SYNOPSIS: Loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel “Vineland,” “One Battle After Another” is a story of rebellion and what happens when the tentacles of the past reach out to touch a new generation.
CAST: Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, Chase Infiniti. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.
REVIEW: “One Battle After Another” begins as a story of The French 75, a revolutionary group on a mission to free hundreds of detainees at the US-Mexico border. Explosives expert Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) and co-conspirator Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) are freedom fighters and lovers who stage daring raids that attract the attention of the aptly named Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn).
Cut to sixteen years later. With Perfidia no longer in the picture, Bob, now stoned and drunk much of the time, lives off the grid with their daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). Fearful his past will catch up to them, Willa isn’t allowed to have a cell phone and never leaves the house unless she has a special pager undetectable by everyone except French 75 members.
When Lockjaw reemerges, now working with a group of white supremacists, Bob is forced back into his old life, trouble is, all that lingers from his revolutionary days is a deep paranoia, the result of massive drug use. When Willa disappears, he must clear his addled brain long enough to track her down.
At almost three hours in length, “One Battle After Another” is an epic story that mixes and matches the political and the personal. A satirical look at the extremes of the left and right, and the resulting tribalism and polarization, when the film settles in after its first action packed hour it focusses on Bob, a revolutionary well past his best by date.
DiCaprio channels “The Big Lebowski’s” shambolic Dude. From his ever-present bathrobe and slightly bewildered facial expressions to his loyalty to friends and family and resilience the star’s take on Bob is a fun and funny homage to Jeff Bridges’s iconic performance. It allows DiCaprio the opportunity to display his comedic chops but also show emotional depth.
He’s at the center of a sprawling film, a movie about the ever-growing chasm between opposing political sides, but the movie succeeds because, at its heart, it’s a thrilling, redemptive family drama about what bonds us, not what divides us. Bob is a hot mess, a deeply flawed guy, but he steps up when his past actions put his daughter’s life in danger, and in the process finds reconciliation in that fractured relationship amid chaos he helped create.
Director Paul Thomas Anderson, who also wrote the script, has a lot on his mind. With its take on radical politics and domestic terrorism, the movie feels timely, while its portrayal of the connection between father and daughter is timeless.
LOGLINE: In “Daddio,” a new drama starring Sean Penn and Dakota Johnson, and now playing in theatres, a woman taking a late-night cab ride from JFK strikes up a revealing and soul-searching conversation with the cab driver as they head toward Manhattan.
CAST: Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn. Directed by Christy Hall.
REVIEW: A two-hander between passenger and driver, with no supplementary characters, “Daddio” has a stage-bound feel. From front seat to back seat with the meter running, the two strangers speak in monologues, detailing their lives, revealing deeply hidden secrets. It is, if nothing else, a showcase for Penn and Johnson’s ability to hold the screen. Each are in top form, subtly and sincerely inhabiting their characters as they reflect on their lives.
It is an intimate, simple film that focusses on the connection between the actors. Do I think this is a realistic exploration of the way complete strangers converse? I do not, it’s over-share central in this cab, but I do think it is an interesting look at the way people can find a rapport with someone they’ll likely never see again.
The characters, Clark and “Girlie,” lay themselves bare, and it is both tragic and tender. Life advice is offered and absorbed, and power dynamics shift, as their journey through the streets of Manhattan, and their personal histories, takes some unexpected turns.
Penn plays Clark as a hard-edged, old-school Hell’s Kitchen New Yorker. He’s opinionated, a know-it-all, unafraid to use his personal experiences to make sweeping generalizations on the dynamics between men and women. He hasn’t always been a great guy, but Penn gives Clark the world-weariness of someone who has actually learned from his mistakes. There is compassion in his eyes, even if many of his ideas about gender politics and relationships are old-fashioned. Still, when “Girlie” asks if he ever misses his ex-wife, the bravado fades and his one-word answer packs an emotional punch.
Johnson makes the confines of the cab her stage. Shot, by necessity, in close-up, the subtleties of her performance fill the screen. Like her work in “The Lost Daughter,” “Cha Cha Real Smooth” and “A Bigger Splash,” she allows the internal work to tell the tale. “Girlie” is strong, but without emotionally firm ground to anchor the character, Johnson allows a deep, ever present hurt to seep through.
“Daddio” was apparently partially inspired by the reality show “Taxicab Confessions,” but writer/director Christy Hall uses the genre to strip away the tawdry aspects of that series to reveal more about humanity than any backseat sex or nudity could.
“Licorice Pizza,” the new slice-of-life drama from director Paul Thomas Anderson, and now playing in theatres, is a very specific movie. It transports us back in time to Los Angeles circa the 1970s. Nixon is president. In Hollywood the Tail o’ the Cock restaurant is the place to see and be seen and gas stations face country wide fuel shortages. But against that specific backdrop comes a story ripe with freewheeling charm, nostalgia and universal themes.
Cooper Hoffman, son of the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman, is Gary Valentine, a cocky fifteen-year-old actor with a blossoming career and a back pocket filled with get rich quick schemes. At picture day at his high school he spots photographer’s assistant Alana (Alana Haim). She is ten years older than him, but he’s feeling lucky and asks her out on a date. She agrees, but says it isn’t a date, just dinner. He takes her to hotspot Tail o’ the Cock and at the end of the night tells her, “I’m not going to forget you. Just like you’re not going to forget me.”
It is the beginning of a mostly platonic relationship that sees them drift in and out of one another’s lives, start a water bed business and navigate maturity. “Maybe fate brought us together,” Gary says to her. “Our roads brought us here.”
“Licorice Pizza” (the name refers to a defunct Californian record store chain) isn’t a movie overly concerned with plot. Instead, it relies on the characters to keep things interesting.
Newcomers Hoffman and Haim, (she plays guitars and keyboards in the pop rock band Haim), do just that. Each are magnetic performers on their own, she is all glowering intensity, he’s got teenage swagger down to a tee—“I’m a showman,” he says, “it’s what I’m meant to do.”—but put them together and sparks fly. From their first exchange in the high school gym to the film’s closing moments they win us over. In the movie the characters experience the first blush of friendship and love. In the audience we get to experience another first, the debut of two new, very promising actors.
Later, after the film, I found myself daydreaming that perhaps we could revisit them every ten years or so à la the relationship trilogy “Before Sunrise,” “Before Sunset” and “Before Midnight.”
Some old-timers get to strut their stuff as well. Sean Penn plays a riff on hard drinking actor William Holden with equal parts smarm and charm and Bradley Cooper pulls out all the stops to bring Hollywood hairdresser-turned-movie mogul Jon Peters to vivid, excessive life.
It is an evocative rendering of a specific time and place, but it doesn’t all sit right. In his recreation of the 1970s, director Paul Thomas Anderson includes two scenes featuring John Michael Higgins as Jerry Frick, owner of the San Fernando Valley’s first Japanese restaurant, The Mikado. In his two scenes he is seen speaking with an over-the-top, buffoonish Japanese accent in conversation with his Japanese wives, played by Yumi Mizui and Megumi Anjo. Both scenes stick out like sore thumbs. I imagine that they are meant to represent the causal racism of the time but they break the movie’s magical spell with cultural insensitivity that adds nothing, save for a cheap laugh, to the story.
“Licorice Pizza” is kind of flipping through a diary. Some details are intense, some glossed over, but everything is relevant to the experience being written about. Like diary entries, the movie is episodic. Each passing episode allows us to get to know Gary and Alana a bit better, and just as importantly, remind us what it means to be young and in love.
Are you among the 200 million people that play Angry Birds on your smartphone? If so you’re in good company.
Angelina Jolie, Jack Black and Jon Hamm are fans and British Prime Minister David Cameron has admitted to being “mildly addicted” to the game. Since December 2009, folks have been flinging flocks of birds at pig’s fortresses, downloading more than 3 billion versions of the app.
This weekend the Angry Birds game takes the next logical step, catapulting onto the big screen with their very own movie.
Jason Sudeikis, Josh Gad and Maya Rudolph star in The Angry Birds Movie, a story that tells us why the annoyed avians — like flock leader Red Bird, Bomb the Black Bird and Slingshot Stella the Cockatoo — are so angry. Turns out they feel betrayed by the tittering piggies that pretend to be their friends but are really only interested in stealing their eggs. Cue the catapults and mountains of TNT.
It’s a brand with a built-in audience, a combination Hollywood finds irresistible, and while it has colourful, easily marketed characters, the game itself doesn’t offer much in the way of story. But that has never stopped producers before.
Remember Super Mario Bros? Siskel & Ebert gave that one two thumbs down and star Bob Hoskins, who played Mario, called it “the worst thing I ever did.”
Despite brutal reviews and box office failure, Nintendo Power magazine praised the film, calling it a trailblazer in the genre of videogame movies.
Which leads us, 23 years after Mario and his brother Luigi stunk up movie theatres, to The Angry Birds Movie. Why is a game from a developer in Espoo, just outside Helsinki, Finland, popular enough to take flight as its own movie?
The success of Angry Birds has to do with something called schema formation, a five-dollar term for mentally grasping and embedding how the game’s interface works the first time you play it.
The addictive part comes in as the action of the game changes. In Play at Work, engineer Charles L. Mauro explains the appeal: “These little birds are packed with clever behaviours that expand the user’s mental model at just the point when game-level complexity is increased.”
The game’s genius is in adding playing details at just the right moment to increase user engagement. In other words, it’s fun. I guess that’s why gamers spend 200 million minutes a day flinging Angry Birds at various targets.
According to marketers AYTM, that’s “equal to 16 years of gameplay every hour of every day.” They also note that players have flung over 100 billion angry birds, a number equal to the amount of real birds on the planet. Those are the kind of statistics Hollywood can’t ignore.
One person unlikely to pass the time with Angry Birds is U.S. communications surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden. In 2014 he claimed the app was “leaky,” and was vulnerable to the harvesting of information by outside groups.
Mikael Hed, CEO of Rovio Entertainment, the makers of Angry Birds, denied Snowden’s claims.
“We do not collaborate, collude, or share data with spy agencies anywhere in the world,” he said, which must have come as a relief to another of the game’s biggest fans, former Vice President of the United States Dick Cheney, who, apparently, also enjoys hurling a bird or two in his spare time.
200 million people play Angry Birds on their smartphones every day. More fictional birds have been flung in the name of the game than there are real birds in the world. It’s the first app to sell movie rights to the movies and if just a fraction of the people who play the game everyday go see the movie it should be a rousing success. Keep in mind though, that if “The Angry Birds Movie” doesn’t lay an egg at the box office it is inevitable that “Candy Crush: The Saga” and “Fruit Ninjas” movies won’t be far behind. The choice is yours.
This weekend the furious feathered friends catapult onto the big screen accompanied by a classic rock score—this may be the only kid’s flick to feature Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid”—and plenty of bird puns—”Pluck my life,” says Red (Jason Sudeikis) when he is sentenced to anger management class.
Sudeikis, Josh Gad and Maya Rudolph star in “The Angry Birds Movie,” a story that tells us why the annoyed avians—like flock leader Red Bird, Bomb the Black Bird (Danny McBride) and Slingshot Stella the Cockatoo (Kate McKinnon)—are so angry. Turns out they feel betrayed when Bird Island is invaded by pigs—including one named John Ham—who arrive uninvited but soon win over the birds. “We mean no harm,” says Leonard the Pig (Bill Hader). “We saw your island from the sea and thought, I wonder what’s going on there?” Only Red who is suspicious of the porcine interlopers. “Something isn’t kosher with these pigs,” he says, “and it’s up to us to figure out what it is.” Seems the pigs are only pretending to be friendly. In truth they’re only interested in stealing all the eggs on the island. To save the eggs Red assembles the troops—“We’re birds were descended from dinosaurs,” he says, “we’re not supposed to be nice.”—the catapults and mountains of TNT.
“Angry Birds The Movie” is about as plot heavy as you’d imagine a movie based on an app would be. It’s an underdog tale with messages of never giving up and being true to yourself but mostly its an excuse for bad bird jokes—Free Rage Chicken anyone?—and lots of finely feathered action. Breezy in the extreme, it is padded out with frenetic chase scenes and music numbers. The colourful animation is designed to attract the attention of young eyes but for many adults the story will be as about as appealing as a case of bird flu.
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.
If you have ever day dreamed about saying the right thing or having a snappy comeback to an insult, there’s a little bit of Walter Mitty in you.
From the original 1947 film starring Danny Kaye to the remake directed and featuring Ben Stiller, the name Walter Mitty has been synonymous with a certain kind of person, defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as “an ordinary, often ineffectual person who indulges in fantastic daydreams of personal triumphs.”
In the new film Mitty (Stiller) is a 42-year-old behind-the-scenes “Life” employee who spaces out so much his new boss calls him Major Tom. He’s a hard working but invisible sixteen-year vet of the magazine’s photo department even his official title, negative asset manager, sounds Kafkaesque.
He’s secretly in love with co-worker Cheryl (Kristen Wiig) but while he dithers with an eHarmony representative (Paton Oswalt) regarding contacting her on-line (even though her office is just down the hall) the magazine is sold.
“This month’s issue will be the last before going on line,” says smarmy corporate lackey (Adam Scott) and soon, he adds, “some employees will be deemed ‘non vital.’”
It looks like Walter’s head might be on the corporate chopping block when he loses a negative from legendary photographer Sean O’Connell (Sean Penn). The picture is pegged to be the last “Life” cover ever, and if Walter can’t locate it, he will lose his job.
To find the picture he sets his daydreams aside and enacts “Life’s” motto, to see the world. His travels take him around the world and, at the same timer, closer to Cheryl’s heart.
Although Stiller appears in almost every frame of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” there’s no hint of the “There’s Something About Mary” Ben Stiller here at all. His take on Mitty is understated. The character’s moments get bigger and bigger as Walter begins to control his destiny, but Stiller never lets go of the core of what makes Walter, Walter. It’s his most subdued performance ever, and it looks good on him.
Wiig also displays her sweet side. There’s not a “little hand” (Dooneese from “S.N.L.’s” Lawrence Welk Show”) or bit of sketch comedy in the performance at all.
Both are quietly funny for the most part—a “Benjamin Button” daydream is the closest thing to punchline-setup in the movie. “My little heart is no bigger than a quarter,” says a mini-Walter, “but it’s filled more than Fort Knox.”
And, because this is a big Christmas release there is an unexpected superhero style action sequence where Walter Mitty tears up Manhattan in defense of his Stretch Armstrong doll, but for the most part it is sweet but occasionally twee.
The embossed “That is the Purpose of Life” slogan on an airport runway blurs the line between magic realism and silly sentimentalism but Stiller the director mostly subverts the mundane with the surreal as though he is following Walter’s own ABCs of everything you want in a man (or in this case director), to be Adventurous, Brave and Creative.
“Fair Game” could be re-titled “One Hundred Minutes of Sean Penn Yelling ‘If We Don’t Tell the Truth No One Will!’” The retelling of the ripped-from-the-headlines tale of Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts), whose job as an undercover CIA agent was exposed by White House officials in an attempt to discredit her husband Joseph Wilson’s (Penn) claim that the Bush administration had falsified information about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, is a different kind of spy story. There are no guns, no gadgets, just words—many of the yelled by Penn—classified documents and furtive meetings on lonely park benches. It does a nice job of recreating Bush era paranoia—“We don’t want this smoking gun to turn into a mushroom cloud!”—and exploring the chasm between truth and policy, but as a drama takes way too long to get to the meat of the story. Three quarters of the movie whips past before the central event, Plame’s unceremonious unveiling as a spy, happens.
The build-up is filled with nice details, like Scooter Libby’s (David Andrews) self satisfied smirk when he puts the plan to get revenge on Plame and her husband in motion, and the insight into the life of a spy who juggles a home life with international intrigue, but it feels padded. Also, director Doug Liman has made some very strange and almost unwatchable choices in regard to the camera work. His camera is a little too restless, constantly roaming, which, I suppose, is meant to give us a “you-are-there” feeling, but instead induces motion sickness, particularly in the boardroom scenes.
Performance wise, however, the movie is top notch. Watt works as Plame, and Penn is passionate, crafting an a performance so big it has it’s own gravitational pull that asks whether Wilson was really a truth seeker or simply a self aggrandizing opportunist.
“Fair Game” is a mostly interesting look at our recent past, too bad director Liman takes too long to develop the important part of the story.
