Guy Pearce goes into low Earth orbit to get his cool back in “Lockout,” a silly sci-fi B-picture made fun by his star turn in the lead role.
It’s “Escape from New York” in space, with Pearce channeling Kurt Russell brawny bravado as Snow, a disgraced CIA agent sent to rescue the president’s daughter who is caught up in a convict’s revolt in the M.S. One space prison.
“Life of Pi,” Yann Martel’s fantastical folk parable about faith and spirituality makes the journey to the big screen more or less intact, a meditative Ang Lee survival-at-sea adventure with many of the same virtues and shortcomings of the novel.
“Her and I have this witty banter thing,” single-mom Kim (Krysten Ritter) blurts out to her date as a way of explaining a little verbal snit-fit she’s shared with gal-pal Deena (Kate Bosworth. “It’s nothing serious.”
There’s fact and fiction in that bit from the preciously titled single-mom rom-com “L!fe Happens.”
No, the banter isn’t very witty. But yes, this is “nothing serious.”
The leading man’s too short, barely suggesting the height that his contemporaries said made him “tower o’er other men.” And his voice, researched and accurate as it may be, is not the Abe Lincoln that’s been inside our head for generations.
The actress they cast to play his wife is decades older than the woman she’s portraying.
U.S. Grant is a sharp-dressed redhead, and like Lincoln himself, played by a Brit.
We don’t get the whole of his life and career, the hardscrabble childhood, the hard-won election, or even much of the civil war that election led to.
But Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” is an elegiac turn from a filmmaker we thought was out of new tricks, a vivid, melancholy and meditative look at one of America’s most revered presidents. Daniel Day-Lewis gives us a very human flesh-and-blood Lincoln, weighed down by events but never at a loss for a funny story, rightfully lionized by history, but flawed and willing to take political shortcuts to secure his place in history.
Chatting with Brian Fritz this AM on the Open Mike radio show on 740 The Game, and we’ll talk up the new Matt Damon/John Krasinski/Hal Holbrooke Rosemarie DeWitt drama about fracking — “Promised Land,” and a couple of vintage films playing this weekend at the Enzian, “Django” and “Rashomon.”
So you didn’t go to film school. Maybe you’re a little put-off by film snobs. If you can’t beat’em, the best way to join’em is to see the essentials — the greatest films ever made, the ones that serious and semi-serious film buffs have to have seen to be in the movie conversation.
Maitland’s Enzian Theater is a lot cheaper than film school. If you hit the art cinema on Saturday=, January 12, at noon, you can see “Rashomon,” by Akira Kurosawa, the film that launched his career in the West and one of the greatest movies ever made.
Not so much a samurai picture as a samuri-era whodunnit, the plot and theme were borrowed in scores of other films — different versions of a story, which is the truth?
Toshiro Mifune stars.
The Enzian is showing the original “Django,” a spaghetti Western starring Franco Nero as a pistolero who drags a coffin with him from town to town, stirring up trouble. In the movie, he sets the KKK against Mexican banditos and plays both sides — kind of caught in the middle — kind of manipulating things, “Yojimbo” style.
Classic? Maybe not. But funky and it inspired Tarantino, who uses that theme song.
Midnight Friday and Saturday. Worth a look.
As anybody who’s watched The Discovery Channel knows, if you’re looking for moonshine, the place to start is in the foothills of south central and southwest Virginia. As the new movie “Lawless” makes clear, ‘shine was never a passing fancy amongv the folk there. It’s a tradition that goes back generations.
“Lawless” is based on Matt Bondurant’s “The Wettest County in the World,” a historical novel spun out of Bondurant’s Franklin County, Virginia moonshiner-ancestors. Bondurant whipped up a war between the local off-the-books distillers and the Prohibition Era Chicago mob, which aimed to take over the lucrative illegal liquor trade, from production to distribution.
The Bondurants are led by Forrest (Tom Hardy), the tough-minded World War I vet who formed the family legend that the Bondurants are “indestructible.” His wild-eyed brother Howard (Jason Clarke) seems to second that notion.
It’s only younger brother Jack (Shia LaBeouf) who seems vulnerable. He reads the newspapers and idolizes gangsters. He has a taste for fancy clothes and fancy convertible roadsters. It’s just that he’s not tough enough to get them.
So he sets out to change that. He’ll hook up with a mobster (Gary Oldman) laying low nearby. He’ll make his own deals.
And when Forrest is put out of commission by one of his many battles with the other unsavories, Jack has his chance.
A dapper, sadistic Chicago mobster (Guy Pearce) has arrived to help the Real Mob take control of the business, with the aid of the local prosecutor. Charlie Rakes wears bow ties and gloves and a little too much cologne. But don’t call him “Nancy.” He takes such aspersions personally.
A dance hall girl (Jessica Chastain) has taken a job in the Bondurants’ Black Water Station roadhouse, and she’s taken a shine to Forrest. And a local Mennonite preacher’s daughter (Mia Wasikowska) has poor Jack trying to figure out how to be a rich, hard-drinking crook and still get her attention.
The proper ingredients are here to cook up a fine backwoods liquor war tale. The archetypes are broad and obvious, the violence is shocking, unflinching and in your face. Amazingly, people are sliced and shot to beat the band, but 1930s era Franklin County emergency rooms were up to the challenge. Mostly.
But Aussie director John Hillcoat (“The Road”) and rocker turned screenwriter Nick Cave deliver a movie that never finds the right tone. It’s alternately grim and bemused. Too many tough guys tell other tough guys “LOOK at me” too many times. There are too many characters to juggle for any of them to truly get their due. Oldman has a glorified cameo, LaBeouf was the bigger star when production began and turning Hardy into the lead in the editing booth doesn’t quite work out.
By Pixar’s own standards, “Cars,” the scenic animated amble on the backroads of the Roadrunner’s desert southwest, was the company’s worst film. Laugh-starved, lacking much in the line of action, it was a triumph of toy sales and product tie-in (NASCAR) over motion picture.
“Cars 2″ over-compensates for those “Get off the fast track” mid-life crisis musings, but does so in an often funny and action-packed “James Bond goes Racing” comedy. They turn more of the story over to the comic relief, the dopey tow truck Tow Mater, and get a sillier, more kid-friendly movie out of it. Yes, “Cars 2″ is better than “Cars.”
“Dangerous Minds,” “Stand and Deliver,” “Lean on Me” — movies about heroic teachers changing students’ lives, and all movies shown in Miss Elizabeth Halsey’s seventh grade English class at John Adams Middle School.
