I'm not sure if I am becoming less patient or just more selective, but I have noticed lately that I am unwilling to watch more than a few movies after the first twenty or so minutes. Our internet scanning culture has made us more in charge of what we watch. We are even watching more, not less, something of which I am all too aware. I try not to leave the boob tube on too much, so I guess when I am going to watch something, usually a "grown-up" movie that I couldn't watch in theaters or when the kid is around, I want to make it count. I have also noticed that these movies that I have rejected are all pretty negative in tone. I just don't have time for that these days.
Prisoners - This movie, with Jake Gyllenhaal and Hugh Jackman got pretty good reviews I think, when it first came out, so I tried to give it a go. I had hesitated for a while because of the subject matter - the disappearance and possible murder of two young girls on Thanksgiving, but I turned it off because it frankly bored the heck out of me. I didn't care for any of the characters, and Jackman's dad seemed one note and off the rails from the get go. I didn't care to find out what happened to anyone.
Prisoners - Nope and nope.
Seeking a Friend for the End of the World - I am a little tired of Steve Carell's sad-sack characters, but I liked the idea of a sort of buddy adventure, although a tad apocalyptic, with Keira Knightley. But the characters didn't really gel with me, and after a minor character offed himself in a seemingly gratuitous and extremely unfunny scene, this black comedy was crossed off my continue-to-watch list.
The Heat - I have tried, I have really tried to watch Melissa McCarthy in movies. I loved her on Gilmore Girls, but I am really getting sick and tired of her blowsy, boorish big-screen characters. I found her foul-mouthed cop in The Heat an unbearable bore that even Sandra Bullock's presence couldn't temper. I never made it past the first twenty minutes of Identity Thief either. I'm not a fan of the recent spate of gross-out comedies, so although I will admit that her character was funny in Bridesmaids, I really didn't care for the film. I am hoping that she doesn't spoil St. Vincent, because I am still looking forward to checking that one out.
I have been a casual watcher of the X-Men films through the years. I really liked the first one, which came out in 2000, directed by Bryan Singer, and starring and launching the film career of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. Wolverine was the anchor for a story that helped introduce to non-comic book fans like myself a host of interesting characters: Professor X (Patrick Stewart), Magneto (Ian McKellen), Mystique (Rebecca Romijn), Storm (Halle Berry), Rogue (Anna Paquin), etc. The idea of "mutants" who have special powers that set them apart from humans resonated - as do most outsider, misfit tales. And let's face it, a lot of what the mutants could do was pretty cool. Professor X can read minds, Magneto can control anything made of metal, Mystique can shape-shift into anyone at any time, Wolverine is seemingly invulnerable and he has those pesky adamantine steel claws.
The Beast (Nicholas Hoult), Professor X (James McAvoy), and Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) in front of Cerebro
The second and third films of that first set were not quite as good, although X2 (2003) featured Alan Cumming as Nightcrawler, who was super-cool and fun to watch. What came as a real surprise after the rather dismal X3 (2006) was a really fun and decent reboot, X-Men: First Class, in 2011. All of the main characters were brought back in an origins story that told how Professor X (James McAvoy) and Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender) and friends came to be. So what would be better than another story based on that timeline with that cast? Well, how about mixing both together, with Jackman's ever-popular Wolverine (who in the meantime had starred in two off-shoots of his own, 2009's X-Men Origins: Wolverine and 2013's The Wolverine) as an anchor?
Something that must have sounded crazy but brilliant (money-wise) on paper turned out to be crazy but fun to watch at the theater. For X-Men: Days of Future Past original X-Men director Bryan Singer came back, and it was great to see a lot of the old gang back together again, especially the recent internet-sensational bromance of Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen. The story starts, like so many sci-fi/fantasy epics do these days, with a post-apocalyptic future. Creepy shape-shifting robots called Sentinels are flying around the world, charged with hunting down and killing off all the mutants. Professor X and a few key mutants (recognizable to comic book geeks, but unfortunately not really introduced properly to the rest of us) are holed up and trying to come up with a plan to stop this war on mutants before they all perish. It's a shame we don't really get to see who's who, because Ellen Page seems to have a fairly big job to do, being able to send Wolverine back in time, but only in the credits or online did I identify her as a mutant named Kitty Pryde. I did recognize Iceman (Shawn Ashmore), and his ice-making ability, from the earlier films.
Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage, above) learns a valuable lesson: don't mess with Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence)
But back to the plot. The assignment? Stop Mystique from killing Sentinel inventor Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage) in 1973, which seems to be the jump-start event of their current perilous situation. And who better to go back in time than Logan, or as we know him, Wolverine, with his whole invulnerable situation.
The X-Men and their movies have always had a sense of humor, so things get off to a good start by plonking the surly Wolverine in the middle of brightly-colored, toe-tapping '70s background soundtrack. I couldn't help but be instantly reminded of Austin Powers's similar journey in his Goldmember film, and wished that some of the time-bending humor was able to be sustained until the oh-so-serious film finish. As usual, a lot of the exploding buildings and robots leave one on the cold (and bored) side, including an inexplicable and tedious CGI sequence of Michael Fassbender lifting and moving a baseball stadium. Doesn't (young) Magneto have better ways to terrorize? But there are some pretty wonderful things happening too, especially concerning a young and super-fast moving mutant (Evan Peters) enlisted by Wolverine to help break Magneto out of the Pentagon. I checked online later and learned he in named Quicksilver. All I know is his character was great and I'm sure will be back for the next one, X-Men: Apocalypse, which is due in 2016 and supposed to take place in the 1980s. Cue up the Prince, punk, and new wave soundtrack in 3, 2, 1 ...
Quicksilver (Evan Peters) steals every scene he is in, super-speed or not
Folks who lived through the '70s or love the decade will be rewarded with clever cultural reference points. The Kennedy assassination - did Magneto curve the bullet trajectory? Richard Nixon's White House. Mystique pulls off a mutant rescue-op in war-torn Saigon. Fans of the entire series will be happy to catch a glimpse of some of their favorite mutants (and villains) from earlier films. Peter Dinklage's villain was interesting - not your typical comic book mad scientist. Surely he's a bad guy for experimenting on mutants, but does he really want to wipe them all out? Or maybe rather to become one? Maybe a comic book fan could help answer that question.
Although I found it hard to connect with the dystopian future scenes, and I suspect, like most movie-goers, enjoyed the time travel to the past far more entertaining, X-Men: Days of Future Past did keep its focus primarily on the characters, the X-Men, and the appealing actors who portray them. And that's who we really all came to see, no matter what decade.
I have to admit that I stopped keeping up with Woody Allen's films on a regular basis in the mid- '90s. Deconstructing Harry was probably the last one I saw in a movie theater until the recent Midnight in Paris. I have seen a few of his more recent output — Match Point is a definite highlight, a modern morality play similar in theme to his earlier, very dark Crimes and Misdemeanors. Allen seems to be drawn to filming moral dilemmas (as well as repeating himself) as evidenced by two of his British-set films that I caught up with recently — Scoop and Cassandra's Dream. Both films use murder to move along their plots, but Allen isn't worried about the body count — he wants the audience to know how he and his characters feel about the inevitability of death.
Woody Allen, Scarlett Johansson and Hugh Jackman in Scoop
Scoop tries to work as an old-school Allen comedy. It features his most recent muse, Scarlett Johansson, as Sondra, a student reporter who starts getting tips from a deceased crack reporter, Joe Strombel (Ian McShane), after volunteering in two-bit magician Sid's (Woody Allen) on-stage show. Strombel, even after death, is wild to break the story of the Tarot Card Killer, and he urges Sondra to follow his leads, which implicate handsome aristocrat Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman). Sondra and Sid both start to see Strombel and team up to investigate Lyman. But Lyman soon charms the pants off of Sondra and she is falling fast. Is she falling in love with a serial killer? Does she even care? Scoop doesn't really work. Johannsen and Jackman have absolutely no chemistry. It's pretty unbelievable that he would be charmed, even moderately interested, in this gawkey, dopey girl. Allen is mildly amusing, and McShane is criminally underused. There is something too serious, too stilted to the pacing. The film and the comedy never take off. Maybe Allen couldn't shake off the mood of his previous film, Match Point.
Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman), "I just can't get the vision of you in your swimsuit out of my head."
Sondra Pransky (Scarlett Johansson), "Oh I'm glad you liked it! It was marked down!"
Sid Waterman (Woody Allen), "The man is a liar and a murderer, and I say that with all due respect."
Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor in Cassandra's Dream
Allen made the much more interesting Cassandra's Dream right after Scoop, and returned to a more serious-toned investigation of murder. Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell play two brothers, Ian and Terry, who are faced with a dilemma. Terry (Farrell) owes a lot of money and is being threatened with harm unless he can come up with it. Enter their Uncle Howard (Tom Wilkinson), who will be happy to lend them the money and solve all their problems, if they can just do him one little favor — eliminate a pesky business rival. The brothers' different reactions to whether or not to do the crime and the resulting aftershock make up the rest of the movie. Both McGregor and Farrell are great — they seem to switch back and forth between who is the "good" brother and who is the "bad" one, leaving themselves and the audience hopelessly muddled in a gray area. The story itself isn't much; it's how the characters react to the choices (or lack of choices) they face.
Ian and Terry's Father (John Benfield), "Like the poet said: 'The only ship certain to come in has black sails.'"
Ian (Ewan McGregor), "He was right about one thing. Once you cross the line, there's no going back."
Supporting players in Cassandra's Dream include a lot of familiar, talented faces: John Benfield, Hayley Atwell, Sally Hawkins, and Jim Carter. Blink and you might miss some of them. Allen definitely likes the ensemble theater approach.
Watching these two films made me think about Woody Allen and actors. He likes to populate his films with the most talented and current actors around, but they frequently operate as position holders in his filmic chess games. Maybe he has never really been overly interested in them. The exceptions come when the actor has such a strong personality or film identity that they are able to transcend or avoid Allen-itis. Some examples of successful avoiders and victims of Allen-itis:
Midnight in Paris — Owen Wilson and Marion Cotillard are appealing people and we connect to their acting personas. Rachel McAdams fares not as well, playing a classic Allen demanding girlfriend, her character and dialogue is caught in the Allen-itis loop.
Marion Cotillard and Owen Wilson in Midnight in Paris
Celebrity — A complete mess. Watching (and listening to) Kenneth Branagh try to sound like Woody Allen is a painful experience.
Everyone Says I Love You — although almost all of the actors suffer from Allen-itis in this film, although it somehow manages to be less obnoxious because of the music (numbers performed by Edward Norton and Goldie Hawn especially) and light tone. Tim Roth's brilliant portrayal of an ex-con who temporarily sweeps Drew Barrymore off her feet transcends Allen-itis and the rest of the movie.
Husbands and Wives — one of Woody's best, thanks to Judy Davis, who is able to brilliantly channel Allen's need for a neurotic character into her own special, specific rhythms. Davis has worked with Woody many times (To Rome with Love, Celebrity, Deconstructing Harry, Husbands and Wives, Alice).
His movies with Mia Farrow — The Purple Rose of Cairo, Broadway Danny Rose, Hannah and Her Sisters, etc. Farrow is such a wonderful, human actress that even when he had her try to approximate his patter she was able to transcend Allen-itis, especially charmingly in The Purple Rose of Cairo.
His movies with Diane Keaton — Annie Hall, Sleeper, Manhattan, etc. Keaton has such a distinct personality that it is likely that she helped shape Allen's oeuvre in the '70s more than vice-versa. In fact maybe Allen-itis is really and truly Keaton-itis ...
"I never work with actors, I just hire them. It's the truth. You know, I hire terrific people. Who have I worked with over the years: Meryl Streep, Diane Keaton, Judy Davis, Helen Hunt, Tracey Ullman, Goldie Hawn, Michael Caine, Kenneth Branagh. I mean I've worked with these wonderful people who were great before I knew them. They come in, they're great. They do their part great. I don't speak to them much. I have very little to say to them. And they go. And everybody thinks that I'm handling the actors. But I'm not. I'm saying, you know "Change the script. Do what you want. Wear want you want. Walk where you want". You know, and they're saying "Oh, thank you." — An interview with Woody Allen by Lucy Cooper
"I never try to talk to them. There's no point. You have Anthony Hopkins. What am I going to say to him? I hire them to get out of their way. They've made great movie before me, they'll make great movies after me, and I just don't want to mess them up." — Directors Tell the Story: Master the Craft of Television and Film Directing By Bethany Rooney, Mary Lou Belli
“Woody doesn’t direct at all,” he told The Orange County Register. “Seriously, he says that all the time. He doesn’t know how to direct. He says he hires you to do your job, and then he fires you if you can’t. On Purple Rose of Cairo, he started with Michael Keaton, who worked for three weeks, and then he let him go. He couldn’t use any of it. Then Eric Roberts came in, and worked for 10 days, and then Woody let him go, too. A third actor came in, but I can’t remember who that was. And, finally, he got Jeff Daniels.”
“I had a different brother in Crimes and Misdemeanors for the first three days. Woody knows what he wants, but he doesn’t direct. He lets you completely on your own. He doesn’t want to talk about the movie. He’ll talk about the Knicks, about hockey, about anything. If the circus is in town, he’ll tell you how much he hates clowns. Anything to not talk about directing.” — Martin Landau on Working with Woody Allen and the Trouble with Writers: “They have all the characters speaking the same way” DailyActor
Maybe he doth protest too much? A Woody Allen movie is fun for the film buff, as one is sure to see some great and popular actors. Allen always works with top talent. He's an artist who knows what he wants. Like all artists, not every work is a masterpiece, but when he gets it right, he gets it very right, as evidenced by more recent films in his oeuvre, Midnight in Paris, Match Point and Cassandra's Dream. For a man who knocks out one film a year, it's pretty hard to argue with his method with actors.
We saw Rise of the Guardians over the holiday weekend. It was beautifully animated, more than a little frenetic, but intriguing. The kid loved it. I enjoyed most of it. Like the equally super-charged The Avengers, I find fight scenes in movies to always be a little too fast-paced and blurry and a little too long in length. I was going to say in animated as well as live-action movies, but lets face it, with so much CGI these days most fight scenes in the movies are 90% computer animated anyway.
Jack Frost just wants to have fun
The story is a standard good vs. evil battle. The very not-nice Pitch (Jude Law), or the Boogeyman, as most have come to call him, is tired of being shunned and ignored and is plotting to turn every human's, and especially children's, dreams into nightmares. The Guardians are a group of beings whose express mission is to protect children. Santa Claus (Alec Baldwin), The Tooth Fairy (Isla Fisher), the Easter Bunny (Hugh Jackman), and The Sandman have come together to decide how to deal with Pitch when the Man in the Moon chooses a new Guardian, Jack Frost (Chris Pine). Jack is not only reluctant to join the crew, but is unsure of who he is and his real purpose. Maybe The Guardians aren't so different from those other super heroes, The Avengers, after all.
Kids will connect to the lonely Jack and love the other Guardians, especially boisterous Santa, his goofy elves, and the guys who apparently do the real work at the North Pole, the Yeti. Parents and guardians will like the slightly darker tone of the story and its imagery. Santa has "Naughty" tattooed on one forearm and "Nice" on the other. The Easter Bunny lives in a warren with monolithic sculptural eggs. The Tooth Fairy is unnaturally knowledgeable about Jack's and everyone's flossing habits. The voice actors for the most part have a lot of fun with their characters and their enthusiasm carries through to the audience. Pine does a nice job as Jack. Baldwin sports a Russian accent for his boisterous Santa. Hugh Jackman gets most of the laughs with his down-under kangaroo — I mean bunny. Jude Law is appropriately menacing as Pitch. Isla Fisher is fine as the Tooth Fairy, but her voice isn't very remarkable or memorable — it's not likely that the audience would recognize her the way they might have if the character was voiced by someone with a more distinctive voice like Reese Witherspoon.
The all-embracing Santa and his sidekicks, the Yeti
After watching Rise of the Guardians I was interested enough to find out a little bit more about it and its author, William Joyce. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I am already familiar with quite a bit of Joyce's work, and am now eager to see and read more. He is the co-director of the lovely animated and Oscar-winning short, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. He is one of the founders of Louisiana-based Moonbot Studios, which produced Lessmore. He has also written several books which have been adapted into films, including Meet the Robinsons and Robots. The upcoming Epic (which we are really looking forward to seeing) is based on his book The Leaf Men.
Coincidentally I had picked up the first book this summer in the Guardians series at a library book sale, Nicholas St. North and the Battle of the Nightmare King. The kid and I had not gotten around to reading it yet. After seeing Rise of the Guardians I zipped through it in two afternoons, deciding to read it first before handing it over to my daughter. We'll probably end up reading it together. It shares some similarities with the film, as Pitch is still the main villain, but it is more of an origin story for Santa Claus, or the bandit Nicholas St. North as he was once known. There are hints of everything from The Wizard of Oz to Harry Potter in the book, but kids should enjoy it and its heroine, Katherine, a young girl who joins Nicholas and the wizard Ombric on an adventure. Joyce has followed it up with E. Aster Bunnymund and the Warrior Eggs at the Earth's Core!which also looks like a lot of fun.
The Easter Bunny can be tough when he wants to be
I'm happy to be getting to see more work from Joyce and his partners in crime (in the case of Rise of the Guardians, Guillermo del Toro). And I like how he talks and thinks about projects:
The idea of developing a feature, as just a feature, seems kind of limiting. You could develop it as a book, and develop it as an app, and get its — see how it’s working, and see if the designs are appealing. And get it out there, get a sense of people’s response to it, and not just stay cloaked behind a veil of secrecy. Back in the day, Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, a lot of those — and Chaplin — they would take their ideas, and take them on the stage first. They’d go and play, evolve those ideas, see how the audience responded to what they were working on, and get a sense of how the story, ideas, the gags and things would work, before they go into production on a film. We’re finding the equivalent of that, you know, now with apps and other technologies. It’s kind of exciting.
DreamWorks's animated films just keep geting better and better looking, and Rise of the Guardians takes viewers through environments that are visual knock-outs. It's a fun movie, if a bit frenetically paced. There are likely to be a sequel or two. Hopefully the filmmakers will slow things down enough for the audience to take in all the pretty pictures.
Sources: A113 Animation, "Interview: William Joyce, Moonbot Studios Co-Founder and Co-Director of Morris Lessmore"
Charlie (Hugh Jackman) is a loser, a has-been boxer who never was. In Real Steel, set in the not-too-distant future of 2020, boxing has changed - robots have replaced humans in the matches, so that they can become even more violent, and Charlie is leading a hard-scrabble life of trying to get bouts for his robot at sixth-rate venues like state fairs and underground arenas.
Real Steel shouldn't be as entertaining as it is. There is a nod in the credits to a Richard Matheson story, "Steel," as being an inspiration for the film, but anyone can see from the previews that it is a live-action version of the '60s toy, Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots. Strangely, that ends up being a good thing. For the same reason that the old TV commercial for the toy is indelibly etched in so many of our minds, there is a bit of a nostalgic thrill whenever the robots appear in the movie. You could never get me to see a Transformers film, but my 7-year old was able to persuade me to see Real Steel. Maybe Hugh Jackman had something to do with getting me to the theater, too.
Charlie left his girlfriend 11 years ago, relinquishing all rights to their son, Max. The mother has now died and Charlie has made a deal with Max's aunt and her rich husband that he will watch him — just for the summer — for a fee — and then surrender custody. Real Steel borrows heavily from many classic boxing movies like Rocky and The Champ. It's also got the "boy and his dog" appeal of a film like ET (Steven Spielberg is an executive producer of Real Steel) and of course, The Iron Giant. The places where Charlie and his son Max (Dakota Goyo) take Atom to fight have a Mad Max/Thunderdome feel about them. Kids won't really get how far down through 2020's social stratas Charlie keeps descending, and how Max and Atom help him back up, step by step, but their parents and chaperones will. Real Steel keeps Charlie gritty and grimy. Its twin protagonists, Charlie and Atom, must crawl up through the mud — sometimes literally.
All the scenes with the robots and Charlie and Max are great. The combinations of real robots and animated ones are seamless. As Jackman has been quoted, "It's amazing that in this world where I'm used to a green screen and a stick with a tennis ball on it [to give an actor a visual target of where a CGI element will be inserted later] that Spielberg actually said to Shawn [Levy, the director], 'You should really have real elements where you can.' ... Basically, if they're not walking or fighting, that's a real robot." Sugar Ray Leonard is also credited as an advisor to the fighting sequences, which helps with the feeling of authenticity.
Real Steel features a subplot of the estranged father and son getting to know one another. The movie doesn't tie up all the emotional loose ends in the tidy, unrealistic knot of Charlie embracing fatherhood, but we do feel that Max will get to spend some more time with Charlie and Atom in the future, after their summer adventure.
For the most part, Real Steel is just a lot of fun. Jackman is always physically impressive, but he has some nice, quieter scenes with both Max and his current on-off girlfriend, played by Evangeline Lilly. There are some over-the-top annoying product placements, but they are amusingly presented — after we watch Max guzzle prominently placed can after can of Dr. Pepper, Charlie scowls and criticizes the kid, who is bouncing off the walls from the caffeine — "You drank all that soda?" There's something very real about Charlie and Atom and Real Steel that keeps it appealing.
tries to work as an old-school Allen comedy. It features his most recent muse, Scarlett Johansson, as Sondra, a student reporter who starts getting tips from a deceased crack reporter, Joe Strombel (Ian McShane), after volunteering in two-bit magician Sid's (Woody Allen) on-stage show. Strombel, even after death, is wild to break the story of the Tarot Card Killer, and he urges Sondra to follow his leads, which implicate handsome aristocrat Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman). Sondra and Sid both start to see Strombel and team up to investigate Lyman. But Lyman soon charms the pants off of Sondra and she is falling fast. Is she falling in love with a serial killer? Does she even care? Scoop doesn't really work. Johannsen and Jackman have absolutely no chemistry. It's pretty unbelievable that he would be charmed, even moderately interested, in this gawkey, dopey girl. Allen is mildly amusing, and McShane is criminally underused. There is something too serious, too stilted to the pacing. The film and the comedy never take off. Maybe Allen couldn't shake off the mood of his previous film, Match Point.
