Broken bond
5
Boyhood
The November Man The end of summer—that miserable time when Hollywood runs out of interesting tent pole movies and starts farting garbage out of its fat ass. Case in point: The November Man, a truly awful movie with Pierce Brosnan headlining. This movie gets a big theatrical release while being the sort of thing most TV executives by would look at and say, “Hey, ya know what? I Bob Grimm don’t want to air that rote piece of shit, even if it does have the former James Bond guy in it. bgrimm@ newsre view.c om It’s not good enough for TV, let alone theaters. Let’s just rerun The Wizard of Oz or America’s Got Talent again. Now … blow me!” Brosnan stars as Devereaux, a former CIA guy who winds up in places like Russia shooting people like nobody’s business and getting himself mixed up in their politics. For starters, there’s no way any American would get away with the crazy crap this guy does in this film. He’d get squashed like a bug the second he stepped out of his hotel room.
1
"Blah. James Blah."
1 Poor
2 Fair
3 Good
4
The film is rife with spy movie clichés. Devereaux has a wife and child who create “complications,” he has a former trainee he shepherded (Luke Bracey) on his trail, along with a couple of CIA heads of questionable character (Will Patton and Bill Smitrovich) messing with him. Yes, there is also the mysterious damsel in distress (Olga Kurylenko) that Devereaux must protect while dealing with his own serious drinking problem. It’s your basic “Who’s the real bad guy?” film, with everybody doing something relatively nasty at one time or another to keep things confusing. Brosnan’s character offs a lot of people, and even cuts an innocent woman’s femoral artery to make a dramatic point.
Very Good
5
2
The Giver
In a post-apocalyptic society, humans are being drugged into a state where they feel no emotion, are completely submissive and see no colors. When they hit their late teens, they are assigned their job for the rest of their life. Everybody’s equal, there is no war, all aspects of life are predestined. Lois Lowry’s novel had an interesting premise, but Phillip Noyce’s film simply feels and looks wrong. For starters, it comes off as a rip-off of Pleasantville, with the film slowly changing from black and white to color, while elements of the dystopian society come off like a dated Disney ride. As for the casting, it’s good to see the likes of Jeff Bridges and Meryl Streep on hand in pivotal roles, but the young leads (Brenton Thwaites and Odeya Rush) seem like they are overreaching. Taylor Swift shows up for a couple of minutes in a cameo, a cameo that is being marketed as a starring role and is mighty misleading for her fan base. Bridges is at least interesting as an old wise man storing all memories of past societies in his head. He’s tasked with passing his memories on to young Jonas (Thwaites), as if that isn’t going to cause some sort of problem. Noyce gives us some pretty pictures and a halfway decent cast, and basically doesn’t know what to do with it.
5
Guardians of the Galaxy
This is a goofy, dazzling, often hilarious convergence of inspired nuttiness. You’ll probably hear comparisons to the original Star Wars, The Fifth Element and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, and all of those comparisons would be plausible. It’s a blessedly new and crazy direction for the Marvel universe, and director James Gunn (Super, Slither) has taken a huge step towards the A-list. Also taking a giant leap toward the upper echelon of Hollywood royalty is Chris Pratt, who mixes great charm, rugged action hero bravado and premium comic timing as Peter Quill, a.k.a. Star-Lord. After a prologue that shows the Earthly origins of his character, Pratt sets the tone for the movie during the opening credits, grooving to his cassette-playing Sony Walkman on an alien planet and using squirrelly little critters as stand-in microphones. After unknowingly stealing a relic that could have the power to take down the entire universe, Quill finds himself in serious trouble. Events lead to his joining forces with a genetically enhanced Raccoon named Rocket (voice of Bradley Cooper), a gigantic tree person thing named Groot (voice of Vin Diesel), an angry, muscle-bound alien named Drax (Dave Bautista) and an ass-kicking green woman named Gamora (Zoe Saldana). Together, they become the Guardians of the Galaxy, an unlikely troupe of mischievous outcasts that plays like the Avengers meets the Marx Brothers. The cast, buoyed by a spirited script co-written by Gunn, keeps things zippy and always funny. Visually, the movie is a tremendous feat of special and makeup effects.
1
Let’s Be Cops
A couple of 30-something buddies (Jake Johnson, Damon Wayans, Jr.), bored with their humdrum lives, dress up as cops for a masquerade party and discover that things are pretty cool when people think you are the law. So they take the masquerade beyond the party
excellent
22 | RN&R |
Incidentally, that woman’s sole purpose is to provide the movie with a sex scene for Bracey. She shows up, gets naked, and then gets the femoral artery severed. Then she goes bye-bye. The way the screenwriters get her character into bed with Bracey is that her cat always winds up in his apartment. Being that his apartment’s door is always closed, her cat always getting in there is the result of some serious stalker behavior that the movie never really addresses. Bracey never says, “Say, your cat is always in my apartment, which means you had to open my door and put it there, unless your cat is a ghost cat that can pass through doors, which would be disturbing. I’m in the CIA, so I’m going to shoot you now because you are a freak, and I’m allergic to cats. Time to disappear!” She’s hot, so she gets away with it. Devereaux and company blow things up like crazy, shoot each other in the streets of Moscow and Belgrade, with no interruption from local authorities. This stuff is going down in public, and nobody with a Russian accent shows up and says, “This nonsense stops now. Go home imperialist pigs. Go home to your Sylvester Stallones, fancy mini phones and diet colas!” Nope, just a bunch of Americans having their way in territories that would surely skin them alive for their behavior. Director Roger Donaldson has had a strange career. The man should’ve been banned from anything to do with movies for making Cocktail back in 1988, and yet he continues to get work. He’s actually responsible for another suck-ass Brosnan flick, the miserable volcano epic Dante’s Peak. Somewhere in the midst of turning out all this crap, he also managed to make the very good The World’s Fastest Indian and Thirteen Days, so go figure. You would think that with the resources given to them, the Hollywood movie machine would be able to give us at least one quality film per week for an option at theaters. Nope, the well has already run dry this summer, and we will probably have to wait it out until October to see something really good. Ω
A lot can go wrong when you film a movie on and off for more than 12 years with the cast aging naturally. Cast members could die, the director could lose his drive and quit, etc. Writer-director Richard Linklater’s cinematic undertaking doesn’t have the ring of experimental or stunt filmmaking about it. It’s just a great looking, terrifically acted, tremendously moving film. It’s an amazing thing to see young Mason (Ellar Coltrane, who we first see set to the joyous strains of Coldplay’s “Yellow” on the soundtrack) go from a wide-eyed 5-year-old boy staring at the sky to an 18-year-old college student dealing with girls and big life decisions. It’s equally fascinating to watch Ethan Hawke, playing Mason’s father, go from Training Day Hawke to The Purge Hawke in the course of three hours. We also see Linklater’s daughter Lorelei playing Samantha, Mason’s sister, and Patricia Arquette as Mom, putting in her best performance since she graced the screen as Alabama in True Romance. All of the performers go through beautiful and awkward stages, aging before our eyes without the aid of special effects makeup. This is a movie that will only be made once. Nobody will ever pull anything like this off again. Linklater has made a permanent, monumental mark on cinematic history.
SEPTEMBER 4, 2014
and start chasing criminals and busting perps. Wayans, Jr., is the spitting image of his dad in every way, and it feels like this is a movie starring his dad after he’s time traveled from the past into the present for the shoot. Johnson, who has been making a name for himself in smart indie comedies (Safety Not Guaranteed, Drinking Buddies) tries to go big time with this vehicle, and fails miserably. The premise is insulting—not to mention a little dangerous—and it’s delivered with stale humor and bad performances all around. Director and co-writer Luke Greenfield (The Girl Next Door) has a made a movie more ugly than funny, and makes Johnson and Wayans, Jr., two funny guys, look like amateurs.
3
Lucy
What starts out as a potentially great movie winds up being a merely good one in the end. Scarlett Johansson stars as the title character, an American living in Taiwan who gets mixed up with the wrong people and winds up not only a drug mule, but a drug mule with a highly experimental drug placed inside her lower stomach. When the drugs start to leak, Lucy winds up using her brain to full capacity, not only resulting in her ability to control her body but also the forces around her. Luc Besson directs with his usual visual competence, and Johansson is great in the title role. The problem keeping the film from greatness is that it feels as if it’s going to some great place, and then suddenly ends at 89 minutes. Granted, it’s a good 89 minutes, but I was left feeling a bit unfulfilled. Morgan Freeman shows up as a scientist who knows a lot about brains, while Min-sik Choi (the original Oldboy) plays a true bastard of a bad guy. Surely, the premise is total bullshit, but the resultant mayhem is fun bullshit at that. I just wish Besson had a more complete story to tell.
2
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For
Robert Rodriguez returns to the world of Sin City and comes up with nothing in the way of advancement. It’s a batch of shorts based on the musings of Frank Miller, and not one of them offers anything better than what the original film provided. It’s a mostly tedious, worthless film from a director who seems to be running out of original ideas. Much of the cast returns, including Mickey Rourke and Bruce Willis, even though their characters died in the first movie. In the case of Rourke, his Marv segments are prequels, based on graphic novels that took place before his character got the electric chair. As for Willis, think The Sixth Sense. It’s a whole lot of people driving around a lot in a black and white film doing those deliberately paced, film noir voiceovers. What was once visually breathtaking has become visually blah—sort of like Mel Gibson—and none of the stories that comprise A Dame to Kill For merit interest. The film plays like a batch of outtakes from the first movie slapped together and put on display nearly a decade later. It’s also the second time this year that Eva Green has given a spectacular villainous performance in a film adapted from a Miller graphic novel that totally sucks around her (the first one being 300: Rise of an Empire). Rodriguez doesn’t have any films in major states of development for the future. Perhaps this is a good thing.
2
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Legions of Michael Bay haters have been jumping all over this Turtles reboot before it even hit the screen. It’s actually not a Michael Bay film; he only served as producer on this one. Jonathan Liebesman (Wrath of the Titans, Battle Los Angeles) is the director here, and he’s put something together that is far more coherent than the latest Bay-helmed Transformers movie. This is not to say that the movie is any good, because it actually isn’t, but it is markedly better than most of Bay’s output. Megan Fox plays April, a wannabe reporter who stumbles upon a vigilante force protecting Manhattan from an evil terrorist group. The vigilantes turn out to be the infamous turtles. The turtles, the result of scientific experiments, were raised in the sewers by a rat, and now they are ready to rise above the street surface and kick some ass. The film has some good moments, and the turtles eat some pizza and get some laughs. Fox is a bit of a bore in the central human role, Will Arnett is virtually wasted as her cameraman, and I’m sick and tired of William Fichtner playing bad guys. The special effects are OK, but the story offers nothing special. A sequel is already being prepared. A director with a better sense of wonder, and a better sense of humor, could do the franchise well.
