Movies about giant things hurdling through space toward Earth are almost as plentiful as the stars in the sky. “Armageddon,” “Deep Impact” and “Judgment Day” all pose end-of-the-world scenarios but none have the satirical edge of “Don’t Look Up.” The darkly comedic movie, now in theatres but coming soon to Netflix, paints a grim, on-the-nose picture of how the world responds to a crisis.
Jennifer Lawrence is PhD candidate Dr. Kate Dibiasky, a student astronomer who discovers a comet the size of Mount Everest aimed directly at our planet. Her professor, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), comes to the alarming conclusion that the comet will collide with Earth in six months and fourteen days in what he calls an “extinction level event.”
They take their concerns to NASA and the White House, but are met with President Janie Orlean’s (Meryl Streep) concerns about optics, costs and the up-coming mid-term elections. “The timing is just disastrous,” she says. “Let’s sit tight and assess.”
With the clock ticking to total destruction Dibiasky and Mindy go public, but their dire warnings on the perky news show “The Rip”—“We keep the bad news light!”—go unheeded. Social media focusses on Dibiasky’s panic, creating memes of her face, while dubbing Mindy the Bedroom Eyed Doomsday Prophet.
As the comet hurdles toward Earth the world becomes divided between those willing to Look Up and do something about the incoming disaster and the deniers who think that scientists “want you to look up because they are looking down their noses at you.”
Chaos breaks out, and the division widens as the comet closes in on its target.
It is not difficult to find parallels between the events in “Don’t Look Up” and recent world occurrences. Director and co-writer Adam McKay explores the reaction to world affairs through a lens of Fake News, clickbait journalism, skepticism of science, political spin and social media gone amok. In fact, the topics McKay hits on don’t really play like satire at all. The social media outrage, bizarro-land decisions made by people in high offices and the influence of tech companies all sound very real world, ripped out of today’s newspapers.
It’s timely, but perhaps too timely. Social satire is important, and popular—“Saturday Night Live” has done it successfully for decades—but “Don’t Look Up,” while brimming with good ideas, often feels like an overkill of familiarity. The comet is fiction, at least I hope it is, but the reaction to it and the on-coming catastrophe feels like something I might see on Twitter just before the lights go down in the theatre.
It feels a little too real to be pure satire. There are laughs throughout, but it’s the serious questions that resonate. When Mindy, on TV having his “Network” moment, rages, “What the hell happened to us? What have we done to ourselves and how do we fix it?” the movie becomes a beacon. The satire is comes easily—let’s face it, the world is full of easy targets—but it’s the asking of hard questions and in the frustration of a world gone mad, when McKay’s point that we’re broken and don’t appreciate the world around us, shines through.
Despite big glitzy Hollywood names above the title and many laugh lines, “Don’t Look Up” isn’t escapism. It’s a serious movie that aims to entertain but really wants to make you think.
With the release of “A Madea Family Funeral” Tyler Perry is putting to rest his most famous character. The actor-director has been playing the elderly, sharp-tongued Mabel “Madea” Simmons on screen since 2005’s “Diary of a Mad Black Woman” but now says, “I just don’t want to be her age, playing her.”
Is the titular funeral for Madea? There will be no spoilers here but I can tell you Perry gives “Krump’s” era Eddie Murphy a run for this money, not just playing four characters in “A Madea Family Funeral,” but also writing, directing and producing. For all we know he also did the catering and best boy duties.
The set up for the action revolves around a family reunion in rural Georgia. The family, including Madea, Joe, Brian (all played by Perry) and Madea’s brother, a Vietnam war vet Heathrow (Perry again). When tragedy strikes the family must arrange a funeral (NO SPOILERS HERE!) “If I’m not in the will I tell you that funeral will be messed up,” says Joe. There’s more at stake than the money in the will, however. Personal secrets threaten to tear the once tight knit family apart.
If you are not already a fan of Madea’s rough-and-tumble humour “A Madea Family Funeral” is unlikely to convert you. Perry’s trademarked mix of slapstick, social commentary, soap opera melodrama and sentimentality is sloppily applied with scenes that recklessly veer from smiles to schmaltz at the speed of light.
The film’s funniest scene is also it’s most disturbing. On the way to the reunion Brian and family are pulled over by an over-enthusiastic cop whose escalating behaviour seems bound for a violent outcome uses humour to portray an all too familiar powder keg situation. It’s the movie’s only concession to current events. The rest feels as though Madea’s sitcom and a soap opera had a baby and named it “A Madea Family Funeral.”
In the cold-blooded world of turtles, Yertle, Gamera, Koopa Troopa and Fastback are hot names. But the most famous testudines of all time have to be the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Stars of movies, comic books, television and video games, the four anthropomorphic turtle brothers even had action figures and breakfast cereals as part of their reptilian empire.
They were 20th-century pop-culture icons, which ain’t too bad for four hard-shelled crime fighters named after Renaissance artists.
Stephen Amell, who plays hockey-mask wearing hero Casey Jones in this weekend’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out Of The Shadows, says he grew up with Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello.
“The live-action films did it for me,” says the actor, who was just nine when the turtles hit the big screen for the first time. “I’ve always ingested superheroes, especially comic book superheroes, via feature films. Like Superman, Batman, Christopher Reeve, Michael Keaton, all that stuff. When they did the live-action turtle movie I remember my brain not being able to fully comprehend how they were going to do this. Those were seminal moments from my childhood.”
The story of four pet turtles transformed by radioactive ooze into sewer-dwelling, crime-fighting ninja warriors appealed to kids, but the original 1984 black-and-white comics were dark, gritty and violent, a subversive homage to popular books like Daredevil, Cerebus and Ronin. Sharp-eyed readers of the second issue of TMNT will notice old issues of Cerebus and Ronin discarded on the floor of the Turtles’ sewer home.
They sliced and diced bad guys and even uttered the odd PG-13 word.
Turtlemania really began in 1987 with an animated series aimed at younger viewers. They quickly became something of a sensation, but with popularity came an erosion of the rebellious aspects of the story. In short, they became the thing they once poked fun at.
The turtles went mainstream, and soon there were arcade games, action figures, clothing, movies and more.
Kids were taken with the turtle soup of gags, colourful characters and pizza obsession, but Amell says there is more than that to their appeal.
“At the baseline of this entire experience, we are talking about the relationship of four brothers — the relationship as they struggle through adolescence,” he says. “I feel like whether you have brothers, sisters, close friends, any type of family, everyone can relate to that.
“It’s this unique idea. It’s so unique it tends to be universal. I don’t know what the secret sauce is, otherwise I would create my own Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and just sit back and collect the royalties.”
For many, including the crowds that will no doubt flock to Out Of The Shadows this week, the allure of the turtles is at least partly nostalgic, a return to a simpler time.
I get the feeling that for the Toronto-born Amell, the appeal is partly sentimental, partly professional.
“It’s pretty cool,” he says. “It’s a really great franchise to be part of. It’s amazing to play a character like Casey Jones. I was just at Yonge and Dundas Square [in Toronto] and it is overrun with Turtles’ posters. It’s a dream come true.”
I never thought I would miss the first wave of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies. The foam rubber-suited lead characters and tongue-in-cheek humour were very much of their time, almost a time capsule of 1990s genre cheese. Just as “The Secret of the Ooze” et al are emblematic of their day, the CGI fest “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out Of The Shadows” is symbolic of its time. Trouble is, I have no nostalgia for pixels and bytes no matter how artfully arranged on the screen.
The action begins one year after the events of the last film. The turtles—leader Leonardo (Pete Ploszek), the rebellious Raphael (Alan Ritchson), good-time turtle Michelangelo (Noel Fisher) and the brains of the outfit, Donatello (Jeremy Howard)—saved the world by bringing super duper bad guy Shredder (Brian Tee) to justice. News cameraman Vernon Fenwick (Will Arnett) got all the credit, and is now a media darling. The turtles, however, are content to stay in the shadows, afraid that people won’t accept them because they are all turtlely. And ninja-esque.
Now trouble has come back to town as Shredder escapes police custody and forms an alliance with inventor Dr. Baxter Stockman (Tyler Perry), two mutants named Bebop (Gary Anthony Williams) and Rocksteady (WWE Superstar Stephen “Sheamus” Farrelly) and Kraang (Fred Armisen), a slimy alien octopus with a robotic shell. “Together we can bring the people of your planet to their knees,” crows the mucus covered ET.
The heroes on the half shell, along with their old sidekicks April O’Neil (Megan Fox), Splinter (Tony Shalhoub) and hockey stick wielding newcomer Casey Jones (Stephen Amell), spring into action to prevent—what else?—the end of the world as we know it.
Ladled into this turtle soup of action, comedy and crazy science—“Inside every human there is a gene that connects us to our animal ancestors!”—are good messages of T’N’T—tolerance ‘n teamwork—but despite the explosive nature of the movie there are no real fireworks here. Maybe it’s because our eyes are so accustomed to CGI spectacle. Turtles can literally fly, but who cares? In a film where anything is possible, nothing is terribly exciting. The computer-generated images bring the turtles, rhinos and warthogs to vivid life but the artificial nature of the main characters do nothing to breathe life into this story.
I’m not saying I expect anything approaching realism in a movie about talking turtles. I’m suggesting that the quirky appeal of Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello isn’t well suited by CGI that looks interchangeable with every other superhero flick. It’s as if the very things that made the turtles unique—there’s only one “Cowabunga!” in the whole film and it isn’t even Michelangelo who says it—have been downplayed in the hopes of turning them into generic, franchise building heroes. I say let their freak flags fly. We liked them because they were subversive. We liked them because, like Godzilla, they were more fun when you could see the zipper on the back of their rubber suits. Smoothing out their edges sands off the stuff that made them unique.
Kraang, the sadly underused villain, is as over-the-top as you might hope and a nice counterpart to the bland Tee as Shredder. As cool as Kraang is, though, this is really the turtle show. They are given more screen time than anyone else, and other than Bebop and Rocksteady, who morph into a rhino and warthog, dominate the proceedings. In the background are Laura Linney and Perry. Linney steps out of the art-house to do a forgettable turn as a justice department honcho and Perry adds little to the flick other than name value.
“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out Of The Shadows” is a CGI orgy that left me (half) shell shocked and nostalgic for a time when four wisecracking, world-saving turtles were something unique and not simply another entry in the superhero sweepstakes.
“Gone Girl” is about many things. It’s about the perfect crime. It’s about the disintegration of a marriage. It’s about the mob mentality that shows like Nancy Grace creates when “innocent until proven guilty” becomes a meaningless catchphrase. Heck, it’s even about proving Tyler Perry actually can act but mostly its about keeping the audience perched on the edge of their collective seats.
When Amy (Rosamund Pike) and Nick (Ben Affleck) first meet both are writers living in New York City. It’s love at first sight. “We’re so cute I want to punch us in the face,” she says. but after a few years of marriage, a recession and a downsizing from Manhattan to Missouri, things go sour. On the morning of their seventh anniversary Amy disappears, leaving behind only an over turned coffee table and a smear of blood in the kitchen. In the coming days Nick’s life is turned upside down. “It’s like I’m on a Law and Order episode,” he says. His wife is gone, her over protective parents are on the scene and he is suspect number one.
Telling any more of the story would be akin to like giving you a puzzle, with all the pieces in place save for one corner. In other words, the more you know the less fun the movie will be. Director David Fincher has constructed an intricate, he-said-she-said thriller, based on a bestseller of the same name by Gillian Flynn, that relies on the element of surprise.
At the helm is Affleck. He’s terrific in what may be his most natural performance ever. He has the charm of a romantic lead but the soulless affect of a man lost at sea personally and professionally.
Affleck is a bright light but Pike burns a hole in the screen. The former Bond girl and “An Education” star has never been better. Cold and calculating, terrified and terrifying, she puts the femme in fatale. A star in the Brian DePalma mode, she’s capable of almost anything except being ignored. It’s a bravura performance and one that will garner attention come Oscar time.
Fincher has populated the film with strong supporting actors. The unconventional casting of Neil Patrick Harris, as an wealthy, controlling ex-boyfriend and Tyler Perry as a celebrity attorney both work well, but the stand-outs are in the female secondary cast.
As Nick’s twin sister Margo, Carrie Coon is spunky, funny—“Whoever took her is bound to bring her back,” she says of the sister-in-law she doesn’t like.—and finally desperate. Kim Dickens as the no nonsense Detective Rhonda Boney, the lead of the team investigating Amy’s disappearance, provides the procedural portion of the story.
“Gone Girl” is not great art, but it is an artfully made potboiler with memorable performances and slick direction that will keep you guessing until the end.
Tyler Perry is a wildly successful actor, director, producer and all round mogul whose movies make oodles of money but so far have received very little love from the award gods. His latest film, “For Colored Girls”—an adaptation of the Tony Award nominated Broadway play “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf”—is his most ambitious film to date but will it be enough to elevate Perry from the ranks of money maker to award winner?
Directing a sprawling ensemble cast Perry (who adapted Ntozake Shange’s original script) weaves together the stories of eight African-American women as they deal with personal issues like the search for love, rape, emotional abandonment, infidelity, sexual repression and abortion. Perry retains the play’s poetic approach, mixing naturalistic dialogue and stark real-life drama with free, impressionistic verse.
“For Colored Girls” is Perry’s most accomplished and ambitious movie to date. It’s risky material, from the dire situations most of these women find themselves in (may I suggest group therapy for the cast?) to the style of language, which is likely to confound and confuse many viewers, and while he has stayed true to the tone of the play, I couldn’t help but think that this type of material would work better on stage. Much of the poetic language is beautiful or evocative—a car is described as “smelling of alcohol and ladies in heat”—but despite good performances from the cast the writing often seems too delicate to be blown up for the big screen.
Couple that with Perry’s melodramatic touch and “For Colored Girls” loses much of its importance of message to overwrought scenes and clichés. The play was a series of monologues and the movie does not improve on the form by intertwining them or creating worlds for the characters to exist in. The choppy segues from character to character feel contrived and as a result, so do the situations that frame the monologues. Individually the stories may have power but as hard as it may be to believe after a while the viewer gets immune to the endless and continuous misery inflicted on these characters.
“For Colored Girls” earns points for ambition and good performances from the cast, particularly Thandie Newton as a troubled sex addict, Macy Gray as the movie’s Acid Queen and Phylicia Rashad as the wise Gilda, but as bold a step as this may be in Perry’s career it isn’t nuanced or interesting enough to gather much steam come awards time.
“Good Deeds” will make you laugh, but you’ll be laughing at it rather than with it as this movie plays out. It may also make you cry, but they will be tears of frustration at a story so predictable that it makes the “See Spot Run” books seem complex by comparison.
Director Tyler Perry is not doing audiences a good deed by releasing his latest film in general release.
In the opening minutes we are introduced to Wesley Deeds (Tyler Perry) and his perfect life. He has a hip apartment, a beautiful fiancée (Gabrielle Union) and is the CEO of a major software company. Trouble is he isn’t sure if he is living his own life or the life he was raised to have. He’s a child of privilege, unlike Lindsey Wakefield (Thandie Newton), a single mom on the verge of eviction and possibly losing her little girl to Child Welfare Services. A chance meeting between the two — she works as a night janitor at the company he runs — leads him to slowly begin unbuttoning his buttoned-down life. It also leads this young woman to see her life in new terms, beyond living out of her car.
The script is filled with the kind of banal chatter people engage in every day. In fact, a drinking game could be built around the amount of times Wesley says, “Are you serious?”
What banal here is ridiculous. Check out this exchange: “How much is a gallon of milk?” asks Wesley. “I don’t know…you’re lactose intolerant.” Don’t expect Noel Coward from this mess.
The story claims to examine the gap between rich and poor, but it fails to make any social commentary worth noting. Instead, “Good Deeds” is a bland transformational fairy tale filled with clichés.
Phylicia Rashad is so cold in her role that when she cries in one scene I half expected crystals of ice to form on her cheeks.
Newton slides by on her looks. She’s given nothing else to do except mouth poorly-written dialogue. Brother Wayne also has one of the most unintentionally funny breakdowns in the history of cinema.
Only Perry as Wesley escapes with his dignity somewhat intact. His banal dialogue is just as painful to endure, but his gentle giant approach is appealing. Less appealing, however, is his carefully manicured bear and Tom of Finland motorcycle outfit, but those are the least of this movie’s problems.
Ultimately, “Good Deeds” is what I call a “Seatbelt Movie.” This film so bad you’ll need a seatbelt to keep you from walking out halfway through it.
“Madea’s Witness Protection” is a movie so awful the distributor sent around an embargo notice forbidding critics to speak about the movie until the day AFTER its release. The sternly worded letter included any comments we might make in print, on-line, via text, or even in public places (they cite elevators, restaurants, and restrooms, “as these conversations may be overheard.”). Also outlawed is any disclosure to family members or close friends.
I think that pretty much says it all about this movie.
The story of a nebbishy New York accountant (Eugene Levy, who, to his credit is trying his hardest to squeeze laughs out of this dreck) accused of masterminding a Ponzi scheme and hidden with his family in Madea’s (Tyler Perry) home is the first time in my life I have ever wished a film came with a laugh track so I might have some cue as to when I was supposed to giggle, because I certainly couldn’t figure it out by watching the movie.
Directed by the Auteur of Awful Tyler Perry, who also wrote and directed, “Madea’s Witness Protection” once again shows us his Maddeningly Witless Predilection for making insufferable movies.
