Tag Archives: Robert Downey Jr

Los Angeles, I’m Yours

Today we’re exploring the big beautiful city of Los Angeles, and to prepare I’ve cycled through several films that have given me invaluable insight on what we might encounter:

Boyz N The Hood: Luckily our hotel is on Hollywood & Vine rather than in the ghetto. Ice Cube and Cuba Gooding Jr play boyhood friends who are just barely surviving the gunfire in their neighbourhood. Bullets and helicopters are the film’s soundtrack. John Singleton paints a pretty bleak outlook for these kids without the benefit of options, futures, or even fathers. Lessons learned: watch out for rival gangs and street racing, and eat your french fries indoors.

Fletch: Chevy Chase plays an investigative journalist a little too comfortable going undercover as a bum\new age guru. Fletch is looking into the booming drug trade on the beach when approached one day by a wealthy man who asks him to be the homeless man who shoots him dead, bypassing cancer and netting his wife the insurance. But Fletch isn’t really a bum and the guy isn’t really dying of cancer. Lessons learned: watch out for rollerskaters on the boardwalk, bums and new age gurus are practically indistinguishable, the people are rude to waiters, LAPD is useless.

L.A. Story: Steve Martin is a weather guy in sunny and 72-degrees Los Angeles. He resorts to hijinks just to make his broadcasts interesting. Then he meets a girl, and that’s when this satirization of the big city really starts to zing. A freeway signpost starts to talk to him, and he begins to listen. Lots of celebrity cameos ensue. Lessons learned: the traffic is so bad you may as well take love advice from it

Less Than Zero: Andrew McCarthy is back from college for the holidays and finds his girlfriend hooking up with his best friend, the drug addict (Robert Downey Jr – kinda tough to watch him like this all things considered). It’s a real testament to crazy L.A. decadence. Then James Spader makes RDJ become a whore, and things really get interesting. Lessons learned: the girls are loose and the drugs are abundant – just my kind of town!

Collateral: Jamie Foxx has cabbie good luck (hot lady fare, Jada Pinkett Smith, gives him respect AND her number) and cabbie bad luck (hit man, Tom Cruise, takes him hostage); just a typical day driving around L.A. I guess! He’s forced to drive around while Cruise assassinates various names on a list of witnesses – the last of which of course turns out to be previously mentioned hot lady. Lessons learned: watch your bags at the airport, doormen are for shit, maybe take the bus? Although Lesson learned in Speed: DO NOT take the bus!

If you’d like to find out whether we’ve taken the bus or a taxi, follow us @assholemovies – we’re updating our California adventure daily!

Road Trip Movies

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Wanderer’s timing has been spooky lately. The Assholes fly out to sunny California today and will be taking a road trip of our own on Sunday along the beautiful Pacific Coast Highway. Perfect time to be thinking of our favourite road trip movies.

Thelma and Louise (1991)– A road trip to a friend’s cabin in the mountains quickly goes off the rails for Thelma and Louise when Louise shoots an attempted rapist to death before they’ve even reached their destination. The trip goes from vacation to nightmare to something much more as the two realize they wouldn’t go back to their old lives even if they could. Nothing like the life of a fugitive to make you finally feel free.

Sideways (2004)– I made a deal with myself that I would only pick one Alexander Payne movie this week. As much as I love his last four movies- all road trip movies- Sideways was an easy decision, given that we will be doing a Napa Valley wine tour of our own tomorrow. Hopefully we’ll have more fun than Miles (Paul Giamatti), a depressed alcoholic and failed novelist. Sideways is a hopeful but often painful comedy that to this day still makes me feel a little guilty every time I order Merlot.

Due Date (2010)– Director Todd Phillips and star Zach Galifianakis’s follow-up to 2009’s The Hangover was highly anticipated and very disappointing to many but I have always stood by it. Galifianakis’ Ethan Tremblay and Robert Downey Jr.’s Peter Highman are forced to drive cross-country together after they’re both improbably kicked off an airplane. Both stars play off of each other beautifully and the gags mostly work but what I love is how the story is constructed around what’s going on in the lives of these two men instead of around a bunch of setpieces and jokes. Downey is particularly good as his performance hints at a more real pain than he has been able to manage even in his recent “dramas” like The Judge.

Avengers: Age of Ultron

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Avengers: Age of Ultron is great! Not Oscar-great but blockbuster-great. No need to think or feel creeped out about A.I. like in Ex Machina, just enjoy the ride with moody Ultron as he carries out his plan to kill all humans. But fear not! Earth’s Mightiest Heroes are on the case.

One of the things Age of Ultron does best is give us lots of new characters. That fits well with the revolving door that is the Avengers comic book roster. So we are introduced/reintroduced to many characters we know are, or will become, Avengers, like War Machine, Falcon, Scarlet Witch, Vision, and in unfortunate licencing loophole, Quicksilver. Jay found that super confusing having already seen a different Quicksilver, without an accent, in X-Men: Days of Future Past, and I agree. It shouldn’t have happened and it takes away from the movie. Still better to have him here, I think, because Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver are great together (this movie captured their relationship well) but it’s time for a deal with Fox. At least Marvel got Spider-Man back from Sony, but let’s get the rest of these movies working together too.

Seeing Vision pop up was an unexpected surprise for me. I liked that he made an appearance and thought he was used well, both as a source of conflict between the Avengers and then as a contrast to Ultron, though they share the same view on humanity’s likely future (i.e., not promising). Really, all the new characters were handled well and I feel like we are well on our way to the Infinity Gauntlet saga.

The disappointing thing is there are now four or five other Marvel movies on the way between now and Avengers 3. I’m excited for Captain America 3, especially with Spidey on board, but beyond that, it’s way too much. Especially when I use Vision’s introduction as a comparison; Ant-Man, Black Panther, and Dr. Strange could all be brought in as part of an Avengers movie, and I wish that’s what was being done. But since there’s money on the table we get separate movies for each. Let’s be honest, I will probably see all those, so you can expect to hear this same complaint every few months between now and the next Avengers movie.

I can’t hold that against this movie though. Avengers: Age of Ultron itself does things exactly right. I thoroughly enjoyed it and wouldn’t have changed a thing so it gets ten Infinity Gems out of ten.

The Judge

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When his mother dies, a successful big city lawyer returns his the small town to which he swore he’d never return. Despite vowing to leave first thing the next morning, his stay gets extended when his father (a respected judge in his community) is charged with murder. Father and son haven’t spoken in years and neither one likes the idea of working together very much but the judge is going to need the best lawyer her can find to keep from going to jail.

Both the prodigal son and the courtroom drama are pretty played out so I wasn’t expecting anything great but when the father and son are played by Robert Duvall and Robert Downey Jr, I didn’t see how it could be bad.

Unfortunately, not much in The Judge feels real. The town doesn’t feel like a real place. The family doesn’t feel like a real family. The court case doesn’t play out like a real trial, with the family drama even playing out on the witness stand in a scene that I couldn’t believe I was watching.

More importantly though, nothing really satisfies. We have to wait until the end of the movie to find out what really happened, both between father and son and the night of the murder. And we should have to wait. All the best payoffs come that way. Our patience doesn’t pay off here though, neither with the family drama or the trial. Even Downey, the king of outalking someone, cross examing witnesses isn’t as much of a treat as it really should be.

The good news is that it’s not all bad. Robert Duvall is a nominee for this year’s academy award for Best Supporting Actor partly because he’s gotten pretty old and it’s been awhile since his last nomination but also because he is just pretty awesome. The best scenes in the movie are all his. His shower scene with Downey manages to be heart-wrenching, tender, and funny and I nearly cried in another scene where he meets his granddaughter. And even if Downey’s return home isn’t as compelling as I would like it to be, his return to real movies is more than welcome. He’s pretty much played no one but Iron Man or Sherlock Holmes for the last five years so even a drama as trite as The Judge is a nice change.

Chef

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I liked this movie. I can forgive the saccharine subtext of the father-son roadtrip to reconnection because this movie is visceral and delicious and real.

Brace yourself, Sean, because I’m about to pay Jon Favreau a compliment: he’s perfect as this chef. Really perfect. He’s fast-paced in the kitchen, ambling in the market, bumbling with his son.

This movie’s already available to rent or stream. It was passed to me by a friend who thought I’d like it, and I aimed to pass the recommendation along to another friend, only he beat me to it, which hasn’t happened since Snow Piercer (watch it). We watch A LOT of movies. About a metric tonne in the course of a normal week, and we talk about nearly all of them, but recommend very few.

Why did so many of us connect with this movie? The passion, maybe. You really believe in the love of food, the drive in your marrow to just cook food that will taste awesome. And you get a real sense of the struggle between the guy with the money, and the guy with the talent. Of course they clash. And there’s another struggle, between the chef, a man who dedicates his life to his kitchen but doesn’t know too much about life outside it, and the social media-enabled foodie culture that can prop him up or tear him down.

This movie definitely pays tribute to a certain amount of food porn, some of which already feels a bit dated (and I admit, I flinched, flinched, over the lava cake bit, having just served it to guests myself about a month ago). Scarlett Johansson is unnecessary in the movie and I can only imagine that Favreau was just looking for any excuse to kiss her (and who can blame him).

I loved the energy and pacing once we took to road in the food truck (another very on-point moment in food), even if it occasionally felt like a commercial for Twitter. John Leguizamo turns out to be a fun side kick. Robert Downey Junior appears out of nowhere. Or, you know, out of Favreau’s back pocket. But the whole mess just starts to feel fresh and real and relatable, no matter what you do for a living. You can’t help but feel his humiliation and then root for his redemption, and be tempted by his sandwiches.

The villain, a food blogger played by Oliver Platt, is kind of a great counterpoint to our protagonist chef. He becomes our scape goat for all the internet bullies, and there’s a not-so-subtle plea for a return to humanity, or civility, or fucking politesse. Even a big tattooed chef has feelings, and you can’t eat all of them away no matter how good the food.

So yes. The ending’s trite, but the passion’s back in his life, he’s rejuvenated, we’re rejuvenated just watching him spark. It’s great. It’s fun. It’s making me bloody hungry.