Film

Catch fire

After a slow start, Only the Brave becomes a solid tribute to the Granite Mountain Hotshots, who lost 19 men battling the massive Yarnell Hill Fire in 2013.

The Hotshots were an elite Prescott, Arizona, crew led by veteran firefighter Eric Marsh, played here by Josh Brolin. Brolin’s performance ranks among his best, showing us a man presiding over his crew like a father to his sons.

Marsh takes a risk on Brendan McDonough (Miles Teller), a former drug user seeking redemption and a decent living to help provide for his newborn daughter. The always reliable Teller matches Brolin’s acting triumph every step of the way, making both Marsh and McDonough fully fleshed, complicated and ultimately likeable characters. The two seem right at home with each other on screen.

Director Joseph Kosinski (Oblivion, Tron: Legacy) takes a solid step beyond his prior sci-fi missteps to provide a movie that is technically sound, emotionally powerful, and just a little hokey and overlong in spots. The movie is never bad, but it does drone a bit during some of the melodramatic build up. It never goes wrong when the team is on the job, fighting fires. It just gets a little sleepy when folks are sitting around talking or bickering.

There are numerous fires we see the team contain throughout the film, giving the sense that these guys were in full command of their trade. Of course, nature is a sometimes awesome and awful beast, and when that wind shifts and sends the Yarnell blaze toward the unsuspecting men, you get a sense of how random and crazy the event was. These guys were the best of the best, and even they couldn’t predict what was going to happen.

Kosinski has assembled a cast that includes Brolin’s True Grit cast mate Jeff Bridges as Duane Steinbrink, Marsh’s supervisor. You can’t go wrong with Bridges, who delivers good humor, at one point busts out his guitar, and ultimately provides the movie with solid emotional punch during the finale. Taylor Kitsch gets some good laughs as troublemaker Christopher MacKenzie, who gripes about handing over his new Vans to trainee Brendan, but winds up becoming his best friend over time.

As Amanda Marsh, Eric’s caring wife who takes care of injured horses when Eric’s away, Jennifer Connelly gets a mighty chance to shine. Like Eric, Amanda has a rough past, and problems bubble to the surface during some of his quick visits between fires. Connelly does well with material that would seem a little played out in the hands of others. She adds a little angst to the mix with Amanda, and it works.

Knowing nothing about the art of firefighting, I can’t vouch for the authenticity of this film, but it sure does seem and feel authentic. The Hotshots do controlled burns to protect landscapes, save historical trees, and rescue neighborhoods.

Even though the movie that precedes it is a little long-winded, and the fate of the men in the film is well known, the depiction of the Yarnell Fire still blindsides you. Brolin’s Marsh figures it’s just an easily contained fire, and he will be home for dinner. Kosinski portrays the shock of the whole situation effectively. The men were working what seemed to be a situation entirely under control.

The final sequences in the movie are so well done, you’ll feel kind of bad for groaning during the film’s more lumbering parts. By the time Kosinski shows the real-life firefighters alongside their Hollywood counterparts, the film had driven a major message and homage to these guys successfully and memorably.

Parts of the country are going through some of their worst fire seasons in modern history. It’s not surprising that this film didn’t have a big opening weekend. It’s a movie that will gain an audience over time. Ω

“is that Bigfoot? i’m pretty sure that’s Bigfoot.”

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41922 For the second time in just a month, Netflix scores again on the Stephen King front with this horrific ghost story starring Thomas Jane, no stranger to King territory having starred in Frank Darabont’s The Mist. Jane plays Wilfred James, a farmer who kills his wife Arlette (Molly Parker) with the help of his lovestruck son, Henry (Dylan Schmid). Of course, Arlette has been murdered in a Stephen King movie so it goes without saying that her soul will not rest peacefully, and her corpse will be riddled with rather spirited and determined rats. Jane delivers a chilling, complicated character in Wilfred, a terrible man yet somebody we can watch for an entire movie and feel some concern for his welfare and the welfare of his misguided kid. Wilfred is one of those men who speaks through clenched teeth, and Jane simply disappears into the character. Parker doesn’t have a lot of scenes before becoming a scary spectral, but she does both the pre- and post-murder scenes well. Schmid is kind of heartbreaking as the dumb son who goes along with his dad’s dumb ideas and winds up paying the price. (Available for streaming on Netflix.)

3American Made The messed-up life of pilot Barry Seal gets a movie that’s not messed up enough in American Made, an entertaining film that plays it a little too safe. Drug cartels and Iran-Contra are played for laughs in a story that probably shouldn’t have us giggling all that much. The movie winds up being moderately enjoyable thanks to Tom Cruise sweating it out in the lead role. Director Doug Liman, who teamed with Cruise on the sci-fi masterpiece Edge of Tomorrow, rips off Catch Me if You Can, The Wolf of Wall Street, Goodfellas, Blow and many more in telling the story of the notorious TWA pilot turned pawn for the CIA. Inspired by Seal’s true story, the movie starts with him grinding out flights for TWA, smuggling the occasional box of Cuban cigars and trying to support a family that includes wife Lucy (Sarah Wright). He winds up taking a side gig for the CIA, taking reconnaissance photos, delivering arms to Central America. This eventually leads to smuggling drugs for Medellin cartel. Honestly, this story might have played better as an HBO or Netflix miniseries than a big motion picture.

4Blade Runner 2049 Ridley Scott’s original sci-fi masterpiece Blade Runner came out in 1982—35 years ago. Scott has tooled with the cut of that movie numerous times, resulting in a final cut that was released about 10 years ago. While there was a lot of monkeying—in a good way—with the original, it didn’t seem there was much thought, or chance, for an actual sequel. The original was a box-office bomb and didn’t start gaining its classic status until a decade after its release. In fact, critics beat up on it a bit. Here in 2017, we actually do get a sequel, this time directed by Denis Villeneuve, the visionary behind Enemy and Arrival. (Scott remains involved as a producer.) Harrison Ford, who has classically moaned about the original movie, has, nonetheless, returned to play blade runner Rick Deckard. A terrific Ryan Gosling steps into the starring role of K, a new blade runner tasked with “retiring” older model replicants, the synthetic humans originated by the likes of Rutger Hauer and Daryl Hannah in the original. Other than the presence of Ford in the final act of the movie, and the vision of Pan Am and Atari logos still present in the Los Angeles skyline, there’s little to make this one feel like a standard sequel. 2049 goes off on many new tangents, bending the mind when it comes to topics like artificial intelligence, what really constitutes love, and determining what is “real” in this world.

3Happy Death Day A college girl learns a few lessons about life—and not being a total ass—by reliving the day she is murdered over and over again in this mediocre movie that gets by completely on the star power of a relatively unknown actress, Jessica Rothe. Rothe plays Tree Gelbman, who wakes up in a strange dorm room on the morning of her birthday to discover she has spent the night with a bit of a dweeb in Carter Davis (Israel Broussard). She storms out of the room, ignoring phone calls from her dad and basically being nasty to everybody she encounters on her walk of shame. It’s established fairly quickly that Tree is a campus jerk and has more than a few enemies. All of those enemies, and even some of her friends, become murder suspects when Tree is stabbed to death by a mask-wearing baddie on her way to a party that evening. After her life force is snuffed out, she immediately wakes up in Carter’s bed again. She goes about the same day thinking it’s just déja vu, but when she is murdered again and wakes up in the same bed on the same day again, she figures things out. She’s living a murder mystery—Groundhog Day style. Rothe just sort of comes out of nowhere to make this movie more than a rip-off of the classic Bill Murray vehicle.

1Leatherface Once again, somebody tries to make a Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise entry to revive things and, once again, we get proof that some things are better left alone. This time, things go to prequel territory, with a silly story about how Leatherface became Leatherface. As was the case with Rob Zombies’s faulty interpretation of Halloween, in which Michael Myers got a bigger backstory, some movie monsters are best left mysterious and mostly unexplained. Much of the action here centers around an insane asylum where a teenaged Leatherface-to-be is hanging out until a riot ensues. He escapes with a hostage nurse (Vanessa Grasse), while being pursued by yet another evil Texas Chainsaw franchise lawman, this one played by Stephen Dorff. Leatherface’s mom is also looking for him, and she’s played by Lili Taylor, whose career is clearly in a downward spiral along with Dorff’s. Directors Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury throw in some gory scares and extremely gross sex scenes, but there’s nothing that puts it in a league with Tobe Hoopers’s original except for the title. (I’ll take this moment to say I’m a fan of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, also directed by Hooper and highly underrated.) This one is a dreary exercise in paint-by-numbers slasher film moviemaking, and totally lacking in fun and legitimate scares. (Available for rent on iTunes and Amazon.com during a limited theatrical release.)

5The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) Writer-director Noah Baumbach delivers his best movie yet with his latest story of family dysfunction that is yet another reminder that Adam Sandler is a knockout actor when he puts his mind to it. Sandler plays Danny, older brother to Matthew (Ben Stiller), father to Eliza (Grace Van Patten), and son of Harold (Dustin Hoffman). Danny is going through hard times, separating from his wife as Eliza prepares for college. His only option is to live with his dad and stepmom (Emma Thompson), a move that drudges up a lot of past difficulties. Matthew comes to town, looking to sell his parents’ house, much to the chagrin of Danny, and tensions grow. Yet, despite the tension, there’s a hilarious way this family communicates and, even when things get bad, their warmth and desire for better times with each other shines through. While Sandler gets some good laughs in the film (especially when he’s allowed to rage, Sandler style), it’s the quieter moments that put him in legitimate contention for an Oscar. As for frequent Baumbach collaborator Stiller, this just happens to be his best dramatic performance as well, so he qualifies as legit competition for Sandler. Hoffman, who has played father to both Sandler and Stiller before—Sandler in The Cobbler and Stiller in the Focker movies—hasn’t had a chance to shine like this in a long while. Like Gene Hackman as the unreliable patriarch in The Royal Tenenbaums, he owns his every scene. (Available on Netflix during a limited theatrical release.)