Interview with Richard Shepard, director of Dom Hemingway

Dom Hemingway is now playing at Harkins Camelview. Michael Clawson spoke with the director, Richard Shepard, while he was here for the festival......

Director Richard Shepard has a smile on his face. It’s not quite beaming, but it’s close.

He’s just walked out of the Arizona premiere of his new movie, Dom Hemingway, which screened earlier this month at the Phoenix Film Festival. He introduced the movie, the lights went out, the film started and he left — he’s seen it before. When I start chatting with him, the movie’s been playing about 30 minutes, which means the audience has endured the film’s audacious cold-open with Jude Law spouting poetry about his penis.

“No one has run out yet, so I guess that’s a good thing,” Shepard says.

The film, which opens in Arizona today, is a tale of redemption about Dom Hemingway, an ex-criminal committed to picking up the pieces of his fragmented life after a long stay in prison. He can embrace reform and be the father he should have been a long time ago, or he can go back to his old ways. Much of the movie is about Dom’s old ways, including when he shows up at the home of his former boss, Mr. Fontaine (Demian Bichir), to pick a fight. The film also stars Richard E. Grant as an exasperated sidekick and Emilia Clark (the Khaleesi herself, Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones) as his adult daughter.

Shepard chatted with the Phoenix Film Festival about his raucous new movie. If you haven’t seen the movie, there are some light spoiler alerts. Nothing that will ruin the movie, but plot points are revealed.

Phoenix Film Festival: How was it in there before the screening? The audience going in seemed very pumped.

Richard Shepard: It’s exciting, and a great place to screen a movie. Lovely theater, too. People flock to film festivals because they want to feel like they’re discovering something. They aren’t going to be showing Captain America at a film festival, which is sorta the point — the festivals want you to find something that you otherwise wouldn’t have watched. On another note, it’s interesting watching my movie around the country. This movie pushes some buttons, so there is, right off the top, 30 percent of an audience that won’t handle it. The rest of the audience will, though. They’ll say, “Holy shit I get this.”

PFF: There’s been a lot of discussion about what the movie is versus what it’s not. It is a character drama and it’s not a heist movie.

RS: There is a perception that movies have to follow a formula. Like if you’re going to make a movie about a gangster there has to be a crime in it. I knew I wanted to make a movie where the criminal commits no crime. It was a gamble that I was able to do because it was a smaller budget with a smaller crew. If I was to make a $100-million movie I know that the studio would expect me to show some crimes, or a heist. Dom deosn’t even need crimes, though. He’s such a compelling character that he brings the audience along on his journey and he keeps them guessing. I think people are watching to see if he’s going to shoot his foot off again. That’s a good tension. You don’t need a ton of plot to create that tension.

PFF: Speaking of tension and expectations, at the end of the film Dom goes into the restaurant and confronts the girl who stole his money, and he doesn’t do what I think everyone wants him to do.

RS: What did you think he was going to?

PFF: Demolish the restaurant.

RS: And that’s the joy of that scene, because the movie set up this tough guy and he goes in and shows restraint. I wanted the ending of the movie to have this scene where the audience went “Oh no!” He has a real shot at redemption and then this woman shows up and he has the opportunity to mess it up. One of the reasons I had that scene in the movie, the one where he beats the man in the garage, I wanted to do something very violent and destructive to tell the audience that he could do something violent and destructive again. The tension of that possibility is what drives the movie from Fontaine’s house to the restaurant at the end. You can see that tension on Richard Grant’s face every time we cut to him. He’s saying, “Please, please, Dom, don’t fuck this up.”

PFF: Richard E. grant is the underrated star of the movie.

RS: I just love him. He’s so funny. When we were editing the film I was contemplating doing splitscreen because his reactions were so unbelievably funny that I didn’t want to cut any of them out.

PFF: As the director are you directing people’s expectations?

RS: Yeah, especially in a movie that’s trying to subvert your expectations. Directors are manipulators ... anyone who tells a story is. I mean, just look at the order of a movie: if you start a movie at the end, it’s going to have a different feel than a movie you start at the beginning. We manipulate everything all the time. For me, I don’t even know how a movie’s going to end when I start it, so that’s a dangerous a way of writing, but I just let my characters take me where they want. I also write to not be bored. If I sense things are getting slow or boring I’ll change the story or take it someplace else.

PFF: HBO’s True Detective is a great example of a script that played with expectations. It had painted itself into a corner for the fans who wanted all the plot points to be resolved. But in the end it wasn’t about the case, it was about the detectives.

RS: I know what you mean, that people wanted it to be more plot. I think it was groundbreaking TV. And yeah, the plot was the least interesting thing in it. It was an average episode of Criminal Minds plotwise. It was all characters and atmosphere. I love the characters and the acting so much that it took me in a totally different direction. As a film fan it took me places I hadn’t expected to go.

PFF: Are audiences ready for character-driven storytelling like that, where the plot is secondary to characters? Like True Detective and Dom Hemingway.

RS: True Detective was highly rated and it did really well. So I think HBO is ready for it. As far as my movies, let me say this, and it might sound strange: I make my movies for about seven people. My core group of friends, the people who really understand me, because I can’t tell how audiences are going to feel. There are a million things that critics like and don’t like. I have zero control over that world. So to worry about all of them is insane. So I just make what I like and hope it works. With Dom, he’s asking a lot from an audience. He’s not an easy guy to love, but he begs you to love him. And by the end of the movie you’re cheering him on. So, to answer your question, I think people are interested in less-obvious character pieces. I’m staking this film on it.

PFF: As it opens in other places around the country, the reviews have been polarizing.

RS: Very hot or cold reactions; no middle-of-the-road at all. The bad reviews are brutal, and the good ones are fantastic. In fact, they’re the best reviews I’ve received in my entire career. The polarizing aspect, I think it’s a good thing. I hope that it is intriguing to an audience. I’ll be honest, this movie needs all the help it can get. People need to talk about it and people need to see it based on the recommendations of others. Otherwise this just doesn’t have the legs to do it on its own. Word-of-mouth is important. Now, some critics have been very harsh on Jude Law, and I must ask, “What fucking world are you living in that you don’t like that performance?” He’s just so spectacular and amazing. We shot the movie widescreen and in France and Jude just looks fantastic on the screen. And as he journeys around you realize he’s the best guy in the world to take a journey with because he’s never boring. I hope people discover his performance, because I think he’s wonderful.

PFF: What draws you to criminals?

RS: They’re fun because we live in Starbucks world, where there’s one on every corner. And when you see a little independent coffee shop you want to go there because it’s different. I feel like we need to break the conventional things and criminals, by their nature, break convention. They push themselves on everything, which is why they are such interesting characters. Dom is that way, too. He’s this rude bull-in-a-china-shop kinda guy, but he’s always pushing himself. And movies have always had love affairs with criminals. If I could rob a million dollars I would do it. I think most people would, and then they’d go back to their jobs and houses and families. It’s a thrill they want to experience. Just look at kids. A parent tells a child not to go there, and he goes there anyway. Kids are naturally rebellious. It’s part of their exploration of the world. Criminals are taking that idea to the next level.

PFF: Tell me about the design of the room with the monkey pictures. It had a very unique look to it.

RS: That was a great confluence of people being creative. We had found this chateau in France that was amazing. We wanted to shoot in this one room, but it was just so plain with the white walls. It was a long scene so we had to find something for the walls that would make it pop. The production designer Laurence Dorman had found these Jill Greenberg photographs of monkeys. He held the book up and we were just shocked. These were just so good on so many levels that it was unreal. It was funny and subversive and just such an inspired decision. Jill had never printed her photographs larger than 8-by-11, so we talked her into letting us print them huge. They need to tower over the characters. The actors walked in and it just lifted everyone’s mood.

PFF: I’ve read several interviews about the famous opening scene: it took six takes, it was all scripted … but did you ever have to dial the content down, or was it always that incendiary?

RS: I wanted to push people when I wrote it. I knew I had a great scene. I kept thinking that if I could get enough money scraped together to do the movie, that it would a great opening. I never dialed any of it down. It’s just such a jolt. It was a jolt to everything, even the film crew. It was the first day of the film shoot, and the crew must have been like, “What the hell kind of film am I on?” I think it’s always nice when you direct a movie that doesn’t have the usual plot tropes. The drama comes from Jude’s character being unpredictable.

Dom Hemingway - Movie Review

Dom Hemingway

Starring:  Jude Law, Richard E. Grant, Demian Birchir, Emilia Clarke

Directed by Richard Shepard

Release Date: 4/25/14

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume

Dom Hemingway is an amplified speaker. A firing machine gun. A cannonball pounding through a reinforced wall. A rocket launch. A sonic boom that shatters windows. It’s a motorcycle gang screaming down a highway. A jet engine. An erupting volcano. A pyrotechnic explosion. Dom Hemingway is whatever shakes your bones and makes your ears pop.

And it is stupendous and mesmerizing, every vile and irreverent second of it.

The movie opens on the most talked-about scene: Jude Law’s Dom Hemingway, with his porkchop sideburns and gold teeth, getting “serviced” in his jail cell. Never one to just stand there and simply take pleasure in the little things of life — like, for him anyways, prison blowjobs — he addresses the camera about his most favorite body part, his penis. He doesn’t say penis, though. “They’ll write sonnets about it,” he says in way that can only be called verbal swagger. “They’ll study it in schools.” As crudely as its presented, the scene is a deviant work of art.

Dom Hemingway, we learn, is about to get out of prison. He was sent there for a robbery he most definitely did commit. But he never welched on his bandit buddies because Dom is bound to a code of honor so screwy that the first thing he does after getting out of prison is put the guy that married his ex-wife into intensive care. Only then can he celebrate with three days of hookers, cocaine and some sort of naked Olympics in one of those hotels where you wrap items in plastic before touching them with your bare hands.

As Dom jumps on a train to go meet his kingpin boss, the movie starts poking at your crime-movie expectations. It does this so repeatedly, and sometimes with pressing urgency, that the ultimate payoff — Dom pulling an epic heist — seems to be around almost every corner. But the movie, and director Richard Shepard, know they have something better than a heist movie on their hands. They have a character study that is so wickedly rewarding that a heist would only muddle the brilliance of Law’s career-jumpstarting performance.

Demian Bichir plays the kingpin, Mr. Fontaine, who is the most dangerous guy in all of Europe as long as he’s not sharing a room with Dom Hemingway, who’s so confrontational that murder seems to drip from the screen. Dom and a buddy (the sad-looking court jester Richard E. Grant) meet Fontaine at his hunting estate, in a room decorated with post-modern furniture and floor-to-ceiling pictures of monkeys. Dom wants money for the prison sentence he served without naming names. Fontaine gives him money. Unsatisfied, Dom asks for more: “I want a present. I want your girlfriend.” The tension ratchets so tight it becomes almost unbearable.

The movie’s plot also involves another criminal underboss, a timed safe-cracking challenge, a rowdy pool party, a fortune-altering car crash, and a nude stroll through a French vineyard, but Shepard, who also wrote the screenplay, keeps a laser-focus on Dom and his eventual redemption. The film goes out of its way to shock you with its uniquely offensive dialogue and to prove how awful a human being Dom is, but it has a gooey center involving Dom and his adult daughter, who is resentful of his imprisonment. At the end, we realize this isn’t a crime drama — though it certainly resembles a Snatch or a Sexy Beast — or a even a heist thriller.

It’s about a man, and his sonnet-inspired penis, breaking a chain of very bad decisions. It’s the best movie I’ve seen so far this year, and one that will likely go down in history as the turning point — hopefully for the better — for Jude Law, who is unnervingly brilliant as he portrays his lovable meatheaded thug. The film has opened in other markets already, and reviews have been mixed. People either love it or hate it. I’ve yet to read anyone who said it was boring, though.

We talk to the team behind "Oculus"

“Oculus”, a new supernatural horror film, arrives in theatres on Friday, April 11!  The Phoenix Film Festival also featured this movie on its crowded schedule, and I had a chance to sit down with director/co-writer Mike Flanagan, executive producer Jason Blum and producer Trevor Macy.  We talked about the film’s mysterious mirror, Katee Sackhoff’s performance and what movies scared them growing up.  

Q: I love the idea of a supernatural force coming through a mirror.   I saw “Prince of Darkness” (1987) years ago, and mirrors creep me out anyways.  Why did you choose a mirror becoming a portal for the supernatural?

MF:  I did all the stuff you do in front of the mirror when you are a kid, like play Bloody Mary.   It always freaked me out too.  I think the thing that brought the portal to it was there is a tradition of the Jewish faith where at funerals, the mirror is covered to prevent the spirits of the deceased from coming back.  I thought that was pretty chilling.  Going back to “Prince of Darkness”, they used it to great effect as well.  Looking at a mirror as a window or a door I think is always really upsetting.

Q: “Oculus” originally was short film.  What was the decision to make it a feature length film and how easy was it to do?

MF: It was really hard actually.   When the short came out and people liked it, there was immediate talk, “Is this going to be expanded?”

It took seven years to figure how to do that.  Besides (deciding) what to preserve in the short and how do we expand it to feature length - and not just making (the movie) really long and boring - it was really hard to find producers who didn’t want to go to “found footage” with it.  There are cameras in the room, and the minute people saw that, pretty much every company in the world was trying very hard to replicate what Jason was doing already (with his “Paranormal Activity” franchise).

(Many producers) were like, “Oh, can we do this in the “Paranormal” style?”

No, they are already doing that and kicking butt with it.  Why would we?  And this (film) was just not the story for that anyway.  It took a very long time to find people who were behind it.  It didn’t happen until 2011 when I had a meeting with Intrepid Pictures, and they were the first people in seven years that said, “Let’s try to do something really unique with the narrative structure.”

Q: Jason, you are involved with the “Paranormal Activity” series, “Sinister” (2012), and “Dark Skies” (2013), and you are known for creating movies on a micro-budget for wide release.  What’s the recipe to accomplish that?  

JB: Sometimes the movies have wide releases, and sometimes they don’t.  It doesn’t always work, but it works a good percentage of the time.  It is very hard to do.  There are three secrets.  The most important secret is the production company’s fee, and the director, the writer, all the actors, and everyone work for the minimum possible.  That’s the biggest thing, and after that, not too many speaking parts and not too many locations.  The low budget parts are those three things, and it is got to be a high concept movie.  That is the short answer to the ingredients to a micro-budget, wide-release movie.

Q: Trevor, you’ve been involved with action pictures (“Doomsday” (2008), “Safe House” (2012), “The Raven” (2012)), but you’ve also dabbled in horror (“The Strangers” (2008)) as well, so what attracted you to this project?

TM: After I did “The Strangers” (2008), I started to see every horror script in town.   The thing that prompted me to want to this film next is you care about the characters.  In “The Strangers”, it’s a relationship.  In this case, it’s a family drama, and (the characters) form the spine of the movie.  That’s the thing that makes you care, relate and think about when you leave the theatre. All of which I think make the best horror.  I’ll make as much horror that satisfies those conditions as I possibly can.

Q:  Katee Sackhoff (“Battlestar Galactica” (2004), “24” (2001), “Riddick” (2013)) stars in this picture.  What can her fans look forward to with this movie? 

MF:  You are definitely seeing a side of Katee you’ve never seen.   I am a huge “Battlestar” fan as well, but this isn’t a part where you naturally go, “Oh my God, that’s where you go to Starbuck.”

So, it’s actually two very different sides of her in this movie.  You have a real maternal and thoughtful side of her that isn’t the bad-ass, kick-ass character (who) people know her as.  Then you have another side that I don’t want to spoil.   It’s a complete departure from everything she’s ever done.  She brought this whole other side to it.   So, you are going to see Katee doing two things you’ve never seen her do before.

Q:  From a horror film perspective, what are the differences between a serial killer and a supernatural force on the loose?

TM: I think they are relatable in different ways.   It’s easy to go back to “The Strangers” for this one.  With a ‘knock, knock’ late at night at your house, well, that could happen to you.  It is relatable in that particular way.  I think one of the reasons, for me anyway, supernatural horror (works) is they are taking that same base fear that everybody has. In our case, it is reflecting the worst part of you, but there’s an external force that’s magnifying it.  I think that’s what makes supernatural horror so good.   Every single good supernatural horror movie is exploiting a flaw in a human.

MF:  I think another major difference is - there are exceptions to this - but most times, when you watch a killer in a movie, deep down, we are rooting for the killer.  Deep down, we are waiting to see Freddy or Jason (or whoever it’s going to be) kill the next person, and we want to watch how they do it.  There’s a celebration of it somehow.  When it’s supernatural, you’re rooting for the poor mortal humans who are at risk.  So, I think you are on slightly different sides of the line when you commit to that.  That is why when you see a movie that’s all about different murders, you get big applause.  You get this weird rush out of the audience.

If it’s a supernatural movie, you aren’t watching “Poltergeist” (1982) and say, “Yea, take that kid!!  Yea!  Whoo hoo!”

It’s a whole different thing.

You are saying, “Oh God, is she okay?”

You are rooting for different teams.

Q:  Lastly, what were your favorite horror movies growing up?  Not necessarily something inspirational, but something that really scared you when you were kids.

JB:  I’m going for “Rebecca” (1940) these days.  Not quite a horror movie, but a thriller.  I really loved that movie.

TM: The first horror movie I ever watched was “Creature from the Black Lagoon” (1954).  I think I was eight years-old and I made my mother sit on the couch with me and watch that movie.  It just scared the hell out of me.  Later, growing up, I got to say, “Alien” (1979).

MF:  I have the boiler plate answers for that which are, “Jaws” (1975), “The Shining” (1980), “The Exorcist” (1973), but the first thing that really freaked me out was an episode of “Fraggle Rock” (1983).  They had this thing called The Terrible Tunnel and any Fraggle who went in would get lost and never come out. The little Fraggles would go in and all the little ghosts of the Fraggles were trapped and that just freaked me out.  Yea, I had nightmares about that tunnel for years.

Muppets Most Wanted - Movie Review

Muppets Most Wanted

Directed by James Bobin

Featuring the voices of Steve Whitmire, Eric Jacobson, Dave Goelz, Bill Barretta and Matt Vogel

From Walt Disney Pictures

Rated PG

112 minutes

Brings your smiles to new Muppet movie

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume

The Muppets give me great hope for humanity. Their very existence is cause for celebration; their longevity and persistence an added triumph. Certainly, if our civilization can create Muppets, then there is good in the world, and that goodness runs deep.

This might soundly grossly overstated, to give such power to little felt hand puppets, but look at what those puppets represent, look at the spirit in which they were created, consider the reason they have thrived for this long — they are, from top to bottom, inside and out, stitch by stitch, happiness.

That happiness explodes from the screen in Muppets Most Wanted, a silly and rewarding follow-up to the great Muppet return in 2011 with the charming, plainly titled The Muppets. That movie’s last scene is this movie’s first: as soon as the Hollywood lights flicker off, the Muppets are once again hunting for an audience to entertain. Out of nowhere Dominic Badguy, pronounced like “badgey,” turns up and whispers the magic words — “world tour.” And off the Muppets go.

The movie is infused with all varieties of comedy bits and musical numbers. The first song is fantastically weird and unabashedly meta as the Muppets sing about how sequels are never as good as the original films, a statement they mostly render false. In one of the verses, they even hint at how Most Wanted isn’t really a sequel because, after all, this is actually the eighth film since 1979. One of the recurring bits involves Gonzo pleading to do a stunt called Indoor Running of the Bulls. It goes off in typical Muppet style, about as well as one of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew’s experiments, one of which is a bomb-attracting vest. Of course, Beaker is wearing it.

As the world tour travels through Europe — the German stop includes the towns of Vomitdorf and Poopenbürgen — it’s revealed that Badguy (comedian Ricky Gervais, as wooden as the Swedish Chef’s cutting board) is actually a master thief following a series of clues that will reveal a way to steal the British crown jewels. He enlists fellow thief Constantine, who perfectly resembles Kermit except for a mole on his froggy lip. After a stealthy switch, Constantine infiltrates the Muppets while Kermit is sent to a Russian gulag in Siberia — or, as the prison guards call it, a state-funded hotel.

In the gulag, Kermit meets a Russian guard (Tin Fey) who says his name like she’s training for some kind of over-pronunciation contest — key-herr-meat, she says struggling. Other prisoners are played by Ray Liotta, Jemaine Clement and Danny Trejo, who other characters simply call “Danny Trejo.” (What a sport: Trejo plays Thug #1 and Inmate #2 in more movie than can be counted and here he does it again as a gag on his career.) In prison, of course Kermit puts together a spirited gulag variety show with musical numbers, sets, props and a prison break that somehow escapes Fey’s Kermit-smitten guard — “I have Netflix and I see every prison-break movie ever,” she says earlier.

Back on the Muppets tour, Constantine is botching up the Muppets careful dynamic by saying yes to every terrible sketch, including Gonzo’s Indoor Running of the Bulls, Miss Piggy’s Celine Dion covers and Animal’s “DRUM SOLO! DRUM SOLO!” Kermit, it seems, is the glue that holds the troupe together. There are many celebrity cameos, including Lady Gaga, Salma Hayek and, inexplicably, Christoph Waltz. None of them are as invigorating as the actual Muppets, most of whom get choice scenes, including Beaker and Honeydew, Animal and Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, Pepe the Prawn, Rowlf the Dog and Fozzie, who is threatened with a fantastic line — “You’ve just wocka’d your last wocka.” Another great line that requires no context: “He’s too stupid to be stupid so he must be a genius.”

Two unlikely stars are Modern Family’s Ty Burrell playing a French INTERPOL detective and Sam the Eagle playing his American counterpart. In their first scene together they start comparing badges, a game of one-up that ends with an endearing payoff. Later, in a scene that simultaneously laughs at the French and ‘Murica, Burrell sips from the tiniest of coffee cups while Sam chugs on what must be a 10-gallon cup of joe.

This is not a perfect Muppet movie, if only because too much emphasis is placed on human characters, who frequently can’t keep up with Jim Henson’s adorable Muppets. It does have lots of jokes, and many of them are clobbered out of the park with spectacular send-offs. The movie has a Pixar feel with it’s humor: it caters to adults and children, and frequently finds middle ground as well. Take your family, they’ll howl through it.

Why are there so many songs about rainbows? Because they make Muppets smile. And smiles are the currency this world should trade in.

Divergent - Movie Review

Divergent

Directed by Neil Burger

Starring Shailene Woodley, Theo James, Ashley Judd, Tony Goldwynn, Jai Courntey and Miles Teller

From Summit Entertainment

Rated PG-13

139 minutes

Incredible setting, broken plot compete in new YA movie

 by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume

In the race to get young adult books turned into movies I feel like roadkill as the studios speed to get their hot properties, with plots involving warring schools/houses/factions/districts/classes, onto the screen to woo in Hollywood’s most fickle audience — teenagers.

This week alone, we’ve already seen the release of trailers for two more, The Maze Runner and The Giver. Between them, The Hunger Games and now Divergent, you would be forgiven for not telling them apart with all their angsty teens, dystopian settings and perilous class warfare.

Divergent, like Hunger Games before it, benefits for looking absolutely stunning. It takes place in a fully realized and crafted science-fiction world, with scarred skyscrapers serving as wind turbines and drained harbors as farming land. Around the city is a fence, it’s electrical countermeasures humming ominously in the soundtrack, that would break the morale of Kong. Early in the film, we’re shown cables criss-crossing the city and later we get a payoff: the cables serve as an exhilarating and impractical transportation system. The production designers must have had fun creating this world; I had fun taking it all in. (On a side note, notice how the most futuristic prop in every sci-fi movie is a syringe.)

And that’s where my praise largely ends. This is a broken movie. It’s plot simply can’t sustain itself. It takes place in a time after mankind has apparently destroyed itself because “people had choices.” I would roll my eyes and say “whatever” to that reasoning, but this plot point is so important that it’s the basis of the entire film and others beyond it. And it ruins the movie.

Divergent begins with Tris (Shaileen Woodley), a sweet-natured girl who questions her less-than-sweet thoughts. She lives with her parents in nearly complete segregation in a destroyed version of Chicago, which is divided into five social classes or castes: Abnegation, the selfless and charitable; Amity, peaceful farmers; Candor, the brutally honest types (and comedians?); Dauntless, the warriors; and Erudite, the intelligent bureaucrats. At a certain age, teens are required to attend the reaping … wait, wrong movie … they’re made to take LSD-fueled tests and then pick the faction that they want to serve for the rest of their lives.

After a lengthy choosing process that involves the most disease-ridden knife, Tris picks Dauntless, a class so laughably dopey they are nearly cartoons. For starters, Dauntless faction members run everywhere, and they climb on everything like spider monkeys. And when they arrive at train stations, they wait for the train to leave so they can board it by jumping into the open doors. I’m pretty sure Dauntless’ creators were born from a Mt. Dew overdose sometime during a mid-’90s X-Games broadcast. Remember Poochy, from The Simpsons? I’m pretty sure he was Dauntless, as was the cast of Point Break, all those Mentos commercials and the Neverland boys in Hook (“Bangarang, Ruffio!).

And this is where the movie gets screwy. See, the factions maintain order. How or why is never really explored; you’re just expected to buy it, ludicrous price tag or not. Some exposition is offered by Erudite mastermind Jeanine (Kate Winslet), but it just made my head spin faster and in the other direction. Most troublesome is how the movie seems to encourage people — teens especially — to choose a team and stick with it. In high school, these factions would be called jocks (Dauntless), nerds (Abagnation), cheerleaders (Candor), student council (Erudite), and cowboys (Amity). Fans of the books will argue that the classes don’t really matter, because the point is that the classes need to be thrown out, which is what Tris eventually tries to do. But why then do fans show up happily proclaiming their faction of choice, and why does the Divergent website proudly let you pick your faction, like segregating yourself into some miserable little Dystopian subgroup was a worthwhile endeavor?

It’s clear the factions are part of a flawed social system, but no one in the movie sees that, even as one faction is chemically programmed to exterminate another faction. The rationale for the genocide: fear … of free agency, of peace, of an open government. None of it makes sense. Yeesh, this is just bad writing. At least Hunger Games made sense: there was a war, a tyrannical ruler and a punishment for choosing the wrong side in the war. You could connect the dots and get an idea of what kind of story was being told. Divegent’s dots lead to a scrambled mess.

When Divergent isn’t tripping over itself, it spends much of the movie with Tris as she is pummeled through Dauntless’ training program, which involves laser tag, train hopping, freefalling through condemned building and public beatings, lots of public beatings. She has one nice instructor (Theo James) and one awful one (Jai Courtney), both of whom seem to make kissy faces in the mirror when they look at their tattoos. Woodley, who does wonders with her sub-standard material, deserves a better young adult movie franchise. This one is beneath her talents. Divergent does reunite Woodley with Miles Teller, who shared some lovely and heartbreaking scenes in last year’s much more rewarding film The Spectacular Now.

I read online yesterday that Veronica Roth’s book franchise falls apart after Divergent, and even the books’ fans are keenly aware of this problem. If this is what the first movie looks like, imagine what’s in store in the later film. Or not.

We talk to Miles Teller and Jai Courtney about Divergent

From big to small: Teller, Courtney maneuver through Hollywood hits

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume

Actors pick winners and they pick losers. Sometimes the obvious winners are duds, and the obvious losers are on year-end best-of lists. It’s a strange way it all happens, especially when the film’s budget is factored in.

Take Miles Teller, who starred in last year’s indie-darling The Spectacular Now, a film that made many critics lists (including the top of mine) and is sitting at a cushy 92 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Its estimated budget was under $3 million. Then consider Teller’s new movie, Divergent, with its novel pedigree, huge cast, special effects and a budget that was reportedly inching close to $100 million. Critics have been savaging it and on Rotten Tomatoes it’s sitting at a depressing, but not altogether miserable, 37 percent.

Teller, who was in town promoting Neil Burger’s adaptation of Veronica Roth’s young adult novel Divergent, put it bluntly: “You want some successful movies on your résumé. You do it for the art all the time, but it’s nice to have one that makes money. You don’t want to be a part of a bunch of flops.”

We spoke before the reviews came out, but Divergent is likely to get the last laugh — it’s expected to do solid business, enough to send the franchise onto its next book, Insurgent. The movie involves a dystopian world set in the ruins of Chicago, where the social classes are broken into five factions, one being Dauntless, a warrior class where Teller’s character resides. The star of the film is Shailene Woodley, who plays a divergent, someone whose mind belongs to any faction it chooses. Woodley and Teller last worked together on The Spectacular Now. They had a different experience together this time out — “Falling in love is hard, learning a fight scene is easy,” he adds.

“It was pretty funny. When we first got there we’d be doing this fight training, working on our fight stuff and she’d be like, ‘Aww, Sutter.’ [His character from Spectacular Now] And it’s like ‘Stop. We’re not doing that shit now. I’m beating you up, little girl,’” he said of teaming up with Woodley again. “I think any time you’re more familiar with an actor, it allows you to just be more honest with them. So Shailene and I would be doing a scene, and if a scene wasn’t working we could almost … not direct the other person, but it’s like we didn’t even need Neil to help us figure it out. We would just be like, ‘alright, this isn’t really working.’”

Teller plays a minor villain, someone who starts bad, but comes around to the turmoil he’s causing. “It was fun for me. I had just done That Awkward Moment, and before that … The Spectacular Now. I wasn’t necessarily looking to play a villain, and I use that word lightly because I think [my] character kind of comes full circle. He’s pretty conflicted. But for me, I was just wanting to do something different, to get off the light-hearted comedy stuff and beat somebody up.”

Jai Courtney, who was last seen in Jack Reacher and as John McClane’s son in A Good Day to Die Hard, was also in town with Teller and agreed that playing villains was oddly cathartic. Courtney’s villain, though, doesn’t have a change of heart and is mostly vile throughout Divergent.

“[Villainy] doesn’t require much of a transformation. You want to try and make your character as likeable as possible, even when you’re playing someone who’s not supposed to be,” Courtney said. “So that’s probably the challenge, remembering that you’re not supposed to be liked. I would try, just instinctively, to be a little more charming with the character and [Burger] was always telling me to just make it dead and flat.”

Both actors are moving onto massive new franchises for their next projects: Courtney is the new Kyle Reese character in a new Terminator reboot, and Teller is going to the new Mr. Fantastic in a Fantastic Four reboot. But for Teller, Divergent was one of the largest sets he’d been on.

“For a big-budget movie these were the shittiest sets I’ve ever been on. This is, by far, the biggest budget I’ve ever done and I was expecting the red carpet and it was pretty much all abandoned buildings in Chicago that would leak when it snowed,” he said. “There would be rats around and Shailene would be like ‘I want an inspection.’”

He continues: “Acting-wise, obviously it’s the same thing. You don’t adjust your acting. But there’s more angles. On Spectacular Now, you’re doing a lot of stuff in a one-shot or a two-shot, and we get about three takes. On this, you’re really breaking it up. You’ll get like 20 takes on one line from six different angles … The trailer was better, a lot better. More time for my hair and makeup. And the scope of this was a lot bigger: at any given time, there’s like 10 of us in a scene, I don’t think I got any one-on-one scenes. There’s always people there, so I guess that was different for me. I’d be on set 12 hours to just … be in soft focus in the background fighting.”

After Divergent’s release, both actors plan on diving into their next roles, and they both admit that taking on established characters, be it comic superhero or a Terminator mainstay, is a little daunting.

“If you want to be a big movie star or whatever you’ve gotta do some big films and take some risks. I’m excited to kind of latch onto this character for the next couple of years and put my stamp on something that somebody else has already done,” Teller said. “That’s what I’m excited about, to kind of reinvent it.”

The Grand Budapest Hotel - Movie Review

The Grand Budapest Hotel  

Directed Wes Anderson

Starring Ralph Fiennes, Tony Revolori, Saoirse Ronan, Jeff Goldblum, Willem Dafoe and Bill Murray

From 20th Century Fox

Rated R

99 minutes

Fiennes leads the charge in Anderson's Budapest assualt

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume

Few things are more blissful at a movie theater than a Wes Anderson film. Even amid death, his depression-laden heroes and some of his more morbid curiosities, you can’t help but smile at his films’ intoxicating presentation and their cheerful precociousness.

Anderson’s body of work, astoundingly unique and inventive beyond all reason, exists in a strange world somewhere between cinema and stage play. And not like a Broadway play either; more like a low-budget children’s theater, one overrun by adult actors, even prestige adult actors. He frames these actors with deep affection amid tableaus of artifice, living dioramas in make-believe tangents of the real world.

His new film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, seems to exist even further outside our plane of existence, in an implausibly quirky Eastern European country in the 1930s. Previous films were shot in schools (Rushmore), trains (The Darjeeling Limited) and oceans (A Life Aquatic), but Budapest exists in sprawling interiors, hilariously simple effects shots and in stylized graphical animations. I hope a hotel like this exists, but then again it works better as fantasy untouched by reality. The movie has an interesting framing device: a woman is reading a book by an author who was told a story by a guy who knew a rather famous hotel concierge. It's somewhat confusing, but made clear in the final shot.

In flashbacks, we're shown the Grand Budapest Hotel and its star concierge, Gustav H. (Ralph Fiennes), a man of impeccable taste in everything except ethics, which he abuses to no end by wooing and sleeping with the hotel's older guests. His scorecard of nonagenarian conquests is shown in a montage that is purely and energetically Andersonian in spirit and delivery.

Gustav is thrown under the microscope when one of his mistresses dies as unexpectedly as a 97-year-old woman can and after changing her will so that Gustav H. gets an expensive painting the rest of her miserable family had been hoping to inherit. With the help of a talented lobby boy named Zero (Tony Revolori), a baker's apprentice (Saoirse Ronan), a hotel owner (Jeff Goldblum) and a fleet of other smaller characters, Gustav H. fights the mistress' family, a vampiric assassin (Nosferatu himself, Willem Dafoe), local police and thinly veiled Nazi stand-ins known as the Zig Zag.

Of course, that's the plot, but that's only a small portion of any Wes Anderson movie. Much of the movie exists in its wacky presentation, its dryly written humor, its adorable sense of time and place, and its ever-expanding cast of characters — Bill Murray and Bob Balaban turn up, and I think George Clooney had a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo. And in an Anderson first, the director jumps genres mid-film. What starts as a fairly standard indie-comedy eventually plays with other motifs: a whodunit, a slasher thriller, a romance and a prison movie.

The prison material takes up a large chunk of film, but it's likely to be a highlight for many viewers, with Gustav H. serving as the prison concierge to a bunch of murderers and cutthroats — “How bout some mush, old chaps?” This is the kind of movie that has prison cakes filled with hacksaws and hammers and it totally gets away with it. The tools serve a prison breakout that lovingly winks at The Great Escape. Anderson is prone to homage, and he does it several times here. In one scene, Anderson re-enacts a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain almost verbatim, but with a terrifyingly sudden climax.

And when it's not re-imagining classics, it's becoming one: there’s an extended chase sequence that leads high up into the Alps on a cable car and then into a monastery, where Gustav H. tracks down his only alibi. The scene ends with the most understated and absurd chase scenes of recent memory as Zero and Gustav sled through every winter Olympic event possible. The special effects are bogus and cheeseball, but that’s precisely the point of this whimsical movie and its outlandish examination of Europe.

One other curiosity: the film switches aspect ratios depending on which time period the movie is in. Some of the picture is told, presumably, in the 1980s, as Jude Law plays a hotel guest listening to another guest (F. Murray Abraham) talk about Gustav H. In these scenes, the film fills the whole canvas of the screen, but then in the 1930s the edges are cropped, as if watching an old movie, its squarish aspect ratio curtained by blackness on its side.

Everything about this movie is just lovely: the clothing, dialogue, every character, Fiennes, Fiennes, Fiennes, the pastel coloring, meticulously designed props, lavish sets, obviously fake sets, sets that seem to be made of paper … each scene is rich with tiny detail. Notice how Gustav H. steps in the elevator and flips a switch to turn the elevator light on, or Zero’s penciled-in mustache, or how Saoirse Ronan has a birthmark in the exact shape of Mexico on her cheek, or that obscene painting Gustav hangs on his mistress’ wall. The movie careens forward with presence and determination.

That being said, let me offer this: this is not Wes Anderson’s best work, a spot I still reserve for The Royal Tenenbaums. I wanted Grand Budapest Hotel to be funnier and more mischievous, but also more grounded. It’s still very good, but as an admirer of Anderson’s previous films, I wanted this one to ring with more truth. At times it gets so big and so comically wacky that it feels empty in places. Let me be clear, though, about my brief complaints: some unevenness aside, this is still lovely filmmaking of the highest order and yet another shining achievement from Wes Anderson.

300:Rise of an Empire - Movie Review

300: Rise of an Empire  

Directed by Noam Murro

Starring Sullivan Stapleton, Lena Headey, Eva Green and Rodrigo Santoro

From Warner Bros. Pictures

Rated R

102 minutes

Same ol’, same ol’ with 300 sequel

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume

In 300: Rise of Empire’s world, there is no honor in life; only in death. That theme finds its way to the screen, where bodies are disemboweled, hacked into pieces, impaled, smooshed, drowned, lit on fire, raped, sliced, diced, and tenderized into an organic hamburger meat. If this is the code of Sparta, then maybe it’s good the civilization never made it out of the BCs.

When Zach Snyder made the first 300, way back in 2006, what he had created was an inventive bonanza of hard-boiled mayhem. Yes, the first film had just as much violence, but the filmmaking was fresh, the style inventive, the visuals iconic. We had never seen anything like it, aside from maybe Sin City, which was its own brand of neo-comic anarchy. Since then, though, a glut of copycats have emerged: The Immortals and The Spirit, both aping (terribly) the graphic novel bandwagon. Many of the most obvious rip-offs were by Snyder himself, including The Watchmen and Sucker Punch, hyper-fantasies of 300’s overt simplicity in style and design.

Now here we are with 300: Rise of an Empire, another nail in this visual style’s lowering coffin. The sequel isn’t by Snyder — though, he produced and co-wrote the screenplay — and is instead directed by Noam Murro, who manages to make a 2014 movie look exactly like a 2006 movie. Give him a medal. Here he strips 300 of all its novelty and discovers that all he’s created is this stupendously awful sequel. What a difference 8 years makes.

It begins where the last one left off: after the 300 Spartans, including Leonidas (Gerard Butler), are massacred at the Hot Gates, the Persian armies pour into Greece with Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) leading the charge atop his Fenway-sized throne nestled on the shoulders of the most resilient slaves. Early parts of the movie focus on Xerxes, who is then abandoned altogether. Other early scenes also contain prequel elements that flesh out miniscule details of the original film, details no one on the planet was curious about, like the name of that guy who’s kicked into that bottomless pit.

Eventually we get to Themistokles (Sullivan Stapleton), a Greek general who decides to help Sparta only after its bravest warriors have been ground into a crimson toothpaste. Themistokles groups an army and tries to button up the Greek coast to prevent a separate Persian army, one that seems to exist outside of Xerxes’ universe, from storming into Athens. This movie’s spatial awareness is difficult to follow, throughout. Locations seem to have large expanses between them, but then they’re on top of each other. The choppy editing magnifies this weird sense of place and distance.

I could tell you about other characters that float through the plot, but it would be needless punctuation to Rise of the Empire’s dyslexic grammar. Everyone looks alike, acts alike and dies alike. Even Lena Headey, so chillingly mad in Game of Thrones, seems bored here. If watching nondescript six-packed men in metal underwear clobber each other into pulpy stumps, the wounds spraying goopy chocolate syrup, then here’s a movie for you.The violence these men perpetrate is so constant that it turns into a steady drone of meaningless background noise. I mean, how many times can you really see a man get slashed by a sword? “A bzillion times,” Murro says from his fanboy pulpit.

Much of the dialogue is that over-emphasized, self-important chest-beating of the first movie: “An honorable death is all that we can ask for,” “We choose to die on our feet rather than live on our knees,” “There will be death and destruction,” and enough Braveheart “freedom” speeches to make even William Wallace beg for mercy. The dialogue gets worse when Eva Green, playing the seductive warrior Artemisia, turns up and takes it all to a whole new level. Green, bless her heart, plays the role like it’s Shakespeare and it’s oddly beautiful, if only because it’s the most garish, over-the-top bad performance of the year. Artemisia, who wears a breastplate with nipples stamped right into the bronze, seduces Themistokles and they engage in a sexual olympics that deserves the gold, silver and bronze medals to be smelted together into one big awesome trophy. At one point in the movie, Artemisia slices off a man’s head, holds up the severed noggin and makes out with it.

Mostly, though, 300: Rise of an Empire is all heroic posturing and lots of talking of dying. Isn’t getting killed in battle counterproductive to the cause? Remember that quote from Patton: “I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor bastard die for his.” Yeah, Gen. Patton would have hated these warriors, who obsess over their eventual defeat like it’s some sort of rite of passage.

Now, all of this negativity I’m blasting out doesn’t mean the movie doesn’t look great, because it really does. It just mostly looks like its predecessor, with very little advancement since then. That being said, some images are magnificent, including one of the utterly bland Stapleton sinking in an ocean filled with floating ship debris, and another of a tradesman carving the bark off a tree trunk, bits of tree and dust shooting up into the air and choking the frame with cloud of organic matter. The slow motion effects, overused by a factor of three, can also be quite thrilling, if only because the pictures are so overloaded with spectacle.

The 300 true believers will adore this movie. But that’s not saying much; they’d adore anything with shirtless men butchering other shirtless men. Everyone else, keep clear of this clunky behemoth and its violent swing.

Elaine Strich: Shoot Me movie review

Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me Directed by Chiemi Karasawa

Starring Elaine Stritch, Rob Bowman, John Turturro, Tina Fey, Nathan Lane and James Gandolfini

From Sundance Selects

Not rated

98 minutes

Broadway star hides nothing in tell-all documentary

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume

It’s winter in New York and Elaine Stritch is prancing down Park Avenue without pants. This is the norm for the 87-year-old actress and Broadway star, and by the end of the movie you’ll be very familiar with those sexy — yes, sexy! — legs.

Stritch is the subject of Chiemi Karasawa’s lovely documentary Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me. Karasawa seems to have unlimited access with Stritch as she bops around Manhattan greeting well-wishers on the street, rehearsing for her new solo show and struggling with her health. The film begins with Stritch as she scoots around the city, possibly to a 30 Rock rehearsal, during which her caustic wit and flamboyant edge are on full display. “This business sucks,” she says, not a hint of irony as she grasps for her next role.

Stritch is not shy. And that gravel-flecked voice, untouched by grace, is still very sharp. She has quite a mouth; her candor leads to many F words and other delicious curses that sound entirely different when said by an octogenarian. In the 30 Rock rehearsal, in which she plays Alec Baldwin’s character’s mother, Baldwin has had enough of her diva behaviour. “You bitch,” he shouts as he walks out of the room. Baldwin might have been serious, but Stritch throws her head back and laughs heartily, as if to say, “Bring it.”

Cameras follow Stritch as she rehearses her one-woman show of Stephen Sondheim songs, a sequel of sorts to a similar show that was a hit many years before. We also see her flipping through her vast library of photographs, memorabilia and Playbills. She was in everything on Broadway, and has a story for each. When an assistant digs up an old photo of her and JFK, Stritch shares the story: Long before he was president, John Kennedy asked Stritch out. After the date, he invited himself up. Stritch turned him down, but always admired him for saying what he meant and not mincing words.

Later, the actress, birdlike and frail, nearly falls into a diabetic coma. She allows herself to be filmed mid-crisis and later in the hospital, where her pantsless hospital gown is a fitting tribute to her wardrobe. She’s gotta stop drinking, she grumbles. Levity fills the room, though, as her unmistakable voice and personality cut through the stillness of the moment. “Dying’s easy. Comedy is hard,” she blurts outs. In many scenes her accompanist Rob Bowman, who should be knighted for his patience and compassion, cares for her as she goes through her health scares.

Besides her performances, which are rather wonderful in their spontaneity and occasional crudeness, the film is filled with humorous little oddities, including one scene in which Stritch grows angry with Karasawa for not documenting the unpacking of a package of English muffins. “Now I have to do it again,” Stritch seethes. In another scene she refers to the hit Broadway play The Book of Norman, seemingly unaware of the actual title. Many actors make appearances, including John Turturro, Tina Fey, Nathan Lane and the late James Gandolfini — he and Stritch were pals, and the movie is dedicated to him.

Mostly, though, Shoot Me just stand backs and ponders Stritch as a landmark to New York, a curiosity that has joyfully refused to stop working. She certainly dresses the park of a cultural institution: she’s often hidden under huge fur coats, her black-stocking’d legs extending from below her long button-ups with big broaches and wide ties. She often hides her eyes behind hats and these big aquarium-sized glasses. She’s the Cruella de Vil of comedy, but somehow much more sophisticatedly trashy. The world is better for her.

The Bag Man - Movie Review

The Bag Man  

Directed by David Grovic

Starring John Cusack, Robert De Niro, Crispin Glover and Rebecca Da Costa

From Cinedigm

Rated R

108 minutes

Cusack, De Niro star in crime stinker

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume

The Bag Man is propelled forward on the strength of one lingering question: What’s in that damn bag? Spoiler alert — nothing.

Not literally nothing. Something’s in there, but by the time the movie ends you’ll wish it contained stacks of cash, "nogotiable bearer bonds" or Walter Sobchak’s dirty undies, just not what was in there. Making matters worse, the contents of the bag have absolutely nothing to do with anything that happens in The Bag Man; if anything, the bag’s contents relate more to some never-to-be-made prequel that hints at the bag’s origins, implications and all the other tedium that can fit into a leather carry-on.

The movie stars John Cusack as an unnamed mafia go-to guy, who has the bag from almost the very beginning. In the first scene, he’s given instructions about the bag by crime underlord Dragna (Robert De Niro). Dragna, spitting and sputtering over dinner, illustrates the importance of the bag using his steak and potatoes. “This is you. This is the bag. This is me,” he says partitioning off his meal, “so get me the bag.” This scene made me realize that I would have preferred the entirety of The Bag Man to be performed by actual steak and potatoes over Cusack and De Niro.

Anyway, cut to the very next scene and Cusack’s Bag Man has the bag. Poof, like that. There’s also a dead man in the backseat, a bullet through his hand and a phone booth clearly rented from some third-rate Hollywood prop vendor — when was the last time you saw a payphone, let alone a full-on glass-walled phone booth? Bag Man is given specific instructions to go to a hotel and wait until Dragna can board a plane, fly to Bag Man’s location and retrieve the bag. Here’s a thought, Dragna: maybe don’t leave the state when someone is retrieving your goods.

This is an idiotic movie, one that seems to have been inspired by better films, ones made by much better directors. It has Quentin Tarantino’s dialogue, Guy Ritchie’s criminal oddballs and Michael Mann’s unnerving obsession with the night. But director David Grovic, who also co-wrote the screenplay, can’t turn any this hackneyed drivel into anything other than crumpled love letter to better movies.

It’s a shame because the movie had a brief window about a third of the way through that had potential. As Bag Man arrives at the hotel, he slowly spirals into a dream-like world of wacky characters, each more surreal than the one before them. For starters, the hotel is stuck in some kind of time warp, with a wheelchair-riding Crispin Glover serving as its de-facto Norman Bates. Other characters include two good ol’ boy cops, some trigger-happy federal agents and two pimps, one them a little person with a bladder that he empties on Bag Man’s head. I also liked how every guy Bag Man killed had an 8-by-10 glossy picture of the bag on them, revealing a wider bag conspiracy. All of this nuttiness threatens to spin the film into a unique, albeit odd, place, but then it settles on being a by-the-numbers crime thriller, and a dopey one at that.

Most of Bag Man is just downright cruel, especially to women. In an early scene, Dragna wallops a woman in the nose so hard she requires plastic surgery. Dragna, ever the gentleman, gives her a referral to a surgeon. In another scene, someone says flatly and with no irony whatsoever, "All women are whores." He was talking about women in general, and also prostitute Rivka (Rebecca Da Costa), a Fifth Element extra with blue hair, red leather miniskirt and theeck Russian accent. Not much on Da Costa looks real, which gives Grovic plenty of excuses to longingly slobber over her curvy frame.

This is not a good movie, nor is it even a commendable bad one. It just hurtles forward with its joyless action and grinding momentum. And that bag, its contents do not make anything better. If you must know what's in it, give it a week or two and the synopsis will be up on Wikipedia — spoil away.

Divergent Red Carpet hits Tempe

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume  

Screaming teen girls, many clutching thick books with dog-eared pages and worn covers, were on the fast track to lost voices and sore throats last night at the Tempe red carpet premiere of Divergent, the latest young adult novel turned film.

“It’s just that I love these books so much,” Hailey Sumtner, 17, said from the packed pavilion, screams bursting behind. “And to see the stars is a chance I couldn’t miss.”

Actors Miles Teller and Jai Courtney, who play antagonists in the Neil Burger-directed movie, made appearances, along with several local celebrities, to mark the film’s premiere in the Phoenix area. The dystopian science fiction movie, based on the hit Veronica Roth book, opens nationwide March 21.

Signing autographs, posing for photographs and working the red carpet, Teller and Courtney brought some Hollywood glamour to the Valley, the likes of which are only rarely seen in a state that shares a border with Hollywood’s home of California. Other than the annual Celebrity Fight Night and the Phoenix Film Festival, the last red-carpet event was in 2009 when X-Men Origins: Wolverine was chosen to host the worldwide premiere, an event that brought out several big names, including Hugh Jackman.

Talking with reporters, Teller, who most recently starred in the comedy That Awkward Moment, spoke about working with Shailene Woodley again after their 2013 film The Spectacular Now. In Divergent, Woodley plays a talented young warrior in a ruined world ruled by competing class-like factions. Teller plays a competitor in the physical and, at times, violent movie.

“Shailene and I are just so comfortable that it was easy to do the fight scenes. We just knew each other so well that it was natural to get in there and do it … where Spectacular Now was more about the relationship, Divergent is more physical,” Teller said. A young girl on the receiving line asked Teller if he thought of Woodley like a sister. “Yeah, but with moments of sexual tension,” Teller added.

Courtney, who previously had a large role alongside Tom Cruise in Jack Reacher and he played John McClane’s son in A Good Day to Die Hard, said much of the first film is introducing audiences to the world of Divergent and its large cast of characters and that some of the plot might deviate slightly from the books.

“You’re never going to be able to please everyone,” Courtney said. “Fans have certain expectations. I certainly hope they like it, and I think they will love it, but these books have huge followings so of course some people will complain about something that isn’t exactly like it was in the book.”

Courtney said he hadn’t even heard of the book when he was offered his role, one that involved him being especially cruel to Woodley’s character. “Mostly I was a fan of Burger’s work, so I got online and read up about everything. After some digging I knew I wanted to do it. It was all very new to me … young adult novels.”

Also at the event were the Arizona Cardinals cheerleaders, several Cardinals players, a silver-medalist womens hockey player, Harkins Theatres owner Dan Harkins and Marvin Young, Valley resident and a prominent face at local press screenings. Young is more widely known by his stage name, Young MC, whose early rap hits, including “Bust a Move,” are considered vital pieces in hip-hop’s history.

“I was excited when I heard this was happening. It’s a big deal that we’re here tonight celebrating this movie,” Young -- whose own movie, Justice is Served is likely to be released within a year -- said from the red carpet. “I’ve read the first book already. I hope the movie lives up to the book.”

Judging by the screams of fans after the packed screening, that’s likely to be the case. Stay tuned here for a review of Divergent and full interviews with Teller and Courtney on the movie’s official release date, March 21.

Movie Review for The Wind Rises

  The Wind Rises

Featuring the voices of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, John Krasinski, Emily Blunt, Martin Short and Stanley Tucci

Directed by Hayao Miyazaki

From Studio Ghibli and Walt Disney Studios

Rated PG-13

126 minutes

Riding with the Wind

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume

If there was ever an animated film that was ready to burst out of its cells to inhabit our live-action world, as if by osmosis, then here it is: The Wind Rises, the supposed last film — “Eh, nevermind” — of Japanese cultural heavyweight Hayao Miyazaki.

Miyazaki is the creator of Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro and many other films from Studio Ghibli, the Japanese Pixar. He’s 73 and the world recoiled when he said he was retiring, and then exhaled rapidly when he said retirement wasn’t really for him. Of course not. Imagination doesn’t store well; it needs to be released into the world.

In past films the Japanese director used whimsy and fantasy to construct his elaborate visions, but The Wind Rises has a streak of realism that runs through it that may stir boredom in younger viewers, though their eyes will often grow wide and still at some of the magnificent animation. The film opens on Jirô, a serious young boy who is lost in his own head. We meet him first in his dream, where fantastical airplanes, hulking zeppelins and squid-like missiles fill the sky in a symphony of aerodynamic movement. Jirô awakes and decides right then he wants to build airplanes.

Many years later, an older Jirô finds himself working for Mitsubishi, where he and a team of engineers are trying to create the next great Japanese fighter plane. The fruits of their labor will eventually go on to wreak havok throughout the Pacific — including at Pearl Harbor, where many Americans died — but The Wind Rises is uninterested in war because Jirô is uninterested in war. He only wants to create something that will soar brilliantly and effortlessly through the sky.

On his journey are a competitive friend, various engineering partners, an Italian inventor he shares dreams with, a bespectacled little man with eyes no bigger than dimes, and Nahoko, a woman whose love and health are somehow inversely proportionate within the plot. Nahoko and Jirô, the film’s tragic core, have shared a traumatic event together, the Kantō earthquake of 1923. The sequence is animated with terrifying realism: waves of earth rise and fall, buildings crumble into heaps, fires spread from one wood-and-paper city to another and, in a haunting visual, bits of glowing embers fill the skies where Jirô’s dream-planes once zoomed.

Aside from several dream sequences and the earthquake scenes, The Wind Rises mostly dotes on Jirô’s quest to aviation greatness. His first assignment is a wing strut; his design reinvents the part. Later there’s new building materials, recessed riveting, bigger planes, faster engines and more majestic lines. He eventually designs a plane with inverted gull-shaped wings, and then the Japanese Zero, the fighter syonymous with the Japanese air force during World War II.

One of the more unique aspects of the film are the sound effects — almost all of them are created using mouth noises, from engines sputtering to life to dirigibles idling through the clouds to the low-rumble of a tectonic plates grinding together. I couldn’t help but smile thinking of sound technicians spitting raspberries into microphones, blowing into empty jugs or contorting their mouths as they give life to steam engines and twirling propellors. And since we’re on the topic of sounds, I highly encourage you to see the movie in Japanese with English subtitles if at all possible. Joseph Gordon-Levitt does a fine job voicing Jirô, but Hideaki Anno’s voice is much richer, with a slightly muffled timbre — it’s worth hearing.

Mostly, though, The Wind Rises is simply gorgeous to behold. The imagery is just astounding in every way. The hand-drawn backgrounds, scenes filled with indivudually animated people, the bits of Japanese culture painted into the edges of frames, the panning shots of trains chugging forward and carts being pulled through busy markets … almost every frame of this movie is breathtaking. I was especially impressed by the small details: Jirô bowing to woman on the platform between traincars, oxen pulling a new plane prototype onto a runway, and a scene with Jirô’s new boss pointing at a hat stand and then a desk, “Hat goes here. Data goes here. Got it?”

The Wind Rises has two companion pieces. The first is Isao Takahata’s watershed anime Grave of the Fireflies, another film in which realistic horrors are visited upon delightful hand-drawn animation. Takahata and Miyazaki were colleagues at Studio Ghibli, and they both understood then that animation wasn’t confining their mature themes, it was liberating them. The other companion piece is Steven Spielberg’s vastly underrated Empire of the Sun, in which a young Christian Bale plays a resilient English lad whose eyes are drawn to the skies and to the Japanese Zeros that have conquered it. The character seemed unaware of “sides” in a war, as does Jirô, whose dreams are gauged by altimeter.

This is a stunningly beautiful movie, and deeply moving. It’s also a departure for Miyazaki, who had previously turned fantastical creatures and plots into modern fairy tales. This is more biopic, but it’s still overflowing with imagination and incredible imagery. It's a must-see.

Non-Stop Movie Review

Non-Stop  

Starring Liam Neeson, Julianne, Moore, Michelle Dockery and Lupita Nyong’o

Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

From Universal Picture and Studio Canal

Rated PG-13

106minutes

Phone-heavy thriller has lots of turbulence

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume

I liked Non-Stop better when it was called Liam Neeson Texting.

And boy does he text a lot. In the terminal, at the gate, in his seat, in the bathroom, standing in the aisle while other people are trying to get by … he’s like a teenage girl, except that instead of spam-tweeting “follow me” messages to Justin Beiber he’s negotiating with the world’s most overworked terrorist.

In this dopey air-thriller, Neeson plays Bill Marks, a federal air marshall who’s fallen on hard times and off the wagon. But ask yourself: wouldn’t you need a steady stream of scotch, and smokes in the airplane bathroom (violation!), to get you through a job that requires you to ride airplanes for a living?

Bill gets on a plane headed over the Pacific and almost immediately starts getting threatening texts, including this one: “A passenger will die every 20 minutes until I get what I want.” What he wants is $150 million transferred into a bank account set up in Bill’s name, which does not please Bill or the emergency responders on the ground who actually think Bill’s dumb enough to set up a criminal enterprise in his own name. Bill’s not that stupid, although the other people on this plane certainly are.

There’s a hot-headed New York cop, a British flight attendant, Lupita Nyong’o in her first post-12 Years a Slave role, a computer programmer who looks like a discount Jamie Foxx, and a spazzy airplane woman (Julianne Moore) because every flight needs at least one, usually in the seat right next to you. These people are the worst. They step on Bill’s toes, they act all pouty and wounded when he makes them sit down, and they seem to ignore evidence right in front of them so they can jump to all the wrong conclusions. At one point, the passengers are watching CNN footage that suggests Bill is the terrorist of the hijacked flight and all they can do is … wait for it … continue to watch TV on their hijacked plane. Nevermind that they can watch it happen live! And when they do finally rise up to stop Bill, it’s at the exact moment he needs the most help to apprehend the real terrorist. And later in the movie, Bill offers everyone free air travel, because that’s much better than dying in a hijacking. You’ve heard of Snakes on a Plane; let me present you Flakes on a Plane.

Poor Neeson, he’s doing too many of these thrillers. He’s great in almost everything, even in mediocre dreck like this. But really, how many times can you do Taken? This movie makes him do some idiotic stuff, like test the purity of cocaine by breaking out a chemistry set and examining the powder’s atomic structure. No, I’m kidding — he pokes a knife in the bag, dabs at some coke and rubs in on his tongue because that worked in every movie from the ’80s. He also has the most erotic bathroom fight that has ever been attempted at 30,000 feet. Neeson also has an awful yawn. He’s just sitting there and — boom! — his head tilts back, his eyes squint and his mouth opens and seems to suck in the entire Eastern seaboard. Why would director Jaume Collet-Serra (Unknown) allow such an ugly moment from his star? The camera even zooms in a little like it’s trying to get a close-up of his tonsils.

Another ugly moment involves a Muslim doctor on the plane. When it’s revealed there might be a hijacker on board, everyone looks at this air traveler wearing a traditional headcovering and beard. Because, LOL, apparently racism is funny. Now, maybe this was a cultural critique of stereotypes and air travel. But I don’t think Non-Stop is that smart, a point that’s validated later again and again as the Muslim character is made the butt of several jokes, including one after a “random” carry-on search. “What?! You didn’t find anything in his bag?” one of the other passengers screeches.

There is a market for these types of frustratingly dumb thrillers, so it’s unlikely I’ll dissuade anyone from seeing it. If you’ve seen any of the Taken movies, then you’ll likely find Non-Stop acceptable, if only because Neeson has perfected this character. Although, judging by that yawn, I would say he might be getting a little bored with it.

In Secret - Movie Review

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume In Secret

Starring Elizabeth Olsen, Jessica Lange, Tom Felton and Oscar Isaac

Directed by Charlie Stratton

From Roadside Attractions

Rated R

101 minutes

In Secret sent me careening backward through time to the tragic loser-hero Walter Neff, the star of Billy Wilder's intensely serious film noir Double Indemnity: "Yes, I killed him. I killed him for money — and a woman — and I didn't get the money and I didn't get the woman. Pretty isn't it?"

Though it's far removed from James M. Cain's crime novel and the movie it spawned, In Secret pulses with their passionate energies. Where Double Indemnity was an insurance scam in 1940s Los Angeles, In Secret is a love affair in Victorian-era France. Its central figures suffer similar ailments: marriage has shrunk their worlds, and murder has imprisoned them in it..

In Secret opens in the 1850s with young Thérèse as her father abandons her with her aunt, Madame Raquin (Jessica Lange), who is not pleased with the addition to her sleepy farmhouse, where her only child has a rather serious lung ailment. Many years pass and the Madame marries Thérèse, now played by Elizabeth Olsen, to her cousin, the runtish, sickly Camille (Tom Felton, Draco Malfoy from the Harry Potter movies), who seems unable to discern the features of a woman from those of a travel trunk. Poor kid, he just seems constantly aloof.

The three move to Paris to take work: the women in a linen shop they own and Camille in some kind of financial institution, where papers are shuffled from desk to desk with little else getting done. At work, Camille runs into a childhood friend, Laurent (Oscar Isaac), who is everything Camille is not, including handsome and unabashedly sexual. When Laurent visits the home on Thursday game night, Thérèse can only gasp and swoon. They begin a steamy affair that is difficult to keep hidden — in one episode Laurent hides under Thérèse's billowy skirt while the Madame skulks around her bedroom.

These affairs can never last, not without spilling over the edges of their own containment. Sure enough, Laurent hatches a plan that will forever destroy the balance of the house, their jobs and their love. Thérèse is mostly bullied into the scheme, aside from one moment of serious reflection that is interrupted by Camille, the boy who unknowingly sealed his fate with a missplaced joke.

The movie is the directorial debut for Charlie Stratton, who does a commendable job bringing the 1867 Émile Zola novel to the screen. The first and second acts are more solidly constructed than the third and final act, where the film staggers against the emotional weight that bears down on Thérèse. She has visions of dead bodies, she mopes around the house, sleeps in the store window and basically gives up on life. Much of the final act is spent dealing with Madame Raquin, who has had a stroke, her eyes trapped in a lifeless body.

The acting is superb all the way around. Isaac, fresh off Inside Llewyn Davis, is fantastic, as is Felton, who brings a boyish innocence to his tragic Camille. The movie really belongs to the women, though — Lange and Olsen are hypnotic in their tormented deliveries. Generations apart, the two actresses somehow occupy the same devastating groove within In Secret’s anguished turmoil. When they face off late in the film, Olsen lets defeat wash over her character’s face while Lange, frozen in place, lets her eyes fill with terror and hate.

I must also commend the cinematography by Florian Hoffmeister, who uses mostly natural light — or candle or fire light — to paint his images. Much of the film takes place in shadows, in sunless corridors and dimly lit parlors, where dominos are slapped on tables and lies are further manipulated onto unsuspecting witnesses. A scene early in the movie struck me as especially remarkable: Olsen sitting at a window, beams of sunlight shooting through in long horizontal bars and, back in the shadows, a bed with a sick boy stirring in the darkness. The movie holds the shot long enough for you to appreciate its composition.

If you’ll recall how Double Indemnity ended, then you’ll know some of the paths In Secret will be traveling. It’s not a pretty route. In fact, it’s terrifyingly dark and morose. But it’s an interesting period piece, one full of remarkable performances, finely detailed costumes, exquisite lighting and a finale that will suck the wind from your chest.

3 Days to Kill - Movie Review

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume 3 Days to Kill

Starring Kevin Costner, Connie Nielsen, Hailee Steinfeld and Amber Heard

Directed by McG

From Relativity Media and EuropaCorp

Rated PG-13

113 minutes

3 Days to Kill might be 2014’s first guilty pleasure. It begins as an impossibly mundane action thriller, but somewhere along the way it blossoms into a film with an absurd amount of charm and quirky likability.

The turn happens about 15 minutes in: CIA super-spy Ethan (Kevin Costner) returns to his Paris flat to find that a rather large family of squatters, all of them impeccably polite, have remodeled his house and appropriated his space as their own. He goes to the French police, but they tell him to wait until April to file a formal complaint — “Wait for spring like birds and bees and boys and girls.” Ethan calls them “turds,” which is a confusing word for French police. “I think he’s calling us shit,” one cop says. Ethan, defeated, returns home, where his squatters try to comfort him in his new bedroom.

At this point, I’m realizing I have no idea what this movie is anymore. This is re-confirmed several minutes later when Ethan, post-shootout, argues with another CIA agent about the difference between a mustache and a goatee. The prop in the scene is an injured, bullet-riddled bad guy with a goatee, who’s kicked and rolled over again and again to prove a point about the merits of facial hair. These comedic bursts are far departures from the high-octane spy thrills of the movie’s first 10 minutes, thrills that only make cameo appearances through the remainder of 3 Days to Kill.

Later, Ethan is forced to retire from the CIA after they find out he has inoperable brain cancer. In Paris, while he tries to regain lost trust with his ex-wife (Connie Nielsen) and his teen daughter Zoey (Hailee Steinfeld), the CIA needs him for one more mission: to hunt down and kill a man known only as The Wolf, whose henchmen include The Albino and The Accountant. His government handler, a sexy vixen with a limitless budget, offers him money and an experimental cancer drug that comes in couture leather pouches. Ethan agrees, which means he spends the rest of the movie alternating between father-daughter dates to CIA-sanctioned murder.

The movie reminds me a great deal of last year’s mafia-comedy The Family, in which Robert De Niro, playing a mob boss, goes to a film club to critique Goodfellas. I wasn’t sure then, and am less sure now, whether The Family was a comedy, crime caper or something else entirely. 3 Days to Kill bops around with generally the same attitude, like when Ethan puts his Italian hostage on the phone with his daughter to explain how to make a perfect batch of spaghetti sauce. Or when he barges into another suspect’s house to talk to his teen daughters about what makes teens tick. The two movies, besides sharing their bizarre comedy timing, share writers — French filmmaker Luc Besson. Now, Besson’s movies have always had quirky streaks in them; think of the lighter moments in Léon, the fantasy-comedy of the Fifth Element, or the utter battiness of the Transporter movies. 3 Days to Kill taps into similar veins and you can sense the film smiling at you from behind the screen.

The movie has several comedic themes that return again and again, including a recurring gag about a purple bike, Ethan’s daughter-approved ringtone featuring Swedish electro-punk, and one of the squatter kids who insists Ethan give him high fives, even as the CIA spy escorts criminals to his bathroom for torture sessions. The McG-directed movie simply marches to the beat of its own drum.

Now, I did say this was a guilty pleasure so don’t go in expecting all the pieces to fit. They don’t. The movie is uneven and awkwardly paced, but it’s consistently entertaining. And Kevin Costner seems to be having a lot of fun, proving that he might not be the most bankable star, but he’s still a dependable and likable one.

Winter's Tale - Review

Winter's Tale  

Starring Colin Farrell, Jessica Brown Findlay, Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly

Directed by Akiva Goldsman

From Village Roadshow and Warner Bros. Pictures

Rated PG-13

118 minutes

Angels and demons collide in vapid fantasy romance

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume

A Winter’s Tale is undiluted romance. Cut it with some sugar and water and you’re likely to get a quadrilogy of sappy love stories.

This movie knows its audience and preach-panders directly to it. I don’t want to generalize and say the audience is women, but it’s mostly women. They’ll adore this movie. They’ll cherish every innocuous detail, every pretentious prop, every whispered stanza of romance. It will live on in their spongy lovelorn hearts as the ultimate personification of emotional tenderness, sacrifice and redemption.

Listen, I’m going to complain about this, but please understand this is the way it goes: men get dragged to these movies and, after a brief window of whiny complacency, they shrug their shoulders and admit the movie wasn’t made for them. This is my window to complain.

A Winter’s Tale plunges headfirst into lady culture. It’s about a girl effortlessly playing the piano, the exchanging of miracles, flying magical horses, princess kisses, charcoal drawings of feminine figures, cute little girls in overly large woolen mittens, beds of roses, an abundance of star metaphors, boxes full of sentimental mementos, cancer scares and eternal love sprinkled in the cosmos. This laundry list might sound exaggerated, but I promise you it’s entirely accurate.

It begins in the 19th century when an immigrant family is turned away from America at Ellis Island because the husband has some sort of contagious disease. In the New York harbor, before a boat takes them back to their home country, the couple stuffs their baby in a wooden model boat and sends it sailing toward Manhattan — because pulling a Moses on your infant is better than, oh I don’t know, being a parent. The baby grows up to be Peter Lake (Colin Farrell), a masterclass thief whose special move is using a comically large grappling hook to shimmy up the front of Brownstones in broad daylight.

After running afoul with henchman Pearly (Russell Crowe), Peter prepares to leave the city on an especially agile horse that won’t gallop away until Peter makes one more score. This horse is a bad influence, but nevertheless Peter Bat-grapples into the home of Beverly Penn (Jessica Brown Findlay), who is home sick with “consumption,” which means she has to stay icy cold like a comic villain. They meet in the parlor, her at her piano banging out Brahms and he with his pistol unholstered and his burglar bag empty. She invites him in for tea. Of course, they fall in love.

What happens next I wasn’t prepared for: angels and demons reveal themselves as vital players in this otherwise sleepy game of romance. And when I say angels and demons, that’s not allegory or metaphor, but actual angels and demons. Pearly plays the demon, and he has a scene where he ventures to meet Lucifer, who turns out to be Will Smith in a cameo so nutty it felt like a product placement for Planters. Lucifer and God have an agreement that neither angels or demons will interfere too much in the lives of humans. “Lou” has to tell Pearly to back off a little, which makes him even more sinister.

Meanwhile, Peter, who might be an angel, has to escape from Pearly without endangering Beverly and without using his “miracle,” which is apparently something he can just give away to anyone, although I first thought it was Beverly’s virginity which also figures into the plot. Before he knows it, though, Peter is waking up in modern-day New York City and trying to right more than a century of wrongs. And Pearly, his crime den now filled with flat screens instead of blackboards, still has a chip on his shoulder for the one who got away.

Yeesh, this movie. It just keeps going and going. And as the dialogue gets blander and blander (“You are my distant star bright and special … blah, blah, blah”) the acting grows more and more frustrating. Beverly is interesting, if only because her medical condition is so laughably odd. She has to sleep in tents in the winter, walk through the snow in nightgowns, and take icy baths when her hand can fog a mirror. If only they had a refrigerator they could stuff her into like that baby and the boat. Farrell is also intriguing, even though I never thought he knew what was happening. I can picture him on the set asking questions and then shrugging, “Nevermind, it’s easier when I don’t know.”

The movie is directed, written and produced by screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, who worked tirelessly for many years to bring Mark Helprin’s novel to the screen. While I thought A Winter’s Tale was tirelessly self-involved and plotted, I must acknowledge that fans of these types of movies will likely adore all that transpires. Two women sitting near me were unabashed by their infatuation for Peter, Beverly and their magical tale; when the movie ended, they were in puddles. I also must admit that his movie makes much more sense than anything in the Twilight series — not a difficult feat, though.

And a quick word on women and Valentine’s Day movies: I’ve made some cheap jokes here about how A Winter’s Tale is a woman’s movie, but we live in a changing world, where a woman might soon be in the White House, a gay man might soon be in the NFL and the pictures on bathrooms doors are merely suggestions for bathroom users. The gender landscapes are ever changing. Women will appreciate this movie, but they won’t be the only ones. If a movie brings joy into your life, then it has succeeded at something.

My heart does go out to spouses and dates, no matter the gender, though — grumble silently without ruining it for anyone else. It'll be over soon enough.

RoboCop Movie Review

RoboCop  

Starring Joel Kinneman, Gary Oldman, Michael Keaton, Jackie Earle Haley, Abbie Cornish and Michael K. Williams

Directed by José Padilha

From MGM and Columbia Pictures

Rated PG-13

118 minutes

This is why films should not be remade

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume

Everything that takes place in the RoboCop remake could have, hypothetically, been gleaned from the poster of the original RoboCop or perhaps the Netflix synopsis, which begs the question: did anyone actually watch the original?

I ask because the remake is a misfire in every conceivable way. Where the original was inventive with its science fiction and laced with social commentary, this one is tone deaf to its own existence, blasting through all the subtlety and nuance that made the original so wickedly prescient.

My heart goes out to RoboCop’s director José Padilha, who expressed publicly that the studio was meddling and refused him the latitude to create a film with any semblance of personality, or even just some nervous tics. At the same time, Padilha wasn’t even able to pull off a mediocre hit — he blew right past “mediocre” on the freefall into oblivion — which says a lot for his work, studio meddling or not.

In fairness to all parties, though, Paul Verhoeven’s work is often misunderstood. Starship Troopers is a great example. Ask the fanboys why they love it and they’ll say two things: space marines killing bugs and co-ed showers. But the film was richer than that, with its layers of pre-Internet “Want to know more?” infotainment and its fascist regard for the military, like a science fiction version of Triumph of the Will. Starship Troopers was an idea movie pretending to be a dumb genre picture, the same of which could be said, in varying degrees, to Verhoeven's Basic Instinct, about icepicks and underwear-free interrogations; Totall Recall, about a talking head prosthetic and three-boobed women; and even the reprehensibly bad Showgirls, about gratuitous nudity and bad acting, the subtext of which was gratuitous nudity and bad acting.

This RoboCop, though, has no big ideas, or thoughtful subtext, or social commentary. It’s essentially exactly what the title suggests: a robotic man becomes a police officer. It stars Joel Kinnaman as Alex Murphy, a detective in Detroit’s embattled police department. Murphy is nearly killed in a bomb blast that leaves him with nothing but a hand, head, heart and lungs. His metallic body is brought together in one of those Iron Man chambers, where all the pieces come up from the floor to assemble. He’s created by OmniCorp, a drone manufacturer that is sending tactical unmanned robots and tanks into Afghanistan to obliterate every 10-year-old holding a kitchen knife.

Omnicorp wants to bring drones to the United States, but they need a test case to woo Congress to throw out a law banning artificially intelligent drones. Murphy, his meaty stumps still simmering from the bomb blast, is that test case. If you’ll recall in the original, Alex Murphy had his brain wiped clean before becoming the cyborg cop. Here, though, this Murphy is aware of who he is, which requires all sorts of family drama with his wife and his son, whose only identifying characteristic seems to be that he likes hockey. (Screenwriter 1: “How do we make this kid less two-dimensional?” Screenwriter 2: “Give him a hobby he obsesses over. Brilliant.”)

For a brief spell right in the middle of the movie, RoboCop does exactly what he’s programmed to do — he arrests bad guys. He does this by using a huge database that crosschecks mugshots with surveillance footage, which leads me to ask an obvious question: Why haven't the regular cops done this?

The movie can’t decide what state Murphy's brain is in. He begins with all his memories intact, and an obvious case of post-traumatic stress disorder, but then the plot requires changes to his brain chemistry: too much dopamine, not enough, microchips are removed, then they’re put back and the whole time Murphy bounces from one emotional state to none at all. One day he can recognize his partner (the great Michael K. Williams in a wasted role) and the next he’s dodging around his weepy wife in a Tron lightcycle. Recall the original film and how neat this was all handled: Murphy’s memories slowly creeped into RoboCop’s programming, suggesting that the human parts of a brain could never be overwritten. Now contrast that with this mess. The difference is night and day.

Mostly, though, the RoboCop reboot is just stupid moviemaking. It takes close to 65 minutes to get RoboCop on the street, and even then he has to go through the most mindless training program, some of it while listening to yodel-sampled dance music (Google “Hocus Pocus” by Focus). The film frequently teases bigger ideas (drones in Afghanistan, the ethics of robotic people, the wackiness of Congress, FOX News' wacky slant) but all lead to dead ends and hollow payoffs. This movie is so stupid that when it pans across the dome of the US Capitol, the Washington Monument piercing the sky in the background, the bottom of the screen reads “Washington D.C.” because apparently it needed to be stated. And there’s poor Kinnaman, stuck in that ghastly suit, his career’s metal-plated albatross.

All those memorable scenes of Verhoeven's RoboCop shooting through skirts, wrestling through drywall and making those awful speeches quoting the police code to victims have been replaced with mindless shootouts and vapid action sequences that your brain will forget, delete and write over as they’re happening in real time.

Many films have been questionably remade: Psycho, Godzilla, Willy Wonka. Each is their own brand of awful, but RoboCop might be the new gold standard for remakes that just don’t get it.

Review for The LEGO Movie

The LEGO Movie  

Featuring the voices of Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Banks, Morgan Freeman, Will Ferrell, Liam Neeson, Will Arnett and Charlie Day

Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller

From Warner Bros. Pictures

Rated PG

100 minutes

Let your imagination run wild with lovely LEGOs movie

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume

The LEGO Movie will crash on you like a ton of bricks — swiftly and unexpectedly and in an explosion of color. And a ton of LEGO bricks, that’s like a billion pieces, right? Get a broom before you’re mom comes in and impales her heel on one of those 2x4s with the sharp corners.

This is the zaniest, most joyfully plucky movie you’ll see this year, a Pixar movie if not in name then in spirit. It arrives on the screen with herky-jerky stop-motion-like animation — it’s actually all CGI — that is warmly nostalgic yet wonderfully alien and foreign. The movie quickly wraps around you, folding you into its charm and whimsy and its nutty hopscotch through pop-culture. In what other movie would it make complete sense for Gandalf, Batman, Shaquille O’Neill and Abe Lincoln in a rocket chair to be chilling out together? And then out of nowhere, Millennium Falcon!

The movie takes place in a LEGO world populated by little minifigures, their skin Simpson yellow and their legs two scissoring hunks of plastic. Their world, overflowing with mindless consumption and the worshiping of all things mainstream, is basically a satire of capitalism (or communism depending on your slant) told in a way a child could understand. Everyone has a job they love, a song they all sing together (“Everything is Awesome!”), inane TV shows they all watch in mass (Where Are My Pants?) and mass-market trends they all follow. When someone is asked what their favorite restaurant is the only response seems to be “any chain restaurant.” The commentary is quite sharp, which is odd considering the nice people at LEGO probably made this movie hoping that LEGO sales would shoot through the roof (and they will), which is itself some kind of twisted satire.

We begin with Emmet Brickowski, a construction worker who builds sparkling new Lego buildings using the most helpful instructions imaginable, IKEA plans for those averse to words. Construction in a LEGO world is exactly how you might imagine: old buildings are demolished so their pieces can be scooped up and used on the next building project. The detail in the world is remarkable: everything is LEGO. And I mean everything: streets, oceans, fire, smoke, suds in a shower … the animators never cheat by using other materials.

What happens next is basically the plot of The Matrix: Emmet (Chris Pratt) learns he might be the subject of a prophecy foretelling of The One, a LEGO man who could essentially reboot the universe into a more open and accepting utopia. He learns he’s the mythical One when he falls down a deep shaft and climbs out with some foreign body — literally, the Piece of Resistance — stuck to his back.

With Emmet playing the Neo role, the Trinity character is WildStyle (Elizabeth Banks), a high-flying action heroine who can, in a nanosecond, flash her eyes over her surroundings and design, on the fly, a schematic for inventive new LEGO creations like double decker motorcycles, submarine RVs or Old West flying contraptions. The Morpheus character is Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman), a wise old wizard with glowing eyes and, yes, Morgan Freeman’s voice. They’re all fighting President Business (Will Ferrell), who despises free thinking and not following the instructions. His secret weapon is the Kragle, a device so devilishly obvious that I will let you discover it.

The movies takes place in a sprawling metropolis, Western frontier lands, a pink-tinted dreamscape in the clouds and in other various LEGO playsets. Some of the imagery is suitably bonkers, including a horse riding a giant horse, a mechanized pirate, ridiculous security systems (“Sharks. Lasers. Sharks with lasers.”) and doomsday devices that count down from “100 Mississippi, 99 Mississippi, 98 …” Human objects turn up later in the movie, including the Polish Remover of Nye-eel and the Sword of Exact-Zero, which drew giddy chuckles from the adults. The movie also has one of the most gloriously glib presentations of Batman that is likely to ever exist.

If you admired the wackiness of the lovely stop-motion movie A Town Called Panic, then you’re likely to be thoroughly charmed by this witty children’s comedy. The voice cast is endearingly goofy, and the animation is endlessly inventive. And the story, bless its plastic heart, has a powerful message about imaginations and tossing out rulebooks and instruction manuals. Now, I can’t say that I like this trend of toys becoming movies to sell more toys. I certainly prefer The LEGO Movie to any of Hasbro’s Transformers movies, but that doesn’t diminish my concern. Along time ago, movies were made to be movies. The merchandise was an afterthought. Now, the toys are the movies.

That being said, LEGOs might be the only movie that can get away with this without much backlash. It helps tremendously that the movie is delightful in nearly every way. It also helps that the nature of LEGOs is to use your imagination to invent your own stories, which is exactly what the creators of The LEGO Movie seem to have done for a sustained and enchanting 100 minutes.

The Monuments Men review

The Monuments Men  

Starring George Clooney, Bill Murray, Matt Damon, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban, Hugh Bonneville and Cate Blanchett

Directed by George Clooney

From Columbia Pictures

Rated PG-13

118 minutes

Great scenes and performances save an otherwise clunky war drama

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume

There are many things The Monuments Men fumbles, including its stop-and-go pacing and fragmented plotlines, but what it gets right is rewarding enough to forgive many of its failures. The movie’s ultimate success is that it understands art on a profoundly deep level.

And not just knowledge of art — “here’s a Rembrandt, here’s a Monet, here’s a Renoir” — the film truly gets the concept of art and its importance to a people. In World War II, Hitler didn’t just want the world as a piece of real estate, he wanted every fiber, every micron of dust, every spinning electron. He wanted it all. That included all the art. “How do you erase a people? You not only kill them, but you erase their achievements,” someone says early in Monuments Men. After all, what is art but a collection of visualized hopes and dreams, fears and desires? Art isn’t canvas or marble or bronze, it’s an impassioned plea for immortality. Hitler, himself a failed artist, knew this and set out to sabotage it.

Pushing back are the Monuments Men, FDR’s super-team of art historians, dealers, architects, sculptors and painters. They’re captained by Frank Stokes (George Clooney), whose first order of business seems to be a movie montage as he recruits his team. I won’t bog you down with character names, because there are many, but the cast is top-notch: Bill Murray, Matt Damon, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban and Hugh Bonneville. Before they can go to Europe and save art, they have to go through basic training, which goes about as well as you would expect with this all-star team of actors. Murray shrugs over the obstacle course wall like a sack of potatoes. In a scene that drew big laughs, Goodman walks through a firing range not knowing the soldiers were using live rounds.

In Europe after D-Day, the Monuments Men quickly begin tracing down missing and stolen artwork, be it big museum pieces or smaller works ransacked from Jewish collectors’ homes. The Nazis used Paris, and much of Europe, like a shopping mall: they’d invade a country and top officials would pop in to get something to hang in their parlors. Several particular pieces are doted on, including Michelangelo’s marble Madonna and Child, Rembrandt’s self-portrait, several pieces by Johannes Vermeer, and the striking Ghent altarpiece, a magnificent 15th-century painting on a set of elaborate shutters. The team is also tasked with telling Allied soldiers what they can and can’t bomb, which is punctuated by a sequence showing Italian villagers shoring up the walls of the bombed-out church housing Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. I looked this piece of history up after the movie; Monuments Men did not embellish how close the famous mural came to crumbling.

The narrative structure of the movie is put together sloppily. Scenes just sorta happen, often times with little leading up to them and little leading after. It all feels disjointed and frenzied. The acting is terrific, as is the insightful and historically relevant dialogue, and the individual scenes are spectacular, including one of Damon returning a painting to an empty apartment, its Jewish occupants long since carted off to gas chambers. But looking at the film as a whole, its scenes forming its central mass, it needs work. Having so many plotlines — the Madonna, the Ghent altarpiece, a weasely Nazi named Stahl and Cate Blanchett playing a museum record keeper — gave us too much to follow and, making matters worse, all the pieces were assembled with little regard to each other.

One other peculiarity, one that might have been intentional: no one really takes the war that serious. When they arrive in Europe, around D-Day+30, the Normandy beaches are mostly calm. As the team works its way inland, they rarely encounter any hostile Germans so it all feels rather tranquil and serene — just a couple armed guys out for a Sunday drive in matching outfits. Murray’s character wears an ascot under his soldier getup. Later he and Ballaban encounter a German soldier and rather than starting a gunfight, they all sit down and have a cigarette. These two share another scene later when Ballaban’s grumpy curmudgeon plays a record from the Murray characters’ grandkids. It’s tender and heartbreaking as a single sequence, but as a smaller piece of a bigger movie it rings hollow since the movie hasn’t established how violent and terrible the war was. Men don’t cry and weep for their families when their safety has barely been threatened. Like I said earlier, though, some of this might have been intentional to punctuate two things: first, the deaths that do occur in the movie, and to show that these guys were not doing the heroic work of real soldiering. After all, they were there to save fabric stretched over wood frames, not save the world from a madman and his armies.

The Monuments Men is directed by Clooney, his fifth feature, and it’s not his sharpest achievement, although it's never dull. It needed more polish and a little more finesse with its script. This isn’t to say I disliked it; quite the contrary, I thought the acting and subject matter to be riveting. I especially loved some of the payoff: great big chambers full of looted artwork, the reclaimed spoils of a terrible war. We've seen heroic survivor movies before, but here's one where the survivor is the culture of an entire continent.

Hot off the presses, check out the new trailer for Divergent