Category Archives: Movie Reviews

Sep 12 2014
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Movie Reviews

Fin-tastic & For Real

All-star cast returns for more true-life dolphin aqua-drama

DOLPHIN TALE 2

Dolphin Tale 2

Starring Harry Connick Jr., Cozi Zuehlsdorff & Nathan Gamble

Directed by Charles Martin Smith

PG

Critics and audiences alike cheered for the first Dolphin Tale, the story of a bottlenose dolphin rescued off the coast of Florida and custom-fitted with a prosthetic tail after tangling and mangling hers in the wires of a crab trap.

The 2011 movie was based on true events, real people, and the actual place, the Clearwater Marine Aquarium, where the repaired and rehabilitated sea mammal, renamed Winter, became a star attraction.

DOLPHIN TALE 2

Nathan Gamble and Cozi Zuehlsdorff

Dolphin Tale 2 continues Winter’s remarkable (true) story and reunites most of the original cast, including Harry Connick Jr., Ashley Judd, Morgan Freeman and Kris Kristofferson, along with teen actors Cozi Zuehlsdorff and Nathan Gamble, and the real-life Winter. Actor-director Charles Martin Smith (watch for him as the aquarium inspector) also returns as writer-director, and surfer-celebrity Bethany Hamilton, whose left arm was infamously bitten off by a shark, makes a cameo.

DOLPHIN TALE 2

Harry Connick Jr.

Once again filming on location at the Clearwater facility, this Dolphin tale involves a new predicament for Winter—and the interplay of emotions between humans as well as other creatures, including affection, bonding, celebration, loneliness, loss, anxiety, and the bittersweet pangs of goodbye. “We don’t know if dolphins feel emotions the way we do,” notes Sawyer (Nathan Gamble), Winter’s young trainer. No, we don’t—but the movie clearly wants us to think that they might…and believe that they can.

And you will believe, as well as learn a thing or two about dolphins—like how regulations prohibit keeping a dolphin in captivity alone, without a companion, and how even the most “trained” dolphin is still a wild animal that can seriously injure a human. You’ll also understand how Winter became such an inspiration for so many real-life visitors, from kids to war veterans, who had lost a limb, or more—as one scene (and even more so, the documentary footage that runs at the end of the movie) so movingly depicts.

DOLPHIN TALE 2Children especially will enjoy the antics of couple of non-dolphin characters, a pelican and a rescued sand turtle, that become unlikely buddies. (And grownups might also pick up a message about how the heart’s gonna do what the heart’s gonna do, without letting land, sea, air, species or anything else stand in the way.)

Like its predecessor, Dolphin Tale 2 is another wholesome, family-friendly movie especially good for younger kids and tweens, and it avoids playing down to its audience, or dipping into the crude humor that often creeps into fare for even the youngest viewers (although there is a blowhole emission, which sounds like a fart, that is clearly meant to get a laugh). There are thoughtful, smart plotlines about growing up, taking responsibility, making tough decisions, sorting out the blurry lines between jealousy and affection, learning lessons in unlikely places—and the drama of waiting to see what happens to Winter when her options appear to have run out.

There’s no explosive razzle-dazzle, and no splashy special effects—but lots of real splashes, some dandy, ballet-like, below-water swimming sequences, and plenty of emotion centered around one fin-tastic dolphin, Winter, whose true tale continues to uplift and inspire.

 —Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

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Sep 04 2014
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Movie Reviews, Pop Culture

Return to Sender

Elvis-tinged parable of twins is bland exercise in make-believe

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The Identical

Starring Blake Rayne, Ray Liotta & Ashley Judd

Directed by Dustin Marcellino

Rated PG

The movie or its marketing materials don’t say it, so I will: The Identical is the strangest Elvis movie not about Elvis you’ll likely ever see.

It’s about a young man who grows up in the South, unaware that he has a twin brother who’ll grow up to become a hip-shakin’ singing sensation—just like Elvis. The young man shares his twin’s musical talent, his Elvis-y stage moves, his Elvis-y looks, and he even gets hired as an impersonator, becoming famous as the best Elvis-y copycat in the business.

But The Identical only makes one fleeting reference to Elvis. Instead, it pretends its characters exist independently, in a bubble, but parallel to real events and real people, including Elvis. It all makes for a curious, weirdly weightless little exercise in make-believe—especially since the movie make-believes it’s not about Elvis. (The movie doesn’t have any rights to actual Elvis music, or anything else “Elvis”—because those things cost a lot of money.)

Elvis actually had a twin brother who did not survive childbirth. What might have happened, though, had Presley’s twin lived? Perhaps something like this, The Identical suggests.

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Ray Liotta and Ashley Judd

A poor couple in Depression-wracked Alabama gives birth to twin boys, but can’t afford to raise them both. So they give away one to a traveling evangelist (Ray Liotta) and his wife (Ashley Judd), swearing them to lifelong secrecy. Then they stage a mock funeral, burying an empty shoebox behind their ramshackle house, so the neighbors won’t question why the infant is no longer around.

The years pass. Newcomer Blake Rayne (a former Elvis impersonator—for real!), making his acting debut, plays both the preacher’s kid, Ryan Wade, as well as the pop-rock sensation Drexel Hemsley, although Drexel has only a couple of scenes and one mumbled line of dialog. This is the story of the “other” brother, who’s tugged between the rock ’n’ roll DNA somehow in his genes and the wishes of his father to pursue a more righteous path.

The Identical is a modest little movie, made on a shoestring, no-frills budget of $3 million. Sometimes it feels just one rib poke away from a Saturday Night Live skit, or the kind of outright parody John C. Reilly did with Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, his faux-Johnny Cash send-up. But it plays it straight—and narrow, constantly hammering its faith-and-values themes of reconciliation, forgiveness and discovering “who [God] made us to be,” and over-amping every emotional tone to eleven.

Seth Green and Joe Pantoliano provide hijinks that feel lifted from old Happy Days reruns. Judd spouts homilies like “Slap the dog and spit on the fire.” And Liotta (also one of the executive producers), best known for playing a mobster in Goodfellas, digs in to his role as a man of the cloth like it was made out of ham and cheese.

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Despite some scenes with howlingly high levels of hoke, some viewers will nonetheless likely find something to love about this bland, edge-less, Elvis-tinged parable, which has nothing to offend, shock or rub even the most sensitive of sensibilities the wrong way—like a lot of Elvis’ music, or his own movies. Come to think of it, Presley may have “left the building” long ago, but his spirit is still around, even in a strange little movie that pretends it’s not.

 

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

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Aug 29 2014
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Movie Reviews

Look Out ‘Below’

‘Found-footage’ scare excursion is a subterranean mess

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As Above, So Below

Starring Perdita Weeks & Ben Feldman

Directed by John Erick Dowdle

Rated R

If young actors ever stop filming themselves going into creepy places, Hollywood’s going to be in a real pickle—filmmakers will have to come up with some other premise for movies like this one, in which yet another batch of 20-somethings go exploring somewhere goose-bumpy, “documenting” the whole thing from the get-go.

This “found footage” technique started back in 1999 with The Blair Witch Project and spawned an entire sub-genre of horror-movie filmmaking, wherein the video that the characters make is later “discovered” and becomes the movie itself.

In As Above, So Below, British actress Perdita Weeks plays Scarlett, a spunky, sexy young history buff-archeologist-adventurer-truth-seeker looking for the Philosopher’s Stone, an ancient fabled object supposedly endowed with magical and mystical properties, including the power to heal and turn objects into gold.

8H89_TP_00003RAll signs point Scarlett, her clue-deciphering friend George (Ben Feldman, who plays Michael Ginsberg on Mad Men), and their tag-along documentary filmmaker, Benji (Edwin Hodge), to the catacombs underneath Paris, the labyrinth of tunnels where some six million bodies have been interred for centuries. Linking up with a trio of cocky, graffiti-tagging French spelunkers, they dig in.

If you’re looking for good scares, you’ll have to wait a while; it takes a while to get going in the shock-o-rama department, and starts out much more in Indiana Jones/Tomb Raider mode. For the first hour or so, it’s all blah-blah and buildup, which adds a bit to the creep-out factor but will disappoint anyone expecting something scarier.

The explorers have to crawl through a narrow passageway full of bones; Benji freaks out and gets stuck. Then they find out they’ve been going in circles. They come across a room full of topless chanting women—ooh la la! And when the real “jolts” start coming, they somehow don’t seem to alarm anyone nearly as much as you’d think they would, especially when things take a decidedly weird, paranormal turn.

“Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” reads the inscription over one passageway they encounter. Hmmm, notes Scarlett “That’s the inscription over the gates of hell.” But in everyone goes—of course.

8H89_FPF_00155RThe plot meanders, like the characters, who spend the majority of the movie lost, wandering, scooting, squirming, slithering, sliding, crawling, running, splashing, or thrashing around in the semi-darkness, rappelling up and down holes, and peeking, panting and peering around corners. It’s almost feels like they’re looking for not only the Philosopher’s Stone, but also a basic storyline, much like the audience.

Things eventually turn violent and bloody, and even more confusing. At the end of it all, it’s a hopelessly tangled, shaky-cam knot of “gotcha!” haunted-house images, loopy, incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo and bargain-basement recycled ideas from other movies. As Above, So Below is reportedly the first movie ever given permission to film in off-limits parts of the Paris catacombs, the largest cemetery in the world. Too bad it comes out such a super-sized subterranean mess.

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

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Aug 22 2014
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Books, Movie Reviews

Incomplete Pass

True-story faith-based football drama falls short of goal line

Alexander Ludwig;Jim Caviezel;Matthew Daddario;Jessie T Usher

When The Game Stands Tall

Starring Jim Caviezel, Laura Dern and Michael Chiklis

Directed by Thomas Carter

PG

When the Game Stands Tall revolves around the record-setting 12-year, 151-game winning streak of the Concord, Calif., De La Salle High School football team, whose feat remains unrivaled in American sports.

As such, it’s not exactly an underdog tale: De La Salle’s Spartans were champions, kings, on top of the world in 2003. Instead, we see how they rebounded from a couple of major setbacks, including a tragedy involving one of their teammates, and what happened when they eventually encountered a team they couldn’t beat.

Alexander Ludwig;Jessie T UsherBut still, it’s a bit hard to feel too sorry for a bunch of California teens at a well-off, suburban school that won every game they played for more than a decade.

So director Thomas Carter, in his adaptation of Neil Hayes’ 2004 book, focuses his attention on the team’s soft-spoken coach, Bob Ladouceur (Jim Caviezel) and his message to his players: Football isn’t just about football—it’s about unity, family and teamwork.

Coach Lad is also the school’s religion teacher, and he likes to toss Bible verses in with his tractor-tire workouts, blocking drills and tackle plays. The movie’s numerous other faith references and subtle sermonizing—most of it synched to sweeping, syrupy music to underscore the moment—will no doubt appease churchgoers.

Caviezel will be familiar to many viewers from his current starring role on TV’s Person of Interest, and many will also remember that he played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s bloody Passion of the Christ (2004). As Ladouceur, he’s also somewhat Christ-like, a pious figure who encourages his players to not “exalt” themselves.

Jim CaviezelJudging from the end-credit video clips, Caviezel plays his role very close to the low-key temperament of the real-life coach. But his performance is so pious and so low-key, it almost feels like he’s standing on the sidelines of the movie in which he’s supposed to be starring. Caviezel makes the coach seem he’s carved out of a big block of grim, sacred wood.

Laura Dern plays his wife, and Michael Chiklis is his assistant coach. Thank goodness both are around to bring some zing to the party. Clancy Brown plays an overbearing father of a star player, but the script almost pushes him into clichéd-villain territory.

The actual football scenes have the crunch and wallop of realism, thanks to veteran Hollywood sports stunt coordinator Allan Graf, cinematographer Michael Lohmann and a squad of college-player stand-ins.

But the movie struggles to find its dramatic center, or even a real message. It puts several ideas in play—the coach’s regrets, his newer players’ hubris, what it means to be “men”—without ever really following through on any of them. And what does the phrase “When the Game Stands Tall” mean, anyway? Instead, the film settles for a soft, mushy kind of feel-good uplift that moviegoers have seen many times before, more powerfully and more potently.

And in a movie about a game being about something supposedly more than football, it comes down to a yet another big finish in yet another a big game that lets you know that, hey, at least in Hollywood, it’s mostly still about football, after all.

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Aug 15 2014
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Movie Reviews

Old Soldiers

Stallone & Co. are showing their age in third testosterone fest

The Expendables 3 - Final One Sheet

The Expendables 3

Starring Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger & Mel Gibson

Directed by Patrick Hughes

PG-13

In the opening scene of this slam-bang, testosterone-fest reunion of aging action-movie icons, Sylvester Stallone’s character points to a frankfurter-sized finger of his meaty fist and a skull-shaped glob of silver—his Expendables “lucky ring.”

The Expendables franchise, about a group of super-covert, battle-scarred warriors hired to do the U.S. government’s dirty work, has indeed been lucky for Stallone. He’s had both his bank account and his ego fed by the success of the previous two movies, which he also had a big hand in either directing or writing.

In the movies, his team is “expendable” because their work is so dangerous, and their missions so secret, no one knows—or can afford to care—if they live or die.

How ironic—since the Expendables don’t seem expendable at all. They just keep coming back, again and again, and Stallone and his co-stars are a veritable, tried-and-true Hollywood guy-movie who’s who. These are some “dependable” Expendables.

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Sylvester “Rambo” Stallone (left) and Arnold “Terminator” Schwarzenegger are the alpha males in “Expendables 3.”

And if anything, they just keep getting more “expandable.” In this excursion, the grizzled, gung-ho wagon train links up former E-team stalwarts Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren, Terry Crews, Wesley Snipes, Jason Statham, Randy Couture and Jet Li with new add-ons Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, Kelsey Grammer (yes, Dr. Crane from Cheers and Frazier!) and Antonio Banderas, and a group of younger Expendables-in-training—Kellan Lutz, Glen Powell, boxing champ Victor Oritz and mixed martial arts fighter Ronda Rousey, the sole female invited into the boys’-club sandbox of bullet-spraying machine guns, missile-launching bazookas, exploding trains, airborne boats, dive-bombing helicopters and ka-booming army tanks.

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Mixed martial arts fighter-turned-actress Ronda Rousey is the only female invited to play in the boys-only sandbox.

There’s a wisp of a subplot about the old-school Expendables (with their knives and guns) vs. the new young high-tech Expendables (with their computers and cameras and drones). But now, four years and three movies into the franchise, the just-plain-old Expendables are beginning to wear visibly thin, the plots have ground down to near nothingness, the wisecracks aren’t wise or crack-y anymore, and the original stars mostly lumber around like middle-aged slabs of spa-toned beefcake. And this movie, in particular, is so bloated with actors, there’s not much space for any of them. Some, like martial arts champion Jet Li, are relegated to little more than a cameo.

When the first movie came out, in 2010, it was an homage to Hollywood’s long tradition of Dirty Dozen-style, action-caper, military-mission flicks, as well as an adrenaline shot of career-rejuvenating mojo for Stallone and some of his action-movie pals from the ’80s and ’90s. Now, as Neil Young’s “Old Man” plays and Stallone’s character proudly watches his young protégés carouse in a barroom, it seems like the original Expendable is thinking about finally easing out of the picture—or at least making much more room for a younger, leaner, greener set of espionage and counter-terrorism experts.

At one point, Trench (Schwarzenegger) tells Barney (Stallone) he’s through. “I’m getting out of this business,” he says, “and so should you.” Maybe it’s finally time for Stallone to take that Expendables advice to heart.

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

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Aug 08 2014
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Movie Reviews

Pass the Corn

Helen Mirren leads cast in yummy-looking food-centric tale

THE HUNDRED-FOOT JOURNEY

The Hundred-Foot Journey

Starring Helen Mirren, Om Puri, Manish Dayal & Charlotte Le Bon

Directed by Lasse Hallström

PG

If this movie were a recipe, its ingredient list would look pretty impressive.

Start with a highly praised debut novel, one especially loved by foodies for its taste-filled tale of a young Indian cook’s culinary journey across Europe. Stir in powerhouse producers Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg, then Swedish director Lasse Hallström, whose 2000 film, Chocolat, made millions of moviegoers lust for something dark, warm and sweet.

THE HUNDRED-FOOT JOURNEYMarinate in deep-dish countryside vistas and luscious scenes of French and Indian food, all potently presented by Oscar-winning cinematographer Linus Sandgren. Steep in a Bollywood soundtrack by Slumdog Millionaire musical composer A.R. Rahman. Garnish with a frisky starring role by the venerable Helen Mirren—Dame Helen Mirren, no less—and season with humor, heart and message about learning to get along.

Taking some liberty with the novel’s sweeping historical narrative, the movie nonetheless covers the basics: Uprooted by war, political turmoil and the death of his wife, Mumbai restaurateur “Papa” Kadam (Indian movie veteran Om Puri) and his children wander across Europe, eventually settling in the south of France.

Mirren plays Madame Mallory, the widowed proprietress of a tony upscale eatery renowned far and wide for its world-class, award-winning cuisine. Her prim, perfectionist world is rocked when the colorful immigrant clan of Kadams opens a competing, very different dining establishment directly across the street—just 100 feet away.

THE HUNDRED-FOOT JOURNEYThings get even more complicated when Papa’s grown son, Hassan (Manish Dayal), begins showing an interest in learning how to cook something other than his spicy Indian family recipes—and also in Madame Mallory’s beautiful sous-chef in training, Marguerite (Charlotte Le Bon).

Hallström has some nice directorial flourishes, especially when it comes to making food a “character” in the story. But that’s not such good news for the actors, who must compete with all sorts of masterfully staged shots of immensely appealing dishes being discussed, made and consumed. Daval and Le Bon work valiantly to light a spark in their romantic subplot, but much of the heat that might have gone there seems to have been diverted to the stovetop.

Mirren and Puri likewise go through the moves of their characters discovering “something” that might be described as romance, but this overstuffed soufflé of a movie never finds room for them to ever do anything other than nibble around its edges. And none of the other characters—Hassan’s brothers and sisters, Madame Mallory’s other employees, a comically hapless mayor—are given much of anything to do, or even say.

THE HUNDRED-FOOT JOURNEYDespite being a bit too long, more than a bit predictable and a whole lot of corny, The Hundred Foot Journey has a lot of heart, and like a platter of yummy things presented by a hostess who relentlessly pours on the charm, it eventually wears down your walls of resistance. A sumptuous-looking confection about decent people living decently, guided by their palettes and their hearts, drawing closer as they celebrate their differences, it will likely go down most smoothly with older audiences who love food and love movies with somewhat equal measure.

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

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Aug 01 2014
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Movie Reviews, Pop Culture

Across the Universe

Marvel’s newest superheroes are an inter-galactic gas

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Guardians of the Galaxy

Starring Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana & Dave Bautista

Directed by James Gunn

PG-13

Marvel Comics gives their all-stars a breather with Guardians of the Galaxy. But Spider-Man, Iron Man, Thor and other tried-and-true, brand-name superheroes had better watch out: This flip, witty, wily, cheeky, action-adventure sci-fi yarn—which introduces an all-new Marvel team of cosmic crusaders—is all set to become one of the summer’s biggest, most buoyant mainstream hits.

Based on little-known Marvel characters that first made a brief appearance in the 1960s, the Guardians are a motley crew of space misfits led by Peter Quill (Chris Pratt from TV’s Parks andguardiansofthegalaxy530439f7bb98f Recreation), who was abducted from Earth by alien pirates as a youngster and taken to the far reaches of the galaxy, where he grew up to become a rogue smuggler with an intergalactic price on his head, a taste for retro FM rock and a weakness for extraterrestrial hotties.

When Peter swipes a silver orb that turns out to be something Very Powerful Indeed, it puts a series of events in motion that eventually congeal the other guardians around him—although not necessarily as teammates, at least at first.

Gamora (Zoe Saldana) is a genetically mutated, green-hued assassin sent to retrieve the orb. Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper), a motor-mouthed raccoon bounty hunter, is in cahoots with Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), a tree-like creature that speaks volumes with the one sentence he can speak, “I am Groot.” And pro wrestler Dave Bautista is Drax, a hulking wall of red-tattooed muscle.

guardiansofthegalaxy5371066e4ab7aTheir adventures bounce them, like interplanetary pinballs, across the galaxy, racing away from—and sometimes into—an ever-growing cloud of trouble. Director James Gunn, at the helm of his first mega-budget, major studio project, creates a teeming sci-fi cosmos of colorful creatures, humanoid hybrids and dazzling digital effects for a totally immersive eye-candy experience. Everywhere the movie goes—and it’s constantly going somewhere—it’s a wild, exuberantly fun new kick.

The cast is first-rate, even down through the supporting ranks. Glenn Close plays the matriarch of a gleaming utopia on the brink of destruction; Michael Rooker is terrific as the swaggering scavenging scoundrel who abducted Peter all those years ago; Benicio Del Toro is The Collector, a mysterious curator of cosmic odds and ends.

But it’s the Guardians, the mismatched team of “losers,” who command the spotlight. And credit the zippy script, by Gunn and Nicole Perlman, for the steady stream of jaunty comedic banter that just keeps the laughs coming—along with a sprinkling of sweetness, a dash of sadness, and even a flash of romance, orchestrated to Elvin Bishop’s “Fooled Around and Fell in Love.”

Will it remind you of Star Wars, Indiana Jones and several other movies, some references to which it just goes ahead and hands you? Sure, but that’s just part of its big, fizzy, movie-lovin’ funhouseguardiansofthegalaxy53bd964656849 spirit. “It’s got a Maltese Falcon kinda vibe,” Peter says of the orb. One scene, when Groot gently gives a young girl a flower, is an obvious nod to a similar moment in the 1931 classic Frankenstein.

You may see classier movies this summer, and you’ll certainly see more serious, sensible ones. But you won’t see another one that takes you on such a rollicking carnival ride halfway across the universe and back, and leaves you with such a big, goofy, satisfied smile when it’s over.

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

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Jul 31 2014
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Movie Reviews, Music

Soul Man

Chadwick Boseman channels James Brown in explosively entertaining new biopic

Film Title: Get on Up

Get On Up

Starring Chadwick Boseman, Nelsan Ellas, Viola Davis and  Dan Aykroyd

Directed by Tate Taylor

PG-13

“When I hit that stage, people better be ready,” James Brown (Chadwick Boseman) says early in a scene from director Tate Taylor’s Get On Up, the explosively entertaining new movie about the Godfather of Soul. “Especially the white ones.”

Indeed—James Brown was something the likes of which the world had never seen in the early 1960s, a keg of black dynamite sizzling with unpredictability and danger: sexual energy, gospel fervor, hyperkinetic dance moves, combustive rhythms, and intense, screaming, searing vocals. As he made his way to the top, he rewrote the rules about could, and couldn’t, be done by black artists in a music business owned and controlled by white men.

Film Title: Get on Up

Chadwick Boseman is electrifying as James Brown.

Get On Up is a revelation, not only because it’s so well made, written and acted, but also because it shows—reveals—so much about its subject. Most viewers will know who Brown was, and will certainly know his hits—“I Got You (I Feel Good),” “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World”. But the exceptionally sharp storytelling and direction take us inside, outside and all around Brown, across a span of nearly six decades, from his childhood of wrenching Alabama poverty and abuse, through his rocky adolescence and finally into adulthood.

And through it all, we see, hear and feel the rhythm, music and grooves that drove him forward. Taylor (a Southerner who also directed The Help) shows us an internal funk engine constantly churning, turning and burning—young Brown incurring the wrath of his father by tapping a stick on the edge of a table, unable to stop the beat inside him; seeing a dreamy, hallucinogenic vision of his step-and-groove future in the horns and drumbeat of a Dixieland jazz band; having a sweaty, stomping, out-of-body experience on the set of a cheesy, white-bread ’60s Frankie Avalon movie.

Film Title: Get on Up

Dan Aykroyd plays Brown’s manager.

And Taylor skips around, putting the events in Brown’s life on shuffle instead of play mode, juxtaposing events from childhood with moments later that show how, and why, they connect, against a backdrop of politics, civil rights and Vietnam.

The movie also doesn’t shy from Brown’s darker side: He was a complicated, preening, strutting egomaniac who beat his wife, wielded guns, did drugs, served time in jail and berated and fined band members for the slightest infractions.

Portraying Brown as a teenager through his final years (he died in 2006), Chadwick Boseman (who played baseball Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson in 42) is electrifying in a tremendous performance that captures his walk, talk, mannerisms, stage moves and morphing looks over the decades.

The movie also features some stellar supporting performances from Viola Davis (as Brown’s mother), Octavia Spencer (as his aunt, who raised him), True Blood’s Nelsan Ellas (as his longtime right-hand band mate Bobby Byrd), and Dan Aykroyd (as Ben Bart, the talent agent who became his manager).

Film Title: Get on UpBut this movie belongs to Boseman, and to Taylor—and to producers Brian Grazer and Mick Jagger (yes, Rolling Stone Mick Jagger), who persevered for eight years, even when this movie seemed un-makeable, because they believed in it. When you see it, you’ll believe, too. It’s a knockout. It feels good.

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

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Jul 25 2014
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Movie Reviews

Going Badly

Two Oscar winners flounder in sitcom-ism geriatric gloop

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And So It Goes

Starring Michael Keaton & Diane Keaton

Directed by Rob Reiner

PG-13

A paint-by-numbers romantic comedy for the AARP crowd, And So It Goes stars Michael Douglas as a cantankerous Connecticut real estate hotshot, Diane Keaton as New England’s most unconvincing lounge singer, and young Sterlin Jerins (who fled zombies with Brad Pitt in World War Z) as the adorable moppet who brings them all together.

Director Rob Reiner has made some good movies, and even some great ones—This Is Spinal Tap, Misery, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Stand By Me. Measured against cult masterpieces and all-time audience favorites like those, a lot of other movies would have a hard time measuring up. But this sitcom-like blob of sentimental geriatric gloop, alas, doesn’t have a chance.

ASIG_02615.NEFDouglas’ character, Oren Little, is still bitter 10 years after losing his wife to cancer. Now he’s a full-fledged grump and one-man insult factory, shooshing playful kids, muttering ethic slurs to potential clients and pelting stray dogs with his paintball gun. “Do people really let you get away with being you?” asks his next-door neighbor Leah (Keaton), incredulously.

When Oren’s long-estranged adult son shows up, he’s packing a surprise: He’s headed to prison. Can Oren keep his young daughter—the grandchild he never knew existed—until he gets out of the pokey?

ASIG_04670.NEFIf you’ve never seen any other movie or television show, ever, you might wonder where this story is headed. Otherwise, you’ll see every twist, turn, bump and bumble coming long before it gets there, as the new “unwanted” addition to Oren’s life sets him on a fresh, friendlier course—and reignites his romantic spark.

Douglas and Keaton are old pros and they ride out the storm as best they can, but even these two solid Oscar winners can’t put much of a shine on a script full of cheap jokes, lame gags and flat-out embarrassing lines of insultingly dumb dialog.

And they can’t keep director Reiner’s mind out of the gutter. We watch a pooch take a poop, see a little girl react to a dog humping a stuffed animal (“Look Mommy—it’s just like you and Daddy dancing!”), and hear Oren make a crude crack about being confronted with…ahem, genitals…when a little boy changes out of his swimsuit. After a badly botched attempt at lovemaking, Leah rebukes Oren: “I had a dog once who wouldn’t leave my crotch alone, and it was more romantic than this!”

ASIG_03855.NEFFor some people, the pile-on of feel-good mush at the end might divert them enough to think they’ve seen a decent, even uplifting movie. But most will be discerning enough to know they’ve just really just been buried alive by a truckload of artificial sweetener.

In one scene, Oren and his granddaughter discuss a sandwich made of two slices of baloney and one of cheese. That’s actually a pretty good metaphor for this slapped-together attempt at making a quick, no-frills multiplex option for viewers old enough to get senior-citizen discounts.

It’s just that I can’t imagine this baloney, and this cheese, being what anyone wants for a movie meal—at any age.

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

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Jul 22 2014
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Movie Reviews

Monkey Business

‘Apes’ sequel further muddles the line between monkey and man

DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Starring Andy Serkis, Gary Oldman, Keri Russell & Jason Clark

Directed by Matt Reeves

Rated PG-13

Whose side are you on when battle lines are drawn between people and other primates? The answer may not be as clear-cut as you think, especially in this terrific second installment of the latest Planet of the Apes series, which muddies the moral ground—as well as other things—between monkey and man.

As Dawn begins, we’re reminded that some ten years ago (in 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes), scientific experimentation—and exploitation—resulted in a proliferation of genetically modified apes and began a widespread viral wipeout of the world’s human population.

Now, in a decimated, post-ape-ocalyptic world, a tribe of hunting, gathering apes—who have learned to communicate through sign language, rudimentary writing and grunted speech—rule the densely forested hills outside the city that once was the metropolis of San Francisco.

DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APESWhen a small group of humans are discovered deep inside ape territory, it begins an uneasy truce—until dissenting factions on both sides stoke tensions to something much more aggressive.

Director Matt Reeves, whose resume includes the monster movie Cloverfield, the moody vampire saga Let Me In and several episodes of TV’s 1998-2002 series Felicity, draws from all those projects for his talent pool and technique. Felicity star Keri Russell is the movie’s female lead, Kodi Smit-McPhee played the bullied young teen in Let Me In, and several of Reeve’s bravura sequences—like the one of apes on horseback, firing machine guns—are as tense and scari-fying as almost anything you’ll see in any monster movie.

But Reeves and his team of FX wizards also create something above and beyond any of those movies—and most other movies, period—when it comes to blending live-action with digital effects. The apes, created through a process of “motion capture” photography where live actors are first filmed then digitally “overlaid” with their personalized primate characteristics, are nothing short of spectacular. You won’t be to separate pulse from pixels, no matter how closely you look.

Hunting partyAnd even though the “human” cast also includes Gary Oldman and Jason Clark (from Zero Dark Thirty), top billing goes to someone you’ll never see, at least out of his digital ape-draping: Andy Serkis, who plays Caesar, the chief of the apes, is the true star of this show. Serkis, who’s also portrayed Gollum in The Lord of the Rings and the biggest ape of them all in King Kong, is a marvel, humanizing Caesar as a diplomat, a father, a husband and a leader who knows that leading can sometimes mean making difficult, unpopular, dangerous and even life-or-death decisions.

With a story that connects to contemporary (as well as ancient) issues and themes—trust, family, betrayal, racism, war, survival—this smart, muscular, action-packed blockbuster is easily one of the summer’s most rousing sci-fi crowd-pleasers. It’s some seriously strong, exceptionally well-made monkey business.

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

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