Tag: Rose Byrne

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Now Playing: Insidious, Miyazaki, Fassbinder

Patrick Wilson directs and stars in Insidious: The Red Door.

Summer movie season is in full swing this second weekend in July.

The highest profile release is Insidious: The Red Door. The Blumhouse horror dynasty made their bones with Paranormal Activity and the first film in the Insidious series. For this one, star Patrick Wilson, who plays long-suffering paterfamilias Josh Lambert, takes the director’s chair. Rose Byrne returns as Renai, who somehow hasn’t had a major breakdown after a decade of jump scares. Their son Dalton (Ty Simpkins, all grown up) isn’t so lucky. As he’s trying to work through his trauma, the spirits who bedevil the family return. This one’s low-budget and high-impact, just like I like ’em.

Four Asian-American women on a “work trip” to China decide to cut loose in Joy Ride. The directorial debut of Crazy Rich Asians writer Adele Lim stars Emily in Paris’ Ashley Park and Stephanie Hsu of Everything Everywhere All At Once fame. This one’s giving off serious Bridesmaids vibes.

Remember Bio-Dome, the Pauly Shore comedy vehicle from the 1990s? Or Spaceship Earth, the 2020 documentary about the extremely weird history of Biosphere, the experimental environment simulator facility in the Arizona Desert which was the inspiration for Bio-Dome? Well, this isn’t either one of those. Biosphere is, instead, a film by indie legend Mark Duplass and director Mel Eslyn, starring Sterling K. Brown and Duplass as two guys trying to ride out the end of civilization. Will the laughs get bigger as the oxygen runs out?

On Sunday at 4 p.m., Fathom Events’ Hayao Miyazaki retrospective continues with Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. The 1984 film, set on a future Earth ravaged by environmental degradation, was way ahead of its time and represented the beginning of Miyazaki’s most creative period. The trailer, which is very 1984, is just a taste of the wild visuals in store.

On Thursday, July 13, The Marriage of Maria Braun pops up at Crosstown Theatre. Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s postwar trilogy began in 1979 with this box office hit, which examined the ennui of German life in the 1950s. It’s now considered a classic of European cinema.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

X-Men: Apocalypse

You can always tell a survivor of the Cola Wars by their sallow complexion, bulging waistline, and rotting teeth. Back in the 1980s, Coke and Pepsi, two competing manufacturers of carbonated sugar water, spent millions of advertising dollars to convince the world that their product was superior, when in fact, the two were virtually indistinguishable. In the summer of 2016, we find ourselves caught in the crossfire of a similar conflict, only this time with superhero movies.

In retrospect, the studios flying the Marvel and DC flags owe much of their success to Bryan Singer. The director proved he could handle an ensemble cast with his 1995 indie hit The Usual Suspects and then used those skills to bring Marvel’s flagship superhero property X-Men to the big screen in 2000, which mutated Aussie musical theater actor Hugh Jackman into an international movie star and paired Patrick Stewart’s Professor Xavier with his frenemy, Ian McKellen’s Magneto for the first time. This year alone, we’ve seen three films that borrowed heavily from Singer’s first two X-Men films: from the boring Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice to the more successful Captain America: Civil War to the genre-expanding lewdness of Deadpool (who, technically at least, is an X-Man himself).

Singer did two X-Men movies before leaving the franchise for the ill-fated Superman Returns, leaving Brett Ratner to butcher the resolution of the Dark Phoenix storyline in The Last Stand. Since then, Hugh Jackman got a pair of spinoff stand-alone Wolverine stories that proved imminently forgettable, and Singer returned to the series as a producer for a prequel trilogy, which got an unexpectedly spiffy start with 2011’s First Class. Singer directed 2014’s Days of Future Past, which featured Wolverine time traveling back to 1973 to prevent a mutant genocide, and now the prequel series concludes with X-Men: Apocalypse. Or probably concludes. Who knows with these things?

Oscar Isaac as Apocalypse ushers in a new age of endless permutations of superhero franchises.

The good news about Apocalypse is the same as the bad news: It’s a Bryan Singer X-Men movie, with all that implies. The cold open takes us back to 3,600 B.C.E., where the original mutant, Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac), is in the process of absorbing another mutant’s healing powers to gain immortality, when he is imprisoned underneath a collapsed pyramid by rebellious slaves. Singer’s brief foray into Pharaonic times is 10 times more rewarding than all of the misbegotten Gods of Egypt.

Flash forward to 1983, when CIA agent Moria Mactaggert (Rose Byrne) witnesses the resurrection of the fearsome mutant by his cult in Cairo. Apocalypse sets out to find and enhance four mutants, beginning with Storm (a mohawked Alexandra Shipp) Angel (Ben Hardy), Psylocke (Oliva Munn), and finally Magneto (Michael Fassbender).

Meanwhile, Magneto’s former protege Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) is running an underground railroad to get mutants out of communist Eastern Europe, where she meets Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and inadvertently helps bring the teleporting Catholic into the fold of Professor Xavier (James McAvoy), who is training Scott Summers (Tye Sheridan), who will one day become Cyclops, the leader of the X-Men. Summers’ slowly blossoming affection for Jean Gray (Sophie Turner, aka Sansa Stark from Game of Thrones) as the showdown with Apocalypse looms is the film’s most deftly executed subplot.

Due to the current state of Marvel copyright case law, the X-Men franchise is in the hands of 20th Century Fox, and thus is not a part of the Disney conveyor belt. That works in Apocalypse‘s favor, highlighting Singer’s distinct look and feel. But Apocalypse still feels like a warmed-over version of what worked better 16 years ago. McAvoy and Fassbender work hard at animating Professor X and Magneto, but they still can’t fill the X-shoes of Stewart and McKellen. Lawrence brings humanity to Mystique, but I miss the chilly cunning of Rebecca Romijn. Only Nicholas Hoult as Hank McCoy improves on the previous incarnation of Beast. And Storm is as underutilized as always. Apocalypse arrives in a season when even single-hero movies such as Captain America have expanded into super team-ups. Whether you choose Coke or Pepsi, it’s still the same brown sludge.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Spy

I’ve always loved James Bond movies, especially the older ones like Thunderball and From Russia With Love. But these days, when I go back to watch Sean Connery swigging martinis while saving the free world, I can’t help but notice how sexist they read. I wouldn’t say the outdated sexual attitudes ruin the experience, exactly, but it definitely pulls me out of the action for a moment. Maybe that’s why I have a soft spot for George Lazenby’s sole effort, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, where Bond actually falls in love with Diana Rigg instead of bedding women seemingly out of spite.

Melissa McCarthy’s new comedy vehicle takes dead aim at spy game sexism. Written and directed by Paul Feig, Spy is likely to satisfy McCarthy’s growing legion of fans and points the way to a bright future for the breakout star of Bridesmaids. McCarthy is Susan Cooper, a CIA analyst who spends her days in the high-tech basement of Langley whispering advice and intelligence into the satellite-linked earpiece of agent Bradley Fine (Jude Law). But when Fine is killed in a mission to track down a loose nuke, Susan is sent into the field to track down his murderer Rayna Boyanov (Rose Byrne) and retrieve the weapon before terrorists can get ahold of it.

Melissa McCarthy

No one takes Susan seriously, even though she’s clearly very skilled. Wringing comedy out of people misjudging her because of her sex or looks is like hitting softballs to McCarthy. Feig understands what kind of movie he’s making and keeps her, and her point of view, dead center for the entire story. McCarthy has plenty of people to bounce jokes off of: There’s Law, who is his usual impeccable self; Miranda Hart as Nancy, a fellow analyst who is Susan’s frumpy confidante; and Aldo (Peter Serafinowicz), a lecherous Italian agent. But surprisingly, McCarthy’s best sparring partner is Jason Statham as Rick Ford, a rogue agent miffed that the fat girl got the important assignment instead of him. Statham demonstrates masterful comic timing while sending up the kind of hypermasculine roles he usually gets cast in, suggesting there’s a lot more to him than Hollywood has been able to find a use for.

Spy is often funny, but it is not a well-oiled machine. The movie starts slow, only kicking into gear once McCarthy and Statham start trading barbs at about the half hour mark. Scenes run on way too long, as Feig was seemingly determined to keep every one of McCarthy’s remotely funny improvs in the final cut. There are way too many characters, many of whom seem to think they’re much funnier than they actually are. The plot is loose to the point of incoherence — I kept forgetting what the McGuffin was until the late third act reveal of the missing atom bomb made me go “Oh yeah.”

But McCarthy overcomes all of that, making the sloppy film watchable by sheer force of charisma alone. She can pack more emotion into an exasperated eye roll than most actresses can into an extended speech. I hope one of these days someone will write a Groundhog Day-level script for McCarthy, and she’ll finally get to create the classic her talent promises. But until then, Spy is a pretty agreeable time at the theater.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Annie

In the beginning of this version of Annie, Quvenzhané Wallis, starring as the famous cartoon orphan, gives a presentation to her class about her favorite president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. During the Great Depression, lots of people were poor and very few were rich. It was like today, only without the internet, she explains as her classmates beat light hip-hop rhythms on their desks, Stomp style. But then FDR made all the poor people rich, and everybody was happy.

This is not quite how the history books record it, of course, but I guess family entertainment needs an educational aspect to partially justify its existence, or, in the case of Annie, to justify two hours of product placement.

Annie has the feel of a vanity project for Jay-Z. The hip-hop mogul who had one of his biggest hits in 1998’s “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem),” which samples one of the two songs everyone knows from the 1977 Broadway musical. But poverty must seem like a distant memory to Jay-Z at this point, since his musical output for the past few years has pretty much been songs about how rich he is, and how he wants to get even richer. So as part of his “getting even richer” program, he enlisted fellow super-rich dad hip-hop star Will Smith to co-executive produce this remake of the class-conscious musical for the mobile phone age.

For Wallis, however, the memory of poverty must be much clearer. At age 5, the child of a teacher and truck driver was found at a cattle-call audition by the director of 2012’s Sundance winner Beasts of the Southern Wild, and subsequently became the youngest person ever nominated for a Best Actress Oscar. She was reportedly paid more to play Annie than was spent in total on her film debut.

Cameron Diaz as Miss Hannigan

You may have noticed that I have been writing about money for this entire review. That’s appropriate, since that’s pretty much what Annie is about. As a little orphan, Annie doesn’t have any. Instead of an orphanage, she lives in a foster home/child services scam run by Miss Hannigan (Cameron Diaz, who at least looks like she’s having fun most of the time) with a bevy of other unfortunates. She pines for her parents until one day, while chasing a stray dog she names Sandy, she is saved from certain death by Mr. Will Stacks (Jamie Foxx, who is usually more able to convincingly look like he’s having fun), a cell phone mogul whose Bloomberg-like mayoral bid is floundering. His two campaign handlers, Grace (Rose Byrne) and Guy (Bobby Cannavale) think he needs to look more human to the voters, so he takes Annie to live in his Tony Stark-like penthouse high above New York City, where she charms him and the rest of the city with her wit and spunk.

Wallis remains a compelling screen presence, but for any actor, it’s one thing to do indie realism and quite another thing to do musical theater. She’s game, even when she’s being out danced and out sung by her fellow orphans, and she at least doesn’t embarrass herself like Foxx, who will likely go to his grave remembering the time a director told him to stand still and hold the Purell bottle so the camera can get a nice long shot of the label. Product placement has long been a scourge of Hollywood filmmaking, but Annie is the most egregious offender in recent memory. When a character takes a moment to read off the model number of the Bell helicopter he’s piling into for the big chase scene, it’s clear the balance has tipped from escapist movie musical to extended infomercial. It’s so egregious that the film finds itself compelled to comment on it, with Grace wisecracking to Annie at the clumsy film-within-a-film Twilight parody they attend, “Product placement is the only thing keeping the film industry afloat these days.” Annie is an argument that it’s time to let that kind of filmmaking sink.