Tag Archives: Ben Foster

Aug 25 2016
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Movie Reviews, Uncategorized

Lords of the Plains

Jeff Bridges pursues bank-robbing brothers in ‘Hell or High Water’

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Hell or High Water
Starring Chris Pine, Jeff Bridges & Ben Foster
Directed by David Mackenzie
R
Wide release Aug. 19

Two masked men bumble and fumble their way through an early-morning bank robbery in an otherwise sleepy Texas town. They’ve got guns and they mean business, but they’ve shown up before the bank is open, before there’s any money in the cash drawers and before anyone can unlock the safe.

“Y’all are new at this, I’m guessin’?” asks a hapless secretary, the only employee on the premises, suggesting they just turn around and leave before the situation escalates—or anyone gets hurt. “Right now, the only thing you’re guilty of is being stupid.”

“Stupid” isn’t the term, however, that comes to the mind of soon-to-retire Texas Ranger Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges), who sees something smarter developing in the string of heists spreading across the parched Texas midsection, always in the morning, always by a pair of men demanding bills of small denominations, and always hitting a small branch of the same bank, Texas Midland.

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Ben Foster & Chris Pine

That’s the terrific setup of Hell or High Water, in which two brothers, Toby (Chris Pine) and Tanner (Ben Foster), try to right wrongs of their past in a scheme that’s much more complex, and much more understandable, than it first seems. Pine, best known for playing Captain Kirk in the Star Trek movies, makes a powerful dramatic breakaway as a divorced dad desperate to hold onto the family farm for his kids. Foster, who’s had supporting roles in nearly 50 movies and TV shows, is galvanizing as his older sibling, an ex-con with rattlesnake-like anger-management issues stemming from childhood.

Playing Texas Ranger Hamilton, Bridges is in somewhat of his True Grit Rooster Cogburn mode, seasoned by a pinch of Tommy Lee Jones from No Country For Old Men. As he closes in on the robbers and their plan, the movie becomes as much about Hamilton’s working relationship with his Comanche-Mexican deputy partner, Alberto (Gil Birmingham, who played Billy Black in the Twilight franchise), and the affectionately racist joshing that’s bonded them over the years.

British-born director David Mackenzie has made more than a dozen films, but probably nothing you’ve seen on a big screen. Here he shows a keen grasp of 21st century America, especially the collision of the Old West and the new-world economy, gun culture, the devastating appetites of corporate greed and the painful, lasting scars of poverty. Cinematographer Giles Nuttgens, who sharpened his craft on BBC nature documentaries and independent fare, elevates the look of practically every frame to artistry.

“We’re like Comanches—raiding where we please, the whole of Texas. Lords of the plains!” gloats Tanner. A later encounter in an Oklahoma casino with a real-life, modern-day Comanche, however, casts an ominous pall over his proclamation.

If you think you know where Hell or High Water is headed, you may be wrong. Or at least you probably won’t be totally right—which is just about right for this outstanding movie, which puts the line between right and wrong underneath a scorching, unforgiving Texas sun then stretches it out on a lonesome, steaming highway, toward a blurred horizon, with no clear end in sight.

—Neil Pond, Parade Magazine

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Dec 16 2013
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History, Movie Reviews

Blood & Bullets

Navy SEALs mission goes tragically off course in Afghanistan

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Lone Survivor

Starring Mark Walhberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch and Ben Foster

Directed by Peter Berg

R, 121 min.

Director Peter Berg’s bloody, violent Lone Survivor comes by its blood and violence honestly. It’s based on former U.S. Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell’s account of a bloody, violent 2005 mission in Afghanistan from which he emerged as—well, you can probably figure that out from the title, based on Luttrell’s New York Times Bestseller.

Luttrell’s book chronicled his involvement as part of a four-man team tasked with covertly tracking down a Taliban warlord in the remote, rugged Kunar province. But Operation Red Wings was quickly compromised and the SEALs (played by Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch and Ben Foster) found themselves in a deadly bind, pinned down by Taliban fighters.

Berg, who adapted Luttrell’s book for the screen as well as directed, has made a rip-roaring war movie that literally rips and roars. Gunfire tears ferociously into flesh, clothing and bone; one shoot-out scene, in particular, is a nearly deafening chorus of high-caliber zings, zips, booms and pops as bullets fly and spent shell casings bounce off rocks.

5685_FPF_00265RThe SEALs’ predicament hinges on a decision they make when an Afghan shepherd, two boys and a herd of goats accidentally come across their mountainside surveillance spot. What they do in that decisive moment sets the rest of the movie in fateful motion.

And what rough-and-tumble motion it is, as Wahlberg and his co-stars absorb blows, bullets and shrapnel, break bones, lose body parts, dent skulls and plunge off the mountainside not just once but twice, sliding, slamming and ramming into boulders and tree trunks. Cinematographer Tobias Schliessler shoots the punishing, pummeling violence as if it’s both horrific and saintly, a Passion play of blood, saliva and bodies battered and bullet-riddled to pulp for a higher cause.

Lone SurvivorIt’s a super-macho movie without a single female character, and definitely not for the squeamish—but neither is war, and what it sometimes requires, and that’s the point. A pre-credits slideshow introduces the real servicemen portrayed by the cast, as David Bowie sings “Heroes.”

And you’ll see another photo of someone in the movie who was also a hero, but I won’t spoil it by telling you who. A modern-day Good Samaritan pivotal to the story in the final stretch, he also reminds us that not everyone in a place where we’re at war is an enemy.

Lone Survivor isn’t exactly a cup of Christmas comfort and joy. But this brutally intense, emotionally stirring tribute to America’s fighting spirit has a message that will certainly resonate, like a punch to the gut, with anyone who’d prefer a steaming slab of gung-ho movie sausage to yet another slice of nutty holiday fruitcake.

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

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