Category Archives: Jay

Veronica Mars

Hello Ladies

When Stuart’s ex-girlfriend comes for a visit, he plans to impress her with a fake but dazzling L.A. lifestyle and an even faker supermodel girlfriend. No room for comedy there!

I hope by now we’re all familiar with Stephen Merchant, once known more as a Ricky Gervais’s big, goofy side kick and collaborator but actually a brilliant writer, comedian, and performer in his own right. Hello Ladies is actually a feature-length follow-up to his successful (but sorrowfully cancelled) HBO series that he writes, directs, and stars in himself. Even if you haven’t seen the series, the movie works as a stand-alone little piece of funnery and is accessible to anyone. It’s based on his stand-up which is always stellar. If you’ve failed to appreciate Merchant in The Office (BBC) or Extras, then feel free to start with Hello Ladies and work your way backward. There’s no bad starting point.

Run All Night: An Ode to Aging Action Stars

7 Replies

It’s not going to take a whole post to tell you I didn’t like Run All Night. I mean, it’s fine. It’s exactly what you expect. It’s a movie capitalizing on Liam Neeson’s strange turn as an elderly action star. It doesn’t bother to be particularly good, not even as good as Taken or The Grey, which didn’t set the bar high to begin with. Liam Neeson plays a retired goon who gets pulled back into the biz when threats to his estranged son force him to kill his best friend’s (and ex-boss’s) son. Father and son “run all night” to avoid the bullets they both know are coming.

Now, I’m not one to talk shit about Liam Neeson. That man’s just got sex appeal (Liam agrees, by the way – “I never did think of myself as handsome–terribly attractive, yes, but not handsome.”) Plus, I’d be worried he’d tape shards of tiny bottles of liquor to his hands and wake me up from sleep with his heavy breathing. Once upon a time, he was known as a “serious” actor, garnering an Oscar nomination for his role in Schindler’s List, and a couple of Tony nominations as well. Steven Spielberg was anxious to re-team with him for the Lincoln biopic but after several delays of the project, Neeson felt he was getting too old for the part and let it go to Daniel Day-Lewis. Apparently he’s not too old to run around the streets of New York, shooting cops and robbers though. He’ll be 63 this summer, and has somehow been rebranded the thinking man’s action hero (note to Liam: another movie like this, and we’re retracting the thinking part). He’s almost as surprised by this turn of events as we are: “I thought it was going to be a straight-to-video release (he’s talking about Taken). That is actually one of the reasons I did it, to be honest. I felt like spending three months in Paris, I’d get to do all this physical stuff that no one would think of me for, and that the film would go straight to video. Then it became this big success. I was a tiny bit embarrassed by it, a tiny bit, but then people started sending me action scripts.”

I bet he’s not so embarrassed now. He earned a nice 5 million dollar paycheque for Taken, but for Taken 2 he demanded 15, and he got 20M for Taken 3. So he’s not just a bankable action star, he’s making serious bank doing it. Liam Neeson is only the latest incarnation of the aged action hero, he’s not the first and I have a feeling he’s not the last. For some reason we have an obsession with old, grizzled action stars and The Expendables series is all over it like a donkey on a waffle.

There is no young hot new action star. There just isn’t. A young man’s action movie has been taken over by the super heroes and that’s created a vacuum where the old guys have been allowed to stick around, and in fact, have been brought back, resurrected. These are action movies for Baby Boomers, the generation THAT WILL NOT RETIRE. Arnold Scharzenegger (67) has a new Terminator movie in the works. Sylvester Stallone (68) has a new Rocky movie. Bruce Willis (turns 60 later this month) is working all kind of action franchises, Die Hard certainly, and Red, and has even more in the works. You cannot kill these men, or the characters they originated before I was born.

Speaking of invincibility: the most pervasive action star is Tom Cruise. He’s “only” 52, a young man in this crowd, but this ageless wonder has somehow kept his body in vintage form. It’s very possible that he sleeps in a large pickle jar and only comes out to run very, very fast on camera, pumping his little arms in a $2000 wind breaker, or else to flash his whitewhite teeth on the red carpet. And I’m sure he pays handsomely for a crack team of Scientology “doctors” to pull very , very hard on his strings to keep everything where it should be: a fine specimen. No wonder he’s in better shape than he has any right to be. In the next few months we’ll see him in Mission Impossible 5, Top Gun 2, and Jack Reacher 2. It’s guys like Cruise who make guys like Colin Firth (54) think they should give it a chance too – hit the gym, do your own stunts, the works, which Mr. Darcy does rather well in Kingsman.

Hollywood is bending over backwards to tell boomers what they want to hear: you’re not irrelevant! We still need you! You’re still capable! “Retirement is for sissies!” as one of Sly’s posters for The Last Stand so succinctly put it. Not only are we reassuring boomers that they’ve still got it, the narrative is that they’re actually better than the young men trying to push them out of the way. In Taken, and in Red, and in countless others, the opponent is much younger (almost as young as the action star’s wife – gross!). In The Expendables 2 (SPOILER ALERT!) there’s only one young guy on the team, and he’s the one who dies. Because boomers are so much better than everyone. Because they have all this valuable life experience, and even if their bodies are a bit droopier, and their reflexes a bit duller and their instincts a bit slower they can still magically make the young dudes disappear. As always in life, the old white man is king.

Kinky Boots

Man Bites Dog (C’est arrivé près de chez vous)

5 Replies

I feel like the word “mockumentary” was not invented for a film like this. Mockumentary, with the word mock front row and centre, seems better suited to something like Spinal Tap. A movie like Man Bites Dog, however, should have its own set of rules.

“Man Bites Dog” is journalism shorthand for how unusual events are more likely to be reported in the news. A (fake) documentary team is following and filming a charismatic serial killer named Ben as he commits his increasingly gruesome crimes. Of course the crew gets drawn in and soon find themselves to be accomplices. Ben takes advantage of the rolling cameras to boast about the murders he’s racking up, but loves the sound of his own voice so much delivers stream-of-consciousness monologues on just about any subject.

It doesn’t exactly surprise the audience that he’s a misogynist, a racist, and that he preys on the elderly. We witness his crimes in graphic detail. Yes, it’s horrible to watch the crew help to subdue a young boy who will then be smothered to death. Not for everyone. But this is not a violent for no reason film. Remember the mock part? Well think of it more as satire, or critique – a sad, sad critique of what sells at the movie theatre, or for that matter, on your 6 o’clock news. Why are we attracted as a society to serial killers, why do we find so magnetic, and why do so many seem to glorify them? Serial killers are the new icons. The media isn’t about the story, which is horrifying, but about the personality. We often learn more about the man committing the crimes than about his defenseless victims. If you think back to the last school shooting, for example, you are more likely to know the name of the gunman than the name of the innocent kid that he shot.

This is a highly interesting film out of Belgium, shot on a dime as I understand it, but it has garnered quite a cult following from people who recognize it as intelligently deviant. I found it hard to watch but I liked the questions I found myself asking. Plus, I learned how to successfully sink the corpse of a dead baby, and how to save a bullet by scaring the elderly to death, and that seems like it’ll come in handy, right?

Much Ado About Nothing (2012)

1 Reply

We’re on a black and white theme this week, so I used it as an excuse to finally check out Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing (2012). It’s one of those adaptations that use Shakespearean language but has modern setting and costumes. I feel like moving Shakespeare’s plays into modern times is startlingly easy to do and helps give me a new level of understanding for the words.

Joss Whedon shot this movie in just 12 days, while also working on The Avengers, like a palette-cleaning sorbet during a big, disgusting meal. He shot it in his own home in lieu of taking an anniversary trip with his wife – apparently with her consent.

This play is actually a soap opera. The premise is completely ridiculous – one dude spurns his fiancée at the altar because of an unconfirmed piece of third-hand gossip, which leads the jilted bride to fake her death to exact revenge, while another dude is tricked into falling in love with a woman he claims to hate after being flattered for about half an hour. Double wedding! As much as I may poke fun of it, the words themselves are just beautiful, and brilliant. A particular favourite snippet of mine: “He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than a man. He that is more than a youth is not for me, and he that is less than a man, I am not for him.”

I enjoyed this movie. Clark Gregg was a stand-out for me, and Nathan Fillion acquitted himself quite well and actually injects some funny into what Shakespeare intended as a comedy. Alexis Denisof, however, seemed like he was in way over his head. With so many words fighting a war of attrition inside his mouth, I just couldn’t relax into this movie.

I can see the allure of this stripped-down black and white piece after the Marvel smorgasbord The Avengers and I think Whedon is a wonderfully versatile director. I just didn’t enjoy this one half as much as I enjoyed Kenneth Branagh’s 1992 version starring Emma Thompson, and I suggest you check that one out instead.

Kingsman: The Secret Service

5 Replies

It’s possible that director Matthew Vaughn cast Colin Firth just because the man looks damn fine in a suit. A whole clothing line was conceived for this film, which actually does hinge on refined bespoke menswear.

While in France, I saw this movie advertised as a cross between James Bond and Quentin Tarantino. Watching the film, the James Bond references slap you in the face – the martinis (gin, stirred for ten seconds while glancing at an unopened bottle of vermouth), the gadgets, the weaponized body parts! And while it’s not quite a spoof, it’s definitely subversive. Colin Firth is a Kingsman, one of many gentlemen spies who teach the uncouth of the world lessons in manners while being blood-lustfully unmannered themselves. He will beat you to a pulp, but he will do so with his couture umbrella. Which is possibly where the Tarantino flavour seeps in – not just in the casting of Firth, who took home an Oscar for his portrayal of a King, but was sent by Vaughn to a gym for 6 months, equipped with a signet ring\hand grenade, and unleashed on the world as an action star to take notice of – but in Firth’s character itself, “tea and testosterone” they’re calling it, a razor-sharp dichotomy you won’t be able to take your eyes off of. Nor should you – Vaughn dives right into the action, and that’s where he stays.

Is this a good movie? Having just wrapped up Oscar season, it’s hard to say a resounding yes. But it IS an awful lot of fun. It’s gleefully violent, unapologetically politically incorrect, and often seems to make a joke out of itself (not all of them land but there was a lot of laughter from the surprisingly hearty Kanata audience). Sam Jackson as the supervillain, lisping away as he takes over the world, is brilliant. He and Firth are having fun. And the young street punk recruited by Firth – played by newcomer Taron Egerton – who must compete with more conventional types to win a spot on the elite spy team brings not only a nice juxtaposition but yet another excuse for non-stop action. Vaughn has plenty of other movies to his credit (Layer Cake and Kick Ass) but this is the one he was born to direct, finally melding gangsters with superheroes and coming up with something all his own.

This movie is definitely not fit for grandma, nor for gentlemen. It’s an energetic bloodbath. It’s exuberantly excessive in its ultraviolence, stylishly brutal, an extravagant killfest. And it’s a massacre to which you’ll enjoy having a front-row seat.

50 Shades of #BlueAboutGrey

6 Replies

Fifty Shades of Grey is a sad testament to the dumbing down of America. The source material was written by a middle-aged woman who read books meant for teenage girls about twinkly vampires. The boy vampire was such an under-aged thrill to her, she started writing erotic fan fiction about him, and other bored housewives were so titillated by her stories that for copyright reasons she changed the Edwards to Christians and before you know it, one underachieving trilogy had spawned another.

It’s garbage. It was embarrassing enough when grown adults read books found in the youth section, but now we’ve got women lining up to glorify an abusive relationship. Because the thing about the sex in 50 Shades of Grey is that it’s not really consensual. She’s a very young girl, and a meek one at that. He’s older than her, and a very powerful man. She’s intimidated, and he’s manipulative. He makes her sign a contract that he of all people knows is meaningless. Meanwhile, he stalks her, plies her with alcohol, and even though she’s constantly expressing doubt and stress, he violates her boundaries to get what he wants.

This is not my opinion, by the way. This is based on scientific research that’s been done in the wake and the fall-out from these books. But even real-life practitioners of BDSM don’t like the book because they feel it depicts an abusive relationship too, and colours their lifestyle negatively. S&M may have a healthy place in some people’s bedrooms, but they insist that this series confuses BDSM with abuse, and uses dangerous techniques. Researchers meanwhile, are concerned about the prevalence of intimate partner violence (IPV) in the books and movie. The study finds that almost every interaction between the two leads is emotionally abusive in nature, including isolation, sexual violence, and the circumvention of consent. Meanwhile, Ana, the young woman in question, exhibits classic symptoms of an abused woman – the constant perceived threats, the stress, the altered identity. There is no equality in this relationship. We’re talking about a controlling narcissist and a vulnerable, insecure woman. This is the breeding ground of the worst domestic abuse.

Why are real-life women paying to romanticize sexual violence and the emotional abuse of women? Not only is this not a love story, it’s not even “kinky” sex. It’s a bad situation, and if this was your sister or your friend, you would want to get her the fuck out. And the movie? Even worse.

When Christian whales on Ana with a belt until she cries big fat tears of pain and humiliation, finally forcing her to angrily ban such a practise ever again, that’s not romance. RED FLASHING LIGHT: that’s not romance! That’s coercive sex. It’s rapey. It is NOT a date movie and mistaking it for something naughty and fun is dangerous to your own sexual health.

People rushed to theatres on Valentine’s day to see this and were so turned off that the movie suffered the second biggest week-to-week drop ever (only Gigli did worse). But the damage is done. Opening box office was huge. The books have sold in the millions. And the poor theatres screening the movie have had to put up with some really disturbing viewers:

– One woman in Mexico slapped on her own handcuffs and proceeded to masturbate.

– Two women in Scotland got so rowdy and drunk they barfed in the aisles and when they were shushed, they stabbed the shusher with a broken wine bottle.

– In England, a woman was so into the movie she lost control of every last bodily function. Probably made the stabbed dude in Scotland be glad all those women did was puke.

– Foot fetishists in the UK used their own socks to blindfold themselves during the movie. The moans were very disruptive but it was the bad foot odour that lead to the most complaints to management.

These are (I hope) extreme reactions to the movie. But I can’t figure out for the life of me why the reaction is not one of disbelief and disgust. There is nothing sexy to see here (and I don’t just mean the lack of passion reported by people who actually saw it). This isn’t sex. We need to label it correctly and we need to be more responsible about what we as a society consume.

Following

6 Replies

Everyone has to start somewhere, and for genius director Christopher Nolan, that movie was Following.

Shot in stark, black and white 16mm stock, Nolan sets the stage for a modern film noir (postnoir?). Bill, between jobs, starts following people in the street. He starts out innocuously, restrained by a code of strict rules, but then begins to take risks when a well-groomed man piques his interest. This man, Cobb, confronts him, and soon the two partner up in Cobb’s break-ins. The burglaries are interesting because Cobb seems more interested in learning about and fucking with the lives of his victims than with stealing their stuff. Bill is seduced by this mysterious and glamorous lifestyle and is soon acting without his mentor. This of course leads him down an even more dangerous path of crime. The movie ends abruptly, I felt (I had to check of maybe it was a two-parter), after a quick 70 minutes.

Do you see a lot of Chris Nolan in this film? Initially I thought no. I’m used to his big, cinematic scapes, whereas this movie has a lot of very tight, close shots. But the story is told out of sequence, keeping us off balance, reminding us that we don’t know as much as we think we do – and that non-linear kind of story-telling is, as you know, very Nolan. To attempt this on a first feature, with no budget, took a whole heap of faith. It marked him as a director with a lot of imagination and a meticulousness for details – both of which helped qualify him for his astonishing follow-up, Momento.

He shot Following just on weekends because his actors and crew all had full-time jobs. He used film conservatively to keep costs down and usually only managed to capture about 15 minutes a day. At that rate, it took them a year to film on a no-budget of just $6000. Nolan wrote, directed and filmed his baby, and helped to edit it too. His friends gave up their apartments for locations and his Mum made sandwiches for the cast and crew. This is obviously not his great oeuvre but it does show a confident young man and tonnes of promise. A tidy little movie that still manages to include a cross, a double cross, a tripe cross – maybe this film isn’t quite so far off the Nolan mark as I first thought. The characters are brooding and enigmatic. The look of the film achieves something atmospheric despite the absence of movie lighting. And the over-arching theme of obsession? That’s pretty familiar Nolan territory.

So I suppose we can watch this decent little indie flick and see hints of coming greatness. Certainly it’s a step in the direction of darkness – and Mr. Nolan is known not just for reviving the Batman franchise but for injecting the whole superhero industry with a trend toward darker reboots. He can be demanding of his audience and he can infuriatingly reward us with an ambiguous ending – but isn’t that just the Nolan charm?

What’s your favourite Chris Nolan?

Movies on Airplanes

3 Replies

Watching a movie on an airplane isn’t exactly optimal viewing conditions. No director plans a scene thinking “But how will this look on a teeny tiny screen located approximately 15 inches from your face?” And putting the volume control on a shared arm rest is just asking for trouble. But you persist, because flights are long and seats are uncomfortable and for the love of god you’ve got to do something to block out the noise coming out of that baby. Of course, you must choose your movie well. I know someone who watched The Grey on a plane: not a wise choice. Weird of the airline, I thought, to even offer it, but apparently it did come with the too-mild warning of “not suitable for nervous fliers.” In The Grey, Liam Neeson barely survives a horrific plane crash only to have his life further threatened by a really spiteful pack of wolves.

Here were by recent choices, for better or worse:

The Skeleton Twins: Estranged siblings played by Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader reconnect after one’s attempted suicide interrupts the other’s. Comedies are good choices for planes and both Wiig and Hader give really strong performances although beware, this one is rife with family drama. They have an ease and charm together that’s really engaging, though the movie does suffer from the worst aspects of SNL – a tendency for a skit to go on way too long. So if you find Bill Hader lip-synching to an 80s power ballad, you’re in it for the full 3m48s and you’ll cringe through every second.

X-Men: Days of Future Past: This one mostly confused me. Sean really liked it and I’m sure a glowing review is imminent. He’s explained to me that this one was basically correcting a crappy previous film, but I struggled to keep up not just with the fast pace, which is appropriately engrossing for a plane ride, but with mutants I wasn’t familiar with interacting with mutants who I was pretty sure had already been killed off. I know this movie is time-warpy and rule-bendy, but does it also have to be a complete mind fuck? I’m suffering from super-hero fatigue (probably have been for at least a decade), but I really liked James McAvoy. And really hated Peter Dinklage, as usual. But the bits where Quicksilver is doing his thing almost make the movie worthwhile on their own – this is Bryan Singer at his best.

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day: I had the feeling that I’d already seen this family feature like half a dozen times. I’ve never seen this one before, but it feels like a pretty uninspired copy, so you try telling it apart. Lots of horrible\”funny” things happen to a family on what I hope is an atypical day. You know it’s supposed to be funny because Steve Carrell is flailing about on fire, but it doesn’t quite evoke out-loud laughter. I happened to be watching this on the very same day that Carrell would walk the red carpet as an Oscar nominee and it’s kind of nice to see that it hasn’t gone to his head. He’s still making room for bad movies. Well okay, it’s not terrible. It’s horrible and terrible and no good. But it’s also Steve Carrell (and a game Jennifer Garner) doing physical comedy with full gusto. Steve Carrell doing goofball antics just plain goes down easily so while you know this movie is mediocre at most, you just can’t bring yourself to hate it. A pirate accent forgives a lot.