With rudeness, cruelty and self-absorption now universally heralded American attributes, with cynical political opportunists, unworthy “talents” and lowlifes dominating reality TV, the time is certainly right for a “Falling Down” remake.
Which is the jumping off point for “God Bless America,” comic-turned-filmmaker Bobcat Goldthwait’s 100 minute tirade about the Kardashian/TMZ/Glenn Beck era in American popular culture.
There are always pearls of wisdom in the cinematic sermonettes of Tyler Perry. And even if they’re a tad too obvious, it’s plain that his connection to Oprah has paid off when he has characters in his films talk about personal responsibility, taking control of your own life and marriage or simply making it a motto to do the right thing.
But the movies around his astute observations about life are generally slow-footed slogs, in desperate need of editing. “Good Deeds” has a few good scenes, a few solid messages about the importance of being needed in a relationship or marriage and the financial tightrope a lot of families are walking in this economy. But he’s such a dull dramatist and boring actor that the message isn’t delivered.
“The Grey” is an old fashioned survival tale harboring pretensions that it is something more. Not a lot more, just a hint of the psycho-cerebral, here, a smidge of the primal and primitive there.
Can a single tone-deaf, wince-inducing joke, even one that’s repeated, kill a movie? No. Not a good film. But a marginal one that has trouble finding its tone? Let’s just say wisecracks about spouse abuse don’t help.
Dreamworks Animation president Jeffrey Katzenberg recently lamented the dearth of holiday-themed movies headed to your multiplex this year. But in foisting “Rise of the Guardians” upon unsuspecting audiences for the holidays, it’s clear he just wanted some cover. Other holiday films would take some of the pressure off this joyless, soul-dead piffle.
“Guardians” is the worst animated movie to ever wear the Dreamworks logo.
That classic “creature feature” “The Thing” earns its third treatment with a film that’s so enthralled with its actual “thing” that it forgets to be scary or suspenseful. A decent cast and a pristine glacial setting are wasted on a movie of alien transmutations and alien dissections that lacks urgency, or even a sense that’s its very cold in Antarctica.
The Norwegians have found something Down There — beneath the ice. And they want to keep it secret. So they drag a t0o-young American paleontologist (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) with a bit of experience dealing with ancient frozen corpses and a few other folks in to figure out what it was that crawled out from that gigantic saucer that’s buried under 100,000 years worth of glacial ice.
The Norwegians, led by the arrogant Dr. Dr. Halvorsen (Ulrich Thomsen) smell a Nobel prize in this discovery, “our visitor.” Keep it quiet. No radio contact with other bases on the frozen continent, even though there’s a storm coming in. The Americans — Kate Lloyd (Winstead) and the helicopter pilots, Carter (Joel Edgerton) and Jameson (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) are instantly wary.
Something big, with claws, is carved from the ice. And before you can say “You don’t know what you’re dealing with” it’s out, and before you can say “We will search in groups of two or three,” it’s preying on the “We must study it” Norwegians and the trigger happy Americans.
Here’s what works in Dutch director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.’s version of the thrice-told tale, which they’re calling a prequel. The location, what they use of it (British Columbia and frozen corners of Canada), is stunning. The effects — a shape shifting creature of teeth and tentacles and every human-faced crab-critter of recent movie vintage — are on the money. The Norwegians are an amusing bunch, profane in English and in subtitled Norwegian.
And hats off to Winstead (“Scott Pilgrim vs. the World”) for her wide-eyed reaction and breathless alarm at this beast and their peril.
Four years and four films into “The Twilight Saga,” Robert Pattinson can see the finish line for the role that made him famous.
With the release of the last half of “Breaking Dawn,” he knows that the whirlwind surrounding him and his cast mates is about to peak, then subside. He says he’s relishing the end, and he’s taking it all in: the attention, the career boost and the way his peers have coped with the sudden fame of a film series whose fans are nothing if not fanatical.
“I am constantly amazed that no one has gone totally crazy,” he says, chuckling. “Everybody has their own way of coping. We’re all trying to be artists at the same time this whole thing is going on around us.”
The 25-year-old British actor has worked with Oscar winners Reese Witherspoon and Christoph Waltz (“Water for Elephants”)and a former James Bond (Pierce Brosnan (“Remember Me”). But he says his contemporaries – his “Twilight” cast mates — “have taught me the most. They’ve grown up in the eye of the storm. I learn from how they’ve dealt with fame. For me, that’s obviously the most overwhelming … thing I’ve had to deal with. You learn a lot about the world and a lot about people when you and they go through something like this.”
(Kristen Stewart on Life After “Twilight” — interview HERE)
That “something like this” has been in evidence since before the first film opened. Pattinson was an all-but-unknown 21-year-old, best known for a glorified cameo as Cedric Diggory in “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” when he landed the role that would change his life the instant he was cast.
Tim Guinee, one of his co-stars in “Water for Elephants,” recalls the paparazzi in helicopters above that film’s set, the scores of fans hanging around, “hoping to catch a glimpse of him. What an extraordinary amount of pressure this was for such a young guy to deal with and I was always amazed at the dignity and fortitude with which he dealt with all of it.”
Pattinson knows that he’s in select company, having come from almost nowhere to star in three spectacularly successful movies — “Twilight” (2008), “New Moon” (2009) and “Eclipse” (2010) — with one more sure-to-be-a-hit installment opening this weekend and another opening next year at this time.
“It inevitably skews your idea of what this business should be,” he says. “But you have to fight against that. The whole fun, the whole point of being an actor is to keep re-inventing yourself.”
Pattinson has managed that, squeezing in a couple of non-vampire roles amid the run of the saga. He earned “acquits himself quite nicely” (Leonard Maltin) notices for last spring’s period piece “Water for Elephants.” He hopes his work will get a fair viewing once “Twilight” ends, that critics and fans won’t make as much of his “brooding beauty” (Elizabeth Weitzman, New York Daily News) as they do now.
“It gets scary. You worry that this is all they’ll let you do. But I could take chances [with other roles] because I always had another ‘Twilight’ movie coming out.
“At the same time, it’s kind of nice that they’re coming to an end, to know I don’t have that safety net and that I have to really strive to do new things and wholly commit to them because there’s nothing to fall back on.”
Pattinson began the films by feeling he was just playing author Stephenie Meyer’s creation — the simmering, silent vampire dreamboat, Edward Cullen, who wins the fair Bella (Kristen Stewart) with just a furtive glance. But as the films have progressed, he’s taken ownership. “Things intermingle, and he becomes more like me, more ‘my character.’”
Pattinson’s take? “Edward spends this whole series trying to catch up to being 17 in today’s society. Even though he’s 108, his values are more old-fashioned. He doesn’t know how to have a relationship with a young modern woman his age. He has to learn. He’s been hidden away from the world for so long that through the saga he’s had to learn how to love all over again.
Gina Carano is the 29 year-old daughter of a former backup quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys and a cheerleader-pretty mom. And those two ends of the gene pool have been having a knock-down drag-out fight in her from the get go.
“Growing up, I was a big “Pride & Prejudice” fan,” she says. “But I kind of got into ‘True Romance’ and ‘Braveheart,’ too. You know, ACTION films.”
Pretty enough to model, she took up martial arts as well. And thanks to her skills in the ring and her drop-kick-dead good looks, she became a stand-out star in the world of professional mixed martial arts. Wait. Didn’t anybody tell her “You’re going to mess up that pretty face?”
What a relief. “Ghost Rider” is a joke — a monumentally foolish comic book movie with lots of unintentional laughs, mixed in with the intentional ones.
Of all the bad horror/fantasy/sci-fi/action pictures Nic Cage has cranked out over the last decade, “Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance” is the Nic Cagiest. A goofy, gonzo thrill ride, “Vengeance” is a bad movie sequel so bad it’s good, a bad movie that’s almost a great bad movie.
