SYNOPSIS: The times they are a-changin’ at Downton Abbey. Old-fashioned traditions clash with newfangled progress at the Edwardian country house as the upper crust Crawley family cope with a changing world. “Our lives are lived in chapters,” says cook Beryl Patmore (Lesley Nicol), “and there’s nothing wrong when a chapter ends.”
CAST: Hugh Bonneville, Jim Carter, Michelle Dockery, Paul Giamatti, Elizabeth McGovern, Penelope Wilton, Joely Richardson, Alessandro Nivola, Simon Russell Beale and Arty Froushan. Directed by Simon Curtis.
REVIEW: At Downton Abbey, that bastion of old-world tradition, change in the air. And if you don’t realize that by following along with the story, don’t worry, the characters will remind you, again and again, with wise one-liners.
It’s 1930, and the world is changing. Dinner for three at the New Ivy restaurant costs an outrageous 10 pounds—“The last time I ate there,” says Noel Coward (Arty Froushan), “I asked for the bill and a pistol.”—but in high society the very mention of the word divorce can still stop a fancy dress ball cold.
As the world turns, the Crawley family, led by Robert Crawley, 7th Earl of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) and Cora Crawley, Countess of Grantham (Elizabeth McGovern), are feeling the winds of change blowing at their backs.
Lord Grantham is reluctant to let the old ways fall by the wayside, but his daughter Lady Mary’s (Michelle Dockery) divorce has brought scandal to the family name and ongoing financial problems may mean the end of years of tradition at their beloved home, Downton Abbey.
A melodrama in fancy dress, “Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale” is pure fan service. It’s all about change, a theme hammered home with the subtlety of a cup of Earl Grey spiked with absinthe, but series creator and writer Julian Fellowes is far too canny to change the dynamic that made the television show and the subsequent movies—”Downton Abbey” (2019) and “Downton Abbey: A New Era” (2022)—popular.
The final chapter brings with it favorite characters, like butler Mr. Carson (Jim Carter), lady’s maid Anna Bates (Joanne Froggatt) and widower Tom Branson (Allen Leech) among many others from upstairs and down. Even the Dowager Countess, memorably played by the late Maggie Smith, is a formidable presence despite having passed away in the previous film.
There are no huge surprises, and it’s all rather predictable, but Fellowes and director Simon Curtis aren’t here to turn the franchise on its head. Instead, they deliver a sentimental swansong that allows longtime fans to spend a few extra hours with beloved characters padding around the opulent rooms, and downstairs kitchen, of one of England’s most famous homes.
Sure, it’s a bit self-congratulatory—the theme music swells as an audience enthusiastically applauds the title card filling the screen in the film’s opening minutes—a montage near the end feels more spectral than sincerely heartfelt, and there are easter eggs galore, but somehow the self-indulgence seems like the right choice to tell a story about a family for whom self-indulgence is a way of life.
“The Holdovers,” a new drama starring Paul Giamatti and now playing in theatres, does such a good job of transporting the audience back to when a pint of Jim Bean only set you back $2 and it was still OK to smoke a pipe at a movie theatre, you’ll swear it’s a long-lost artefact from the Nixon era.
The setting is Barton Academy, a New England old-money stop over for wealthy boys on their way to the Ivy League school of their choice. They are the future, or, as Ancient Civilizations professor Paul Hunham (Giamatti) calls them, “entitled little degenerates.”
Universally disliked by staff and students alike, Hunham is by-the-book, the kind of teacher who assigns heavy reading over the Christmas break, with the promise of an exam on the first day back. “Our one purpose,” he says, “is to produce young men of character.”
Every year there are a handful of students who stay on campus over the two-week Christmas holiday, which means a teacher has to stay behind as chaperone. This year the duty falls to Hunham, who plans an intensive fortnight of studying, physical fitness and discipline for five boys abandoned by their parents.
“You should go easy on them,” says the school’s cook Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph).
“Oh please,” Hunham snorts. “They’ve had it easy their whole lives.”
When four of the five get a last-minute invite courtesy of a rich dad with a helicopter, the impromptu Breakfast Club is narrowed down to one, Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), a smart but troubled young man whose mom chose Christmas break to run off on a honeymoon with her new husband.
As the days pass, and Christmas approaches, the odd couple find common ground, and discover they aren’t as different as they thought.
“The Holdovers” has a fairly simple set-up—a Scroogey character discovers his humanity by making a connection with a younger person, just in time for Christmas—but it’s the film’s warmth, once you scratch through its icy facade, that’ll win you over.
When he is referring to his students as “hormonal vulgarians,” Giamatti is at his curmudgeonly best but there is more to him than fancy insults (although his put-down, “you are penis cancer in human form” is rather memorable) and walleyed glare. He’s a man deeply damaged by life, who now finds himself waging class warfare on the privileged kids he teaches at what is, essentially, a depository for rich boys.
A man out of time—“The world doesn’t make sense anymore,” he says.—he’s quick to anger, with a bubbling rage roiling just under the surface at all times, and even when he tries to be charming, he comes off as awkward at best. His idea of light, Christmas party conversation? “Aeneas carried mistletoe when he went into Hades,” he says to blank stares.
Giamatti keeps him watchable by making sure to access the character’s brokenness. His bluster is a mask for his heartache, and as he gradually makes connections with Angus and Mary, his defenses lower, revealing his true self. It’s a touching and warm, and Oscar worthy, performance hidden beneath an inch or two of insolence.
He is ably supported by newcomer Sessa, whose character’s actions lead to emotional growth as he forms an unlikely family as one third of a trio of misfits. It’s a touching performance, part swagger, part shattered, that hints at more great thing to come from the young actor.
As Mary, a woman traumatized by the death of her only son in Vietnam, Randolph, who displays her comedic chops on “Only Murders in the Building,” brings a poignant edge to the story as the glue that binds this impromptu family together.
“The Holdovers” is a warmhearted coming-of-all-ages movie, but never succumbs to cheap melodrama or saccharine sentimentality. It’s an uplifting tale of, as Armistead Maupin put it, embracing your logical family instead of your biological one, that avoids the pitfalls of so many other movies about broken people.
Richard makes a Painkiller, the perfect cocktail to enjoy while watching the new Emily Blunt, Dwayne Johnson action-adventure “Jungle Book.” It’s the Rock on the rocks! Have a drink and a think about “Jungle Cruise” with me!
“Jungle Cruise,” now playing in theatres and on Disney+ with premium access, is a new adventure story that reaches back into Hollywood history for inspiration. The Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson movie is based on the 65-year-old Disneyland riverboat cruise theme park ride, which, in turn, was inspired by the Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn’s antics in the 1951 film “The African Queen.” Add to that a hint of “Indiana Jones” and “Romancing the Stone,” and you have a family friendly film that simultaneously feels brand spankin’ new and old fashioned.
Blunt is the eccentric botanist Dr. Lily Houghton, an English adventurer in search of the Tree of Life, a mythical Amazonian tree whose “Tears of the Moon” blossoms are said to have healing properties. If she can find it and harness its powers, she believes it will be the beginning of a scientific revolution.
Travelling from London to the Amazon, she meets steamboat captain “Skipper” Frank Wolff (Johnson), a fast-talking cynic who reluctantly agrees to take her and her assistant, brother MacGregor (Jack Whitehall), on his ramshackle boat into the heart of darkness. “If you believe in legends,” Frank says, “you should believe in curses too. It’s not a fun vacation.”
On the voyage up river they contend with slithery supernatural beings and the rival Prince Joachim (Jesse Plemons), a Hapsburg aristocrat determined to use brute force to reach the Tree of Life before Houghton, on a dangerous race against time.
Movies based on theme park rides have a checkered history. For every “Pirate of the Caribbean” that becomes a hit and spawns signals, there is a “The Haunted Mansion” or “Tomorrowland” gathering dust in a delete bin somewhere.
“Jungle Cruise” seems likely to avoid that fate. A classic adventure, it is an action-packed journey fuelled by the chemistry between the leads, Blunt and Johnson.
The opening half-hour actually feels like the theme park ride. It takes off like a rocket with one elaborately staged action scene after another. That sets the frenetic pace the movie keeps up for most of the running time, right up to a drawn-out ending that threatens to overstay its welcome, but doesn’t, courtesy of the actors.
Blunt and Johnson have great chemistry, verbally jousting throughout. It’s the “Romancing the Stone” template; they’re an odd couple who roast one another while dodging life-threatening situations and ultimately reveal their true feelings. The comic timing works and adds much charm to the action sequences.
Threatening to steal the show is Plemons, who reveals his rarely used comedic side. As the power-mad Prince Joachim, the actor embraces the cartoon aspects of the character, creating one of the best family-friendly villains in recent memory.
“Jungle Cruise” is much more fun than you might imagine a movie based on a theme park ride will be. There’s some dodgy CGI and a slightly over-inflated running time but it’s an old-fashioned adventure, updated with one character’s coming-out scene (no spoilers here) and a reversal of the theme park’s treatment of its Indigenous characters, that delivers action, humour and chemistry.
“Ratchet and Clank,” a new animated movie based on a popular video game series, has good messages for kids but is that enough to make it a good movie?
The Chairman (voice of Paul Giamatti) of Drek Industries has a plan. Using the deplanetizer, a terrible war machine invented by Doctor Nefarious (Armin Shimerman), he destroys planets in the Solana Galaxy with the idea of cobbling together one perfect world from the remains.
On the other side of the quickly disappearing galaxy Ratchet (James Arnold Taylor) is a rambunctious mechanic with dreams of one day becoming a Galactic Ranger like his hero Captain Qwark (Jim Ward). Trouble is, he’s a Lombax—ie: a “cat thingy”—and far too small. “Dream smaller,” says his grandfather (John Goodman). “There’s less disappointment that way.”
Rejected by the Rangers as “a weak, muscle less mass of weakness,” Ratchets gets a second chance to do his duty when a helper bot named Clank (David Kaye doing a C3PO impression) crash lands on his planet. Together they are a formidable team who aid the Rangers in the battle against Drek but is being a hero all Ratchet thought it would be?
“Ratchet and Clank” is sci-fi for kids too young for Kylo Ren’s nasty father issues. Starring an underdog character whose disappointment will turn into triumph, its colourful and constantly-in-motion-design will entertain young eyes but is unlikely to engage their brains.
There are lessons about everything young folks need to be successful and happy—not allowing a swelled head to get in the way of doing the job, the virtues of teamwork, friendship and perseverance, being true to who you are, treating people (or aliens) with respect, thinking before you act and even, for Kardashian wannabees in the audience, a warning against the seduction of fame. That’s enough life lessons here to make self-help guru Dale Carnegie’s head spin but that’s the kind of movie this is. There is always something happening, a joke, a moral or more complicated world building. It’s busy, as if the filmmakers didn’t trust the characters to maintain the interest of young minds. Didn’t like that storyline? Don’t worry there’ll be another one shortly.
“Ratchet and Clank,” with its so-so animation and excitable nature is less a move than a PlayStation 2 game blown up for the big screen.
“It’s impossible to talk about N.W.A without talking about South Central LA in the late 1980s.”
Straight Outta Compton is the legendary album by gangsta rap group N.W.A, released Aug. 8, 1988. It’s a sonic blast that plays, as Rolling Stone said, like a “bombastic, cacophonous car ride through Los Angeles’ burnt-out and ignored hoods.” It became the first platinum album to reach that status with no airplay or major tours and now it’s also the title of a biopic that documents the group’s beginnings and turbulent history.
Writing for theverge.com, Lizzie Plaugic observed, “It’s impossible to talk about N.W.A without talking about South Central LA in the late 1980s.” Infected by crack and gang violence, the area was so rough the LAPD created a special unit known as CRASH — Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums — and it was these surroundings that helped birth the ferocious beats of Straight Outta Compton and a genre known as gangsta rap.
Music is unavoidably influenced by the surroundings of those who make it and music biopics have always been quick to use location as a shorthand to help the audience understand how and why musicians produced the music they did.
Just as South Central sets the scene for Straight Outta Compton, Manchester’s drug-fuelled “Madchester” club scene of the late 1980s and early ’90s informs 24 Hour Party People and the mean streets of Brooklyn set the stage for the meteoric rise of rapper Notorious B.I.G. in the 2009 film Notorious.
There is no shortage of John Lennon or his birthplace on celluloid. There are five official Beatles movies, documentaries like The U.S. vs. John Lennon, a 2006 movie that focuses on Lennon’s transformation from musician into antiwar activist, and even experimental short films like the John and Yoko shorts Two Virgins and Apotheosis.
Portrayed by everyone from Paul Rudd (in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story) to Monty Python’s Eric Idle, rarely has any actor captured both Lennon’s rebelliousness and vulnerability as Aaron Taylor-Johnson does in Nowhere Boy, the story of the musician’s formative years.
Taylor-Johnson, recently seen in blockbusters like Avengers: Age of Ultron and Godzilla, is aided in his performance by a gritty portrait of Lennon’s lower-working-class neighbourhood in Liverpool, England. You can almost smell the bangers and mash coming off the screen and the vivid Merseyside backdrop provides subtle clues about the man Lennon would become.
Set back when you could still drink a bottle of stolen booze in the shade of the Hollywood sign without being arrested for trespassing, The Runaways focuses on two glue-sniffing, glam-rock obsessed tough girls named Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart) and Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning). Disaffected SoCal teens, they see an exit from their mundane suburban lives through rock ’n’ roll.
Unfortunately their ticket out comes in the form of impresario Kim Fowley, a record producer and self proclaimed “King Hysteria.” He cobbles together the band, trains them to be rock stars, convinced that they will “be bigger than the Beatles.” Before they can play Shea Stadium, however, the band breaks up — knee deep in ego, drug abuse and bad management. Set in and around the Sunset Strip’s late 1970s seedy underbelly, the movie perfectly captures the sun-dappled decadence that illuminated the time.
In the movies, like real life, it’s about Location! Location! Location!
“Straight Outta Compton,” the new biopic of original gangster rap band N.W.A. and their turbulent rise and fall, is at once a very specific look at the birth of a musical genre and a universal music industry story about how money, ego and bad management will break a band a part faster than you can say, “Boyz-N-The Hood.”
We first meet MC Ren (Aldis Hodge), Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins), Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell), DJ Yella (Neil Brown, Jr.) and Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson, Jr) as young men growing up in Compton, the most notorious neighbourhood of South Central Los Angeles. Dre and Cube are music obsessed teens, trying to avoid getting “locked up or laid down.” Dre is a genius DJ, a master of beats, while Cube is a journalist of sorts, writing rhymes that report on life in the hood. Their reality is near constant police harassment, casual violence and intimidation by gangs.
Eazy-E, a local drug dealer looking or a way out of the life, puts up the seed money to start a record label and soon he moves from banker to frontman and NWA is born. A couple local hits later they’re approached by Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti in another role, following this year’s “Love and Mercy” that sees him exploiting a Californian musician) an old school manager with a plan to make them famous and himself rich. They become a sensation, birth gangsta rap and fall to pieces under the weight of their success. Heller, Eazy-E and the shards of NWA on one side, Dr. Dre and Suge Knight (R. Marcos Taylor) on another with Ice Cube completing the triangle. Bad blood and bad business deals blow apart their once tight relationships and it isn’t until they consider getting back to basics that old wounds begin to heal.
“Straight Outta Compton” plays like dozens of music bios that came before but despite featuring music industry clichés—sometimes the clichés of cheating managers, ego and excess are clichés because they’re true—it spends more time on the characters than the situation. It’s funnier and warmer than you might anticipate a movie about the ferocious and profane beginnings of gangster rap, a music born out of frustration and a need to be heard, but the emotional truth of the film is based in the relationship between the leads, particularly Dre, Eazy and Cube. A palpable sense of camaraderie is present throughout, and it grounds the film during its more excessive moments.
Mitchell’s Eazy-E has the widest emotional arc and he pulls it off, bring a steely vulnerability to the character that humanizes him and makes his (SPOILER ONLY IF YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT N.W.A.!!) early demise all the more devastating.
Jackson Jr., Ice Cube’s real life son, dispels any talk of nepotism, handing in a performance that captures the familiar mannerisms and essence of his father.
Also strong are Hawkins as the budding megaproducer Dre and Keith Stanfield as the young Snoop Dogg.
On the downside the movie doesn’t have much use for its female characters unless they are playing stern mothers, compliant groupies or supportive wives. We may have to wait for the Salt-N-Pepa biography for a look at the female side of hip hop.
At two-and-a-half hours “Straight Outta Compton” is a detailed look at the band that, although it takes liberties with the facts in favour of drama, grabs the rhythm of the time by the throat and doesn’t let go. Echoes of the Rodney King trial reverberate throughout the film giving the movie, in light of Black Lives Matter, a timely feel that showcases the prescient nature of Ice Cube’s rhymes.
Carla Gugino was living in New York in September 2001. Every day she would look at the Twin Towers from her window, and then, one morning they were gone. The rush of emotions she felt on 9/11 stayed with her as she filmed her new movie, the earthquake disaster flick San Andreas.
“I thought about it a lot in the way Dwayne Johnson’s character and my character reconnect in this movie,” she says.
In the film she plays Johnson’s estranged wife who teams with him to rescue their daughter from a devastating earthquake that rips California in half.
“What I found so smart and well done is that they connect not in a cliché way or in a sentimental way; they reconnect because they may not be alive the next day. In those moments, which was very much the case with 9/11 and what happened that morning, you realize you want to go help people. You want to be with the people you love and you want to not sweat the small stuff. It contextualizes life in such a radical way.”
Warner Bros chose not to change the release date of San Andreas in light of the recent deadly earthquakes in Nepal. Instead they’ve used the film’s trailers and ads to raise awareness about relief efforts and have vowed to match donations made by their employees. “There were always going to be public service announcements after the trailer and the film,” Gugino adds, “but then they were specifically geared toward Nepal.”
“This is a movie that does not take Mother Nature or her tics lightly,” says Gugino, “and I think it’s about the triumph of the human spirit, which is what always amazes me. At 9/11 and seeing this terrible situation in Nepal the thing you are reminded of is the resilience of the human spirit.”
The actress, best known for her roles in Spy Kids and Sin City, lives in New York but spent twenty years living in Los Angeles on top of the shaky San Andreas fault line.
“I’ve been in a couple of big ones in LA and they are intense,” she says. “The first one I ran outside which is exactly what you are not supposed to do. That is a good thing about San Andreas, you actually learn some stuff too—the whole under a doorway, or under a desk ting. Or under Dwayne Johnson. That is one of the advantages of his size.”
Where’s Irwin Allen when you need him? He was the Master of Disaster, a director and producer who gave us misery masterpieces like “The Poseidon Adventure” and “The Towering Inferno,” films that gave cinematic calamity a good name. Allen’s mastery of the form is sorely missing from a new earthquake movie that rumbles but fails to shake up the audience.
In “San Andreas” Dwayne Johnson, the actor formerly known as The Rock, goes head to head with his biggest foe ever—the tectonic fault line that runs through most of California.
He plays Ray, a Los Angeles Fire Department rescue-helicopter pilot who tries to save his wife (Carla Gugino) and daughter (Alexandra Daddario) in the wake of a devastating earthquake in San Francisco. How big is the quake? “Even though it is happening in California,” says a seismologist (Paul Giamatti), “you will feel it on the East Coast.”
Cue the wild action, crumbling buildings and Johnson’s trademarked strained neck muscles.
Come to see The Rock! Stay for the collapsing digital buildings! “San Andreas” is an orgy of CGI with pixel dust billowing out of hundreds of buildings made of bits and bytes. There is much computer artistry on display, but sadly little artistry of any other kind.
Johnson is tailor made for big action movies, but here he is done in by a script that uses lines like, “I know this sounds crazy but…” as a crutch to push the action forward. Unfortunately the big set pieces actually get duller as they get bigger. Not enough variation—Look everyone! There’s yet ANOTHER building falling apart!—and lackluster 3D make “San Andreas” on of the most visually uninteresting action flicks to come along in some time.
The only thing less interesting than the look is the dialogue, which consists mostly of the actors mouthing, “Are you hurt?” or “Oh, this is not good,” or my favourite, “It’s an earthquake!” The only cast member given more to do is Giamatti, who, as Mr. Exposition, must explain, ad nauseam, why earthquakes happen. “Lost” screenwriter Carlton Cuse, appears to have used only half his keyboard to peck out the script.
“San Andreas” is a natural disaster picture but it didn’t have to be a cinematic disaster. Johnson is charismatic and funny, so why not give him a chance to flex those muscles here? The movie is too earnest by half, from the schmaltzy score that swells underneath the scenes of chaos to the heartfelt reconciliation scenes between Johnson and Gugino—Ahhh… don’t you have something better to do, like rescue your kid, than discuss what went wrong in your marriage right now? Instead, why not have some fun with the over-the-top action? Perhaps it would have been funny to see the snooty woman Gugino is lunching with when the first quake hits get eaten up by the splitting ground. Alas there is no such campy pleasure to be had in “San Andreas.” As it is I hoped the ground would open up and gobble up whole the movie. What a disaster.
