Tag: Sandra Bullock

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The Lost City

You’ve seen it before and you’ll happily see it again: An intellectual woman (Sandra Bullock) falls for a big-hearted himbo (Channing Tatum).

Last weekend, I was at the Time Warp Drive-In for the screening of the classic Indiana Jones trilogy. Yes, there was lots of stuff to do around town on Saturday night, and I’ve seen Raiders of the Lost Ark hundreds of times, but I just couldn’t resist the rare opportunity to watch a masterpiece of adventure cinema at the drive-in. As Harrison Ford and Alfred Molina skulked through the booby-trapped Peruvian temple, I glanced over to Malco Summer Drive-In’s screen three, where I saw Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum in an overgrown jungle temple, surrounded by snakes, lorded over by a guy in a fedora who looked a lot like Indy’s arch enemy Belloq. The movie was The Lost City, and its existence in 2022 speaks to the enduring influence of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg’s collaboration in the early 1980s.

The dashing archeologist/adventurer Indiana Jones has deep roots in the pulp literature of the early 20th century, where characters like Doc Savage and Allan Quatermain were both scholars and two-fisted men of action who traveled to exotic locales to find treasure and thwart the plans of other well-educated, but evil, Westerners. Lucas encountered these hyper-competent heroes in films like 1937’s King Solomon’s Mines and the adventure serials which ruled the Saturday matinee. You can still see those kinds of heroes get out of unlikely scrapes, most recently in Uncharted.

Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum search for the Crown of Fire in The Lost City.

Almost as soon as Spielberg set the new template for the colonial adventure tale, people started parodying it.

The earliest light ribbing of Indiana Jones was Romancing the Stone, Robert Zemeckis’ 1984 romantic comedy starring Kathleen Turner as Joan Wilder, a romance novelist thrust into an adventure right out of one of her books, and Michael Douglas as a rakish big-game hunter who comes to her rescue. In The Lost City, Sandra Bullock’s Loretta Sage is the direct descendant of Joan Wilder. She’s the author of a highly profitable series of books about extremely sexy hero Dash and his on-again, off-again archeologist love interest Angela Lovemore. Loretta can’t come up with a good end for her latest romantic escapade, in which the couple searches for the legendary Lost City of D, and her publishing company publicist Beth (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) is increasingly agitated about it. When she finally gives up and tacks on a stupid ending, she finds herself thrust into a book tour opposite Alan (Channing Tatum), the hunky model who lends his image to Dash for her book covers.

As with all good rom-coms, we know they’re destined to get together long before they do. Just as the book tour is falling to pieces, Loretta is kidnapped by Abigail Fairfax (Daniel Radcliffe), the embittered scion of a Murdoch-esque publishing fortune who spends his ample free time and disposable income treasure hunting. The mysterious artifact Loretta used as the MacGuffin for her latest novel, the Crown of Fire, is real, and it turns out that, in researching her book, she came closer to discovering its final resting place than anyone in history. Fairfax whisks her away to the island where the crown is allegedly located to help finish his search. Meanwhile, a frantic Beth convinces Alan to contact his old friend Jack Trainer (Brad Pitt), a former Navy Seal who promises to return with Loretta in 48 hours “or your next rescue is free.”

Directed by brothers Aaron and Adam Nee, The Lost City is not breaking any new ground, but it’s a pretty tight little film which does exactly what it sets out to do. It succeeds based mostly on the chemistry between Bullock and Tatum, never missing an opportunity to wedge them into a cramped sleeping bag or confront Bullock with Tatum’s bare bum. It’s a given that the intellectual Loretta will eventually fall for the big-hearted, thick-headed himbo. The supporting cast is all in on the joke. Pitt once again proves he’s a character actor trapped in a leading man’s body. Radcliffe steals scenes as the civilized villain whose luxury MRAP has a mini-bar. Randolph carries her own comic B-plot almost single-handedly. The self-referential script, like its protagonist, is often too smart for its own good. Ultimately, it’s very refreshing to see a lighthearted romantic adventure where the stakes are human-sized. Sure, it’s derivative, but as Radcliffe’s villain says when he knocks Bullock out with chloroform, “It’s a cliché for a reason.”

The Lost City
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Ocean’s 8

What is the appeal of the heist movie? Is it about watching a supremely clever person concoct an elaborate plan, and then reveling in the OCD perfection when all the pieces click into place? Is it about the powerless getting one over on the powerful? Or is it all about the charisma of the criminal mastermind, a way for the audience to harmlessly indulge their need for a leader?

The history of heist pictures goes all the way back to the beginnings of American cinema, and they’ve always been popular. The Great Train Robbery held the record for highest grossing movie from 1903 until Birth of a Nation in 1915. It was also the subject of the first remake in history, when Edwin S. Porter’s original film was redone by Sigmund Lubin and released under the same title in the same year.

The only heist movie that’s been remade almost as often as The Great Train Robbery is Ocean’s 11. The original is a curious artifact: a massive vanity project put on by the Rat Pack as their Las Vegas decadence reached fever pitch. It’s not a great movie. Frank Sinatra is visibly distracted, while Martin is visibly drunk. It’s a bunch of celebrities cynically cashing in on their fame, best enjoyed by fans who are content just to look at their heroes.

Anne Hathaway and Helena Bonham Carter star in writer/director Gary Ross’ Ocean’s 8.

That’s one of the reasons Steven Soderbergh’s 2001 Ocean’s 11 remake was so surprising: It was actually a pretty good movie. Just as the original cemented the Rat Pack as the pre-eminent stars of the early 1960s, so too did Soderbergh’s Ocean’s 11 define the first batch of 21st-century superstars: George Clooney, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, Don Cheadle, Bernie Mac, and Andy Garcia. Julia Roberts was the lone feminine presence to redeem the sausage fest.

Soderbergh took the barely-there plot of trying to rob a bunch of casinos at once and honed it to a razor edge. His editing was tight and cinematography outstanding. The 2001 Ocean’s 11 wasn’t just an object of fan admiration — although it unmistakably was on some level — but unambiguously good filmmaking. It’s trashy fun, but incredibly well executed.

A female driven remake was inevitable in the #MeToo era. The ragtag band of thieves camaraderie translates perfectly into the girl power moment, and high-powered talent agencies would love to see their clients put into the roles that women all over the world would imprint on. In the Sinatra/Clooney slot is Sandra Bullock as Debbie Ocean, the younger sister of Danny Ocean, who, we find out in the opening shots of the film, is dead. Probably.

The film gets off to a good start with Bullock faking sincerity in her parole hearing. She’s got the smooth prattle and irresistible charisma of the Ocean family down pat. Less than a day after being released from her five-year stint in the pen, she’s shoplifted a whole new wardrobe and fraudulently ensconced herself in a luxury hotel. Then, there’s the requisite gathering of the team: Lou (Cate Blanchett), a crooked New York nightclub owner; Amita (Mindy Kaling), a jeweler; Constance (Awkwafina) the pickpocket; a hacker known as Nine Ball (Rihanna); and Tammy (Sarah Paulson), a big time fence hiding out as a suburban mother of two. The plan, which Debbie came up with while in solitary confinement, is to steal a necklace called The Toussaint, valued at $150 million. To steal it, it has to be lured out into the open at the Met Gala, an annual, super ritzy fashion world party thrown by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. To do that, the gang targets Rose Weil (Helena Bonham Carter), a fashion designer drowning in debt, to convince superstar actress Daphne Kluger (Anne Hathaway) to use her clout to convince Cartier to let the necklace out of the vault so she can wear it for the party.

During the scenes inside the simulated Met Gala, Ocean’s 8 functions extremely well as lifestyle porn with a more propulsive plot than Fifty Shades of Grey. The actresses are rarely called upon to do much more than stand around and look cool, so heavy hitters like Blanchett and Paulson are out-cooled by a spliff-smoking Rihanna. In that way, Ocean’s 8 is much more like the 1960 Ocean’s 11 than the 2001 version. Unfortunately, director Gary Ross fundamentally lacks the Soderbergh snap that was on display in last year’s Logan Lucky. But if you’re just in it to look at some of the best actresses in the business pal around for a frothy summer treat, Ocean’s 8 will do just fine.

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Film Features Film/TV

Minions

Let’s start with what Minions gets right: It’s a mercifully short 93 minutes long.

But even at that length (which, in my book is about right for a comedy), it still feels padded. The story, such as it is, is patched together out of a disconnected batch of ideas via rote formula straight out of the screenwriting manual Save The Cat!. If you’ve noticed some startling similarities in Hollywood product in the last few years, it’s because the cult of Blake Snyder’s book, which boasts the subtitle The Last Book On Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need, has become ubiquitous among studio producers. When the victory celebrations of Minions Kevin, Bob, and Stuart (all identically voiced by Despicable Me co-director Pierre-Louis Padang Coffin) are interrupted by a sudden and inexplicable re-emergence of vanquished villain Scarlet Overkill (Sandra Bullock), I groaned audibly in the theater. The “false ending” beat is right out of Save The Cat!, and it’s become one of my biggest pet peeves.

I’m not really spoiling anything by telling you about the ending, because Minions is a prequel to Despicable Me, the sleeper hit of 2010 that starred Steve Carell as a sympathetic supervillain named Gru who is assisted in his plot to steal the moon by a pack of strange, Simpsons-yellow blobs with goggles and overalls. The success of the Minions as a pop-culture icon is a tribute to the power of neoteny, the display of traits associated with babies. With their big, goggled eyes, bulbous heads that double as bodies, and pre-vocal gibberish vocabulary, the Minions are essentially abstracted toddlers. Aiming the character design straight at the audience’s mammalian brain has paid off big time for the studio in the form of stuffed doll sales. The one-joke supporting characters got their own vehicle.

Scarlet Overkill and Minions

The joke pays off best during Minions‘ opening sequence, where the little yellow fellers are given a backstory that reaches back into geologic time. Apparently indestructible and immortal, the Minions served T. Rexes, Neanderthals, and Dracula before being forced into hiding in an arctic cave because they got on Napoleon’s bad side during the retreat from Moscow. When three of them finally emerge in 1968 to look for a new villain to serve, they end up at a supervillian’s convention that looks like a rejected sequence from The Incredibles.

The charms of the Despicable Me franchise lie in its subversion of comic book superhero tropes, but nearly everything it does was done better in the 1990s by Ben Edlund’s The Tick. Minions also borrows heavily from The Venture Bros., and if I were the showrunners, I would sue for the blatant lifting of the character design of Scarlet Overkill from Dr. Girlfriend. But in place of brainy jokes about failed heroes and villains that makes The Venture Bros. consistently one of the best shows on television, Minions offers half-assed Three Stooges re-treads, phoned-in performances, and unimaginative animation.

There are two numbers that sum up Minions: The production budget was $75 million, less than half of what Inside Out cost. But, as an unnamed insider leaked to Ad Age, the promotion budget was a whopping $593 million. If you think you’ve been seeing a lot of Minions lately, that’s why. The advertising medium is the message. The film is just an afterthought.