Ex cons, muscleheads, weightlifters. Steroids.
A heist. A heist with consequences.
Michael Bay teams up two muscle-bound funnymen, Dwayne Johnson and Markl Wahlberg, adds Anthony to the team, sets them off after Tony Shaloub’s ill gotten gains, and has them face Ed Harris as a consequence. Funny stuff. Great sight gag, piling the three of them into an ancient Fiero.
“I’ve seen a lotta movies. I know what I’m doing.” Look for “Pain & Gain” April 26.
There’s nothing more alarming to power than people organizing themselves to usurp that power.
Even if that power is a union, an organization founded to protect the many from the abuses and whims of the few.
Ten years ago, when a then-teenaged Ari Graynor was making her debut on TV’s “The Sopranos,” you’d have been hard pressed to convince her that within a decade she’d be the voice of big screen angst-at-turning-30. No way.
“I never would have seen myself this way, representing this on the screen,” she says.. “But that’s what I’m playing, at least in movies this year — women in their late 20s, taking stock, having regrets and wondering how to go forward.”
She managed variations on that theme in “Celeste & Jesse,” found herself as a comically love-lorn phone sex operator struggling stay above water in Manhattan in “For a Good Time, Call…” And in “10 Years,” she’s a mom married to a drunk and wondering where the decade went at her tenth high school reunion.
“It’s the most natural thing in the world to be nostalgic for your youth,” the 29 year-old Graynor says. “I’m a little nostalgic, every day. All these characters in this movie are still young. But they’re already looking back. My character, when she was 18, she probably envisioned a lot of this life she’s now leading. But when she gets there, things don’t feel the way she hoped they would. It’s different for every character in the movie, this not-quite-sadness thing of what might have been.”
Graynor herself doesn’t own up to any regrets. Ariel Geltman Graynor is a Boston-born child actress who worked years on stage before “The Sopranos” gave her a break. She has simmered in dramas (“Conviction,” “Holy Rollers”)) but has found comedies — from “What’s Your Number” and “The Sitter” to “Whip It” and “Youth in Revolt” — to be her bread and butter. But even in the funny stuff, there’s a serious subtext.
Writer-director Scott Linden wrote Ari’s role in “10 Years” for her, “targeted the part for what she’s really good at, what I knew she’d bring to the part. She is smart, intuitive, can be funny and dramatic, which is what you need when you’re playing somebody who has accepted the choices that she’s made, who she’s married to. No matter how embarrassing that choice can look, at times.”
Graynor says Linden cooked up her “10 Years” character after running into her at the premiere of the Emma Stone comedy “Easy A.”
“I was there with a friend who was drinking — A LOT,” Graynor remembers. “Jamie saw me ‘managing’ my friend, and tapped into that sort of positive side of co-dependence — the caretaker trying to make things OK. I was aware that was something that I tend to do, so we decided to work that into the character.”
Actors are always cast pretty close to their age, but Graynor finds herself particularly at home in that time-span where one first realizes that mistakes you make now, count.
In your late 20s, most of us “take those huge steps — getting married and having children, there’s a sense that you can’t step back from that. For better or worse, that’s what your life becomes — completely. Then again, there’s that melancholic sadness that doesn’t quite reach the level of regret. I don’t think Sam in ’10 Years’ regrets where she is. It’s just the occasional sad realization that this isn’t what she expected. Doesn’t mean she wishes she hadn’t gotten married and had kids. But she thinks about it.”
Graynor isn’t trying to think about where she expects to be ten years from now. She did a Woody Allen Broadway show last fall, and has another stage comedy, “The Performers,” lined up for this fall. After that, she’s looking for something dramatic, “more transformative, more surprising.”
And if she’s still “acting up a storm, maybe producing (she did that on “For a Good Time, Call…”). Maybe even directing.” She hopes to be “in love, happy,” in ten years. “But I can’t plan my life ten weeks in advance, much less ten years. I just hope I don’t have any big regrets, then.”
When was the last time Hollywood gave us a drug dealer as a hero, as comic relief in a drama? It’s not something that happens often in a country where “Just say no” rivals “E pluribus unum” as a national credo.
But here is Harling Mays, lifelong pal of substance-abusing pilot “Whip” Whitaker, the comical candyman whose every entrance signifies emotional rescue, good times and “Just say YES” in the new drama “Flight.”
“Just say yes,” laughs Goodman, who plays Harling. “No way I’m owning that. Not something we want the kids to take up, is it?”
The “yes” phrase gets a laugh out of screenwriter John Gatins. He scripted “Flight,” which stars Denzel Washington as the pilot who acts heroically and saves many lives with an amazing bit of flying after his plane has a catastrophic mechanical failure. The guy flunks his drug test after the crash — big time. But Harling is the guy who can ease his pain, get his “edge” back — pharmaceutically.
“I don’t know if I’m glamorizing coke dealers, or even if Harling is a glamorous or cool character,” Gatins says. “Harling is exactly who he seems to be.” And who he seems to be, Gatins says, is Whip Whitaker’s true-blue friend.
Gatins is stunned by the reactions to this character, whom the Village Voice praised for his “dirtbag bonhomie,” whom Screen Daily described as the film’s “riskiest performance,” a jolly, bad-influence Falstaff to Denzel’s Prince Hal.
“I’ve seen the movie with a lot of audiences now, and the scene pops up where Harling is strolling down that hallway with a knapsack full of cocaine, riding to the rescue, people are cheering,” Gatins says. “It’s the strangest thing. I want to ask people, ‘Why are you cheering?”’
Credit the director, Robert Zemeckis, who scores Harling’s entrance with the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.” Credit the screenplay, which sees Harling as an uncomplicated character in a movie full of moral ambiguity. And credit Goodman, the lovable big man who decided “Harling is stuck in another era,” and gave him the clothes, the shades and the ponytail — “Hair extensions, man. Two months. It was hell.” — to match.
“We all have that guy in our life we’re conflicted over,” says Gatins, a recovering alcoholic who combined “my two biggest fears — “drinking myself to death, and dying in a plane crash” for “Flight. “You kind of love the guy, but you don’t like what he brings into your life. He’s a bad influence, but he is the one person who says, ‘You need to go testify to the National Transportation Safety Board? I can have you out of here in seven minutes. You make the call.’ That’s who Harling is.”
Perhaps only Goodman, who like Gatins (“Dreamer,” “Coach Carter”), has had sobriety issues, could give Harling the credibility and lovability that makes the character work and whose contribution has helped “Flight,” which opened Nov. 2, become one of the most critically-acclaimed films of the year.
“If you’re a character actor, you spend some time thinking about your function in the story,” Goodman says. “You’re helping the director out when you do that, and you’re serving the story better when you know what it is your character does to move it along.
“Harling Mays is an easy out for Whip. He’ll tell Whip anything he wants to hear and supply him with anything he needs to get through the day. Starting with hero worship, building him up when he’s low, and continuing on through to supplying him vodka, cocaine.”
That’s part of the secret to Goodman’s success as a character player — that special breed of supporting actor who provides the exclamation point to scenes with the lead actor or actress, and sometimes steals those scenes. Goodman’s cool quotient stays high thanks to a steady gig, appearing in many of the tragi-comedies of the Coen Brothers, from “Raising Arizona” — “Still my best screen entrance ever, crawling up out of the earth and mud.” — to “Big Lebowski” and next year’s “Inside Llewyn Davis.”
And even without the Coens, Goodman is having quite the fall. He’s in “Trouble With the Curve,” playing a baseball team head scout sympathetic to a crusty, nearly-blind veteran of his scouting staff played by Clint Eastwood.
“My character, Pete, is a go-between,” Goodman says, laying out his “function” in “Curve.” “He wants to see his old pal and this new way of running a baseball team reconciled. He risks a lot to try to do that. He believes in old time baseball, so he wants Gus, Clint’s character, to succeed — be vindicated.”
And as John Chambers, he is the Oscar-winning makeup artist and comical-cynical Hollywood insider who helps the CIA set up a fake film production to free Americans trapped in Iran in the critical and box office smash, “Argo.”
“John Chambers’ function is being the guy who knows Hollywood, the guy who jokes about the business, but knows the business, explains the business to the CIA and the audience. And he’s willing to get mixed up in something most people will never find out about.”
Gatins says that Goodman, like Washington, masterfully puts flesh and blood on a character designed to create unease in the audience for “Flight.” Could a sober man have cooly made the decisions that saved lives on this doomed airliner? And is the guy who keeps this addict functional merely an enabler, or the source of the edge that pilot needs?
“I want everybody to head into that last turn in the movie going, ‘I don’t know WHAT I’m rooting for here, or who,'” Gatins says. “Do we blame them, or let them go? The characters might seem evil, on the surface. But are they?” Washington and Goodman, Gatins says, give audiences inclined to see such characters in stark terms — “pause. And that’s what I hope people are arguing about when they leave the theater.”
Whip Whitaker had an epic night in Orlando — an all-nighter with a sexy stewardess and much imbibing. A little snif-sniff bump to get him going in the morning? Sure.
He puts on his uniform and shows up for work. He’s an airline pilot. Maybe a couple of bottles of the plane’s mini-vodkas to take the edge off the edge? Why not?
He dozes off in the cockpit, brushes off the “You feeling OK, Captain?” questions from the co-pilot. He’s an accident waiting to happen.
But when it does, nobody is cooler under pressure than Whip, given an aged, icy competence by Denzel Washington. He gets a doomed jetliner on the ground near Whip’s hometown of Atlanta with minimal loss of life. He’s a hero, right? Except for all that earlier stuff.
“Flight” is a terrific thriller about that crash — detailed to the nth degree — and “that earlier stuff.” Because what do you do with a case like this, a self-destructive alcoholic whose condition may have contributed to a tragedy, or mostly averted it?
Washington gives one of the great performances of his career in this fence-sitter of a film. “Forrest Gump” director Robert Zemeckis, returning from the “Polar Express/Mars Needs Moms” toy store of motion caption animation, and screenwriter John Gatins (“Coach Carter”) serve up a morally ambiguous morality tale that dares to suggest that maybe this guy’s condition was a good thing — in this case.
A bright, socially awkward boy tries to make sense of 9/11 and find some closure with the father he lost on what he calls “the worst day” in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. The film, based on a Jonathan Safran Foer novel, is a sometimes tearful remembrance of that day and the lives it ended or disrupted forever. And while it flirts with the preciousness that comes with Foer novels (Everything is Illuminated), it is engrossing and emotional in ways no other 9/11 drama has managed.
Of course, “Expendables 2” is all good fun and games and recycled catchphrases. Until somebody gets hurt. A lot of somebodies.
When you’re filling the screen with every big screen action star of the past 25 years — except for Mel Gibson, Wesley Snipes and Steven Segal — and every one of them needs his own body count, you see the problem. You run smack up against the Maximum Mayhem Threshold.
“Expendables 2” is a sillier wallow in excess, a too-cute trip down ’80s Action Film Lane with one past-his-expiration-date action hero too many for its own good.
“What to Expect When You’re Expecting” is a “Valentines Day” take on impending parenthood. Assorted couples cope with pregnancies, planned and unplanned, adoption and the epic change that is coming to their lives.
It’s wafer-thin, but it has plenty of laughs — a lot of them involving pregnant women’s bodily functions, the rest coming from Chris Rock, who unloads lots of daddy-to-be wisdom on one prospective father. But what’s surprising is how touching this film from the director of “Waking Ned Devine” and “Nanny McPhee” manages to be. Kirk Jones and the screenwriters found real pathos in adapting the Heidi Murkoff self-help book, dubbed America’s “pregnancy bible.”
The writer of “Training Day” and “Harsh Times” brings us more cop movie grit with “End of Watch,” a vivid series of impressionistic sketches of a year in the lives of two Los Angeles police officers.
These aren’t the corrupt cops writer-director David Ayer built his name on. They’re just patrolmen, in a family of officers — sometimes heroic, often cocky, occasionally miscalculating. And in telling their stories episodically, with a rhythm that builds suspense slowly, Ayer gets at the level of trust they have to have for one another and the meaning of that old cop movie cliche — “He took a bullet for me.”
“The Five Year Engagement” plays like a five episode R-rated story arc from “How I Met Your Mother.” With more profanity and more explicit sex. And considerably less drinking.
