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.
Richard Crouse interviews Carla Gugino on starring in the action film “San Andreas”
Gugino on women in action films: “In the 1950s women did draw at the box office then a lot of things changed but I think we’re coming back to the place where one does not preclude the other. You don’t have to just have men kicking ass and women being passive because that is not something today that women relate to. Women are not passive in general.”
On Tuesday, March 3rd, two-time Academy Award nominee, director Mark Osborne was in Toronto to give an exclusive presentation at the TIFF Bell Lightbox about the making of “The Little Prince.”
In the presentation followed by a Q&A hosted by Richard, Osborne spoke about the concept of the animated feature, the making-of, completing production n Montreal, and showed some select images, clips and b-roll from production. Osborne also revealed that Orson Welles once planned an adaptation of “The Little Prince” as a follow-up to “Citizen Kane.”
From Entertainment One: With the voices of Rachel McAdams, Jeff Bridges, Marion Cotillard, James Franco, Paul Rudd,Benicio del Toro, Paul Giamatti, Ricky Gervais, Albert Brooks, Bud Cort and Riley Osborne.
Through an inventive narrative concept, the movie will offer a family experience on a grand scale: the audience will be invited to discover a fantastic, dreamlike universe.
Thomas Hayden Church is a former sitcom star best known as the lovably dim-witted mechanic Lowell Mather on the show “Wings” before making the leap to big screen stardom as a comedic sidekick to Paul Giamatti in the Oscar winning wine movie “Sideways.”
His latest film, “Whitewash,” sees him leave the comedy behind to take on a darkly psychological role that pits him against the snowy backdrop of Northern Quebec.
In the film’s opening moments we witness the event that shapes the remainder of Bruce’s (Church) life. A wild, drunken ride on a bulldozer through town leaves a man (Marc Labreche) dead. Panicked, Bruce hides the body in a snow bank and hightails it for the deep woods in an effort to avoid the police and clear his head.
The cold rugged wilderness provides a backdrop for Bruce as he pieces together the events of the past few days and flashbacks on exactly how he wound up in this situation.
There are moments of dark humor here as Bruce struggles to survive, physically and mentally, but the tone of the film is bleak. It starts with an accidental murder and never strays far from the primal necessities of Bruce’s life.
Church is in virtually every scene and delivers an extraordinary, minimalist performance. He doesn’t appear to be doing much, but subtly rides the lines between sanity and insanity, between absurdity and logic, leaving the viewer off balance as the film veers between the present and flashbacks. It’s Church’s performance that adds colour to “Whitewash’s” bleak story and ice white surroundings.
The dynamic between Labreche’s character Paul and Bruce fuels the story, building slowly to the film’s climax.
“Whitewash” is quietly suspenseful, melancholic that won’t be to everyone’s taste, but is an elegantly told story of redemption and survival.
Based on the true story of Walt Disney’s (Tom Hanks) attempts to convince cantankerous “Mary Poppins” author P.L. Travers (Emma Tompson) to sell him the movie rights to the story, “Saving Mr. Banks” may be the only documented case of a writer holding an entire studio hostage.
Walt Disney made a promise to his daughter that would take twenty years to fulfill.
The young girl loved the magical nanny Mary Poppins, and wanted her father to bring her to life on the big screen. Trouble was, writer P.L. Travers wanted nothing to do with Disney.
“These books,” she said, “don’t lend themselves to chirping and prancing.” Fearing his adaptation of Poppins would careen “toward a happy ending like a kamikaze,” she tried to explain that Mary was the “enemy of whimsy and sentiment.”
Still, Disney wouldn’t take no for an answer and that’s where “Saving Mr. Banks” begins.
In a last ditch attempt to woo her, Disney flies Travers to Hollywood to work on a script with songwriters Richard and Robert Sherman (Jason Schwartzman and B. J. Novak) and screenwriter Don DaGradi (Bradley Whitford). The idea is to shape a movie that everyone can live with, but Travers, a pinched women whose withering remarks leave welts, is uncooperative.
(Side note: If she really was this contrary in real life, one has to wonder how the controlling Travers would have felt about having her actual life portrayed one screen.)
As the movie unfolds a psychological drama reveals itself in the form of flashbacks to Travers’s life as a child in 1907 Queensland, Australia. Turns out her contrary nature with the filmmakers comes from a deep seeded desire to protect the memory of her father, bank manager Travers Goff (Colin Farrell), a loveable scamp who drowned his inner torment with a sea of booze, and was the inspiration for the “Mary Poppins’s” patriarch, Mr. Banks.
“Saving Mr. Banks” is a serious movie about a whimsical movie. It also has darker underpinnings than you might imagine about the origins of “Mary Poppins.” The glossy Disney sheen casts its glow but the tone of the film is downbeat. Travers is a tough cookie, but heartbreakingly so. She’s a little girl lost, the product of an unhappy childhood that haunts her into adulthood.
It’s a character that could have been a flat line, a portrait of an unhappy woman with a perm-scowl and a bad attitude, but as Thompson allows her icy façade to melt Travers takes on dimensions. By the time we realize that Mary Poppins is not there to save the children but the troubled father the movie starts to pluck the heartstrings but because of Thompson’s skill it doesn’t feel manipulative.
Hanks is effortless as the folksy Disney. He hands in a quiet but lovingly rendered portrait with some real heart and lots of nuggets of wisdom.
Ditto Schwartzman and Novak, who breathe life into the creative process with enthusiastic performances and Paul Giamatti as limo driver Ralph. It’s a supporting role that doesn’t forward the story much but does add some nice light moments that seem to blunt some of Travers’s more deeply set psychological issues.
On the minus side “Saving Mr. Banks” hopscotches between time zones in Hollywood and Australia, a contrivance that slows both stories down, dividing the focus and keeping the audience off kilter for the entire running time. It’s a tough balance and the film doesn’t quite pull it off, but makes the uniformly excellent performances to cover the movie’s languid pacing.
There’s a key line near the beginning of “12 Years a Slave, “ the new drama from “Shame” director Steve McQueen. Shortly after being shanghaied from his comfortable life as a freeman into a life of slavery Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) declares, “I don’t want to survive. I want to live.”
Based on Northup’s 1853 memoir the movie is an uncompromising story about will, suffering and injustice.
The film begins in 1841 in Saratoga, New York. Northup is a respected member of the community, an educated family man and talented musician. His journey into hell begins when he accepts a gig to provide music for a traveling magic show. While on the road he is sold into slavery by two unscrupulous men and shipped from the safety of the northern states into the south’s servitude.
Torn from his wife (Ashley Dyke) and two kids (Quvenzhané Wallis and Cameron Zeigler) he is sold from plantation to plantation, all the while hiding his education and literacy in an effort to deflect the attentions of his overseers and owners.
No matter how bad his situation, and it is dire, he never gives up his will to live and his dream of making his way back to the north and his family.
Unflinching in its portrayal of brutality, “12 Years a Slave,” is a grim document of man’s inhumanity and twisted justification—“A man can do whatever he wants with his property,” spits Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender)—that serves as a primer of pain and cruelty suffered by those pressed into slavery.
Powerful situations and performances abound.
An excruciating lynching scene is all the more powerful because of McQueen’s quiet, unblinking camera. As Northup struggles with a rope around his neck McQueen pulls back, showing the complete diorama, with people going about their day, children playing and white owners gazing passively at the man as he fights for breath. It’s an unforgettable sequence that hammers home the horror of how commonplace this unspeakable behavior was.
The movie is ripe with such scenes that bring the true terror and pain felt by Northup. Its not easy viewing but it is effective, brought alive by interesting work from Paul Giamatti as a slave trader who says his sentiment for those he buys and sells, “extends the length of a coin,” Benedict Cumberbatch, Northup’s first and kindest master and Fassbender, the personification of cruel and unusual.
Paul Dano, Brad Pitt and Lupita Nyong’o also add much, but the core of the movie is Ejiofor’s passionate work as a man forced into unimaginable circumstances. Simultaneously vulnerable and defiant he delivers a deeply layered performance that is sure to earn him the notice he has deserved for years given his work in movies like “Dirty Pretty Things” and “Children of Men.”
“12 Years a Slave” is a harrowing, stark movie that is equal parts educational and devastating.
Gravitas literally drips off the screen during “Parkland,” director Peter Landesman’s impressionistic look at the three days surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Somber music spills from the soundtrack, people fret and pray while Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley pontificate on “one of the more horrible days in American history.”
Trouble is, there’s no story.
Instead, it’s a character study of the folks, from the doctors and nurses at Parkland Memorial who tried to save JFK’s life (Zak Efron, Colin Hanks and Marcia Gay Harden) to secret service and law enforcement officers on the scene (Billy Bob Thornton, Ron Livingston) to Lee Harvey Oswald’s family (James Badge Dale, Jacki Weaver) to the reporters who broke the story (Mark Duplass) and the man who took the most famous images of the shooting, Abraham Zapruder (Paul Giamatti).
It’s a sprawling cast who all vie for enough screen time to make an impact in this fast moving but ultimately ineffective study of the time.
The period details are all in place, and Giamatti, Dale and Thornton shine, but former journalist-turned-director Landesman’s lack of a point of view adds nothing to this often told tale.
The success of the 1966 cartoon The Grinch Who Stole Christmas triggered an avalanche of Yuletide themed movies from producers eager to cash in on the spirit of the season. Every year a new one comes out and for every hit there are a Santa’s sack of stinkers like Jingle All the Way and Surviving Christmas.
A year ago a new teaser trailer appeared in theatres to whet people’s appetite for a movie called Fred Claus. It was a lighthearted, fun clip featuring Fred (Vince Vaughn) and his brother Santa (Paul Giamatti) playfully yukking it up for the camera. It was a funny, warm scene that helped drive memories of the odious Christmas with the Krumps from the section of my brain that catalogues Xmas movies.
The casting of these two unlikely actors playing brothers seemed inspired and the supporting cast included no fewer than four Oscar nominees or winners. It seemed like a winner. Unfortunately, like so many previous failed holiday themed movies Fred Claus is naughtier than nice. It’s as though The Grinch, not satisfied with stealing Christmas from Whoville, swooped down on this movie and stole all the humor.
Vaughn, playing the title role, reprises his usual fast talking character—he’s part charmer, part con man who dreams of opening his own business, an OTB Parlor. Trouble is, he’s $50,000 short of the start-up money, so to raise money he dons a Santa hat, creates a fake charity and hits the pavement, silver bell and donation bucket in hand. After a dust-up with some other sidewalk Santas he winds up in jail with only one option for bail—his brother.
Fred has been estranged from his sibling (he’s an independent Claus or perhaps even Claustrofobic) ever since Nick cut down his favorite pine to make the first-ever Christmas tree. Wouldn’t that make them hundreds of years old, you ask? Why yes, apparently when Nick was made a Saint his entire family was frozen in time—they never age. Since then Fred has been living under the shadow of his younger brother.
St. Nick not only antes up the bail, but agrees to loan Fred the $50,000 he needs to open the OTB if he comes to the North Pole and works for the cash. Of course Fred agrees, and during his trip to Santa’s home turf befriends a lovesick elf (suffering from low elf esteem no doubt), and throws the whole operation into chaos to the point where Christmas is almost cancelled. By the end of the movie, however, everyone has learned valuable lessons about the importance of family, co-operation and acceptance.
Fred Claus earns a big lump of coal in almost every department. I don’t know what happened between the time the teaser trailer hit the multiplex and the film was released, but all the charm captured in that one scene we saw a year ago—which isn’t in the movie by the way—has been sucked out of the final product. Even the film’s funniest scene, a Siblings Anonymous meeting with cameos by Frank Stallone, Roger Clinton and Stephen Baldwin is poorly paced and not as effective as it could be.
The problems start from the top down. Vaughn’s inborn edginess works well in something like the R-rated Wedding Crashers but falls very flat in family fare; ditto his patented mile-a-minute patter. Director David Dobkin uses Vaughn’s size—he’s 6′ 5″—to good effect, however, taking every opportunity to hang the actor’s long legs over the edge of the tiny elf beds, but apart from some of the physical comedy Vaughn seems to be on auto pilot.
Co-lead Giamatti, tries hard but doesn’t fare much better than Vaughn. Crammed into a Santa suit (with disturbingly swollen hands) he resembles an overstuffed Christmas goose. It’s a shame; Giamatti is a great actor capable of much, much more than this. I wonder if his acting teachers at Yale ever imagined him delivering the line, “Ho, ho ho! I’m not gonna listen to no!”
Fred Claus uses the worst kind of manipulative holiday motifs to try and force the audience to care about these cardboard characters. There’s the orphaned young boy searching for a family, the bad-boy looking for redemption and the grinchy businessman. These stereotypes are the staple of every Yuletide story from A Christmas Carol on up and can be effective, it’s just too bad they weren’t put to better use here. Fred Claus exactly the nightmare before Christmas, but if you spend your money on this one, yule be sorry.
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.
