I had higher hopes for this when I first heard of “Tomorrowland.” Chatted with director Brad Bird about it, briefly, a couple of years back. A more grown up fantasy film with sci-fi elements, Disney lineage and George Clooney. This looks more like standard issue young adult wish fulfillment fantasy, at least in the teaser trailer. Not particularly Christopher Nolanish. Teen-20ish lead, Clooney omniscient narrator/seer/puppet master. “Tomorrowland” opens next May.
So here’s a big, broad academy-set satire of race relations in America, a “Do the Right Thing” meets “School Daze,” for those who speak Spike.
Could be funny. Doesn’t look subtle. Timely as all get out.
“Birdman” is Michael Keaton’s comeback, the one sure thing in what was supposed to be a Year Long Michael Keaton comeback.
That Aaron Paul race-across-America movie didn’t deliver, but “Birdman” is an Oscar nomination, possibly an Oscar win, for the former Dark Knight/Beetlejuice.
He plays a version of himself, a fictional, demented, desperate version of a guy who used to be a big deal and knows he isn’t any more. It’s a funny, revealing and brittle turn, brave and heedless of danger.
But getting an honest answer out of him about his first reaction to the script, getting an admission that he knows this is how people perceive him — downcast, bitter, irritated at the whole Superhero thing? That could be tricky. Having interviewed his touchiness before, I am wary.
But you shouldn’t be. Always looking for suggested lines of questioning. Got some ideas? Comment below, and thanks for the help.
Sometimes, the spark of a movie can come from a photograph. That’s the case with the new British comedy “Pride.” Screenwriter Stephen Beresford had already settled on telling the true story of gay activists reaching across a cultural divide to help embattled coal miners during a desperate strike in homophobic early 1980s Britain.
But then Jonathan Blake, one of the surviving activists, showed Beresford an image of one night when Blake and his friends met and partied with the crusty, culturally conservative miners in the little Welsh town where they were on strike.
“It’s a rather stunning shot,” Blake, 65, says. “All these miners and their wives, gay people, dancing all around me.And me in the middle, clapping my hands with joy!”
It was a breakthrough moment for two unlikely political allies, and it’s the money shot of “Pride.” Beresford wrote the union hall dance scene. Director Matthew Warchus and his choreographer concocted over four minutes of choreography. And the producers scored the rights to that disco anthem, “Shame, Shame Shame.”
“Jonathan has this exultant look on his face in that photo,” says Dominic West, who plays Blake in the film. “They all look like they’re having a really good time — miners, gay activists. That’s the movie, right there, that these two very disparate groups became such close friends.”
West, of “The Wire,” the new Showtime series “The Affair” and films such as “300,” took the supporting role in the film, which stars Ben Schnetzer, George Mackay, Imelda Stanton, Paddy Considine and Billy Nighy, just for this moment. It’s not every day he’s asked to dance a little disco.
“I’m not a very good dancer. I had a good two or three months training. And on the day, with this four minute long scene, all this choreography, I had to be toweled off between takes. Nine shirts. Just exhausting!”
It paid off.
“When West, playing an actor hitherto soured on political activism, jumps on a union-hall table and lets his freak flag fly to Shirley & Company’s disco anthem ‘Shame, Shame, Shame,'”critic Geoff Pevere of Toronto’s Globe & Mail says, “all resistance melts.”
West got to meet Blake, a stage actor and one of the first people in Britain diagnosed HIV-positive, and found the key to playing him in that meeting.
“This remarkable and courageous man has had this HIV death sentence hanging over him ever since those days, the early ’80s,” West marvels. “I got a sense of what it’s like to have that hanging over you. So, in the film he starts in despair. He’s lost any purpose in his life. But what he and his fellow activists try and do for the miners gives him a renewed reason to go on.”
The activists struggle to get miners to accept their help. They endure abuse and rebuffs. Then, walls come down. And the sour and somewhat cynical Jonathan finally cuts loose — dancing on the table.
“One wants to make sure that when he breaks out of this despair, he does it in some considerable style,” West laughs.
Blake says that, no, that’s not literally his life being portrayed on the screen. But he doesn’t disapprove.
“Oh, I would LOVED to have been the Jonathan that Dominic played. Witty and warm. Life of the party. And a great dancer.”
And for his part, West is happy to have been a part of a film that tells part of a story he has known all his life. West, 45, grew up in Sheffield, home to the headquarters of Britain’s miner’s union, and remembers that ’84-85 strike. In playing Jonathan Blake, gay man who befriends previously homophobic miners, he tried to keep in mind the message of “Pride.”
“Our director said, “Proximity destroys prejudice.” Only through ignorance, not knowing them, can you fear them. You meet somebody, you lose your fear of them and your prejudice. That’s a nice thought to take to work every day, making a movie. I hope viewers of the film take it with them, too.”
We only hear about them if there’s video or audio — coaches, mostly — a Bobby Knight, grabbing and choking players, a Mike Rice, hurling basketballs and the foulest abuse at a recruit.
We hear the rationalizations, shake our heads and watch the court of public opinion take them down.
Terrence Fletcher is Bobby Knight with a baton, the tyrant of the jazz band program at New York’s prestigious Shaffer Conservatory. A mercurial bully, he charms and flatters only so he can tear down those he charms and flatters — trumpeters and ‘bones players, bassists and drummers — with the ugliest vulgarity and cruelty you could imagine.
And playing him, deftly delivering the bipolar changes in mood, tone and volume, the great character actor J.K. Simmons will give you “Whiplash.”
“Whiplash” is about that band bully and his latest target, a drummer so driven to be among the jazz greats that he will play until the blood spatters from his raw hands all over his drum kit. Miles Teller, of “The Spectacular Now,” establishes his drumming bonafides in an opening practice scene. He can play. And for the rest of this film, Teller holds his own with Simmons in a jaw-dropping battle of wills, a musical descent into madness, all in pursuit of perfection.
” You know who I am?” is Fletcher’s introduction to Andrew (Teller). Fletcher skulks outside rehearsal rooms for the underclass bands, his menacing shadow glimpsed through the frosted glass on the door.
“You know I’m looking for players?”
Andrew grins and nods. But there’s an edge to the meeting, an insincerity to the flattery and the threat of what is to come in the way Fletcher tricks and tests the kid, hitting him with “Then why did you stop playing?” Followed by “Did I TELL you to start playing?”
Expanded from a short film by screenwriter (“Grand Piano”) turned writer-director Damien Chazelle, “Whiplash” gives us sweaty, nerve-wracking rehearsals of classic big band charts — “Caravan,” for instance — and “Whiplash,” the title tune.
All the young players are on edge. A lost set of charts makes this highly strung bassist or that fearful drummer flip out. Because they know the manipulative, volcanic Fletcher will flip out. Andrew is slow to catch on that he’s been brought in as an alternate to scare and intimidate the lead drummer. Fletcher kicks people out, just to send a message. He conducts instant, mid-rehearsal witch hunts to figure out who is out of tune. He throws things, and not lightweight things either.
And he is toughest on drummers. Before “Whiplash” is through, he will have worn out three of them, shouting out which bar he wants to hear, cutting them off a couple of beats into it — “Double time swing. Faster. FASTER.” He insults them, time and again, with a quiet, disappointed “NOT my tempo.”
Andrew’s failed-writer/wife-left-him dad (Paul Reiser) is supportive. But that will be used against him. The kid tries for normality, pursuing the cute candy counter girl (Melissa Benoist) at the Manhattan revival house movie theater he frequents with his movie-buff dad. How will she fit in with the sado-masochistic thing going on every day at rehearsal?
Chazelle ups the tempo and the tension of scenes with quick cuts and extreme close-ups — reeds wetted, spit valves emptied, drumheads tuned. He never lets any musician give comfort or advice any other musician. This is as paranoid and cutthroat a world as the movies have ever seen, and Andrew, the “squeaker” (new guy) is just another bone for Fletcher to chew.
The script and Simmons, known for TV’s “The Closer” and as tantrum-tossing editor J. Jonah Jameson in “Spider-Man,” make Fletcher a monster, and then look for ways of explaining him. We see a sentimental side, his genial public face. Simmons is a charmer, which is why he gets to do those folksy insurance commercials on TV. But “Whiplash” teaches us never to trust him again.
It’s a great performance, and Teller, in a performance just as intense, gives us the faintest hope that this kid will grow the callouses to withstand the beatdowns. If his craving for approval doesn’t drive him mad first.
MPAA Rating: R for strong language including some sexual references
Cast: Miles Teller, J.K. Simmons, Paul Reiser, Melissa Benoist
Credits: Written and directed by Damien Chazelle. A Sony Classics release.
Running time: 1:46
Whatever else children take from Judith Viorst’s delightful “Alexander and the Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day,” the sly subtext this picture-heavy book is how exhausting and sometimes misguided the optimism of the eternally optimistic can be.
Parents who smile all the time, who make light of the weight of the world kids carry around sometimes? Annoying, especially to those kids.
That’s what the film version kicks around around the block, and rather amusingly, a few times. Life is going to trip you up. A lot. Smiling about everything may help. But getting up after every knock-down is the only sure cure.
Alexander (Ed Oxenbould) is the wimpy kid, here, whose “Very Bad Day” begins with gum in his hair.
“An epic disaster?” To his 12 year-old mind, maybe. And the tumbling dominoes of disarray around him, his baby brother, would-be-actress sister (Kerris Dorsey) and prom king brother (Dylan Minnette) only add to that sense. To him.
But Mom (Jennifer Garner) has the stress of all these kids and a book marketing job where she’s expected to dazzle 24/7. Dad (Steve Carell) has been out of work for ages and has an important job interview with a video game company where everybody is half his age. Baby spit-up on his shirt is the least of his problems. Because this day is about to go straight to heck.
“Daddy wishes he could SWEAR right now!”
Alexander may worry about the birthday party nobody will come to, but the brother is about to lose a prom date (Bella Thorne) for the ages, the sister frets about being too sick for her opening night as “Peter Pan” (Burn Gorman is well-cast as the snooty teacher/director) and the parents’ days devolve into chaos quicker than you can say “Dick Van Dyke.” He’s the celebrity reader brought in for a botched book launch. Yeah, Disney pulled out all the stops here.
It’s just competent, light entertainment, no more ambitious than that. But the stuff that’s not in Viorst’s slim book for children is what gooses this kids comedy, the plot points and grown-up concerns handled with comic flair by Garner and Carell, both of whom come right up to the brink of melting down — but don’t. This is why you hire movie stars, folks. Carell wears the mayhem with a long-suffering grin that might be masking a grimace.
“You’ve got to have the bad days so that you love the good days even more.”
And it’s good to know that even “perfect” families can lose their optimism, briefly, when a day turn as terrible, horrible, no good and very bad as Alexander’s does.
MPAA Rating: PG for rude humor including some reckless behavior and language
Cast: Ed Oxenbould, Steve Carell, Jennifer Garner, Dylan Minnette, Kerris Dorsey, Bella Thorne
Credits: Directed by Miguel Arteta, screenplay by Rob Lieber, based on the Judith Viorst book. A Walt Disney release.
Running time: 1:21
So it wasn’t the rains that kept the Turks from getting their cannons to Vienna, seizing the city and ending Western Civilization in the late 15th/early 16th centuries.
It was Prince Vlad, hero of the Transylvanians, a misunderstood warrior with fangs and a taste for Turkish Type O.
That’s the premise of “Dracula Untold,” a vampire tale that attempts an origin story for “Vlad the Impaler” that takes him back to his days in service to the Turkish sultan. That’s when the hostage warrior learned to stick his enemies on a spike.
“Untold” picks up the story after the prince (Luke Evans) has returned home to rule Transylvania, paying tribute to the Turks to keep the peace. All he wants is to sleep with his comely wife (Sarah Gadon) and raise his wimpy kid. Then the sultan (Dominic Cooper) ups the tribute. Not just silver coins, but boy hostages to turn into Turkish troops. And not just boys, but Vlad’s own son (Art Parkinson).
“What ees one son,” the Turk purrs. “Eef you are VIRile, you will make plenty more.”
That sends Vlad into the bat cave on Broken Tooth Mountain. That’s where he makes his deal with the Devil, or Satan’s nearest proxy. And that’s when “Dracula Untold,” which opens badly and ends worse, gets better.
Charles Dance is the Nosferatu-garbed monster in the cave, a balding, toothy villain in the great tradition of British vampires — Christopher Lee, Gary Oldman, Michael Sheen and Kate Beckinsale among them. The moment he shows up, all shadowy menace and prophecy, “Dracula” gets interesting.
“Why spill blood, if not for the pleasure of it?” He promises Vlad “dominion over the night and stars.” What lad could resist that?
The vampire can give Vlad the strength to stick Turks on skewers. But if Vlad tastes blood himself, he’ll be lost forever. There’s a three day return limit on this vampire conversion kid.
“Dracula Untold” is a straight two-genre genre picture (vampires, sword and sorcery), well-mounted, with whirlwinds of bats and gloomy, moon-clouded nights. Some battle sequences are viewed on the reflection of a shiny sword blade. Nice touch, (director) Gary Shore. The action scenes are otherwise a blur of singing swords and blood spray. Evans, a bit bland, at least wears the cape well.
“Untold” might have been better left untold, but all things considered, not a bad genre film.
What makes it at all watchable is the self-aware humor, the moment a converted Vlad punches a rock, sees it crumble and mutters, “THAT’S useful.”
An unnamed Renfield is introduced — “Yes, master.”
And Western Civilization is saved, the Enlightenment ensured and the way paved for Bram Stoker to make this notorious prince, whose dungeon was just discovered last month, immortal — thanks to some fictional dental touches.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of warfare, vampire attacks, disturbing images, and some sensuality
Cast: Luke Evans, Dominic Cooper, Sarah Gadon. Charles Dance
Credits: Directed by Gary Shore, screenplay by Matt Sazama, Burk Sharpless. A Universal release.
Running time: 1:32
Bill Murray has his most adorable film role ever in “St. Vincent,” playing a cranky and embittered old drunk who becomes a father figure to the little kid who moves in next door.
It takes every ounce of his disaffected cool, all of his misanthropic hipster persona to tamp down our intense need to go “Awww” at this little comedy’s crowd-pleasing cuteness. But Murray and writer-director Theodore Melfi play us like a music box, manipulating and charming our socks off even as the Vincent for whom the film is named curses, gambles, drinks and cheats — all in front of an impressionable 10-year old.
Vincent MacKenna lives in a run-down Brooklyn row house, sharing his sardines with a Persian cat, driving his battered, 30 year old K-Car convertible to Belmont race track where he loses what little cash he has on hand.
He’s short-changing the testy Russian hooker he frequents (Naomi Watts). He’s in arrears to his bookie (Terrence Howard). And then he gets new neighbors.
Maggie — Melissa McCarthy — is going through a divorce. Oliver, her son (Jaeden Lieberher) is a quiet kid facing the hazing/bullying rituals of his new Catholic school. And Vincent isn’t interested.
Naturally, he ends up babysitting the kid for the desperate mom whose story “I don’t want to hear.” Shockingly, he drags the kid to the track, to a bar. And as self-absorbed as Vincent is, he can’t help but notice the kid’s problems. He’s never seen Abbott and Costello movies. Are they old?
“They’re dead. That’s the oldest you can be.”
He needs to stick up for himself, fight back against bullies.
“I’m small, sir!”
“So was Hitler.”
This bonding half of the film, with every outing and life lesson set to bouncy pop rock, is so jaunty that you may find yourself waiting for a shoe to drop. Because there’s always a shoe that’s about to drop in movies like this. The pleasures of Murray’s performance overwhelm that dread and make you forget the manipulation that comes with it.
McCarthy, allowed to play someone more human than caricature, shines. Watts wears Daka the pregnant hooker’s miles and baby belly with a marvelously cynical resignation. Chris O’Dowd was born to play a hip teacher at Oliver’s school, the guy who instructs the new Jewish student about saints. A great joke? By show of hands, we’re told that almost nobody in Oliver’s new school is actually Catholic — Jews, Buddhists, Protestants, Agnostics to a one.
“I’m Catholic,” Brother Geraghty cracks. “Which is the best religion. Because we have the most rules. And the best clothes.”
But this is Murray’s vehicle, and even if he never quite sticks with an accent or convinces us of an infirmity, he is captivating, first scene to last. He dances. He sings (stay through the credits). And he charms. If he’s finally reached Walter Matthau’s golden years, it’s only fitting that “St. Vincent” be his “Bad News Bears.” No bad influence ever seemed as sweet.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic material including sexual content, alcohol and tobacco use, and for language
Cast: Bill Murray, Melissa McCarthy, Naomi Watts, Jaeden Lieberher
Credits: Written and directed by Theodore Melfi. A Weinstein Co. release.
Running time: 1:43
“The Judge” dawdles, lingers, takes sidebars and recesses — much like a celebrity trial in which TV cameras have been allowed into the courtroom.
A bloated all-star melodrama with none of the lean, mean legalese of a John Grisham adaptation, it’s a showboat’s movie cast with a lot of actors each promised “a big, cool scene.” And when those scenes of love, family, sex, illness and autism, small town life and courtroom confrontation show up, Robert Downey Jr., Robert Duvall, Vera Farmiga, Billy Bob Thornton and Vincent D’Onofrio swing for the fences.
The trouble with that is, the script has shortened these fences to Little League range.
Downey stars as Hank Palmer, hot-shot Chicago attorney to the rich and infamous. He’s “not encumbered” by the limitations of truth, honor or reputation, he admits. Which is one big reason he’s estranged from his father, a legendary small-town Indiana judge.
But when mom dies, Hank has to fly home. His little girl (Emma Tremblay, all pasted-on perkiness) wonders if grandpa’s dead, too.
“Grandpa Palmer’s dead to ME,” Hank riffs. That’s how Downey plays things these days, his antic banter has become a trademark, like Jimmy Stewart or Jack Lemon’s stammering, like Will Smith’s “Oh HELL no.” It’s a crutch.
Watch him trot it out when he reunites with his Carlinville, Indiana brothers. Autistic Dale (Jeremy Strong) and ex-jock Glen (D’Onofrio) need reminding that their ogre of an old man threw things at them.
“But he threw things at us to get our attention, NOT to draw blood,” Glen jokes. And rationalizes.
Hank cannot reconnect with the harsh, self-righteous judge (Duvall). And then the old man, who has grown forgetful, is accused of killing somebody with his car. He needs the ethically suspect wiseacre to remind him that if “You don’t talk, you walk.” Because grumpy dad is determined to use a local rube who moonlights as an antiques dealer (a goofy Dax Shepard) as his lawyer.
The case gives Hank the excuse to recall the charms of the redneck but picturesque mill town where he grew up, the ill-tempered locals (watch him mockingly size up a mob, “Sherlock Holmes” fashion) and the girl he left behind.
Vera Farmiga plays the shapely, country gal old flame, Leighton Meester is her hot-to-trot grown daughter. Yeah, they’re both eyeing the rich out-of-town attorney.
The story lurches from awkward yet funny seductions to autistic guy jokes, into death and divorce, disease, the indignities of old age and shattered dreams. Big secrets are suggested and revealed. Almost everybody has one.
The great Janusz Kominski (“Saving Private Ryan”) photographed this, and it is simply gorgeous — one immaculately framed composition after another. Even the home movie footage flashbacks (Austistic Dale hides behind an old eight millimeter silent home movie camera) are beautiful.
And some of the scenes have spark. But it’s always a showy sort of spark. Billy Bob Thornton plays a lean, feral prosecutor brought in to bring down the city slicker. Naturally, the movie makes a big deal out of his fancy folding chrome water cup. Downey is always engaging, even when he’s trying too hard. Duvall still has that “Great Santini” tantrum-tosser in him, and D’Onofrio and Farmiga are reliably real.
But the script wastes a lot our time.There’s zero tension to the courtroom scenes, and a weird illogic hanging over every abrupt lurch in tone or character behavior. Hank left 20 years ago, but graduated from high school in 1989. Downey and Farmiga are plainly in their mid-40s, D’Onofrio even older. That chronology doesn’t work in the movie for reasons that will be obvious if you see it.
Director David Dobkin (“The Change-Up”) is plainly more at home with the funny stuff, as are his under-credentialed screenwriters. If they’d edited the movie that way, the dramatic failings wouldn’t have stood out so much.
As it is, this “celebrity trial” of a movie so overstays its welcome that nobody will care about the verdict when the jury renders one on “The Judge.”
MPAA Rating: R for language including some sexual references
Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Robert Duvall, Billy Bob Thornton, Vera Farmiga, Vincent D’Onofrio
Credits: Directed by David Dobkin, written by Nick Schenk and Bill Dubuque. A Warner Brothers release.
Running time: 2:21
“Kill the Messenger,” the film about journalist Gary Webb’s shocking newspaper stories that connected the Reagan Era CIA to America’s crack epidemic, shows just how hard it is to film investigative journalism as a drama, and get it right.
The film about a reporter destroyed by a story that turned out to be one of the great scoops of all time feels muted, more compelling than riveting.
But Jeremy Renner dazzles as Webb, giving him both the swagger of a guy willing to take on the C.I.A. and its media friends, and the nervous worry that he’s in over his head.
His editor at the San Jose Mercury News (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) warns him — “We’re not the L.A. Times.”
“We’re not SMALL time, either,” Webb fires back.
Webb had already broken the first stories on police seizures of private property in drug cases when a drug dealer’s girlfriend (Paz Vega) approached him. The film shows Webb cleverly feeding questions to her beau’s defense attorney (Tim Blake Nelson) as the lawyer goes after a highly-placed informant in the dealer’s trial.
“You thought you were getting a piece of cheese,” the Latin drug moll purrs, “I just gave you the mouse!”
That makes the twitchy prosecutor (Barry Peppers) blink, and that points Webb to other low-hanging fruit, all of whom point to the Central Intelligence Agency providing planes and guns to the people then-President Reagan praised as “the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers,” opportunists who flooded America’s inner cities with cocaine.
The street dealer (Michael K. Williams, excellent) complains that he couldn’t “keep up with the supply.”
“You mean demand.”
“No. SUPPLY.” The cheap coke through Nicaragua, where Reagan’s Col. Oliver North was funding an insurgency against the leftist government, meant that poor Americans could afford cocaine. The crack epidemic began.
Oliver Platt plays the paper’s managing editor, the one who complains that “this was ten years ago” (the movie is set in ’96-97), but who relishes “The Big One” that Webb breaks.
Then the story turns, showing how Webb’s well-financed, well-connected competition — The Los Angeles Times and especially The Washington Post — used their C.I.A. sources to attack the story and Webb personally.
Director Michael Cuesta (“L.I.E.”) ratchets up the energy by chasing Webb with a jumpy hand-held camera, playing up Webb’s touchy meetings with government insiders (Michael Sheen), an imprisoned Nicaraguan drug lord (Andy Garcia, oozing charm) and a Ray Liotta character that seems inspired by Donald Sutherland’s Master Conspirator in Oliver Stone’s “J.F.K.” That bit of the tale makes it seem that we’re seeing all this through Webb’s increasingly paranoid eyes.
The personal cost to Webb and his family is also squeezed in, with Rosemarie DeWitt as the wary as a wife who is leery of her husband’s obsessions and mistakes and Lucas Hedges is good as the adoring son who sees Dad’s flaws for the first time.
Like the “Dark Alliance” stories themselves, “Kill the Messenger” feels leaky and a little incomplete. A screen version of a scandal with real people in it, naming some names and changing others, is never going to wholly satisfy.
But Renner’s performance — beginning with bluster and descending into twitchy paranoia — sells it and makes us fret for every “messenger” suddenly the target of the spotlight himself.
MPAA Rating: R for language and drug content
Cast: Jeremy Renner, Rosemarie DeWitt, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Oliver Platt, Andy Garcia, Ray Liotta
Credits: Directed by Michael Cuesta, written by Peter Landesman, based on books by Gary Webb and Nick Shou. A Focus Features release.
Running time: 1:46
Movie Nation 