Category Archives: Movie Reviews

Nov 05 2013
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Movie Reviews

Long Shot

With five Oscar winners on screen, ‘Last Vegas’ should be more of a winner, too

LastVegasPhotoTûR[1]2Last Vegas

Starring Robert De Niro, Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Kline & Mary Steenbergen

Directed by John Turteltaub

PG-13, 105 min.

Advanced-age audiences have become a sizable movie demographic in recent years, one to which Hollywood has (wisely) been paying more and more attention.

Somebody wasn’t paying quite enough attention, however, to Last Vegas, which seems like a lazy exercise to cash in on the growing base of “maturing” ticket buyers using a cast of venerable, award-winning actors plugged into a story template clearly lifted from another successful franchise.

A buddy comedy about four 70-ish friends who convene for a bachelor-party weekend as the last single member of their group is (finally) about to tie the knot, it’s an over-the-hill Hangover with most of the ribald raunch of that 2009 blockbuster replaced with creaky jokes about achy joints, hemorrhoids and rapper 50 Cent sheepishly complaining to hotel management that the four horsemen of the AARP apocalypse are slammin’ and jammin’ so loudly he can’t sleep.

The movie counts on its all-star pedigree to carry its slender storyline a long way—and that’ll probably be enough for some folks, who’ll simply enjoy the precedent-setting spectacle of seeing Robert De Niro, Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman and Kevin Kline sharing the screen as the childhood buddies now grown up and reunited for a geezer-fied fling.

K72A3158.CR2The quip-filled script by Dan Fogleman (whose resume includes Cars, Bolt, Tangled, Crazy, Stupid Love and The Guilt Trip) sets up the characters quickly: Sam (Kline), who’s had so many joints replaced that his friends jokingly call him “the Bionic Man”; Archie (Freeman), recovering from a stroke but dying a slow death under the suffocating care of his overly attentive son; and grumpy Paddy (De Niro), living under a cloud of gloom after the death of his wife.

All three come to Vegas from their far-flung corners of the country when Billy (Douglas), their slick, high-living, lifelong bachelor bud with a sexy 32-year-old girlfriend, decides to get married and throw himself a Sin City send-off.

As the guys acclimate to the glitz of their new surroundings, director John Turteltaub, who previously steered three National Treasure kid-centric adventures, has them run a gauntlet of geriatric jokes. Most of chuckles, alas, feel churned from cheap sitcom stock. Sam, who’s been given a weekend “free pass” (as unlikely as that sounds) from his wife, can’t wait to pop the single Viagra pill in his pocket. Archie tries to maintain his ruse from his son that he’s really on a church retreat. The doorkeeper at the hotel’s after-hours nightclub thinks the group’s paltry $5 tip to skip his long line must be a joke. A young inebriated woman asks them if they have any drugs. “Does Lipitor count?” they want to know.

“This may be the first bachelor party I’ve attended that could be covered by Medicare,” says Diana (MaryK72A7000.CR2 Steenbergen, Oscar winner No. 5), a lovely lounge singer who’ll become a major player in the way the weekend unfolds.

Other movies have plumbed the issues of growing older with grace, dignity and a real sense of the humor and humanity that can be found in the walk into the long shadows of the twilight years. The four old lions in Last Vegas don’t aspire to anything so profound as they rip, roar, rib each other and “party like it’s 1959.”

You might expect more from an assemblage of actors with a spread of six golden Oscar statues among them. Those seem like pretty good odds for a successful, can’t-lose movie, right? Sorry to report that payoff is such a long shot.

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

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Oct 29 2013
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Movie Reviews, Pop Culture

Dirty Old Man

Johnny Knoxville takes his Jackass show on the road

JACKASS PRESENTS: BAD GRANDPAJackass Presents: Bad Grandpa

Starring Johnny Knoxville and Jackson Nicoll

Directed by Jeff Tremaine

R, 92 min.

Released Oct. 25, 2013

After its debut in 2000 on MTV as a half-hour series of candid-camera pranks, rude ’n’ crude practical jokes and outrageous, knuckleheaded, often dangerous stunts, Jackass became a pop-cultural rocket ride for head hoax-master Johnny Knoxville and his motley crew of cutups, spawning several TV spin-offs and three movies.

Now Knoxville is back in a fourth, reprising a character that will be familiar to fans who made his franchise first a cult hit and then a much broader commercial franchise.

In Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa, transformed by facial prosthetics, layers of makeup, grey hair and pastel polyester pants, Knoxville, 42, plays a randy octogenarian on a cross-country road trip with his grandson. The “grandpa” character had made appearances in skits and stunts in his previous movies and on the TV series.

JACKASS PRESENTS: BAD GRANDPAThis movie, however, expands the typical Jackass format of disconnected kamikaze skits by concocting a plot throughout which Knoxville’s “Irving Zisman” and his young charge, Billy (9-year-old Jackson Nicoll, terrific) spring a variety of hidden-cam pranks on unsuspecting people—just like in the previous movies and TV show. (Knoxville, one of the screenplay’s six writers, reassembled his Jackass team of director Jeff Tremaine and producer Spike Jonze for this project.)

Just how funny—or not—you find it all will depend on how far Jackass antics of yesteryear tended to move the needle on your personal laugh-o-meter. If you guffawed before at the Jackass-ery of people being surprised, shocked or angered by being prodded beyond their comfort zones, you’ll probably guffaw again at these shenanigans in a funeral home, doctor’s office, convenience store, bingo hall, restaurant, biker bar, wedding reception and all-male strip club, where Knoxville’s character lets it all hang out in his tighty whities (which aren’t quite tight enough, as it turns out); and as Irving and Billy bring a bumping, grinding grand finale to a kiddie beauty pageant.

Be warned: Knoxville has a thing for body parts, and body functions, that you’ll never, ever, see on America’s Funniest Home Videos.

JACKASS PRESENTS: BAD GRANDPASo, on the other hand, if you don’t think there’s anything funny about a 87-year-old man who appears to get, ahem, a delicate part of his anatomy stuck in a soda vending machine, and the reactions of the people around him when he asks for their help in extracting himself—well, maybe this isn’t your kind of flick.

When Jackass launched on TV, its format was a brash, gonzo, in-your-face update on Candid Camera, the 1960 series that pioneered the idea of putting ordinary people in outlandish situations, then showing how they reacted. Now, more than a decade later, the idea not’s so brash or so gonzo, especially since Sacha Baron Cohen and his Borat movies have taken the idea to such scatological, wrecking-ball extremes.

Knoxville’s a funny guy, willing to go a long, long way for a laugh, and this is a funny movie…sometimes. But the gags are hit and miss; the ones that fall flat seem to be weighed down by the contrivance of the plot, which makes everything feel overly forced, especially when you see how much fun the crew seems to be having in the behind-the-scenes outtakes during the credits.

Those three minutes of pull-back-the-curtain docu-giggles suggest Bad Grandpa would have been better if it had dropped the whole plot charade, invited the audience in on the joke from the beginning, and let good times roll.

Ah, yes, just like the good old-fashioned, hit-and-run Jackass days of yore.

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

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Oct 22 2013
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Movie Reviews, Pop Culture

Information Breakdown

WikiLeaks drama pounds its story, but becomes too much of a cold slog

Daniel Br?hlThe Fifth Estate

Starring Benedict Cumberbatch & Daniel Brühl

Directed by Bill Condon

R, 128 min.

Earlier this year, I went to a team trivia event where one of the questions was “What is the ‘fourth estate?’

Having a bit of newsprint in my blood, I knew that it was an old British term for “the press.” Our team got the point—hooray for us, right? But what struck me that evening was how many teams were completely stumped for an answer.

Was the term really that arcane, that unfamiliar, that antiquated?

If so, are the people on those teams going to have any idea what The Fifth Estate is, either? And an even bigger question: How interested will they be in seeing this movie, no matter what it’s called?

The Fifth Estate dramatizes the beginnings of WikiLeaks, the cyber-organization that shook up world governments and conventional media by posting highly confidential news from anonymous sources, who “leaked” it from places where it was supposed to be contained, sealed away, secreted. Among other stories, the site released sensitive files about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, about civilians killed by military airstrikes, and about what went on at the notorious prisoner detention center Guantanamo Bay.

The term “fifth estate,” the movie tells us, refers to the way news reporting was shaped by the speed, force—and recklessness—of information zipping around the planet in the new millennium’s digital, instant Internet age. If the old-fashioned printing press was the pillar of the fourth estate, new e-media, spurred by WikiLeaks, became the fifth.

The movie centers on WikiLeak’s Australian founder, Julian Assange, and his contentious, co-dependent relationship with Daniel Berg, the site’s German representative (on whose book, Inside WikiLeaks: My Time at the World’s Most Dangerous Website With Julian Assange, the screenplay is partly based).

FE2Benedict Cumberbatch is mesmerizing as Assange, a blonde-haired cyber warrior crusading to expose fraud, corruption, injustice, war crimes and other sins in high places. Daniel Brühl, who also co-stars in the new movie Rush, is Berg, a young computer hacker whose prankish, anti-establishment sparks are fanned into flames of international activism by Assange’s zeal and heated rhetoric.

Director Bill Condon—whose diverse credentials include the musical Dreamgirls, the Gothic drama Gods and Monsters and two Twilight teen-angst vampire sagas—pumps the story hard, backfilling details of Assange’s damaged childhood; weaving in a difficult romantic relationship for Berg; and inserting a pair of Washington D.C. insiders (Stanley Tucci and Laura Linney) who have to deal with the serious fallout WikiLeaks creates as it puts foreign diplomats, military personnel and their families in danger by revealing their identities.

FE3Was Assange a hero or a traitor? That’s the question the movie wants us to ponder. It also paints him as a cyber rock star, with throngs of fans, followers and groupies. (He’s currently living in London, where he’s been granted diplomatic asylum after a 2010 sexual assault investigation.)

But the movie’s all too much of a slog, I’m afraid, through a story that a lot of viewers will find too heavy on current events and history and too light on entertainment. Like the cold, bleak backdrops of Belgium and Germany, where the filming took place, there’s far too little warmth, wit or movie sunshine to penetrate its overarching sense of its own seriousness.

The movie ends with a faux-documentary segment in which Cumberbatch, as Assange, addresses the audience, as if he’s being interviewed about the movie they’ve just seen. He somewhat dismissively brushes the question away, then looks directly into the camera and tells viewers to become inspired to seek their own truths, to ferret out their own information, to become their own crusading whistle-blowing leak-finders and “look beyond this story.”

That’s assuming, of course, that they see it begin with—which might require a leap of an estate or two beyond a lot of people’s usual areas of interest.

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

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Oct 16 2013
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Books, Movie Reviews, Pop Culture

O Captain, My Captain

Tom Hanks is riveting in real-life high-seas drama

Tom Hanks

Captain Phillips

Starring Tom Hanks

Directed by Paul Greengrass

PG-13, 134 min., released Oct. 11, 2013

First of all, finally—a movie about pirates that doesn’t have anything to do with Johnny Depp.

The rascally, comically rakish Capt. Jack Sparrow in five Disney Pirates of the Caribbean flicks, Depp is nowhere to be found in this pulse-pounding drama based on the real-life 2009 pirate hijacking of an American cargo ship off the coast of Africa.

And these pirates are a world away from Disneyland, in every way. A desperate bunch of gun-toting coastal villagers from chaotic, war-torn Somalia who attack the massive Maersk Alabama in their small fishing boat, they light the fuse on an international drama that ultimately draws the explosive deadly force of the U.S. Navy and its elite special ops SEALs.930353 - Captain Phillips

Director Paul Greengrass, who previously steered two Bourne spy thrillers and the nail-biting, real-time United 93, starts the story as the commercial captain of the title (Tom Hanks) departs his Vermont home for Africa, where he’ll meet his ship, his crew and his fate.

In the first scene, we eavesdrop on the conversation between Phillips and his wife (Catherine Keener) on the way to the airport about how their kids should study harder in school to keep up with the big, changing world in which they’ll soon become adults—a foreshadowing of the grueling tutorial on the imbalance of global economics Phillips will soon get first-hand on the other side of the globe.

Working from a taut screenplay by Billy Ray (based on Richard Phillips’ book, A Captain’s Duty, about the incident), Greengrass shifts his cinematic canvas from the vastness of the open ocean to the stifling confines of a claustrophobic closed lifeboat in which the final high-wire act plays out.

In the title role, Hanks reminds us why he’s one of the most versatile actors in all of modern movies, capable of just about anything. As Capt. Phillips’ situation moves from bad to worse, his performance intensifies to a rawness that will leave a lot of viewers gasping—if not weeping—along with him at the end.

Tom HanksA movie “based on real events” can often be at a bit of a dramatic disadvantage in that audiences know everything that happened—or at least they think they do. But even if that’s the case here, it doesn’t matter: Greengrass draws out the tension, the suspense, and the sense that anything can happen into the very final moments.

(A new chapter emerged recently, however, as some of the real crew members involved in the incident brought a $50 million lawsuit against their employers, claiming that Phillips and the Maersk shipping line put their lives in danger by taking unnecessary risks—and that the real-life Capt. Phillips wasn’t quite the hero the movie makes him out to be.)

But if the story unfolded anywhere close to the way it’s depicted on the screen, it’s impossible not to come away from it somewhat moved, if not shaken, after watching this high-seas, high-stakes saga that didn’t spring from someone’s imagination, from a comic book, or from an amusement park ride—but rather from the real world in which we live, and one that really happened, to real people, not so long ago.

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

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Oct 09 2013
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Movie Reviews, Pop Culture

Out of This World

Stunning, spectacular ‘Gravity’ shoots for the stars—and gets there

GRAVITYGravity

Starring Sandra Bullock & George Clooney

Directed by Alfonso Cuaròn

PG-13, 90 min.

Released Oct. 4, 2013

Wow—that’s the single best word I can think of to describe this truly awesome piece of moviemaking, which has instantly vaulted to the top of my list of the year’s best films.

Marooned in space after the destruction of their craft, two American astronauts suddenly find themselves on a new mission of survival.

That’s a simple enough premise, but Gravity turns its into something at once monumental and sublime, slicing to the core of our basic fears and primal issues about death and dying, isolation, abandonment and spiritual longing, and the general cosmic inhospitality and indifference that greets humans whenever we venture outside the comfort zone of the earthly place we call home.

It’s also one of the most technically dazzling spectacles to ever grace the screen, an eye-popping, digital/live-action marvel that makes the senses reel with new levels of sophistication in its groundbreaking special effects that leave most other films looking like they’re lagging light years behind.

GRAVITYAs it begins, we meet veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) and his space shuttle’s medical engineer Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), a newcomer on her first mission. In a breathtaking, 15-minute sequence during which the camera never breaks away, we see Dr. Stone working outside the docked shuttle on the Hubble telescope, and Kowalski whisking around leisurely with his jetpack, cracking jokes with Mission Control (voiced by Ed Harris, a nice nod to another astronaut flick, The Right Stuff), when they receive some alarming news: A shower of shrapnel from a detonated Soviet satellite is speeding directly at them, at 25,000 miles per hour.

But the warning comes too late: The cloud of space junk, catapulted by centrifugal force as it orbits the Earth, plows into the shuttle, rendering it useless—and sending Dr. Stone flying out into the inky, star-flecked blackness, adrift, detached and alone.

And that’s just the beginning!

Other things happen—a lot of things. But revealing more would rob you of the many edge-of-your-seat surprises Gravity has in store, both visually and thematically, in the gripping story written by director Alfonso Cuaròn and his son, Jonás. Suffice it to say, as Bullock’s character does at one point, it’s “one hell of a ride.”

Back in 2006, Cuaròn made critics giddy with the tracking shots he used in Children of Men, a grungy futuristic fable that became known for a couple of lengthy, carefully executed segments in which the camera stayed with the action and characters, without cutting away, for several long, protracted moments. Those shots were über-cool, but they’re nothing compared with what the director pulls off here, in which his camera goes places, and does things, that are nothing short of jaw-dropping.

GRAVITY

You’ll not only feel like you’re floating in space, you’ll feel like you’re inside Sandra Bullock’s space helmet. (In one amazing slow zoom, the camera “takes you along” as it seems to magically penetrate the glass of her visor from the outside, turn around, and begin looking out—all as she’s turning head over heels, weightless.)

This is one of Bullock’s best performances, without a doubt; reserve her a seat down front now at this year’s Oscars. It’s one of the most dazzling-looking films you’ll ever have the opportunity to see, especially if you see it in 3-D, or better yet, in 3-D and IMAX—believe every bit of the hype. It’s a masterful achievement of technique and craftsmanship, creating what has to be the most realistic “in space” experience ever for any motion picture.

And its final scene is a brilliant cinematic brushstroke of pure movie poetry that blends heaven and Earth, rebirth and renewal, past, present and future, and a poignant reminder of the Newtonian universal constant from which the film takes its title.

In almost every way, Gravity is out of this world.

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

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Oct 02 2013
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Movie Reviews

Life In The Fast Lane

Ron Howard’s real-story racing movie is a hip, cool-running crowd-pleaser

RUSHRush

Starring Chris Hemsworth, Daniel Brühl & Olivia Wilde

Directed by Ron Howard

R, 123 min.

Released Sept. 27, 2013

The rivalry between two professional racers becomes the driving force in Rush, director Ron Howard’s dramatic depiction the 1970s competition between James Hunt and Niki Lauda.

The racing world was captivated, back in the day, as Hunt and Lauda became superstars of European-based Formula One racing and vied for championship trophies in the first half of the decade. Not only were they passionate, prickly competitors, they also represented polar opposites: Hunt was a dashing, daring blonde-haired British playboy; Lauda was a straight-laced Austrian with an obsessive, calculating mind wired for speed—and a face, as Hunt used to remind him, like a “rat.”

The media loved them, the public loved them, and they loved—well, they loved racing, even though they knew it could kill them. There was a part of them that loved it because they knew it could kill them.RUSH

As Lauda (Daniel Brühl) points out, every time he climbs into his car’s cockpit, he’s aware there’s a 20 percent chance he won’t make it out alive.

“Staring death in the face, there’s nobility in that,” says Hunt (Chris Hemsworth). “It’s like being a knight.”

Brühl and Hemsworth are both outstanding, and it’s especially good to see Hemsworth break out of his Thor tights. Olivia Wilde shines in her role as the globetrotting fashion model who becomes Hunt’s wife…until another playboy, this one a famous Hollywood movie star, enters the picture.

RushMoviegoers who might be put off by the idea of a “racing” movie should know that while Rush revs up its story, it’s much more than a flick about fast cars. At its core are two men who happen to be racers, and the drama that builds around them as the years unfold. We learn how both Hunt and Lauda came to be both rivals and admirers, and how they were both “hulk-headed kids, scorned by [their] families, headed nowhere,” before finding their futures behind the wheels of the low-slung, super-fast cars on the Grand Prix circuit.

And we see how Lauda finds the will to recover from a horrific accident, and return to the track, by watching videotapes of Hunt continuing to win races.

Howard, the former child actor who grew up to become one of Hollywood’s top directors, adds another winner to his resume with this hip, cool-running crowd pleaser that’s also a terrifically made movie all-around. Each scene is meticulously constructed with careful detail, from the burnished, Kodachrome-esque glow cast by cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (who won an Oscar for his work on Slumdog Millionaire), to the parade of ‘70s fashions and the soundtrack of retro tunes from David Bowie, Steve Winwood and Thin Lizzy.

8D92_FPF_00305R.JPG_cmyk

The racing scenes, whether on sun-dappled pastoral country roads in England or dark, rain-lashed sections of do-or-die championship track under the imposing shadow of Mt. Fuji in Japan, are thrilling, taking advantage of everything that modern movies can do with seamless integrations of live action and digital effects.

But the thing that Rush does best, however, is never let you forget about the two men—the two real men—who did the driving.

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

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Sep 25 2013
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Movie Reviews

‘Prisoners’ Pounds Its Message(s) Home

How far is too far when the law doesn’t go far enough?

PRISONERS

Prisoners

Starring Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal & Paul Dano

Directed by Denis Villeneuve

R, 153 min.

Released Sept. 20, 2013

Plunged into every parent’s worst nightmare, a desperate father (Hugh Jackman) takes matters into his own hands when his young daughter and her friend disappear and the local police department can’t get answers out of the man he’s convinced abducted them.

With no evidence to hold the developmentally challenged Alex Jones (Paul Dano), who was driving the rattrap minivan seen near the girls just before they vanished, the cops have to let him go. That’s when Jackman’s character, Keller Dover, abducts him, secretly holds him prisoner in an abandoned building, and begins a prolonged attempt to beat the truth out of him.

PRISONERSHow far is too far to go, Prisoners asks, when the law doesn’t go far enough?

That’s not the only question the movie raises, in its brutally direct way, as it plows through a minefield of raw nerves, shattered emotions, shifting moral boundaries and unnerving religious overtones. Most of those questions don’t have easy answers.

What are we to think, for instance, when Dover fortifies himself with the Lord’s Prayer before another grueling session subjecting his captive, who has the mental capacity of a 10-year-old, to almost unthinkable abuse? Or when Dover’s neighbors Franklin and Nancy (Terrence Howard and Viola Davis), whose young daughter was also taken, justify their complicity to his plan? “We won’t help him,” Nancy reasons, “but we won’t stop him, either.”PRISONERS

And feel free to overlay any number of social issues, current events, theological debates or other entry points for discussion onto Dover’s declaration that his prisoner is “not a person anymore,” and that “we have to hurt him until he talks.”

Det. Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal), seemingly the only cop on the case in the entire (unnamed) Pennsylvania town, tirelessly tracks down clues that always seem to leave him frustratingly short of a breakthrough. Unable to cope, Dover’s wife (Maria Bello) retreats into a prescription-induced haze.

Melissa Leo plays Alex’s aunt, who raised him after his parents died, and David Dastmalchian is chilling as another suspect with a peculiar interest in children’s clothes…and other creepy things.

“Prisoners” has a strong cast with seven Oscar nominations and two Academy Award trophies among them. The movie’s palette of bleak winter landscapes also packs a visceral punch, thanks to ten-time Academy Award-nominated cinematographer Roger Deakins, who’s worked on five Coen Brothers movies and the sumptuous-looking James Bond adventure Skyfall.

But strip away its impressive Hollywood pedigree and it basically boils down to basic B-movie stock, shock and schlock. If you’ve seen anything like it, you’ve probably seen a lot of things like it.

PRISONERSNote the “s” in the title. By the time Prisoners ends after a marathon 153 minutes, it’s obvious it wants to leave you thinking about how you’ve encountered more than one prisoner, in more ways than one. But you’ll also be thinking about how it’s at least half an hour too long, how much of a grim ordeal the whole affair turned out to be, and how director Denis Villeneuve threw in way too much of just about everything, including snakes, some mumbo-jumbo about a “war against God,” and all those mazes, mazes and more mazes that all lead nowhere.

Fans of forensic-investigation and crime-procedural TV shows like CSI might enjoy the twisty-turn-y trip down the zig-zaggy rabbit hole to the end. But as the credits rolled after the final scene set in the darkness of night, in the winter cold, with a frosting of snow on hard, frozen ground, I was glad to “escape” to somewhere brighter, somewhere warmer, and somewhere I hadn’t just seen Paul Dano’s face repeatedly bludgeoned into the consistency of raw deer meat.

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

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Sep 18 2013
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Movie Reviews

Don’t cross ‘The Family’

De Niro, Pfeiffer play mobster mom and pop on the lam

RDN_and_TLJ_cropThe Family

Starring Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer & Tommy Lee Jones

Directed by Luc Besson

R, 111 min.

Released Sept. 13, 2013

“Want a hand with the bags?” Maggie Blake (Michelle Pfeiffer) asks hubby Fred (Robert De Niro) as he heads out to unload the car after arriving at their new home with their two teenage kids.

No, says Fred, he’s got it covered.

The bag Fred’s about to cover—with dirt, in his new backyard—is no suitcase. It’s a plastic tarp with a dead body wrapped inside. And the family in The Family is no ordinary family.

The “Blakes,” the alias they’re using on this move to a villa in Normandy in the north of France, are a mob family on the run. “Fred,” a former Brooklyn Mafioso whose real name is Giovanni Manzoni, ratted out all his old associates. Now under federal witness protection supervised by a grumpy senior agent (Tommy Lee Jones) trying to keep him alive as the slow wheels of justice turn, he’s a wanted man in hiding with a $20 million underworld bounty on his head.

PortraitA big problem, however, is that Manzoni and his family find it impossible to leave the old days, and the old ways, behind. Maggie sets off a homemade bomb in a local market when the French salesclerk and a couple of snooty customers gossip about her. The two teens, Belle (Dianna Agron, from TV’s Glee) and Warren (John D’Leo), don’t waste any time at their new high school seducing a teacher, beating fellow students to a pulp and setting up a flow of goods and services to make things run smoothly.

And Giovanni…well, even though he insists he’s a “nice guy,” he still has a problem controlling his “sadistic urges.” Pity the poor plumber who wants to overcharge him for repair work, or the head of the local factory that Giovanni’s been told is responsible for funk-i-fying his drinking water.

Bat

Don’t cross the family, or you might end up in the hospital—or worse.

All of this makes The Family a strange mash-up of a vicious mob yarn squeezed into a foul-mouthed, movie-length sitcom. Every chuckle it gets is followed up (and swallowed up) by moments of gasp-worthy violence.

For De Niro, this kind of role has to pose a special kind of challenge: How do you play criminal goombahs without falling back into the very stereotypes that you so masterfully created, across the decades, in movies almost too numerous to mention, like The Godfather II, Goodfellas and Casino? Here he just seems to roll with the big inside joke, culminating in Giovanni getting invited to be a guest commentator for an American movie night in the villa, an event that turns out to have a loaded meta-connection to both the actor and his character.

Pfeiffer, too, appears to be having fun, strolling down a movie-memory lane that often recalls her 1988 role in Married to the Mob, especially in a flashback to the family’s happier New York days.

French director Luc Besson based the movie on a French book, Malavita, which translates literally to mean Badfellows. Martin Scorsese, one of the movie’s producers, directed De Niro in Raging Bull, Casino, and Taxi Driver and…yes, Goodfellas.

A subplot involves Giovanni’s alias as a historian, telling his new neighbors he’s working on a book about the D-Day invasion of 1944. Then, the Americans were cheered in Normandy as liberators and heroes. This time around, after all the beatings, bashings, bullets and bloodshed dealt by the so-called Blakes, I suspect the folks in France would be more than happy to say au revoir to the The Family and set them sailing on a boat back home.

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

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Sep 11 2013
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DVDs, Movie Reviews, Pop Culture

‘Fugitive’ Runs With New Baggage

20th anniversary Blu-ray loaded with bonus features

TheFugitiveThe Fugitive

Blu-ray $19.98 / Warner Home Video

The 20th anniversary high-def re-release of the 1993 action-thriller, about a doctor (Harrison Ford) wrongly convicted for the murder of his wife, escaped from federal custody, looking for the mysterious one-armed man who did the dirty deed, and relentlessly pursued by a persistent U.S. Marshal (Tommy Lee Jones), comes with an all-new reunion interview with its two stars and director, plus a behind-the-scenes featurette, a look at the making of the movie’s spectacular train-crash scene, and other extras.

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

Sep 11 2013
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Movie Reviews

Don’t Cross Him Off The List!

Vin Diesel’s back for another brawny Riddick adventure

R-1Riddick

Starring Vin Diesel, Karl Urban & Katee Sackhoff

Directed by David Twohy

R, 119 min.

Released Sept. 9, 2013

The latest pulpy sci-fi yarn spun around the super-bad space-survivalist-antihero of the title opens on a bleak desert planet, an inhospitable place no reputable intergalactic travel agent could possibly recommend.

“I don’t know how many times I’ve been crossed off the list and left for dead,” says Riddick (Vin Diesel) in a growly opening narration.

Then he grabs a giant vulture by the neck and chokes it, sets his broken leg just in time to fend off a pack of marauding jackals, and gets the upper hand in an encounter with a carnivorous “mud demon,” a colossus that looks like a nasty mutation of a dinosaur, tadpole and scorpion.

R-3Riddick is marooned in this desolate, dangerous place, all alone, Robinson Crusoe-style.

But as to whoever he thinks has been crossing him off the list—well, it certainly hasn’t been anyone making movies and videogames. Riddick follows two previous live-action films, Pitch Black (2000) and The Chronicles of Riddick (2004), plus an animated feature and two games. And Diesel has played the character in all of them.

So there is a rather detailed mythology to Riddick, his tale, and how he ended up on this desert orb called Furya. You can go back and connect all the dots, if you’d like, but it’s unnecessary. (Why do his eyes glow? Not important—don’t worry about it.) This movie can stand pretty much on its own story-wise, and the franchise as a whole isn’t trying to be Star Trek, for goodness sake.

The Riddick series isn’t a string of polished sci-fi pearls, by any stretch, but it does deliver pretty much what fans expect: slam-bang action, space creatures, decent effects, a good deal of dry, wry humor, and just enough R-rated skin, blood and language to appease grownup tastes.

The plot of Riddick is simple enough, with overtones of a vintage Western transplanted a few centuries into the future and several light years out into distant space. When Riddick, a wanted man for murder, among other galactic misdeeds, triggers the signal beacon from an abandoned security outpost, it’s answered by two competing teams of bounty hunters anxious to haul him in.

R-2The mercenaries, expecting to make quick work of their task, are unprepared for their quarry’s lethal predatory skills—and for Riddick’s plan to shanghai one of their two ships to hightail it off his rock. There’s also the matter of that big, nasty-looking thunderstorm on the horizon, and the monstrous surprise Riddick knows it will unleash once the rain begins to hit the ground.

Riddick may be a criminal in this Wild West, way-out “frontier,” but he’s the good guy by comparison—heck, he even raised one of the jackal pups to become his loyal “dog Friday.” There’s no question about who the audience is rooting for.

And there’s also little question, by the end of the movie, about whether or not you can expect to see Riddick again. If you haven’t learned already, you should know by now: This is one guy you should never cross off the list.

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

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