Category Archives: Movie Reviews

May 28 2014
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Humor, Movie Reviews, Movies

Potty All The Time

Adam Sandler’s new comedy can’t find its way out of the bathroom

BLENDED

Blended

Starring Adam Sandler & Drew Barrymore

Directed by Frank Coraci

PG-13, 113, min.

 

You might get a sense of where Adam Sandler’s latest movie is headed as the first scene opens to the sound of a toilet flushing and the sight of his co-star, Drew Barrymore, exiting a public restroom stall.

Blended marks the third time Sandler and Barrymore have worked together, after The Wedding Singer and 50 First Dates. This time around, they play a couple of single parents whose blind date—at a Hooter’s—is a disaster, but who later end up, in one of those only-in-the-movies contrivances/coincidences, “blended” together with their respective kids at a luxurious African resort.

Sandler’s tastes in humor have never exactly been hallmarks of high refinement, and by now even most of his fans realize that he seems somehow incapable of evolving to a more enlightened state. BLENDEDThere are a lot of things wrong with Blended, but the biggest is that it drags so many younger actors down to Sandler’s crude, bathroom-humor level, all in the name of a “family” comedy about family togetherness.

Sandler’s character, Jim, has three daughters; Lauren (Barrymore) has two sons. So when they all end up together in the Dark Continent, it’s like an episode of the Brady Bunch, only with cutaway shots of rutting rhinos and jokes about cleavage, buttholes and crotches.

It’s hard to hold the “children” in the movie responsible for the actions of the adults, particularly Sandler, director Frank Coraci (who also directed him in The Waterboy, 50 First Dates and Click) and the writers, who concocted not one scene, but two, in which Jim’s youngest daughter (six-year old Alyvia Alyn Lind) gets to chirpily mispronounce a certain feminine body part as “bagina.” Isn’t that adorable?

Sandler, 47, plays the same wisecracking, goofball man-child schlub he’s basically played in every movie. Barrymore is adorable, but given little of substance to do outside of being his secondBLENDED banana, filling the necessary “female” role. The two of them do have a natural, relaxed chemistry, and some of their scenes together in this rom-com reunion, especially when Sandler’s not gobbling every punch line in sight, have a warm, unforced sweetness that almost feels like something from another movie entirely.

It’s just too bad that those little seeds of sweetness are buried beneath such a heaping mountain of comedic crap. For every genuinely funny, clever line, there are three dozen moaners. Technically, the movie’s a mess—it looks like it was shot, staged and edited in a mad rush. And it’s depressing to see such a big cast, including Shaquille O’Neal, Saturday Night Live alum Kevin Nealon, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Joel McHale and Terry Crews, yukking around in such muck.

“Is this a sick dream?” ask Sandler’s character at one point. After watching a movie that begins with a flushing toilet and ends with kids singing a song about poo, pee and “juicy farts,” it sure might feel that way for his audience.

 

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

May 23 2014
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Movie Reviews, Movies, Pop Culture

Hear Him Roar

The King of the Monsters makes a rompin’, stompin’ comeback

GODZILLA

Godzilla

Starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Brian Cranston and Elisabeth Olson

Directed by Gareth Edwards

PG-13, 123 min.

 

At an age when some folks are thinking about retirement, the world’s most famous mega-monster is enjoying a roaring comeback.

First introduced in a 1954 Japanese flick as a metaphor for the nuclear weapons that had leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, Godzilla went on to become a worldwide pop-cultural phenomenon—and sometimes a parody. The gigantic lumbering lizard appeared in nearly 30 other movies, squared off against everyone from King Kong to Bambi, inspired a song by Blue Oyster Cult, shilled shoes for Nike, and received an MTV Lifetime Achievement Award.

If it sounds like show-business super-saturation turned the King of the Monsters—a title he’s held since the 1950s—into a softy and a sell-out, the latest movie returns him to his rockin’, rompin’, stompin’ roots.

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Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elisabeth Olson

While this Godzilla has an all-new, modern setting and story, it still connects back to the tale’s 1950s Atomic Age roots. Opening in 1999 when a nuclear physicist (Brian Cranston) detects a seismic anomaly in the Philippines that turns out to be something much more ominous, it quickly jumps ahead to present-day San Francisco, the scientist’s now-grown son (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and another Pacific rumble signaling something big and bad once again about to blow…

Godzilla fans may be somewhat disappointed that they have to wait an hour for the main attraction to appear. But director Gareth Edwards deftly plays out the build-up to the big guy. He develops his characters (although Elizabeth Olson, as the wife of Taylor-Johnson’s character, and Ken Wantanabe, a fine, pedigreed Japanese actor, are all but lost in the shuffle). We meet a couple of other creatures, the huge, gargoyle-like Mutos, and delve into a subplot of government conspiracy and cover-up.

GODZILLASo when Godzilla finally does show, we’re ready for the rumble. As monster-movie fans know, Big G’s not really a bad guy; in fact, he usually appears when some other monster gets seriously out of bounds. And when two—or more—mega-monsters are tussling, well, you can just expect some things—Tokyo, Las Vegas, San Francisco—to get a bit trampled in the process.

Godzilla is also an environmentalist, of sorts. As Wantanabe’s character explains, “Nature has an order, a power to restore balance. He is that power.”

GODZILLA

Edwards, cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, and the special effects team do a great job of integrating digital dazzle and live action, and several scenes have an almost trippy, hypnotic aura of amazement and awe, as soldiers parachute through battling behemoths into the wrecked cityscape below, or children on a school bus watch Godzilla rage alongside the Golden Gate Bridge.

Other monsters come and go. But a prehistoric creature that still has the atomic oomph to strut out of the ocean depths, make a 400-foot-tall, megaton statement, and set the world straight, well, there’s only one that comes to mind.

Godzilla is still da bomb.

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

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May 21 2014
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Movie Reviews

Nighttime Drive

Tom Hardy masterfully steers riveting one-man show

LOCKE_0092236_rgb

Locke

Starring Tom Hardy

Directed by Steven Knight

R, 85 min.

A man gets in his car and heads into the night, alone.

You’ve probably seen a movie start that way before. But I guarantee you’ve never seen a movie like this one, in which that man, in his car, is the movie—the entire movie.

British writer-director Steven Knight’s uniquely captivating Locke unfolds in 90-some minutes of real time as its title character, Ivan Locke (Tom Hardy), steps into his BMW SUV and, instead of going home after work one evening, makes a fateful turn at a traffic signal and heads in the opposite direction.

Soon enough, we learn why, through conversations Locke makes and receives on his vehicle’s hands-free Bluetooth phone.

Locke 3rgbLocke is the only character we see throughout the entire film, and he never ventures outside his automobile. It’s a confined, closed-off, claustrophobic setting that ratchets up the intensity of Hardy’s magnificent one-man-show performance, which is almost exclusively done from the neck up.

Even within such a Spartan setting and with such sparse details, we learn much about Hardy’s character: Ivan Locke is a good, solid, highly respected man, a construction foreman working on the biggest project of his career, a concrete pour for the foundation of a massive skyscraper that will be the tallest in all of Europe. Locke’s phone conversations with his wife, his sons, his boss, his co-worker, and a woman—miles away, waiting for him, alone in a hospital—reveal a crack in the foundation of his life that is getting wider with every mile he drives, threatening to send it all crashing down, in rubble, around him.

Hardy is a fine British actor, best and most widely known as the villainous Bane in the Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises. He gives Locke a comforting, calming Welsh Midlands purr perfect for his character—a planner, a preparer, a fixer, a repairer, a man who knows what needs to be done and how to do it. But can he do it now? “I’m not going to turn back,” he vows. “I am trying to do the right thing.” (It’s no coincidence that the character shares the last name of one Britain’s greatest philosophers, John Locke, who believed in reason as the pathway to enlightenment.)

Locke 2That “right thing” forms the movie’s moral core, the shape for the riveting story that builds around it. Cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos creates a mesmerizing swirl of reflections and refractions—headlights, taillights, street lights, dashboard lights, road signs and signals—as Locke’s vehicle zooms through the darkness, drawing us into the character’s world and its compounding complications.

Locke is a “little” film that probably won’t play wide, in a lot of mainstream theaters. Admittedly, it’s a tough sell: It’s a movie in which nothing really “happens” in the conventional sense. But if you love movies, seek it out. Its themes of construction and cracks, choices and consequences, decisions and detours, right and wrong, and frailty and strength are woven into a masterstroke of storytelling and minimalist filmmaking. And it’s your chance to see a powerhouse of a young actor, Tom Hardy, in a role that people are likely going to be talking about for years.

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

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May 16 2014
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Movie Reviews, Sports

Here’s The Pitch

Jon Ham stars in unlikely true underdog baseball tale

MILLION DOLLAR ARM

Million Dollar Arm

Starring Jon Hamm, Lake Bell, Suraj Sharma & Alan Arkin

Directed by Craig Gillespie

PG, 124 min.

Based on a true story from 2008, Million Dollar Arm stars TV’s Mad Men leading man Jon Hamm as a struggling sports agent who goes scouting for baseball’s next pitching superstars in an unlikely part of the world.

After hopeful negotiations to rep a pro footballer (played by Cincinnati Bengals linebacker Rey Maualuga) fall through, Hamm’s character, J.B. Bernstein, and his business partner (Aasif Mandif) turn their sights to baseball, hoping to find a young, unknown, unsigned player. But where? All the international hot spots (Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, even China) have already been staked out and tapped.

In a flash of inspiration, J.B. sees a cricket match on TV and gets an idea: Go to India, a country where baseball is virtually unknown, find cricket “bowlers” who can pitch, and bring them back to America.

MILLION DOLLAR ARMSo he concocts a contest, called the Million Dollar Arm, and sets off to the other side of the globe to discover what he hopes will be the next ballpark sensations—and the ticket to keeping his small agency afloat.

Hamm is the star of this show, clearly, but Million Dollar Arm is also a movie about journeys, geographical as well as emotional. As J.B. adjusts to his new surroundings in India, we meet the two young men, Dinesh (Madhur Mittal, from Slumdog Millionaire) and Rinku (Suraj Sharma, the star of Life of Pi), that will eventually be chosen for a shot—a long one, at that—at baseball’s big leagues, and we come to understand their anxieties about leaving their families, their rural villages, and the only ways of life they’ve ever known.

MILLION DOLLAR ARM

Madhur Mittal and Suraj Sharma portray the two contestants ultimately chosen to come to America.

J.B. is accompanied on his trip by a grumpy semi-retired American baseball scout (Alan Arkin, dialing in his usual comical crankiness), and he ultimately brings his new recruits home to learn fundamentals under the tutelage of a former MLB player now coaching college ball (Bill Paxton, portraying real-life USC coach Tom House with just the right dose of sunburn and seasoning).

MILLION DOLLAR ARM

Lake Bell and Jon Hamm

Bollywood actor-comedian Pitobash brings both heart and humanity to his sidekick role as J.B.’s volunteer Indian assistant, who dreams of someday becoming a baseball coach himself. But the movie’s real “heart” belongs to Lake Bell, as J.B.’s brainy med-student guesthouse renter, whose graceful, unforced acting keeps her character’s slow-blooming romance with J.B. feeling more sincere than sappy.

The Disney folks surely took some license, as moviemakers often do, but all of this really happened. To see just how closely the film paralleled the real characters, stay for the credits and the photos, video clips and other postscript highlights.

More cynical viewers might wish for a more cynical movie, a movie with more rough edges or tough breaks or dark corners. But for anyone who wants to bask in a ray of early summer sunshine, this uplifting, spirit-boosting tale of baseball, dreams, second chances and the grand, glorious game of life itself could be just the ticket.

 

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

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May 09 2014
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Movie Reviews, Movies

Chick Flick Fail

The stars deserve better than this revenge-comedy mess

THE OTHER WOMAN

The Other Woman

Starring Leslie Mann, Cameron Diaz and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau

Directed by Nick Cassavettes

PG-13, 109 min.

 

If The Other Woman didn’t have such a recognizable cast, it might be just plain forgettable. Instead, high-profile stars and a major chick-flick marketing push almost guarantee it will make an even bigger, messier splash as it goes down.

Leslie Mann (This Is 40, The 40-Year Old Virgin) plays Kate, a whiny, neurotic housewife who discovers her cad husband, Mark (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau from TV’s Game of Thrones), is having anTHE OTHER WOMAN affair with a sexy Manhattan lawyer, Carly (Cameron Diaz).

So what does Kate do? Why, she befriends her husband’s mistress, naturally!

Then Kate and Carly find out Mark is cheating on them both (gasp!) with another woman, portrayed by former Sports Illustrated model Kate Upton, whose role here (if not her acting career in general) seems to be limited to what can be done in a teeny bikini, in slow motion.

The next step in the mind-bogglingly implausible plot is all three women becoming BFFs and plotting their revenge on the man who can’t be faithful to any of them. Their plan includes spiking his breakfast smoothie with estrogen, swishing his toothbrush in the toilet, replacing his shampoo with hair-removal cream, and putting laxatives in his liquor.

In 2011, the hit comedy Bridesmaids introduced mainstream audiences to the idea that an ensemble cast of gals could be just as raunchily funny as a bunch o’ guys. But “The Other Woman” has none of that movie’s masterful mojo, which begins with a great script and extends through the director.

THE OTHER WOMANIn this case, director Nick Cassavettes (The Notebook) bears much of the blame, lacking the deft touch to bring off the right blend of humor and humanity needed for a “revenge comedy” that ventures into the tricky trifecta of love, marriage and serial adultery. Screenwriter Melissa Stack, a former lawyer herself, supposedly based the Diaz character somewhat on her own experiences as an attorney, but somehow her tale is lacking almost anything any modern female would ever think, say or do.

And poor Coster-Waldau, who as the ever-wayward husband has to suffer for his other-womanizing in so, so many painfully slapstick-ish, potty-humored ways, including enduring an explosive bout of diarrhea, walking through a pane of glass and sprouting a pair of hormonally enhanced man-nipples.

As an actor, he deserves better—and so does everyone else in The Other Woman, and anyone who buys a ticket expecting to see something funnier, something smarter and something better.

 

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

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May 05 2014
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Movie Reviews, Pop Culture

Itsy Bitsy Spider

Marvel Comics’ wall-crawling teen hero has to fight for his own spotlight

Andrew Garfield

The Amazing Spider-Man 2

Starring Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone & Jamie Foxx

Directed by Marc Webb

PG-13, 142 min.

 

The other night on TV, a show featured an urban-legend-ish conversation about someone who’d been bitten by a spider and then discovered little spiders crawling out of the bump on his neck.

I couldn’t stop thinking about that as I watched this, the latest in the ongoing Hollywood franchise about a nerdy teenager, Peter Parker, turned into a wisecracking, crime-fighting superhero by the bite of a radioactive arachnid. Not only is the Spider-Man empire, with its deep comic-book roots that go back to 1962, built on the bite of a spider, but this now marks the fifth big-screen treatment of the tale, and the second notch of the new cinematic arc following the original Spider-Man cinema trilogy, starring Tobey Maguire, that ended in 2007.

Andrew GarfieldThose little spiders—they just keep coming. The problem is, now they’re in danger of getting lost in their own enormous web: massive productions with king-size star sizzle, mega special effects and north-of-$200-million budgets. This time around, the iconic wall-crawler (Andrew Garfield, reprising his role from 2012) has to deal with multiple villains, Peter Parker’s complicated relationship with girlfriend Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone, also returning), and troubling questions about his deceased parents.

Director Marc Webb, who also directed 2012’s Amazing Spider-Man, throws a lot into the movie’s sprawling two hours and 20-plus minutes—eye-popping action, tender moments, romance, humor, and musings on life, death, love, longing, friendship, loss, hope and the importance of fighting “for what matters to you.”

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Jamie Foxx as Electro.

It’s jam-packed, stuffed with too much of everything, especially bad guys—do we really need three of them? Jamie Foxx plays an electrical engineer with serious self-esteem issues who gets turned, via a freak high-voltage mishap, into the rampaging super-villain Electro. Dane DeHaan is Harry Osborne, Parker’s rich, preppy high-school friend with a mutant family gene that morphs him into the monstrous Green Goblin. And Paul Giamatti, who opens the movie as a Russian prison escapee, later appears transformed into yet another one of Spidey’s archenemies from the good ol’ Marvel Comic book days.

Andrew Garfield;Emma Stone

Garfield and Stone have natural chemistry as Peter Parker and girlfriend Gwen.

Garfield, 30, and Stone, 25, seem a tad old to be playing recently graduated high school seniors. But the two of them have great natural chemistry (they’re a real-life couple, too). And their scenes together, especially when Garfield is out of the Spidey spandex and playing plain ol’ Peter, provide the movie’s strongest human heartbeat. Webb, whose directing resumè also includes the indie charmer 500 Days of Summer, gives Pete ’n’ Gwen just as much of the story as Spider-Man, a wise move for making this movie resonate even more as a date flick.

Like most comic-based characters, superheroes never seem to age; Peter Parker/Spider-Man will always be eternally young. At least it’s that way in the movies, where time can be suspended, reset and rewound, and “old” actors, like Maguire, can be replaced by newer ones, like Garfield—who’s already signed on to star in the first of the two additional Amazing Spider-Man follow-ups.

Yes, those little spiders—they do just keep coming. Perhaps next time, the itsy bitsy spider won’t have such a hard time fighting for his own spotlight.

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

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Apr 29 2014
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Books, Humor, Movie Reviews, Movies

A Great Escape

Wes Anderson’s latest romp is a quirky, colorful movie getaway

Digital Fusion Image Library TIFF File

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Starring Ralph Fiennes, Tony Revolori and Willem Dafoe

Directed by Wes Anderson

R, 100 min.

 

With director Wes Anderson, you either “get him” and his oddball characters, quirky plots and distinctive, whimsical visual style, or you don’t. A whole lot of people do, however, in his movies including The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Moonrise Kingdom and The Royal Tenenbaums.

Now The Grand Budapest Hotel offers a bustling movie getaway most Wes Anderson fans will find irresistible.

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Tony Revolori & Saoirse Ronan

A wild romp set in a 1930s Eastern European mountain resort, it features a colorful assortment of players and a story within a story within a story that keeps burrowing deeper into its own silly seriousness. As with most Anderson projects, he works with cavernous open spaces as well as delicate, meticulously detailed miniatures.

His sights, like scenes carefully colored with pastel crayons from a storybook, are often sumptuous, and his actors move, and speak, with a clockwork cadence that adds to the sense of comedic orchestration.

The plot unfolds backwards, as unspooled by the owner of the hotel (F. Murray Abraham) to one of its guests (Jude Law), relating his beginnings as the establishment’s bellboy, Zero (played by newcomer Tony Revolori in his first starring role). Zero and his mentor, the hotel’s longtime, ladies-man concierge, the ultra-dapper Monsieur Gustave (Ralph Feinnes), become friends and co-conspirators in a spiraling, sprawling misadventure that includes a murder, a missing will, a purloined painting, an outlandish prison break, and the outbreak of something that resembles World War II.

Along the way, they encounter a spectrum of characters, played by actors including many who’ve cropped up in previous Anderson movies (Owen Wilson, Edward Norton, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray—who’s appeared in every Wes Anderson film—Adrien Brody, Jeff Goldblum, Willem Dafoe, Bob Balaban, Harvey Keitel), as well as Saoirse Ronan, Tilda Swinton and Tom Wilkinson.

Digital Fusion Image Library TIFF File

Bill Murray

Everyone seems to be having a big old time in the big old hotel, and everywhere else, and several scenes are real hoots, like the scampering prison escape—which feels like a live-action re-enactment of something from the stop-motion animation antics of The Fantastic Mr. Fox—and an extended sequence in which a secret cadre of other concierges drop everything to help one of their own out of a jam.

The story is based on a book by little-remembered Austrian novelist and playwright Stefan Sweig, who was actually one of Europe’s most popular writers of the 1920s and ’30s. Anderson gives Sweig an “inspired by” credit at the end of the film.

Anderson’s detractors often think his movies are contrived, pretentious, gimmicky, too indy/arty or simply not nearly as funny as Mr. Anderson must think they are. OK, fair enough. But if you’re looking for a kooky, slightly off-kilter stopover in a place that can offer you an exhilarating, completely unique experience like nothing else at the multiplex, then I recommend you check in for a couple of free-wheeling hours—at The Grand Budapest Hotel.

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

 

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Apr 22 2014
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Movie Reviews, Movies, Sports

I Feel a Draft

Kevin Costner goes to the gridiron in fictional yarn based on annual NFL event

DRAFT DAY

Draft Day

Starring Kevin Costner, Jennifer Garner and Dennis Leary

Directed by Ivan Reitman

PG-13, 109 min.

Somewhat as Moneyball looked at the inside business of baseball, director Ivan Reitman’s Draft Day pulls back the curtain on the high stakes, high pressures and high-wire hoopla of the annual process by which the National Football League selects its new recruits.

Unlike the better-crafted, based-on-a-true-story baseball movie, however, this formulaic, made-up tale is a pure Hollywood concoction. But it blurs its line between fact and fiction by the use of real NFL locations, cameos by real-life past and present NFL players and other real-life sports personalities, and scenes filmed for the movie at last May’s NFL draft at Radio City Music Hall in New York City.

The movie is set in one 12-hour period, during which the main character, fictitious Cleveland Browns manager Sonny Weaver (Kevin Costner), has to set things up to get the best new players he can when the Browns’ “picks” come up in the draft. This involves some serious war-room wheeling and dealing.

DRAFT DAY

It’s getting hot in here: The head coach (Dennis Leary) and manager (Kevin Costner) take a meeting.

Should Sonny go for the hotshot quarterback (Josh Pence), the humble son of a retired Browns player (Arian Foster), or the passionate defensive tackle (Chadwick Boseman)?

To add Sonny’s stress, he’s got a team owner (Frank Langella) who wants to fire him, a head coach (Dennis Leary) who doesn’t like him, and a girlfriend/co-exec (Jennifer Garner) who’s not happy that he’s not happy that she’s just found out she’s pregnant with their child.

Even Sonny’s own mom (Ellen Burstyn) piles on him. “You sold a cow for magic beans!” she chides him after hearing of a deal he intends to make.

Reitman and veteran film editors Dana Glauberman and Sheldon Kahn do some innovative things with split-screen wipes, swipes and pans, as when two characters have a telephone conversation and “overlap” into each other’s spaces. It gives a sense of motion to scenes where the only thing going on otherwise is just two people yakking—and there is a good deal of that.

DRAFT DAY

Costner and co-star Jennifer Garner

Football fans may be a bit disappointed that there’s so much blab-age and so little yardage—excessive talking at the expense of actual gridiron action. But the movie does a good job of dramatizing an aspect of the sport that’s become an entertainment event itself; this year’s draft will be televised on ESPN May 8-10.

And most fans will likely enjoy the all-around air of authenticity, spotting the real-life sports personalities—and throwing penalty flags when it feels like Hollywood puts a bit too much melodramatic spin on the subject.

DRAFT DAYAnd through it all, Costner—trailing decades of weathered charisma from Field of Dreams, Bull Durham and Tin Cup—anchors the story with a screen persona that seems right at home in a sports-themed movie about a central character under pressure, making decisions at odds with those around him, but somehow rallying to show that maybe he knows what he’s doing, after all.

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

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Apr 11 2014
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Movie Reviews

Let It Rain

New take on Old Testament tale isn’t your familiar Sunday School fare

NOAH

 

Noah

Starring Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Emma Watson & Anthony Hopkins

Directed by Darren Aronofsky

PG-13, 138 min.

Is director Darren Aronofsky’s sprawling saga of Noah and the Great Flood a profane violation of a sacred story? Or is it a mind-blowing cinematic exploration of a character wrestling with faith, doubt, dreams, guilt, miracles and the fate of mankind itself, set in one of the most epic tales of all time?

You’ll have to see it to decide for yourself, but there’s ammunition for both camps.

Russell Crowe plays Noah as the last good man—literally—in a bleak, barren world that’s gone downhill after the good ol’ Adam & Eve days of yore in the Garden of Eden. He gets a message from “the creator” that mankind isn’t worth keeping around, and it’s time to wipe—or wash—the slate clean and start over. (“God” isn’t mentioned by name, which has apparently rankled some by-the-Book viewers.)

NOAHSo Noah builds a big boat, with a plan to take along only his wife (Jennifer Connelly), their three hunky sons, an orphaned girl who’ll grow up to become his daughter-in-law (Emma Watson)—and the only creatures on the planet that haven’t defiled and depleted it, the animals.

“Men are going to be punished for what they’ve done to this world,” Noah says. “The creator has chosen us to save the innocent.”

You probably know the rest of the story. But you probably don’t know the parts about Noah and his lineage being plant-loving, peaceful vegetarians, while the rest of mankind are bloodthirsty, meat-craving barbarians. (Take that, Earth-killing carnivores.) Or that Noah was pretty handy snapping necks or dispatching his enemies with an axe, or a knife, or whatever weapon was handy. Or that he had a pretty sizeable assist in putting the ark together by a group of stone giants, one of them voiced by Nick Nolte.

NOAH

Emma Watson

There are also subplots about teenage rebellion and young love—this is a big-budget, big-studio movie, after all—and a cool, artsy film-within-the-film when Noah explains the seven days of creation. (Cue even more controversy.) The flood itself is something awesome—and awful—to behold. And there are explosions.

Anthony Hopkins plays Noah’s father, Methuselah, and Ray Winstone is Tubal-Cain, a minor character barely noted in the Old Testament who gets elevated to his own subplot as a conniving thug of a king who threatens to derail Noah’s entire mission.

The sets—especially the locations filmed in Iceland—look spectacular. Some of the special effects have an over-the-top, sci-fi, Lord of the Rings feel that may be a bit jarring to some viewers, but hey, consider the magnitude of what the story is about, after all—a cataclysmic mega-event bigger than anything hobbit Bilbo Baggins ever faced in Middle Earth.

NOAH

It’s long, a lot to digest, and it certainly deviates from what you might have covered in Sunday School. But boy, is it ever interesting—and well worth seeing, especially if you’re open to a bold, trippy new interpretation of an old, old story, about miracles of varying size and shape, in which you still today might find some new inspiration.

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

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Apr 07 2014
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Movie Reviews, Movies, Pop Culture

Time Jumper

Marvel’s red, white & blue WWII hero confronts contemporary enemies

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Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Starring Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Robert Redford and Samuel L. Jackson

Directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo

PG-13, 135 min.

 

Thawed out from his Rip Van Winkle-like cryogenic hibernation, experimentally enhanced WWII U.S. Army super-soldier Capt. Steve Rogers—a.k.a. Captain America (Chris Evans)—now adjusts to the modern world. His Nazi-hunting days are behind him, but he’s still serving his country on missions for S.H.I.E.L.D, the global protection conglomerate, with his sexy crime-fighting partner the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), a former Soviet agent.

But maybe Cap’s not so free of his past, after all. A legendary, near-indestructible assassin rumored to be almost 100 years old, with a Hannibal Lector-like muzzle on his mouth and a gleaming robotic arm, is out to get him. And he smells a rat inside his own organization; could the high-ranking S.H.I.E.L.D. operative Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford), now running the World Security Council, have anything to do with it? Paranoia is everywhere. “Don’t trust anybody,” his wounded leader, Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), warns him.

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Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury.

A brawny blockbuster-formula movie with the brains of an espionage thriller, Captain America: The Winter Soldier recalls vintage ’70s spy romps but resonates with contemporary issues about military might, black-ops government conspiracies, historical cover-ups, war, peace and privacy in this digital era.

Sibling directors Anthony and Joe Russo stage the action with gusto and a real sense of the changing scale and proportion needed for fight sequences that take place in a variety of settings, ranging from the claustrophobic confines of a crowded elevator to the expanses of a colossal cargo ship, and eventually taking flight into the sky itself.

Savvy fans who keep up with the Marvel Comics universe will enjoy watching for the obligatory cameo from founder Stan Lee, and staying for the after-credits surprises—both of them—about where the ever-expanding franchise will go next.

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“How do we know the good guys from the bad guys?” the Cap’s new ally, Sam Wilson/The Falcon (Anthony Mackie), asks in the middle of one particularly rousing, action-y moment. It’s a good question, then and now. Who can you trust?

At least in this movie, you can always trust the guy with the shield and the star—the guy who says, “The price of freedom is high, it always has been.” He’s been one of the good guys for a long time.

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

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