A Bunch Of Blu Rays & DVDs That Have Been Stacking Up

I haven’t posted as much as I would’ve liked this summer because of two big distracting factors: #1. My wife and I moved
from our house in Raleigh to Clayton (roughly 20 minutes outside of Raleigh),
and that was really exhausting. #2. I’ve had a few health issues over the last
few months including an inflammation and a blood clot – and that’s been pretty
painful.

While I’ve been recovering I’ve been making my way
through a bunch of Blu rays and DVDs that have stacked up in my office over the
last few months. Most of them are from the world of VOD (Video On Demand), and
had either limited or no theatrical release, so you may not have heard of them.
Most of them aren’t very good either, but there were a few halfway watchable ones. Let's take a look at a handful of 'em, shall we?

First up, there’s Philip Martin’s THE FORGER,
starring John Travolta as, yes, a master art forger who makes a shady deal to
get an early release from prison, but in return he must pull off “one last
job.” So it’s a heist movie, and with Christopher Plummer as Travolta’s father,
and Tye Sheridan as Travolta’s dying son both in on the caper, it highly
resembles FAMILY BUSINESS, a less than stellar ‘80s comic thriller that starred Sean Connery,
Dustin Hoffman, and Matthew Broderick in the grandfather-father-son roles. 

Set
in Boston with bad accents to boot, THE FORGER is a competently dull collection
of clichés that’s a good example of how much Travolta’s been treading water in
his film career since, well, probably HAIRSPRAY (his hair was more realistic in
that too). It also resembles FAMILY BUSINESS in that it deserves to be
forgotten.

Another fail of a thriller follows - this one coming from Canada - Atom Egoyan’s THE CAPTIVE starring Ryan Reynolds, Scott Speedman, Rosario Dawson, and Mireille Enos. Reynolds and Enos play a couple whose daughter is kidnapped by a pedophile trafficking ring. Dawson and Speedman play a pair of detectives that are on the case that lasts over 8 years. The more than capable cast try their darnedest, but the material is crazy convoluted, and the score by Mychael Danna overreaches as it annoyingly builds suspenseful strain on top of suspenseful strain only calling attention to how unsuspenseful the whole thing is. The fractured narrative that skips back and forth in time just makes it confusing too. A murky misfire on every level. Next!

Matt Shakman’s CUT BANK is a more inspired thriller
than THE CAPTIVE, but it’s no great shakes either. The directorial debut of
Shakman, who has directed episodes of scores of notable TV shows including Six
Feet Under, The Good Wife, Weeds, House M.D., and It’s Always Sunny in
Philadelphia, it stars Liam Hemsworth as a small town dreamer – dreaming of
getting out of the small town naturally – who accidently captures the murder of
the local mailman (Bruce Dern) on videotape. Hemsworth hopes to use the reward money
offered by the U.S. Postal Service to finally escape with his girlfriend (Teresa
Palmer) from their dead end existence there in Cut Bank, Montana, but, of course,
things aren’t that simple. 

John Malkovich as the town’s sheriff, and Billy Bob
Thornton as Palmer’s father have their suspicions, and a creepy taxidermist who
everybody thought was dead (Michael Stuhlbarg) starts looking into the matter
as well. It twists and turns through a mess of schemes and scams in the
tradition of both the movie and TV show versions of FARGO (Shakman directed two
eps of that too), but it never twists and turns itself into anything but a
watchable throwaway. Shakman should stick to TV.

Henry Hobson’s MAGGIE, another directorial debut, is
one of the few here that got more of a theatrical release (it actually came to
my area), and it’s obviously because of its star, Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s
another zombie apocalypse scenario, with Schwarzenegger as a farmer in the Midwest
taking care of his daughter (Abigail Breslin) who’s been bitten. 

The father struggles
with how to handle the situation as the country doctor (Jodie Moore) tells him
he has three options: take her to quarantine; give her a drug cocktail that
leads to a slow, painful death; or “make it quick.” It largely feels like a
stand-alone episode of The Walking Dead - one of the uneventful ones on the
season set on the farm maybe - but it has a nicely restrained performance by
Schwarzenegger in his uncharacteristic role, there’s a lot of genuine effort by
Breslin in embodying her infected character, and the eerie grey tone is effective.
I got fairly bored in the last half hour, but fans of the genre and of Ahnold
will probably be more into it.

At the beginning of this just under feature length (68 minuntes) documentary a scroll tells us that HATING OBAMA is an attempt to document the pure hate towards President Barack Obama while asking the central question: “Is Obama hated more for his policies or because he’s black?” It’s a fair question, and there’s some interesting chitchat from a bunch of articulate talking heads here, but Marquis Smalls’ doc doesn’t elaborate on anything we didn’t know already. It mainly plays like a greatest hits of the times Obama has been disrespected, touching on such incidents as when Republican House member Joe Wilson yelled “you lie” during the President’s Healthcare speech, with interspersed commentary mostly from supporters who do indeed think there’s racism at play.



There is significant time given to some anti-Obama voices, such as conservative political activist Derrick Grayson and Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson, but it’s telling that at the end writer/director Smalls shares with us his poll of all his interviewees and 82% of them approve of Obama. A doc like this can’t help but be biased, but the thesis needs more work. HATING OBAMA is a watchable, well constructed conversation of a video essay, but it has no real conclusion - it just throws the question back at us at the end.

Finally, there’s Michael Almereyda’s CYMBELINE, which is another one of those gritty modern adaptations of Shakespeare much like Baz Luhrmann’s ROMEO + JULIET, Ralph Fiennes’ CORIOLANUS, and Almereyda’s own HAMLET, as this re-unites the director with that film’s star, Ethan Hawke. The setting is again New York, but this time in the world of urban gang warfare with the ever crusty Ed Harris in the title role of the king of the Briton Motorcycle Club, who are battling the corrupt cops of the Roman Police Department. Hawke plays the villainous, agitating Iachimo, Milla Jovovich plays Harris’s queen, Anton Yelchin is her son, and, of course, there’s a pair of star-crossed lovers - Dakota Johnson (FIFTY SHADES OF GREY) as Harris’s princess daughter and Penn Badgley (Gossip Girl) as her secret commoner husband. 



All the film's dialogue comes from the original text, albeit trimmed down to the essentials, and it’s fun to see folks like John Leguizamo (as Badgley’s servant) put such effort into their recitations. The old school manner of speaking is an amusing anachronism in this Brooklyn crime-lord context, but you really have to pay attention to follow it or it can get pretty confusing - especially with all the bloody, layered plotting. I appreciated several of CYMBELINE’s set pieces, particularly one in which Jovovich sings Dylan’s “Dark Eyes” (much in the manner of Patti Smith’s version), but it’s far from an easy, entertaining viewing. Like his HAMLET, Almereyda’s take on the Bard here is initially an interesting experiment but one that’s hardly essential.

More later...

THE EXPENDABLES 3: The Film Babble Blog Review

Opening today at a multiplex near you:


THE EXPENDABLES 3 (Dir. Patrick Hughes, 2014)

If you don't know the drill by now, it goes like this: Sylvester Stallone assembles a cast of every action movie star ever into a summer blockbuster filled with explosions and fantastically stupid stunts in hopes that every action movie fan ever will go see it.



So far it’s worked - both 2010's THE EXPENDABLES, and its 2012 sequel were huge hits despite largely negative critical reaction.


So here’s the third one, directed by Australian filmmaker Patrick Hughes, whose only previous feature length credit is the little seen thriller RED HILL.

This time, the mercenary group headed by the smug 68-year old Stallone goes up against Mel Gibson as a former Expendable gone rogue. 



The bare bones of the plot-line: On a team mission in Somalia, Crews gets shot in the ass (that’s right) by evil arms trader Gibson, which causes a guilt ridden Stallone to disband his crew, made up of the returning Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, Terry Crews, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Stallone hires new Expendables (Kellan Lutz, Ronda Rousey, Glen Powell, and Victor Ortiz) to help him bring down Gibson, but he captures the new recruits so the old members get back together to go save them.


A less crabby than usual Harrison Ford fills in for Bruce Willis as the gang's CIA contact, a slick Wesley Snipes, and a constantly jibber jabbering Antonio Banderas are on hand as a new “old” Expendables, and Kelsey Grammer, for some reason, appears as a retired mercenary who helps Stallone find the new blood.



There’s way less dumb fun as the second installment, but it’s still much better than the first, although it shares that film’s draggy down times. 



It’s surprising that three writers (Stallone with Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt) are credited for the screenplay, because most of the dialogue has a real make-it-up-as-we-go feel to it especially when it comes to lines like “You were stupid enough to get yourself into this mess! And we're the only ones crazy enough to get you out of it.”


Another favorite bad line, “Morons need friends,” could serve as the movie’s motto, and just about everything that Schwarzenegger says is funny as Hell - especially his callback to PREDATOR: “Get to the Chopper!” 


The climax, taking place in an abandoned building in Bulgaria that Gibson has rigged with C4, is the most successful set-piece sequence, a reward of sorts for being able to get through the excruciating boredom of the bulk of the film.


It, of course, all comes down to hand-to-hand combat between Stallone and Gibson right up to the building being detonated, because what action film doesn’t end with the protagonist and antagonist facing off? You know, like in FACE/OFF?


Except for some jokes made about their elders’ advancing age (“That would be a good plan, if it was still 1985” one quips about Stallone’s proposed strategy), the new Expendables don't make much of an impression, except for Rousy, a UFC Women’s Bantamweight Champion in real life, but that’s really only because she’s the only woman present.


Ford is amusing in his role, showing off his helicopter piloting skills, and I almost believe him when he says at the end that the adventure “was the most fun I've had in years.”


Gibson makes a great scenery chewing adversary, you know, the kind of vicious villain that kills his henchmen if they fail. He certainly makes the most of being the guy that audiences love to hate, even without saying anything racially insensitive.



But this is Stallone’s show, and overall I like how he’s re-branded himself with this franchise. It’s so much more preferable to him putting out Rambo and Rocky sequels for the rest of his life, but it’s disappointing that this sloppily executed old school action exercise doesn’t go for the so-bad-it’s-good gold until the last 15 minutes.



I also hate that it's the first EXPENDABLES that's rated PG-13. I really miss the blood splatter.



More later...