Posted by terrencetodd | Filed under Black Eye, Gigs
Fox19: The Surprising Thrills of the New ‘Road House’ Remake
13 Saturday Apr 2024
13 Saturday Apr 2024
Posted by terrencetodd | Filed under Black Eye, Gigs
26 Tuesday Jan 2021
Sorry that the grade was cut at the very end.
I rated ‘Locked Down’ a solid B, after careful additional consideration.
Posted by terrencetodd | Filed under Black Eye, Gigs
06 Friday Oct 2017
Tom Cruise is the quintessential all-American male. He is the rock-jawed hero with his dark hair and roguish smile, forever running off — thoughtlessly — to “do” something. Cruise is a man of action, first and foremost. He embodies the idea of “shoot first and ask questions later”; it matters little whether or not the characters he plays actually bear arms or not, maybe because Cruise is a weapon unto himself. All of that grinning charm and explosive energy contained in that compact human package are dangerous.
Which is why his latest film, American Made, is a damned near perfect Tom Cruise vehicle — for good and ill. It is the true story of Barry Seal (Cruise), a bored pilot who starts off working for the CIA (after he’s caught smuggling Cuban cigars into the country) but soon finds himself running drugs and guns during the 1980s and getting involved with the Medellin Cartel as well as the U.S. government’s efforts to undermine Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. As presented by Cruise, Seal is a good old boy, eager for a little fun to spice up the grinding routine. He imagines himself to be a hero with the guts for all the glory he believes is headed his way. Let’s be honest: That’s the real American Dream; not all the hokey pride and principle stuff we’re spoon-fed.
And if you think about it, that’s exactly what Cruise has been selling for most of his career. But maybe it’s time that we pump the brakes and consider whether or not we’re down for the breezy star-powered attraction that director Doug Liman and Cruise are peddling here. Liman definitely knows how to exploit the classic appeal of movie stars — think Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in Mr. and Mrs. Smith. But in American Made, he and Cruise have concocted a rollercoaster ride that rockets to the heavens on manufactured thrills, then comes crashing down into a swamp of lies, corruption and political scandal that caused such problems as the escalating drug problem that we refuse to honestly discuss. How very American. Thanks, Tom Cruise. (Continuing in theaters) (R) Grade: C-
Posted by terrencetodd | Filed under Briefs, CityBeat Archives
04 Thursday Aug 2016
From the start, the question has always been, “Who is Jason Bourne?” With the new Jason Bourne film, the fifth in the series and featuring a returning Matt Damon after he wasn’t in 2012’s The Bourne Legacy, it’s a question that should be asked more than ever. It opened last weekend and quickly became the nation’s top-grossing movie, so everyone’s talking about it.
Back in 2002’s original The Bourne Identity, directed by Doug Liman from a script written by Tony Gilroy and William Blake Herron based on Robert Ludlum’s bestselling thriller, that question drove an amnesiac who was riddled with bullet holes and literally fished out of the water to discover that he, in fact, was Jason Bourne, an elite assassin borne in a top-secret CIA covert-ops program.
While attempting to piece together his fragmented psyche, Bourne adjusted to instinctual bursts of lethal muscle memory, reactions that time and again saved his life as he found himself under pursuit by the spy agency, which assumed he had gone rogue.
Damon turned out to be an inspired choice — he always seemed to be an everyman performer, more actor than movie star. Here, he was capable of convincing audiences that he was processing a host of situational variables instantaneously before his explosive reactions. He also radiated an almost Zen-like calm in the quieter beats with his co-star Franka Potente who, as a rootless bystander, gets caught up in the massive manhunt for Bourne.
And so, a franchise was born. With a marketable star and a trilogy of novels forming the narrative foundation, the character offered a stark and relentless counterpoint to the excesses of James Bond. Bond was the spy we loved, despite the parade of faces that had stepped in and out of the role, in a series of dated and ever-more cartoonish movies. In the estimation of critics and even some faithful fans, that iconic brand had come unmoored, especially in light of the new and sleekly improved Bourne model.
The addition of director Paul Greengrass, the helmer of The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, the next two installments in the ongoing saga, further bolstered this notion. Greengrass brought a frenetic visual stamp on the action, complete with shaky handheld camera work and staccato editing, which mimicked the razor-sharp shorthand of the minds of trained professional killers and the handlers seeking to keep track of them.
The Ludlum estate wisely assessed the situation and enlisted Eric Van Lustbader to extend the literary life of Bourne. In the books, Bourne is an alias created by the CIA, a mythic figure to spook players in the espionage game.
Along the way, an operative named David Webb also assumes the identity, which over time becomes more of an actual split personality that takes over in times of stress or duress. The books explore this constant give and take between Webb and Bourne, the latter the killer forever lurking in the shadows.
In some ways, it would have been fascinating to watch Damon engage in this internal struggle. While he has expertly navigated the action heroics as presented onscreen thus far, imagine adding the psychological layers of the Webb-Bourne dynamic, which could have allowed him to venture into The Talented Mr. Ripley territory again.
Instead, the film franchise jumped the track in the Bourne-free iteration, The Bourne Legacy, which focused on an agent, played by Jeremy Renner, from a parallel covert project. Now it has rebounded somewhat with Jason Bourne.
These movies have painted themselves into a corner though. Bourne, the character, knows exactly who he is and how he became the force that he is. So what’s left for him? And for that matter, what about Damon, who is probably not going to want to gear up to play this coiled spring of a character forever?
Maybe it’s time for a new Bourne, one more in line with the Ludlum-Van Lustbader mold (a combined 13 books thus far). Jason Bourne, even moreso than James Bond, can be anyone, so why not take a page from his narrative exploits and use his history to transform him, with a bold new face and a new-old identity?
Posted by terrencetodd | Filed under Black Eye, CityBeat Archives
04 Wednesday Jun 2014
Posted Black Eye
in04 Wednesday Jun 2014
Posted Black Eye, CityBeat Archives
inAt one time, the title for Doug Liman’s new release was All You Need is Kill and it featured a raw 18-year-old military recruit sucked into a time-fractured narrative that had him reliving the same day on what seemed like an endless loop — a D-Day style attack on an alien outpost on the Normandy beachhead that concluded with great losses to the human forces. The recruit died each day, only to wake up at the start of the day with the knowledge of what was going to happen and the ability to learn from the previous day’s mistakes. Incorporating the knowledge only went so far, though. He continued to die and come back, rebooted into the scenario.
It was a videogame, one of those first-person-shooter players with an ever-expanding arsenal of tech and impossible moves that you would learn because you had hacked into the game’s code thanks to the constant dying and returning. You can see where this premise would have intrigued Hollywood executives with dreams of tapping into the gamer community.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the multiplex.
Liman (Mr. & Mrs. Smith and The Bourne Identity) scrapped that perspective, focusing on a more familiar, albeit loopier, sci-fi action adventure that feels, on the surface, like a cross between Groundhog Day and Starship Troopers. Upon closer inspection, Edge of Tomorrow — the rebooted version of All You Need is Kill — recalls more independent-minded fare like Duncan Jones’s Source Code with Jake Gyllenhaal or Rian Johnson’s Looper with Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
Hanging on the precarious Edge now is an older and far more reluctant officer named William Cage (Tom Cruise) with zero battlefield experience; Cage is a cagey marketing pro who used his ROTC service to finagle his Major rank.
Assigned, so he believes, to provide behind the scenes promotional support before the upcoming beach-storming offensive, Cage runs afoul of General Brigham (Brendan Gleeson), the no-nonsense commander of the human forces in Europe, and winds up demoted. Now he’s one day away from what will be a colossal ambush and slaughter, but somehow on the battlefield Cage lives long enough to take out an alien fighter. And just as he succumbs to a deathblow, he miraculously wakes up at the exact moment when he finds out he’s been demoted.
And in Groundhog Day/Source Code fashion, Cage replays the daily events in truly spectacular detail, inevitably leading to his death somewhere along the line, but the seemingly endless loop allows him to learn from his mistakes, offering the slight possibility for him to develop a plan to halt the alien incursion. A chance encounter with a glorious Valkyrie named Rita (Emily Blunt) teases him with the knowledge that he’s not the only human who has experienced this time-displacement issue. So Rita and Cage, with able assistance from Dr. Carter (Noah Taylor), another time-looped war-gamer, embark on a clever and rather humorous series of repeated adventures that tend to feature questions like, “We’ve had this conversation before, haven’t we?”
Plus, there’s the delicious joke for audiences who are not Tom Cruise fans; Edge provides the opportunity to see him die repeatedly. Rita, a warrior in the James Cameron Ripley (Alien)/Sarah Connor (Terminator) line, endeavors to train Cage and to transform him into the perfect weapon in this war. This requires trial and error — lots of trial and error, meaning he dies fighting training bots, aliens on the battlefield, and just as often at the hands of Rita who has no problem putting a bullet in his head in order to start things over.
What naturally occurs, though, is a bonding, thanks to the repeated exchanges and interplay between the two (and to some extent, the larger cast of characters like Bill Paxton’s Master Sergeant Farrell in the unit Cage gets assigned to). This is where Edge of Tomorrow shines and hits its target. We come to see Cage as more than a mere gamer, eager and intent on beating a score; he’s a real character who evolves — from a would-be cowardly dodger to a cunning fighter and tactician — before our eyes. We never learn anything more about who he was before he landed in Europe, but we can imagine that he was a smooth talker with no meaningful connections back home. Yet Cage, through his interactions with others, develops a satisfyingly human backstory.
Liman subverts expectations for what a summer blockbuster is supposed to provide us, sneakily remaking a sci-fi action movie into a character drama with more than a few genuine laughs. Sounds almost indie and edgy, right? (PG-13) Grade: A (tt stern-enzi)
09 Wednesday Apr 2014
Comparing the Supreme Identities of Captain America and Jason Bourne
Captain America: The Winter Bourne
17 Wednesday Nov 2010
Posted Black Eye, CityBeat Archives
inTags
Walking out of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the film that set off the Brangelina phenomenon, I felt like the lone voice in the audience screaming for everything that was missing in that overly explosive affair.
The movie exuded too much haughtiness, relied far too much on shocking punches and double-barreled cheap shots and simply lacked the decency to allow any of the performers to develop a sense of character in their, you know, characters. It was Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw for the new media age, which meant the business was all about the behind-the-scenes show, the tacky and tawdry revelations of infidelity, the Oscar-winning black widow stealing the hunk away from America’s best friend.
But the real story, the one lost in all of the drama, was about Doug Liman — the director behind Swingers, Go and the first installment of the Jason Bourne franchise, The Bourne Identity, who had already displayed a real penchant for fast-and-furious filmmaking that also flashed a surprising degree of smarts through a willingness to play with fractured narratives and exposing the human emotion lurking beneath his thrilling heroics. I wanted less of the explosives and more of the banter, the potential he teased us with in those earlier films.
While it might have been cool to watch Brad and Angelina set their mega-caliber sights on each other and pummel their pretty faces into beautifully chiseled sculptures ready to cast in Planet Hollywood’s version of Mount Rushmore, who wouldn’t have enjoyed a few quieter moments of Aaron Sorkin-styled verbal foreplay, biting retorts that spoke far more directly above their feelings — the simmering love-hate-love brewing just below the surface?
Well, Liman gets a second chance with Fair Game, and the stakes are actually higher than they were with Mr.
& Mrs. Smith because this one is based on the true story of Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts), a CIA operative outed by the Bush administration after her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson (Sean Penn), dared to call the Bush administration out for misquoting facts Wilson procured from an information-gathering mission to suss out whether or not Iraq was fast-tracking the development of a weapon of mass destruction.
Liman uses all of the techniques we’ve come to expect of contemporary thrillers —the restless hand-held camera, dialogue bleeding into scenes and the ever-looming threat of violence and torture to obtain objectives — but we know this time that, at least at this stage in the historic re-enactments, they are deployed to alert us to the fact that Liman and his story are searching feverishly for the truth, not some explosive moment of glory or cheap heroics.
Once the fix is in and the administration has released the identity of Plame to the media in retaliation for Wilson’s New York Times op-ed piece that exposes the false claims that became the excuse to drive the war machine, the couple finds themselves in the uncomfortable position of keeping secrets from one another as they attempt, in their own fashions, to deal with the situation. In these moments, Game recalls a smarter version of the Smith story. Plame and Wilson are fighting the same battle, in possession of the same truth, but are driven apart by suspicion and their own motives.
Watts and Penn don’t beat us over the head with grandstanding displays because Liman understands that this time we’re not here just for the Hollywood beats. Liman ratchets up the movement, or the sense of it, to create narrative tension in a story we know and relate to more as a piece of reported news, probably from one end of the political spectrum or the other, which means we know more about the opinions of the media commentators than the real truth.
Interestingly, though, it is not the job of Fair Game to present the truth either, and this is exactly what Liman gets right: The film lets us know that the truth is out there, still largely unknown, and it is up to us to find it for ourselves. And, thankfully, no other drama gets in the way this time. Grade: A- (tt stern-enzi)
17 Wednesday Nov 2010
Posted Black Eye, CityPaper Archives
inTags
Walking out of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the film that set off the Brangelina phenomenon, I felt like the lone voice in the audience screaming for everything that was missing in that overly explosive affair. The movie exuded too much haughtiness, relied far too much on shocking punches and double-barreled cheap shots. It simply lacked the decency to allow any of the performers to develop a sense of character in their, you know, characters. It was Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw for the new media age, which meant the business was all about the behind the scenes show – the tacky and tawdry revelations of infidelity, the Oscar-winning black widow stealing the hunk away from America’s best friend.
But the real story, the one lost in all of the drama was about Doug Liman, the director behind Go and the first installment of the Jason Bourne franchise (The Bourne Identity). Liman had already displayed a real penchant for fast and furious filmmaking that also flashed a surprising degree of smarts through a willingness to play with fractured narratives and exposing the human emotion lurking beneath his thrilling heroics. I wanted less of the explosives and more of the banter – the potential he teased us with in those earlier films. While it might have been cool to watch Brad and Angelina set their mega-caliber sights on each other and pummel their pretty faces into beautifully chiseled sculptures ready to cast in Planet Hollywood’s version of Mount Rushmore, who wouldn’t have enjoyed a few quieter moments of Aaron Sorkin-styled verbal foreplay? A few more biting retorts that spoke far more directly about their feelings – the simmering love-hate-love brewing just below the surface?
Well, Liman got a second chance and in Fair Game, the stakes are actually higher than they were with Mr. & Mrs. Smith because this Game is based on the true story of Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts). Plame was a CIA operative outed by the Bush administration after her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson (Sean Penn), dared to call the administration out for misquoting facts he gathered from an information-gathering mission to suss out whether or not Iraq was fast-tracking the development of a weapon of mass destruction.
Liman uses all of the techniques we’ve come to expect from contemporary thrillers – the restless hand-held camera, dialogue bleeding into scenes, and the ever-looming threat of violence and torture to obtain objectives. But we know this time that, at least at this stage in the historic re-enactments, they are deployed to alert us to the fact that Liman and his story are searching feverishly for the truth, not some explosive moment of glory or cheap heroics.
He ratchets up the movement, or the sense of it, to create narrative tension in a story we know and relate to more as a piece of reported news, probably from one end of the political spectrum or the other, which means we know more about the opinions of the media commentators than the real truth. Interestingly though, it is not the job of Fair Game to present the truth either, rather, and this is exactly what Liman gets right. The film lets us know that the truth is out there, still largely unknown, and it is up to us to find it for ourselves. And thankfully no other drama gets in the way this time. (tt stern-enzi)