“Fury” is a brutal war film with exciting and well-executed battle sequences, but its most vicious scene takes place over a meal, at a table set with a lace tablecloth.
Set in April 1945, the movie sees hard-bitten commander “Wardaddy” Collier (Brad Pitt) lead a U.S. 2nd armored division tank nicknamed Fury through Germany in the final days of World War II. His crew, “Bible” Swan (Shia LaBeouf, once again acting opposite giant machines), Gordo (Michael Peña) and redneck Grady (Jon Bernthal), have fought together since the beginning of the war. When Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), a new gunner recruit with no battle experience, signs on, he must fit in or endanger the entire crew. “You are no use to me if you can’t kill krauts,” says Wardaddy.
Body parts fly, tanks try to out maneuver one another and the cost of the fake body parts that litter the battlefield must have rivaled Pitt’s salary but the scene that keeps “Fury” from becoming Das Boot on land happens midway in the film after the crew has captured a German town. Once the bullets stop flying two local women prepare a meal for Wardaddy and Norman. The long scene begins with tension as the German ladies try and figure out if the Nazi hunters mean them harm but when the core group crowds around the table it becomes something akin to a surreal family dinner where real humanity, or lack thereof, is laid bare. It could have stopped the movie dead in its tracks, but instead is a welcome interlude that showcases the effects of battle on a tightly knit but disparate group of men.
It’s a stunner of a scene that breaks up the relentless grimness of the action. The gruesome sights of war—bodies on the battlefield and even a close-up of part of a man’s face in the tank cab—are on ample display but I was fascinated by the tank interiors. A sense of claustrophobia, tension and fear percolates inside the tiny spaces and literally bleeds off the screen. It helps that the performances are very strong, but it’s the primal feeling of being trapped inside the small cab that gives the movie much of it oomph.
As the leader of the crew Pitt does a good job of leading the cast. He could easily have done a rehash of his Nazi hunting character from Inglourious Basterds, but there are subtle differences. That character was over-the-top, and so is this one; much of his dialogue sounds like it was written by Quentin Tarantino, but the character is deeper, not so much in what he says, but in his quiet scenes when everything you need to know about him is written on his face.
Lerman brings a conflicted sensitivity to a role of a young man thrust into a situation beyond his control and understanding, and Bernthal takes another step towards becoming a go-to character actor, but the actors must constantly compete with the tanks to get noticed.
On the battlefield “Fury” is tank porn. The action scenes are certainly exciting, but it is the quieter moments where the movie makes the point that War is Hell no matter what side you are on.
Fury, the new Second World War film starring Brad Pitt and Shia LaBeouf, is being called the most realistic war film of all time. The story of a U.S. 2nd Armored division tank rolling through Germany in the final days of the war is as authentic as director David Ayers could make it.
Actors were put through their paces at a week-long boot camp, living and sleeping inside tanks. Then there were the tanks themselves. Borrowed from collectors all over the world, Fury is the very first time a genuine Tiger 1 tank has been used in a Second World War film.
Onscreen authenticity has been the goal of many directors. As Michael Cimino once said, “If you don’t get it right, what’s the point?”
Cimino, director of Heaven’s Gate and The Deer Hunter, is a stickler for detail. For a scene in a Chinese eatery in Year of the Dragon, the director hired the Shanghai Palace Restaurant to supply the meals that dotted the tables. Cimino not only wanted to create the look but also the vibrant atmosphere (complete with food smells) of a bona fide restaurant. To that end chefs worked round the clock, whipping up 100 plates at a time, using 500 eggs rolls and hundreds of pounds of chicken, beef, shrimp and vegetables. “If the food got cold we had to throw it away,” said chef Charlie Wu. “The food doesn’t look good when it is cold.”
Any other director would have done the Nut Room scene in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with computer-generated imagery, but Tim Burton decided he wanted a more lifelike approach. To make sure the scene looked as real as possible, animal trainer Steve Vedmore spent 10 months training 40 real squirrels to crack and sort nuts on a conveyor belt.
Eric Schwab, the second unit director on Bonfire of the Vanities, was asked to grab a shot of the Concorde landing in New York against the backdrop of the setting sun. Schwab spent months studying the rotation of the Earth and the flight path of the plane to capture the perfect, pure moment when the sun framed the landing aircraft.
Finally, it’s not just live-action movies that go to extreme lengths for authenticity. The creators of Monsters Inc. individually animated each of giant fuzzball Sully’s 2,320,413 hairs to make them look as lifelike as possible. Every frame featuring the character took 11 hours to render.
There’s anticipated, then there’s highly anticipated and even strongly anticipated and then there is the level of audience expectation for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It’s the kind of anticipation that didn’t accompany the resurrections of other screen icons like Rocky or Rambo. Nope, this is in a class of its own. I’ve known expectant parents who weren’t as pent up as some of the Indy fans I’ve spoken to in recent months.
“Will Crystal Skull hold up to the originals?” they ask.
“Can senior citizen Harrison Ford (he’s 66 years old!) convincingly don Indy’s fedora after a gap of twenty four years?”
“Will George Lucas tarnish the Indy franchise as badly as he has buggered up Star Wars?” they bleat.
The answers, I’m glad to report are yes, yes and no.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a return to form for not only Lucas, but also Steven Spielberg and Ford. Separately they churn out trash like Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, The Terminal and Hollywood Homicide, but bound together sparks fly. Lucas has kept only the clichés necessary for the continuity of Indiana’s character; Spielberg has amped up the action and the pacing and Ford fits the lead role like a well worn-in pair of slippers.
In this cold war story’s opening minutes Indy (Harrison Ford) is taken prisoner by Russians dressed as American soldiers, led by Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett). Seems she’s interested in an artifact that could help her exert mind control over entire armies; an artifact that Indy can help her locate. In a breathless sequence involving car chases, rockets and an atomic bomb blast Indy escapes. Soon he teams up with a switchblade-toting juvenile delinquent in a leather jacket (Shia LeBeouf) and together they high tail it to the Peruvian jungle, racing against time to reach the Crystal Skull before Irina and her KGB thugs.
Of course that’s the Reader’s Digest version of the story. There’s also double crosses, rekindled love, giant ants, a snake that comes to the rescue, science fiction and action, action, action. While there is nothing here as iconic as the giant boulder chase or the Nazi face-melt from Raiders of the Lost Ark by and large Crystal Skull does a good job of paying homage to the original three movies.
At the heart of the film, of course, is Harrison Ford. Of all the actors who came of age in the 1970s—De Niro, Pacino, Hoffman, Hackman—Ford may be the most ironically American. He’s not the best actor of the bunch, not by a long shot, but like John Wayne he represents what is good about the United States—strength, courage and ingenuity. He brings these traits to every character he plays, but Indiana Jones is his greatest creation and the two decades between films in the franchise hasn’t dimmed that light one bit. He’s aged—LeBeouf’s character asks, “What are you, like 80?”—but fedora planted firmly on the top of his head he is still the heroic icon he was when the first film hit theatres and Ronald Reagan was president.
That’s great for movie fans who lined up to see Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom on opening day, but audiences have changed in the years since the last movie was released, and there is a whole generation of moviegoers who have never seen an Indy movie projected on a screen. It raises the question of whether kids will be interested in Indy’s old-fashioned brand of screen hero. Sure, there’s action and adventure a plenty, but I wonder if today’s audiences, many of whom weren’t even born when Indy first bull whipped a golden idol out of the hands of the bad guys, aren’t more cynical and more likely to gravitate towards a deeply flawed and conflicted hero like Iron Man’s Tony Stark. It would be a shame if they didn’t. In these dark and dangerous times a bit of simple, straightforward heroics just might be a good thing.
It can be hard to work with family, particularly when your brothers are trigger happy moonshiners. In “Lawless” Shia LaBeouf is Jack Bondurant, the youngest, and least experienced of the three outlaw brothers.
Based on the memoir “The Wettest County in the World,” “Lawless” takes place in Franklin County, Virginia during Prohibition. The bootlegging business is booming, run by hillbillies who’ll sell to anyone with a buck and a thirst. The most notorious are the Bondurants, Forrest (Tom Hardy), Howard (Jason Clarke) and Jack (LaBeouf). The older boys are hard as nails, reputed by the locals (and themselves) to be indestructible. Jack is ambitious, but didn’t inherit his sibling’s way with a fist. He soon learns to put up or shut up when a corrupt lawman, Special Agent Charlie Rakes (Guy Pearce), is imported from Chicago. Rakes wants a cut of the profits and when the stubborn Bondurants refuse, a moonshine war erupts.
It’s the hicks versus the city slickers, the battle of outlaws from both sides of the law. Australian director John “The Road” Hillcoat and writer Nick Cave (he wrote “The Proposition” for Hillcoat) present an intriguing look at the bootlegging business where the good guys aren’t always the one with badges and the bad guys rarely wear black hats.
It’s not a new idea, but the all-star cast—Gary Oldman is a bloodthirsty gangster, flame haired Jessica Chastain is a femme fatale, and “Alice in Wonderland’s” Mia Wasikowska who plays the minister’s daughter, a girl so angelic she even has a pet fawn—work past the clichés, creating vivid characters, while for the most part ignoring the stereotypes on display in most moonshine movies. There isn’t a “gol durn it” and “dag nab it” within earshot, instead Hillcoat, Cave and Company treat their characters with respect.
Hardy leads the cast as a soft-spoken thug with a brainy bent. “It’s not the violence that sets men apart,” he says, “it is the distance he is prepared to go.” When he isn’t waxing philosophical he’s tersely going about the job of being a bootlegger, and, along the way earning most of the film’s few laughs. It’s a natural, unaffected performance that really shows what he can do without a mask strapped to his face.
LaBeouf has the film’s only real character arc, maturing from timid but ambitious to cocky and vengeful. He’s at the right age to play characters stuck between being a boy and a man, and pulls it off.
The only real misstep is Guy Pearce who, while entertaining, falls just short of twirling his moustache and creeping around like the bad guy in a cheap pantomime.
“Lawless” is a violent (except for a surprisingly unconvincing gunfight near the end) but entertaining glimpse at life as seen through the prism of a jar of white lightnin’.
Penguins are the new dogs. Not since the heyday of dog movies like Benji and Lassie has one species won over the hearts of so many. March of the Penguins was a left field hit a year or so ago and an R-rated parody of that movie, Farce of the Penguins, soon followed. The little furry birds have recently appeared in Happy Feet, Madagascar, the 3-2-1 Penguins series and even something called Penguins Behind Bars. Everybody loves penguins, but will they love penguins who surf? Disturbia star Shia LaBeouf is counting on it.
LeBeouf provides the voice for Cody Maverick, a young penguin who idolizes legendary surfer Big Z. When he is scouted to compete in the Big Z Memorial Surf Off he soon comes up against stiff competition in the form of Tank Evans, the surfing champion who beat Big Z, and forced him into taking his last, fatal ride on a surfboard.
After Cody takes a nasty spill he is rescued by lifeguard Lani (Zooey Deschanel) who introduces him to Zeke (real life surfer Jeff Bridges doing his best Big Lebowski routine). Turns out Zeke isn’t just a washed-up old surfer, he also has valuable life lessons— “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey,” and “Winning isn’t everything,”—for his young protégé.
On the surface Surf’s Up doesn’t seem to offer much we haven’t seen before. There’s animated penguins, goofy sidekicks and lots of poop jokes, but Surf’s Up is a cut above the rest.
First of all is the style of the film. Instead of the usual animated movie approach, which is often the standard wide shot, close up, television framing, Surf’s Up takes it’s inspiration from documentary films and reality television. Jittery camera work is mixed with the usual documentary clichés—talking head interviews, confessionals and historical footage—to tell the story.
Imagine Dogtown and Z Boys and The Real World with penguins and you get the idea. It’s a simple, but effective trick and it separates Surf’s Up from the rest of the animated pack.
Kids might not get all the jokes—many are clearly aimed at mom and dad—but they will certainly love the surfing sequences, the jokes they understand and the penguins.
If this movie does well—and it deserves to—expect to see penguins in absolutely everything next year. Indiana Jones and the Dancing Penguins anyone?
You can’t say Michael Bay doesn’t try to give you your money’s worth in “Transformers: Dark of the Moon.” With a running time of two and a half hours the third part of the Hasbro saga has a story epic enough to hold up to Bay’s overblown style. It’s loud and proud filmmaking and for the first time in the series, it really works.
Set three years after the last movie Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) has an Ivy League education under his belt and a new girl on his arm. A new job for a multinational company places Sam, once again, smack dab in the middle of a showdown between the nasty Decepticons and the heroic Autobots. The former are the bad guys, the latter are the white hats, other than that, you’re on your own. There’s a lot going on here, including an ulterior motive for JFK’s space race, Chernobyl and an almost Shakespearean double cross.
While it is unsettling to see good actors like Frances McDormand grab a paycheque for acting opposite giant robots, “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” is the most satisfying blockbuster of the year. Its heavy metal filmmaking, all bluster and bee stung lips (more on that later).
Bay has never been known for his restraint and in the past his overblown ascetic has gotten in the way of his storytelling. This time out he reigns in the story and yet pulls it off. It’s jammed packed—the long prologue plays like a “Forest Gump” tribute, featuring everyone from JFK to Nixon to Walter Cronkite—and likely the subplots with Sam’s parents and John Malkovich as a horrible boss could have been cut to save on time, but the movie’s relentless pace ensures it never drags. By amping up the action and playing down the story Bay greases the wheels and has created a satisfying summer movie.
Bay has also finally figured out how to shoot the frenetic action scenes so the clashing robots are no longer just blurs of glinting metal but clearly defined warriors. The action scenes, particularly the extended battle that eats up the film’s last forty minutes, are exciting in a visceral way. There’s not a lot of substance here, but who cares, it’s the movie’s silly season and nobody blows things up like Bay.
People go see “Transformers” for the robots—and their transformation scenes remain the coolest thing about the series—but it should be noted that Megan Fox’s is not missed. Her replacement, former Victoria’s Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, has a mouth that redefines the term “bee stung lips” and is confident enough to allow Bay’s camera to assess every inch of her body as she makes her debut as Sam’s latest fling.
In “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” Bay shifts into third gear and delivers the best robot porn yet.
My attempts to come up with one catchy word to describe Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen ended in frustration. This loud, hyperkinetic sequel to the 2007 summer blockbuster is so over-the-top, such an assault on the senses that simply plucking a word from my Canadian Oxford Dictionary was clearly not going to be sufficient to describe the aural and optical onslaught brought on by the director of Armageddon and Pearl Harbor. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is such a singular vision, such an exercise in excessive filmmaking that I was forced to step outside the dictionary to find the right descriptor. The word? “Hullabayloo.” Definition? 150 minutes of bombastic retina roasting movie making from the mind of Michael Bay.
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen takes place two years after the first film, with Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) leaving home and going to college at an Ivy League school. Once there Sam realizes he has information about the origins of the Transformers; info the evil Decepticons desperately want and the Autobots must stop them from retrieving. To save the world, and perhaps even the universe, Sam and Mikaela Banes (Megan Fox) once again join forces with the Autobots and do battle against their sworn enemies, the Decepticons.
Bay isn’t known for his restraint, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that his directing style on Transformers: ROTF is excessive. Apparently no one has ever explained the idea that less is more to Mr. Bay. This is a magnified version of the original, with extra helpings of everything that made the first one a hit. It’s longer than the original, there’s more gratuitous shots of Megan Fox (as one newspaper pointed out this week, take the “n” out of her name and you have Mega Fox), more humor, including a reprise of the radio gag from number one and more of Sam’s goofy parents, and way more of the Autobots and Decepticons.
Unfortunately there’s also more of the stuff we could have done without from the first movie.
Bay understands that Tranformers: ROTF isn’t about the actors, it’s about the robots, but once again more attention seems to have been paid to the animated characters than the real-life actors. The paper thin characters feel more like place holders for the action than real people. Whatever. I know fans don’t expect richly drawn characters, so if Megan Fox’s characterization involves simply looking hot and yelling “Sam!” in an ear pierce yelp, so be it. Maybe next time around (there’s already a threequel planned for release on July 4, 2012) though Bay could spend a few minutes of the time he normally spends thinking about how to blow things up and work on the characters just a bit.
Of course Transformers: ROTF earns a gold star for its special effects—the all important transformation scenes are, once again, a marvel of technical wizardry—but like the last film the robot action sequences, while exciting, are so frenetic that it’s sometimes hard to differentiate the good ‘bots from the bad ‘bots. The battle scenes, which should be the highlight of the film, are hard to follow, looking more like blurs of crunching metal than well shot and defined action scenes. That’s a problem.
Also a problem is the volume. Bring earplugs and the Advil. It’s loud. Like end of the world loud. The Who at Wembley Stadium loud. Come for the robots, stay for the headache.
Transformers: ROTF is the bigger, louder and slightly more obnoxious brother to the original, but should please fans of the franchise.
Director Michael Bay, the auteur behind such hits as The Rock, Armageddon, Bad Boys 1 and 2 and the Lionel Ritchie video for Do It to Me recently said that he doesn’t make movies for critics. Never has a truer statement been spoken. His latest film, Tranformers, continues his trend of making big, loud dumb movies that make a lot of money at the box office but leave critics reaching for the Advil.
In this update of the popular 80s animated kid’s show, hot young star Shia LaBeouf riffs on the geeky teen role he played earlier this year in Disturbia. He’s Sam, the high school nerd who thinks if he gets a cool car a cool girlfriend will soon follow. A used car salesman named Bobby Bolivia (Bernie Mac) gives him a pseudo-mystical sales pitch about how he won’t really choose his own car, the car will choose him. Sure enough, as soon as he lays eyes on a beaten up yellow Corvette strange things start to happen. The car has spoken—literally.
Meanwhile, there’s a parallel story set in the Middle East. After a mysterious robot decimates an army base, the few survivors are airlifted back to the United States to report on the strange goings on.
Thanks to some narration at the beginning of the film we already know what Sam doesn’t, that evil Decepticons from the planet Cybertron are on there way to earth to battle the good Autobots and retrieve a powerful cube called the Allspark which holds the key to the survival of their planet. Both sides are tracking Sam because he unwittingly holds the map to locating the cube.
Not only does the Sam’s new car get good mileage, it also whizzes and whirls and turns into a giant yellow and black robot called Bumblebee. He’s kind of like Kitt from Night Rider, only way cooler and more versatile. Bumblebee’s job is to protect Sam, and in a funny early scene act as match maker by automatically tuning the radio to play seductive songs like Sexual Healing while Sam gives a lift to the school hottie Mikaela Banes (Megan Fox).
Soon, of course the two storylines fuse, and Sam and Mikela fight side-by-side with the special ops guys and the Autobots to battle the Decepticons and save the planet.
Transformers boasts great special effects—the all important transformation scenes are marvel of technical wizardry and the blending of live-action with the computer-generated elements is seamless—but more attention seems to have been paid to the animated characters than the real-life actors. LeBeouf is an extremely likeable actor, and well cast here, but Bay doesn’t require him to do much other than remain sympathetic and look at the camera with his large expressive doe eyes. Fox is relegated to the beautiful-but-tough female role, with little to do except wear revealing clothing and act as eye candy for the teenage boys in the audience. Josh Duhamel once again displays the kind of bland appeal that demonstrates why he’ll never be a full-fledged leading man.
Of all the actors the only John Turturro holds his own with the ever-mutating robots. As the mysterious Agent Simmons he’s so over-the-top he seems to be the only one in the cast who realizes that this is supposed to be big dumb fun. He alone looks like he’s having fun with his role.
Michael Bay knows, however, that Tranformers isn’t about the actors, it’s about the robots. The battle scenes are quite thrilling, even though they are so frenetic that it’s sometimes hard to differentiate the good ‘bots from the bad ‘bots. He also knows how to stage an action scene. This guy never met a building or car or city that he didn’t want to blow up in spectacular fashion—so take some sun screen, you could get a tan from the glare off the giant fireballs that light up screen.
Bay has delivered a movie that has all the ear marks of a big blockbuster summer movie, and one that will doubtlessly appeal to fans of the original series, but in the end could have benefited from more of a human touch.
“Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” the long awaited sequel to Oliver Stone’s 1987 Oscar winning film Wall Street, is bogged down by financial claptrap. The explanation of how Wall Street ended up in Bailout City is almost endless. Money terms like short selling, moral hazard and derivative are tossed around like coins down a wishing well. Luckily a lot of the dialogue is delivered by good actors like Frank Langella and Michael Douglas, but ultimately the whole experience is kind of like watching an episode of Mad Money with better looking people.
Shia LaBeouf, continuing his resurrection of 1980s film franchises, plays Jacob Moore, a Wall Street trader with a conscious—a mix of greed and green. He’s ploughing millions of dollars into sustainable energy, but just as a major project is on the brink of a breakthrough the bottom falls out, his firm goes bankrupt and his mentor (Frank Langella) commits suicide. At home things are better. His girlfriend Winnie is devoted to him. She’s also the estranged daughter of Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) the disgraced inside trader recently released from prison. Jacob and Gekko make a deal—a non financial one. Jacob will facilitate a reconciliation between father and daughter and Gekko will help find out who was responsible for the rumors that led to death of Jacob’s mentor. The question is, can Gekko, who once famously said, “Greed is good,” be trusted?
“Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” shows how Wall Street fell due to crashing markets and clashing egos. Stone wants us to understand how it all fell apart, but unfortunately the inner workings of banks and big financial deals, at least the way they are presented here, aren’t that dramatic. Real people losing their jobs, their homes, their bank accounts, that’s dramatic, but a bunch of bankers sitting around talking about money is less so. Stone fails to listen to his own creation, Gekko, when he says, “it’s not about the money, it about the game.” Unfortunately the game is a little dull.
The cautionary message about greed and its effects is good and timely—“Bulls make money. Bears make money,” says Gekko, “Pigs get slaughtered.”—but it is wrapped up in a movie that is too earnest and a little odd tone wise. A meeting between Gekko and Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen), the man responsible for sending him to jail in the first movie, is played for laughs which seems out of place, and frankly, kind of unlikely. Stone tries to cram too much story into the film—the father-daughter story, the meltdown angle, the revenge plot, the Gekko comeback—and with each of those plot shards comes a different tone.
Like the people who caused the financial meltdown that inspired this “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” director Stone seems to have lost perspective. He draws good performances from the cast—Douglas could be nominated for a second time for playing Gekko, and LaBeouf is very good—but allows the rest of the movie to get as bloated as Lehman Brothers on a spending spree.
