Many new titles this week, including an astounding re-creation of a dark history, a black comedy from England and three American films that should have been a lot funnier.
Here’s the list:
RED 2: 2 ½ stars
Turbo: 2 ½
The Hunt: 4
The Act of Killing: 4 ½
Sightseers: 3
Only God Forgives: 3
The Conjuring: 3
R.I.P.D. 2 ½
20 Feet From Stardom: --
RED 2: This is how you mess up a sequel to a surprise hit. You put in more and then more again and feel confident that what you’re creating is even greater fun than the original. So, if Helen Mirren firing a gun was a novelty last time, have her fire more, out of both sides of a car at one point. Have her stunt drive so fast and with so many spinning turns it’s dazzling. Correction. Make that unbelievable. In other words, take everything beyond common sense. Compared to the first, this movie feels contrived. Check out the last vision: John Malkovich with Carmen Miranda fruit on his head, for one example.
Bruce Willis as the ex- CIA guy classified as RED (Retired, Extremely Dangerous), can’t live a quiet life. An internet leak names him as part of an old Cold War black op that hid a nuclear device somewhere in Moscow. He sets out to find it (with the help of Malkovich and Mary-Louise Parker) while both the Americans and the British want him dead.
The Pentagon hires the world’s top contract killer (Korean actor Byung-hun Lee) and MI-6 hires an old friend, Mirren. The Russians fling an ex-lover (Catherine Zeta-Jones) at him. It gets crowded and there’s ne more. Anthony Hopkins, as the man who designed the bomb, has to be sprung from a psychiatric prison and urged to remember. The quest takes them right into the Kremlin, you know that place just across the plaza from a Papa John’s pizza? It’s no more secure than the White House, in the movies at least. There and in the streets of Paris and London, in an Iranian embassy and on an airport runway we get gun battles, crashes and explosions but less coherent fun. 2 ½ out of 5
TURBO: Dreamworks Animation managed to turn an ogre into a sympathetic character (Shrek) but can’t work similar miracles with this snail. It’s just too much of a stretch that he could gain the speed of a race car (after getting doused with nitrous oxide) and compete in the Indy 500 against his hero, French-Canadian ace driver Guy Gagné. The film will delight some kids but bore most parents. It feels like a knock-off of Pixar’s Cars movies and you might do better to wait for their next one, Planes, coming in three weeks.
Turbo, voiced by Ryan Reynolds (he’s in two new movies this week), is a dreamer and while there’s a good message in encouraging kids to follow their dreams, wouldn’t it be better to offer something more attainable? Like not getting splattered by over-ripe tomatoes falling on them? There is better role modeling on display: Turbo avoids getting crushed by a kid riding a Big Wheel and he falls in with a couple of taco-hawking Latino brothers in California and helps revitalize a strip mall. Visually, the film is well made; it just lacks pizzaz and is over-stuffed with celebrity voices. Samuel L. Jackson and Paul Giamatti are fine but you hardly hear Snoop Dog, and do children care that the real Mario Andretti speaks two cameos? (International Village and many suburban theatres) 2 ½ out of 5
THE HUNT: Here’s a gripping, riveting, angry story of a false charge of child abuse that nevertheless destroys a man’s career and turns his community against him. It’s from Denmark’s Thomas Vinterberg, who dealt with abuse before in The Celebration and now shows how innuendo can explode into a mess. A young girl (Annika Wedderkopp) inadvertently says her kindergarten teacher (Mads Mikkelsen) exposed himself to her. The head of the school believes her because children don’t lie and a counselor asks leading questions that only deepen the accusation, even when the girl tries to take it all back.
Mads, who is slow to take it all seriously, is shunned by his friends, banned from the local grocery store and roughed up. The police are called in and he’s arrested. This film grabs you and lays it on pretty thick as it details every step showing exactly how suspicions run wild and meager evidence grows into a net-like trap. Worse, it shows how a herd mentality blocks out reason. Mikkelsen won the best actor award at Cannes for his performance and 5-year old Wedderkopp is absolutely natural as his not quite accuser. This is a very good film. (5th Avenue Cinemas) 4 out of 5
THE ACT OF KILLING: The banality of evil is unveiled to bizarre effect in this astounding documentary. Your jaw will drop as you watch it. You’ll think, “This can’t be real.” But it is. Texan Joshua Oppenheimer went to Indonesia to hear about the slaughter of Communists and ethnic-Chinese that followed an attempted coup back in 1965. Some one million people died. He couldn’t get survivors to talk, they’re still too scared, so he asked some of the perpetrators. They had no qualms; they were happy to talk and demonstrate. A wire pulled hard around a neck works best, apparently. What they did next is pure surrealism: they re-enacted their killings to make a movie.
They’re as enthusiastic as kids putting on a show when they do make up, don costumes (one in drag), stage musical numbers and show off their interrogation and killing techniques. They direct a crowd to show more energy when they chant “Kill them, Kill them”, and when they proudly show the film to their families and young children they receive respect in return. Louts and gangsters back then, heroes today, although one, originally among the most enthusiastic, with 1,000 kills to his credit, comes to view things differently in a traumatic catharsis. The film avoids the politics of the time to focus on universal themes, which prove disturbing. (The VanCity Theatre is showing both a short and a long version. Their website http://www.viff.org/theatre has the details) 4 ½ out of 5
Playing in tandem with …
SIGHTSEERS: This British film is a black comedy, that won’t have you laughing very much but does resonate in this summer travel season. It features the kind of self-absorbed folks you run into now and then, blithely moving along without purpose and causing ill without another thought. Alice Lowe and Steve Oram, a couple of TV actors, wrote it and, under the direction of Dennis Wheatley, star as a couple touring the high spots of northern England, like a pencil museum, Fountains Hall and a tramway museum.
She’s a mousey woman taking a break from her overbearing mum and he, her new boyfriend, imagines he’s a deep thinker and a considerate man. He tries to get a litterbug to pick up after himself and later accidentally backs his camper trailer over him but feels no regret. Other annoying people get pushed off cliffs as the couple open up to be more assertive while remaining thoughtlessly unaware. They banter and argue, laugh and fall deeper in love and the film views them with a mixture of sympathy and condescension. I can’t imagine it’s a true portrait of modern England, as some claim, but it is oddly endearing. (VanCity Theatre) 3 out of 5
ONLY GOD FORGIVES: This film is so languid in pace and so beautiful to the eye that you’ll feel like you’re in a trance much of the way. Some ingested substances may add to the experience and keep the boredom away. The story, set in Bangkok, Thailand, can sure use the help. Ryan Gosling stars and Nicolas Winding Refn directs, (their second collaboration after Drive two years ago) in a tale of another existential loner. This time he’s also opaque. He hardly speaks, preferring to gaze and think and remain passive. He’s tested though when his brother kills a young prostitute, and is killed in turn by her father, and his mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) demands he hunt down the killer. That sets off a cycle of revenge and a slowly-revealed but under-developed oedipal psycho drama.
Local hoods, cops and a particularly vicious semi-retired cop (played with cool efficiency, a sharp sword and interludes of karaoke singing by Vithaya Pansringarm) get involved and the violence spurts and spirals. That got it booed at Cannes but you should key on the oddities in the story, the visuals and the surreal atmosphere as well as Kristin Scott Thomas, more strident and brassy than we’ve ever seen her before. (Rio Theatre) 3 out of 5
THE CONJURING: Another good haunted house movie offering creepy chills, not blood and gore, from people who are getting to be old hands at this. James Wan, the director, made the first Saw movie, but turned away from such torture porn with Insidious two years ago. In that one, Patrick Wilson played a father who moves his family into an old house and encounters demons. In this one, Wilson plays real-life ghost hunter Ed Warren, who with his wife Lorraine (Vera Farmiga), investigated many hauntings including The Amityville Horror and A Haunting in Connecticut.
Here, Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor are newly-moved-in with their five kids when the creaks and thumps start, clocks stop at precisely 3:07 in the morning, and hidden entrances are revealed into a basement and a crawlspace behind a cupboard. The tension builds slowly and potently and whether you believe it or not (apparently a belief in God and the devil is something of a requisite) you’ll recall times when you were nervous about looking under the bed or checking out that sound outside the door. The tingles, scares and startles are nicely modulated, although an amateur exorcism goes a bit over the top. (International Village and suburban theatres) 3 out of 5
R.I.P.D.: Here’s a real timewaster. It’s reasonably entertaining, in a dumb way, but also terribly derivative. The story is a near copy of Men in Black, with cops searching not for space aliens among us, but dead people who keep on being active. The cops are dead too. Hey it gets more strange than that and awfully muddled.
Ryan Reynolds plays a Boston cop who’s killed on the job by his partner (Kevin Bacon) and ends up in sort of a pre-purgatory where Mary-Louise Parker drinks Fresca and recruits him into a special squad. They’re all dead lawmen charged with finding those near-dead down here on earth. His new partner is a Buffalo Bill type played with scenery-chewing relish by Jeff Bridges. He’s an Oscar winner. What’s he doing here? And it gets stranger yet. A sinister plot is revealed drawing on something or other 3,000 years old to bring dead criminals back from a vortex in the sky. It comes from a comic book and is directed with a sprightly pace, cheap-looking special effects and lots of real estate destruction in downtown Boston by Robert Schwentke. He made a hit out of another graphic novel, RED, but passed on the sequel to do this film. Good use of 3-D. (International Village and suburban theatres) 2 ½ out of 5
Also now playing …
20 FEET FROM STARDOM: Not many people read the names of the musicians and singers on the records they listen to but most everybody who’s heard the Rolling Stones’ "Gimme Shelter" has noticed that woman’s voice vibrantly belting out “It’s just a shot away.” That’s Merry Clayton, who along with others, like Claudia Lennear, Judith Hill and Lisa Fischer, finally get some recognition in this documentary. Stars like Sting, Bruce Springsteen and Mick Jagger speak their praises while the film tells their personal stories, few of which are happy. Darlene Love, for instance, suffered the indignity of having other women lip-sync to her voice. Because of a scheduling conflict I haven’t seen the film yet but because I’ve heard so much good about it, I’m ready. (5th Avenue Cinemas)
NOTE: All images are movie stills provided by the producers. They are the exclusive property of their copyright owners.