In 2011, I accused the first movie in the “Puss in Boots” franchise of neutering the once-charming character. We fell in love with the frisky feline, as voiced by Antonio Banderas, in the “Shrek” movies, but his journey from supporting to leading character was far from purrfect. The movies were predictable and worse, had none of the purr-sonality (OK. I’ll stop with the cat puns now) of the “Shrek” movies.
Now, one television series, sequel and video game later, comes “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” a movie, now playing in theatres, that raises the stakes.
The new film opens with the plucky ginger cat (once again voiced by Banderas) in a life-or-death battle against a fur-midable (last one, I promise) opponent. “I am known by many names,” he brags. “Stabby Tabby. El Macho Gato. The Leche Whisperer. I am Puss in Boots!”
He’s been in sticky situations before, but this one is different.
“I have bad news,” says the doctor who attends to his wounds. “You died.”
It looks like the end for Puss in Boots, until he reminds the physician, “Doctor, relax! I have nine lives!”
“And how many times have you died already?”
“Oh,” says Puss, “I’m not really a math guy.”
Turns out, Puss is on his last life and must give up his adventurous ways if he wants to survive.
Rather than become a lap-cat, the swashbuckling Puss, along with love interest Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek) and chatty therapy dog Perro (Harvey Guillén), sets off to into the Black Forest to find the mystical Last Wish and restore the lives he lost. “I need to get my lives back,” he says. “Without them, I am not the legend.”
But after eight lives lived, Puss has many enemies, all of whom want track him down. “I find the idea of nine lives absurd,” says the Big Bad Wolf (Wagner Moura), “and you didn’t value any of them.”
Animation is generally thought of as entertainment for kids, but legends like Don Bluth and Ralph Bakshi made their careers creating films that addressed darker subject matter. Now, “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” is no “The Secret of Nimh” or “Fire and Ice,” but it is bleaker and more experimental than anything else in the franchise. Like the recent “Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio,” “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” treads into adult territory theme wise, with higher stakes than we’re used to in a film aimed at kids– the Cave of Lost Souls, anyone?—but does so with family audiences in mind.
The character of PiB may be in peril, but the flamboyance that made him such a scene stealer in “Shrek 2” is still on full display. He’s a huge personality in pocket-size, and Banderas brings a perfect combination of roguishness and righteousness to the voice work.
Fun, villainous voice work from Florence Pugh, John Mulaney, and Wagner Moura, as Goldilocks, “Big” Jack Horner and Big Bad Wolf / Death respectively, add some spice and beautiful animation lifts the adventure sequences skyward.
Best of all, the film’s underlying life lesson, that time is precious and we should enjoy it while we can—”When you only have one life,” says Kitty Softpaws, “that’s what makes it special.”—is nicely woven into the film’s fleet-footed, if slightly predictable plot.
Richard joins Ryan Doyle and guest host Tamara Cherry of the NewsTalk 1010 afternoon show to talk about Squirt soda and the origin of the tequila-based cocktail the Paloma, and some movies to watch on the weekend, including “Black Widow” and “No Sudden Move.”
If you were to make a Venn diagram of “Black Widow,” now on Disney+ with premium access, and the recent animated film “The Boss Baby: Family Business,” you’d be surprised by the overlap. Both movies are about estranged families coming together and siblings finding a path forward after years of bitter feelings. One is much louder than the other, but underneath it all they are both all about family. “I chose to go west and become an Avenger,” Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) says. “They treated me like family.”
The story begins with a flashback.
It’s 1995 and sisters Natasha (played as a child by Ever Anderson) and Yelena (Violet McGraw) are separated from their Soviet sleeper cell family in Ohio. Removed from their undercover agent parents, scientist mother Melina (Rachel Weisz) and super-soldier father Alexei (David Harbour), they are placed under the supervision of evil Soviet General Dreykov (Ray Winston) in a training camp called the Red Room where they are brainwashed and taught the deadly ways of the Widows.
Jump forward twenty-one years to the gap between the events of “Captain America: Civil War” and “Infinity War.” Natasha (Johansson) is cut loose from her Avengers pals after breaking the Sokovia Accords. The superhero clan have gotten “divorced,” and Natasha is hiding out in Norway. When she is attacked by Dreykov’s bodyguard, the mysterious Taskmaster, she reunites with her estranged “family” to take on the Russian general.
“Black Widow,” the first Marvel Cinematic Universe solo outing for Johansson’s character, has spent a year bouncing around the pandemic release schedule and brings with it high expectations from fans.
Directed by Cate Shortland, Romanoff’s convoluted backstory is handled in a fairly straightforward way, part Marvel, part “The Americans.” The movie does offer up a fair amount of fan service but still provides eye-scorching action and basic, relatable themes of the importance of family and responsibility for the casual viewer.
Despite the wild CGI action and Jason Bourne style one-on-one combat, the film feels more grounded than most other Marvel movies. Perhaps it’s because Natasha and Yelena (Florence Pugh) don’t have super powers (although they are VERY resilient) or perhaps it’s because the story details the dysfunctional, tragic past that put Natasha on the road to becoming an assassin or maybe it’s because the villain Dreykov barely makes an impression, but the usual stakes—saving the world—take a backseat to more personal concerns.
“Black Widow” is a swansong for Natasha. The character jumped off a cliff in “Avengers: Endgame,” sacrificing herself so her superhero buddies could acquire the Soul Stone and help defeat genocidal warlord Thanos. Johansson sends her off with a suitably steely yet vulnerable performance, and when she isn’t running, jumping, punching or shooting, she brings some real humanity to the quieter scenes.
Pugh and Harbour bring some much-welcomed levity, the former as the eye-rolling sarcastic younger sister, the latter as the insecure wannabe super soldier who is just a bit too concerned about his legacy. Their bickering and subtle character touches help add life to the family vibe so important to the story the movie is trying to tell.
Like so many of the Marvel films, near the end “Black Widow” succumbs to overkill, noise and frenetic CGI action scenes. The family is united, à la “The Boss Baby” but the onscreen fireworks overwhelm the compelling family story that lies at the heart of Natasha’s journey.
The Legend of Barney Thomson is a movie Robert Carlyle was almost destined to make. The Once Upon a Time star not only plays the lead character, he directed the Scottish black comedy about an awkward barber who unwittingly becomes a serial killer.
“I was offered this four or five times purely as an actor over a period of five or six years,” he says. “I was over here in Vancouver working and a friend of mine said he had a Scottish script that I might be interested in. I said, ‘Of course I’ll read it,’ and it was that again. I can’t get away from it.”
The script is based on The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson by Douglas Lindsay, a novel The Scotsman described as “gleefully macabre.”
Carlyle, a Maryhill, Glasgow native, liked the screenplay but says, “there were certain aspects of Glasgow culture that were missing from it.”
“In Glasgow we have a way of speaking to one another that is kind of harsh. That was missing.”
He drew from personal experience to find Glasgow sites that “fitted in with Barney’s life.”
“A lot of the locations you see in the film like the Barrowland Ballroom are places that are kind of dying and might not be around for much longer so I thought this was an interesting way of documenting some of these places.”
Initially he signed on only as an actor but soon found himself doing double duty.
“Believe me when I say, it certainly wasn’t my idea. I don’t know if (the idea) came from the financiers or not. I can’t remember but from whichever source it came from it seemed to be an interesting hook to hang this on that not only was I going to be in it but direct it also. That enthused the financiers.”
The first time feature film director says he took his lead for the tone of the movie from the book and the script.
“Let’s not have the camera moving around and spinning around in circles. Let’s spend the time on the performances and not the camera angles, which you end up cutting anyway.”
He recruited an all-star cast, including Sir Tom Courtney, Ray Winstone and his old Trainspotting cast mate James Cosmo. In a casting coup, he hired two time Oscar winner Emma Thompson to play against type as Barney’s monstrous mom.
“Many, many years ago at the beginning of my career she did a piece on Scotland TV called Tutti Frutti,” he says. “She’s played a Scot in that, from Glasgow. I thought, ‘She’s remarkable. I thought she was English.’ Then suddenly I realized, she is English and just did this terrific accent. There’s not many English people who can do a Scottish accent that well.”
The Legend of Barney Thomson has already won Best Picture at the Scottish BAFTAs and Carlyle is keeping busy on the small screen as Mr. Gold/Rumplestiltskin on Once Upon a Time.
It’s his next project, however, that has the Internet buzzing. In May he’ll reprise the role of the pint glass-wielding psychopath Francis Begbie in the sequel to Trainspotting alongside the film’s original director and cast.
“We were all very emotional when we read it,” he says, “even Danny (Boyle), because these four characters have followed us around for twenty years. Where ever I go people are talking about Begbie. It is very close to us.”
Sean Penn is back on the big screen this weekend in The Gunman, his first leading role in almost four years. It can’t rightly be called a comeback because he never really went away. Supporting roles in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and Gangster Squad have generated column inches, but in the last five years he has devoted more energy to raising money for earthquake relief in Haiti than to being a movie star.
In the film he plays Special Forces military contractor Jim Terrier. By day he protects foreign workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo but he moonlights as a hired gunman for big corporations. His assassination of the Congolese Mining Minister forces him to flee the country and changes the course of his entire life.
It’s what Penn jokingly calls “geriaction,” an action movie starring a middle-aged actor. Other than that, don’t expect to hear him speak a great deal about his new film. “Honestly within a week after I’ve finished shooting a film I’ve almost forgotten it,” he said recently.
In February he was honoured with an honorary Cesar Award for “choosing his films with sensitivity and commitment.” At the ceremony the “legend in his lifetime” watched a clip reel spanning the width and breadth of his career, including excerpts from Dead Men Walking, Mystic River and Milk.
Later the actor said, “I remember playing none of those scenes. I remembered the movies [but] I saw myself in scenes with actors I didn’t even know I’d ever worked with!”
To jog Mr. Penn’s memory here’s a “compenndium” of some of his memorable roles:
1. In Milk Penn won a Best Actor Oscar playing the real-life Harvey Milk, a native New Yorker who became America’s first openly gay man to be elected to public office. Penn fully embraces Milk, from the thick New York accent that characterized his speech to the goofy grin that endeared the real-life activist to his supporters, both gay and straight.
2. This Must be the Place is a rare thing. I speak of that elusive beast Pennigma Seanun comoedia—the Sean Penn comedy. He plays a retired and world-weary American rock star living with his wife (Frances McDormand) in Ireland. This is Sean Penn like we’ve never seen him before. With poufy hair, black toenail polish and affected vocal cadence—like Andy Warhol on Quaaludes—he creates an intriguing, strange character.
3. In Hollywood dramedy Hurly Burly Penn played against type as Eddie, the hyperactive casting agent. It’s an emotionally raw performance—witness Eddie try and use cocaine to snort away his troubles—but one without the studied glumness that he frequently brings to the screen.
4. Fair Game could be re-titled One Hundred Minutes of Sean Penn Yelling ‘If We Don’t Tell the Truth No One Will!’ He’s Joseph Wilson the real-life whistleblower who claimed the Bush administration falsified information about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Penn is passionate, crafting a performance so big it has it’s own gravitational pull.
5. Finally there’s All the King’s Men, a movie memorable for all the wrong reasons. Penn is a fine actor, but as Willie Stark, (loosely based on Louisiana governor Huey P. Long) he is so over-the-top it’s as if he’s acting in a different movie than the rest of the cast. It’s a vein-popping, arm-waving performance that suggests that maybe he should lay-off the Red Bull.
With the release of “The Gunman” Sean Penn joins the ranks of middle-aged actors looking to Neesonate their careers. Liam Neeson famously made the leap into action movies later in life, a move that has revitalized his career and generated millions of box office bucks.
Penn, fresh from the gym and frequently shirtless, plays Special Forces military contractor Jim Terrier who protects foreign workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo by day and sidelines as a hired gunman for big corporations by night. His he assassination of the Congolese Mining Minister (Clive Curtis) forces him to leave the country, his job and girlfriend Annie (Jasmine Trinca) behind. Eight years later he’s back in Africa. This time around instead of killing people he’s trying to do some good but three armed killers determined to do him in throw his humanitarian mission off track. His past has caught up to him and if he is to survive he has to return to his old ways.
Thrillers don’t get much more generic than “The Gunman.” It has all the elements of “Bourne Identity” or “Taken.” There are exotic locations, guns galore and loads of handheld camera, what’s missing is the thrills. Despite suitably menacing performances from heavyweights like Ray Winstone, Javier Bardem (despite his Foster Brooks drunk routine), Idris Elba and Mark Rylance everything is so by-the-numbers it’s as if the script (based on the 1981 novel The Prone Gunman by Jean-Patrick Manchette) was written to pay homage to older, better thrillers rather than offering up anything new.
Sloppily written—the “mess with the bull and you’ll get the horn” bull fighting climax takes place in present day in Catalonia even though they banned the sports years ago—with clunky dialogue and loose ends galore—what happens to Annie’s adopted baby?—“The Gunman” is unlikely to give Penn the necessary Neesonudge to reinvent his career.
Looks like another actor is taking a page out of Matthew McConaughey’s playbook.
The star’s recent Oscar win for “Dallas Buyer’s Club” was the frosting on the McConaissance cake, the transformation from shirtless rom com star to serious leading man.
Jude Law seems to have taken note, trading in the “pretty young thing” roles of “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and “Alfie” in favor of darker character pieces. His latest, “Dom Hemingway,” is his most noir creation yet.
When we first meet Mr. Hemmingway he’s in jail, a safecracker with anger issues in the midst of a twelve-year stretch. Upon release he looks up best friend Dickie (Richard E. Grant), a one-handed small time crook who reconnects him with former boss Mr. Fontaine (Demian Bichir), an elegant but deadly crime lord. The way Dom sees it Mr. Fontaine owes him a great deal of money for keeping his mouth shut in prison but a near death experience changes everything.
“Dom Hemingway” is not a great movie. It is weirdly paced and betrays it’s hard edge with sentimentality but it is worth seeing despite itself; worth seeing because of Jude Law’s performance.
“I am a legend, a myth, a glorious tale to be handed down from generation to generation,” Hemmingway boasts, with a self worth almost as broad as his vocabulary. He’s an uneducated thug with a way with words and Law brings him to vivid whiskey soaked life in an aggressively comic performance.
Twenty years ago the part would have been played by Bob Hoskins or Ray Winstone, rough and tumble actors with a built in sense of menace. Law, by contrast, doesn’t seem to be an obvious substitute, but it’s the kind of character part that suits him. In retrospect he always seemed an uncomfortable fit in some of his leading man roles that relied more on his charm than talent. Here he brings an unexpectedly dangerous but funny vibe to the film, reminiscent of Ben Kingsley’s work in “Sexy Beast.”
Whether he is bragging that his manhood could save starving children in Somalia, in a bravura opening monologue, or staring moon-eyed at his estranged daughter, Law is better than the movie in a role that could come to redefine his career.
“Noah” is not your father’s biblical movie. It’s an art house epic that filters the story through director Darren “Black Swan” Aronofsky’s impressionistic style.
The best way I can describe “Noah” is emotionally ambitious. It takes a familiar tale and shines a new light on it by highlighting Noah’s spiritual quandary. In the film—which takes liberties with the biblical story—he’s a vegan prophet who grapples with doing God’s will while balancing the needs of all of humanity, particularly his family. The meaning of faith and the consequences of adhering to that faith are the film’s main thrust, but as interesting as that is, the movie feels like one thing when it is addressing the spiritual and quite another—possibly a “Lord of the Rings” flick—when it is in action movie mode.
The movie starts at the beginning. Literally.
After a quick recap of Old Testament highlights—the Creation, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and Cain vs Abel—we meet Noah, the last descendent of Adam and Eve’s good hearted son Seth. The world he lives in is a dangerous place, ruled by Cain’s bloodthirsty bloodline but Noah (Russell Crowe) and family (Jennifer Connelly, Douglas Booth, Emma Watson, Logan Lerman and Leo McHugh Carroll) live peacefully as nature loving, proto hippies. That is, until Noah has a disturbing apocalyptic dream. Consulting with his grandfather Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins) he determines The Creator wants him to build an ark and laden it with two of every creature on earth in advance of a great flood that will destroy mankind and the violence they perpetrate. It’s ultimate Mulligan—a do over for the planet—but Noah will have to make some troubling decisions to fulfill God’s will.
Some may criticize the movie for not being reverent enough, but Aronofsky treats the story as a living breathing thing and not an artifact from another time. The addition of a spectacular creation of the world sequence, as narrated by Noah, may annoy Creationists, but is a moving and beautiful retelling of the biblical story.
Aronofsky may play fast and loose with Noah’s story, but underlines the spirituality that is at the very heart of the tale as evidenced by the Seven Days of Creation scene.
He’s also aided by a terrific performance from Crowe.
Crowe’s been in a bit of a slump in recent years. The dangerous, complex actor of movies like “Gladiator” and “A Beautiful Mind” seemed to have taken a backseat to the performer who thought making “The Man with the Iron Fists” was a good idea. “Noah” is a nice reminder of Crowe’s delicate mix of fearsome masculinity and subtle sensitivity and his tortured performance hits Noah’s zealotry square on the head.
But having said that, Aronofsky moves in mysterious ways. He shot the epic almost entirely in close up and the flood scene could have used a bit more Cecil B. DeMille. Aronofsky means this to be a personal story of a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders, but it is still an end of the world movie. Despite the occasional Peter Jackson flourish—like the stone giants The Watchers and sweeping crane shots—“Noah” doesn’t feel as big as it should. It has big ideas, but the expected sweeping visuals aren’t there.
“Noah” is a thought-provoking take on a familiar story that will keep you guessing until the end credits roll.
I admired Martin Scorsese’s last two movies, Gangs of New York and The Aviator, but I didn’t love them, and Scorsese is the kind of filmmaker who should inspire fanatical praise. The last two were handsome, big-budget epics but it felt like he was making movies to please Academy voters and not himself. The Departed is a departure from those sleek studio efforts, and places the director firmly back where he belongs, on the mean streets surrounded by gangsters, duplicity and violence.
Based on a Hong Kong film called Mo-gaan-do (titled Infernal Affairs in North America) The Departed, relocates to Boston and stylishly tells the story of two men on opposite sides of the law. Both are cops, one deep undercover in the organization of mob boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson), the other an ambitious state trooper who appears to be on the straight and narrow, but is actually an employee of Costello’s. Both men, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon respectively, are tormented by their duplicitous lives, feeling trapped between the truth and lies, but neither has a way out of the situation. DiCaprio is so far undercover that officially he doesn’t exist, and Damon’s character owes a huge dept of gratitude to Costello. Their lives intersect both professionally—as they play cat and mouse with one another—and personally as they unwittingly become involved with the same woman, a beautiful therapist played by newcomer Vera Farmiga.
Scorsese skillfully tells this story about loyalty and men who lead dark, dangerous lives, infusing each frame of the film with excitement. He has created an unpredictable atmosphere, where the threat of trouble hangs over every scene. Not since 1995’s Casino has he so effectively embraced the down-and-dirty world of crime. The film is a study of contradictions, both in character and style—Scorsese mixes fluid camera work with hard-edged editing; his script is both darkly funny and brutally violent.
The movie’s large ensemble cast of Hollywood A-listers do great work. The youngest members of the above-the-title cast, DiCaprio and Damon, each set the bar very high. This may be DiCaprio’s first truly adult role, a man who can’t trust anyone and who battles his jangled nerves to do the right thing. Damon plays off his clean-cut image, expanding on his recent work in Syrianna and the Bourne movies, to present a good-guy façade that is being eroded by paranoia.
The rest of the cast, Ray Winstone, Martin Sheen, Mark Walhberg (as the foul-mouthed Dignan) are stellar, but if there are two performances that look Oscar bound they are Jack Nicholson and Alec Baldwin.
Baldwin plays Ellerby, a task force head out to get Costello with gusto. The character is a mix of steely-eyed determination and goofy comedic relief, and Scorsese keeps him in check, allowing to walk to the edge of the cliff without ever jumping over into overacting. It’s a fine line and Baldwin walks it expertly.
In a film packed with great performances—it’s as if everyone was putting in extra effort for Scorsese—Jack Nicholson still manages to steal the show. Costello is his King Lear, a tyrant on the edge of madness, but with Nicholson’s burning eyes. Closing in on 70 years old he is still vital, still scary and still capable of blowing younger, prettier actors off the screen. There is a reason why some people are legends and in The Departed we are reminded once again why Nicholson is acting royalty.
The Departed finds Scorsese in top form, and is the coolest and best movie so far this year.
