lifted the title, character names and general situation but they are simply pegs to hang his crude jokes on.
It’s a comedy—there is a paparazzi joke that made me laugh hard—but it’s a lowest common denominator comedy. I like a poop joke as much as anyone, but there have to be peaks and valleys. Shepard aims low, then goes lower. If you like a certain amount of shame with your cheap laughs then “CHIPS” is for you.
When the movie isn’t commenting on Ponch’s bathroom habits it is laying rubber. The crime story isn’t terribly complicated or interesting but the guys tear up the pavement with a handful of pretty good chase scenes. They are frenetic and it’s not always possible to tell exactly who is who, but the scenes add some zip to the story.
“CHIPS” is not your father’s “CHiPS.” It’s a kinda-sorta action comedy that revels in its rudeness at the expense of paying tribute to the source material.
Collateral Beauty had a long Hollywood history before director David Frankel came on board. Hugh Jackman was attached at one point and Rachel McAdams had been approached to play a part.
The long development came to an end when Will Smith signed on to play Howard Inlet, a charismatic advertising kingpin who becomes despondent after the death of his six-year-old daughter.
“When I came on it, it felt like it was written in stone,” says Frankel. “Everybody loved the screenplay and we were going in three months and then people started whispering, ‘I wish we could fix that.’ So it turned out to be a pretty normal development process where we tried a lot of stuff.
“Once the actors got involved, Professor Will Smith, Professor Edward Norton and Professor Kate Winslet, there was a lot more writing. Mostly condensing. Edward had this brilliant vision of the movie as a screwball comedy, which I think was really smart. Will always said, ‘We have to make the first half of the movie as funny as possible so that we don’t kill people.’ We worked on that.”
The changes continued into the shooting. In the story Howard spends his nights practising self-therapy, writing angry letters to the abstractions of Time, Love and Death demanding answers as to why his child was taken. In the original script he met the abstractions, personified by Jacob Latimore, Keira Knightley and Helen Mirren, in a different order than in the finished film.
“It was written where he first ran into Love, then Time then Death,” says Frankel. “We shot them in the order, Death, Time, Love so as we were approaching Love Will and I were still arguing about whether Love should be first or last in the sequence.
“We had prepped for six months up to that moment thinking Love was first. He came to me the day before and said, ‘I think Love should be last.’ I fought him tooth and nail about it because I really thought that moment on the train when he confronts Death was the pivotal moment and then it rained and because of the weather (the shots) wouldn’t have matched. The sequence wouldn’t have made sense.
“Of course Will said, ‘God works in mysterious ways.’ But Will Smith got his way. Big surprise.”
The movie details the anguish Howard feels and the steps his friends take to help him reconnect with the world.
“I have seen some pretty profound grief,” says Frankel. “My wife lost her mom six years ago and grief really can distort someone’s connection to the universe. I learned you don’t just get over it. That’s why the line Helen (Mirren) has, I think is the most profound line in the movie. ‘Nothing is really ever dead if you look at it right.’
“That I thought was really beautiful. That is how we all live on, in memory, not in fact.”
It may seem like an odd subject for a Christmas film but Frankel says, “In holiday movies you always want a sense of hope. That’s ultimately what we dreamed of for this movie.
“I know when Will saw it for the first time he ran to hug Willow who was in the audience with him. People want to connect and realize the fragility of our time here.”
“Collateral Beauty” tries desperately to be a feel good movie, but is really a feel bad flick. Or maybe it’s just a bad movie about the intersection where grief and greed cross.
When we first meet Howard Inlet (Will Smith) he’s a charismatic advertising kingpin giving his employees a pep talk that could raise the dead. He’s an inspiring figure but just three years later, after the death of his six-year-old daughter, he becomes despondent dude who sees his life, his time on the planet, as a prison sentence. He barely says a word, spending his days at work making giant domino mazes. Without his leadership the company hits hard times.
Fortunately his partners, best friend Whit (Edward Norton), Claire (Kate Winslet) and Simon (Michael Peña), have a great offer that would see them all make a fortune. Unfortunately Howard, who owns sixty percent of the company, does not want to sell.
Determined to make the deal happen Howard’s three friends and partners conspire against him. When a private investigator discovers Howard spends his nights practising self-therapy, writing angry letters to the abstractions of Time, Love and Death, they concoct a plan to use the notes against him. “Howard is not in a good mental state,” says Whit. “It’s about underlining that fact so others can see it.
To that end they hire three actors, Raffi (Jacob Latimore), Aimee (Keira Knightley) and Brigitte (Helen Mirren) to personify Time, Love and Death. They are to approach Howard as the private eye video tapes them. Later they will digitally remove the actors and use the tapes to prove that Howard is not mentally fit to run the company. Bingo, bango they get their deal while Howard is left tormented by what he thinks must be bereavement hallucinations.
There’s more but that is the conceit fuelling “Collateral Beauty’s” story and therein lies the film’s main problem. It’s a really weird and not very nice idea. Watching Howard’s sad sack friends plotting against him while trying to convince one another—and us—that they are doing this for his own good is a singularly unpleasant experience. A little bit of nastiness at the holidays is never unwelcome. “It’s a Wonderful Life” has an undercurrent of meanness that nicely offsets the saccharine aspects of the story and it works. Here the characters grasp for justification of their awful behaviour and the film allows them to get away with it.
Layer that with a healthy dollop of pop psychology—“Nothing’s ever really dead if you look at it right.”—that rides the line between inane and inaner and you have a film that wants to be inspiring holiday fare but is instead a downer look at some of the worst of human behaviour.
Richard and “Collateral Beauty” director David Frankel spoke in front of an invited audience at a screening of the film in Toronto recently. To hear Frankel (whose other films include “The Devil Wears Prada” and “Marley and Me”) and Richard discuss working with Will Smith, rewriting on the fly and shooting in New York City, keep your ear on the House of Crouse podcast the week of December 16!
“If you had told the ten-year-old me that I would be doing what I’m doing now my head would have exploded,” says Peyton Reed, director of the latest Marvel superhero movie Ant-Man.
The director, best known for making comedies like Yes Man and The Break Up, says he grew up obsessed with comics and movies.
“I read comics and got a Super 8 film camera when I was thirteen and started shooting film from a young age. My after school life was divided up between my jobs. I had a paper route and I mowed lawns to make money to buy comic books and buy Super 8 film to shoot movies.”
Marvel comics played a major part in his comic book consumption.
“The thing I loved about Marvel was Stan Lee’s storytelling techniques and his editorial attitude. Those Marvel comics had a clear sensibility. They were really of the moment and had this attitude that was equal parts cocky and self-effacing. I loved it. They created these heroes who all had real world problems. Spider-Man was Spider-Man, but he could never get the girl in high school and he had to figure out how to make enough money to pay his rent.
“I actually told Stan Lee this when he did his cameo in our movie. I said I grew up reading the comics and my mom was an English teacher and I became an English major and I learned so many vocabulary words form Marvel comics. He wrote in this very flowery style. If someone was disappearing into the microverse he’d write, ‘Slowly and inexorably he disappeared into the ether.’ I’d run to the dictionary. What does inexorably mean? What is ether? It was hugely educational for me.”
Reed admits his small-but-mighty superhero, Ant-Man, played by Paul Rudd, has “really absurd powers.” His ability to shrink and control ants don’t seem as impressive as Thor’s Hammer or Hulk’s rage but, Reed says, “there is an inherent comedic component to the idea of Ant-Man which we also really embraced.
“I think one of the biggest things that helped was having Paul Rudd at the center of it because Paul manages to do something in this movie that I think is really interesting. He really does relate to these weird situations in the same way you or I would. He definitely acknowledges the absurdity of the situation but then goes ahead and fully commits to that situation.”
At the end of the year don’t be surprised to see ”Ant-Man,” the latest Marvel superhero franchise starter, take the top spot on the Canadian Entomologist Magazine’s Top Films of the Year but numbers 2 through 10 as well. It not only features a man who can shrink to the size of an insect, but a supporting cast featuring colony after colony of ants. Bugheads are going to love it, and I suspect, so will fans of the Marvel Universe.
The origin story of “Ant-Man” begins with Dr. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas). He’s not a mad scientist, but he’s certainly angry. At the height of the Cold War his creation, the Pym Particle, was a breakthrough but he refused to allow its miniaturization properties to be used as a weapon. “As long as I am alive,” he says, “nobody will ever get the formula!”
Cut to present day. Pym’s Particle is still a secret from everyone, including his daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly) and former protégé Darren Cross (“The Strain’s” Corey Stoll). Cross is now in charge of Pym’s company and has worked to develop the technology with an eye toward selling it to the highest bidder, a.k.a., HYDRA.
In the hopes of stopping Cross, Pym and his daughter recruit cat burglar Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) to don the incredible shrinking ant suit and use his particular set of skills to break into Cross’s laboratory and destroy the miniaturization technology. If he is successful he can save the world, if he isn’t, he will be crushed like a bug underfoot.
Surely the silliest, and most definitely the smallest of all Marvel superheroes “Ant-Man” nonetheless has the same sort of swagger as the first “Iron Man” movie. It’s an origin story that uses humour to smooth over some of the rough bits of exposition. For instance, it’s self aware enough to follow a revelation of Pym’s complicated plan with a throwaway line from Rudd. “That sounds like a job for the Avengers.” It gets a laugh and stops the film from taking itself far too seriously.
As Lang Rudd has the same off-the-cuff charm that Downey brought to Tony Stark and the movie is the better for it. To pull off the story of a man who flies on the back of winged ants and is small enough to get sucked up by a vacuum cleaner you need someone with a spring in his step and a permanent wink and Rudd has both, finding just the right tone in scene after scene to make this work.
Michael Peña brings full on comic relief as Lang’s motor-mouthed friend, Lily adds strength to a character who could be spun off to her own franchise and Douglas has old school gravitas to burn, but make no mistake, this is Rudd’s movie, whether he is running through the grass with a herd of ants or slyly trying to seduce Hope.
Entomophobics may have nightmares following the film, with memories of a dog-sized ant scurrying around their dreams, but for the rest of us, “Ant-Man” is a fun, larger than life summer diversion.
“Fury” is a brutal war film with exciting and well-executed battle sequences, but its most vicious scene takes place over a meal, at a table set with a lace tablecloth.
Set in April 1945, the movie sees hard-bitten commander “Wardaddy” Collier (Brad Pitt) lead a U.S. 2nd armored division tank nicknamed Fury through Germany in the final days of World War II. His crew, “Bible” Swan (Shia LaBeouf, once again acting opposite giant machines), Gordo (Michael Peña) and redneck Grady (Jon Bernthal), have fought together since the beginning of the war. When Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), a new gunner recruit with no battle experience, signs on, he must fit in or endanger the entire crew. “You are no use to me if you can’t kill krauts,” says Wardaddy.
Body parts fly, tanks try to out maneuver one another and the cost of the fake body parts that litter the battlefield must have rivaled Pitt’s salary but the scene that keeps “Fury” from becoming Das Boot on land happens midway in the film after the crew has captured a German town. Once the bullets stop flying two local women prepare a meal for Wardaddy and Norman. The long scene begins with tension as the German ladies try and figure out if the Nazi hunters mean them harm but when the core group crowds around the table it becomes something akin to a surreal family dinner where real humanity, or lack thereof, is laid bare. It could have stopped the movie dead in its tracks, but instead is a welcome interlude that showcases the effects of battle on a tightly knit but disparate group of men.
It’s a stunner of a scene that breaks up the relentless grimness of the action. The gruesome sights of war—bodies on the battlefield and even a close-up of part of a man’s face in the tank cab—are on ample display but I was fascinated by the tank interiors. A sense of claustrophobia, tension and fear percolates inside the tiny spaces and literally bleeds off the screen. It helps that the performances are very strong, but it’s the primal feeling of being trapped inside the small cab that gives the movie much of it oomph.
As the leader of the crew Pitt does a good job of leading the cast. He could easily have done a rehash of his Nazi hunting character from Inglourious Basterds, but there are subtle differences. That character was over-the-top, and so is this one; much of his dialogue sounds like it was written by Quentin Tarantino, but the character is deeper, not so much in what he says, but in his quiet scenes when everything you need to know about him is written on his face.
Lerman brings a conflicted sensitivity to a role of a young man thrust into a situation beyond his control and understanding, and Bernthal takes another step towards becoming a go-to character actor, but the actors must constantly compete with the tanks to get noticed.
On the battlefield “Fury” is tank porn. The action scenes are certainly exciting, but it is the quieter moments where the movie makes the point that War is Hell no matter what side you are on.
THE BAD (in alphabetical order)
