Yearly Archives: 2016

A Million Ways to Die in the West

So my mother gave me a film recommendation last weekend. She couldn’t remember the title, naturally, but she said it was an 1800’s western where they “say modern jokes.” Had my brother-in-law not come to the rescue I may never have guessed Seth McFarlane’s A Million Ways to Die in the West. A critical and commercial flop, I would never thought that its only thought was my mother of all people: the woman who taught us that “shut up” and “vagina” were bad words, and who to this day can barely utter “Frig” when the absolute worst has happened.

a-million-ways-to-die-in-the-west Yet just ten seconds in, someone’s shouting “Pussy!” – a term I’m sure was used very sparingly in the western novels by Louis L’amour her father always read. Then there’s the death by flatulence, and Oscar winner Charlize Theron’s fat ass, and Sarah Silverman’s sore asshole. And MY MOTHER WATCHED THIS.

The premise of the movie is “the west fucking sucks and I bet I can get a lot of mileage out of that.” In truth, you can get a little mileage out of it. Seth McFarlane, managing to only half sound like Peter Griffin, somehow attracts not just Theron but Amanda Seyfried as well, even though he’s a terrible sheep herder and looks stupid in a bolo tie. There are a few laughs along the way but the plot is useless-to-nonexistent, yet it still takes entirely too long for nothing to ever happen.

So, Mom, what was your favourite part? The daisy up the butt? The 15 year old spinsters? maxresdefault The sheep penis? No, wait. It was the pooping in hats, wasn’t it? I bet it was the diarrhea-filled cowboy hats that really got you giggling. A Million Ways to Die in the West will cost you 116 minutes of your life, but finding out your mother has a dirty, disgusting sense of humour? That’s priceless.

Captain Fantastic

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Captain Fantastic, the movie and the man, asks big questions, gives brutal answers, and leaves you with deep thoughts for analysis.

Captain Fantastic, played with vigour by Viggo Mortensen, is a man raising 6 kids in the woods like a pack of wild coyotes. They’re off the grid. They hunt web1_160715_edh_captfantastic_m-1024x682 and grow food, read meaty novels by campfire light, and train their bodies strenuously, sometimes dangerously. Each kid has a unique, made-up name so they’ll be the “one and only” in the world. It sounds heavenly or lonely, depending on your perspective. Not all the kids are happy. Not all the parents are happy either, although so far I’ve only mentioned Captain Dad. Mom, as it turns out, is off in a mental health facility, and has been away from the family for several months before they learn she’s committed suicide.

Her death is the catalyst for the family returning to civilization to attend her funeral.

Viggo Mortensen is fantastic, although not always likeable. I’ve seen enough documentaries to know that raising a family off-grid, though idealistic, is not always so great for the kids. In Surf Wise, a doctor raises his kids on the beach, establishing a surf school. He turns out some great athletes, but the kids are otherwise totally unprepared for real life. Without education or even identification, it’s tough for them to rejoin the ‘real world.’ In The Wolfpack, a bunch of kids are kept pent up in a New York apartment. They develop rich inner lives and lots of art, but are totally unaware of what real life entails. In Captain Fantastic, the kids are book-smart but lacking in experience. They don’t know how to interact with the modern world, so unless all of them are prepared to continue subsistence living, and form an incestuous colony, it’s not really a sustainable lifestyle. And the kids are growing resentful.

Captain Fantastic raises a lot of interesting questions about parenting. Should a parent’s decisions always be respected? Are anti-capitalist, anti- movies_captainfantastic establishment values best addressed by dropping out of society? How much freedom is too much freedom for children? And what kind of risk is acceptable? And do children need to sometimes be shielded from difficult or painful concepts, or is complete honesty always the best policy?

This film is quite funny in parts, and quite serious in others. And by serious I mean I cried a small ocean’s worth of salty tears. The kid actors are mercifully good, and Mortensen is generous with them in their shared scenes. Writer-director Matt Ross delivers some pretty satisfying emotional release, and a captivating twinning of joy and sorrow. Unfortunately the script dips a bit in its final acts, letting Captain Fantastic off a little easily, but it’s already a philosophical triumph by that point, a good movie that’s actually about something.

The Light Between Oceans

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The Light Between Oceans is a film for the literary sort. It’s poetically paced, languid in its development. It’s about a man (Michael Fassbender) who, having survived the war, is keen on some isolation and takes a job as a lighthouse keeper on a lonely island. He doesn’t count on falling in love, and is delighted to double the population of his rock when he takes a wife (Alicia Vikander). Now all they need is a baby and they’ll have a real population boom on their hands.

But wait. The babies aren’t coming so easily for this young couple. In fact, the only baby that comes is one that washes ashore, screaming in her dead father’s arms. It’s the lighthouse keeper’s duty to report orphaned baby to the mainland, no matter how much his distraught, infertile, grieving wife may want to keep her. Right?

The Light Between Oceans is beautifully shot by DP Adam Arkapaw; you’ll be sick of the postcard-perfect scenery by the end of the movie. We get it, it’s gorgeous. Fassbender and Vikander fit right in (once she shaves off his mustache anyway), pantomiming love so well they actually fell in love themselves, and are a couple to this day. They’re committed in their roles and aren’t to be blamed when this film ultimately falters.

What makes it stumble? The pace may be a deterrent. While I was okay with the unhurried pace, I worried that Sean was bored. Or asleep. He assured me he was neither, and I nearly believe him. Second, and hugely, is the contrived plot which forces the characters to behave rather stupidly. As much as you want to like them, and have liked them, you will grow frustrated. And emotional: director Derek Cianfrance is adamant that you cry. He will not be satisfied, or leave well enough alone, until you do.

Hell or High Water

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This movie is more high-noon western than high-octane thriller, but there is indeed a heist at its heart.

Two brothers, Toby, tall and handsome (Chris Pine), and Tanner, short and surly (Ben hell-or-high-water-chris-pine-ben-foster Foster), have little in common except for the rough past they come from, which they are both desperate to escape. Toby has spent the last few years caring for their mother while the family ranch slips away. Tanner has spent the past year since he’s been released from jail tempting the fates to put him back. Now they’re working together to save the family ranch from default – and will do so by robbing a bunch of Texas Midland bank branches, and paying the bank back with its own stolen money.

The only catch: sheriff Marcus (Jeff Bridges) is close to retirement but not keen to go, and this one last case is not going to be the blemish on his career. He chases the brothers all over Texas until he pinpoints the next branch they’re about to hit, and lies in wait.

Hell Or High Water is superbly acted. You can’t even say with certainty which of the three leads steals the film, but they’re all making the right choices, the quiet choices that make for the most interesting of character studies. That said, the secondary characters – and hell, even the one-liners – are all praise-worthy here. And I am obliged, once again, to worship at the altar of Jeff Bridges, chronically underrated but truly one of the wonders of the world.

The pace helps set this movie apart. It’s not fast or furious: it blows by at about the speed of a tumbleweed in a gentle breeze, which means you have time to get to know everyone, 97178_044 and in getting to know them, maybe you actually care. There is a certain sympathy accrued for both the cops and the robbers. It’s the kind of movie that made the car ride home extra engaging, as we figured where they all stood on the Bad Guy Scale. Toby, for example, is robbing the bank that robbed him. He’s doing it to give his kids a future. But he’s using a gun, which means people could get hurt. So is he good, bad, or somewhere in between? 49% good? 51% good? 75% relatable? 100% justified?

One thing’s for sure: the blackest hat of all is reserved for the banks. The Big Short was last year’s testament to the American Dream’s foreclosure, and although my hat’s off to Adam McKay for making a narrative film out of a nonfiction book (and I don’t mean a biography – this baby was characterless, plotless, and read more like a textbook, by which I mean full of facts and figures, but not remotely dry or boring), it never really resonated with me. Hell or High Water puts a name and a face to poverty, and calls it a disease. An epidemic, even. Director David Mackenzie has accomplished something significant here, dragging the good old Western into the 21st century, a time of economic anxiety, where the little towns look even more derelict and neglected than they did in the wild, wild west. There’s an ache to this film cultivated by fantastic dialogue and scenic shots, handily catapulting itself into my top 5 of 2016.

Three Days in Auschwitz

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Auschwitz may or may not be on your list of places to visit. It’s not your typical holiday fare, to stand on the ground where millions were murdered. A trip to Auschwitz is not a day easily spent. It is somber and it is difficult, and it is meant to be. Living history is what makes it real for us, turns a textbook event into something concrete that happened to real people, not very long ago in our human history. The evilness makes it feel surreal, and it takes a real emotional impact to ground the experience for us once again.

The act of remembering belongs to all of us. This is how we heal. It’s also how we learn, and how we make sure it never happens again. It seems just as important today as it’s ever been to challenge prejudice, discrimination and hatred.

And it’s a tribute to the dead. Millions of lives lost, cruelly. People made to suffer, to live in agony, to live with the constant loss of loved ones, to live with ghosts, to live without the promise of a future. There are fates worse than death.

And it’s in memory of the survivors, those who survived the camps but lived with the scars. Who were faced with the daunting task of rebuilding. Who struggled with grief. Who scraped their hearts raw in the search for forgiveness. Who went on, alone.

We are all saddened\enraged by what we know of the Jewish genocide at the hands of the Nazis. The Holocaust is a dark shadow for humanity. We all owe a debt of some kind, and we pay it in part by bearing witness.

Three Days in Auschwitz is a documentary by Philippe Mora covering his own trips to visit the site. His mother had been thrown in a concentration camp and was rescued from it just one day before she would have been shipped to Auschwitz herself. Eight other family members perished there. It’s a tough subject but we’re soothed by its graceful score by Eric Clapton.

Mora’s film is not filled with facts or figures, none of the statistics we’re all familiar with anyway. It’s just a humble attempt to grapple with its reality: an act of mourning, an act of vengeance.

Visiting Auschwitz with a heavy heart and a troubled stomach, you find the thing that speaks to you: will it be one shoe, left behind? The remains of an oven built to roast people? The electrified, bard-wired fence that represented hopelessness to the millions of people imprisoned and starving behind it? For Mara it seems to be the train tracks. It’s an image he comes back to often. Auschwitz was chosen by Hitler because of its easy access by train. Bodies were crammed into cars, many dying before they reached their final destination. The trains were incessant. People were “sorted” as they disembarked, some sent straight to death, others sent into slavery first. The train tracks great disturb him.

And that’s the thing. A visit to Auschwitz may make you feel sick. Watching this documentary may do the same. It should. Don’t turn away. Don’t say it’s “too hard.” Remembering is the easiest part of this thing, and you’re lucky that this is the role you were born to play. If ignorance and hatred are what allow atrocities like these to be committed, then education and remembrance can help fight them. Do your part: it’s available on DVD and VOD and in select theatres September 9th.

Nine Lives

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How bad was it?

There was never any question of it being good. You knew it, I knew it. We went because it’s the last drive-in weekend of the season, and this is what was playing (double-billed with The Mechanic, and I bet you can’t wait to find out which was worse). We also brought some pizza and 4 dogs. In my little Beetle.

Fudgie the 6 pound Yorkie growled every time the cat came on the screen. And the can comes on screen a lot. You know why? Because it’s Kevin Spacey. And I don’t just mean voiced by him, I mean the movie does a Freaky Friday switcheroo where Kevin Spacey’s human character somehow gets transposed into the body of a cat (while the real him is in a coma).

The movie looks as bad as it sounds, the production values shouting Disney channel, and made for TV. Jennifer Garner plays the put-upon wife but the poor thing can almost never get anyone to take her seriously as an actress so she’s used to this kind of mistreatment. She may not even realize she’s in a bad movie. This probably isn’t even the worse thing she’s in this year. And Christopher Walken is just feeling lucky to still be invited. To keep things simple they’ve had him reprise his role from Click. He’s the guy who makes you reevaluate your life by trapping you into a very unhappy scenario. He’s basically the modern day Ghost of Christmas Past. Kevin Spacey, however, is an Oscar winner. What’s his excuse?

In this movie, he plays a gross caricature of a businessman. He’s an egotistical, money hungry absentee father with zero nuance or dimensionality. When he gets turned into a cat you feel he got off lightly. And then he does every “help I’m a man trapped in a cat’s body” joke my 5 year old nephew could have come up with given some light prompting and a box of crayons. It’s horrible. It’s beyond horrible. Even the effects animating the cat are horrible, and mistakes are visibly noticeable. Cringe.

So, to recap, a short history of Kevin Spacey’s career:

1995: The Usual Suspects, a career high

1999: American Beauty, wins him another Oscar, this time lead

(long, hard fall, involving lows such as K-PAX, Fred Claus, and Horrible Bosses)

2016: Nine Lives, utter bottom

Why? Why has this happened, Kevin?

a) He owes someone at the production company serious money.

b) He mistakenly thought the script was ironic and\or symbolic.

c) He got paid a lot of money for probably like 10 days worth of work, and that subsidizes his true love, working in the theatah.

Nine Lives is bad. As bad as they say, and worse. But it has at least one fan: about 3 cars over from us, with its windows rolled way down, a little boy was laughing his guts out.

Diary of a Mad Black Woman

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I guess I keep thinking that if I watch this movie enough, I’ll finally understand it. I mean, I can follow the plot. It’s the tone that’s like monkeys throwing poop. It zooms between farce, romance, and drama. It’s from 2005 but feels a decade older. It uses and overuses montages and voice-overs to frost over the crumbly bits. And then it gets DARK.

A woman, Helen (Kimberly Elise) is thrown out of her home when her philandering husband finally gets tired of her after 18 years. The pre-nup says she gets nothing. Helen is broken but her grandmother is there to put her back together – the grandmother being played by Tyler Perry, of course, in his first appearance as the famous Madea.

Even if you’ve never seen a Madea movie, you know that she’s loud and proud. Of course she is. Perry is hamming it up for all he’s worth. He knew this was his chance to spawn himself a franchise, and he did. A whole empire, in fact.

Tyler Perry is a talented man. I don’t love Madea the way some do, but it is refreshing to see every day families and strong women taking centre stage. He writes what he knows. And Perry knows his audience too, an audience that Hollywood largely ignores. His movies routinely make $50M against a budget half that – it’s a rate of return you can’t ignore.

Madea has her roots in a series of plays that Tyler Perry wrote and staged across the country. They were filmed and available on video for years before he got to make a movie. But after a string of successes, on the big screen and the small, now he’s got carte blanche. Good for him. He circumvented obstacles by doing it all himself and never compromised a principle.

Term Life

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I like Vince Vaughn. There, I said it. He hasn’t been in a good movie since 2005’s Wedding Crashers but in the early noughties he and the rest of the 1620 “Frat Pack” (Owen Wilson, Will Farrell and the like) could do no wrong. Vaughn was almost always the fast-talking, bipedal id, just pure charm, sarcasm, swagger, and impulsivity. He had a twinkle in his eye and just enough pudge to be approachable. Attainable. He was everybody’s fake boyfriend around the time he pretended to be Jennifer Aniston’s. But he never translated that shtick into anything else, and repeating it in movies like that Google commercial The Intern, and the even more unwatchable Unfinished Business, it just gets sad. Nobody wants to see him do it anymore.

In Term Life, Vince Vaughn is a bit of a dirt bag, so it’s “better” for “everyone” if he stays out of his 16 year old daughter’s life. He plans thefts. He’s a 960 criminal; not a particularly good one, he’s just trying to stay one step ahead of his gambling problem. But then some dirty cops frame him for a bust gone wrong, and it’s not just his neck on the chopping block, but his daughter’s (played by Hailee Steinfeld) as well.

Vince Vaughn needs a hit. This wasn’t it. I’m not super confident that the Mel Gibson-directed Hacksaw Ridge will be either. At least he’ll be embracing his dramatic roots, but Hacksaw Ridge is an Andrew Garfield vehicle about a conscientious objector during WW2. Vaughn’s a second banana at best, billed below Sam Worthington, Hugo Weaving, and Teresa Palmer.

Vaughn’s in need of a career intervention (a McVaughnaissance?) even though I’m not sure he really deserves one anymore. He’s a gun nut – and I mean that in every sense: that he likes guns, and that he has insane beliefs about them. Like putting guns in schools makes kids safer. But he lives in a free country, and he’s entitled to his wrong opinion. He’s also entitled to keep making insipid assembly-line comedies that go straight to video. So there’s that.

Hollywood Doppelgängers

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Hollywood has absolutely no faith in audiences. If they think you liked something, they’re so overanxious to play it safe that they’ll sell it to you twice. We’ve had twin movies as far back as memory serves: movies that have near-identical plots and are essentially the same right down to their release dates. Wyatt Earp & Tombstone. Dante’s Peak & Volcano. Armageddon & Deep Impact. Antz & A Bug’s Life. Infamous & Capote. And on and on. The interesting thing though is that we don’t just have twin movies, we have twin stars too. Hollywood thinks we like familiar things. Familiar faces. And of course, plastic surgeons can only make so many noses. Everyone wants the Liv Tyler lips and the Salma Hayek tits. We can’t be surprised when they come off the assembly line looking a little too similar.

javier-bardem-jeffrey-dean-morgan Javier Bardem and Jeffrey Dean Morgan: are they actually the same person?

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Amy Adams and Isla Fisher: they don’t just look alike, they sound alike too!

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Will Arnett and Patrick Wilson: even losing hair at the same rate!

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Jessica Chastain and Bryce Dallas Howard: sharing the same bottle of Miss Clairol since 2001.

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Jesse Plemmons and Matt Damon: even their accents are the same!

Henry Cavill and Matt Bomer: yup, that’s two different people. Same damn jaw.

Paz Vega and Penelope Cruz: they usually say that a woman this stunning “broke the mold” but that’s clearly not the case.

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Elijah Wood and Daniel Radcliffe: these two look so alike it’s creepy. Watch this face meld of the two of them and you won’t be able to distinguish one face from the other.

Who are your favourite Hollywood twins?

Short Film: Where You Are

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A young mother continually loses her son to time and to space. It sounds like sci-fi but it’s actually a bittersweet testament to childhood flying by. Each moment, each stage is gone so quickly, and we see it all through this woman’s parental panic as she literally grasps for her son. It’s parenthood in an emotional 12 minute chunk: a reminder to stay in the moment, to cherish time, to be present.

Written and directed by Graham Parkes, Where You Are stars the astonishing Sarah Burns, who you may know from EVERYWHERE. She got her start playing Barney (yes, THE Barney), believe it or not, but has since appeared in nearly everything – including Grandma and Slow Learners more recently. Parkes uses long, uninterrupted takes to help draw us in to Burns’s increasing urgency and bafflement. Feel free to watch the film if you’ve got 12 minutes to spare (and your kids are in bed) and let us know – can you relate?