There are many types of movies about people who deal in death to make a living. There’s the cold-blooded killer story, the revenge drama and even comedic takes on killing for fun and profit. Assassins can be men, women, children and even robots.
In this weekend’s American Assassin Michael Keaton is the teacher, a Cold War veteran who trains undercover executioners. He teaches counter-terrorism operative Mitch Rapp, played by Dylan O’Brien, the ropes of the killing game.
A quick look back at decades of death merchant movies reveals a set of rules and philosophies assassins will always follow.
When we first met John Wick he resembles the Sad Keanu meme. He’s a broken hearted man whose wife has recently passed away. He’s a loner until a package arrives at his door. It’s a puppy, sent by his wife just before she died, in the hopes that the dog’s love will help ease his pain. For a time it works, but when some very bad men break into his house to steal his Mustang, the dog winds up as collateral damage. With the last living touchstone to his late wife gone, Wick reverts back to his old ways as a mad, bad and dangerous to know assassin bent on revenge. We learn that you can quit, but you’ll always get pulled back in.
“People keep asking if I’m back and I haven’t really had an answer,” says Wick. “But now, yeah, I’m thinkin’ I’m back. So you can either hand over your son or you can die screaming alongside him!“
Charles Bronson, as the skilled slayer in The Mechanic teaches his young protégé, played by Jan-Michael Vincent, some basic hitman lessons. “Murder is only killing without a license,” he says, adding that when you shoot someone do it right. “You always have to be dead sure. Dead sure or dead.”
That’s key killer advice, but slow down, there is a progression to becoming a hitman.
In The Professional Leon (Jean Reno) details the system. “The rifle is the first weapon you learn how to use,” he says, “because it lets you keep your distance from the client. The closer you get to being a pro, the closer you can get to the client. The knife, for example, is the last thing you learn.”
Along the way movie assassins also learn that relationships are verboten.
Remember what happened to Mr. and Mrs. Smith (Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie)? “Your aim’s as bad as your cooking sweetheart,” taunts John to Jane, “and that’s saying something!”
Day of the Jackal’s would-be Charles de Gaulle assassin (Edward Fox) adds, “In this work you simply can’t afford to be emotional,” although sometimes feelings inevitably get in the way. Just ask Prizzi’s Honor’s Charley Partanna (Jack Nicholson) who memorably said, “Do I ice her? Do I marry her?”
Once they’ve learned the ropes, one question remains: Why do movie assassins kill?
Max Von Sydow plays one of the great movie killers in Three Days of the Condor, Sydney Lumet’s classic story of conspiracies and murder. His reasoning for doing what he does is chillingly simple. “The fact is, what I do is not a bad occupation,” he says. “Someone is always willing to pay.” The Matador’s Julian Noble (Pierce Brosnan) agrees, “My business is my pleasure,” he said.
Your interest in seeing “mother!,” the new psychological thriller from “Black Swan” director Darren Aronofsky, may be judged on your keenness to watch American sweetheart Jenifer Lawrence flush a beating heart down a toilet. Doesn’t appeal? Perhaps get your pulse racing with “It” instead. If it does, read on.
Lawrence and Javier Bardem are “mother” and “him,” a May-December married couple living in a remote and rambling countryside Victorian mansion. It’s a house with a history. Partially destroyed by a fire—which also claimed him’s first wife—the place has memories. Him, a poet, has been blocked ever since the fire, but finds solace in one of the few things to survive the blaze, a crystal that he now displays in his home office. Despite mother’s efforts to make the house a home—“I want to make a paradise,” she says.—a pall hangs over her wannabe Eden.
The weird factor amps up when a man (Ed Harris) shows and is invited by him to stay the night. He’s oddly antagonistic and inappropriate—“Your wife? I thought it was your daughter!”—but him treats him well, like a long lost friend. She feels like a third wheel in her own home.
The next day the stranger’s wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) arrives, making herself at home. She asks unusual, probing questions—“Why don’t you want to have kids? I have kids. That is what’s gonna keep your marriage is growing.”—and likes to booze it up during the day. Mother, unable to understand the new guests or her husband’s behaviour toward them, is further alienated when their aggressive, argumentative sons (real life siblings Brian and Domhnall Gleeson) show up. It begins to feel like a home invasion rather than a visit.
Paranoia grows as Mother becomes pregnant and a celebratory dinner turns to violence and murder. That’s not a spoiler. ‘mother!” is so bonkers mere words on a page can barely do it justice. Is that my failing or the film’s?
Aronofsky makes movies that refuse to cater to audience expectations. “mother!” is an uncomfortable watch, an off-kilter experience that revels in its own madness. As the weight of the weirdness and religious symbolism begins to feel crushing, you may wonder what the hell is going on. Are these people guilty of being the worst houseguests ever or is there something bigger, something biblical going on?
Aronofsky is generous with the biblical allusions—the house is a paradise, the sons are clearly echoes of Cain and Abel, and there is a long sequence that can only be described as the Home-style Revelation—and builds toward a crescendo of wild action that has to be seen to be believed, but his characters are ciphers. Charismatic and appealing to a member, they feel like puppets in the director’s apocalyptic roadshow rather than characters we care about. Visually and thematically he doesn’t push button so much as he pokes the audience daring them to take the trip with him, it’s just too bad we didn’t have better company for the journey.
“mother!” is a deliberately opaque movie. Like looking into a self-reflective mirror you will take away whatever you put into it. The only thing sure about it is that it is most confounding studio movie of the year.
“The Dark Stranger” is one of the rare horror movies that would probably work better if the horror elements were extracted, leaving just the underlying family drama to speak for itself.
Leah Garrison (Katie Findlay) is a comic book illustrator grappling with the suicide of her artist mother. Recovering from a nervous breakdown, Leah has hallucinations and cuts herself as punishment for what she believes was her part in her mother’s death. Old wounds are reopened when art lover Randall Toth (Stephen McHattie) asks Leah’s father (Enrico Colantoni) if he can present the late mom’s paintings in an exhibition showcasing artists who battled depression. Leah hates Toth and doesn’t want her mother’s work displayed in the show. Enter the Dark Stranger, a character from Leah’s recent work. The gaunt stranger might be a metaphor for her troubled state of mind or a physical manifestation of her demons or both. Either way the stranger is a destructive force on everyone around the young artist and just happens to look like Toth.
“The Dark Stranger” is an accomplished film for first time director and writer Chris Trebilcock. I’m just not sure it accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do. As a horror film with supernatural overtones it leaves a mildly eerie aftertaste. But as a look at mental illness and the life changing effects of depression it packs a wallop. Real true scares are few and far between and the final moments of the movie are a bit too on the money but very solid performances from Findlay, Colantoni and the legendary McHattie keep things moving forward in an interesting way.
In Born to Be Blue, a stylish new biopic about the turbulent life of My Funny Valentine trumpeter Chet Baker, Miles Davis tells the horn player, “You haven’t lived enough” to be a great musician.
When I ask Hawke if great art can be created without life experience, he says, “My take is that there are no rules, but you don’t become Nelson Mandela without suffering. There is a huge myth around Mozart that he was just divinely inspired, in truth he worked really hard. He was obsessed with music from a very young age.
“You could make the case that Michael Jackson suffered immensely and that is part of what drove him. I think the service of the artistic community is to translate our lives back to us and hopefully to lend some understanding. You need to participate in life and feel life to be able to do that. But you know lots of people suffer without a gift or talent to translate it into a beautiful painting.”
Baker took Davis’s comment to heart and set off on a life long self-destructive bender that saw him fall into drug addiction, even pawning his instruments to support his drug habit.
“In the arts, self destruction is a real enemy,” Hawke says. “If you eliminate self-destruction, if you get out of your own way, give yourself permission to have respect for yourself and treat yourself like someone that you love, your chances of success quadruple. That’s really hard.
“It sounds so simple. The documentary I made [Seymour: An Introduction] is all about how hard that is. The joys of life are actually really simple. We think they are going to be, ‘Oh I’ll be happy if this, that and the other thing [happen].’ In truth it is pretty awesome that the sun comes up and if you stay focussed on that things go OK. As soon as you take your eye off that, life gets really weird and tricky.”
Hawke shares Baker’s rough-hewn good looks and does a convincing job of imitating the fragile beauty of his singing voice. More importantly he apes the addict’s temperament. Charming one minute, petulant and or incoherent the next, he plays Baker as a talented train wreck; a man whose tragic life experience fed his art. Unsure which of his proclivities are his angels and which are his devils, he’s a conflicted guy who tries to do well by those around him but often fails. Hawke may resemble the musician but the similarity is only physical. He is comfortable in his skin in a way Baker never dreamed of.
“It’s strange, I’m turning forty-five this year,” he says, “and I have been professionally acting for thirty years. When I was young I was really afraid that I wouldn’t get to do it. That was a big part of my identity as a young person. Even if a movie did well that I would think, ‘Is it over?’ Will I ever get to do it again? It’s how I imagine baseball players and professional athletes feel. Do they ever really know when their last game is? With acting, I’m working on my King Lear now. I’ll be able to do this until I am old no use to people anymore. In athletics it’s not that way.”
Trumpet player Chet Baker is no stranger to the big screen. He was the subject of “Let’s Get Lost,” a 1988 documentary by Bruce Webber, acted in movies with exciting names like “Howlers of the Dock” and “Hell’s Horizon” and his sublime playing haunts the soundtracks of everything from “The Sixth Sense” to “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” He’s back on the big screen as the subject of “Born to be Blue,” a stylish new drama starring Ethan Hawke.
Writer-director Robert Budreau begins the story during a valley in Baker’s life. Consumed by heroin, a beating by a drug dealer leaves him broken and barely able to play. To recuperate he and soul mate Jane (Carmen Ejogo) head to Baker’s childhood Oklahoma home where his antagonistic father (Stephen McHattie) sheds some light on why the musician behaves the way he does.
Later, on the comeback trail, Chet and Jane live in a van in Los Angeles as the trumpeter tries to convince his old producer Dick Bock (Callum Keith Rennie) to work together again. As he regains his chops and confidence the question remains, will he be able to embrace the change or will fall back into his old bad habits?
It’s a matter of historical record how Baker’s life ended, but “Born to be Blue” isn’t particularly interested in the facts. Jane is a composite figure of several of Baker’s girlfriends and wives and some of the events portrayed as fact are in debate. Instead the movie is more interested in giving the viewer a feel for Baker’s life and struggle.
Hawke shares Baker’s rough-hewn good looks and does a credible job of imitating the fragile beauty of his singing voice. More importantly he apes the addict’s temperament. Charming one minute, petulant and or incoherent the next, he’s a talented train wreck; a man whose tragic life experience fed his art. Unsure which of his proclivities are his angels and which are his devils, he’s a conflicted guy who tries to do well by those around him but often fails. It’s a compelling, if not uncommon, music bio story and Hawke embodies it.
Also compelling is Ejogo as Jane in what could have been simply a supportive wife role. She has great chemistry with Hawke and sparks fly in her character’s relationship with Baker. The heart of the film is their connection and sometimes the fireworks that fly between them are exciting, sometimes heartbreaking.
“Born to be Blue” suffers from occasional melodrama—Kedar Brown plays Miles Davis as a bebop caricature—but nails the sense of melancholy that characterised Baker’s best work.
Things get hairy for Cayden (Lucas Till) when he discovers a secret about himself. One night, under the light of the silvery moon he turns from high school football star to werewolf fugitive on the run for the grisly murders of his girlfriend and parents.
With the help of lone wolf Wild Joe (John Pyper-Ferguson) he finds refuge in Lupine Ridge, home to farmer and wolf John Tollerman (Stephen McHattie), bar owner Angel (Merritt Patterson) and warring packs of werewolves. Here he hopes to find answers regarding his strange affliction. His presence is welcomed by some of the locals, but pack leader, the big bad wolf Connor (Jason Momoa) doesn’t take kindly to Cayden and wants him gone, one way or another.
“Wolves” is part of the curious genre of teen werewolf movies. There’s romance, mild gore and buff wolves running shirtless through the forest. The only thing missing for teen wolf enthusiasts is Taylor Lautner.
It’s “Twilight”—or maybe should have been called “Tween Wolf”—with characters who have to comb their faces but within its parameters it works well. There aren’t a lot of surprises, but the all-important transformation scenes are furry fun and any horror film with Stephen McHattie is worth a look. On the downside there’s too much narration and Mamoa is a one-note standard issue villain, complete with a top hat and mustache I was surprised he didn’t twirl at least once.
Where would Canadian horror movies be without St. Valentine’s Day? In 1981 My Bloody Valentine, a creepy little slasher flick shot in Cape Breton, ran afoul of the ratings board but has since gone on to become a cult classic. Now a new type of terror rears its ugly head on the day Hallmark created. In Bruce MacDonald’s Pontypool, the townsfolk of a small Ontario town are infected by a deadly virus on St. Valentine’s Day. A God Bug that turns them into flesh eating zombies. Not even Cupid with a quiver full of arrows can keep this town safe.
In the film’s opening minutes we meet Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie), a down-on-his-luck talk radio host. He’s a former big market jock reduced to working in Pontypool, a backwater station far from his last big gig. Stopped at a crosswalk on his early morning drive to work the silence of the small town is interrupted by a strange woman pounding on his passenger side window, speaking nonsense. Perturbed, he continues on to work and turns the strange encounter into a topic for his show. “When do you call 911?” Soon though, troubling reports of rioting in the town’s core start pouring in. When the reports turn ominous Mazzy realizes he is at the center of a big story and keeps broadcasting. What he doesn’t realize is that, perhaps, he is helping to spread the disease.
To call Pontypool a zombie movie isn’t quite accurate. Sure the movie is about a disease that turns regular people into flesh eating creeps, but it’s more about how they became that way than the eerie aftereffects of the sickness. Set entirely inside a small radio station in the basement of a church, the story focuses on Mazzy, his producer Sydney (Lisa Houle) and call screener Laurel Ann (Georgina Reilly) who use eye witness accounts to slowly piece together the horrible story that is happening outside their doors.
We’re barely given a glimpse of the zombies, which is good for those with weak stomachs, but may disappoint hardcore George A. Romero fans who expect blood and guts. MacDonald, however, has reinvented the wheel by replacing the gore with brain matter, but the kind you think with, not eat. MacDonald captures horror in mostly subtle ways. In his film a broken window with blood dripping from a shard of glass becomes a chilling symbol of the violence that we never see.
At the center of Pontypool’s cerebral thrills is Stephen McHattie. The actor best known for playing Dr. Reston on four classic episodes of Seinfeld carries the entire picture on his back and it is his intense performance that makes up for the lack of gory thrills. As the grizzled Mazzy his face is so lined, so etched with life experience that lost travelers could use it as a road map. It’s not the face of a hero and that edge gives the film some of its great moments. This is a guy who drinks scotch in his morning coffee and likes to break the rules. How he will react in the face of a virus spread by the spoken word when all he really knows how to do is talk keeps the story unpredictable and compelling.
Pontypool is a movie set in a radio station that plays like a radio show. By and large the action is described and for once the old cliché that what you can’t see is more terrifying that what you can actually see rings true. Couple that with a mounting sense of doom and you have an edge of your seat thriller.
