Fury

14 Oct

By Tom Meek in Paste Magazine
<i>Fury</i>

War is hell, a tried and true axiom that gets personified to the nth degree in David Ayer’s World War II epic, Fury, about a tank crew who utter a book full of cliches and live out religious allegories while quoting the Gospel. Ayer, who wrote Training Day and directed such smash-mouth dramas as Harsh Times and End of Watch, has his nose deep in male bravado and testosterone bondsmanship. The scribe-turned-helmsman could probably learn a thing or two from Paul Schrader, who penned Taxi Driver but had mixed success transitioning to the director’s seat with the likes of American Gigolo, Cat People and Light Sleeper. Schrader however, was interested in character-driven stories, whereas Ayer seeks to drop vestiges of square-jawed manliness in chaotic hell often punctuated by hyper violence. Sam Peckinpah had it covered from both sides, and the fact that he did, and that many have attempted to emulate his style and resonance, and failed, only strengthens the testimony of his unbridled cinematic genius.

Right from the get-go, Ayer lets us know that this isn’t the clean, moral war captured on black and white back in the ’40s and ’50s, but something darker and more complex. Coming across a bomb-blasted field of American tank carcasses, an SS officer on a white horse checks the carnage to make sure there are no survivors. For something to be alive doesn’t seem possible, but springing from atop one steel beast is Brad Pitt, who quickly puts a knife blade through the officer’s occipital brow and then unsaddles the horse and allows it to go free—a metaphor for the freeing of white Europe by the grubby Americans?   Continue reading →

Tags: , , , , , ,

The Judge

9 Oct

Despite stellar acting, The Judge falters with a played out storyline 

Mistrial

By

Robert Downey Jr. brings some snark to his role in The Judge, while Robert Duvall lights up the screen with his bravado

Robert Downey Jr. brings some snark to his role in The Judge, while Robert Duvall lights up the screen with his bravado.

Sometimes you can add all the right ingredients, but if the base you’re working with isn’t properly blended, you can’t make it work. That’s the case with The Judge, where all the star power helps to make the film enjoyable but doesn’t erase the abounding clichés in the uneven courtroom drama. And despite revolving around a trial, the flick is really more about the personal interactions of the players outside the crucible of justice and how those relations season the unbiased proceedings. John Grisham-lite or Nicholas Sparks with some gravity might be the best way to describe The Judge. The film’s a bit of a genre switch too for director David Dobkin as he cut his directorial teeth with screwball comedic fare like Wedding Crashers and The Change Up.

By construct, The Judge is rife with conflict and paradox that come in the form of well-worn archetypes like past versus present, country versus city, and the father railing against the son who just won’t see things his way. The film’s most beatific blessing however, beyond the gorgeous bucolic setting (Shelbourne Falls, Mass. subbing in for small town Indiana), is the casting of Robert Downey Jr. as Hank Palmer, a slick Chicago attorney who does nothing but win and has a wife with abs and a derrière you could bounce quarters off. But, as we shortly find out, Mrs. Palmer (Sarah Lancaster) has been bored and wandered with one of her fellow gym rats, something Hank is unceremoniously informed of. All this news comes at the same time Hank learns that his mother has died after a long battle with cancer. Clearly Hank is detached from the family out in the heartland, and for us, the viewer, he gets a few automatic demerits for not being there with mom at the end — his quick reprieve lies in his fatherly compassion towards his seven-year-old daughter Lauren (Emma Tremblay).  Continue reading →

Tags: , , , , , ,

Boston Movie Trailer with yours truly quoted

2 Oct

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/d41e5814a3/boston-movie-trailer

Gone Girl

2 Oct

Twisting and turning, David Fincher adeptly handles the Gone Girl adaptation 

Girl Interrupted

By

Ben Affleck's smile at press junkets caught director David Fincher's eyes and helped him get the role of Nick Dunne

How does one even have a go at Gone Girl? Anyone who’s read Gillian Flynn’s wildly popular novel — she penned the script as well — knows there’s some pretty well-laid change-ups within the story line, and we’re not even talking about the plot twist that comes sailing in at the end of the book. No, we’re talking about subtle turns of the screw that change and redirect context and the viewer’s orientation, forging an ephemeral, yet enjoyable immersion into the rapture of intrigue. So, I’ll tread carefully.

As the title implies, a woman goes missing under some curious circumstance and her husband’s innocence or culpability in the matter hangs in the balance. Gone Girl, much like Denis Villeneuve’s dark and foreboding Prisoners (2013), isn’t so much about solving the mystery at the fore, but the potpourri of personalities that drive and shape it. It’s an interesting comparison too, because the bleak rainy sheen that Villeneuve renders inPrisoners conjures up ominous shades of some of David Fincher’s more macabre works, namely Zodiac and Se7en.

Given Fincher’s running success with cinematic adaptations of bestsellers (Fight Club, The Social Network, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) the pairing would seem perfect, but invariably an assembly of ideals doesn’t always guarantee a victory. That’s not to say Gone Girl doesn’t work — far from it — but it is somewhat hampered by the continual churn of machinations and the inherent contrivances imbued in Flynn’s yarn. That said, the vestige of under-the-table trickery is aptly scant, and Fincher is far too accomplished a director to stumble into cliche. At his core, he’s a stylist who’s mellowed over the years. The frenetic flash cutting that generated smash-mouth kinetics in Fight Club and Se7en have been supplanted by the haunting aural moodiness composed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who won an Academy Award for their collaboration with Fincher on The Social Network.  Continue reading →

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Boston Crime Scenes

30 Sep

From ‘Good Will Hunting’ To ‘The Equalizer’ — Who Gets Boston Right?

Denzel Washington and Nash Edgerton appear in a scene from "The Equalizer" set in Boston. (Scott Garfield/AP, Sony, Columbia Pictures)

BOSTON — Bostonians, how we love our town. And as the years have gone by, Hollywood has loved the Hub too. Why the love?

Some of it has to do with the scenic, historical richness our city has to offer, some of it has to do with (the controversial) tax break incentives to use Boston as a backlot, some of it has to do with the waning power the unions hold and much of it has to do with Boston’s deep and storied criminal past that has become a romantic obsession in Tinseltown.

So used it is, that Dennis Lehane, who’s penned many crime novels set here that have become successful film adaptations also shot here (“Mystic River,” “Gone Baby Gone” and “Shutter Island”), flipped the setting for the script of “The Drop” from Dorchester to Brooklyn.

The latest Hollywood product to call the Hub home, “The Equalizer,” opened this weekend. While it’s not likely to be a Boston-branded movie, it does make excellent use of the city, balancing the dark criminal past and peripheral pockets that still persist today with the sweeping gentrification.

It’s a neat and true testament to see the unpretentious working class streets of East Boston (where Denzel Washington’s equalizer lives in a humble apartment) coupled with an Edward Hopper-esque diner in Chelsea offset by the wide shots of the Zakim Bridge and a high-rise criminal perch with panoramic views of the Financial District and the Seaport. The film also boasts the single best use of a Boston Herald delivery truck as a plot device.  Continue reading →

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Don’t Look Back

28 Sep

By Tom Meek
Published in Paste Magazine

 

<i>Don’t Look Back</i>

“You’re such a trope,” a vengeful young woman in William Dickerson’s cagey psycho-thriller shouts at an interfering interloper. The barb’s recipient responds with a blank look, to which the issuer drives home her point, angrily stamping, “A cliché!” which, and sans intent, borders on camp as Dickerson’s low-budget/high-ambition effort brims blissfully with said overused motifs. A quick autopsy of Don’t Look Back (an overused maxim in its own right) yields elements from such “bad seed” staples as The Dark Half, Misery and Single White Female—all, already formulaic genre, boosted above mainly by talents of those involved.

On the plus side, Don’t Look Back begins so wobbly—at a near soft-core level—that the budding confidence and moody acumen it generates midway through almost bristles with a sense of auteur bravado. The house of psychological cards builds around a young writer (Lucy Griffiths of TV’s True Blood) who’s made a name for herself with a beloved YA series based on her troubled childhood—some sort of a blend of The Hunger Games and fairytale archetypes. From inside the claustrophobic office of her shrink (Kate Burton), we learn that Nora’s grandmother (who raised her) has just passed. To deal with the estate and find a new slice of inspiration for the next volume in the series, Nora decides to returns to the snow-capped mountain high near Palm Springs where she grew up.  Continue reading →

Tags: , ,

The Equalizer

26 Sep

By Tom Meek Published in Paste Magazine
<i>The Equalizer</i>

 

Here’s a zany idea, take a moderately successful 1980s TV crime drama staring a British actor (Edward Woodward. the compelling condemned lieutenant in Breaker Morant) as a retired “C.I.A.” agent living in New York City who “fixes” peoples’ problems, drop in Denzel Washington and transpose the setting to Boston. The result would seem likely to be pretty weak tea that, without Washington, might be something heading for the vast realm of VOD obscurity without a theatrical release. And still, even with the Oscar-winning actor, is a payoff possible?

The good news for this iteration of The Equalizer, however, is that moody stylist Antoine Fuqua has the helm. He and Washington blew audiences’ minds back in 2001 with the bad cop fable Training Day. There, the synergy of their collaboration shone through brightly, and here, it goes a long way, too. The bad news, or not so good, is that the script is penned by Richard Wenk, a guy who’s made his jam by doing Expendables films and The Mechanic remake. It’s within his milieu, sure, but those testosterone-infused retreats were never going to make members of the Screenwriters Guild take pause during awards season. Continue reading →

Tags: , , , , , ,

Tusk

23 Sep

By Tom Meek (Paste Magazine)
September 22, 2014  |  8:20pm

 

<i>Tusk</i>

The latest from Kevin Smith signals something of a return to form and a bit of a surprise. After all this was the man who felt so dejected by the film biz that he pretty much checked out after his mixed, “self-published” effort, Red State (2011), and retreated into various cultish, fan-adoring safe havens—podcasts and AMC’s tediousComic Book Men. Of course, Smith’s sloppy commercial outings preceding Red State—Cop Out and Zack and Miri Make a Porno—probably had something to do with it, too. That all said, the one thing about Smith that’s always been consistent beyond his whiny mewling, has been his snarky resilience—and that’s a good thing, because Tusk, despite being the WTF film event of the year, pays dividends for those with acquired tastes.

The film, a hefty slab of comedy atop a serial killer thread, alleges to be based on “actual events.” Those being that Smith got his hands on a posting by a lonely older seafarer in Canada who was offering free room and board for anyone willing to hang out and wear a walrus suit for a few hours a day. On-air, the quirky post got spun into a plot brainstorming session which in turn launched the social media campaign, #WalrusYes. The response not only birthed Tusk, but, purportedly, a whole True North trilogy to go with—or offset—Smith’s breezy Jersey assemblage (Clerks, Mallrats and Chasing Amy).  Continue reading →

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them

18 Sep

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them looks at the two sides of one marriage

She Said, He Said

By

Jessica Chastain stars as the titular Eleanor Rigby

The notion of there being two sides to every story isn’t a new one. And Ned Benson’s The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them isn’t the first film to explore the two perspectives of a couple, even more so if the duo is in turmoil. Right from the start The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them sets the table as the titular Eleanor (Jessica Chastain) and her husband, Conor (James McAvoy), appear to be a perfect couple doing the casual fine-dining thing in a swank New York eatery when they decide to up and split on the bill. It’s not that they can’t afford din-din, it’s just their united expression of freedom, frolic, and a strange sense of foreplay. The scene is short and sweet, then in the next scene, and at some future time, we catch Eleanor (so named affectionately after the Beatles’ song) walking her bike across a bridge. She’s despondent and troubled, and, in a flash, she’s over the rail. It’s a strong visual juxtaposition of how relationships can change, almost seemingly at the drop of a hat.   Continue reading →

Tags: , , , , ,

The Drop

12 Sep

Dennis Lehane Moves ‘The Drop’ From Boston To Brooklyn

Tom Hardy as Bob in The Drop (Courtesy, Fox Searchlight)

First we lost Pierce and Garnett to Brooklyn and now we’ve lost the setting for “The Drop” to that city as well. Revered Boston crime novelist Dennis Lehane’s screenplay for “The Drop” (his first endeavor as a cinematic scribe) was based on “Animal Rescue,” a short story he wrote ten years ago and set in Boston. For “The Drop,” which opens today, he transposed the locale to Brooklyn, purportedly because the author wanted to stretch his wings and try out some new turf. In addition, Lehane just turned “The Drop’s” screenplay into a similarly titled novel.

So, just to make sure that we’re all on the same page, it’s a book, based on a screenplay, based on a short story. Got it?

Lehane himself, on the heels of the successful screen adaptations of his crime novels, “Mystic River,” “Gone Baby Gone” and “Shutter Island,” has departed Boston for L.A. to be closer to the biz. It’s an understandable move, but not free of the ironic shadows of “Beat L.A.”(which Pierce and Garnett did) and the same migratory path of ignominious Boston crime boss, Whitey Bulger.

James Gandolfini as "Cousin Marv" in "The Drop" (Courtesy, Fox Searchlight)

Brooklyn, as “The Drop” has it, is a dark, dingy place where hard-working people and shady mobsters intersect with plenty of crossover. One such middler is the affable, yet gruff Marv (played by the late James Gandolfini), who runs a bar, tagged Cousin Marv’s. Marv used to own the bar, but the Chechen mob took over to create a cash drop. A quick montage depicts illicit greenbacks on the move, slipping through a secret slot in the bar top during business hours and later, after closing, then getting sealed into a Trojan keg of sorts and shipped off to be laundered—or something like that.    Continue reading →

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →