Based on the 1982 film of the same name by Harry Hurwitz, “The Comeback Trail,” now on VOD, is star Robert de Niro’s third Hollywood satire after 1997’s “Wag the Dog” and 2008’s “What Just Happened.” It doesn’t pack the same kind of sardonic punch as those films but supplies a laugh or two.
Set in 1974, De Niro plays Max Barber, a Hollywood hanger-on and producer of bottom-of-the-bill b-movies with names like “Killer Nuns.” He dreams of the big time, of making an epic but his reputation and lack of money put his dream out of reach until he concocts a deadly scam.
With his unsuspecting partner and nephew Walter (Zach Braff), Barber sets up a new film starring Duke Montana (Tommy Lee Jones), a suicidal western star living in a home for retired and forgotten, actors. The tough old coot spends his days playing Russian Roulette, but when Barber offers him a gig, Duke thinks this might his comeback and puts away the gun.
Barber, who is being pressured by gangster Reggie Fontaine (Morgan Freeman) to repay a sizeable loan, has other ideas. His scam is to kill Duke, shut down the movie he never planned to finish, and, make a killing, literally, with the insurance money.
But, like so many things in Barber’s life, his scheme doesn’t go as planned.
“The Comeback Trail” is a movie in love with the movies. Barber and Fontaine banter in movie references—“I’m gonna choke you.” “Like Tony Curtis in the Boston Strangler?”—and, ultimately, it sings the praises of the power of the movies to inspire and transform lives.
Film fans may enjoy the sentiment but they likely won’t be as impressed by the slack pacing and obvious telegraphing of joke after joke. It takes ages to get to the heart of the one-joke premise and, while there are mild laughs sprinkled throughout, as soon as director George Gallo (who wrote “Midnight Run”) allows the story to limp on to the film set-with-the-film, the movie starts to run out of steam.
Of the three Oscar winners who headline “The Comeback Trail,” only Jones appears invested in creating a memorable character. His take on the “broke-down-over-the-hill-has been” Montana has enough flashes of pathos to hint at what this movie could have been, a bittersweet comedy about the dreamers who live and breathe celluloid, but the movie’s silly tone lets him down.
“Ad Astra,” a new space opera starring Brad Pitt, is not simply a journey into the universe but a trek into the star’s ability to keep the story earthbound while reaching for the stars.
Set in the very near future, “a time of hope and conflict,” “Ad Astra” stars Pitt as astronaut Maj. Roy McBride. His father, Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), went missing three decades before while travelling space, looking for alien life.
The younger McBride’s latest mission is his most important ever, both personally and professionally. Something or someone is sending deadly anti-matter surges toward the earth and NASA thinks they may be coming from McBride Sr’s lost spaceship. They send the stoic Roy, armed with a nuclear device, on a top-secret mission to Neptune to find out what’s going on.
As the stoic Roy hurtles through space his path his fraught with risk. But the most dangerous part of the trip isn’t battling moon bandits or intergalactic monkeys, it’s the journey into his own psyche.
A father and son twist on “Heart of Darkness,” “Ad Astra” is cerebral, humanist sci fi. It is more akin to films like “2001: A Space Odyssey” and Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Solaris” than the big budget space operas that tend to top the box office. It’s a solemn, meditative look at masculinity, isolation and emotional stoicism.
Pitt gives an understated but effective performance that relies on the subtlest of movements. McBride’s outward fortitude masks a tumultuous inner life, ripe with questions and muddled feelings. His training has taught him to stay even keeled—his pulse never raises above 80 even in the most stressful situations—but as he comes closer to Neptune and the possibility of being reunited with his father, cracks begin to appear in his carefully crafted facade. Pitt, in a largely non-verbal performance save for copious voiceover, shows his emotions through the cracks, allowing the character to reveal himself in the contemplative but compellingly unsettling way.
“Ad Astra”—which means “through hardships to the stars” in Latin—has all the hallmarks of a blockbuster, there’s a big star, beautifully shot action sequences by “Interstellar” cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema and the kind of end-of-the-world scenario the Avengers love, but it’s a heady one. It’s more concerned with what’s going on inside McBride’s head as what’s happening outside. Also, like so many blockbusters, it doesn’t know what to do with the female characters. Liv Tyler is glimpsed only through a screen and Ruth Negga, while always wonderful, is essentially an exposition machine. Still, the character study is spellbinding enough, thanks to Pitt’s performance, to maintain interest.
With news organizations under fire from all sides these days along comes a movie about journalists who spoke truth to power. “Shock and Awe,” the new film from director Rob Reiner, details the efforts of the Knight Ridder journalists who questioned the reasoning behind the 2003 Iraq War.
The main thrust of the narrative begins on September 11, 2001. As the press struggle to find the real story behind the terrorist attack, George W. Bush’s White House begins a campaign of misinformation, shifting the blame from Islamic extremist Osama bin Laden to secular leader Saddam Hussein. Knight Ridder reporters Warren Strobel (James Marsden) and Jonathan Landay (Woody Harrelson) sense something is not quite right with the story, even though many of their colleagues eat up the Bush administration story of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Their insiders suggest the White House is deliberately trying to start a war with Iraq, forging a connection between Hussein and Al-Qaeda.
When Knight Ridder papers like The Philadelphia Inquirer decline to publish their reporting editor John Walcott (Reiner) reaches out to a big gun, Bronze Star-winning war correspondent Joe Galloway (Tommy Lee Jones), for help. “We don’t write for people who send other people’s kids off to war,” says Walcott. “We write for people whose kids get sent to war. You only have one thing to ask: Is it true?” With Galloway’s support Landay and Strobel burn shoe leather to support their “Donald Rumsfeld is lying” angle.
There is not much either shocking or awesome in “Shock and Awe.” The story should be edge of your seat stuff but feels muted. Part of the trouble is the amount of exposition particularly a speech from Strobel’s love interest Lisa (Jessica Biel) that sums up 4000 years of Iraq history in just under two minutes. It doesn’t make for good drama, despite the explosive nature of the true events.
Perhaps the movie’s indignation about politicians and media not valuing the truth feels blunted in this time of Fake News. Or perhaps it is lost in the film’s breezy nature. Either way, the result is a movie that has its heart in the right place but isn’t angry or intrepid enough.
“Always at the Carlyle” can’t rightly be called a documentary. It’s more of a love letter to one of Manhattan’s great hotels. Plump with celebrity interviews, glamorous people and the attentive—if somewhat secretive—staff who coddle the one percenters who stay there, it’s a glossy, uncritical look at a hotel whose rooms can cost as much as a car.
Director Matthew Miele lines up a who’s who of a-lister types to talk about the hotel’s special charms. George Clooney and the late great Anthony Bourdain wax poetic, while Harrison Ford grouses, good naturedly, about not ever being housed in the hotel’s $20,000 a night suite. Sophia Coppola describes what it was like to live there when she was a child and rich people you’ve never heard of describe the hotel’s upwardly mobile ambiance in hushed reverential terms.
Miele provides a peak at the colourful murals in Bemelmans Bar, painted by Ludwig Bemelmans, artist of the “Madeline” books, and tells of the legendary Bobby Short’s musical contributions to New York nightlife via his work at the equally legendary Carlyle Café.
It’s not very deep, but it is all very swanky, as crisp as the monogrammed pillowcases that adorn every bed. “Always at the Carlyle” works best when it recounts the hotel’s sophisticated history, told by former guests and employees with eye candy photos for illustration, but like the best hoteliers the doc chooses discretion over gossip. That’s good for the guests, but not good for the viewers of the film who might want something more. If only those walls could talk—they might tell a more interesting story.
In the latest Jason Bourne movie, Matt Damon will punch, kick and spy master his way to the top of the box office charts.
His previous Bourne films, Identity, Supremacy and Ultimatum, were all hits commercially and critically.
Damon says he owes a great deal to the fictional character.
After the early success of Good Will Hunting, Saving Private Ryan and The Talented Mr. Ripley made him a star, a string of flops cooled his box office appeal.
“Right before The Bourne Identity came out,” he said, “I hadn’t been offered a movie in a year.”
Then his career was Bourne again.
“It’s incalculable how much these movies have helped my career,” he told The Telegraph. “Suddenly it put me on a short list of people who could get movies made.”
In the spirit of “one for them, one for me” for every film like The Martian or the new Jason Bourne, Damon has attached himself to smaller, riskier projects.
He lent his star power to The Good Shepherd, a low budget film directed by Robert De Niro. It’s a spy movie without the bells and whistles we’ve come to expect from our favorite undercover operatives.
There are no elaborate chase scenes a la James Bond or even the great scenery of the Bourne flicks.
In fact, the only thing The Good Sheperd shares with any of those movies is Damon, who plays Edward Wilson, one of the (fictional) founders of the CIA.
Despite mixed to good reviews — USA Today gave the film three out of four stars—and winning the Silver Bear of the prestigious Berlin International Film Festival, the movie barely earned back its production costs at the box office.
Ninety per cent of director Steven Soderbergh’s job on The Informant! was casting this mostly true tale of a highly paid executive-turned-whistleblower who helped uncover a price fixing policy that landed several executives (including himself) in jail.
It’s a tricky balancing act to find an actor who can keep the audience on-board through a tale of corporate malfeasance and personal greed, who can be likeable but is actually a liar and a thief, but Damon is the guy.
The Informant! skewed a tad too far into art house territory to be Soderbergh’s new Erin Brockovich-sized hit, but Damon’s presence kept the story of accounting, paperwork and avarice interesting. Reviews were kind but A Serious Man and The Twilight Saga: New Moon buried the film on its opening weekend.
Damon teamed with John Krasinski to produce and co-write Promised Land, a David and Goliath story that relied on the charm and likability of its cast to sell the idea that fracking is bad and the corporations who dupe cash-strapped farmers into leasing their land are evil.
It’s hard to make talk of water table pollution dramatic but Promised Land makes an attempt by giving much of the heavy lifting to Damon.
Done in by middling reviews and “sobering” box office receipts, this earnest and well-meaning movie might have been better served in documentary form.
With an Oscar on his shelf and more than 70 films on his resume Damon is philosophical about the kinds of films he chooses to make, big or small.
“If people go to those movies, then yes, that’s true, big-time success,” he says.
“Jason Bourne,” the first Matt Damon led film in the series in nine years, proves that actions speak louder than words. Damon speaks a mere twenty-five lines of dialogue as he kicks, punches and crash-boom-bangs his way through this spy thriller, letting the action do the talking.
Damon’s fourth go-round as amnesiac superspy Jason Bourne begins with him tormented by his violent past. Most of his memory is intact, but he’s eaten away by guilt for the terrible things he did as a government programmed killer. “I remember,” he says. “I remember everything.”
To get his ya-yas out he goes all Fight Club, bare-knuckling any and all contenders but he’s drawn back into the international spy game—the movie never met an exotic location it couldn’t use, whether it’s Berlin, Reykjavík, Athens, London or even Vegas—after his former-handler-turned-hacker Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) tells him of a collaboration between CIA director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones, whose face is one forehead wrinkle away from becoming a caricature of an old man) and Silicon Valley kingpin Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed). They’re working on Edward Snowden’s worst nightmare, a new program called Ironhead, a system of full spectrum surveillance; watching everyone all the time.
Wanting Bourne out of the way Dewey uses every newfangled asset at his disposal—like state-of-the-art global surveillance—to find the agent before turning to the old ways and bringing in an assassin known as, appropriately enough, The Asset (Vincent Cassel) to take care of business. “I’m going to cut the head off this thing,” says Dewey.
Flitting about the edges of the intrigue is the CIA’s cyber ops head Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander), who helps Bourne in an effort to keep him away from The Asset’s deadly gaze. “Bringing him in is the smart move,” she says. “There’s no bringing in Bourne,” Dewey says. “He needs to be put down.”
Cue the carnage.
If nothing else “Jason Bourne” proves once and for all that you can’t keep a good man down. Shot, beaten, dropped from a tall building or whatever, he’s the Energizer Bunny of international spies. He just keeps on ticking. We expect that from Bourne and we also demand feral fighting scenes, crazy car crashes and action, action, action. Make no mistake, there’s plenty of Bourne battle and bloodshed and some of it is quite exciting but it doesn’t have the finesse of the earlier films. Director Paul Greengrass’s signature handheld you-are-here style is in place but doesn’t feel as fresh as it did in the other films. Often frenetic instead of pulse-racing, the action sequences are frequent but not as memorable as the magazine-in-the-toaster gag from “Bourne Supremacy” or “Bourne Ultimatum’s” hardcover book punch. Still, you might not make it quite to the edge of your seat, but the combo of action and intrigue will shift you out of a reclining position.
“Jason Bourne” has its moments. Damon brings a grizzled power to the role and Vikander is a welcome addition, even if her motives are sometimes are hard to understand. There are interesting messages about online personal rights versus public safety that would have been moot in 2002 when the series debuted, a labyrinthine plot occasionally weighed down with unnecessary exposition and an unhinged Vegas climax—Bourne must really hope that whatever happens in Vegas stays in Vegas—that would not be out of place in an Avengers movie. I just wish the ending felt less like an Avengers scene—with cars comically flying through the air—and more like a Bourne moment.
From marilyn.ca: “If you love going to the movies, but you’re never sure what to see, Richard Crouse has the answer! Check out these sure-to-be blockbusters to keep you entertained all summer!” They argue about “Finding Dory” and preview “The BFG,” “The Secret Life of Pets,” “Jason Bourne,” “Suicide Squad” and “Ghostbusters.”
The new Kevin Costner movie “Criminal” is crying out for a subtitle. “Criminal” is such a drab, nondescript name. It doesn’t tell you anything about the movie or grab the eye. How about “Criminal: How a Psychopath Found Redemption and Revenge.” It’s grabby and sums up everything you need to know about this deeply silly movie.
The movie begins with a cameo by everybody’s favourite Canadian Ryan Reynolds as Bill Pope, an undercover intelligence officer for the CIA. He alone knows the location of Jan Stroop, a computer whiz (Michael Pitt) who has hacked into the US’s military computers and now controls the world’s fate. The CIA desperately wants to find Pope and Stroop but unfortunately evil-doer and all round bad guy Hagbardaka Heimbahl (Jordi Mollà) got to Pope first. After some very unpleasant back-and-forth the steel jawed agent refuses to give up any information and is left for dead.
Here’s where it gets weird. CIA mucky-muck Quaker Wells (Gary Oldman) finds the grievously wounded Pope and with a ‘never say die’ attitude keeps the man alive long enough so scientist Dr. Franks (Tommy Lee Jones) can transplant the comatose CIA agent’s memories into the mind of another person. “Can you or can’t you transport memories from one live mammal to another?”
Here’s where it gets weirder. In their infinite wisdom the CIA chooses death-row psychopath Jericho Stewart (Costner) as the memory recipient. “He does not understand society or how people are supposed to behave,” says Wells. Perfect. What could go wrong? Jericho must come to grips with the two personalities swirling around his brain—“It’s like my skull is being crushed from the inside,” he says.—as he slowly develops emotions and enough awareness to help and not hinder law enforcement in their search for Stroop.
By the time Pope’s daughter (Lara Decaro) teaches Jericho to play Christmas carols on piano “Criminal’s” cheese factor needle is bouncing uncontrollably into the red.
Remember the face-transplant surgery movie “Face/Off”? It was a silly movie, but at least it made sense in its own oddball way. Unlike the face swap film, however, “Criminal” has no internal logic. Things happen simply because the story requires them to happen and not because they make sense. The leaps of faith required to buy into “Criminal’s” story would give Evel Knievel vertigo. Suspension of disbelief is fine, and a time-honoured way of enjoying a movie, but you have to care about the story and characters in order to go along for the ride. Unfortunately not even this group of old pros can elevate this material.
When Jericho appears to develop feelings for Pope’s wife Jill (Gal “Wonder Women” Gadot) he expresses himself with the most unintentionally funny line of the year. “I know what that ‘love’ word is supposed to mean but…” It’s straight out of a b-movie, a b-movie that should be called “Criminal: How a Psychopath Found Redemption and Revenge.”
What would you do if Robert De Niro cut short your conversation with a quick, “I’m not doing this, darling,” and exited? If you’re Radio Times journalist Emma Brockes you write about it and watch your article go viral.
As unpleasant as the encounter may have been — he objected to the “negative inference” of her questions, she called him condescending — it did exactly what it was meant to do, generate buzz for De Niro’s upcoming film The Intern.
Who won? I’ll give the edge to Brockes who, when faced with a bad situation, turned De Niro’s lemons into lemonade and earned just as much press as the touchy actor.
De Niro took some blowback for his behaviour. Daily Mail columnist Piers Morgan wrote, “If I’d been her, I’d have slapped him ’round his smug little chops,” adding the Goodfellas star is “renowned as the rudest, most difficult and frankly obnoxious star to interview, possibly in the history of planet Earth.”
I think Morgan overstates his case. De Niro isn’t the worst — anyone who has ever done a movie junket knows Tommy Lee Jones is the crankiest, most soul destroying interview ever — he’s just a reticent interview, who, according to director Nancy Myers, doesn’t want “to expose himself all the time.”
De Niro isn’t alone in the chat-and-dash sweepstakes. Robert Downey Jr. and Quentin Tarantino bolted on Krishnan Guru-Murthy with the Avengers: Age of Ultron actor later calling the Channel 4 news presenter a “syphilitic parasite.” Robert Pattinson, Naomi Campbell and Russell Crowe have also done runners on the press.
So why submit to promotional interviews at all? Contractual obligation has much to do with it, but beyond that, they’re good for the movie. Daniel Radcliffe, star of Harry Potter, Horns and the upcoming Victor Frankenstein, once told me no matter how famous the actor, anyone who doesn’t get out and pump their film up to the press is making a huge mistake.
As a result everyone does them and while it’s easy to look at De Niro or Downey as spoiled brats, I’m surprised walkouts don’t happen more often.
It must get brutally dull answering the same questions over and over, particularly when they are of the “Of all your leading ladies who was the best kisser?” variety.
How bad can it get in the interview suites?
Once a talking head proudly told me she wrote new lyrics for Beyoncé’s hit song Survivor… “My name’s Beyoncé/ I’m in Goldmember/ You’re watching blah blah on blah blah blah…” and asked the superstar to sing them as a promo for her television station. If I were Beyoncé I would have exited stage left without a song on my lips.
I remember one “reporter” asking George Lucas “whether Dark Vader was a good guy or a bad guy.” If I were Lucas I would have hitched a Millennium Falcon ride out of there.
Recently I heard Tom Cruise try and answer the question, “What kind of stunt would you do to impress a girl?” If I were Cruise I would have grabbed the side of the nearest plane and jetted out of there.
As for De Niro, Brockes graciously says she has sympathy for him “because nobody wants to be there for these choreographed junket interviews.”
De Niro wasn’t quite as kind, but at least he called her “darling” and not “syphilitic parasite.”
