ParsingHaus
Joined May 2015
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ParsingHaus's rating
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ParsingHaus's rating
Mysteries abound on our planet. Why did Homo sapiens prevail over Homo neanderthalensis? Who will decode the Zodiac letters? Why is Kate McKinnon such total comedic catnip? And now, thanks to Tom Cruise, we have another: Why in creation is Jack Reacher: Never Go Back showing in IMAX?
To actually shoot a film in IMAX isn't just some eh-why-not decision -- it requires bulky and expensive cameras, it costs a lot of money, and there aren't a whole lot of screens around to show it. This is why hardly anyone does it. (Christopher Nolan used it in Interstellar, and The Dark Knight Rises also had a few flagship scenes; JJ Abrams and Zack Snyder have dabbled as well. Clint Eastwood's Sully is notable for being arguably the first major motion picture shot almost entirely on IMAX cameras.)
But there are also IMAX pretenders, shot on regular film but projected onto the giant screen regardless. Star Wars Episode III is one. Having just watched the advance screening of Cruise's Jack Reacher sequel in IMAX, it sure looks to be another.
And this is strange, because Jack Reacher is about the last film I'd expect to merit the ten-story treatment. It has no special effects to speak of; no sweeping expanses or shiny alien worlds or majestic spaceflight or men in capes swinging from rooftops.
The original didn't, either. I liked the original Jack Reacher film, the way I might like finding a classic boombox at a garage sale or dropping an LS1 into a V70. Underpromoted and under-appreciated, it was a tidy, gritty, old fashioned and workmanlike little picture that punched considerably above its weight, a solid genre piece in a hard-nosed genre we don't see much of anymore.
This sequel, though, falls short.
Cruise reprises his role as reserved tough-guy Reacher, a modern-day drifter with a military police resume, savage street-fighting take-downs, and a deep respect for the uniform. His itinerant existence is getting over the top here -- he's traded the 1970 Chevelle of last time for hitchhiking around with only the clothes on his back and thirty bucks in his pocket -- but he's still, somehow, not only surviving but helping MPs solve unspecified crimes on federal land (?). He takes a shine to Major Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders) based solely on her comely phone voice (...) and buys a bus ticket to DC to take her out to dinner (not weird at all). He arrives to find that she's been stripped of her command and tossed in the brig, and a mystery is brewing -- involving arms in Afghanistan, Blackwater-esque security firms, government intrigue, and a possible teenage daughter Reacher never knew he had (Danika Yarosh). Reacher sets out to get to the bottom of all this, thus beginning a -- well, the kind of movie your dad would watch, and probably will.
The lion's share of the film involves Reacher, Turner, and the maybe-daughter fighting with people, running from people, or hiding out in hotels. Director Edward Zwick makes much of every drawn out foot chase, fistfight, and taunting phone call from the villain -- who, surprise of surprises, is a nonspecific stubble-faced ex-special forces crony who lacks even so much as a name.
Strip away the seventies-style action (they're coming, run!) and the one-beat plot, and you're left with Reacher being an off-grid know-it-all hard-butt, and Cobie doing her level best to inject some modernity into the exercise. (She has a brief scene where she complains about having fought sexism her entire career -- but that message didn't seem to reach the writers, who in the end still relegated her safely to a back up role.) The maybe-daughter looks something like Anna Paquin and is mildly petulant but never really sympathetic, and so there's not much for Reacher to do but deliver brutal and unrealistic one-hit take-downs to a series of "ex-military" thugs he finds in various spots (chiefly downtown DC and New Orleans -- hardly the most inspiring global locations.)
Abundant cell phones aside, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back belongs in another era. It plays like a flip-book of filmgoing memories, the kind of film where characters slink away unnoticed from a shooting scene, disappearing into a crowd; where the good guys spend the whole movie running from the law but all is forgiven as soon as the real bad guy is revealed. A lot of this strains believability, especially today. I mean, Reacher can savagely beat two men in a crowded plane without raising any suspicion whatsoever? Come on -- once the cabin door closes you can't even play Words With Friends without being tossed onto the tarmac and probably tazed.
But perhaps that's the appeal. In a world of senseless death and "active shooters" -- a world where Baltimore street criminals routinely pump dozens of rounds into each and every victim -- it's sad to say it's refreshing to watch grizzled, macho war machines pound one other in the face for good, honest, salute-the-flag reasons. If only that were our world -- and if only Never Go Back did it quite so well as the original.
Haus Verdict: In search of an old-fashioned, low-tech little potboiler that'll make you long for the time when fists were enough? See the first one.
Jack Reacher: Never Go Back opens Friday October 21.
To actually shoot a film in IMAX isn't just some eh-why-not decision -- it requires bulky and expensive cameras, it costs a lot of money, and there aren't a whole lot of screens around to show it. This is why hardly anyone does it. (Christopher Nolan used it in Interstellar, and The Dark Knight Rises also had a few flagship scenes; JJ Abrams and Zack Snyder have dabbled as well. Clint Eastwood's Sully is notable for being arguably the first major motion picture shot almost entirely on IMAX cameras.)
But there are also IMAX pretenders, shot on regular film but projected onto the giant screen regardless. Star Wars Episode III is one. Having just watched the advance screening of Cruise's Jack Reacher sequel in IMAX, it sure looks to be another.
And this is strange, because Jack Reacher is about the last film I'd expect to merit the ten-story treatment. It has no special effects to speak of; no sweeping expanses or shiny alien worlds or majestic spaceflight or men in capes swinging from rooftops.
The original didn't, either. I liked the original Jack Reacher film, the way I might like finding a classic boombox at a garage sale or dropping an LS1 into a V70. Underpromoted and under-appreciated, it was a tidy, gritty, old fashioned and workmanlike little picture that punched considerably above its weight, a solid genre piece in a hard-nosed genre we don't see much of anymore.
This sequel, though, falls short.
Cruise reprises his role as reserved tough-guy Reacher, a modern-day drifter with a military police resume, savage street-fighting take-downs, and a deep respect for the uniform. His itinerant existence is getting over the top here -- he's traded the 1970 Chevelle of last time for hitchhiking around with only the clothes on his back and thirty bucks in his pocket -- but he's still, somehow, not only surviving but helping MPs solve unspecified crimes on federal land (?). He takes a shine to Major Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders) based solely on her comely phone voice (...) and buys a bus ticket to DC to take her out to dinner (not weird at all). He arrives to find that she's been stripped of her command and tossed in the brig, and a mystery is brewing -- involving arms in Afghanistan, Blackwater-esque security firms, government intrigue, and a possible teenage daughter Reacher never knew he had (Danika Yarosh). Reacher sets out to get to the bottom of all this, thus beginning a -- well, the kind of movie your dad would watch, and probably will.
The lion's share of the film involves Reacher, Turner, and the maybe-daughter fighting with people, running from people, or hiding out in hotels. Director Edward Zwick makes much of every drawn out foot chase, fistfight, and taunting phone call from the villain -- who, surprise of surprises, is a nonspecific stubble-faced ex-special forces crony who lacks even so much as a name.
Strip away the seventies-style action (they're coming, run!) and the one-beat plot, and you're left with Reacher being an off-grid know-it-all hard-butt, and Cobie doing her level best to inject some modernity into the exercise. (She has a brief scene where she complains about having fought sexism her entire career -- but that message didn't seem to reach the writers, who in the end still relegated her safely to a back up role.) The maybe-daughter looks something like Anna Paquin and is mildly petulant but never really sympathetic, and so there's not much for Reacher to do but deliver brutal and unrealistic one-hit take-downs to a series of "ex-military" thugs he finds in various spots (chiefly downtown DC and New Orleans -- hardly the most inspiring global locations.)
Abundant cell phones aside, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back belongs in another era. It plays like a flip-book of filmgoing memories, the kind of film where characters slink away unnoticed from a shooting scene, disappearing into a crowd; where the good guys spend the whole movie running from the law but all is forgiven as soon as the real bad guy is revealed. A lot of this strains believability, especially today. I mean, Reacher can savagely beat two men in a crowded plane without raising any suspicion whatsoever? Come on -- once the cabin door closes you can't even play Words With Friends without being tossed onto the tarmac and probably tazed.
But perhaps that's the appeal. In a world of senseless death and "active shooters" -- a world where Baltimore street criminals routinely pump dozens of rounds into each and every victim -- it's sad to say it's refreshing to watch grizzled, macho war machines pound one other in the face for good, honest, salute-the-flag reasons. If only that were our world -- and if only Never Go Back did it quite so well as the original.
Haus Verdict: In search of an old-fashioned, low-tech little potboiler that'll make you long for the time when fists were enough? See the first one.
Jack Reacher: Never Go Back opens Friday October 21.
Ding-a-ling, and take your seats children because it's time for Oscar-bait semi-thinky semi-sleazy undercover period pieces! You know the type. Some high-wattage actors get all mustached, gold-chained, and spread-collared and take on the eighties. And that's pretty much what happens here. With Bryan Cranston!
It's not a great film, but it's a solid genre base hit and entertaining, if a tad too drawn out.
On the tail of the successful series Narcos comes The Infiltrator, the story of a slightly less dramatic undercover sting that chased the money, not the coke. Bryan Cranston plays Robert Mazur, a government agent who goes deep as Bob Musella, a mob- connected money launderer. Teaming up with Emir Abreau (John Leguizamo) and his cover-fiancé Kathy Ertz (Diane Kruger), Mazur brokers some cash-washing deals between the Medellin folks and a big investment bank, and we follow the trail as it leads deeper in and higher up.
The story is based on real-life Mazur's equally real-life book, and frankly isn't terribly interesting (as, to be fair, I suspect many other true bust tales probably are not). And the fact that real-life Mazur wrote the real-life book also presumably accounts for the ultra-pure, good-guy undergirding of Cranston's protagonist in the film. Whitewash? So be it. The victors write the history, and all that.
Director Brad Furman (The Lincoln Lawyer) tries to spice things up with a dusting of sexual tension between Mazur and his cover girl (will they or won't they?); there's also a feely bromance with Benjamin Bratt, who plays the gleaming, wholesome gentleman of the drug trade. Mazur and Ertz form earnest friendships with Bratt and his family, hinting that when the time comes it might be hard for Mazur to sell his pals down the river.
Except it's not. Said friendships feel too forced and phony, and Bratt's genteel drug lord character strains credibility -- he's just too polite and wholesome and nice. There's no real doubt that goodie-goodie Cranston will do the right thing in the end.
But that doesn't make The Infiltrator a bad movie. For starters, Cranston is a really terrific actor. Even in a throwaway opening vignette with a bowling alley waitress, his microexpressions just seep realism. His performance here is fantastic, and it's worth watching this movie just for him. The supporting cast is earnest and hardworking and generally believable. There also are some pretty locations, great fashions, flamboyant characters, classic meanies, and crisp shots. It all comes together quite nicely.
And then it stays there. The Infiltrator falls short (long?) in its pacing, running probably a half hour past its bedtime. It's perhaps hard to fault Furman for this, given that he was directing from a script his own mother wrote (no joke -- must be a first?). Happy Mother's Day, I left your chaff in my picture! Either way, you might find yourself wondering when time's up.
All told, The Infiltrator might not be best of breed, but it's engaging, atmospheric, nicely shot, and offers an interesting take on the 80s drug war -- one with fewer Uzis and drug mules and more middle eastern bankers. Relax and enjoy.
It's not a great film, but it's a solid genre base hit and entertaining, if a tad too drawn out.
On the tail of the successful series Narcos comes The Infiltrator, the story of a slightly less dramatic undercover sting that chased the money, not the coke. Bryan Cranston plays Robert Mazur, a government agent who goes deep as Bob Musella, a mob- connected money launderer. Teaming up with Emir Abreau (John Leguizamo) and his cover-fiancé Kathy Ertz (Diane Kruger), Mazur brokers some cash-washing deals between the Medellin folks and a big investment bank, and we follow the trail as it leads deeper in and higher up.
The story is based on real-life Mazur's equally real-life book, and frankly isn't terribly interesting (as, to be fair, I suspect many other true bust tales probably are not). And the fact that real-life Mazur wrote the real-life book also presumably accounts for the ultra-pure, good-guy undergirding of Cranston's protagonist in the film. Whitewash? So be it. The victors write the history, and all that.
Director Brad Furman (The Lincoln Lawyer) tries to spice things up with a dusting of sexual tension between Mazur and his cover girl (will they or won't they?); there's also a feely bromance with Benjamin Bratt, who plays the gleaming, wholesome gentleman of the drug trade. Mazur and Ertz form earnest friendships with Bratt and his family, hinting that when the time comes it might be hard for Mazur to sell his pals down the river.
Except it's not. Said friendships feel too forced and phony, and Bratt's genteel drug lord character strains credibility -- he's just too polite and wholesome and nice. There's no real doubt that goodie-goodie Cranston will do the right thing in the end.
But that doesn't make The Infiltrator a bad movie. For starters, Cranston is a really terrific actor. Even in a throwaway opening vignette with a bowling alley waitress, his microexpressions just seep realism. His performance here is fantastic, and it's worth watching this movie just for him. The supporting cast is earnest and hardworking and generally believable. There also are some pretty locations, great fashions, flamboyant characters, classic meanies, and crisp shots. It all comes together quite nicely.
And then it stays there. The Infiltrator falls short (long?) in its pacing, running probably a half hour past its bedtime. It's perhaps hard to fault Furman for this, given that he was directing from a script his own mother wrote (no joke -- must be a first?). Happy Mother's Day, I left your chaff in my picture! Either way, you might find yourself wondering when time's up.
All told, The Infiltrator might not be best of breed, but it's engaging, atmospheric, nicely shot, and offers an interesting take on the 80s drug war -- one with fewer Uzis and drug mules and more middle eastern bankers. Relax and enjoy.
There's a definite Apatow-type genre comedy making the rounds these days, consisting of semi-improvised dirty talk by young ne'er do wells who suddenly get super wholesome around act three. This is one of those, and it's a decent example of the breed — which is to say, not particularly intelligent and almost entirely dependent on (a) its cast and (b) the ability of said cast to pull off funny one liners.
Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates isn't a good movie, but it does get you from (a) to (b). (Like that?)
The titular Stangle brothers (Dave, played by Zac Efron, and Mike, Adam Devine) are thinly-sketched liquor salesmen with a serious failure to launch; while they bounce around all Animal House style, their parents lament the brothers' (utterly contrived) history of ruining family gatherings (by generally being manic and partying too hard). The parents implore the duo to stop chasing women and to find real, actual dates for their dear little sister's wedding.
Their Craigslist ad soon goes viral, landing them a TV spot and the attention of an even bigger pair of screw ups, freshly unemployed drunks Tatiana and Alice, played by Aubrey Plaza and Anna Kendrick. The wily ladies hatch a scheme to clean themselves up, land the guys, and score a free trip to Hawai'i. Of course, they do.
The wedding gets royally boned, but that's not particularly funny or interesting. People also get sporadically wholesome, and ditto on that. These characters are thin and none has much of an arc save for bouncing around like pinballs between wholly artificial deep reveals. If it weren't for Plaza's foul-mouthed quips over sly, knowing glances, Kendrick's actually-kind-of-decent-after-all damaged damsel, Devine's babyface rants, and Efron's pure comedic charisma, this film would founder. But every now and then, the guys — and it is generally the guys, I think — hit one out of the park. There's some legitimately funny stuff in here. (It also has low points, like the cringe-worthy, 2010-era Adam Sandler-style cutting of the ATV crash scene. Feels like you're watching a cheap B-movie comedy.) Upshot, it's uneven.
The supporting cast is decent here. I doubt you'll rush to the marquee to see Stephen Root, but he's good as the frustrated dad; Sugar Lyn Beard (now there's a name) does more with the little sister bridal role than she probably needs to, hamming it up to good effect. I enjoyed the choice of Sam Richardson as her fiancé, and similarly that the filmmakers made precisely no mention of the fact that the pending marriage was interracial. (But before you ring the bell and declare social justice achieved, consider the underlying premise of women as simple arm candy to soothe and control hyperactive man-boys — and gaze also upon Alice Wetterlund's "Cousin Terry," a comic-relief predatory lesbian with a Tesla who certainly comes off like a stereotype, but to my knowledge, isn't — at least not yet.) Bell not rung.
I will say, for a movie about pretending to be someone you're not, this film graciously shortchanges the inevitable reveal. (You know, that moment when a protagonist has fibbed to get where they are, reaped the rewards, and then has to come clean, despite having developed real feelings in the interim their poor counterpart is always dumbstruck and super hurt, whereas in real life they'd likely have smelled a rat and seen it all coming.) Reveals happen here, of course, but they don't seem to matter very much to anyone. Blink and you'll miss one of them. I like that.
So, overall? I loved the first 15 minutes of this movie. I loved various other minutes of it, but nowhere near all of them. It has a saggy and dumb middle and it misses its shot at greatness by a substantial margin. But sometimes you're in the market for a lousy, R-rated comedy with a few high notes, some good looking leads, improvised quips, and nice Hawaiian scenery. There are other, better entries in this slim little canon (Forgetting Sarah Marshall comes immediately to mind), but this one isn't all bad. Summer's here. See a movie.
Haus Verdict: About as smart as you thought it would be (not very), and sometimes a whole lot funnier. Efron really makes it for me. Is that weird?
(via Haus at www.parsinghaus.com)
Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates isn't a good movie, but it does get you from (a) to (b). (Like that?)
The titular Stangle brothers (Dave, played by Zac Efron, and Mike, Adam Devine) are thinly-sketched liquor salesmen with a serious failure to launch; while they bounce around all Animal House style, their parents lament the brothers' (utterly contrived) history of ruining family gatherings (by generally being manic and partying too hard). The parents implore the duo to stop chasing women and to find real, actual dates for their dear little sister's wedding.
Their Craigslist ad soon goes viral, landing them a TV spot and the attention of an even bigger pair of screw ups, freshly unemployed drunks Tatiana and Alice, played by Aubrey Plaza and Anna Kendrick. The wily ladies hatch a scheme to clean themselves up, land the guys, and score a free trip to Hawai'i. Of course, they do.
The wedding gets royally boned, but that's not particularly funny or interesting. People also get sporadically wholesome, and ditto on that. These characters are thin and none has much of an arc save for bouncing around like pinballs between wholly artificial deep reveals. If it weren't for Plaza's foul-mouthed quips over sly, knowing glances, Kendrick's actually-kind-of-decent-after-all damaged damsel, Devine's babyface rants, and Efron's pure comedic charisma, this film would founder. But every now and then, the guys — and it is generally the guys, I think — hit one out of the park. There's some legitimately funny stuff in here. (It also has low points, like the cringe-worthy, 2010-era Adam Sandler-style cutting of the ATV crash scene. Feels like you're watching a cheap B-movie comedy.) Upshot, it's uneven.
The supporting cast is decent here. I doubt you'll rush to the marquee to see Stephen Root, but he's good as the frustrated dad; Sugar Lyn Beard (now there's a name) does more with the little sister bridal role than she probably needs to, hamming it up to good effect. I enjoyed the choice of Sam Richardson as her fiancé, and similarly that the filmmakers made precisely no mention of the fact that the pending marriage was interracial. (But before you ring the bell and declare social justice achieved, consider the underlying premise of women as simple arm candy to soothe and control hyperactive man-boys — and gaze also upon Alice Wetterlund's "Cousin Terry," a comic-relief predatory lesbian with a Tesla who certainly comes off like a stereotype, but to my knowledge, isn't — at least not yet.) Bell not rung.
I will say, for a movie about pretending to be someone you're not, this film graciously shortchanges the inevitable reveal. (You know, that moment when a protagonist has fibbed to get where they are, reaped the rewards, and then has to come clean, despite having developed real feelings in the interim their poor counterpart is always dumbstruck and super hurt, whereas in real life they'd likely have smelled a rat and seen it all coming.) Reveals happen here, of course, but they don't seem to matter very much to anyone. Blink and you'll miss one of them. I like that.
So, overall? I loved the first 15 minutes of this movie. I loved various other minutes of it, but nowhere near all of them. It has a saggy and dumb middle and it misses its shot at greatness by a substantial margin. But sometimes you're in the market for a lousy, R-rated comedy with a few high notes, some good looking leads, improvised quips, and nice Hawaiian scenery. There are other, better entries in this slim little canon (Forgetting Sarah Marshall comes immediately to mind), but this one isn't all bad. Summer's here. See a movie.
Haus Verdict: About as smart as you thought it would be (not very), and sometimes a whole lot funnier. Efron really makes it for me. Is that weird?
(via Haus at www.parsinghaus.com)