Subtitles Pawn Stars (El precio de la historia) TV Series, 18 Season, 507 Episode.
A MOST WANTED MAN (Three and a Half Stars) U.S.-United Kingdom-Germany, 2014 It’s nice to see a big-budget A movie that exercises your intellect as well as your tolerance for violence. In A Most Wanted Man—a smart, sophisticated new spy thriller based on the 2008 novel by John le Carre (“The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,“ “Tinker, Tailor. Soldier, Spy“)—the late, uncommonly brilliant actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman plays an uncommonly well-observed character: a German anti-terrorist agent named Gunther Bachmann. Bachmann is a cynic, a spoiled idealist, an addict who chain smokes cigarettes, downs whiskey after whiskey and speaks in a rumbling monotone glib growl laced with world-weary innuendo. For his sins, he’s been assigned to the anti-terrorist office in Hamburg, a snake pit of spying and double-dealing in which murder runs rampant and catastrophes like the 9/11 World Trade Center attack are planned. You could not possibly see this part performed better than Hoffman does here.
With that uncanny expertise he had for believing his roles, and thoroughly conveying that belief, this genius of a stage and film player convinces us that he’s German, that he’s a anti-terrorist agent, and that he’s a good man trapped in a bad job. It’s a role (and an accent) that suggests a mix of great popular literary and cinematic traditions: with hints of Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet and James Mason (at his seediest) and shots of other le Carre movie anti-anti-heroes, played by actors like Richard Burton, Mason and Alec Guinness. Thanks to Hoffman — and to le Carre, director Anton Corbijn, scenarist Andrew Bovell, and a really fine crew and supporting cast — the movie sweeps us almost effortlessly into that gray sinister British,/European/Russian world of international espionage in which le Carre (the nom de plume of ex British intelligence operative David Cornwell) has specialized since the ‘60s. This is the dark fictive domain not only of le Carre but of earlier master book or movie spy-tale-spinners like Eric Ambler and Graham Greene. And, as you watch the lead actor peel aside all the layers of this sad but relentless man he‘s playing –an often disgusted professional who has seen the worst and expects no better than some kind of merciless compromise — he manages to tilt the entire world of le Carre’s Hamburg in his darkish direction, to immerse us in its deadly, ruthless complexities. He makes the man Bachmann and the fictional world around him, come burningly, woundingly, terrifyingly alive Thanks to le Carre a.k.a.
Cornwell (who is also this movie’s executive producer and whose sons Simon and Stephen Cornwell are two of its producers), Hoffman brings to life this unfazed anti-terrorist agent, bedeviled by more brutal and less humane colleagues. He‘s a wily operative who’ trying to set a trap for a well-respected Muslim philanthropist (Homayoun Ershati as Dr. Abdullah) whom Bachmann suspects is secretly funneling cash, hidden among his charitable gifts, to terrorist groups, and who is about to get a huge donation from a half-Russian, half Chechin refugee in Hamburg (Grigoriy Dobrygyn as Issa Karpov). Karpov is a wounded innocent on the run — a devout Muslim escapee from Russian prison and torture, who wants to make up for the evil his military father committed by giving all his inheritance to good people and organizations for good works. Trying to help Issa — who is the Most Wanted Man of the title — is a dedicated knockout leftist Hamburg lawyer named Annabel Richter (Rachel McAdams). Holding the estate, warily, is sage, tightly buttoned Hamburg banker Tommy Brue (Willem Dafoe). And working with, or against, or at cross-purposes with Bachmann — helping or hindering him, or maybe both (or maybe neither) — are a friendly, almost maternal looking CIA agent named Martha Sullivan (Robin Wright) and a vicious little spy twerp named Dieter Mohr, whom Rainer Beck turns into the very personification of the kind of self-righteous, nasty, officious little prick who blights most governments, most corporations and not a few smart movies.
Bachmann’s allies and co-workers are his plucky associates Maximilian (Daniel Bruhl) and Irna Frey (Nina Foss), who may also be his lover, or his squeeze, or whatever they call it in Hamburg. Now, don’t get me wrong.
I didn’t laugh a whole lot. But I chuckled enough to briefly rescue this tawdry but good-tempered big-studio send-up of ‘60s-‘70s-era movie Westerns from the dung heap of off-color humor, Wild West satire, genital jokes and smirkingly fatuous toilet-gags in which it seemed to be plunging (or flushing itself) beginning with the first scenes — which include a TV ad-style montage of Monument Valley shots (that’s Ford country, of course) and a semi- High Noon-style gunfight interrupted by a fellatio joke. It’s another Seth MacFarlane show — a Wild West Fart Farce. MacFarlane’s Albert is, in some ways, a distant relative of the Glenn Ford character in The Sheepman and (more closely) of the Bob Hope characters in The Paleface and Alias Jesse James. He is an outsider (like Ford) and a wisecracking coward (like Hope) stuck in a dusty, dangerous, disease-ridden 1882 Western town called Old Stump, Arizona.
Anna, while on furlough from Clinch, teaches or inspires Albert to fight, shoot, squint, stride manfully into a saloon full of gun-toting sociopaths, make love (probably), dodge sheep-piss and survive sheep stampedes, and otherwise behave like a late-night talk-show host plopped into Old Stump, Arizona, circa 1892 and handed a six-shooter whose trigger he can barely pull, and a weenie that is (temporarily) the laughing stock of Old Stump. To cover the political bases, there are also some good Indians, with peyote, led by Wes Studi ( Geronimo) as Cochise, and a Tarantinoesque cameo by Jamie Foxx, who shows up at the end to wipe out the memory of a racist shooting gallery gag. That fit’s the movie’s main source of humor of semi-humor: which is the proposition that the Old West was actually a pretty unbearable place, unless you had Charlize Theron around to teach you how to shoot. (That’s not too far from where Sam Peckinpah took the Western in The Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.). The movie is basically a parody of Mel Brooks’ infinitely funnier 1974 Blazing Saddles, which of course, is itself a parody, and pretty heavy on toilet gags and fart-foolery and potty-mouth humor and genital jokes (As Cleavon Little might say: “Pardon me while I whip this out!”).
A parody of a parody? The anti-racist Blazing Saddles, which is Brooks’ choice as his funniest movie (I’d pick The Producers) is done with the same kind of unbuttoned irreverence, but with more affection than you’d expect (MacFarlane‘s picture has some too). And it had a fitfully hilarious cast, including Gene Wilder as a whimsical gunslinger, Little as a sharp-tongued black sheriff (a part intended for and partly written by Richard Pryor) and assorted other Western simpletons including a Gabby Hayes imitator, Madeline Kahn as a Marlene Dietrich-ish bar lady and Brooks himself as Mayor Fartmaster. (Look it up.). Without Blazing Saddles (and Ford and Leone and Peckinpah or Eastwood), there might be no Million Ways to Die in the West — which some would applaud. A Million Ways to Die — which gets its title both from an old spaghetti western (I think) and from the 1986 Hal Ashby-Lawrence Block-Jeff Bridges crime thriller 8 Million Ways to Die — has a pretty funny cast too, though they’re not necessarily funny here, at least not all (or most) of the time.
But MacFarlane knows his westerns, and he has some affection for them too. He not only starts the movie off in Monument Valley, but he has a Frankie Laine-ish title song, sung and co-written by Alan Jackson (Blazing Saddles actually had Laine), but he has a very good ersatz Elmer Bernstein score by Joel McNeely. And he brings on Western vet Matt Clark as a grizzled old prospector for Clinch to torment and shoot, and there are not one but three High Noon spoof showdowns, There’s also a hoedown emceed by Bill Maher, set to an old Stephen Foster song called “If You’ve Only Got a Mustache, with interpolated lyrics by MacFarlane and his buddies, that squeezes out a few more chuckles too. (So does the peyote dream sheep can-can number.).
MacFarlane has his part verbally, but not physically. He can’t do (or doesn’t) the Western moves of even an inept Western movie hero — or given it the reverse pizzazz spin that, say, Jim Carrey or Ricky Gervais or Ben Stiller might have mustered in the part. MacFarlane is sort of funny, but he doesn’t really generate empathy, even when the sheep urinate on him. A Million Ways to Die reminded me, mood-wise, of a bawdily comic ‘60s-‘70s Burt Kennedy Western (like Support Your Local Sheriff) than anything by Ford or Leone. Not that the movie is really trying for Ford or Leone.
Last week, I watched Hawks’ Red River again, with John Wayne and Brennan and Montgomery Clift, and I was caught up once again in that great movie’s effortless flow and tension and psychology and visual beauty, which you would think would be possible to replicate. (Maybe Spielberg should try.) In recent years, the most artistically successful Western was probably Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff — a low-budget revisionist Western that few people saw. That film had poetry, and I think you need some of the pop poetry of the great old westerns even when you’re sending them up and showing how bad everything was. But A Million Ways to Die doesn’t even have the effortless flow and visual beauty of Blazing Saddles.
Though it does have the farts and a little fellatio. Posted inComments Off on Wilmington on Movies: A Million Ways to Die in the West. BEARS (Three and a Half Stars) U.S.: Alastair Fothergill & Keith Scholey, 2014 Sky, Scout and Amber Three bears huddled on the snowy lopes of a vast white mountain as a raging avalanche crashes down alongside them. Fish fighting their way upstream in a glistening river, with one spunky salmon rising up from the spume and spray to nearly swat a waiting bear. A mama bear bravely standing between her two threatened cubs and a renegade clanless bear who circles and circles and wants to make a meal of them. Bears, the latest DisneyNature story-documentary contains some of the most absolutely astonishing sights any recent film has given us — no matter how elaborate that other movie’s CGI and production design, and no matter how photogenic its stars.
Here, the production design and effects, peerless, are the world around us, and the stars, nonpareil too, are the bears and animals themselves. At their best, these images have a power and a beauty, that most of today’s sci-fi spectaculars and action extravaganzas can’t match. The story — and Bears does tell a story, with characters, and drama and suspense, just like the ’50s Disney nature documentaries The Living Desert, The Vanishing Prairie and White Wilderness — follows a mama bear (a formidable lady named “Sky” by the filmmakers) and her two cubs (the rambunctious boy Scout, and the more demure girl Amber) through an action-packed year of their lives. We watch them, from the moment they awaken, curled up together, in the slumbers of hibernation, to their emergence form their winter refuge, to their quest for survival from mountain to seashore — in a saga filled with many encounters with other animals, some rewarding, some dangerous, all extremely picturesque and engrossing.
Bears are among the most simpatico of all wild (and sometimes dangerous) animals — largely because they are the inspirations for the world’s most well-loved cuddling toys. These movie star bears, except for Scout and Amber, don’t look necessarily cuddly. But most children, and their adult companions, should enjoy watching them all lumber across Alaska, facing wolves, oceans and possible starvation with equal aplomb. It’s an important, vital record of life on earth that’s also an amusing, absorbing, sometimes tense and thrilling entertainment.
That’s partly because Bears was directed and co-written by a genuine auteur of nature documentaries: the tireless Britisher Alastair Fothergill, who was the genius anthropologist/writer/filmmaker David Attenborough‘s estimable collaborator on TV documentary mini-series masterpieces like Planet Earth and Blue Planet. It was co-directed (and co-produced) by Fothergill’s new DisneyNature partner Keith Scholey, and co-written (and co-produced) by Adam Chapman. It’s a good show. The Attenborough-Fothergill films (along with some of the other Attenborough-scripted and hosted series like Life of Birds), are, I think, the greatest nature documentaries yet made. If you haven’t seen them, you’ve missed one of the cinema’s true treasures — and their wonderful box sets and series belong in any well-stocked DVD library. Bears, like its DisneyNature predecessors Chimpanzee and African Cats, is a sight to behold itself.
In a way, it’s a recognizable ancestor of the Disney nature documentaries of the ‘50s, like The Vanishing Prairie, The Living Desert and White Wilderness. Those movies, like this one, spied on wild animals and built stories around them. But, good as they were, those pictures weren’t blessed with the superb technological resources and brilliant technology, and decades of wild-life camera savvy that are common today. And that Bears has. Thanks to that technology and that new expertise, Bears does terrifically well what the movies do better than any other art form. It takes us right into another world, and into domains of Earth hidden from most of us for most of time, but here presented with a technological mastery which renders that less-seen world as clear as crystal and as plain as day.
That‘s the territory of the bears of course — the brown bears of the Alaskan peninsula, as represented by Sky, Scout and Amber, all of whom become as familiar to us, and as lovable and beguiling, as any other movie star, recorded by eight excellent cinematographers (including Sophie Darlington, John Shier, Gavin Thurston, Mark Yates, Warwick Gloss, Matthew Aeberhard, John Aitchison and Mark Smith) and helmed by a great (well, sometimes great) director. As before, Fothergill deploys his resources with massive skill, and his camera aces and his recorders capture sights and sounds that we simply (or probably) haven’t seen before. He was at his best in Planet Earth, which I think is one of the greatest films ever made. But though Fothergill plus Attenborough makes for one of the movies’ best collaborations, Fothergill plus Scholey is more of a good team, who craft movies that are fun to watch and entertaining, but that don’t make you gasp with wonderment, as you often do in the Attenborough films.
The Bears narration, here delivered with crusty-voiced good humor by comedian/actor John C. Reilly, is okay, funny, sometimes a little corny, while Attenborough’s narration is brilliant and exciting, and delivered with enormous enthusiasm and involvement. (Attenborough was the BBC executive who was responsible for Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, before becoming a mini-series on-camera TV star himself.
And he has a breadth of vision and an engagement with life and art and history and science, that these new films mostly lack. When they hired Fothergill, I wish Disney had hired Attenborough as well, and that the two of them had gone on to make more films like Planet Earth and Blue Planet for the rest of all our lives. Bears, while no masterpiece, is a movie to see and revel in, but not necessarily to be inspired. Or to cuddle, for that matter. The engagement at Disney’s El Capital in Hollywood, which I caught, includes an onstage wild animal show, plus Wurlitzer organ pyrotechnics by Disney’s star theater organist and American Theater Organ Society “Organist of the Year” Rob Richards. Posted inComments Off on Wilmington on Movies: Bears.
THE HIDDEN FORTRESS (Blu-ray) (Four Stars) Japan; Akira Kurosawa, 1958 (Criterion) The great Akira Kurosawa action samurai epic, and one of Kurosawa’s most sheerly entertaining and thoroughly engaging films, this is the movie whose storm-the-fortress-and-save-the-princess plot helped inspire George Lucas’s smash hit space opera Star Wars — and whose two wandering peasant clowns (played by Minoru Chiaki and Kamatari Fujiwara) were Lucas’s inspiration for the bickering robots C-3PO and R2-D2. One of the supreme adventure movies, with the inevitable Toshiro Mifune as the gruff warrior-general Makabe (one of his best roles), Takashi Shimura (the leader of the Seven Samurai) as the old general and Misa Uehara as Princess Yuki, the lady they’re all battling over. Like all the best Kurosawas — which encompasses most of his output — this is a beautifully crafted, tremendously exciting movie, and it features some of Kurosawa’s best action scenes, shot and cut in his characteristic vigorous three-camera set-ups. It’s better than Star Wars. (In Japanese, with English subtitles.). BLUE JASMINE (DVD; Blu-ray; Digital HD; UV) (Three and a Half Stars) U.S.: Woody Allen, 2013 (Sony) Blue Jasmine may not really be one of Woody Allen’s best films, as many are calling it.
But it definitely contains one of the great actress performances in any of his picturess: Cate Blanchett’s heart-breaking portrayal of Jasmine French. Allen and Blanchett’s Jasmine is a razor-sharp look at a woman of style who seems solidly part of the American rich — but then loses everything. It’s one of the most memorable jobs ever by an Allen actress, on a level with Diane Keaton in Annie Hall and Manhattan, Mia Farrow in The Purple Rose of Cairo and Broadway Danny Rose, Dianne Wiest in Bullets Over Broadway, Judy Davis in Husbands and Wives and Penelope Cruz in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Blanchett’s hungry eyes, and exaggerated elegance stick in your mind, gain depth and feeling as you watch her. Besides winning the Best Actress Oscar, the performance has been nearly universally praised, and it deserves to be. Perhaps that’s because Jasmine as acharacter is a kind of culmination of Allen’s attitudes toward the moneyed white culture Jasmine represents.
Jasmine lives what seems a charmed life as a member of the Manhattan financial social elite Allen loves to have fun with — but then finds herself hurled into the chaos of the 2008 financial collapse, and turning into Woody’s version of Blanche DuBois, Tennessee Williams’ lady on the edge, wandering, desperate, talking to herself, at the end of the line. Is this a comedy or a drama? Actually it’s both. Much of the film is clearly intended (and works) as high dramatics, but the movie also draws from rich comedy wellsprings: swindles, self-deception and humbuggery. Here, these illusions destroy more than dignity, drive Allen’s characters into the stormy waters of Bergmanesque emotional trauma (in Interiors, Another Woman, or Match Point). Jasmine, whom Blanchett plays with a radiant selfishness and fragility, loses it (money, position, comfort) all, or most of it. She discovers that her life is a lie, and that her smoothie financier husband Hal (Alec Baldwin, dead-on slickly manipulative) is a liar, cheat and thief (both financial and romantic).
She finds that her world was whirling on a Bernie Madoff-style ponzi pyramid of lies, and that she has few resources to cope with her present plunge to the Middle Depths. When we first see Jasmine, she’s on a plane headed for San Francisco and a temporary refuge with her sister Ginger ( Sally Hawkins, the breezy free spirit of Mike Leigh’s 2008 Happy-Go-Lucky), jabbering away about her life to her captive seatmate (Joy Carlin), who tells her husband later that Jasmine started off the conversation by talking to herself — which she does more and more these days. Soon, Jasmine has reached the Mission District where Ginger lives with her auto repair guy boyfriend, Chili ( Bobby Cannavale) — which is where we get the first of many deliberate parallels to Williams’ great, sad, lyrical play A Streetcar Named Desire. Jasmine has arrived like Blanche DuBois at the New Orleans apartment of her sister Stella and of Blanche’s macho nemesis, Stella’s brutal hubby Stanley Kowalski — at a place which is her last stop, with a household where she’s partly welcome and partly resented and desired, and where her only hope of escape is Stanley‘s mama‘s boy bowling buddy Mitch.
Ginger is the Stella character, and Chili is Stanley — and so is Ginger’s ex-husband Augie (played surprisingly well by “hoodlum-of-humor” comedian Andrew Dice Clay). There are couple of possible Mitches, the most plausible of which is Peter Sarsgaard as Dwight, a State Department guy who sees Jasmine — or at least Jasmine in her dream world — as a fit wife for a man with political ambitions. Another more obnoxious maybe-Mitch is D.
Fischler the horny dentist ( Michael Stuhlbarg of the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man), who employs her as a very nervous receptionist. Jasmine is humiliated by Fischler’s attentions — and humiliated also by Ginger’s lower-class apartment and the crudity of Chili and his sports fan buddies. She does have her own Belle Reve memories though — and half the movie is taken up with flashbacks to Jasmine’s One Percenter life with Hal, and with the destruction of that dream, as she finally discovers everything he was — and everything his world was. At the end, Allen gives Blanchett the actress, a shattering moment — fittingly for an actress whose own stage performance of Blanche (under Liv Ullmann’s direction) was said to be phenomenal. This is his 44 th movie.
Why does the old stand-up guy turn his story into a grim parody of one of America‘s greatest saddest plays? Can we expect “Death of a Comedian” or “Long Deli’s Journey Into Knockwurst” or “Who’s Afraid of Sholem Aleichem?” or “12 Angry Yentas” somewhere down the line?
Well, in fact parody, and putting himself into different worlds, is the Sid Caesarian soul of much of Allen’s comedy. He can be as much a parodist as his old Sid Caesar writer-colleague Mel Brooks — but where Brooks sends up Frankenstein and Star Wars, Allen has classier targets: Bergman, Fellini, film noir.
Like Owen Wilson in Midnight in Paris, he likes to flee into other worlds, other times. Woody twists some of the scenes: Augie and Chili are not such bad guys; Jasmine is less sympathetic than Blanche, and her strangers less kind. The real villain in Blue Jasmine is the economy itself, and its agents like Hal. Blanchett is an amazing actress. Like Katharine Hepburn (whom she impersonated in The Aviator) or Meryl Streep (with whom she shares a sisterly resemblance), she is a player of tremendous vitality and depth, And brain power. Here, she often seems to be flirting with pathos, but she always slips the clinch — and dances away many times from the edge of humor, too. It’s a very intellectual performance, and the ending loops back to recall the beginning.
Everything Blanchett does is transparent; like Jasmine — and like Blanche, we can see right though her. The rest of the actors, taking on literate, challenging Allen-scripted parts for scale (and obviously having a ball doing it) are wonderful. So is the mellow cinematography of Javier Aguirresrobe and the posh or more ordinary settings by Santo Loquasto.
The music is more of the period jazz, blues and pop he loves to play or us, and that we should love to hear. August: Osage County (DYV; Blu-ray) (Three and a Half Stars) U.
S.: John Wells, 2013 (Anchor Bay) A blisteringly good script by Tracy Letts — using the classic “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”/“Who’s Afraid if Virginia Woolf?” theatrical form of a loud, partly drunken gathering where secrets are revealed and wounds torn open. And with a super cast: Julia Roberts, Ewan McGregor, Juliette Lewis, Chris Cooper, Benedict Cumberbatch, Abigail Breslin, Dermot Mulroney, Margo Martindale and others. The virtuoso center of the film however is (stop me if you’ve heard this one) Meryl Streep. In an uncharacteristically rowdy and foul-mouthed turn as Violet Weston, a nasty, drugged-out old pseudo-matriarch, celebrating her husband’s ( Sam Shepard) passing by flaying alive her daughters and their men, Streep brings down the house, in more ways than one.
It’s a classic scene-stealing performance by a lady who’s stolen many a scene before. Banks (Three Stars) U.S.: John Lee Hancock, 2013 (Walt Disney) Who would have thought that, nearly 40 years after the release of Walt Disney’s favorite creation, the bouncy Disney mass audience movie musical of P. Travers’ Mary Poppins, they’d make a Hollywood art movie and biopic on the making of Poppins, and that it would be graced by performances as rich and good as Tom Hanks’ gentle mogul Disney, Emma Thompson’s tart Britisher Travers, and Paul Giamatti’s good-guy turn as her driver. A nice show — and I mean that in a nice way. Extras: Deleted scene.
Posted inComments Off on Wilmington on DVDs: The Hidden Fortress; Blue Jasmine; August: Osage County; Saving Mr. NOAH (Three and a Half Stars) U.S.: Darren Aronofsky, 2012 (Paramount) “God gave Noah the rainbow sign.
No more water, but the fire next time.” Old spiritual ( Ralph Stanley) I. The Flood Will Russell Crowe ever again get a part that so suits his special screen persona and gifts — that natural genius he seems to have for projecting awesome tormented heroics and mad obsessions — as the one he plays in his new film: Noah, the lord’s visionary deadly servant in Darren Aronofsky’s sometimes crazy and often wonderful version of the biblical story of The Great Flood? Or a film that so stupendously sets those gifts off? Maybe he will and maybe he won’t. Crowe, it seems to me, has long since ascended to Burt Lancaster’s old throne as the brainy movie swashbuckler and later leonine old man; the only major things he lacks for the job are Lancaster’s world-devouring grin and his acrobat’s physique. But Crowe has the same kind of looks and range and ambition and the same virile appeal.
Like Lancaster and George Clooney, he’s a thinking woman’s (and man’s) hunk with good taste in scripts, and, with this project, he’s lent his movie magnetism to the kind of rich, story, drenched in narrative grandeur, that might have made a great opera or epic poem and that, on the screen, tends to overwhelm us and overflow its boundaries. Crowe, who has played warrior-rebel-heroes (in Gladiator, for which he won the Best Actor Oscar) and madmen, who talked to themselves and answered (in A Beautiful Mind) and bedeviled nerds who blew the whistle on their bosses (in T he Insider) — here gets to be heroic and mad and the ultimate outsider (a man who really does have almost the entire world against him). His Noah starts out as a decent family man, idealistic, religious, generous, a good person in every way, with a loving family whom he loves. Then comes the message, the obsession, the instructions, he believes, from God — a dream of drowning and of a big boat, a vision that he interprets as a Heavenly order to build the boat and rescue the animals of the world, and his family (at least temporarily) from the approaching Flood — and eventualy, to watch as the sinful world, condemned by God, is swallowed up in the mother of all tsunamis.
When the rains come down and the waters rise and rise, and the doomed masses of humankind outside the ark crawl over each other in a writhing, toppling tower, consumed by their frenzy to escape the inevitable cataclysm, and when Crowe’s Noah — huddling with his family on the huge deck of the ark — stares at the burst, pouring skies with melancholy acceptance and sorrow, it’s the kind of scene that almost cries out for a Richard Wagner or a Verdi to compose for it, a Bosch or a Turner to envision and paint its magnificent tumult. The movie does have composer Clint Mansell (Aronofsky’s regular musical collaborator) and production designer Mark Friedberg — and real-life, bleakly overpowering beginning-or-end-of-the-world scenery supplied, in Iceland, by The Creator. (For this movie, that may be enough.) And it has Aronofsky, of course. And Russell Crowe. And a supporting cast that includes Jennifer Connelly as his warm but conflicted wife Naameh, and Ray Winstone as Noah’s brutal antagonist Tubal-Cain, and Anthony Hopkins as his sage, sly grandfather Methuselah and Emma Watson as the seemingly fragile, threatened Ila, one of his son‘s wives or wives to be.
They’re all good, better than good. But the Flood blows them all, at least temporarily, off the screen. It’s the kind of super-theatrical disaster (masterminded here by special effects supervisor Burt Dalton), that movies were invented to give us (at least occasionally). That may disturb many Los Angeles residents or movie workers, awaiting and dreading the big quake — or other acts of God that may level the Earth and remind us how puny and tiny we really are.
MUPPETS MOST WANTED (Three Stars) U.S.: James Bobin, 2014 (Walt Disney Pictures) There was never a TV puppet show quite like “The Muppet Show” — or a romantic couple of any kind quite like Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy the hamme fatale — or a supporting troupe like Fozzie the Bear, Gonzo, Animal, the Two Old Curmudgeons, and all their funny, fuzzy friends. And I’m happy to say that the new Walt Disney movie Muppets Most Wanted continues that splendid renaissance of Muppetry we saw in the 2011 Disney picture The Muppets. It’s not necessarily as good, because it doesn’t have the built-in emotional charge of being a Muppet revival movie about the revival of the Muppets — a storyline which, for those of us who’ve been familiar for years with the handmade troupe of the great late muppeteer Jim Henson (and Frank Oz and the rest) quickly became hilarious and touching and something to cheer for. Muppets Most Wanted, the follow-up, is darker and more cynical, and far less sentimental. But it’s just as entertaining. It has the same director-writer, James Bobin, the same co-writer, Nicholas Stoller, the same composer ( Christophe Beck) and songwriter ( Bret McKenzie), and some of the same technical people — and of course it has the same button-eyed, enthusiastic wild and woolly-faced bunch of Muppets.
Even if it doesn’t carry the same emotional charge, this movie still has similar amounts of sly wit. Show biz pizzazz, lovable high jinks, colorful set design (by Eve Stewart of The King’s Speech and Les Miserables) and lots of all-star cameo guest appearances. ( Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga pop up together in one of the first songs, “Were Doing a Sequel,” and Celine Dion sings with Miss Piggy (voiced by Eric Jacobson) and Kermit ( Steve Whitmire) on the big ballad “Something So Right.“ If you don’t blink too much, you’ll catch Tom Hidddleston, Christophe Waltz (waltzing), Usher (ushering), Zach Galifianakis (galifianakissing), James McAvoy and Chloe Grace Moretz. If Muppets Most Wanted is a step down from The 2011 Muppets (and I don’t think it is), it’s certainly not a very far step down, if it’s a step down at all. After all, The Muppets, thanks to Jason Segel, Amy Adams and the whole gang, was the best Muppet Show of any kind in decades. There are problems with sequels however, and no one knows that better than the show biz-savvy Muppets, who are by now almost as imperishable a part of the movie biz as the Oscar Show. This movie‘s two first musical numbers, in the zippy new score by McKenzie.
Are “They’ve Ordered a Sequel” (sung by superfan Walter, Statler and Waldorf, and the aforementioned “We’re Doing a Sequel,” sung by The Muppet Ensemble, plus Bennett and Gaga — an ideal Muppet all-star pairing and a snappy, slap-happy number that sets the tone for the wised-up story that follows. This movie begins right after the last movie ended, with the triumphant comeback of the Muppet company. THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL (Four Stars) U.S.-British-German: Wes Anderson, 2014 (Fox Searchlight) I. The Great Zubrowkan Novel Wes Anderson’s new movie The Grand Budapest Hotel is — What’s the word I’m looking for? Yes that’s it: Playful. Not the sexiest adjective, I realize.
Ah, well But that’s what the picture is: It’s playful to a fault — and Nabokovian and scrumptious and all the rest too. Done in Anderson’s unmistakable style, full of toy-like miniatures, painted-looking backdrops, sprightly camera moves, quick zooms, and high-style writing and acting, it’s a deliciously wayward and intricately amusing show — a delightful example of what can happen when a gifted movie artist isn’t afraid to try something eccentric or out of the way. Working within a rigorously stylized format, but with plenty of oddball kinks, twists and gags, Anderson and his fellow moviemakers and actors seem to be having a ball. They toss around ideas and visions and crazy little diversions that they‘re drawing from all kinds of classic books and movies and paintings and musical pieces — and when the film is really working, which is most of the time, their art and artistry seems to fully connect with their imaginations and with us, and with the images and thoughts tumbling around in their heads.
The show, set in a fictitious world drawn from our own, is about theatricality — about play. And it’s full — to the brim — with visions of those odd little wonderlands we can create for ourselves, when life begins to seem too dark and borderline awful to bear without them. So, we can invent a whole fantastical other-world — especially if we’re someone like Wes Anderson, the maker of Bottle Rocket and Rushmore and The Darjeeling Limited and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and Moonrise Kingdom, some of which are films people like a lot, and some of which irritate the bejeezus out of them (including, at times, me), but none of which are any less than personal statements by a real filmmaker — dreams in full flight. (Notice I didn‘t call them “quirky.”).
“The Grand Budapest Hotel” is the name of the movie, of course. But it’s also the title of a fictitious book we see being opened, in the present, in this film‘s opening sequence.
A classic of the literature of an obscure (and fictitious) Eastern European country Zubrowka, it was written by a celebrated (but nameless) fictitious author, played by Tom Wilkinson, who lives there — in a place that seems to be part Czech, part Hungarian, and part Ruritania before the revolution. In 1985, this great author, in his study, tells us the incredible story that became his novel: told to him on a memorable night long ago (when he was Jude Law) in 1968 at Zubrowka’s storied but now deteriorating and nearly empty Grand Budapest Hotel — where the writer met the hotel’s mysterious owner Mr. Moustafa ( F. Murray Abraham). Moustafa, a man of elegant demeanor, rare charm and impeccable manners, introduced himself to the author (as a literary fan) in the hotel baths, invited him to dinner, and then, over fine drinks and pretty little pink-and-green pastries, in the vast, nearly empty Grand Budapest dining room, he tells the writer and us the incredible, unbelievable, but (he insists) true story of M. Gustave ( Ralph Fiennes), the concierge of the Grand Budapest in its prime, and his own elegant, impeccable mentor. All this took place back in 1932, when Moustafa was a teenager named Zero and the world was a much different, though not necessarily better place.
Moustafa narrates — F. Murray Abraham, like Morgan Freeman, is a wonderful narrator — the story of how he came to the Grand Budapest in its heyday, and how he was chosen by M. Gustave to be his lobby boy, a position Gustave once held himself with great distinction. Gustave knows everything about the hotel, upstairs and down. He’s a stern, meticulous but tender-hearted taskmaster who lives in a Spartan little servant’s room in the back of the hotel. His instructions and eloquent speeches are spiced with poetry, laced with irony, and spiked with a “fuck” or two, or more. In the course of his seemingly endless duties, he has seduced and become the lover of a whole company of elderly, blonde, very rich women guests of the hotel, including the fabulously wealthy Madame De ( Tilda Swinton, a fine job), who regularly comes to the Grand Budapest to dally with M.
Gustave, but now has premonitions of disaster. Gustave pooh-poohs her, but she’s right. Gystave’s new lobby boy, the young “Zero” Moustafa ( Tony Revolori), is a refugee from a fictitious war-ravaged middle eastern country, where his family was slaughtered. He was hired by the hotel on a trial basis, though he has seemingly zero experience and zero qualifications, beyond his appealing looks, his lively intelligence and his equable disposition — and he soon also becomes M. Gustave‘s right hand boy, his pupil and his fellow adventurer. Gustave, who is played with near flawless comic technique and brilliance by the not-usually-funny Fiennes, shows him the ropes, teaches him how to multi-task Grand Budapest-style, how to anticipate a guest’s wishes before he or she wishes them.
(Revolori plays the teen-aged Zero very well, with nice boyish appeal and presence.) Their bond is not sexual, or at least not overtly sexual — Zero also has a fine, resourceful pastry-cook girlfriend named Agatha ( Saoirse Roman, very good and moving), whom he still remembers and adores years later. But the bond between boss and student sometimes seems a touch homo-erotic, just as Anderson’s movies often seem to be elegant bromances, this one included. The rite of passage soon becomes a murder mystery. Madame De dies, and M.
Gustave and Zero travel by train to her mansion — a journey interrupted when they are nearly arrested by thuggish police, but saved by the gentlemanly Officer Henckels ( Edward Norton, a really fine job), whose parents stayed sometimes at the Grand Budapest, and who was befriended by M. Gustave when he was a “lonely little boy.” We can sense something dark right around the corner, in a story that seemed on its way to being a pure Lubitschian comedy of sexual manners. Murder is afoot.
The seeds of totalitarianism, and World War II, are in the soil. And the old world is falling. At the De mansion, the family’s suave attorney Deputy Kovacs ( Jeff Goldblum, fine also), reads the will, which leaves everything to Madame De’s immediate family and a horde of distant relations — but mainly to Madame De’s vicious son, Dmitri Desgoffe und Taxis ( Adrien Brody, terrific). But then Deputy Kovacs opens a second will, delivered to him only that day, which is to replace the earlier one if Madame De’s death is ruled a murder (which seems likely, since she died of strychnine poisoning). That will leaves most of the money to the family, but also leaves one “priceless” painting, called Boy With Apple, to M. And that bequest throws Dmitri — who can, without fear of argument, be called insanely and murderously selfish — into a towering rage and a tantrum, in which he accuses M.
Gustave of seducing his mother and others (which is true) of being bisexual (which may be true), of seducing multitudes, including perhaps the Boy with Apple, and orders him arrested, thrown from the house, or destroyed, whichever is easiest. That will be the assignment of Dmitri’s truly scary odd-job man and hired killer, the skull-faced Jopling ( Willem Dafoe, a perfect heavy), who begins his workmanlike string of violence and crimes in this movie by socking Zero (who socked Dmitri who socked Gustave) and hurling Deputy Kovacs‘ defenseless cat out the window. Gustave is unjustly in prison, arrested by the gentlemanly Henckels, with Zero and Agatha as part of Gustave’s assembly of outside helpers — which also includes a secret organization of eminent European concierges, called The Society of Crossed Keys.
300: RISE OF AN EMPIRE (Two and a Half Stars) U.S.: Noam Murro, 2014 Greek history doesn’t get much livelier — or bloodier, gorier, more absurd and more wildly over the top — than it does in 300: Rise of an Empire, producer-writer Zack Snyder’s 3D version of the three-cornered war back in 480 B.C. Or so between the Greek and Spartan armies and the invading Persians. A follow-up to Snyder’s surprise smash historo-hit 300 (made back in 2007) — which re-imagined the battle at Thermopylae between Xerxes’ Persian hordes and the outnumbered but ferocious Spartans of King Leonidas ( Gerard Butler), as it might have been experienced in a cocaine-fueled nightmare — this show, like its predecessor, often resembles a gigantic immersive video game designed and executed with unlimited computer resources. It may be preposterous — hell, it is preposterous — but it’s never boring.
The movie is taken from graphic novel guy Frank Miller’s book Xerxes — just as 300 was based by writer-director Snyder on Miller’s 300 — and it’s been produced and directed to within an inch of its life by Snyder (and Mark Canton, Gianni Nunnari and Bernie Goldman) and Israeli director Noam Murro ( Smart People) — a sort of sideways sequel (the stories take place simultaneously) to the hugely successful 300. This picture is almost as crazy and spectacular, but not really as good — despite the best efforts of all the production people and of the movie’s unquestioned star: ex-Bond Girl Supreme and sexy villainess specialist Eva Green, who steals, and all but eviscerates, the entire movie. Her role: Artemisia, the dark-eyed, fierce commander of the Persian fleet, a warrior queen who can quite literally screw you to death.
300 II (which we’ll call it for convenience’s sake), also somewhat resembles a ‘60s Italian-shot Roman he-man epic (in the heyday of Steve Reeves, Pietro Francisci and Vittorio Cottafavi) gone berserk. Like those sword and sandal shows, it’s a beefcake promenade, full of dour-faced, bare-chested muscle-men with names like Themistokles ( Sullivan Stapleton as the Greek naval commander), lusty Scyllias ( Callan Mulvey) and his faithful son Calisto ( Jack O’Connell). Here, caught by a constantly prowling camera, they and the rest of the body-building Greek navy, wander around flexing pectorals, grandly orating and discussing battle plans with deadly sobriety, crying out “I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees!” (which is sort of the movie‘s motto) or running around half-naked, wielding and waving mighty swords and lopping off bloody arms and heads — all in often gruesomely protracted slow-motion photography that makes Sam Peckinpah’s balletic gunfights in The Wild Bunch look almost Bressonian. Incidentally, you may well wonder why these Greek fighting men (and many others before in beefcake history movies) keep running into battle with bare chests and gigantic swords, eschewing armor — which seems like a recipe for mass suicide. But, in fact, baring your chest in battle, whether historically accurate or not, seems to be a requirement of the Greek and Persian navies here, as it is in many sword-and-sandals specials. And that undress code is observed by almost everyone but the otherwise brazen Artemisia, who keeps her epic chest covered until she gets Themistokles alone in her cabin for what she whimsically calls a summit meeting.
The movie is grim, and gruesomely spectacular. It is narrated, with poetic solemnity (which I rather liked), by Queen Gorgo ( Lena Headey) of Sparta. Themistokles never cracks a smile (nor do any of them, as I remember, except for Artemisia, who has a wicked half-grin she keeps flashing). And he remains a sourpuss even when Artemisia, at the summit meeting, gives him a meaningful glare from her heavily shadowed eyes, and then rips off his clothes, and hers, and he rips as well, and they both rip. And she fastens on him like a mad vampire and rams him all around the cabin just like a bare-chested Greek gladiator sex toy — ignoring the poor guy’s explanation that marital relations are not his specialty, and that he is, as he puts it, “married to the fleet.” The movie’s inarguable highlight, and apparently done without CGI, this doozy is only one of 300 II’s bizarre and violent love scenes, dwarfed in ferocity by the one where Artemisia, still smiling, decapitates another defiant Greek, kisses the lips of his corpse and tosses the head away like a peanut shell. Most of the movie’s imaginatively staged sea battles take place under roiling turbulent dark-as-death skies, apparently a ruse of the Greeks to discombobulate the Persians, and when the ships crash and warriors are tossed or jump into a sea full of writhing serpents, while flaming arrows hit their targets from what looks like a mile away, one can only stare in astonishment. They don’t make wars like they used to!
And all this takes place while the Persian general Xerxes ( Rodrigo Santoro), a warlike fancy dan, tall as an NBA center and covered head to toe in golden paint, is busy bashing the heroic Spartans, who would rather live on their feet than die on their knees. Will there be another 300?
There still are yet more foes to bash and torsos to cleave, and grosses to win! (“I would rather live in my bank, than die in the charts.“) And there is yet more Greek history to ravish and ravage — though not sadly, with Eva’s Artemisia, unless she comes back as a sorceress or a vision or a Persian sex toy.
I can’t say this second 300 isn’t entertaining — if not.
It’s a sexy costume drama full of action between erotic monsters and a virgin swordswoman. A snake woman, a long-nosed goblin, and skeleton ninja: The sword of the virgin slashes sensual monsters!In the Edo Period, repressed sensual monsters have revived one after another, and attacked people. Born as the 15th magical swordswoman, Beni Tsubomi is destined to clean up these monsters. Only she can handle the magical sword handed down in the Benis for that job, and therefore, her “chastity loincloth” is shielded.
But she’s usually an ordinary 18-year-old girl. While undergoing training at Beni Dojo under her grandfather, Genjiro, as a master, she’s beloved as the idol of the dojo by the trainees.
One day, a young man named Nagata comes to join the dojo. With his handsome looks and superb swordsmanship, Tsubomi’s heart pounds. But he really is a long-nosed goblin that tries to seduce her and steal her virginity to eliminate the power of her magical sword. The furious battle between Tsubomi and the sexy monsters has begun!