Tag: Kurt Russell

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Film Features Film/TV

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 never gets better than its opening sequence. To bring Vol. 1 to a successful conclusion, Groot, the mono-phrased, living tree-man portrayed, as far as it goes, by Vin Diesel, had to sacrifice himself. But, since he’s a tree, he budded and was replanted by his platonic life partner Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper) — now known simply as Rocket, because apparently it’s okay to have a talking raccoon heavy weapons specialist in your movie, but using the word “Raccoon” in his name is just a step too far for the Disney marketing department.

Anyway, Groot has now grown enough to walk, and when you’re traveling in Star-Lord’s company, you’re going to get into some weird scrapes. The camera follows Baby Groot through a battle with a rando glitter octopod, introducing the perpetually bickering Guardians of the Galaxy in turn: the giant, blue Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista), green-skinned daughter of Thanos Gamora (Zoe Saldana), and the self-appointed Star-Lord, Peter Quill (Chris Pratt). Like most of the rest of the movie, it’s practically all computer animated, but director James Gunn and the Marvel team simulate an Alfonso Cuaron-style, single take tracking shot focusing on what all the laser-fueled mayhem looks like to the sapling Groot.

In addition to being visually thrilling, the shot immediately establishes Baby Groot as the audience surrogate and sets the tone for what we’re about to see: spectacular scenes of stylized, bloodless battle delivered with a wink and nudge.

Science fiction started out in the 1800s as a fairly serious-minded enterprise. Then in the early 1900s, it devolved into lurid stories for pulp magazines. Since then, sci-fi books and movies have either embraced the pulp tradition or pushed against it — is it better to be respectable, or is it better to be fun? It seems weird that Arrival and Barbarella are in the same genre, but they represent its two extremes. Star Wars straddled the line between serious and silly by mapping pulp tropes onto a mythological framework. Perhaps because its source material is the descendant of the pulp magazine, comic books, Guardians of the Galaxy sees no need to feign seriousness. Gunn and company just go for whatever feels good from moment to moment. They’ve got jetpacks, and they’re not afraid to use them.

And I’ll have to say, it’s pretty refreshing. We live in, as Obi-Wan Kenobi would say, the Dark Times. We need escapism. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is providing exactly what Hollywood has historically done best: cinematic comfort food.

The Character Formerly Known As Rocket Raccoon (voiced by Bradley Cooper) and Baby Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel).

Zoe Saldana as Gamora

Besides, Kurt Russell is in it. He plays Ego, the Living Planet, who is pretty self explanatory. The question of whether or not Ego is Star-Lord’s long-lost father provides the plot-like structure to prop up one eye-popping space action sequence after another from Disney’s golden hoard of digital artists. It’s a tribute to Chris Pratt’s charisma that he can share scene after scene with Russell and not be overwhelmed by the actor’s epic facial hair.

The other bit of silly alchemy that continues to work for the Guardians franchise is marrying 1970s cheese rock with insane space action. Both Star Trek: Beyond and Doctor Strange tried the same trick, only to fall flat. Guardians nails it repeatedly. Sure, he’s got a knack for snappy dialog and endearing character beats, but Gunn’s unerring ear is his secret weapon.

It’s cool to be back in these characters’ colorful, crazy world, but the story seems like a thin, disjointed collection of leftover ideas. The swashbuckling is first rate, but the scale of the violence and the casualness with which it is dispatched by our heroes is occasionally icky. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 may not be a masterpiece, but it’s a movie that knows exactly what it’s trying to accomplish. Sometimes, that’s enough.

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Film Features Film/TV

Deepwater Horizon

Sometimes, real life comes up with deeper ironies than any fiction a writer could envision. For example, did you know the catastrophic fire and explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant was started by a botched safety test? If I read that in a screenplay, I would recommend changing it, because it’s just too on-the-nose.

The story of the Deepwater Horizon, the oil rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, killing 11 people and ultimately causing the biggest oil spill in the history of the world, has several such ironies attached. The biggest one is that, moments before the explosion, executives from BP and Transocean, the owners of the half-billion-dollar floating oil rig, had gathered the staff in the cafeteria to hand out a safety award to the rig’s captain, Jimmy Harrell. Forty-eight hours later, the cafeteria — along with the rest of the rig — would be on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

It’s a dramatic story, but not an obvious choice for a film. The mechanics of what happened that day are highly technical, and the choices that led to disaster boiled down to a series of judgment calls made by highly trained engineers trying to understand a man-made system of devilish complexity. But try director Peter Berg has, with fairly good results.

Mark Wahlberg plays Mike Williams, a mechanic charged with keeping the Deepwater Horizon afloat in good working order. Williams has his work cut out for him, as the massive rig has been on station 100 miles southwest of New Orleans almost 50 days longer than scheduled. The phones don’t work, computers controlling vital machinery are regularly showing the Blue Screen of Death, and, most ominously, many of the fire detectors are masses of sparking short circuits. Kurt Russell plays the captain, known as “Mr. Jimmy,” as a tough, pragmatic sea dog who commands the respect of his crew by the purposefulness of his walk alone.

I am of the opinion that Russell automatically makes things better and should therefore be in all movies, but Deepwater Horizon doesn’t really get going until John Malcovich slithers onto the screen. You can tell by the slime dripping off his elaborately casual Creole accent that BP engineer Donald Vidrine is bad news. The crew has taken to calling the troublesome hole they’re digging in the floor of the ocean “The Well From Hell,” and Mr. Jimmy is appalled when he hears that BP has skipped some important safety inspections in the interest of getting the over-budget project into production mode as soon as possible. The confrontation between Russell, who urges caution, and Malkovich, who wants immediate results, crackles with tension. Once things are off the rails, Malkovich fades into the background, but Russell’s story is the film’s most intense. Mr. Jimmy was taking a shower when the rig went boom, so Russell gets to crawl naked and flash blind through broken glass. It’s a gutsy, brilliant performance that overshadows the supposed star of the show, Wahlberg.

Deepwater Horizon puts the blame for the disaster on meddling by the money men, which brings us to our final level of irony. The New York Times reported that the original director, J.C. Chandor (All Is Lost, A Most Violent Year) was fired by the producers when it became apparent that he was making the story an ensemble film that examined a historical tragedy from multiple points of view. He was replaced with Friday Night Lights producer Peter Berg, whose marching orders were to make Wahlberg’s character the hero of the story and to cut down on the sneering villainy of Malkovich for fear that BP would sue. Maybe that’s why Deepwater Horizon seems so uneven. Since Hollywood in 2016 doesn’t think a person simply doing his or her duty is enough to make for a sympathetic hero, the film starts with an interminable scene between Williams and his wife, Felicia (Kate Hudson). Making the obviously shoehorned-in scene even more awkward, Berg and his screenwriters put the first big chunk of exposition into the mouth of Williams’ 10-year-old daughter Sydney (Stella Allen). Deepwater Horizon doesn’t explode and sink, but there are enough flashes of brilliance here and there to know that, like its namesake, it was compromised by the incompetence of middle managers who concentrated too fiercely on the bottom line.

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Film Features Film/TV

The Hateful Eight

In 1977, an ad touted the Heroes album with: “There’s Old Wave, there’s New Wave, and there’s David Bowie”. Like the Thin White Duke, Quentin Tarantino has become a genre unto himself. There are thrillers, there are mysteries, and there are Tarantino movies.

The buzz going into The Hateful Eight was characteristically bizarre: a Western shot on 70MM film in the age of digital. For the cinephile, anything that starts with the Cinerama logo raises expectations of wide-open vistas, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey. After the opening overture, The Hateful Eight seems like it’s going to deliver on that promise with a series of shots of a stagecoach plowing through Montana’s snowy vastness. But then the stage is stopped by a lone black figure: Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a former Union calvary major-turned-bounty hunter, sitting atop a pile of dead bodies. The horseless man asks the coach’s charter John “The Hangman” Ruth (Kurt Russell) for a ride so he can escape the coming blizzard. Ruth is reluctant to help, because he is transporting his own bounty to Red Rocks, a woman named Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and she’s extremely valuable. But Warren is very convincing, and since they once had dinner together in Chattanooga long ago, Ruth agrees. Then, the action shifts to a long conversation inside the stagecoach, and we’ve seen the last of the beautiful western landscapes. After picking up another hitchhiker, racist sheriff Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), the stage arrives at Minnie’s Haberdashery, a frontier tavern where the inhabitants hope to hunker down to avoid the snow. Needless to say, things go spectacularly wrong.

Kurt Russell and Samuel L. Jackson

From there, The Hateful Eight resembles Reservoir Dogs more than How the West Was Won. The motley crew trapped in the blizzard slowly circle each other spouting stupendously flowery dialogue as they look for an opening for murder. If there’s one thing QT is good at, it’s writing a menacing speech leading up to mayhem, and his language machine is cranking double time. Jackson and Russell provide ideal vessels for the profane wordsmith, but from Tim Roth to Bruce Dern to Michael Madsen, there really are no weak links here. Lies are told, identities shift, Pynchonesque names are checked, and poison surreptitiously administered. Tarantino uses the fantastically expensive and obsolete camera technology not to open up spaces, but to present the whole of the interior of Minnie’s as a single stage set where he can move his crack actors around like a theater director.

SLJ. ’Nuff said.

There are a hundred reasons why a three-hour widescreen epic that devolves into an Agatha Christie play shouldn’t work, and yet, at least after the first viewing, The Hateful Eight comes off as more satisfying than Inglourious Basterds or Django Unchained. It’s the critic’s job to explain this stuff, but Tarantino creates alchemy that defies easy description. Sometimes things just work.