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.

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.

Movie Review for Ride Along

  Ride Along

Starring Kevin Hart, Ice Cube, Tika Sumpter, Bruce McGill and John Leguizamo Directed by Tim Story

From Universal Pictures Rated PG-13 100 min.

Ride Along has some serious Hart

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume

Through the haze of cliché and absurdity that is Ride Along, comes an endearing performance by Kevin Hart, an actor I’m growing increasingly fond of with each new movie.

Hart, who stands just a smidge over 5 feet — a physical characteristic that plays right into his shtick of misplaced cockiness and faux swagger — is not a terrific actor. Nor is he the funniest or the most versatile. But he’s likable, and that quality goes a long way to smooth out some of the other wrinkles.

Hart takes this likability and laminates it to the soul of Ben Barber, a hapless geek with a big heart and quick wit. Ben is dating Angela (Tika Sumpter), who is a whole head taller than him, but nevermind that — they’re so cute together that their height difference is a testament to their oddball chemistry. Before he can pop the big question to her, Ben feels obligated to ask her brother for permission first. The brother, James (Ice Cube), a hard-boiled police detective on a tough organized crime beat, wants nothing to do with the “pipsqueak,” so he hatches a plan to get Ben on a police ride along, where he’ll prove to him he’s not man enough to marry his sister.

James rigs the ride along from the beginning, including their first call to stop a biker gang from parking in front of a business. Ben strides up to the bikers and makes a valiant effort, but the deck is stacked against him. Some of these scenarios are tirelessly rote; think of every Kevin James performance and reduce the stupidity by a fifth. I did like a bit in the police station, where James makes Ben fill out a release form — “This says that if you take a blow to the chest, get stuck by a Hep-C needle or eat a bullet from the stress that the department is not liable for your dumb ass.” Ice Cube, ironically playing against his miscreant gangbanger Doughboy in Boyz N the Hood, is a reliable comedy force, but not an exceptional one. I did get a laugh when he said late in the movie, “It was a good day,” a call back to his biggest music hit.

The movie is mostly about James and Ben coming to trust and rely on each other, if not for their common interest, Angela, then for their survival on the mean streets. But the film introduces a plot point at the beginning that actually has a worthwhile payoff: James is tracking an elusive criminal mastermind named Omar, a man no one has actually seen. This, of course, leads to a scene later when Ben has to pretend to be Omar to get James out of a deadly trap. And then the real kingpin shows up — I’ll let you discover who plays Omar.

Mostly, though, the movie serves as vehicle for Hart, who frequently feigns a wacky tough-guy persona to hype up his own sense of bravery, which usually ends with him falling down or taking a bullet to the shin. He has this curious habit of making rubbery faces as he mimes profound exasperation, like he smelled something foul. His humor is rooted in too much slapstick — think of the black-and-white “before” scenes in TV infomercials — but it’s also occasionally witty and smart. I have no excuse for the film’s overreliance on Ben’s video game that he plays early in the movie. It serves as the backbone to many of the jokes, including one where he wanders through a gunfight looking for ammo on the ground because that’s what happens in his video game. It’s one of the dopier Mall Cop-like moments, but it comes and goes fairly quickly.

By no means is Ride Along the movie you should be seeing this weekend. It’s a forgettable comedy filled with many disposable performances and one rather silly one. If you do happen to catch it, you’re likely to come out thinking what I did: “Kevin Hart just made a mediocre movie sorta charming"

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit - Movie Review

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit Starring Chris Pine, Kevin Costner, Kenneth Branagh and Keira Knightley Directed by Kenneth Branagh

From Paramount Pictures Rated PG-13 105 minutes

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume

Someone call Hoarders, Chris Pine has a problem.

The guy who took over James Tiberius Kirk, captain of the USS Enterprise, is now Jack Ryan, Tom Clancy’s most famous creation, a CIA analyst living in a world fraught with geo-political terror. Two franchises isn’t really that much to get worked up about, but if he’s the next Han Solo or James Bond or the Little Tramp then we’ll have to light the Hoarders beacon.

Of course, Pine is not the first person to tackle the late author’s most resilient character. Alec Baldwin played him in The Hunt For Red October, Harrison Ford took over for Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger, and then Ben Affleck — another potentially obsessive franchise collector — played the CIA analyst in The Sum of All Fears. If you recall, that last movie wasn’t received so well: 7 months after 9/11 it “entertained” viewers with a nuclear detonation at the Super Bowl. Classy.

Anyway, here we with Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit and Pine, who plays a rebooted version of the mild-mannered spy. After a tour of duty in Afghanistan, where he’s horribly injured in a helicopter crash and ambush, Ryan finds himself at Walter Reed Medical Center learning how to walk again and taking mini-meetings with Thomas Harper (Kevin Costner), a CIA officer who eventually recruits Ryan into his fold of spies. His first assignment after getting his legs back is to infiltrate a Wall Street bank to trace shady accounts. And this being Wall Street, there are plenty.

One of them leads to a global conspiracy to undermine the American dollar, a plot that will be jumpstarted with a massive terrorist attack. It’s a believable scheme, but one that seems more likely to happen from JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs or any of the other crooked financial institutions in Lower Manhattan than any foreign power. Maybe that’s in the sequel, Jack Ryan: Securities Exchange Warrior.

I must admit, this movie’s chances of success looked less and less likely after it was announced it wasn’t opening in December 2013 and instead opening in January 2014, in the dregs of the new year, where most of the studios dump their stale scraps. Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, though, is a plucky little spy thriller. It’s not quite up there with the much superior Harrison Ford movies, but it holds its own as the spunky reboot.

The movie’s central plot opens with a bathroom assassination attempt, and then a series of meetings with the film’s ultimate villain, Russian businessman Viktor Cherevin (Kenneth Branagh, who also directed the picture), a bad guy right of Rambo III. Yes, the movie sidesteps many real global issues — like terror in the Middle East and its overused catalogs of stereotyped villains — to basically refight the Cold War, this time with terrorism and currency manipulation. But it’s all given a fresh spin here, as Jack bats accusations back and forth with Cherevin, who apparently only leaves his well-guarded office for plot purposes.

Keira Knightley shows up at one point as Ryan’s girlfriend. She thinks she’s being cheated on. “No, of course not. I’m in the CIA,” Ryan says. She giggles like a schoolgirl. Later in the movie, poor Keira is escorted from a restaurant, rescued on the street, kidnapped, and then rescued again. If she were any less helpless, she would be a store mannequin.

The movie has a distinctly 24 and Jack Bauer vibe. The gadgets are ridiculously simple. A computer hacking module doesn’t even need a computer; just plug it into the wall and it uses the electrical infrastructure. A scene on a CIA airplane condenses six months of espionage and intelligence gathering into 20 minutes of keyboard mashing. Ryan pounces from monitor to monitor cross referencing his clues until one of the computer spits out the final answer: “The terrorist event will take place …” If this plane existed in Zero Dark Thirty, Bin Laden could have been killed in the womb.

Pine is a totally acceptable action star. He’s just such a safe choice — the vanilla of ice creams — that his casting is almost boring. It’s not a bad performance, it’s just bland. I did like Knightley, though, who turns off her British accent, which sends her into some kind of weird uncanny valley of artificiality. And Costner, make fun of his failures all you want, the guy is routinely spectacular in almost everything he touches, including here as he is snipes security guards from a Russian rooftop.

There is much to like in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, and some to shrug at. And then there is the editing. All of the action, and even some of the snappier dialogue sequences, are edited in the Bourne style of handheld, quick-cut, super close-up messiness that many action movies have adopted. It’s just awful, awful, awful. Not only is it difficult to tell who is shooting who, or who is punching what, but the effect robs the film of its naturally kinetic pace and swaps in this manic, ADD version of cinematography and editing. It’s beyond ugly. And it needs to stop. Listen, not everything needs to be Lawrence of Arabia here, but if the editing of the movie moves faster than my eyes can focus, that’s a terrible and unforgivable problem.

That being said, I think there might be some real potential for this new franchise, assuming they don’t dump Pine like they did Affleck after Sum of All Fears. Judging by the quality of this one, I’d be interested in another, assuming that Pine can handle two franchises at once.

Movie Review for Lone Survivor

Lone Survivor

Starring Taylor Kitsch, Mark Wahlberg, Emile Hirsch, Ben Foster and Eric Bana.

Directed by Peter berg

From Universal Pictures

Rated R

121 minutes

Opening January 10th, 2014

by Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume

 

How does a director go from Battleship, one of the most reviled military thrillers of recent memory, to Lone Survivor, a very personal movie about real American soldiers who fought and died in Afghanistan?

 

For Peter Berg, the director of both, the answer is this: very carefully.

 

If you're familiar with Berg and his directing style — picture manic swearing screamed from a belligerent child strapped to the front of a battering ram — then you'll know why his reverent handling of Marcus Luttrell's 2007 book comes as a surprise to me. Berg was cast in the shadow of more technical directors (James Cameron), more endearing ones (Ron Howard) and more bombastic ones (Michael Bay), and aside from the poignant FridayNight Lights, his catalog is filled with dud (The Rundown) after dud (Hancock) after dud (The Kingdom). Somehow, though, the actor-director pulls this one together with the kind of skill and wizardry of some of Hollywood's best. 

 

Lone Survivor strikes the right note right out the gate. It opens on documentary footage of Navy SEALs going through their BUD/S training. If you'll recall Ridley Scott's G.I. Jane, BUD/S, or Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL, is the hellacious training that Demi Moore's character suffers through to prove herself. In this footage, though, we're not seeing actors, but real faces. They beam with potential. These faces will return; more on that later.

 

The film picks up with Michael Murphy (Taylor Kitsch) assembling his SEAL team — Marcus Luttrell (Mark Wahlberg), Danny Dietz (Emile Hirsch) and Matt Axelson (Ben Foster) — to get choppered into a valley deep in Afghanistan to pour some mayhem down on a terrorist target. These are some bad dudes, with their beards and their swagger. To quote Zero Dark Thirty: "… you guys with your dip and Velcro and all your gear bullshit." A fantastic early sequence has one of the "rootin' tootin' shootin' paratroopin'" newbies reciting a SEAL poem that is as charming as it is vulgar.

 

Musically held together not by pop music or blaring rock 'n' roll, Lone Survivor is scored in part by post-rock instrumentalist outfit Explosions in the Sky, and the band's floaty free-form guitar concepts hypnotize the early sequences into a cerebral meditation on service and the cohesion that exists with these elite warriors. By the time the four SEALs are initiating the beginning phases of Operation Red Wing, we're pretty much ready for that "everything is going to be OK" illusion to be shattered. And it certainly does when the soldiers are faced with a moral dilemma that they pass with flying colors, even if it means their lives are forfeit.

What happens next is the least interesting part of the movie, but one that will likely thrill most action junkies: the four SEALs are boxed into a guns-blazing battle with dozens of enemy fighters. The gunplay is intense and violent, much of it to due to the action's stark presentation and the realistic weaponry. Guns have powerful calls, and bullets have devastating responses. (But the RPGs seem to have no negative repercussions, even as they burst next to exposed faces.) With superior training and firepower, the four soldiers push the enemy back with extreme precision. And even as bullets skid past (and through) them, they shake it off and hold their corners. Remember when Jesse Ventura said he "ain't got time to bleed" in Predator? That was a paper cut compared to these wounds, including one that is gaping so wide that medical treatment involves packing it with soil. At one point, the SEALs are backed up against a cliff, and they make a choice that requires a level of commitment that is beyond comprehension — they jump off. Their bodies ragdoll down the rock face, tumbling over boulders and through trees. The sequence is so effective you're better off watching it from behind your fingers. 

The four cast members are often hidden behind their beards and rifle scopes, but they depict their subjects with honor and valor, neither deifying their bravery or downplaying their heroism. They're played like average guys, guys you'd want to get a drink with and watch a football game with. They were doing their jobs partly for their country, but mostly for each other; Uncle Sam is an idea, but Marcus, Mike, Danny and Axe are real people. I only hope that audiences recognize these guys as brothers before action heroes. 

That being said, Lone Survivor is a competent and agile movie that does justice to its four central heroes. And best of all, Berg ends the movie the way he started it — with the faces of the real SEALs. It's the most important part of the picture, and I'm glad Berg lets the images linger on the screen. We need to see those faces, and remember them.

Movie Review of Her

Her  

Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Joahnsson, Amy Adams, Chris Pratt, Rooney Mara and Olivia Wilde

Directed by Spike Jonze

From Warner Bros. Pictures

Rated R

126 minutes

Opens Jan. 10

By Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume

I'm going to say something kinda nutty and audacious, so brace yourself: Her features the most heartbreaking movie romance since Casablanca.

Yes, Her's intricate power play of heartache, loss and existential exile from love is comparable to Ilsa and Rick's devastating acceptance of love's victory in Casablanca, a movie that has, over countless decades, come to symbolize the momentous weight of the heart's needs and desires.

Her is directed with beautiful resonance by Spike Jonze, a soft spoken and gentle director, whose careful personality and soft presence must be inviting to actors. How else would someone get this kind of performance from Joaquin Phoenix? He's so delicate and vulnerable that he spends the whole movie in a suspended state of shattering. 

Phoenix plays Theodore, a nebbish wimp who sits in a cathedral-like office and writes poetic love letters for other people. Technically, though, he doesn't even write them; he speaks the letters out loud and his computer transcribes his words into a handwritten font. In the movie's quasi-sci-fi universe, even love is outsourced to others. After a modern Apple-like reveal, a new cell phone operating system hits the market. Theodore downloads it, answers three simple questions and in chimes Samantha, his personalized operating system voice. She's no Siri: her voice is smooth and measured, and her responses show personality and grace. The voice is played by Scarlett Johansson, though we never once see her. It might be one of the single greatest voice casting performances in the history of the cinema. Hyperbole much? See the movie and disagree with me; I dare you. 

Samantha begins by making Theodore's life more organized. She spell checks his emails, responds to his divorce attorney and streamlines his appointments. But she's more than a digital assistant — she's attentive to his needs, she can hear fluctuations in his voice that might indicate concern or worry, and she has a personality. One of the great mysteries of the film is trying to decide if she was programmed this way, or if she naturally learned, through her artificial intelligence, to show her user so much compassion.

The movie takes place in the not-so-distant future, but it is only barely science fiction. One can make all kinds of pointed accusations about the film's intentions, but I don't think it's an indictment on our reliance of technology. It certainly makes the case that we depend on our phones and the Internet too much, but I think the soul of the movie resides in its central pairing — the human Theodore and the discombobulated voice of Samantha.

Of course Theodore falls in love with Samantha. More surprisingly is how Samantha falls for him. They share long discussions in bed, in his living room, on the beach and out in the city, where other people are also cooing intimate whispers with the earpieces socketed into their heads. The world is accepting of their courtship, at least as accepting as Japanese culture is with people marrying video game characters or body pillows — odd, but harmless. (Speaking of Japan, this will remind you heavily of Lost in Translation, another movie about love and longing with Johansson.) At one point Theodore and Samantha go on a date with another human couple, and it works simpler than you'd think: Theodore's cell phone is propped up so Samantha can "see" and she becomes an active participant in conversations. It's essentially a conference call. And when Theodore walks around he pins a safety pin in his shirt pocket, like a booster seat for Samantha's digital eye. It's kinda cute.

Sex is handled in an interesting way — it's basically phone sex. Later in the film, Samantha wants to provide Theodore with a deeper, more physical encounter so she hires a sex surrogate who serves as her body. Theodore is flattered, but it feels like cheating, so he backs out. The real woman, impressed with their commitment, can only sob with envy. It's a strange world they all occupy. 

Like Ilsa and Rick, this relationship has limits that neither can sustain, or want to. One has to leave, to where they do not know, but it's uncharted territory. Her's conclusion, neither set in stone nor ambiguous, is gratifying because … well, of course this is how it had to end. In a movie about connections — how we connect and to whom — this script finds all the right balances when it comes to organic versus electrical, real versus artificial, spoken versus unspoken. I was not entirely stunned when I saw that Jonze had written it as well as directed it. It looks exactly like the kind of movie a director who has already made Adaptation, Being John Malkovich and Where the Wild Things Are would make — one of profound presence. (Let me also suggest Jonze fans check out his sci-fi short, I'm Here, which shares some of Her's central themes.)

And let me reiterate how phenomenal Phoenix and Johansson are: they are simply breathtaking. I razz Johansson a lot for taking so many stupid movies, but here she is simply perfect. For the performance to work, we have to fall for her voice. For me, that happened almost instantly. It has just the right timbre; a little scratchy, but curious, sexy and devastatingly precise in mood, tone and speed. Phoenix has more at stake — a voice and a face — and he keeps up. To think, this guy almost retired, or "retired."

Now, I said this movie is comparable to Casablanca. While the two movies vary greatly, they contain one central driving mechanism: love is as much letting go as it is holding on. Both can be painful. Both can be exhilarating. Rarely are they both at the same time.

August: Osage County Movie Review

August: Osage County  

Starring Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Julianne Nicholson, Chris Cooper, Juliette Lewis, Margo Martindale, Ewan McGregor, Dermot Mulroney and Benedict Cumberbatch.

Directed by John Wells

From The Weinstein Company

Rated R

121 minutes

Opens Jan. 10

By Michael Clawson of Terminal Volume

August: Osage County is a dusty, wind-swept void of dark comedy.

It’s about incest, affairs, death, suicide, emotional assault, drug addiction, alcohol abuse, and one scene of an adult trying to possibly exploit a minor. It’s a dark comedy with every shade of dark. But right there in the middle of it is a scene I never thought I would ever see: one beloved Academy Award winner telling another beloved Academy Award winner to eat the catfish on her dinner plate. “Eat it, you …” and then just fill the rest in with your favorite four-letter words. These demands, delivered like salvos of mortar fire, are said with so much disdain that a fork plunged through a major artery might actually be a step down.

The scene is made all the better by the stars of it: Julia Roberts and Meryl Streep. Julia is the one doing all the cursing, and wow is it ever glorious. If Erin Brockovich was her warm-up then August: Osage County is her showing off with a marathon of f-words and other vulgarities. At one point she riffs on the word “vagina,” coming up with a lovely array of colorful synonyms for her mother’s lady parts. On the receiving end of the catfish scene is Streep, here playing a pill-popping widow whose cruel reign over her family has created an avalanche of resentment and pain. Streep, a lovely actress who will no doubt get many acting nominations for this remarkable performance, has been cursed at like this before — albeit never in public or on camera — by every actress bumped out of a nomination list by the famous star. Only Julia has done it on camera for everyone else to witness.

And, real quickly, speaking of catfish, this is the second time the bottom-feeding whiskered fish has featured prominently in a movie in the last year. The first time was in that wacky piece of abstract sex-art in Ridley Scott’s The Counselor. And now here. Both scenes are completely bonkers, but for very different reasons.

August: Osage County is based on the play by Tracy Letts. It begins with Sam Shepard speaking his Hemingway-like lines with a touch of whiskey-infused poetry. He’s talking to the newly hired maid, who serves as the only constant in this mangled tale of family. By the next day, he turns up dead in a lake — suicide. As his family converges in on his homestead for the funeral, his three daughters — foul-mouthed Barbara (Roberts), cousin-loving Ivy (Julianne Nicholson) and floozie Karen (Juliette Lewis) — must wrangle with their mother, Violet (Streep), who isn’t too heartbroken by her husband’s death. She pops some pills, dons a wig and then claws into her children, some of whom deserve it. She uses her mouth as a weapon, sniping at every failure of her children, be it minor (divorce) or major (incest). The irony is not lost earlier when we find out she has cancer. Mouth cancer.

This is some of the finest acting you will see on the big screen. A rather big deal has been made about Streep’s career, how she gets nominated simply because “she’s Meryl.” That all may be true with certain performances (Iron lady comes to mind), but it can’t be said here, where she outdoes herself with this vile and wicked mother and her conniving perspective on life. Streep’s craft, and her dedication to it, is unquestionable as she blurts and spurts vindictive rhetoric at her kin. Then there’s Julia Roberts, a force all her own. she pokes holes in the name "America's sweetheart," but not many.

The minor performances will be stampeded over to congratulate the two powerhouses, but smaller performances deserve recognition too, including Julianne Nicholson as Violet’s most naïve and optimistic daughter, Chris Cooper as a straight-shootin’ brother-in-law, character actress Margo Martindale as a controlling aunt and Misty Upham as the maid, who remarkably doesn’t walk out of the job 10 minutes into this madness. The cast is so big that I haven’t even yet spoken about Ewan McGregor, Dermot Mulroney or Benedict Cumberbatch — all three play pawns in this devious game of chess.

August: Osage County does not contain the most remarkable plot, nor does it contain the most riveting dialogue. Some viewers will find its pacing slow, and its story lacking. That's alright, though, because the reason you're going to see it — to watch two acting juggernauts duke it out in an all-out verbal warfare — is plenty enough already.

The Wolf of Wall Street Movie Review

The Wolf of Wall Street 

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie, Matthew McConaughey, Jon Favreau, Kyle Chandler, Rob Reiner, Jean Dujardin, Pj Byrne, Kenneth Choi

Directed by: Martin Scorsese

Rated: R

Run Time: 180

Genre: Biography/ Comedy/ Crime

Opens December 25th

By Lisa Minzey of The Reel Critic.com

Also opening on Christmas day is the latest film from director Martin Scorsese. “The Wolf of Wall Street” is Scorsese's fifth collaboration with actor Leonardo DiCaprio, based off the book by convicted ex-stockbroker Jordan Belfort. Will audiences flock to theaters to see a film about power, greed, sex, drugs and overall debauchery? Or will it get lost amongst all the other holiday releases?

Based on the true story of New York stockbroker dubbed “The Wolf of Wall Street”, Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) was a man who went from rags to riches in a very short time by duping people out of their hard earned money. Following his start at  a well known brokerage firm on Wall Street in the late 1980’s, Jordan’s mentor Mark Hanna (Matthew McConneghy) taught him the ropes of what he would expand on to build his own fortune.

On his first day as a full blown stockbroker was the day the stock market crashed in 1987. Out of a job and not sure what to do, Jordan found a place that was hiring “stockbrokers” out in the suburbs. Turns out this place sold penny stocks, which Jordan quickly figured out how to get the maximum amount of money from middle class people. Being the savvy entrepreneur, Jordan conjured up a “Business Plan” to use the same tactics to go after the big fish upper class. Enlisting Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill) and a few other guys he knew from his younger days, Jordan formed Stratton Oakmont, Inc., a brokerage firm which traded billions of dollars, including raising equity for shoe designer Steve Madden.

Thanks to his flashy parties, excessive drug use and boneheaded compadres, Jordan found himself on the FBI watchlist for securities fraud. Unwilling to cooperate, Jordan finds himself in further trouble when he tries to avoid the investigation and enlists people to cover for him. It’s a matter of time before the house of cards Jordan built for himself, family and employees will tumble, but how many people will be willing to take the fall for Jordan?

This is a strange choice for Scorsese. Although it takes on the edgy material of stock fraud, drugs, orgies, cheating scandals and unscrupulous characters, it’s odd to see so much comedy in a Scorsese film. Perhaps it was just odd scheduling for DiCaprio this year to have his role as a different millionaire in “The Great Gatsby” open earlier this year, but he expands on that romanticized role of Gatsby and pumps it up with some much cocaine and greed that he Gordon Gecko-ized Jay Gatsby. On the other hand, Jonah Hill is extremely creepy as Jordan’s sidekick Donnie Azoff. His over-sized veneers and oddly sexual tendencies are a stand out among the strange cast of characters in this black comedy. The women in the film albeit pretty are not that memorable as it’s hard to compete with DiCaprio and Hill’s drug filled rants and antics.  Although it clocks in at three hours, it hardly feels that long since the film follows a decent pace and material is incredulous that it keeps the viewer engaged the whole time. “The Wolf of Wall Street” opens nationwide starting Wednesday December 25,2013.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty Movie Review

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty  

Starring: Ben Stiller, Kristen Wiig, Shirley MacLaine, Adam Scott, Kathryn Hahn, Sean Penn, Patton Oswalt

Directed by: Ben Stiller

Rated: PG

Run Time: 114 mins

Genre: Adventure/ Comedy/ Drama

Opens December 25th

By Lisa Minzey of The Reel Critic.com

Another film throwing its hat into the holiday box office is a film that’s not only a remake of the 1947 version starring Danny Kaye, but has been in development on and off since 1995. There has been several stars and directors attached to the project, but it was Ben Stiller to pull off getting the finished project into theaters. Will audiences enjoy this film or is one of those films that should have never been remade?

To deal with his mundane life, Walter Mitty (Ben Stiller) frequently wanders off in his day dreams as a coping mechanism. His job for the past 19 years, Life Magazine is laying off tons of people as it is going thru a rebrand and digitizing it’s content. For the most part, Walter thinks he’s safe, but when the final cover negative from famed photographer Sean O'Connell (Sean Penn) goes missing, his new boss Ted Hendricks (Adam Scott) has it out for him.  To make matters worse, the girl of his dreams Cheryl Melhoff (Kristen Wiig) may or may not be dating someone else.

It’s not until Cheryl suggests to Walter on a clever way to track down the missing negative, treat it like its a mystery novel that Walter’s dreams of traveling become a reality. Will Walter be able to find the negative in time or will all of Walter’s hard work over the past two decades be for naught?

Sometimes remakes, especially those that sit in development hell for decades at a time, turn out worse than the original. In this case, this is untrue. What Ben Stiller accomplishes in this film is film magic. Using the movie wizards in the special effects world, with a combined subdued comic performance from Wiig and Stiller, this film is a heartwarming journey into the mind and life of daydreamer Walter Mitty. At the core of the story are messages of inspiration, hope and courage to go follow those dreams to see where life may take you. Be sure to catch “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty when it opens in theaters starting Wednesday December 25, 2013.

Grudge Match Movie Review

Grudge Match  

Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Robert De Niro, Kevin Hart, Kim Basinger, Alan Arkin

Directed by: Peter Segal

Rated: PG-13

Run Time: 113 mins

Genre: Comedy/ Sport

Opens December 25th

By Lisa Minzey of The Reel Critic.com

Hey Phoenix Film Fans!  Opening Christmas Day is a matchup of two Hollywood heavyweights in a physical type of role they made famous early in their respective careers. “Grudge Match” stars Robert De Niro, Sylvester Stallone and Kim Basinger. It has been over thirty years since their more famous boxing roles, but do the men have what it takes to pull off such a demanding role?

The first fight between Henry “Razor” Sharp and Billy “The Kid” McDonnen was March 27, 1982, the win going to McDonnen. The second fight was two years later which two things happened. The fight ruled the win to Razor and him walking away from the sport for good. To this day no one could figure out why there was never a rematch between The Kid and Razor to determine who was the better boxer. The Kid would taunt Razor in the media, but there was some sort of bad blood between them that Razor would never discuss.

Fast-forward thirty years; McDonnen is now the proud owner of several businesses that include a car dealership and sports bar, playing up his sports-god like image from his glory days. Sharp, on the other hand, when the money ran out, returned to his factory job and has been there ever since. When Sharp is approached by promoter Dante Slate Jr. (Kevin Hart), (his father was Sharp’s original promoter) to work on a video game featuring himself and McDonnen, Sharp vehemently declines. It’s not until he realizes that the mounting bills and support he’s been giving to his old coach Louis “Lightning” Conlon that he needs to do this job. Sharp accepts under one condition, he must not have contact with McDonnen at any cost. Slate agrees and upholds the terms, but McDonnen so desperate for a rematch, shows up to the job early, starting a fist fight, destroying the video game set.

Thanks to the power of the internet, Sharp and McDonnen are viral sensation, and whenever they are together in public some sort of scuffle happens. This brings the opportunity that McDonnen has been wanting for years, Slate managed to get enough sponsors interested to get a Grudge match going. At first Sharp refuses but then after the amount Slate is offering, the money is too good to refuse. Both men will need to get back into shape quickly but due to their age, if the fight even happens, will one walk away more damaged from before? Or will this fight is just what brings much needed to closure to both boxers?

At first glance, this may appear like “Rocky: The Senior Years”, but is much more clever than that. Approaching the role with humility and cheeky humor, Stallone and De Niro have great chemistry together as the aging boxing rivals and display how great of shape they are in for their age (despite the wrinkles and loose skin). This is an entertaining story that shows age is just a number and that goals can be reached no matter how long it takes. It was also refreshing to see Kim Basinger back on the silver screen, looking just as good as she did in “L.A. Confidential”. Here’s a fun fact; keep an eye out in the opening scenes as Basinger’s daughter Ireland plays a younger version of her character Sally. Alan Arkin, as always, is a scene stealer, even schooling Kevin Hart in the scenes they have together. Be sure to check out “Grudge Match” when it opens in theaters nationwide starting Wednesday December 25, 2013