“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.
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.
The lives of LAPD cops have been he stuff of TV shows and movies for years. So how do you lend some interest to the story of two South Central patrol cops? By not telling a story, that’s how.
Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña play Officers Taylor and Zavala, patrol cops in Los Angeles’s tough South Central neighborhood. A routine traffic stop turns into something bigger when they confiscate money and guns from a cartel member. “Be careful,” they’re warned by a senior officer, “You just tugged on the tail of a snake that’s going to turn around and bite you.”
“End of Watch” is all build up. The movie spends an hour-and-a-half introducing its characters, giving us a sense of the dynamic between Taylor and Zavala as they bust chops and solve crimes. We learn about the mundane work-a-day nature of policing (“Policing is all about comfortable footwear,” we’re told.) We also come to discover that these guys are trouble magnets. Not since Angela Landsbury in “Murder She Wrote” have fictional characters have such a knack for being where the crime is.
It takes a while to warm to the “story’s” episodic nature. Director David Ayers (who specializes in LA cop drams, having written “Training day,” “S.W.A.T.” and directed “Street Kings”) eschews traditional storytelling for character study. Through a loosely related series of scenes we learn about the sense of love, honor and loyalty shared by these cops. Once you allow yourself to be drawn into the performances and the chemistry of the leads, you’ll be sucked in straight through to the exciting conclusion.
The beginning is tough, however. The first half-hour is stagey. The having-the-character-film-part-of-the-movie thing has been done to death, and adds a level of artificiality to the movie that doesn’t need to be there. The Barf-O-Matic hand held camera work adds a sense of immediacy to the action scenes, but it’s overused and it is sometimes hard to tell what’s happening. Take out the wobbly cam and no one would miss it.
Also, it’s hard to discuss the end without being spoilerific, but let’s say the movie goes from jovial to gritty and then back to jovial again. I didn’t love it, but Hollywood seems to be allergic to tragic endings and Ayers found a way to circumvent that and stay true-ish to his gritty vision for the story.
Despite an unnecessary coda, “End of Watch” works because of the naturalistic performances and the climax.
Oliver Stone’s films often express alternative theories of reality. In JFK he explored the vast conspiracy theory that has sprung up around the assassination of John Kennedy. His takes on Alexander the Great, Jim Morrison and Richard Nixon were all as contentious as the subjects were diverse. Stone almost never plays it safe but in World Trade Center he has put aside the provocative material he is best known for and made his most straightforward film in years. Focusing on the plight of two 9/11 first responders and their families Stone has made a film about a difficult subject that offers hope instead of controversy.
The power of the best Stone films is very much on display here—unforgettable images include the shadow of the plane that crashed into the first tower and the resulting twisted wreckage of the building—without the self-indulgent tendencies that mar his less interesting work.
Stone hones the story down to two men, Sergeant John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno, two Port Authority workers who were trapped under tons of rubble when the second World Trade Center tower collapsed on them as they prepared to evacuate people from the devastation. He focuses on their struggle to stay alive and their hope that they will be rescued. Above ground Stone cuts to the families of McLoughlin and Jimeno and their search to uncover information about their loved ones.
It’s a very effective way of dramatizing the events of 9/11. By narrowing the scope of the story down to two families the viewer gets an up-close and personal look at the tragedy of the day. From afar the story is too large, the kind of evil that caused the destruction too hard to understand but we can understand the tears of a wife who doesn’t know if she is a widow or not or a long hug between two people wracked by grief. Stone handles these moments gently.
Not so gentle is the actual event itself—the felling of the towers. Stone puts us inside a collapsing building and it is harrowing. The mournful wailing of the twisting metal, the giant chunks of cement and the black billowing smoke make it seem like hell on earth. We all saw it on television on the day, now Stone has placed us inside the building and it is harrowing.
The two men trapped men are helpless and must survive on the hope that the ray of light they can see far above them is a lifeline. Otherwise all is lost. Despite acting with only their faces—the rest of their bodies are trapped under rubble for most of the film—Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena hand in multi-layered performances. As they talk to one another, keeping one another company in their underground hell, we learn what makes them tick. What could have been tedious, claustrophobic scenes of the two men pinned by giant slabs of rock become strangely uplifting as they talk about their families and their lives in a desperate attempt to stay alive. Stone, through his actors chooses to celebrate the human spirit and the ties that bind, not the ideology of separation. By excluding any mention of al-Queda Stone shows that his movie has no political agenda. It is simply a movie about people rising above a dreadful situation.
World Trade Center isn’t the final word on 9/11. As the defining event of a generation filmmakers will revisit this story many times, many different ways, and while the film reveals little about the event it portrays, it speaks volumes about the people it affected.
The plot of “30 Minutes of Less” is simple. That’s a good thing because this movie burns along at such a clip there isn’t much room left for subplots, story arcs or narrative aesthetics. It’s a bottle rocket, a small but entertaining burst of bad taste and action adventure.
Very loosely on the Collar bomb case, a strange Erie, Pennsylvania bank robbery, the story involves a slacker pizza delivery boy (Jesse Eisenberg) who is kidnapped by two moronic criminals (Danny McBride and Nick Swardson) who strap a bomb to his chest and order him to rob a bank or, in ten hours, everything will go boom.
That’s it.
There’s more about a best friend (Aziz Ansari), his sister (Dilshad Vadsaria) and a psycho killer (Michael Peña) but their stories are add-ons to keep the action moving a bullet-like pace.
There’s nothing genteel about “30 Minutes or Less.” The presence of Danny McBride assures that. For me the “Eastbound & Down” star is a love-him-or-hate-him actor. There’s no middle ground. If you don’t find his brand of foulmouthed, anything-goes humor, then you’ll find very little to like here. He isn’t the star, per se, but his toxic style sets the tone for the movie.
But, if McBride turns your crank, you’ll find much to like here. “Social Network” star Eisenberg gets in a good joke about facebook, Ansari is a ball of manic energy and there’s way more wild action than you usually find in a comedy.
I guess “30 Minutes of Less” the spiritual, but foul mouthed cousin to Eisenberg’s “Zombieland,” a mix of unexpected action and jokes.
