Have a curious and curiouser Christmas with a copy of “Cabinet of Curiosities,” a new book from director Guillermo Del Toro.
From amazon.ca: Over the last two decades, writer-director Guillermo del Toro has mapped out a territory in the popular imagination that is uniquely his own, astonishing audiences with Cronos,Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth, and a host of other films and creative endeavors. Now, for the first time, del Toro reveals the inspirations behind his signature artistic motifs, sharing the contents of his personal notebooks, collections, and other obsessions. The result is a startling, intimate glimpse into the life and mind of one of the world’s most creative visionaries. Complete with running commentary, interview text, and annotations that contextualize the ample visual material, this deluxe compendium is every bit as inspired as del Toro is himself.
Contains a foreword by James Cameron, an afterword by Tom Cruise, and contributions from other luminaries, including Neil Gaiman and John Landis, among others.
When we think of elves at this time of year visions of Santa’s helpers fill our heads.
The cute, industrious and diminutive creatures from the North Pole can be seen everywhere in December in Christmas TV specials, greeting cards and movies like Arthur Christmas and Santa Claus: The Movie.
One of the most famous movie elves is Buddy, played by Will Ferrell in the neo-classic Elf.
“You’re not an elf,” says Leon the Snowman. “You’re six-foot-three and had a beard since you were fifteen.”
So technically he’s not really an elf, just a human raised by elves but he has more Christmas spirit than Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donder and Blitzen put together.
This weekend, just weeks before December 25, Buddy is joined on the big screen by a very different kind of elf.
“She’s slightly reckless and totally ruthless and doesn’t hesitate to kill.” That’s how Evangeline Lilly describes the 600-year-old “she-elf” Tauriel from this weekend’s The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.
The bow-and-arrow wielding character is new to the J.R.R. Tolkien movie franchise, created by director Peter Jackson and his co-writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens.
“She’s our redhead,” says Boyens. “We created her for that reason. To bring that energy into the film, that feminine energy. We believe it’s completely within the spirit of Tolkien.”
Buddy and Tauriel are just two of the many kinds of movie elves.
Elves, or (Gelfling as they’re called in the flick), are the main focus of the Jim Henson film The Dark Crystal.
Dobby the House Elf was voted the No. 1 favourite magical creature in the Harry Potter series by NextMovie.com and Thor: The Dark World featured Dark Elves, an ancient race of dangerous beings whose spaceships are powered by black holes.
The cheeseball b-movie Elves features the tagline, “They’re Not Working for Santa Anymore.” Well, if not Santa, then who? Nazis, that’s who.
Finally Tom Cruise consorted with an elf named Honeythorn Gump in Legend, the Ridley Scott film The New York Times called “a slap-dash amalgam of Old Testament, King Arthur, The Lord of the Rings and any number of comic books.”
Swiss actor David Bennett played the feisty elfin sidekick who not only is the protector of the world’s last two unicorns but, along with elves Screwball, Brown Tom and Oona, helps Cruise’s character save the world from the nasty Lord of Darkness (Tim Curry).
“Jack Reacher,” Tom Cruise’s new hope for a movie franchise, is an old fashioned movie. It’s the kind of movie that Steven Seagal might have starred in circa 1992. It’s a bare-bones action movie and predictable but Van Dammit, taken for what it is, it’s also a bit of fun.
The movie starts out with a brutal and tense sniper attack. Five random people—or are they random?—are gunned down by a disturbed military trained shooter named Barr (Joseph Sikora). He is quickly arrested, but despite almost insurmountable evidence against him assembled by a hot-shot cop (David Oyelowo) and district attorney (Richard Jenkins), he doesn’t confess. Instead, refusing to speak, he writes a cryptic message, “Get Jack Reacher.” Turns out Reacher (Cruise) is a ghost, a war veteran who has been off the grid for almost two tears. When Reacher sees a news story about the case on TV, however, he comes out of hiding and work’s with Barr’s lawyer (Rosamund Pike) to get to the truth.
There’s a light, snappy tone to “Jack Reacher” which is unexpected from a movie containing this level of violence. The banter between Jack and Helen almost sounds ripped from the script of a screwball comedy. It’s not particularly funny, and the chemistry between the two is lacking, but the rat-a-tat rhythm is in place.
That’s just one of the surprises offered up by this adaptation of the ninth book in the popular Reacher series by British author Lee Child. The second is an unhinged extended cameo by Werner Herzog, as the cataract infected, fingerless bad guy. He’s been acting on and off since the early 1970s, and his in front of the camera work is usually as wild and wooly as his behind the camera work is brilliant. Here he outdoes himself in a memorable scene that gives new meaning to the meaning of the word frostbite.
That scene is an off kilter treat in a movie that mostly plays it straight. The unvarnished violence—punches in the face that look like they really hurt—and unadorned action scenes—director Christopher McQuarrie has not used music in the car chase and fight scenes, which gives them a real sense of immediacy—all work well. Those parts the movie gets right. Unfortunately it’s a long movie with lots of other parts between the boffo scenes.
Richard Jenkins is wasted in a generic pay cheque role and Reacher’s habit of connecting the evidentiary dots is pushes the limits of credulity, but Cruise (in Sherlock Holmes mode when he’s not swinging fists) sells it with a combination of swagger and cold-blooded charisma. Van Dame or Sly Stallone might have been more fun in the role, but Cruise, despite not being anywhere the size of Reacher from the books— 6′ 5″ tall (1.96m) with a 50-inch chest, and weighing between 210 and 250 pounds—he’s a big enough star to pull it off.
The elephant in the room is how the subject of a random mass shooting will play with audiences just one week after the Newtown, Connecticut school massacre. The sniper scenes are effectively done, and comprise some of the best work in the film, but may be upsetting to some viewers.
“Jack Reacher” is a fun but violent ride, that should keep fans of Cruise’s actionman persona happy until the next “Mission Impossible” movie comes along.
“Knight and Day,” the new couple-on-the-run movie starring Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, borrows elements from “North by Northwest,” “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” and even “There’s Something About Mary” to form one whole that is slightly less than the sum of it’s parts.
If this was “North by Northwest” Diaz would have the Cary Grant role. Here she plays June Havens, a single woman who gets sucked into a very dangerous situation. A routine flight from Wichita, Kansas to Boston becomes not so routine when she meets Roy Miller (Tom Cruise), a handsome but deadly spy whose world is divided into two kinds of people—“bad guys” and “worse guys.” Following a crash landing, a some globetrotting and briefings and de-briefings by good guys and bad, June must learn who to trust and more importantly, who not to trust. At stake is a tiny battery that could power an entire city, a nerdy inventor and possibly, just possibly, June’s romantic future.
“Knight and Day” attempts to combine the specialties of its two stars—romantic comedy and action—but it’s not exactly a seamless package. Diaz has years of rom com experience under her stylish Gucci belt and Cruise adds a comedic edge to his standard issue action hero but the two never quite gel. The movie can’t decide whether it is screwball spy movie like “Get Smart” with bigger guns or a romantic comedy with explosions. It is weighted heavier toward the action, but I couldn’t help but think it would have worked better as a straight up spy drama without the punch lines or the romantic yuks.
It’s a movie that wants us to care more about the characters than we actually do. Cruise and Diaz are working it here, dodging bullets, exchanging the odd kiss and trying to create some heat, but every time we start to get to know the characters the movie slams the pedal to the metal and kicks into action movie mode. Much of the action is fun, some of it inventive, but none of it is really exciting, perhaps because the stakes are so low. When you don’t really care about the characters who cares if they get blown to bits by Spanish terrorists?
It could be that the on-screen personas of Cruise and Diaz are so firmly etched in our minds—he’s the heroic man of action, she’s going to end up with the guy in the end—that it’s hard to build excitement when you know how it’s likely to end. That’s not a spoiler… just an observation.
Not that the whole thing is a flat line. Far from it. It’s a slickly made movie that shies away from the new norm of action photography. Here you can actually see what is happening as things blow up and Cruise catches some air on his motorcycle, unlike the recent “A-Team” movie that confused frenetic camera work with exciting action.
“Knight and Day” tries to use the star wattage of Cruise and Diaz to sell a story that tries to be an action movie that will appeal to the rom com set, or a romantic comedy that action fans will like. Unfortunately it falls somewhere down the middle.
Lions for Lambs has a tagline that reads like the moral from one of Aesop’s fables: If you don’t STAND for something, you might FALL for anything. Directed by Robert Redford—his first stint behind the camera in seven years—and starring mega stars Redford, Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep, the film weaves three stories together to underline the importance of courage, honesty and standing up for what is right and what you believe in.
Cruise and Streep play a Republican Senator with a new plan for victory in the Middle East and a skeptical reporter. Redford is a college professor who spends his running time debating with a bright, but lazy student while Michael Peña and Derek Luke play college students who enlist in the army to help serve their country.
I’d say Redford balances these three storylines, but there’s nothing balanced about Lions for Lambs, and that’s OK, this isn’t a documentary and the filmmaker is entitled to his point of view. So instead of finding a way to juggle these story threads he jumps back and forth between them willy-nilly.
The problem with making socially conscious films is that occasionally the passion of the message trumps the director’s instincts as a filmmaker. Redford is clearly preaching from a hate the war but support the troops platform, but unfortunately it really feels like we’re being preached to. He forgoes most of the action, instead presenting one of the stagiest and wordiest movies of the year; pedantic beyond belief.
It’s more of a pastiche than a movie, with ideas bouncing off the viewer hard and fast from a number of sources. The trouble is the ideas seem hackneyed as though we’ve heard it all before. The script presents the idea that the press, by reporting on every move of the White House, may actually simply be acting as a PR arm of the government; that America’s kids don’t have a sense of social responsibility anymore, oh, and that old chestnut, War is Hell. It’s simplistic and for all its wordy bluster is about as deep as a lunch tray.
Lions for Lambs was clearly designed to spark debate among its viewers, but I would guess the only quest they’ll be asking when they leave the theatre is, “Why didn’t we go see No Country for Old Men instead?”
Like a cat, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), the indestructible secret agent star of “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol,” has nine lives. Maybe more. He packs more death defying hero activity into one afternoon than… Scaling buildings and crashing cars, he’s always on the go.
There’s the usual assortment of exotic locations, international intrigue, beautiful assassins, clocks ticking down to zero, subtitles in various languages, but despite all that, MI4 makes WAY more sense than its predecessors. Clarity of story has never been a strong suit of the MI series, but “Ghost Protocol” trims down the convoluted plots of the first three movies.
The IMF—that’s Impossible Missions Force for the uninitiated—is disavowed after Ethan Hunt and his team Jane (Paula Patton) and Benji (Simon Pegg) are accused of bombing the Kremlin. Under the rules of Ghost Protocol they are left on their own with no support and must go rogue to clear their name.
“Ghost Protocol” is by no means a comedy but there are more light moments–usually courtesy of Simon Pegg–than in all the previous movies combined. There’s even a short joke at Cruise’s expense.
The jokes are place holders for the wall-to-wall action. If nothing else Ghost Protocol will make you chew your popcorn a little faster. Spectacular set pieces, like Cruise repelling down the outside of the tallest building in the world, and a car chase in a dust storm, should satisfy any action fan.
The various subplots may not, however. Too much time is spent on Jeremy Renner’s back story, a long-winded tale of combat fatigue that reveals a connection to Hunt. The movie is best when it is running and jumping and while the story doesn’t slow the overall momentum, it feels unnecessary.
In the end “Ghost Protocol” has everything you expect from a MI movie. There’s action galore, a cool gadget for every occasion, the patented Tom Cruise Run–hands extended, determined look on face, hair blowing from the sheer velocity of his stride–and sneering bad guys
Based on a 1956 short story by sci-fi guru Phillip K. Dick, Minority Report is the first collaboration between two of Hollywood’s most powerful figures, Tom Cruise and director Steven Spielberg. Best described as cerebral science fiction, the movie is a feast for the mind as well as the eyes. The script tackles complicated moral issues while astounding us with spectacular action sequences. Spielberg has created a dazzling future world of hard glass and talking billboards (conveniently allowing for shameless product placement in the movie), but doesn’t get lost in the special effects and forget to tell the story. Tom Cruise plays police chief John Anderton, head of the Pre-Crime Unit. His specialty is using a series of high tech computers and three human ‘precogs’ to determine when crimes will happen, and stop them before they happen. Then one day he is accused of a committing a murder in the future, goes on the lam, and is hunted by the same people he once worked with. It’s not really a “who-dunnit,” as much as it is a “will-he-do-it.” Cruise does a nice job of carrying the action, but it is Max Von Sydow as his friend and mentor Director Burgess who adds depth. Once again, after being nominated for an Oscar as the mute Hattie in Sweet and Lowdown, English actress Samantha Morton proves that she can outperform most of the actresses in Hollywood, and barely say a word on screen. Minority Report is smart, action packed and thrilling fun. Not only one of the best films of the summer, but one of the best of the year.
MI:3, the latest in a series of action movies inspired by the classic television show of the same name, stars Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt as a super agent and leader of the Impossible Missions Force. In the capable hands of Alias and Lost creator and writer J.J. Abrams the movie plays like a big screen version of Alias, which is OK, because Alias was basically just an estrogen injected Mission Impossible.
Abrams breathes some new life into the franchise by creating a home life for Ethan Hunt. When we first meet him he is engaged to a young beautiful doctor and pretty much retired from the field. He now spends his time training agents to do impossible super agent things and is trying to have a regular life. All that changes when one of his favorite pupils falls into the hands of the incredibly evil Owen Davian, played by Oscar winner Phillip Seymour Hoffman. He heads up her rescue mission and is lured back into a world of intrigue and international espionage.
But Abrams really brings out the movie defibulator with the introduction of a great bad guy. Casting Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who has traded the fey mannerisms of Truman Capote for a mean left hook and a bad attitude, is an inspired move. He’s not on screen for long, but there hasn’t been a bad guy that has so much with so little screen since Anthony Hopkins wore a muzzle in Silence of the Lambs.
The first two Mission Impossibles offered up incomprehensible plots, but each contained at least one great action sequence guaranteed to make your eyeballs dance. Remember Tom, the chopper, the train and the Chunnel from the first one? How about the acrobatic motorcycles from number two? Nothing in number three rocks as hard as either of those set pieces, but they certainly don’t skimp on the action—Tom is still cruising for a bruising. Action sequences sprout like tulips in the spring—many things go boom, many bullets are fired and even the Vatican isn’t safe but none of the stunts have the cool factor of Cruise lowering himself from a wire into a room sensitive to sound, weight and body temperature.
Part action flick, part travelogue–MI:3 could be subtitled Around the World in 800 Bullets–the movie works as a popcorn movie and the kick-off to the summer blockbuster season.
“Oblivion” is one stylish movie. Every frame could be clipped and hung on the wall to garner oohs and ahhs from your houseguests. Everything about it looks great. Morgan Freeman even wears a jaunty cape. But, I’m afraid the style took precedence over the substance. There is much to like here, but for me the story starts to go slightly out of orbit in the last hour and never quite becomes earthbound again.
Tom Cruise plays Jack Harper, a security and drone maintenance man on planet earth sixty years after a war with the alien Scavs destroyed all life on the planet. Nearing the end of his mission on the desolate place, he and girlfriend Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) are due to return to home base, now located in outer space. Thing is, Jack doesn’t really want to leave. He has memory jolts, little shards of recollections the life he led before the war and his memory wipe, and he wants to stay and explore them. When he discovers a human survivor, Julia (Olga Kurylenko) he begins to question everything about his existence.
This is the kind of movie Tom Cruise was born to star in, the sort of thing that made him a superstar. He understands the dynamics of anchoring a huge movie like this, and hits all the right notes in the action scenes.
Nobody outruns a fireball quite like Cruise.
The trouble is, this is a romantic sci fi movie without much of an emotional center. It’s all stark and calculated, and feels sterile.
Riseborough does bring a lot of humanity to a character who isn’t required to do much but much of the heavy lifting is left to Kurylenko’s character, and while she’s beautiful, I’m afraid she has the range of an emoticon. She does much better work in To the Wonder.
I won’t give away any spoilers from the last half because the plot thickens near the end, but it still manages to be kind of standard. Of course there is the customary scene where someone is about to be executed but is saved by an alarm, and does everyone in post apocalyptic worlds listen to classic rock? But beyond the usual Hollywood contrivances, it telegraphs virtually all of its third act reveals. Pay attention in the first hour and there’s no real need to hang around for the closing credits except for the view.
Visually director and writer Joseph “Tron” Kosinski creates an amazing world. There is a bombed out beauty to the images of New York City—you see the top of the Chrysler Building peeking up from the earth, surrounded by fields and lakes—the result, we’re told of the Scavs destroying the moon and Mother Nature destroying the rest.
Seems Mother Nature also wiped away whatever humanity was left on the planet as well.
Have a curious and curiouser Christmas with a copy of “Cabinet of Curiosities,” a new book from director Guillermo Del Toro.
