“In the Heart of the Sea” stars the man who plays Thor, another guy who was Batman villain Scarecrow and ‘Mad-Eye’ Moody from the “Harry Potter” series but it’s not aimed at the comic book crowd. Based on a the best-selling Nathaniel Philbrick novel of the same name, it’s a retelling of the true events that inspired one of the literature’s greatest novels, Moby Dick.
The story begins with Herman Melville (Ben Whishaw) offering inn owner Thomas Nickerson (Brendan Gleeson) three months room and board for one night of conversation about a terrible whaling disaster. As a young man Nickerson’s first seafaring job saw him sail out of Nantucket aboard the Essex. Crewed by Captain George Pollard, Jr. (Benjamin Walker), first officer Owen Chase (Chris Hemsworth) and second officer Matthew Joy (Cillian Murphy), their mission is to reach the Pacific Ocean and harvest 2000 barrels of whale oil.
Their journey leads them to 1000 leagues along the equator, a place where, they are warned, “wales go to hide from men.” There are whales aplenty, but soon the tables are turned and the hunters become the hunted as a “demon whale, 100 feet long, white as alabaster,” attacks the Essex, destroying the ship leaving the crew a drift in small whaleboats.
The ship gone, the remaining crew attempt to sail to South America battling not only repeated assaults from the whale, but also starvation and dehydration. At sea for three months the men were pushed to the edge of sanity as they took drastic steps to survive.
“In the Heart of the Sea” feels like an old-fashioned whale-of-a-tale. Big strapping men battle nature, drip testosterone, reinvent sushi (I guess you’ll eat almost anything when you’re adrift) and drink grog. The only thing missing is Errol Flynn.
Director Ron Howard does a good job of respecting the power of the sea, effectively showcasing the brutal payback from Mother Nature when the Essex sail too close to a storm. It’s too bad then, later, when the whale is using the Essex as a ping-pong ball, the movie isn’t nearly as intense or exciting. By that point it’s a horror movie with the whale as Freddie Kruger and the crew as scared-but-determined teens trying to stay alive. The whale is menacing due to its size but it’s barely a character, more a malevolent force but Jason Voorhees had more personality than this leviathan.
At the same time it’s hard to view the sailors as victims when they have been spearing the whales and scooping oil from inside the beast’s heads. So it feels like a lose, lose situation where you don’t care much about the creature or the sailors.
“In the Heart of the Sea” is a handsomely mounted film, just not an exciting one.
“Rush,” the new Ron Howard film about the rivalry of real-life Formula One racers, Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl) and James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth), provides insight on the “rebels, lunatics and dreamers,” who strap themselves into “a coffin, filled with high octane fuel” and drive 120 miles per hour.
When we first meet Lauda and Hunt they are third stringers, talented Formula 3 drivers desperate for a chance to move up to the big show. Lauda makes a financial deal that lands him on Team Ferrari while Hunt uses tenacity, charm and a touch of desperation to grab a spot with the McLaren team.
Bad blood flows between the two, stemming back to an incident when Hunt edged Lauda off the track the first time they faced off against one another. That rivalry spills over from the track as the two engage in name-calling and spar in the press.
In the 1976 season Lauda seems unstoppable, a sure bet to reclaim his World Champion title. Then tragedy strikes as Lauda is badly burned in a fiery crash. During his recuperation Hunt rises in the ranks, leading to a showdown, just 50 days after Lauda’s accident, for the World Championship at the Japan Grand Prix.
In some ways “Rush” is a paint-by-numbers story—Formulaic 1, maybe?—of opposites.
Lauda is methodical, reserved, clinical, egotistical, a man who races not for passion, but as an exercise in control and discipline. “If I had more talent,” he says, “and could earn more money at something else, I would.”
Hunt, on the other hand, is a wild card driven by passion and aggression; a flamboyant but troubled man who wore racing overalls embroidered with Sex: The Breakfast of Champions.
The pair face off in predictable ways—the kind of thing we’ve seen in other sports films—but the film really takes off in its second half when the characters show some growth and the racing scenes take center stage.
Howard takes us inside the cars—literally. Close-ups of revving engines and point of view shots form the driver’s visors make the race scenes a you-are-there feel, placing the viewer in the cockpit. They are exciting, visceral and as close as I’ll ever get to rounding a hairpin curve at super sonic speeds.
Hemsworth hammers it home, proving there is more to him than playing superhero Thor in “The Avengers” movies but it is Brühl who shows the most range.
It would have been easy to play Lauda as a one-note egotist, but as his character finds his passion after the horrific accident, Brühl adds complexity, bringing him to life as a fully rounded man.
“Rush” is more than “Rocky” on four wheels, it’s an exhilarating, stylish film with pedal-to-the-metal verve.
That quartet of words conjures up images of burning rubber, revving engines and lightening fast pit stops.
This weekend the new Ron Howard movie Rush tries to capture the excitement of Formula 1 racing. Daniel Brühl stars as Niki Lauda, the real life Austrian driver and three-time F1 World Champion who faced off against British legend James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) at the 1976 Formula 1 World Championship at Fuji in Japan.
The story of their rivalry promises not only a great sport story, but also pedal to the metal action and fiery crashes. Like racing kingpin Dale Ernhardt Sr. once said, “You win some, you lose some, you wreck some.”
Just ask the producers of Days of Thunder, who destroyed 35 cars during the shooting of the Tom Cruise racing flick.
Loosely based on the relationship between crew chief Harry Hyde and driver Tim Richmond—played by Robert Duvall and real life racing enthusiast Cruise—and set in the world of Nascar, Days of Thunder is essentially Top Gun on four wheels, but it does feature some thrilling scenes and deafening engine noise.
As for the autos, most were Chevrolets fitted with fake stock cars fiberglass bodies. Not exactly built for the kind of speed required for the film, they regularly broke down and at one point half the fleet was in the shop.
Whatever James Garner’s Grand Prix lacks in story—there basically isn’t one—it makes up for with exhilarating racing footage. To fulfill director John Frankenheimer’s wish for realistic race scenes the cars actually raced at speeds of up to 130 miles per hour. In the past racing sequences had been shot at slower speeds and then sped up in post-production, but Frankenheimer felt that technique would look fake to an audience who was now used to watching racing on television.
Equally exciting for race fans is Le Mans. The advertising tagline for this 1971 film raves, “Steve McQueen takes you for a drive in the country. The country is France. The drive is at 200 MPH!”
“When you’re racing, it… it’s life,” says Michael Delaney (McQueen). “Anything that happens before or after… is just waiting.”
At first glance you wouldn’t imagine television presenter David Frost and disgraced ex-president Richard Nixon have much in common. Frost was a well known playboy, as famous for his off screen antics as he was for his various television shows. Nixon was, well Richard Millhouse Nixon, the only US president to ever resign the presidency. They were an odd couple who became inextricably linked in the public’s mind following an historic series of interviews that brought in the largest audience for a news interview in history. In the new film Frost / Nixon, director Ron Howard details how much alike these two men actually were. He spends time forging psychological parallels between the pair as two men from modest circumstances who rose to the top of the heap in their fields but never earned the respect they felt they deserved.
When we first meet Frost (Michael Sheen) he’s a successful talk show host in Australia. His American show had been recently cancelled and he longed for another chance at fame in the US. “Success in America is unlike success anywhere else,” he says. Meanwhile Richard Nixon is about to resign the presidency following the Watergate scandal. When Frost—and 400,000,000 other people worldwide—watched Nixon’s resignation Frost saw a chance to rehabilitate his reputation. He understands that Nixon’s Shakespearean fall from grace would make great television, and he knows how to make great TV. He plans a series of four ninety minute interviews with Nixon covering a variety of subjects, including Watergate and the subsequent cover-up. Nixon signs on, for a price, seeing the interviews with the lightweight Frost as the perfect venue to mend his battered political status.
Based on a play by The Queen screenwriter Peter Morgan Frost / Nixon is one of the rare plays that actually works better as a film. Howard opens up the story taking us to places and events that are only talked about in the stage show. His work here is enlivened after the turgid DaVinci Code, with a quick pace that keeps the wordy script moving along at a fast clip.
There’s no action to speak of, save for the verbal sparring between interviewer and interviewee in their fourth and final televised meeting, and it is here that sparks fly. Sheen, best known to North American audiences for his portrayal of Tony Blair in The Queen, gives a flamboyant performance as the showy Frost but this is Frank Langella’s movie.
In Langella’s hands Nixon, one of the most vilified public figures of the last fifty years becomes almost sympathetic and not because he is handled with kid gloves. Quite the opposite; Howard often shoots Nixon peering out from the shadows to subtly imply that he is a shady character and the script has great fun portraying the president as a money grubbing opportunist. He becomes sympathetic through Langella’s humanizing portrait. A man so often remembered in sound bites is shown here, in a commanding performance, as a real person, warts and all. He isn’t, by his own admission in the script, a likeable man, but Langella’s carefully calibrated performance unveils previously unseen aspects of his personality. In the film’s final half hour—the events leading up to the final interview and the interview itself—Langella delivers tour de force work that could win him the Oscar for Best Actor.
The timing of the release of Frost / Nixon is interesting. Obviously a December release date puts it squarely in line for Academy consideration but beyond that it is an interesting look at the sad post Oval Office life of a president who left office with a very low approval rating. George Bush, take note.
In “The Dilemma,” the latest from director Ron Howard, Vince Vaughn and Kevin James star as car designers trying create a new, sporty hybrid automobile. It’s a fitting job for them as the movie is kind of a hybrid itself, two parts screwball comedy to one part drama.
Vaughn and James are Ronny and Nick, best friends and business partners who relate to one another mostly by speaking in football metaphors. By day they work together, creating a new hybrid car for Dodge; at night (in the beginning of the movie anyway) they and their significant others, girlfriend Beth (Jennifer Connelly) and wife Geneva (Winona Ryder), hang out, tight as peas in a pod. Everything changes one day, however, when Ronny sees Geneva kissing another man, the muscle-bound stud Zip (Channing Tatum). Enter the dilemma. Does he tell his best friend that his wife is having an affair and risk ruining their marriage and adding stress to Nick’s life when they are on the cusp of the biggest business deal of their careers?
At the heart of “The Dilemma” is Vince Vaughn, once the charming actor of “Swingers” and a series of comedies like “Wedding Crashers,” now a one-trick-pony who relies a bit too heavily on his uncanny ability to string together long uninterrupted phrases of hip back talk. It was funny in 2005, amusing in 2007 and has now worn out its welcome. What happened to the actor capable of interesting work in movies like “Into the Wild”? He’s become guilty of recycling the same character from movie to movie with only small variations.
Here he plays a self-centered meddler who sticks his nose where it doesn’t belong. Sure there are a few laughs — and only a few — along the way, but they come with a been-there-done-that feeling of déjà Vaughn.
Otherwise it’s an adult sit-com whose idea of humor is to have the stocky Kevin James deliver lines like, “Love can be very filling, like a warm stew.” The serious stuff, and there’s more than you would expect in a movie marketed as a comedy, doesn’t really ring true, but at least Jennifer Connelly brings an air of authenticity to the relationship end of her story.
Most of “The Dilemma’s” best moments are in the trailer, a two-minute synopsis of the story, which benefits from the lack of Vaughn’s motor-mouth riffing. Come to think of it, the entire movie could have benefitted from less Vaughn and more jokes.
The DaVinci Code is finally in the theatres after months of anticipation and hype. No movie in recent memory has generated the kind of controversy and column inches as this one has, but like Public Enemy used to say, “Don’t believe the hype.” The Ron Howard adaptation doesn’t live up to expectations. Howard has crafted a handsome 2 ½ hour movie that is faithful to the book—for better or worse.
The coded symbols and secret messages are here, all of which are crucial to the understanding of the convoluted story, but unfortunately the slavish adherence to those story conventions slows the whole thing down to a crawl, draining most of the excitement out of this provocative material.
Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman edit the story, removing some of author Dan Brown’s superfluous story tentacles, but still get bogged down.
For what is essentially a chase movie it is awfully talky. The story is a multi-faceted juggernaut with Howard balancing a police procedural with a scavenger-hunt and religious intrigue. Add in a few mad monks, an eccentric English Lord and a deadly butler and you should have the basis for a ripping good tale, the 45 million or so readers of the book thought so, but the filmmakers are more interested in getting from one place to another in the story to worry too much about the characters. The actors appear to be there to support the story instead of being an organic part of the story. They all have heaps of dialogue but little in the way of actual characters. The result is a clumsy screenplay that doesn’t move along as quickly as the book.
Of the international cast, featuring French superstars Jean Reno and Audrey Tautou and Brits Paul Bettany and Ian McKellen only the latter seems to be enjoying himself. As the crusty Leigh Teabing, a Holy Grail obsessive, McKellen seems to have grasped the pulp fiction roots of this piece and actually calibrates his performance away from the terribly serious tone of the rest of the film.
Anchoring the cast is a morose Tom Hanks as Harvard Professor of Religious Symbiology turned murder suspect Robert Langdon. Hanks doesn’t do much with the character other than act as Mr. Exposition. He is the guide to the mystery of the DaVinci Code and as such has to deliver a great deal of information about symbols and the movie’s revisionist view of the life of Jesus Christ. These long speeches aren’t particularly cinematic and Hanks’ flat delivery of the material makes them even less so. Even when the pace of the film is more upbeat, the script lets him down. In a rare moment of passion he must deliver one of the least thrilling lines in the history of thrillers. “I have to get to a library—fast!” Hitchcock or any other good thriller director would have ditched that line at the first read through.
The movie does soft peddle some of the book’s more controversial claims. “We’ve been dragged into a world of people who think this stuff is real,” says the cinematic Langdon who is more of a Doubting Thomas than his literary counterpart. The filmmakers have added a sequence that stresses the influence of Jesus Christ in the modern world but these concessions to political correctness actually undermine the story, stripping it of some of its drama. Whether the history presented in the book and film is hokum or not, we need the characters to believe in it to make their search compelling. If they don’t believe, then why should the viewer care?
The DaVinci Code is a drama without much drama, a thriller with few thrills whose biggest sin is a failure to entertain.
Ron Howard, the flame-haired actor turned director of The Da Vinci Code, wasn’t surprised by the success of his adaptation of the best selling Dan Brown suspense novel.
“The idea at the centre of The Da Vinci Code was so provocative and such a hot button issue it really lived at the centre of popular culture for almost two years,” he said this week in Rome before the premiere of Angels & Demons, the follow-up to the record-breaking Da Vinci Code.
“Angels & Demons is a popular novel,” the director says, although he acknowledges that it isn’t as notorious as the other book. “What I’m finding, however, is if you like The Da Vinci Code you’re going to really like Angels & Demons. I feel like it could be a thrilling and exciting experience for audiences in of itself; separating itself from The Da Vinci Code movie or the novel.”
The new film, starring Tom Hanks in a reprise of his Da Vinci role as symbologist Robert Langdon, sees the Harvard professor work to solve a murder, unravel the mystery of an ancient secret brotherhood called the Illuminati and prevent a terrorist act against the Vatican.
The mix of intrigue and religious may sound familiar to Da Vinci Code fans but Howard maintains Angels & Demons is a different beast. “If I felt like it was a cookie cutter situation and I was being asked to repeat myself then it wouldn’t interest me,” he said, “but I just didn’t want to miss this next Robert Langdon adventure.
“I like the uniqueness of these Dan Brown stories. Sure they use the murder mystery genre, but in a way that is so fresh that these films stand on their own as something brand new.”
Something that certainly is new in Angels & Demons is the setting. Shot on location in Rome, the movie is a love letter to the Eternal City.
“For scheduling reasons we had to shoot in June,” Howard says.
“Everyone in Italy kept saying that we couldn’t have chosen a worse month but I’m very glad in a way it was so hectic and intense because it energized everything.”
• Angels & Demons opens across Canada next Friday.
Ron Howard’s mostly true story of Jim Braddock is a depression era Rocky. It follows Braddock’s career from his early days as a contender for a light-heavy weight title through to the dark Depression years when injuries and age prevented him from making a living in the ring right up to his amazing comeback in the ring when he became a symbol for courage in a country “that had been brought to its knees.” This is a big, good looking movie that seems to scream Oscar, except that it is a bit too long and relies too heavily on boxing movie clichés that we have seen before. The performances, however, are quite good. Paul Giamatti plays Braddock’s manager Joe Gould with a lot of energy, while Renee Zellweger redefines the term “mousey” in her portrayal of Braddock’s wife Mae. At the heart of the movie is Russell Crowe who shines as the humble, but driven Braddock. Crowe could be nominated for Best Actor for just one scene in this movie–where he goes back to a club frequented by his old boxing associates to beg for money from his former friends to pay his electrical bill.
