One of the most jaw-dropping things we witnessed at the movies this year took place before the movie started. Attached to “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” was a trailer for a claustrophobic thriller in an elevator. It’s doing a pretty good job of selling itself, and then a title card comes on that says, “From the mind of M. Night Shyamalan.”
The audience burst out laughing. Wow.
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“Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo” is exactly what you expect it to be. It’s crass, it’s gross, it goes for the easy joke at every opportunity, it – ooh, the weather girl is topless! Sorry, what was I saying? Oh, right. This movie is fucking dumb, okay? And apparently, based on the audience that attended this screening, there are tons of people who love this shit. At the same time, even these very, very easily amused people groaned on more than one occasion at the cheap shots the filmmakers took. Is there anyone left who thinks that jokes about Asians having small dicks are funny? Yes? Then come on down, good sirs. I have just the movie for you.
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If the animators behind Tim Burton’s love letters to Ray Harryhausen put as much effort into the story they’re telling as they put into the ten-inch stick figures that tell it, they would truly be dangerous. His first stop-motion foray, 1993’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” was charming but flawed, too impressed with its technical achievement for its own good. The same affliction mars “Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride” as well; it’s visually stunning, leaps and bounds beyond both “Nightmare” and 1995’s “James and the Giant Peach.” The story, however, is seriously lacking, and the tunes aren’t that good, either.
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“Concussion” is a film without an audience. Football fans won’t see this movie, because they don’t want to embrace the fact that the NFL lied to them for years about the dangers associated with playing football, and threw thousands of its former players under the bus in order to protect the brand, because money. Who does that leave, then? Medical procedural fans? Well, maybe, because “Concussion” plays more like a TV movie than a theatrical release. The worst thing about it is that the subject of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) deserves a larger audience than it currently has, and yet the movie’s villain, unlike the like-minded “The Insider,” which targeted the tobacco industry, is the NFL. People like the NFL, which means they’re far less likely to see a movie that tells them that their favorite thing is wicked.
It is 2005, and Nigeria-born Dr. Bennet Olamu (Will Smith) works for the coroner’s office at Pittsburgh’s Allegheny County Hospital. He has an odd relationship with his patients, in that he speaks to them while he’s determining their cause of death. One day, he examines the body of local Steelers legend Mike Webster (David Morse), who’s recently committed suicide, and sees an unusual amount of protein in his brain. Unluckily for him, as it were, Bennet examines a few more football players who exhibited erratic behavior shortly before their premature deaths, and concludes that they are suffering from brain trauma that arose as a result of repeated blows to the head. Bennet thinks that he is doing the NFL a favor by giving them this information. He is mistaken.
The best thing about this movie is something that is impossible to prove, and that is the suggestion that former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliague resigned because he knew that damage from concussions was a very real thing, and that his feet were about to be put to the fire for what was done on his watch, so he stepped down and put human jellyfish Roger Goodell (jellyfish need very little oxygen for brain function, you see) in his place. Goodell is played by Luke Wilson, which seems like an “Idiocracy” in-joke in retrospect.
The film is well-acted, mostly. Smith is fine as the uber-smart, level-headed Bennet, though his accent work is not as impressive as he probably thinks it is. (Anyone can do that accent. Seriously.) The best work comes from the supporting roles, or at least the male roles. Albert Brooks is terrific as Cyril Wecht, the Allegheny County Coroner who encourages Bennet to keep digging, ultimately to his detriment. Alec Baldwin does a solid job as Dr. Julian Bailes, a former Steelers team doctor who has had enough with the cover-up. Gugu Mbatha-Raw, on the other hand, gets nothing to work with as Bennet’s wife Prema. Their meet-cute is the most joyless marriage proposal you will ever see, and she plays the victim from there on.
The main culprits in “Concussion” are the script (stodgy and predictable), the direction (also stodgy and predictable), and frankly, time. Aaron Sorkin may have made this subject interesting with a spiffier script, but even then, it’s possible that the audience tunes out because time has yet provide proper perspective. The story of the 1919 Chicago “Black” Sox, who threw the World Series for money, didn’t become a book until 1963, and it didn’t become a film until 1988, nearly 70 years later. Granted, the Black Sox hurt no one but themselves, and the CTE issue is hurting people now, but for many, this concussion thing is still too soon, their favorite player’s health be damned. May history see it in a more favorable light.
(2 / 5)
When word first started circulating that “Thor: Ragnarok” would have a much lighter tone than its predecessors, that seemed strange for about three seconds, and then one remembers “Thor: The Dark World,” and welcomes the new approach with open arms. The end result is indeed heavier on laughs, but it also sports one of the higher body counts in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. One wonders which came first in the story development; were the laughs added as a spoonful of sugar to help the (violent) medicine go down? It would not surprise us in the slightest if that were the case.
The beauty of films like “Kingsman: The Secret Service” is that once they’re seen, they can’t be unseen, and the world is forever different than it was before. Matthew Vaughn’s turbo-charged 2015 film completely rewrote the rules for spy films, depantsing its spy predecessors in the process. The best James Bond films look positively ancient by comparison, and even relative spy newbies like Jason Bourne and “Mission: Impossible” hero Ethan Hunt show the age of their source material when viewed through, ahem, “Kingsman” lenses.
Warner Bros. had to have been shaking in their boots a little bit when “The Dark Tower,” based on the much-beloved series of Stephen King novels, died a quiet death at the box office a mere four weeks ago ($47 million domestic gross, $60 million budget). The executives surely saw stink lines emanating from the cold, dead carcass of “The Dark Tower” like an alien life force searching for a new host, only to imagine it making a beeline for their own decades-old adaptation of a Stephen King property, “IT.” Panic ensues. “Is Stephen King over? My God, we even planned to make a second film from this book, from the viewpoint of the adults! What on earth were we thinking?”
Christopher Nolan decides to make a World War II film, so of course it’s one of the most impossibly English WWII films ever made. The Dunkirk evacuation – which took place 18 months before the United States entered the war – has all of the hallmarks of a traditional underdog story. Allied forces were surrounded on all sides, and outnumbered by a factor of two to one. The soldiers were pinned on the beach, making them easy targets. England had an extremely difficult decision to make; even with 400,000 soldiers’ lives at stake on the beach, they stood to lose even more in a rescue attempt.
Ah, “Cars” movies. They will never soar like Pixar’s finest work, but there is a modesty to them, a pureness of heart that is difficult to deny. “Cars 3” is in many ways a rehash of “Cars,” in which a humbled Lightning McQueen needs to learn a valuable life lesson in order to rise above the setback of the moment. There are a couple of things, though, that elevate “Cars 3” slightly above its predecessors, namely the stunning blend of what appears to be live action photography with cutting-edge CGI (you’ve literally never seen a Disney/Pixar film like this), and an ending, however predictable, that delivers multiple gut punches.
The idea of Tom Cruise being involved in “The Mummy” seems odd on a number of levels. It doesn’t fit his m.o. at all, which makes one wonder how they were able to lure him in. My theory, based mainly on that new Dark Universe title card, is that Universal wants to reboot their classic horror properties to launch their own MCU, the Monster Cinematic Universe, and they wanted a bona fide star, someone with a higher Q factor than Brendan Fraser had when Universal last rebooted the “Mummy” franchise in 1999, to serve as the anchor. Hmmm…