Tag Archives: Kevin Bacon

You Should Have Left

Susanna (Amanda Seyfriend), a young, beautiful actress between jobs, and her old, rich ex-banker husband Theo (Kevin Bacon) take their daughter Ella on a picturesque little hideaway vacation in Wales. The home they rent is nestled in some truly gorgeous if isolated Welsh countryside, but the house itself is strikingly modern.

It’s on this vacation that a little girl will learn that her father was once accused of murdering his first wife. They probably thought that this is what Ella would remember of their time in Wales, but then Theo learns that Susanna is having an affair, and that little explosive piece of news grabs all the headlines. But both of these facts will be overshadowed by what comes next.

The whole family’s been having nightmares since they arrived. Nightmares that don’t always feel like nightmares. But strange things are happening during the day, too. It’s the house (is it the house?); Sean correctly identified it as a “murder house” about ten seconds after clocking it and it’s definitely giving off hostile vibes. Perhaps not your traditional haunted house (think American Psycho rather than Psycho Psycho) but it does have a peculiar knack for rearranging itself on the fly. You may have opened the door to the laundry room but you have found yourself in the basement. What’s in the basement? Nothing good, but you’ll have to walk down an ever-lengthening hallway to meet your fate.

Writer-director David Koepp delivers some effective jump scare and both Seyfriend and Bacon are convincingly paranoid and/or terrified, but something just feels off, and I don’t mean the morphing blueprint. There’s just no definitive villain, nothing concrete to fear. There’s a fair amount of tension but it doesn’t ever build to a satisfying conclusion. Koepp fucks around with time, space, the supernatural, and the existential: if you threw a punch with your eyes closed you should be able to hit something, but Koepp just never hits his mark, or defines it. He’s got a pretty bag of tricks, by which I mean he took some pretty meticulous notes while watching The Shining one night. This movie didn’t scare me and I get scared every time our furnace kicks in. Every. Time. But worse, it didn’t interest me or entertain me. A dozen loose ends don’t add up to a mystery, it means a script hit production before it had any right to, and now there’s another aimless horror movie in the world bringing the bell curve down for everyone.

Crazy Stupid Love

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Poor Cal. He thinks he’s moments away from a creme brulee when his wife Emily hits him with a wallop: she wants a divorce. And that’s not all. On the tense car ride home, Emily (Julianne Moore) confesses that she slept with someone. Cal (Steve Carell) pulls a LadyBird out the car but it’s not going to save his marriage.

At a local bar, a very despondent Cal is attracting the wrong kind of attention. Crying in public will tend to do that. Resident lady’s man Jacob (Ryan Gosling) takes pity on him, and takes him under his wing to dress him up and teach him how to flirt. Best wing man ever? Suddenly Cal, who’s only ever been with his wife, is putting serious notches into his new, single guy Ikea bedpost. Which doesn’t sit well with Emily, but who is she to complain. Right?

Meanwhile, Jacob’s love life is going in the opposite direction. He’s met a woman he actually wants to not just sleep with, but wake up with. Hannah (Emma Stone) is the right mix of neurotic-quirky-cute and for the first time, Jacob’s falling in love.

Sure it’s a little too sweet sometimes, but Crazy Stupid Love is a legitimately funny rom-com with effervescent dialogue delivered by an A-list cast. Carell is likable as ever, making a convincing transformation both inside and out. For his part, Gosling is game for poking a little fun at his own image, punctuating some of the absurd if not ever quite crazy idiosyncrasies of dating, whether it’s the first or second time around. There’s a maturity (perhaps a pre-Tinder maturity) to it that gives it universal appeal.

Apollo 13

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The real Apollo 13 mission was largely ignored in 1970. People had already seen men walk on the moon twice before, so this just seemed like more of the same. Interest was so low that lots of news programs weren’t even broadcasting it. Until, that is, things went wrong.

An oxygen tank exploded, which crippled essential systems. The 3 astronauts aboard just had to hang out in an increasingly inhospitable ship as the NASA crew on the ground scrambled to get them home safely. The planned moon walk was of course aborted; they never landed on the moon, just orbited around it. Over the next few days, the spacecraft had limited power, a worrying loss of cabin heat, a shortage or drinkable water, and an urgent need to fix the carbon dioxide removal system or die trying.

America might have been bored with moon walks, but for astronaut Jim Lovell, it would be the culmination of his life’s ambition. It was not to be.

Ron Howard brought this story of NASA’s most successful failure to the big screen in 1995, and still thinks of it as his best film. In fact, he thinks the launch sequence is the highest point of his career, and he’s not wrong. Watching First Man more than 20 years later, it’s clear that Apollo 13 had a huge impact on movies that would follow it.

Jim Lovell thought that perhaps Kevin Costner had a passing likeness, but once Ron Howard signed on as director, he immediately sent the script to Tom Hanks, who is a known space buff. Bill Paxton portrayed Fred Haise, while Kevin Bacon got the role of Jack Swigert, who was never supposed to be there. He was only on the mission as a backup, but blood screening suggested that Ken Mattingly (Gary Sinise) might have the measles, and he was replaced last minute. Though this was an undoubtedly heartbreaking switch, it was Mattingly’s expertise on the ground that ultimately helped save his crewmates. He sat in the simulator for days, doing simulation after simulation until he could work out a way to rescue his friends.

The actors, or actornauts as Howard called them on set, floated around in $30K space suits. And yes, they really did float. Steven Spielberg suggested that Howard approached NASA for special permission to use its KC-135 airplane, and permission was granted. Dubbed the vomit comet, the plane climbs to 38 000 feet and then does a big 15 000 foot drop, creating a zero-gravity effect, but it only creates about 23 seconds of weightlessness. For the film’s production, they had the plane perform 612 dives, for a total of 54 minutes of footage. Even still, sometimes when you see the actors just bobbing around in their capsule, they’re actually just sitting on seesaws. Pretending to be in space is hard! [Note: the 3 actors were very proud to report that none of them vomited on the comet…but several cameramen could not say the same.]

It took them 6 days to get them safely home, and while America did not care about a third module landing on the moon, it became obsessed with the imperiled mission that may or may not return. Millions of people tuned in every night, and so did the friends and families of the astronauts on board. NASA didn’t have time to give them proper updates, so they, like everyone else, relied on Walter Cronkite to feed them information. Ron Howard brought Cronkite in to record a few extra reports.

Tom Hanks and Gary Sinise had of course appeared together the year before in Forrest Gump, where Sinise’s Lieutenant Dan says to Forrest: ” If you’re ever a shrimp boat captain, that’s the day I’m an astronaut.” Lo and behold. The movie is full of little Ron Howard nods: Kathleen Quinlan who plays Jim’s wife Marilyn, actually had her first ever screen credit in American Graffiti, in which she played Peggy, a girl complaining in a bathroom about her boyfriend Steve – who was of course played by Howard himself. He also found a role for Roger Corman, the producer who gave Ron his first big break in Grand Theft Auto. Ron’s mother, his father, his wife, and of course his brother all appear in the film. The real Marilyn Lovell is briefly seen in the grandstands at the launch, and the real Jim shakes hands with the fake Jim aboard the Iwo Jima.

Apollo 13 was well-received, and it holds up well almost 25 years later. There are lots of movies about astronaut heroes, but Apollo 13 sets itself apart by portraying the time when someone’s dream doesn’t come true. It takes a story whose outcome is known (and in fact infamous: “Houston, we have a problem”) and still makes it feel tense and compelling.

Thursday Movie Picks: Dance Movies That Aren’t Musicals

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Matt

As usual, Wandering Through the Shelves has given me an excuse to catch up on movies you probably wouldn’t believe that I have missed- movies that I probably never would have sought out without this weekly challenge. The most crucial check off of my bucket list this week was Footloose, which until this week all I knew of was the Kenny Loggins song of the same name and Chris Pratt’s summary of the plot in Guardians of the Galaxy. I now know that Kevin Bacon understood what no one else in Beaumont did; that dancing has a way of helping you blow off steam like nothing else can. Not even Tractor Chicken.

Footloose may not be my favourite movie about dancing but it shares a philosophy of dance with some that are. My first pick is Billy Elliot (2000), whose main character is an 11 year-old boy with lots of reasons to want to blow off steam. His mother is dead, his father is distracted by the 1984 Miner’s Strike, and boxing doesn’t seem to be working out for him. It’s only when a no-nonsense ballet teacher (Julie Walters) takes him under her wing that he finds his voice, confidence, and an outlet for his frustration. (Like Kevin Bacon, he does a lot of angry dancing). It’s touching and very funny.

Taking a page from Billy Elliot, inner city New York fifth graders learn several styles of ballroom dancing in the 2005 documentary Mad Hot Ballroom. The film follows a pilot project with the NYC Department of Education that aims to expose students to dances from around the world including the tango, foxtrot, and merengue. Like Billy Elliot, it’s surprisingly funny, with lots of Kids Say the Darndest Things Moments. Plus, it’s hard not to crack up seeing the discomfort of 10 year-old boys having to dance with a girl for the first time. Just as importantly though, the documentary lets us bear witness to a program that gives these kids a unique opportunity to learn about the arts, other cultures, and the opposite It may just make you want to dance too. At the screening I attended ten years ago, I passed a couple swing dancing right there in the theater.

Not every movie about dancing will make you want to get up and dance though. My third pick is Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler (2008), which to me follows two kindred spirits who whose bodies are exploited in one way or another for the entertainment of others. As the title suggests, Marisa Tomei’s aging stripper is not the central character in The Wrestler but it’s a memorable one, especially when contrasted with Mickey Rourke’s aging wrestler. Both characters are seeing signs that it’s time to make a clean break. She manages to walk away by the end, getting a chance to see what else life has in store for her, even if the wrestler isn’t so lucky.

Sean

Footloose – My favourite scene in this movie is and will always be the tractor scene, which is one of the few in this movie not involving any dancing or head-bobbing at all. Even before I saw the movie the soundtrack was part of my life – a kid on my bus had the soundtrack and insisted that the driver play it every single day. Which would have been fine except that every day I heard the same two songs before my stop so it got a little bit repetitive. But the movie and especially the tractor scene are still great.

Black Swan – this movie is creepy and crazy and awesome. I don’t even know how to describe it or do it justice. It’s a must see and it’s about dancing so that works out really well.

House Party – it is because of this movie that I knew in 1990 who Kid ‘N Play were even though I had never heard any of their songs. It was everything a white kid needed to know about house parties and rap battles and b-boy dancing. And everything I needed to hold a (brief) conversation with all the white kids in my high school rocking fades and Raiders hats and jackets. We watched it recently and I really didn’t remember any of it but it’s fun and it has a few recognizable faces in addition to Kid ‘N Play, including both Martin Lawrence and Tisha Campbell, pre-Martin.

Jay

Sean doesn’t know how to describe why he likes Black Swan? Let me give it a try, and I only need two words: Lesbian sex. But sure, let’s call it “dancing.” I prefer “dancing” to dancing myself, but I am quite partial to Billy Elliot, that little scamp! I was a bit of a mean little knock-kneed ballerina myself, once upon a time, and I relate to the toe-tapping need to dance although admittedly I’m not much of an angry dancer these days. Angry baking? Sure. Angry showering? All the time. But dancing I save for the happy times.
Cuban Fury – Bruce (Nick Frost) was a child salsa prodigy but gave up the swivelling hips when bullies tore the sequins from his chest and taught him a valuable lesson in humility: salsa’s for pussies. He hasn’t danced in 25 years. He lives a lonely life, bullied at work by his manager Drew (Chris O’Dowd). But then the office gets a new boss, Julie (Rashida Jones), who happens to be a dancer herself and suddenly his passion is reignited. All three of these people are comic heroes of mine, and the movie works purely on that level alone. But I also really love the atypical-dancer motif, which is only acknowledged by others in the film. Salsa may have you thinking more Antonio Banderas than Nick Frost (are you picturing Patrick Swayze and Chris Farley doing their Chippendales act right now?) but Frost does the legwork (and the foot work!) to make the dance come alive. Although I’m not sure I needed to see him wearing quite so many silk blouses, I’m a sucker for Latin music (and Latin music mixed tapes!), and I go absolute batshit crazy for a dance-off.

Waiting for Guffman – One of Christopher Guest’s genius mockumentaries, this one tells the tale of Corky St. Clair, a fabulous wannabe-Broadway director trapped in small-town Missouri, where he gets to put on a low-budget historical musical for the town’s anniversary. As usual, his talented cast mostly ad-lib their way through the movie, which makes for crazy good times, but my favourite is when Christopher Guest is attempting to teach choreography to a bunch of bozos. Corky’s patented dance moves are irresistible and I dare you not to smile. Eugene Levy couldn’t do it – he had to be hidden way in the back during filming because every time Guest danced it would set him off into a fit of giggles that took too long to recover from. It’s so earnest and deadpan I don’t know how any of them ever make it through a scene – I know I never do.

Gotta Dance – This documentary follows a for-true-real experiment by the New Jersey Nets – one year they put together the NBA’s first-ever all-senior (as in citizens! 60+ and creaking hips all the way) hip-hop dance troupe. I suppose this is a pretty good counter-point to Matt’s documentary with the kids since this one introduces us to a crowd of people who thought their ship had sailed. Some are discovering dance for the first time, others have enjoyed a little soft shoe in the kitchen for so many years the linoleum’s worn out. Two of the troupe’s over-80 members are grandmothers of Nets cheerleaders, and their stories are among my favourites. We get to know all of them, including one dowdy school teacher who develops a Beyonce-like Sacha Fierce alternate ego for performing. They’re fun to watch, even as some let their 15 minutes go to their heads, but they’ve all got commendable energy and spirit…but when they’re out on the court at half-time with thousands of people half-paying attention as they pee and get hot dogs, will they even remember the moves? Or will the racy Jay-Z lyrics trigger seizures? Anything can happen, folks!