By John Campb ell
TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION After an overnight flight from Tokyo to the Gold Coast, I approached this with little haste but confident at least that its noise level would not encourage me to drift into the deep sleep that my head longed for. Michael Bay has directed all four of the Transformers series, dating back to 2007, and he is really good at what he does, ie, mega thrash-trash sci-fi. Showing no taste for experimentation or even mild variation, Bay has more or less made the same movie over and over, and the latest incarnation differs from its predecessors only in its overdue change of cast. Matey Mark Wahlberg, as Cade Yaeger, a Texan grease monkey, has taken over from the intensely irritating Shia LeBeouf as the indestructible Everyman protagonist, while a rather pouty Nicola Peltz, as his daughter Tessa, has joined the party to fill the time-honoured role of the Helpless Blonde. As far as story goes, it is at first complicated, with the transformers (cars that turn into giant warrior robots) being in two factions – those that are on the side of humans opposed to the megalomaniacs who have a tendency to reduce cities like Chicago, Beijing and Hong Kong to rubble. The US government, represented by Kelsey Grammer, has been in cahoots with the high-tech industrialist Stanley Tucci in an effort to ‘clone’ the aliens and, as the government always does in these situations, it has become the oppressor of the people it is meant to save (or something like that). Amir Mokri’s robust, vibrantly coloured cinematography, if tending to be over-reliant on the extreme angle, is a constant pleasure and, to give credit where it’s due, the CGI is astonishing – a chase through and over the gleaming towers and grungy tenements of Honkers is thrilling. Tucci, as you’d expect, provides moments of understated humour and Bingbing Li, as the Chinese agent Su Yueming, is inscrutably sexy in black. The concluding scene, however, suggests that the extinction referred to in the title cannot, alas, be taken literally.
BLENDED I have liked Drew Barrymore ever since I saw her as the little girl in ET, but I can’t stand the monstrous ego and knuckledragging ‘comedy’ of Adam Sandler. His CV of lousy movies is second to none, so the depths to which he might sink in his latest disposable Hollywood rom-com was always going to depend on whether the sweet Barrymore could keep it afloat. She can’t.
28 July 1, 2014 The Byron Shire Echo
They were thrown together with only mildly disastrous consequences in The Wedding Singer and Fifty First Dates, but the odds firmed in favour of this being yet another dud when I saw the name of director Frank Coraci, whose collaborations with Sandler and Kevin James have given dross a bad name. The setup is as old as the hills. Jim and Lauren, both single parents, meet on a blind date at Hooters – such blatant product placement should be enough to give the game away.
The date goes pear-shaped and, you wouldn’t dream about it … they meet up again when they are on holiday with their kids in South Africa. Obvious is too subtle a word to describe the bellclanging certainty with which Jim and Lauren’s inevitable falling for each other is laid out before us. The scenery, a pleasant distraction, is of the eye-candy variety and the general tone of what is an execrable, deliberately unsophisticated script is more in keeping with the Stone Age. Sandler’s view of women appears to have been heavily influenced by the Taliban, and how he gets away with the demeaning racial stereotyping that defiles this crock is beyond me. Unfortunately, the dispiriting truth of the matter is that there is an audience that is regularly amused by it. Ordinarily I prefer not to quote other reviewers, but the New York Times's AO Scott hits the nail on the head, viz: ‘Most of Blended has the look and pacing of a three-camera sitcom filmed by a bunch of eighth-graders and conceived by their less-bright classmates’. What he said.
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HEALING The opening sequence in writer/director Craig Monahan’s unheralded gem Healing, of an eagle in pursuit of a hawk, is breathtakingly fast and tense. When the mighty raptor is entangled in barbed wire, it is collected by the inmates of a prison farm and, with other damaged birds, nursed back to health in an aviary constructed for the purpose. Viktor (Don Hany), an Iranian, will be its chief minder. The obvious metaphor, in the title and circumstances of the men’s captivity, is beautifully dealt with in a script that creates mounting tension without resort to mawkish sentimentality or thrill-seeking violence – it is subtle in a way that has become all too uncommon. Performances are great – Hany, whom we know from TV, gives to Viktor an embittered stubbornness and inner turmoil that easily elicits empathy, the ever reliable Hugo Weaving is stoic but likeable as Officer Perry, while Mark Leonard Winter’s Shane, the weedy but rat-cunning stoner, delivers lines of deliciously un-PC humour. Lifting it to greater heights, the music of David Hirschfelder, so perfectly withheld until exactly the right moments for maximum effect, makes poetry with Oscar winner Andrew Lesnie’s cinematography. Perhaps the real star of the show, however, is Yasmine – a wedge-tailed eagle, just like the ones we see soaring on the thermals of our own skies. Releasing her into the wild, Viktor tells her, ‘All you seek, is you’. As in real life, the perfect ending might not always be what you anticipated, for, as Bob Dylan sang all those years ago, ‘are birds free from the chains of the skyways?’ The greatest learning is gifted to us when we’re able to cope with the hardest truths. This is by far the best movie on in town, one that will let your heart take flight. Go see it.
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TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION (M) (No Free Tix) Tue 1, Wed 2: 11.45 (3D), 3:00, 6.15 (3D), 8:45pm Thu 3-Tue 8: 1:20, 6:15, 9:00pm Wed 9: 1.20, 9.00pm 22 JUMP STREET (MA15+) Tue 1, Wed 2: 2:20, 6:50, 9:20pm Thu 3-Tue 8: 9:00, 4:35, 9:30pm Wed 9: 4.35pm THE TRIP TO ITALY (M) Tue 1, Wed 2: 2:05pm, 6:30pm Thu 3-Tue 8: 4:05pm DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES Wed 9: 9:00am, 4:05, 6:40, 9:30pm All sessions are correct at the time of publication. Current session times at: www.palacecinemas.com.au
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