Category Archives: Jay

John Wick

John Wick (Keanu Reeves) has a dead wife and a cool car. That much we can all agree on. The freshly dead wife has sent him a gift posthumously (dear movies: can we stop with the deliveries from beyond the grave now? it creeps me out) – a puppy to help him grieve. Wick’s initially not much of a fan of Daisy, but when he spends the day with her, cruising around in his cool car, they bond. But then something terrible happens: he runs out of gas. And we all know what happens when we stop to pump gas – we run into Russian mobsters. Okay, well, that hardly ever happens to me, but I gas up at Canadian Tire. But Keanu stopped at Shell or some such, and so of course his life is threatened when he refuses to sell his car for no apparent reason – and his little dog too.

Russian mobsters are infamous for not taking no for an answer, so they follow him home and wage a sneak attack when he’s sleeping to steal his car and kick his dog. Poor Daisy dies in the attack, and that dead dog is the impetus for all that unfolds next.

The dog was apparently the last shred of his old life that was holding him together. Turns out he used to be a bad dude, as evidenced by the arsenal he digs up from his basement. He learns that the kid who killed his dog is actually the son of his old boss, head of Russian mob. The mob guy learns that John Wick, his most accomplished assassin, is coming out of retirement on behalf of his dead dog, gunning for his only son, and freaks out. There’s a $4 million bounty on John’s head, which he deals with by checking into some sort of hit-man hotel where apparently you’re not allowed to kill people, but that’s assuming that criminals can follow the rules, which we all know they can’t.

And that’s where I lost the thread. It’s just pretty much plotless revenge-fuelled action movie after that, constant movement, lots of shattered glass. Body count: 119, 78 by Keanu’s hand. It doesn’t sound like much, and it isn’t, but I’m pretty positive that if you like watching people kill for karma, cash, or just plain bloodlust, you’re going to want to see this movie.

The Best of Sundance 2015

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The Sundance Film Festival has been crazy busy this year, and tonnes of great movies have already debuted (and many bought for distribution!). Here’s a short list of some of the most-talked-about and highly anticipated movies to come out of the festival so far.

The Hunting Ground , a documentary by Kirby Dick who also did Invisible War a couple of years ago. The Hunting Ground is a powerfully charged film about rape on college campuses, a timely topic (sadly) that had audiences gasping audibly at the mockery of universities’ investigations into sexual assault. The film takes a hard look at fraternity culture, and also serves as a warning to the NFL about Florida State quarterback Jameis Winston – accused of rape he has yet to be formally charged but his accuser speaks out publicly for the first time, and it’s chilling. This movie also features the most talked about song at Sundance this year, Lady Gaga’s “Til It Happens To You”, co-written by the esteemed and venerable Diane Warren. The Hunting Ground is slated for release March 20 and will air later this year on CNN.

Going Clear is another documentary of note this year, this one directed by Alex Gibney (who you may remember from Taxi to the Dark Side). This one’s about Scientology and you can bet it’s ruffling plenty of feathers (HBO famously hired 160 lawyers to vet the thing). Gibney’s got lots of former scientologists on deck, including disillusioned former leaders, delivering first-hand accounts of what it’s really like behind closed doors. This doc lands bombshells about the torture of members in a prison known as “the hole”, the harassment of those who have left, and the intentional breaking up of Tom Cruise’s marriage to Nicole Kidman (and even wire-tapping her phones). Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief airs March 16 on HBO.

IFC Films laid out $3 million for the rights to Jack Black’s new comedy, The D Train, where he plays a loser who tries to save his high school reunion by recruiting the class’s favourite and most famous student (James Marsden), an actor in a successful Banana Boat commercial, to attend.

Brooklyn looks like another one to look out for – a romantic drama based on a best-selling book (by Colm Toibin) with a screenplay adaptation by Nick Hornby. If memory serves correctly, it’s about a young woman who emigrates from Ireland to Brooklyn and faces homesickness and heartbreak as she chooses between 2 men and 2 countries. Something like that. 🙂

The End of The Tour sounds a little like Almost Famous but for book worms as opposed to groupies. It follows Rolling Stone writer David Lipsky (played by Jesse Eisenberg, who I’m a little wary of at this point) on a five-day road trip with David Foster Wallace (brought to the big screen by Jason Segel). Wallace committed suicide a few years back and apparently his family aren’t pleased about the movie, so it’s sure to create some chatter when released later this year.

I am not sure, though, that anything will create quite as much controversy as James Franco’s new movie, I Am Michael, based on the life of gay activist Michael Glatze who co-founded an LGBT teen magazine only to renounce his sexuality and become a Christian pastor. Zachary Quinto and Emma Watson also star.

For those of you worried about having too much fun at the movies this year, here’s one that’s sure to be a downer: in Stockholm, Pennsylvania, Saoirse Ronan plays a young woman who was kidnapped as a young child and held captive for 17 years. Recently returned home to her family, she must now reconcile her haunting past with the reality of parents (Cynthia Nixon and David Warshofsky) who are pretty much strangers, and a world she didn’t know existed.

And if you’re in the mood for a couple of chuckle-heads turned dramatic, Jonah Hill slips on his serious glasses to play Michael Finkel, a disgraced journalist who learns an obsessive murderer (James Franco) captured in Mexico is stealing his identity. Finkel travels to interview the prisoner in hopes of restoring his integrity. True Story has a limited release set for April 10.

Which ones are you most excited to see?

Women in Hollywood

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Russell Crowe is an ass. Everyone knows this. So when he recently went on a rant about how there are plenty of parts for women in movies so they should just shut their yaps and “act their age” no one was surprised by the medium or the message. As long as there’s been movies, there’s been sexism and by god, where sexism goes so does ageism.

Looking at this year’s Oscar nominations it was pretty clear to me that meatier roles go to men, but I’m not going to sit here and lament the missed opportunities when instead I could be celebrating the success.

Earlier today, Paul Feig posted an untitled photo to Twitter featuring Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones. Feig provided absolutely no comment but fans were quick to speculate that this was the cast of his much-discussed reboot of The Ghostbusters franchise. McKinnon and Jones are both current members of SNL while Wiig and McCarthy are already Feig collaborators, having co-starred in Bridesmaids, the highest grossing domestic R-rated female comedy of all time, edging out Sex and the City (2008).

Meanwhile, at Sundance, Emily Nussbaum, award-winning critic for the New Yorker, moderated a panel of “Serious Ladies” featuring the uber-talented Wiig, Jenji Kohan (who wrote for Sex and the City and Gilmore Girls before creating Orange Is the New Black and Weeds), Lena Dunham (creator and star of Girls) and Mindy Kaling (writer\producer\star of The Mindy Project). Although they’re all at the top of their game, they all shared stories about how tough it was to break in. Kohan recalled male-dominated writers’ rooms where one cave-dweller told her “If God had meant women to be in a writer’s room he wouldn’t have made breasts so distracting.” Kaling discussed the pressure to be a role-model versus the artist’s craving to push the envelope and maybe even offend. Sometimes feminism means creating a female character that isn’t necessarily “likeable.”

Dunham, who recently released a memoir, spoke about the difficulty women face in being mistaken for the characters they play (and wondered why Woody Allen and Larry David don’t get pigeonholed in quite the same way). She hopes to one day see women outnumber men in their profession – “That would be my favourite, if guys some day were to say, ‘It’s impossible to get into Hollywood! It’s a women’s club!’ ”

Jenji Kohan pointed out that she was still expected to write material about weddings and motherhood, a notion she challenges with the huge success of her show, Orange Is The New Black. That series, a Netflix original, won big at the Screen Actors Guild awards on Sunday. Uzo Aduba took home Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series that night (she plays “Crazy Eyes), and gave a heartfelt speech. But the best part was the love and support coming from the OITNB table – it’s always heartening to see women cheering each other on. Aduba was back on stage before long – the show also won Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series, wrestling away the honour from Modern Family. What a great sight to see so many strong and talented ladies on the stage at once.

There are still mountains to climb for women in Hollywood, but if you look around (or follow our Twitter feed – @assholemovies ) you’ll find brave mountaineers everywhere. Just today it was announced that Toy Story 4 would be making its way to theatres in 2017 and that Rashida Jones and her writing partner Will McCormack would be tapped for the screenplay. Although they only have one previous credit to their names (Celeste and Jesse Forever), John Lasseter insists he “wanted to get a strong female voice in the writing of this.” This is a nice change from Pixar’s usually male-dominated animated lineup (Buzz, Woody, Nemo, Mike, Sully, Wall-E, etc) and a step in the right direction for us all.

Fury

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Another WW2 movie released in 2014 – see my reviews of Unbroken and The Monuments Men – that didn’t get a whole lot of attention. Is it possible the American film-going population is finally sick of movies about old wars? None of these movies is great but neither are they bad, which to my mind place them above American Sniper, which showcases a more recent war effort but also glorifies it.

Fury is about a tank crew in the final days of the war. Brad Pitt plays “Wardaddy”, an aging staff sergeant to a veteran crew: “Bible” (Shia LeBoeuf), “Coon-Ass” (Jon Bernthal), and “Gordo” (Michael Pena), who credit him with keeping them all alive. They’ve recently lost their fifth man so newbie Norman (Logan Lerman), a typist who’s never seen the inside of a tank let alone the ravages of war is drafted to join the gang. Pitt’s in charge of his tank, nicknamed Fury, but it’s obvious that the fury also comes from inside him. He’s angry at what he’s seen and takes comfort in abusing prisoners and killing Nazis. He counsels young Norman to do the same, but Norman doesn’t think killing prisoners is “right” and refuses.

After discussing the moral relativism inherent in A Most Violent Year, this movie had me thinking more along the lines of righteousness, and whether those ideals apply to wartime at all. The film does a brutally stirring job of showing good Nazis, bad Allies, sympathetic Germans, ignorant Americans, and everything in between. THIS is truth. This isn’t Clint Eastwood’s fanatical fanboy version of war, this is the real and harsh and horrid. One man may be both hero and monster. Both sides believe in what they are doing. Everyone’s afraid.

Director David Ayer put his actors through a controversial process, starting with boot camp, but also forcing them to live together in the tank, encouraging them to fight each other physically on set, and hurl verbal abuse at each other, while swearing them all to absolute secrecy. Shia LeBoeuf, never a stranger to controversy himself, took things a step further, pulling out his own tooth, cutting himself repeatedly, and refusing to shower for the duration of the shoot.

Did all of this make for a better movie? Certainly the tank stands in for their “home” and the crew as their “family”, with all the dysfunction and closeness and claustrophobia that brings. The violence is relentless. The tension is gut-clenching. But it’s the middle act that stabbed at me – how the Greatest Generation is merciful and merciless at war. Unfortunately, we get a little glimpse of anyone’s life pre- (or post) war and the characters feel a little one-note. Brad Pitt, kind of old to be a non-commissioned officer at this point, may also be a WW1 veteran, but in Fury, nothing outside the tank matters – or maybe they’ve just been at it so long they’ve forgotten who they used to be. Watching them go from one act of savagery to the next, it’s easy to believe that whoever they once were, they aren’t anymore. When we sent these men home (if they made it home at all), they were changed.

Available on DVD and Blu-Ray today.

Before I Go To Sleep

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Nicole Kidman plays a woman who wakes up peacefully in bed with her husband (Colin Firth), only she has no memory of him, or how she got there, or, come to think of it, of the past several years. Turns out, she’s had an accident that stops her from making any new memories, so every time she sleeps, she wipes out the day before and wakes up a stranger in her own body.

The most embarrassing thing about this movie is that I’d forgotten I’d already seen it. It’s bad news to watch a movie about an amnesiac and not realize you’re actually rewatching it.

Anyway, it sounds, on paper, a lot like 50 First Dates, except things aren’t as rosy for Nicole as they were for Drew. There are holes in her story that even someone with a brain injury can see through, so there’s a little Momento mixed in, just for fun. A mysterious doctor and a friend from her past show up to help her solve the question mark, but she can’t be sure who to trust, and neither can you. The brain trauma thing is kind of overused for such a rare disease, but it does put the viewer on equal footing with our poor, disoriented heroine. Her confusion makes for an unreliable narrator if ever there was one and so the who-dunnit unravels in darkness for her like it does for us.

The genre is tired and this one’s not adding much to the mix. It feels like it’s taken a page from Gone Girl, but lacks Fincher’s balls with the follow-through. The story demands more of our attention while actually deserving less. It does silly, unforgivable things like using the old “I have something important to tell you, but not over the phone!” and even worse, the old, “I’m being attacked and fear for my life but won’t yell for help.” Plus, director Rowan Joffe has these little tells, like constantly showing us a close-up of Kidman’s blood-shot eyes, that get annoying real quick. It’s a thriller that’s so banal and (ironically) forgettable, I accidentally watched it twice.

Muscle Shoals

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This documentary isn’t terribly structured but it does offer some brilliant insight into the making of some of the best records of all time: Percy Sledge, Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, The Rolling Stones…and what do they all have in common? They were all produced and recorded in small town Muscle Shoals, Alabama. You may not know the studio, but you definitely know the music.

Everyone gives lively, reminiscent interviews, including Bono, who just loves to hear his own voice because in actual fact he never recorded there. But everyone who’s anyone has, and most showed up to praise the sound coming out of the south.

What struck me the most was that, without any effort, just born out of one musician’s respect for another, more was done for race relations on vinyl in those studios than anywhere else. Black and white musicians worked together to make a cohesive sound that both describe as “funky.” This was rural Alabama in the 1960s but what was happening out there couldn’t mess with what was happening in the studio. It was magic.

Cake

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I actually worried whether I was the worst person to review this movie, or the best, which would crush me. Jennifer Aniston plays Claire, a woman who suffers from chronic pain, a condition which is not unknown to me.

Claire attends a support group for chronic pain sufferers where the members are currently dealing with the recent suicide of one of their own (Anna Kendrick). Claire is unwilling to share in group but is haunted by visions of her dead friend.

Jennifer Aniston is absolutely the reason to see this film. Her performance is very touching because it’s raw and real and visceral. It’s hard to watch, or it was for me. Soon we start to see that there’s a lot more to her pain than just the physical, though the script remains maddeningly vague on these parts. Actually, the story feels anesthetized, like it doesn’t quite want us to feel what we know must be there.

I worried about what it would be like to see the private struggles of my life up on the big screen, but I came away not thinking of myself, but of my husband. In the movie, Claire’s husband (Chris Messina, love him) is estranged and it’s not hard to see how she’s managed to push away all the people in her life. Her pain makes her angry and acerbic, but it’s also a clever strategy for getting rid of people she doesn’t want to deal with. She wants to be in pain, be alone with her pain. Being in pain makes sense to her. Her maid, played lovingly by Adriana Barraza, is her only remaining caregiver, one with seemingly infinite patience for the pills and the bitterness and the constant setbacks. But the brutality of Claire’s expression weighs on her heavily, as it must. This is actually a very sweet and savvy exploration of the relationship between domestic and employer.

The story of what happened to Claire unfolds too slowly, and allows the audience to connect the dots before the big reveals, diluting their punch. But the full story is never wholly understood, so the emotional payoff, both ours and Claire’s, is lacking.

Unbroken

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I was cynical about this movie because critics told me to be. “It’s bad”, they wrote, “don’t bother.” But I watched it and thought: it’s not so bad. Good, even, in some parts. Basically redundant I suppose, but not bad. So why then was it panned? And why then did I feel much the same way upon viewing The Monuments Men, also derided by critics – maybe it wasn’t great, but it also wasn’t the disaster I’d been lead to believe.

So now I’m worried that critics are taking pot-shots at “celebrity” directors. There’s almost nothing conventionally roastable about George Clooney, yet Tina Fey and Amy Pohler still found a way to mock him for making what I thought was a decent movie. He pretended to be a good sport about it, but they hit him where it hurts. If Kim Kardashian was standing behind the camera, fine, open season. But Angelina Jolie has paid her dues and proves it with a movie that is technically sound, and both made movies this year that contribute to a proud historical record for their country. Clint Eastwood, another actor-turned-director did the same with American Sniper, and though I’d say it’s the weakest of the three, it’s being hailed (although not uniformly) as the best.

Unbroken tells the story of Louis Zamperini, a true tale that’s been simmering in different Hollywood pots for the past 70 years. He was an Olympic runner who competed in the Berlin Games and then joined the army just a few years later after the Pearl Harbour attack. As a bombardier in world war two, he and his fellow crewmates were sent out on a search and rescue mission on a plane that couldn’t hack it, and went down due to mechanical failure. One of only three survivors, he then spent more than 6 weeks at sea, barely surviving only to be washed onto Japanese soil where he brutally treated as a POW for the remainder of the war.

You can see why people thought this would make a good movie; it moves episodically from one huge hurdle to the next, a great showcase for the human spirit (and for American spirit in particular). In fact, it’s a relic, the kind of war movie that casts the Japanese as “the enemy” pure and simple, and its indomitable American protagonist as the uncomplicated hero. But what should have been great turns out merely to be good. It’s beautifully shot but generic – we’ve seen the castaway thing a million times, and the POW thing a million more. Jolie adds nothing of her own to these events.

Jack O’Connell impresses again in a physically demanding role (he’s even better in Starred Up) and the cast is strong, but no one is given much more than the standard paces to work with, the script being surprisingly traditional after a Cohen brothers treatment. The movie opens with some nerve-wracking battle scenes in the sky, but from the moment the plane splashes down, we’re drowning in misery and degradation.

While Zamperini’s story is one of redemption and forgiveness, Unbroken shows only despair. Zamperini’s character is lost, a sense of triumph unearned, and the movie stirs emotion only by default.

Maps to the Stars

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Well…that was interesting. Not quite what I’ve come to expect (and fear) from David Cronenberg, but not your typical Hollywood fare either, though that’s exactly what it’s satirizing.

John Cusack is the family patriarch, a successful therapist\coach of some sort, with a book deal a talk-show circuit and an awful lot of bullshit. His wife acts as the agent for their spoiled child-start son, fresh out of rehab which he entered at the age of 9, and who’s still the “good kid” and certainly the bankable one, compared to a sister (Mia Wasikowska ) who’s just finished an involuntary stint in a sanitorium and now works as a “chore whore” (personal assistant) for an aging diva still aching for parts (Julianne Moore).

I confess that I didn’t always know where this is going, and I’m still not sure where it went, but the performances, Moore’s especially, were so strong, it hardly mattered. It occurs to me that an ode to Julianne Moore is long overdue here – in this movie and in so many others, she just goes for broke. It’s not always pretty but she’s one of few actresses not deterred by the unflattering. In this she goes from raw and wounded to vacuous and self-absorbed, but she does it in a way that’s not unsympathetic. The misery and sorrow feel real and thus it’s impossible to really hate her. Moore somehow manages to humanize her characters and put a real spark into them.

The script is less than brilliant. It’s easy to point fingers at Hollywood, to laugh at the yoga and the dysfunction, but it’s already been done dozens of times. This is just another fresh layer of fucked-up.

In Canada, we used to honour cinematic achievement with a Genie award (they’ve now merged into the “Canadian Screen Awards”). They’re irrelevant as ever (Cronenberg has 5) but if you’ve ever wondered what else they’re good for you, boy are you in for a treat.

The Monuments Men

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Based on the “true story” of a motely gang of art historians, museum curators, and the occasional sculptor for balance, who risked their lives to save and protect major works of art that were stolen by Nazis during the second world war, The Monuments Men, as they were called, feels a little like a war-themed Ocean’s 11.

Critics were pretty hard on this movie, but having finally watched it, I feel like that’s unfair. Art expert Franks Stokes assembles a crack team just as impressive as any of Danny Ocean’s – Matt Damon, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Hugh Bonneville and Dimitri Leonidas all give strong performances though they compete for screen time. Bill Murray and Bob Balaban are probably my favourite duo; they play off each other fabulously. The trouble with The Monuments Men is with the tone: this wants to be a light-hearted caper, like Ocean’s 11, but Clooney feels too much reverence for the subject and so throws in another lecture rather than a joke. Truthfully, when George Clooney lectures, I’m going to listen. That man has the twinkliest eyes short of Santa Claus. But this is not exactly playing to his cast’s strength, or his audience’s expectations.

The Monuments Men arrive mostly as the war is winding down, so there aren’t a lot of battle scenes, which is not to say there is no blood. Anyone looking for a typical, action-driven war movie will be out of luck, though it certainly looks like one, with beautiful, crumbly post-war Europe shot and framed with care. This one is more of an intellectual exercise, with a moral question at its heart: is a human life worth a piece of art?

Clooney’s character answers this rather touchingly, in the end, with an older version of himself visiting a monument he recovered in the 1970s. “Yeah,” he says, eyes twinkling. I wondered for half a second if this was perhaps the real Frank Stokes but it was the twinkle that gave it away. Must be a Clooney, I thought, and so it was (Nick, George’s dad).

George Clooney knows this is a story worth telling, and seeks to honour the men who made it possible. It just feels like maybe this is the wrong medium to do it. Even at two hours, he just barely manages to give each of his actors one big “moment.” The monuments are pretty well served, but to really know the men, maybe a miniseries would have been more appropriate. Next time, George, take it HBO.