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“Making love on camera is such hard work,” says actress Julie Christie, “that there is no time for the libido to take over.”
Maybe so, but some good-old-fashioned romance does manage to blossom on movie sets. Just ask Brad Pitt or Goldie Hawn or Ben Affleck. Each of them met their current paramour while making a movie.
Let’s take a look at some of the greatest Hollywood on-set romances… READ THE WHOLE THING HERE!
Hancock is unlike any other superhero. The Hulk, Batman and Daredevil all have serious personal issues but none have the PR problems that plague Hancock. When stopping crime and thwarting the bad guys the Los Angeles based superhero usually does more harm than good—the price tag for one rescue reaches 9 million dollars after he rips up streets, and damages buildings. He’s hated by the very people he tries to protect, and on top of it all suffers from alcoholism, anger issues, amnesia and very low self esteem. Dr. Phil would have a field day with this guy.
He’s anything but mild mannered. When we first meet Hancock (Will Smith) he’s passed out drunk on a bus shelter bench while a major crime takes place nearby. Awoken by a child who asks him to help, he sneers, rubs his unshaven face and tries to wrap his alcohol addled brain around the situation. After an orgy of destruction that sees the bad guys deposited atop the Capitol Records building, Hancock is criticized by everyone from politicians to television talking head Nancy Grace who says that he has no regard for anyone other than himself. When he saves the life of a big-hearted PR flack (Jason Bateman) Hancock is set on the road to career rehabilitation.
That’s just the first forty-five minutes. It’s jokey, action packed and essentially what you see in the trailer. It’s in the second half that Hancock deepens, becoming one of the very few superhero origin stories not to have originated in a comic book that actually works. I can’t give you any details without giving away some major spoilers and ruining the fun, but rest assured, director Peter Berg makes sure there is a good action to story ratio as the movie takes several unexpected turns.
In the lead role Will Smith is up to the task of adapting to the film’s ever changing demands, effortlessly shifting gears from the light tone established early on to the darker mid section and the mythic romance of the coda. He draws on his natural charisma and charm, infusing Hancock with highlights from his past films. There’s a dash of Men in Black’s wonky humor, a glimpse of his action hero of Independence Day, and a taste of Enemy of the State’s troubled paranoiac. Best of all there is absolutely nothing that echoes Wild Wild West.
Jason Bateman makes the best of a thankless role that could easily have been overpowered by Smith’s flashier part. Ditto Charlize Theron who takes the role of the love interest and makes it something memorable.
My major complaint is with director Berg. Buy a steady cam! Or at least a tripod! His love of wobbly cam work reaches new heights here. If you suffer from motion sickness I recommend popping a couple of Gravols before the screening.
The script, originally titled Tonight, He Comes, made the rounds in Hollywood for a decade before star Smith and director Berg came on board, bringing this strange and surprising story to the screen. An unusual mix of humor, romance and dark subject matter Hancock stands apart from other superhero movies by daring to be different.
Richard Matheson’s 1954 novella I Am Legend is no stranger to screen adaptations. Originally filmed in 1964 as Last Man on Earth it starred Vincent Price as Dr. Robert Morgan, the only survivor of a world-wide epidemic who is being hounded by zombified plague victims. A few years later it was updated with flared trousers and afro hairstyles as The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston’s hairy chest and clenched teeth. Now the sci fi classic is being given a third life—it’s a tri-make—with Will Smith as government virologist Robert Neville, in what is certainly the loudest version of the story ever committed to celluloid.
The film begins, however, with quiet contemplation. Smith and his trusty dog Sam are alone in New York City, now an overgrown shell of a city where deer run wild in Times Square. Their daylight hours are spent searching for food, hitting golf balls into the Hudson and setting up a welcome wagon on NY’s South Street Seaport for any stray survivors. So far none have shown up.
At night though, things get a bit more complicated.
Once the sun goes down pasty-faced plague-infected zombies come out to play, and they like to play rough. For three years Neville has carefully avoided contact with the beasties; he’ll occasionally trapping one to try out a newly concocted antidote but that’s it.
Soon though his luck runs out and his quiet life is upended when he stays out after sundown and the ghouls attack. The confrontation temporarily unhinges him and he decides on a suicide mission to kill himself and as many of the zombies as possible.
His death wish is thwarted by a woman (Alice Braga) and her young son (Charlie Tahan) who appear out of nowhere and save him from a grisly death at the hands (and mouths) of the hungry flesh eaters. He should be happy to see the pair, but after three years of solitude his social skills have deteriorated somewhat. She tries to convince him to join her on a trip to a “safe” community in Vermont. He’s convinced there are no other survivors, let alone a community of them living in the mountains and tries to get her to stay put in his heavily fortified hide out.
Unfortunately for them the creatures of the night have discovered their hiding place. At this point the movie literally ends with a bang. After a smart and stylish first half it’s as if the filmmakers decided to pay homage to one of Will Smith’s older films, only this time it’s called Bad Boys III: When Angry Zombies Attack. Bullets fly, mayhem ensues and many actors in whiteface scream into the camera. It’s loud and chaotic and seems like it belongs in another movie.
Luckily, however, I Am Legend starts strong with powerful images of a deserted New York City. The tranquility of the once vibrant city is beautifully captured, but when that stillness is shattered, as it is when a herd of deer bolt through deserted streets, it is breathtaking in its effectiveness.
Without a word—after a short prologue the opening ten minutes or so are largely dialogue free—director Francis Lawrence has created a visual world in which something has obviously gone horribly wrong—its solid show me-don’t-tell-me filmmaking. Couple that with amazing set design and visual effects and the film rates as first class eye candy.
Will Smith, along with a buffer-than-buff physique, also brings some chops to the role. We first meet him in full movie star swagger mode, but as the movie progresses he convincingly portrays Neville’s gradually deteriorating mental state. It’s not going to earn him an Oscar nod, but it’s good work.
Unfortunately not everything else works as well. Neville’s habit of talking to mannequins is silly and off putting. It’s something out of a b-grade sci fi flick, not a smart slice of speculative fiction. Overall screenwriter Akiva Goldsman does a good job of updating the material, but references to Bob Marley’s personal philosophies seem a bit staler than the three year old can of Spam Neville finds lying around.
Then there is the ending. While some might find the action-packed finale exciting and climatic, I found it typical, easy and not nearly as interesting as the first half of the film.
I Am Legend is a good sci fi movie but with a bit of tweaking at the end it could have been a great one.
I was six when Apollo 11 happened and was incredibly bored by the whole thing. I couldn’t understand why the shows I liked were being preempted for moon launch coverage. The Cape Canaveral takeoff plays a big part in “MIB3” and I felt like I was six again. Not filled with wonder but wishing I was watching something else.
As the third installment opens Boris the Animal (Jemaine Clement), a notorious intergalactic serial killer is 40 years into a life sentence. He’s locked away in the only place that will hold him, a super-high security prison on the moon. After a daring escape he plans a full-scale invasion of earth, but first he wants revenge on the man who put him in jail: MIB agent K (Tommy Lee Jones). The only way to thwart Boris’s evil plan is for Agent J (Will Smith) to go back in time to 1969 and stop Boris.
Once every decade or so Will Smith makes a big-budget mistake. He’s the biggest movie star in the world and his charisma is usually enough to save almost any movie he chooses to do. But every now and again he makes a “Wild Wild West” or, this season, “MIB3.” Smith’s got a good track record, but you can’t always hit it out of the park.
There is some good stuff here. If this acting thing doesn’t work out for Brolin he does have a future as a Tommy Lee Jones impersonator. He could do weddings and Bar Mitzvahs and make a fortune. He’s that good.
I also enjoyed Smith literally hurtling through time, Bill Hader’s take on Andy Warhol, the idea that Mick Jagger is an alien sent to the planet to breed with Earth women, Michael Stuhlbarg’s unusual performance as an alien psychic and the battle in the Chinese restaurant. All of these elements were cool, but despite a good bad guy, some cool creatures and Brolin the movie didn’t have the charm or the energy of the first two films.
The magic of the first film is gone. Even the fun stuff in this film seems to evaporate as soon the next scene starts and don’t even get me started about the ending. The attempt at adding in some heart to what should be an oversized sci-fi romp fails miserably.
“Men in Black 3” brings something to the franchise that was missing from the great first film and not even present in the second, lamentable entry in the series. Unfortunately that element is blandness.
In most cases sequels are the work of the devil. It is rare that the second kick at the can compare favourably with the original, although several films have managed to muster up enough inventiveness to keep things interesting. The Bride of Frankenstein and The Godfather II are examples of movies that equal or surpass their namesakes. Sadly MIB II is no Godfather II, heck, it’s barely Police Academy II. The first film was one of the funniest, original and entertaining comedies to come down the pike in quite a while, which makes the failure of the second one so much more profound. MIB II seems tired – almost as tired as Will Smith’s lyrics to the movie’s theme song – and vaguely familiar, like we’ve seen it all before, only better. It’s the dumb younger brother who can’t seem to measure up to his older, brighter and better looking sibling. Smith and Jones fit their roles like finely tailored suits, but aren’t given much to do. Even the jokes feel dated. When Frank the talking dog cranks the radio and sings along to Who Let the Dogs Out I cracked a smile, but wasn’t that same gag in a car commercial about two years ago? The special effects are good just not that interesting. Only Smith’s elaborate fight scene against a cloned flying bad guy is truly inspired. Keep your thirteen dollars locked away in your wallet, and rent the original Men In Black on video instead.
Call it “Will Power” or “Strength of Will,” however you slice it Will Smith has had a remarkable career. He’s had number one hit records and a long running sitcom; he can flip flop from violent action movies to romantic comedies, from drama to animated cartoons. The only entertainment field he hasn’t conquered is porno, and I’m sure it’s not because he wouldn’t be good at it, he’s probably just too modest. This Christmas season sees him hand in his strongest acting performance since Ali.
In The Pursuit of Happyness Smith plays Chris Gardner, a down-at-the-heels family man trying desperately to keep his family together in early 80s San Francisco. A get rich quick scheme isn’t going well and his wife is tired of living hand to mouth. A chance encounter with a successful stock trader and his skill with a Rubik’s Cube become his ticket to a different world—but first he must intern at a brokerage house for six months with no pay. In short order his wife leaves him, he fights for the custody of his son, he gets evicted, thrown in jail and his one form of income, these bulky bone density gizmos he tries to sell door to door, gets stolen.
The situation is bleak and only Gardner’s sheer strength of will prevents him from going over the edge. I hate to say it but so far this story sounds like the typical inspirational “Based on a True Story” twaddle that clogs up the multiplexes this time of year but there is a difference and that difference is the abovementioned Mr. Smith.
The movie has a tendency towards the maudlin, the easy sentiment, but Smith’s lead performance elevates the entire film. The inherent sense of decency he brings to the role of a man bloodied but not beaten by life shines through. He has the exhausted posture of a person who is fighting disappointment, doing his best not to throw in the towel and give up. In this performance is a certain kind of pride and dignity that audiences will relate to.
The Pursuit of Happyness is a crowd-pleaser that succeeds because of one very good performance.
In his last film Will Smith played an alien with an anger management problem. In the new movie Seven Pounds he once again plays a creature that doesn’t exist in real life—an IRS tax collector with a conscience.
Seven Pounds has one of the most opaque trailers I’ve seen in a long time. Those looking for clues as to what the movie is about won’t find them in the promo clip. Is it a comedy or a drama? A love story or a thriller? Well, it’s all of those things—excepting comedy; this is one of the most low key, minor chord films of the year—and I’m loathe to expand on the trailer for fear of giving away the film’s big secret. I can tell you that Smith plays a troubled man determined to change the lives of seven carefully chosen strangers. To find out why he’s so eager to help, and how he helps, you’ll have to plunk down twelve bucks at the box office. I’ll try and let you know if it’s worth the money.
Seven Pounds re-teams Smith with Gabriele Muccino, the director of The Pursuit of Happyness. Muccino is the guy Smith turns to when he wants to do something different, something that stretches his well known, and well loved comic screen persona. This time out they have dialed Smith way back. Fans of the Men in Black Will Smith beware; he plays Ben Thomas as a man crushed by the weight of his emotions, a walking zombie who has given up on life. When a smile does cross his lips it looks insincere, as though he has to try a little too hard to curl his lips upwards. It’s a far cry from the Fresh Prince.
Smith pulls it off, but the film takes a little too long to get where it is going. In the first hour Muccino doesn’t give much away, keeping the reasons for Thomas’s behavior close to the chest. We are given hints as to what is going on and the odd snippet of a flashback suggests a tragedy in Thomas’s past, but we aren’t given any firm details.
This could have been an effective set-up for a thriller, but Smith plays Thomas in such a low key way—he spends a lot of time sitting in silence in a dowdy motel room waiting for the phone to ring—the audience doesn’t have any reason to really care what happens to him. Smith is a charming actor and can usually sell even the thinnest of premises, but here his minimalist character—at one point he says calling himself unremarkable would be a step up—doesn’t connect.
Seven Pounds is an interesting premise with some nice supporting performances—Rosario Dawson is lovely as the ailing Emily and Woody Harrelson, although he is given little to do, makes the most of his short time on screen—but lacks the heart to be truly memorable.
Will Smith is the world’s biggest movie star. Nobody can touch him. Cruise jumped the couch, Clooney’s movies don’t make any money and Hanks appears to be in semi-retirement. Only Johnny Depp comes close and he is a distant second.
Newsweek called him the most powerful actor on the planet and Vulture coined the term “omni-star” to describe the kind of worldwide fame he wields. But how did he become the biggest star of the Millennium—or should that be Willennium? Boffo hit movies have padded out his bank account, but there are other intangibles that set him apart.
1.) Smith owns the camera. Even in his first starring role on the sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, where you could see him mouthing the other actor’s lines, he stood out. What he lacked in technique, he made up in charisma.
2.). Smith works hard. “I’m above average in talent,” he said in 1996, “but where I think I excel is psychotic drive. All I need is for somebody to say I can’t do something and this crazy switch inside me makes me attack whatever I’m doing. Psychotic drive is where I excel over people that are probably more naturally gifted.”
3.) Smith is the most bankable star on the planet and he’s even more popular abroad than he is at home. Big Willie’s movies have taken home $6 billion worldwide. That’s billion with a “b.” He was the first actor to have eight consecutive movies break the $100 million mark at the box office and even his worst reviewed film, the steampunk western Wild Wild West, grossed more than $200 million worldwide.
4.) Smith can do it all. As an action hero he’s annihilated more on screen aliens than almost any other a-lister. Then he proved he could play comedy and kill aliens in Men in Black. In Hitch he was the romantic lead—“Life is not the amount of breaths you take,” he said in the movie, “it’s the moments that take your breath away.”—while later voicing a giant fish in the animated Shark’s Tale. When he gets serious, as he did in Ali and The Pursuit of Happyness, he earns Oscar nominations. (He hasn’t taken home an Academy Award yet, but he and D.J. Jazzy Jeff won the first ever Grammy in the Rap category in 1988.) He’s even played a golf caddy in The Legend of Bagger Vance.
5.) Smith is an empire builder. He and wife Jada Pinkett Smith have passed down their magical DNA to a future generation of actors and singers. Daughter Willow made her acting debut in 2007 in the film I Am Legend and won a Young Artist Award for her work in Kit Kittredge: An American Girl but it is as a singer that she is best known. Her earworm Whip My Hair was a big hit that Entertainment Weekly called “Lil Mama meets Rihanna.” Son Jaden Smith is a rapper, but as one writer said, has proven “that he’s no mere beneficiary of dynastic largesse” in roles like The Karate Kid remake and the upcoming After Earth.
It seems 2013 is the year Hollywood took Stephen Hawking, the world’s leading theoretical physicist, to heart. “The human race shouldn’t have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet,” he says, suggesting that if we don’t change our ways we “might end up like Venus, at 250 degrees centigrade and raining sulphuric acid.”
No fewer than three upcoming movies portray the Earth meeting an untimely end.
After Earth sees Will and Jaden Smith star as a father and son who crash land on Earth after an alien war has left the planet dead and abandoned. A Seth Rogen comedy aptly titled This is the End sees a cast of young A-listers — like Jay Baruchel, James Franco, Paul Rudd and Emma Watson — at a Hollywood party when the world suddenly ends.
This weekend Tom Cruise brings us Oblivion, another story about a scorched Earth, which Cruise’s character, a drone maintenance man, discovers the planet might not be completely abandoned.
It’s the end of the world as we know it, at least according to Hawking and Hollywood, but it isn’t the first time the world has ended, on screen anyway.
Coming a just half a dozen years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Five goes down in the almanac as the first sci-fi nuclear war film. It’s set in a world destroyed by nuclear holocaust. The only five Americans to survive include a pregnant woman and her unborn baby, a neo-Nazi, an African-American man and a bank clerk. The story of subsistence and racial intolerance is an influential movie — Roger Corman and several others have borrowed the basic plot line — but its director, Arch Oboler, was a radio producer and the film is as visually interesting as you would guess a movie made by a sound engineer to be.
The Bed Sitting Room is a British take on Five, only with jokes instead of Oboler’s earnest message. Starring Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, it’s set in a post-nuclear-holocaust London following the Second World War. The war lasted only two minutes and 28 seconds before the bomb was dropped, leaving this strange group of survivors, including a civilian who is next in line for the throne, to explore their devastated city.
So far we’ve talked about serious and strange end of the world movies, but how about a silly one? That would be Savage Planet, an abandoned Earth movie that sees the planet taken over by giant killer space bears!
Richard’s new Cineplex.com column is now up and running!
