Will Ferrell has made some good ones, like Anchorman and Talladega Nights. Get Hard is not an equal. Better to check out John Boorman’s new one, a Hungarian animal rebellion or a creepy teen horror.
Here’s the list:
Get Hard: 1 ½ stars
Queen & Country: 4
White God: 3 ½
It Follows: 4
Boychoir: 3
The Riot Club: 3
October Gale: 2 ½
GET HARD: Get away, I’d say. Will Ferrell is back in one of his worst movies ever. Not only is it offensive in many parts, but there are long stretches with nothing funny going on. Not even the low-class humor these films traffick in. It’s deadly for a comedy when an audience is silent for so much of the time. Only Kevin Hart and his combination of manic energy and sincerity manages to put some life into the tale.
Ferrell plays a hedge fund manager sentenced to prison but given 30 days to clear up his affairs. He turns to Hart, the guy who washes his car, for lessons on how to toughen up for San Quentin. He reasons that since Hart is black, there’s a one-in-three chance he’s been to prison. His explanation invoking three pieces of pizza falls completely flat and just portrays him as a complete doofus which the film tries to exploit for laughs. It works a few times. Meanwhile, there’s a clever take on race and class relations wanting to get out here. It doesn’t. The comments are cheap, obvious, crass and homophobic. Scenes with blacks in the hood, racist bikers and sniggering Latino gardeners don’t help either. (Scotiabank and suburban theatres) 1 ½ out of 5
QUEEN & COUNTRY: Hope and Glory from 1987 is probably John Boorman’s most popular film. Now, 28 years later, he’s made a sequel and great for him. This one is funny, at times moving and extremely well-acted. Most of the time it’s a service comedy, a genre that’s rare these days but used to be churned out often on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s also about one young man’s impossible infatuation with a woman from a class way above his.
Bill Rohan, who was a boy during the London Blitz in the first film, is now 18-years old, conscripted into the army to be sent to fight in Korea and played by Callum Turner. He’s best friends with Percy Hapgood (Caleb Landry Jones) a prankster who can’t stand their snooty officers (David Thewlis, Richard E. Grant, and others) or the assignment they’ve been given: teaching typing. They steal the regimental clock in protest. Grant fumes, Thewlis frets and various familiar British military characters have their say. There’s a priceless court martial scene. Very entertaining stuff. The love story is sprinkled in among the fun and leaves a bittersweet residue just as Queen Elizabeth’s coronation is on TV. “They’re all Germans,” one character rants about the royals and Bill calls Korea an “immoral war.” Boorman’s eye is sharp as ever invoking that time. (International Village) 4 out of 5
WHITE GOD: The basic story outline—dog is abandoned, girl searches for him, he tries to find his way home—may have you thinking The Littlest Hobo, The Incredible Journey or other nice, uplifting fare. Not so. This one is from Hungary and it gets dark and cruel and turns into something like the recent Planet of the Apes movies. Budapest is overrun by a full-scale dog rebellion. We see exactly what brings it about.
13-year-old Lili is parked with her divorced father for the summer while her mother goes travelling. Dad is a morose former professor now working as a meat inspector and no fan of Lili’s dog, a mutt named Hagen. He leaves him at the side of the road and for the rest of the movie dog and owner are trying to find each other. Hagen is captured, drugged and corrupted for a dog fighting ring. These scenes, especially the fighting, are hard to watch. He’s captured by dog catchers but avoids a close call at the pound by leading a mass escape. Hundreds rampage through the streets, overrun a band practice and bring on martial law. The director says it’s a parable about marginalized people. I see it more as a revenge of abused animals. Either way, its an exciting film with remarkably well-trained dogs putting on a show. The title may be a play on Sam Fuller’s infamous film, White Dog. (VanCity Theatre) 3 ½ out of 5
IT FOLLOWS: What a treat. A horror film that doesn’t rely on blood and gore to stir up its scares. Traditional devices like atmosphere and mood bring on these intense feelings of dread and unease. They don’t nauseate; they entertain in this low-budget but expertly-crafted chiller by David Robert Mitchell, a director whose name is new to me. The film, made in Michigan, was one of the most talked about at Cannes.
The cast are mostly unknown, although Maika Monroe in the lead won’t be for long. She plays a teen who has a sexual encounter and then can’t shake the feeling she’s being followed. The guy she was with explains it like this: he was infected by some demonic force that he could only shake by passing it along. He suggests she do the same by sleeping with someone as soon as possible. If not, it will follow forever and often appear to her as a friend or loved one. She can’t trust anyone. We never get a clear picture of the force except as an allusion to sexually-transmitted disease. But we get the results in her desperate search for answers. Strongly unsettling—we used to call it spine-tingling--and beautifully presented in widescreen visual compositions. (VanCity Theatre and SilverCity Metropolis) 4 out of 5
BOYCHOIR: Fans of choral music and ensembles like The Vienna Boys Choir will like this one. There’s quite some music performed in this drama set at a famous New Jersey school called American Boychoir. It’s directed by Quebec’s François Girard, known for The Red Violin of 16 years ago and for staging operas. He has brought a fairly standard story alive with the music. A problem boy is sent to the private school where a strict teacher (Dustin Hoffman) implores him to stop wasting his talent-his angelic soprano voice- and the school head (Kathy Bates) has to eventually rule whether he should be expelled.
Along the way we learn his personal story (absent father, mother dies in a car crash, he’s surly and disrespectful.) And we get an environment much like those boarding schools we used to see in English movies. The boy is an outsider to some of the snobs there and he has to fight back. Newcomer Garrett Wareing is endearing as the youth, even in his bad-boy times. We get to see and hear a great deal of rehearsing, the teaching methods and the performing of great choral works, culminating in The Messiah. This would be fine family film around Christmas time. No mention at all of a scandal that made the news at the school. The film is too nice for that. (5th Avenue) 3 out of 5
THE RIOT CLUB: Get your blood boiling with this potent look at entitlement among the rich. Watch out though. It gets more and more mean-spirited as it goes and becomes uncomfortable. What it shows is hardly new; it’s just extreme.
For most of the film, the young rich men at Oxford University go about their status conscious ways. Among them, history students Sam Claflin (The Hunger Games) and Max Irons (son of Jeremy) , and Douglas Booth (the movies’ most recent Romeo). Their burning ambition: to be accepted into The Riot Club, an ancient society dedicated to binge drinking and hedonism. It’s loosely based on the real Bullingdon Club, which has connections to the Conservative Party in England and, in the play this story comes from, is meant as an attack on privilege and the power of money. The attack gets vicious as the bright young things hold their annual dinner party at a country pub, trash the room, anger the other guests, bring in a prostitute (and then a girlfriend) for some cruel humiliation and blithely pay off the pub owners as if they did nothing wrong. It’s sharply visualized, if you need to actually see it happening. (5th Avenue) 3 out of 5
OCTOBER GALE: Here’s a thriller with few thrills, little tension and an under-developed story. That’s not all there’s to it, but those faults upstage the good elements. This is the latest collaboration of Toronto director Ruba Nadda and American actor Patricia Clarkson, after Cairo Time five years ago. Clarkson plays a Toronto doctor who goes to clear out her cottage on a picturesque lake where her husband (Calum Keith Rennie) died in a storm a year before. She partially blames herself and has memory flashes of their good times together. Serenity, 20 minutes of it, is broken when a man (Scott Speedman) arrives at the dock bleeding with a bullet in his shoulder.
She treats the wound and as he recovers they trade their backstories. Those scenes work, up to a point. But they don’t develop long enough to bring the two together; not to justify the kiss he attempts or the film’s ultimate resolution. And with another storm on the way, his pursuer shows up still bent on killing him. As played by Tim Roth, he’s oddly philosophical but adds a needed spark-- for a time. (International Village) 2 ½ out of 5