Over at the movie website ScreenCrush, critic Matt Singer coins a term that I really hope catches on: �legacyquel.� Singer writes that it describes a �very specific kind of sequel - in which beloved aging stars reprise classic roles and pass the torch to younger successors.�
The phrase fits, especially when applied to the highly anticipated seventh chapter in the STAR WARS saga, STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS (out in 2 weeks!), but it�s the seventh installment of the Rocky franchise, CREED, that really embodies what a great legacyquel should be all about. And it�s largely because it features an Oscar caliber supporting turn by the series� star.
On the surface, CREED is a spin-off centered on Michael B. Jordan as Adonis �Donnie� Johnson Creed, the son of Rocky�s greatest opponent, world heavyweight champion Apollo Creed, and it works as such for its first 20 or so minutes.
Donnie�s back story is that he was born to a mistress of Apollo�s who later died leaving him to bounce from foster homes and juvenile detention, until his adoption by Apollo's widow Mary Anne (Phylicia Rashad). Donnie�s adopted mother worries about his fighting lineage, hoping that he�ll take a job in a corporate office instead of pursuing professional boxing, but she knows he�s his father�s son and there�s no getting in the way of his dream.
That�s where Sylvester Stallone, resurrecting Rocky Balboa from the ashes of what was supposed to be his swansong (2006's ROCKY BALBOA), comes into play. Donnie travels to Philadelphia to coax the Italian Stallion out of retirement to be his trainer, but Rocky, still running the restaurant established in the last sequel (ROCKY BALBOA), tells him that he �don�t do that stuff no more.�
You know it�s only a matter of time before Rocky gives in and we�re immersed in training montages of Donnie, in a familiar gray sweatsuit, intensely working out at the gym, running through the streets of Philly at dawn, and chasing chickens, all set to the triumphant score of Swedish composer Ludwig G�ransson, who, of course, calls upon Bill Conti�s iconic Rocky theme �Gonna Fly Now� at just the right moments.
Stallone�s Rocky now takes on the part that Burgess Meredith�s Mikey played in the first three films in the series, that of the lead�s trainer/father figure, and he wears it well. The duo attempt to keep their collaboration under wraps, but after his first major fight with the gym owner�s (Richie Coster) son (Gabe Rosado) it gets out that Donnie is Apollo Creed�s offspring.
This leads to Graham McTavish as the manager of �Pretty� Ricky Conlan (played by real-life professional boxer Tony Bellew), setting up a fight between his client and Donnie. The highly hyped event will be the last professional match for Conlan as he is going to jail for seven years for gun possession, and it will serve as this entry�s trademark final fight.
Meanwhile, Donnie has a love interest on the side in the form of his neighbor Bianca (Tessa Thompson, DEAR WHITE PEOPLE, SELMA), it turns out that Rocky has Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma but refuses to undergo chemotherapy because of what his late wife Adrian went through. This moment, in which Rocky faces his mortality in a cold hospital room, is one of the film�s most affecting. Stallone�s performance is a thoughtful and measured piece of work that deserves all the Oscar buzz its getting.
It�s also uplifting and exciting to witness the making of a bonafide movie star. Jordan bests his solid work in Coogler�s stirring 2013 debut FRUITVALE STATION, his first collaboration with screenwriter/director Coogler, and should really make a name for himself with his powerfully invested work here.
Jordan obviously did a lot of real training for the gripping and emotionally wrenching fight scenes, which were shot by cinematographer Maryse Alberti. Donnie�s first fight is a standout scene: a single, long unbroken shot taking place inside the ring, captured by stunningly choreographed camerawork.
In the incredible CREED, Coogler punches up the Rocky formula with great success. It believes so deeply in the Rocky mythos, that we believe in it too. We go along that these are real people with a shared history because every detail, from Rocky and Donnie�s interactions to the tidbits revealed about the past, is convincingly heartfelt. CREED keeps it real, while keeping all the Rocky feels.
It�s truly one of the biggest surprises of the year that CREED is as genuinely good as it is. It�s the must see movie event that few saw coming, and it�s, for sure, the legacyquel this season to beat. However, I hear that the Force is strong with its upcoming competitor.
Tom McCarthy�s SPOTLIGHT is everything that James Vanderbilt�s Rathergate drama TRUTH wanted to be � a vital journalism procedural that actually has the facts to back up its case.
The film focuses on the 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation by the Boston Globe�s �Spotlight� team into the scandal of child molestation and systematic cover-up within the Catholic Church.
The investigation is spearheaded by editor Martin Baron (Liev Schreiber), who has just joined the paper after a buyout. Baron tasks the team � made up of editor Walter �Robby� Robinson (Michael Keaton), and reporters Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams) and Matt Carroll (Brian d'Arcy James) � to dig into the case against Father John Geoghan, a Catholic priest charged with sexual abuse of over 80 children.
The staff reports to assistant managing editor Ben Bradlee Jr., son of legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee of Watergate fame (see ALL THE PRESIDENT�S MEN) sharply played by John Slattery of Mad Men fame.
To prove that Cardinal Law found out about Geoghan 15 years earlier and did nothing, the Globe sues the church to obtain access to incriminating documents, something that may alienate the paper�s readership, 53% of which are Catholic.
With the help of lawyers Mitchell Garabedian (Stanley Tucci), and Eric MacLeish (Billy Crudup), it doesn�t take long for the team to uncover that close to 90 priests in the Boston area have been accused of sexual misconduct.
McCarthy certainly atones for his previous film, the atrocious Adam Sandler vehicle THE COBBLER, with his passionately meticulous work here. The camerawork, shot by cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi, is straightforward as is the editing, as no flashiness is required to enhance the swift, compelling storytelling on display.
Many films have great casts, but SPOTLIGHT is my vote for best ensemble of 2015. Keaton, who was wrongly passed over by the academy for his performance in BIRDMAN last year, could be back in the Oscar race for his stellar turn here. Ruffalo, whose reaction to the enormity of the scandal is the most emotional, also stands out, and McAdams puts in her second solid performance of the year (SOUTHPAW was the first one). Schreiber, Slattery, James, Tucci, and Crudup crush it as well � man, this film is really a boy�s club! � and a few non-names such as Neal Huff and Michael Cyril Creighton shine in roles as outspoken victims.
I bet that, much like its classic newspaper drama predecessors ALL THE PRESIDENT�S MEN and ZODIAC, this is a film that will reward repeat viewings. Its pace and construction is tightly wound, but still takes time for some interesting moments in-between the unveiling of events � i.e. a shot of Scrieber looking for the publisher�s office, a beautifully framed shot of Ruffalo, James, and McAdams working at their desks with Keaton in his office behind them (see above).
SPOTLIGHT will definitely make my top 10 films of 2015 list, and I�ll be pulling for it come Oscar time. The acting, screenplay, editing, direction, Howard Shore�s stirring score, etc. should all be acknowledged in the upcoming awards season.
More importantly, it should be seen. It has a lot of competition and isn�t playing on a huge amount of screens so folks should really seek it out. Too many great films slip through the cracks and are largely overlooked. Don�t let that happen to the brilliant, intelligent, and �ber insightful SPOTLIGHT.
Brie Larson�s sturdy performance in SHORT TERM 12 is considered by critics to be her breakthrough, but it�s her powerful work in ROOM, Lenny Abrahamson�s adaptation of Emma Donoghue�s award-winning 2010 novel, that should make the actress a household name.
Larson plays Joy Newsome, a young woman living under horrifying conditions. For the last seven years Joy has been trapped in a sound-proofed, concrete garden shed in the backyard of the house of her abductor only known as Old Nick (Sean Bridges).
With Joy is her son, five-year-old Jack (first-time child actor Jacob Tremblay), the result of one of many rapes that Joy has suffered over the years. To Jack, the small, filthy space they live in is their entire world. Joy has maintained this illusion by telling Jack that there is nothing beyond the four walls of �room� except outer space, and that what he sees on their crappy beat-up TV is make believe.
However, the day has come for Joy to tell Jack the truth, because she�s devised a desperate plan for escape. Joy fakes Jack�s death, and rolls him up in a rug for Old Nick to take away in his pick-up truck. Joy instructs Jack to wriggle out, jump from the bed of the truck and run for help.
The plan is successful and Jack is able to direct the police to the shed, and mother and son are finally free. Jack is astounded at how big and limitless the real world outside the room is, while Joy struggles with rehabilitation.
Joy discovers that her parents (Joan Allen and William H. Macy) have divorced, and that her mother has a new boyfriend (Tom McCamus). Without spelling it out, Macy conveys how uncomfortable he is with having a grandson who is a product of rape.
Needing financial help, Joy agrees to do a prime time interview, but it doesn�t go well because of the glibly insensitive questions posed by the show�s host (Wendy Crewson).
This leads to Joy spiraling down into depression, and attempting suicide. Jack, still wide-eyed at his surroundings, gets his long hair, which he calls his �strong,� cut by his grandmother, and sends his ponytail to his mother in the hospital. This gesture helps in Joy�s recovery, and we see that once again Jack has saved his mother.
Abrahamson, whose film FRANK (the one with Michael Fassbender as a musician who wears a giant papier-mache head) was one of my favorite films of last year, handles this material with great poise. Every scene seems to have profound purpose, especially one late in the film where Joy and Jack revisit room for closure, though composer Stephen Rennick�s score lays it on a bit too thick at times.
I was incredibly moved by ROOM. It�s a durable drama that has moments of gripping suspense - i.e. the escape sequence � but it is its tender concern for its characters that will stay with me the most. It�s largely due to the stellar acting of the mother-son duo.
Tremblay puts in an impressive naturalistic performance for a 5-year old, although his voice-over narration, a totally unnecessary device here, gets a little icky.
Larson, who may be best known to mainstream movie-goers as Amy Schumer�s sister in TRAINWRECK, excels as Joy. One can feel her strained pain in her every expression, and all of her interactions with Tremblay shine with authenticity.
It�s flawless work, a career best, and if she doesn�t get nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, I�ll be very offended.
ROOM�s dark disturbing first half is exceedingly effective, but it�s the way that its second half earns its uplift that makes it a fully rounded, and satisfying emotional experience.
What's impressive to me immediately is how much the in-trailer narrative here feels designed to alleviate concerns that this is more AVENGERS 2.5 than CAPTAIN AMERICA 3. Obviously, the ancillary marketing and pop-cultural "presence" will be leaning harder into "Hey guys! Here's The Avengers again - many with slightly-redesigned outfits so you have to re-buy some figures!," but as an introduction-trailer this drives home the idea that this is a natural continuation of the Steve/Bucky storyline with everyone else onhand because, hey, this is their social-circle.
Sure, the premise of this Seth Rogen joint is pretty flimsy - i.e. three friends have one last Christmas Eve blow-out and farcical hilarity ensues - but after giving the silly stoner spin to such subjects as the apocalypse, cancer, and Kim Jong-un, I�m cool with that, as long as they keep the laughs coming.
And that they do, right from the get-go with a very welcome voice-over appearance by Tracy Morgan reciting rhyming lines in the familiar style of the classic Clement Clarke Moore poem from which the film derives its title. This gives us the set-up that back in 2001, Joseph Gordon-Levitt�s character Ethan lost his parents in an automobile accident, and in an effort to cheer him up, his friends Isaac (Rogen) and Chris (Anthony Mackie) initiate a hard partying holiday tradition that later comes to include an ongoing quest through the streets of New York City to find the elusive, mysterious Nutcracka Ball, considered �the Holy Grail of Christmas parties.�
In the present day, Isaac is a successful lawyer whose wife (Jillian Bell) is about to give birth to their first child, Chris is a pro football player who�s just started to get a taste of stardom, and Ethan is stuck in a rut as a struggling musician who has to take work that involves dressing as an elf and serving hors d�ourves at a corporate party on Christmas Eve.
The job is humiliating but things look up when while working coat-check Ethan happens upon 3 tickets to the Nutcracka Ball. Ethan gleefully steals them, quits his job, and runs off to find his friends. Meanwhile, in one of the movie�s most implausible moments (of which there are many), Isaac�s wife Betsy gifts him a neatly packaged box of hallucinogenic drugs and encourages him to go wild at his get-together. Yeah, sure.
So the fellows don tacky Cosby-style Christmas sweaters (Ethan�s has a standard line of red reindeer, while Isaac�s has a Star of David and Chris�s a black Santa � see above) and hit a karaoke bar, where they perform Run-DMC's �Christmas in Hollis,� and run into Ethan�s ex Diana (I forgot to mention that the guy is still reeling from a break-up) played by Lizzy Caplan.
Caplan, who, as a veteran of Party Down, THE INTERVIEW, HOT TUB TIME MACHINE, and going way back with these guys to the Freaks and Geeks days, is well acquainted with such sausage party shenanigans, is accompanied by Mindy Kaling (The Office U.S., The Mindy Project), who gets her phone mixed up with Isaac.
This leads to Isaac, who�s gone goofy by consuming most of the drugs in his gift box, getting dick pic texts and not knowing how to respond.
In true Seinfeldian-fashion, each character has their obsessive hang-up - Isaac�s is that he�s too fucked up to function, Chris is wanting to score weed for his team�s quarterback that he�s trying to impress (this is one of the film�s clunkiest scenerios, which involves Mackie chasing Broad City�s Ilana Glazer as an evil drug stealing freak), and Ethan�s is, of course, wanting to get back together with Diana.
And in a wonderfully unexpected appearance, a hilariously deadpan Michael Shannon shows up as the guy�s high-school pot dealer, Mr. Green. This marks the second time that Shannon has stolen a movie away from Gordon-Levitt (see: PREMIUM RUSH). Shannon kills it here � every line is a stone cold gem � so much so that he ought to have his own comedy vehicle some day.
The only thing that matters in a movie like this is if it�s funny, and THE NIGHT BEFORE has some of the funniest moments of any comedy I�ve seen this year, and it has a warm, fuzzy heart that conveys way more genuine Christmas spirit than, say, crap like the dysfunctional family comedy LOVE THE COOPERS (currently #3 at the box office).
The joyous energy that Rogen and gang, including screenwriters Jonathan Levine, Kyle Hunter, Ariel Shaffir, and longtime collaborator Evan Goldberg, bring to this round of crude gags, dick jokes, drug jokes, wacky mishaps, pop culture riffs, and surprise cameos, is crazy infectious.
THE NIGHT BEFORE is way better than THE INTERIEW, but a notch below THIS IS THE END on the scale of output of from the Apatow alma mater. It may have lazy plotting, some overly obvious set-ups, and much silliness just for silliness� sake, but it brings so much in the way of laughter, likability, and an undoubtedly sincere theme of friendship, that it more than makes up for those faults.
It did make me wonder how much longer the 33-year old Rogen can make these man-child has to face growing up movies. He�ll probably yet again take a cue from Apatow, and do �em til the big 4-0. As long as he keeps bringing the funny, that�s fine by me.
Well. This took forever (over an hour long this time - wow!) and Sony immediately issued a YouTube copyright claim on it. Said claim is now in dispute, so watch this while you can! :)
A weird thing about how AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D has evolved as a series is that the more both the series and the audience seem to have accepted its position as the redheaded stepchild of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the more cavalier it's gotten in playing around with the worldbuilding. Throughout most of Season 1, when the audience was still assuming/hoping that the series was going to be a mythology-packed weekly geek-out setting up dominoes for the movies to knock down, it operated strictly on the fringes of its own universe until it was more-or-less forced to use the good silverware because CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER's storyline made it unavoidable.
But now, with the audience effectively resigned to the idea that AGENTS is mostly going to do it's own thing as "NCIS: MARVEL UNIVERSE" and not have any real noteworthy impact on the movies (example: Multiple friends/colleagues of The Avengers know Coulson is alive now, but not The Avengers themselves for absolutely no good reason) ...the show is somehow now more emboldened about play with what feel like big, essential moving-parts of the Universe that you'd think the movies would get first-dibs on messing with: Last season got to introduce The Inhumans (whose movie doesn't come out until 2019) and start early on Marvel's long-term goal of turning them into Mutant/X-Men replacements; and now along with continuing that work Season 3 now gets to re-write a huge part of the MCU's history (on Earth, anyway) with a single conversation.
Specifically: HYDRA, the villainous group whose shenanigans have driven the plots of (so far) four movies and lurk (retroactively) in the background/mythos of all the rest, now has a brand-new, way way out there origin-story - which could be a signal that the movies are done using them or that the movie and TV sides of the MCU are about to start playing nice(er) with eachother.
SPOILERS FOLLOW: "Many Heads, One Tale" is, like last week's "Chaos Theory," for the most part a plot-plot-plot affair (we are now racing toward the mid-season finale) with some long-awaited character moments dropped in for seasoning: Fitz/Simmons finally cry it out and kiss, Coulson and Price both show all their cards, we get official confirmation that Gideon Malick is the Security Council member Powers Boothe played in AVENGERS and a HYDRA bigwig to boot, we (apparently) learn what the ATCU is (and isn't) actually up to and May and Lincoln bury the hatchet...
...oh, and it turns out everything we thought we knew about HYDRA, one of the essential building-blocks of Marvel's continuity-experiment, is not only wrong - they're actually up to something that sounds (conceptually) like the biggest-scale villain plan any MCU villain has had outside of whatever Thanos is up to.
So let's get that out of the way first: As revealed to Ward by Malick, HYDRA is actually over a thousand years old, with The Red Skull's "Nazi Deep-Science Division" incarnation being merely HYDRA's "thing to do" in the 1940s. As it turns out, HYDRA's actual origin is a cult that worships an unnamed all-powerful Inhuman from ancient times who was exiled from Earth using The Monolith - their entire purpose, encompassing everything the organization has ever done, is to find a way to bring this Inhuman "god" back to Earth so he (she? it?) can conquer it.
...alright, then.
In light of that, the major revelations otherwise almost seem kind of perfunctory - even though they're directly tied-in: The ATCU has been run by HYDRA via Malick the whole time, but (apparently) without Rosalind Price's knowledge - oh, and they aren't "curing" Inhumans, they're working to make and conscript as many of them as they can. Astronaut Will's portal-crossing mission? HYDRA as well, with heavy implication that the shape-shifting, mind-controlling entity that bedeviled Will and Simmons on the alien planet is the unnamed Inhuman "god." Lash? Now in Malick/Ward/HYDRA's hands, seemingly on-track to be re-weaponized. So... a lot going on to deal with.
On the non-plot side, the reveal that Price has been played by the outfit she was supposedly running felt so weirdly clunky that I almost want it to be a double fake-out. I mean, seriously? All this time she's been confidently/assertively running an operation whose supposed sole reason to exist (warehousing and attempting to cure Inhumans) she was just "taking on faith" as existing because the work was being done in a room she wasn't supposed to go into? That's dumb.
I get the purpose of the fake-out: Get the audience all riled up to see Coulson pull a stone cold "Gotcha! I played you before you could play me!" move, then yank it away by contriving a scenario where Price was actually duped and acting in good faith - making Coulson (kind of) the asshole this time... but there had to be a better way. On the other hand, the actual reveal of this was a fine acting turn for both of them. It's always uncomfortable, in a modern context, to see a "good guy" doing the 60s James Bond seduce-to-manipulate thing; and it's especially strange when the perpetrator is a character like Coulson who's typically played as a boyish do-gooder. Credit that they pulled off what's a pretty dark turn (Coulson basically used and manipulated Price in an overall pretty cruel way in order to get at intel she wasn't hiding and didn't know herself) in a way that leaves new places for characters to go rather than just ruining the character (Coulson) forever.
Elsewhere, the "let's go undercover" infiltration scene with Hunter and Bobbi was fun, but it's also the kind of well the show has gone to too many times when it needs a "fun" was to dump a bunch of exposition and place-setting. Apart from the "Oh, it's HYDRA again and they're making their own Inhuman army" discovery, we get the debut of a new recurring Inhuman villain in Mark Dacascos "Giyera;" and while Dacascos is one of those hardworking B-movie martial-arts pros action fans are always glad to see (depending on your age/region he's immediately recognizable as either Wo Fat from the newer HAWAII FIVE-0, The Chairman from IRON CHEF AMERICA, Mani from BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF or Billy Lee from DOUBLE DRAGON) it's a little dissapointing that his Inhuman power turns out to be "Magneto, just without the name and outfit."
BULLET POINTS:
Who/what is the ancient Inhuman that HYDRA has apparently been trying to bring to Earth this whole time? I don't know. I still have trouble believing that it's going to be one of the marquee Inhumans at this juncture, and it really could be any Cosmic Marvel fixture not yet claimed by the movies re-worked as "actually an Inhuman." So for now I guess everyone from Immortus to Death is on the table ("Ma'Veth," Hebrew for "Death," is the title of the mid-season finale.)
That having been said, it could more narrowly be The Unspoken, who was the Inhumans' king before Black Bolt. OR, if we're supposed to glean anything from HYDRA's logo apparently having evolved from a ram skull, Pazuzu technically exists in Marvel as well.
THAT having been said, some of the dialogue from Fitz/Simmons laying this all out mentioned "inspiring legends of devils." I wonder... could this be where/how we get an MCU version of Mephisto (who is not technically *the* devil, in the comics)?
Over in Entertainment Weekly, Clark Gregg (Coulson) coyly refers to talk of the (now pretty obvious) emerging storyline of S.H.I.E.L.D and HYDRA both having Inhuman armies as "a war of some kind that will not be civil in nature, while at the same time being very civil in nature." Heh.
But wait - it won't exactly be a surprise if AGENTS has to mention/incorporate the events of CIVIL WAR similarly to the way WINTER SOLDIER and AGE OF ULTRON worked, but does this mean S.H.I.E.L.D and HYDRA are taking "sides" in it? Hm. In the comics, "Civil War" was an organic ideological schism, but I can see the movies going with "HYDRA did stuff to trigger/escalate this fight."
See also: Bret Dalton (Ward) has been teasing a "WINTER SOLDIER-level" twist for the mid-season. But short of "Coulson has been evil this whole time, somehow" I'm not sure what's left to do that could meet that challenge (and that would be stupid.)
NEXT WEEK: Nothing, because Thanksgiving. But the week after next brings "CLOSURE," the penultimate episode before the series breaks for Winter (and Season 2 of AGENT CARTER.)
Apologies, once again, for the delay. It won't repeat for tomorrow's show.
So! Once again, AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D puts a big chunk of it's internal mysteries on the table and drops in a bunch of new ones. Clever storytelling? Side-effect of only having a general sense of where your story is "allowed" to go week to week? Who can tell, at this point...
SPOILERS FOLLOW!
We knew Andrew Gardner was Lash as of last episode, and now as of this one we know how he got that way (Jaiying rigged some of her personal-effects with Terrigen booby-traps, leading Andrew to be exposed and discover that he has been an Inhuman this whole time) and everyone is on the same page about it; with Lash himself now filed-away in the ATCU's holding-facility - which, under the circumstances, Daisy is now feeling less self-righteous about unilaterally opposing. Well, isn't that convenient.
A strong episode overall, though (apart from the aforementioned May/Andrew business) a little light on the character work in favor of the plot. It's nice to see the pieces continuing to move so quickly, since at this rate it feels like the current scenario(s) could well be totally upended by the time the AGENT CARTER break arrives; potentially giving us yet another new status-quo to look forward to in the second half. It would be in keeping with the speed at which things have moved this season, and I'm starting to wonder if we can actually hope for a significant CIVIL WAR lead-in.
...or not. In any case:
New mystery #1: What, exactly, was Lash trying to accomplish? Before he went down at May's hands (great performances from Blair Underwood and Ming-Na Wen, once again) his dialogue seemed to imply that he was going after Inhumans who'd done something "wrong." In the comics, Lash's deal is that he kills those who've turned without "earning" it whom he deems unworthy after the fact, but this doesn't appear to be that - particularly since he claimed to be using Jaiying's genealogy-charts as a hit-list. At this point, it would be a very "signature" AGENTS' moment for Lash to turn out to have been wrongly-fighting a yet-unknown threat, so...
New mystery #2: Who is Gideon Malick and what does he have to do with the ATCU? Last time, we learned that the (apparent) head of the S.H.I.E.L.D-overseeing Security Council played by Powers Boothe has a name and is apparently a bad guy (he's reached out to Ward and Nu-HYDRA.) Now, just as Coulson (and maybe the audience?) was getting ready to trust Rosalind Price - Daisy saving her life during a fight with Lash and all that - we (but not Coulson) learn that Malick has been in contact with her the whole time. Is he calling ATCU's shots?
New mystery #3: Who were the Monolith's pre-S.H.I.E.L.D owners? Should've seen this angle coming, but did not. So, good on you, writers. While continuing to look for ways to bring Simmons' astronaut boyfriend Will back to Earth with the Monolith/portal destroyed, Fitz lands on a big clue: A near-match to the insignia from the old castle where the device was hidden at some point before S.H.I.E.L.D had it appears to have been hidden in the design of Will's mission-patch, suggesting that it wasn't (only?) NASA backing his mission but some remnant of the occult-esque secret society that was using the Monolith for unknown purposes back in the day. Okay, so maybe there are more people out there who know about the portals and how to use them... but who are they?
No need for bullet-points theorizing this time, since it feels to me like they're heading for all of these stories to converge this time around. Here's the thing: We know that whoever the Monolith-cultists were, they were men of means and position. We know that S.H.I.E.L.D had the Monolith after them, but apparently no one we've yet met was high-grade enough to know when they got it or how. Now, we know that at some point at least 15 years ago, it was used in conjunction with a NASA mission likely at the behest of those same cultists. So it feels like a pretty easy guess that said cultists are connected-to S.H.I.E.L.D in such a way that they could use The Agency's "keep an eye on alien stuff" directives to hide the thing. Seems like something Malick would be involved with, if not in charge of, yes?
So who are they (the "cultists," that is)? Well, another tangent HYDRA seems like the obvious call, but maybe too obvious at this point. AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D could use a fresh(er) regular antagonist, so even if they are HYDRA I'd imagine they'll be a "related" branch that goes by a different name. My guess? The Serpent Society. Either way, I maintain my earlier guess about Malick being a "re-imagined" version of Albert Malik, aka the second Red Skull.
Extrapolating further: A big part of the post-CIVIL WAR Captain America comics involved the real Red Skull "possessing" a high-placed military/industrial figure, so it already wouldn't surprise me to see that plotline come up somewhere in the MCU in the near future. If so, I'd bet Malick isn't so much "Red Skull II" as the O.G. Skull, Johann Schmidt, wearing a new face. Keep in mind: The one thing we know about these people is that they owned and figured out how to control a space/time portal - wouldn't it be something if Schmidt (who was zapped off to who-knows-where by the similarly portal-centric Tessaract in FIRST AVENGER) found his way back that way and has been hiding out ever since?
The cast and writers have been teasing a "WINTER SOLDIER-level" twist for the Winter Break, after all, and Powers Boothe pulling off his face the reveal that The Red Skull has been secretly hanging out this entire time would certainly qualify. Plus, if it means the Skull might concievably become available for the movies again (maybe as a secret CIVIL WAR heavy, dare I hope??) I'd be all for that. In the comics, Red Skull serves the vital purpose of providing a "baseline" of evil to give every other villain a degree of relative nuance (i.e. "Sure, I'm a pretty bad person - but that dude is, literally, a NAZI!") and it'd be fun to have an agitator onhand who's just bad for bad's sake if you need to get a plot going economically: "Why are they trying to blow up The Rainforest, exactly?" "Nazi With a Skeleton-Head!"
NEXT WEEK:
Coulson and S.H.I.E.L.D are apparently double-dealing against ATCU even still in "Many Heads, One Tale."(okay, that title makes me feel even more secure in predicting The Serpent Society.)
Just a quick update: This last week (and counting) has been murder on my schedule, which is why a recap for S.H.I.E.L.D from the previous week didn't end up running. It will run sometime later this evening, and the regularly-scheduled one for tomorrow should run on time. Apologies for the delay.
The 100th anniversary of the birth of legendary film-maker Orson Welles was half a year ago (May 6th to be exact), but here in N.C. it�s better late than never to celebrate as special showings of some of the man�s best work are hitting local screens this month.
Earlier this month The Cary Theater in downtown Cary hosted a Cinema Studies Screening of Orson Welles� 1957 thriller TOUCH OF EVIL, presented by the Modern School of Film, and kicked off a Sunday afternoon series of November Welles screenings with the director�s 1942 adaptation of Booth Tarkington�s 1918 novel THE MAGNIFICIENT AMBERSONS.
The following Sunday, the 22nd, the lesser known, but still essential, THE STRANGER (1946) will be featured, and the series wraps up on the 29th with Welles� final completed film F FOR FAKE (1973).
On Friday, November 13th, the Colony Theater in North Raleigh is opening the new 4k digital restoration of Carol Reed�s 1949 film-noir masterpiece THE THIRD MAN for a week long run. While Welles didn�t direct, many film buffs feel that his film-making fingerprints such as use of deep focus, long takes, and abstract angles are all over the sublime post-WW II thriller. There�s no doubt to his contribution in his writing of his own dialogue as the iconic Harry Lime character, especially when it comes to the famous �Cuckoo Clock� speech.
As the Colony Theater is sadly closing next month, it�s great that they�re showing such a classic piece of cinema as THE THIRD MAN before shutting down (The Colony will also be showing such notable films as THE PRINCESS BRIDE, THE WIZARD OF OZ, and DARK STAR in the weeks ahead, click here for more info).
I have to work this Sunday so I�ll be missing The Cary�s screening of CITIZEN KANE, but I will be attending The North Carolina Museum of Art�s showing of the film on Friday, November 20th. It�ll be my first visit to the redesigned SECU Auditorium, and I�m taking my 17-year old nephew Linus, who�s never seen it or much in black and white for that matter.
Last summer, I was talking to Linus about the Netflix superhero series Daredevil and how good Vincent D�Onofrio is as the villain Wilson Fisk, and I mentioned that D�Onofrio had played Orson Welles more than once (in Tim Burton�s ED WOOD, and in his own short film FIVE MINUTES, MR. WELLES, which you can watch here).
�Who�s Orson Welles?� Linus asked, and, well, I was a bit taken back. Still, as this happens a lot when I babbling about some old thing to kids who are completely disconnected to it, I dropped the subject.
More recently, Linus told me that he may want to study film in college � he�s not sure where he�ll go to college, mind you � and I said that he really ought to see CITIZEN KANE � it�s Film 101. So it�s all set for next week, and I�ll report back what the kid thought.
My first experience with Welles was seeing THE MUPPET MOVIE with my grandmother when I was 9, something I�ve written about before. Welles had a cameo in the film as the powerful head of a movie studio who signs up Kermit and gang to be stars (�prepare the standard �Rich and Famous� contract for Kermit the Frog and Company).
My grandmother, who is still alive, told me who Welles was � KANE, the �War of the Worlds� radio show, etc. � and the seed was planted, but it was years before I actually watched any of his work.
So now I�m attempting to pass on my Orson obsession, or, better yet, the movie-loving gene to my nephew � we�ll see how that goes.
For those of you out there that are new to Welles, there is a great documentary that came out last year, Chuck Workman�s MAGICIAN: THE ASTONISHING LIFE AND WORK OF ORSON WELLES, available now on Blu ray and DVD. It gives a fairly thorough overview of Welles career in 91 minutes, and despite its overly tidy summing up of some messy material, it makes for a good introduction to the man.
Scores of vivid vintage photographs, generous samplings of archival footage, and sound-bites from insightful interviews from the likes of Norman Lloyd, biographer Simon Callow, Steven Spielberg, Buck Henry, and Peter Bogdonavich help tell Welles� tale, and it�s cool to see clips of Welles being portrayed by the aforementioned D�Onofrio, Christian McKay in Richard Linklater�s ME AND ORSON WELLES, Liev Schreiber in Benjamin Ross's 1999 HBO telefilm RKO 281, and Jean Guerin in Peter Jackson's 1994 crime drama HEAVENLY CREATURES in the mix. *
Of course, it�s the words from Welles himself that are the most notable. Some choice quotes: �I�m ashamed of Rosebud, it�s a rather tawdry device - it doesn�t stand up very well, � �You know, I always liked Hollywood very much � it just wasn�t reciprocated,� and �I would�ve sold my soul to play THE GODFATHER, but I never get those parts offered to me.�
Well, that�s enough Welles for now. Hope to see a lot of folks coming out to see these classics on the big screen in Cary and Raleigh. And, by the way, this post is part of my new �Drag a kid to KANE� initiative. Yeah, that�s right � I�m really trying to start that as �a thing.�
WARNING: This review contains Spoilers! But I bet you guessed the supposed biggest one two years ago.
James Bond is back, but this time he�s far from �better than ever� as the ad campaign has declared every time a new entry has appeared since the series began in the early �60s.
There�s a considerable drop-off in quality in Agent 007�s 24th adventure, SPECTRE, from his previous outing, but since that was the universally acclaimed, box office record-breaking smash SKYFALL, that�s hardly surprising.
And that's just it - as hard as they tried, there are no surprises in Daniel Craig's fourth time out as Bond. Let's start with how Mendes and Co. misguidedly took a page from the reboot rulebook established by STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS by lying to fans for years about the villain's identity.
J.J. Abrams and his crew swore up and down that Benedict Cumberbatch was not playing the series' most notorious villain, Khan, in the second installment of the rebooted Star Trek franchise and we got burned bad there. So much so that Abrams admitted later that they screwed up the reveal.
When news got out that Christoph Waltz was cast in SPECTRE, the first thought everybody interested had was that he must be playing the Bond series' biggest villain, Ernest Stavro Blofeld.
But when Waltz was asked if he was playing Blofeld, he replied: �That is absolutely untrue. That rumor started on the Internet, and the Internet is a pest.�
Well, the internet must be a pest because they guess things right sometimes.
Beyond that, the film is a stitched together collection of overly familiar action set pieces hung on a story-line that's no match for the plot of the last MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE movie.
The plot being that Bond, spurred on by a cryptic video message left by his deceased superior M (brief final Judi Dench cameo!), Bond goes on a rogue mission (hello, LICENSE TO KILL) to track down the titular evil organization behind a new electronic global surveillance initiative called Nine Eyes set to dismantle the MI6 00-division.
SPECTRE starts off smashingly with a pre-credits scene involving a high-jacked helicopter (hello, FOR YOUR EYES ONLY!) going out-of-control above the huge crowds of Mexico's Day of the Dead festival, but after the rather lackluster theme song �Writing's On The Wall,� it settles into draggy drama for a bit.
The new M (Ralph Fiennes) puts Bond on leave, so Q (Ben Whishaw) only gives him one gadget (a watch that can explode) and tells 007 �enjoy your downtime!� Of course, Bond disregards the notion of taking a break, steals MI6's snazzy new Aston Martin DB10, and heads off to Italy where he hooks up with Monica Bellucci as the widow of the guy Bond killed at the film's beginning, and he learns of a secret meeting of international terrorists that he is able to infiltrate a little too easily.
This is where Waltz as Blo...sorry, Franz Oberhauser, clothed in shadowy darkness, comes in and senses Bond's presence in the room immediately. This leads to a pretty standard-issue car chase through the streets of Rome, then Bond follows another lead to the snow-covered mountain terrain of Austria.
There he hooks up with L�a Seydoux as Madeleine Swann (sadly, the more age appropriate Bellucci is long out of the picture), the daughter of Bond's former adversary Mr. White (Jesper Christensen, making his third appearance in the series after CASINO ROYALE and QUANTUM OF SOLACE).
This, of course, leads to another chase, with 007 chasing after the film's Oddjob stand-in Mr. Hinx (WWE wrestler-turned-actor Dave Bautista) in a commandeered private plane that gets its wings clipped (hello, LIVE AND LET DIE!).
Meanwhile, Fiennes's M frets over a merger with MI5 and clashes with his new superior, C (Andrew Scott, best known as Moriarty on Sherlock), while Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) and Q (Whishaw) have more screen-time than usual on the sidelines aiding 007 and M.
Bond and Swann follow another lead to Morocco, and after a brutal fight on a train with Mr. Hinx (Hello, FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, LIVE AND LET DIE, and THE SPY WHO LOVED ME!), they make their way to SPECTRE's meteor crater lair (like Blofeld�s volcanic lair in YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE!), and that's where we get the lowdown on our villain's background and all that other spoilery stuff (apart from Waltz's identity as Blofeld there actually are some plot-points here I'll refrain from describing).
The London-set climax, which involves blowing up the remains of the old MI6 building, and more helicopter shenanigans, isn't very inspired and whatever excitement was in the film had drained from the film way before they get there.
Screenwriters Neal Purvis, John Wade, John Logan, and Jez Butterworth unsuccessfully try to duplicate the highlights of SKYFALL, which all but Butterworth scripted, and the result is an uneven, and frustratingly paced narrative.
And, running at 2 hours and 40 minutes, it�s the longest, and most drawn out, Bond movie of the series. That�s another strike against it.
But back to my original beef about how they tried to hide that Waltz was playing Blofeld. This is no way to treat the re-introduction of SPECTRE, absent from the franchise since DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER for legal reasons.
It would�ve been a better move, and, I bet made for a better movie, if they�d just announced up front that the two-time Academy Award winner was portraying 007�s most powerful and iconic foe, instead of fashioning their film around such an obvious �twist.�
Instead we�ve got this epically ineffective Bond in which Craig looks bored and ready to go home. After this routine ride with such a surprise fail, that�s sure how I felt.
I really only have a passing familiarity with the "lore" of WARCRAFT (Paula Patton is a human/orc hybrid, I take it?) so my interest in this has been less about what it get's "right" than about what it does to justify its own existence in a tonal/aesthetic sense. For me, the main thing that's been kneecapping video-game movie thus far is that even densely-plotted stuff like WARCRAFT tends to be a melange of genre tropes where the originality comes either from unique design/character work or from the built-in strangeness that comes from interactive storytelling; but film adaptations have thus far tended to downplay much of the "video-gamey" weirdness - resulting in films that don't seem to have much reason to exist.
If nothing else, WARCRAFT seems to have those priorities straight. This first trailer feels cut/scored to feel as akin (plotwise) to yet another LOTR also-ran, dialing back the plot/character/mythos details to focus on getting a mass-audience onboard, so the more interesting storyline we've been assured is in there is taking a back seat to the look of the thing - but man, it's a hell of a look.
I'm especially liking that the design is very clearly erring on the side of new/different/interesting over "realistic." Much as I've enjoyed seeing most of the genre from LOTR to GAME OF THRONES find a working balance between classical high-fantasy art and practical reality, WARCRAFT's world is on a whole other bonkers level in terms of bizarre creatures and locations - half-measures in that direction were never going to cut it. I'd rather the Orcs be detailed and ridiculous-looking than photorealistic (the CGI is great, but we're in Hulk-territory here where nothing is going to fool you into thinking this being can physically exist), or the humans' armor/weapons to look like super-expensive cosplay, or the locations look absurdly over-designed than try to water down everything that makes this world worth inhabiting - I mean, I'm pretty sure that one gut at 1:07 has some kind of flint-activated shotgun in a medieval-fantasy setting. That's wacky.
I imagine the question will be how Universal/Legendary think they're going to sell a mainstream audience on this stuff. HARRY POTTER was the movie-arm of a once in a generation pop-literature phenomenon hitting at the zenith of its popularity. LOTR was already widely known and had the selling point of "You've never seen live-action fantasy look this huge before." By contrast, the WARCRAFT franchise's "moment" in terms of mainstream-ubiquity (i.e. WOW) feels like it came and went awhile ago, and "LOTR but twice as melodramatic and a thousand times more cartoonishly odd" doesn't sound like a sure thing.
I doubt the studio is too worried - Universal is sitting on a ridiculous mountain of cash after a year of absolutely massive smash-hits (they literally went from a struggling industry has-been to having JURASSIC WORLD, MINIONS, FURIOUS 7, PITCH PERFECT 2, 50 SHADES OF GREY and STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON all hit in the same year) and we're still in a gold-rush period where content-starved Russian and Chinese audiences are going to turn damn near any remotely-serviceable 3D-ready actioner into a moneymaker. But they're looking for this to be a long-term multimedia tentpole, and other studios with game-adaptations in the waiting are hoping that either this or ASSASSIN'S CREED do the deed of finally breaking the genre for Joe Popcorn. That sounds like an uphill climb (and one they should've been advertising for much earlier than this) but I'm rooting for it.
They didn't botch it. They didn't break it. They didn't screw it up. The Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus etc you'll be seeing up onscreen and/or introducing the next generation to are largely the same ones you grew up with; and they've arrived in a perfectly agreeable, modest, sweet little movie that should re-establish them as touchstones for another several decades to come. So if those were worries you'd been nursing about THE PEANUTS MOVIE, you can exhale: It's fine.
THE PEANUTS MOVIE is probably the first pop-culture "nostalgia revival" blockbuster in a good long while to face the (potential) hurdle of having to scale itself up to fit onto the big screen. Whereas other long-lived, mass-marketed intellectual properties like the Marvel movies or TRANSFORMERS land in development already dragging decades of mythology and narrative sprawl needing to be whittled down to manageable size for a feature film, Charles Schulz's PEANUTS is a gag-a-day newspaper comic strip built almost-exclusively around incidental observation that reached it's prior adaptation high-point in the form of 20-30 minute TV specials with prior attempts at movie-length adventures meeting a mixed reception.
The filmmakers solution to this problem, evidently, has been to eschew trying to "solve" it altogether: In lieu of trying to retrofit Charlie Brown's world into a space for feature-sized adventures, they've instead conceived a set of four individual mini-stories that feel very much of a kind to the classic TV specials the characters are arguably best known from, joined together by the relatively constrained scope of the action (school, the neighborhood and the individual kids' homes) and a narrative through-line about the ever-luckless Brown haphazardly trying to reinvent himself so that a new student (the enigmatic "Little Red-Haired Girl" of the comic-strip lore) might see him as something other than the "blockhead" everyone else has become accustomed to.
This kind of episodic storytelling, coupled with the gently-deliberate pacing that Schulz's world exudes as a matter of course, feels like something of a risk in an age of kids' movies where frenetic yet sprawling, plot-heavy quest narratives are the order of the day; but it pays off. The result is a quietly profound little gem that can't help but recall other classic child's-view-of-childhood vignettes like A CHRISTMAS STORY or Bradbury's DANDELION WINE. Rarefied company, yes, but well-earned - this might not be the best or most exciting children's movie of the year, but it's hard to imagine one more emotionally nutritious.
I'll admit: I was a little worried when the "Little Red Haired Girl" plot element reared it's head. Her function in the plot makes sense given her place in Peanuts canon, but in 2015 the last thing movies (especially movies aimed at the next-to-rise generation of little kids) need are more stories where a female character exists mainly for their affection to be a prize motivating the hero. Yes, LRHG gets a name and a face for this iteration, but she's still inhabiting the role of an out-of-reach ideal for Charlie Brown to strive for - not far removed from that football Lucy will never let him kick, come to think of it. He's effectively elected this person the arbiter of his own self-worth without asking if she has any interesting in that role, and the plot isn't terribly concerned with her agency or whom she might be beyond that.
So, yeah. That could be a bit (ugh) "problematic" in a modern context, but the specific context of the circumstances neutralize the issue almost immediately (or at least they did for me): These are very young kids, written and performed as such, and there's zero real sense of prurient interest at play in Charlie Brown's intentions (indeed, he's already decided that "the new kid" is a reason for him to fix himself before he knows anything else about him/her) or anyone else's. Yes, she's a (mostly-offscreen) metaphor for more powerful forces, much like the disembodied trombone-voiced adults or Snoopy's imagined Red Baron nemesis, but I'd say that's okay in a movie that has so many other rich and varied characters (male and female) otherwise.
More importantly, the story they're using this setup to tell works. Charlie Brown is uniquely defined as a pop-icon by the tragi-comic confluence of his innate goodness and the Universe's seeming utter disdain for him. Few characters have endured more martyrdom with less cause, and here he tries everything from flying a kite to a talent show to a school dance to a book report on "Leo's Toy Store by Warren Peace" to remake himself as... someone capable, basically, and is continually derailed either by his own selflessness (it's a wise stroke that we're made to understand that he's a fundamentally decent person every bit as much as a luckless one early one) or the cruel chaotic randomness of fate at every turn.
Yes, adults will see where this is all going a mile away: of course when this particular Job meets his "god" she'll have taken notice of his good intentions all along, and of course he'll come to understand that he was already worthwhile just as he is; but you know what? That's one of those lessons every new generation of kids could stand to learn as early and as often as possible, and who better to relay it to them than Good Ol' Charlie Brown?
And make no mistake: Despite the group-inclusive title, this is a Charlie Brown movie, through and through. The supporting Peanuts, though, get their room to shine. To a certain extent, the tertiary characters are the space where the film elects to go through its "greatest hits" catalog ("Dog germs!," Lucy's nickles, the stationary dance-cycles, the choral Christmas-carroling, etc), but what a catalog it is. The one spot where this begins to feel like a bit much are the Snoopy "WWI Flying Ace" fantasy-sequences that here do double-duty as act-breaks and showcases for more elaborate and 3D-friendly animation sequences. Don't get me wrong: These slapstick divergences are a PEANUTS staple, and this is the same method Blue Sky Studios perfected for keeping younger kids engaged with the suprisingly character/dialogue-heavy ICE AGE movies i.e. breaking up the more "serious" parts with cutaways to Scrat and his acorns. But they eventually run just a touch too long for my taste, relative to how much more invested I was in getting back to watching "Chuck" keep trying to kick that football.
On the other hand, what I will say for the story beats involving the other characters is that it was a huge relief to find a near-total lack of self-awareness or obvious pandering to the nostalgia set. Yes, when one of the classic Jazz tracks from the Halloween/Christmas specials kicks up on the soundtrack or the camera pans across the skating-pond or "The Wall" older fans are meant to smile or get a little misty-eyed (my near-Pavlovian response to hearing Linus casually mention The Great Pumpkin hit me with a force I imagine would've made the filmmaker's exchange satisfied high-fives) but if you've come for winking ROBOT CHICKEN-style asides to now-adult ground-floor fans about, say, Peppermint Patty and Marcie being "a thing" or whether or not Snoopy's angry unintelligible squawks at Lucy being something particularly "obscene," you won't find them here.
In fact, the lack of attention drawn to the fact that this even is a nostalgia-revival property is kind of remarkable. Even as I was appreciating the attention to detail in matching Schulz' original art-style and the unique limited-motion animation aesthetic of the cartoons (the 3D character-models are animated to look/feel more like embossed colorful stickers in stop-frame, with facial and motion-line details retaining a 2D line-art look), it took me until well after my initial viewing to realize how unusual it was that, despite no "time" being given for the setting, the characters are still using rotary phones, checking books out of libraries and otherwise existing in the same pre-computer, pre-internet, pre-iCulture world they're best remembered in.
That's almost-certainly a correct design choice (I shudder to think what a Charlie Brown with even less incentive to leave his room might be in 2015) but I'm strike by how effortless it feels where a lesser adaptation might've tried to hammer home some point about how much "better" childhood was under these circumstances. On the other hand, I look at scenes like an extended sequence where Snoopy and Woodstock try to negotiate a manual typewriter and I wonder if the youngest in the audience have any idea what that machine even is.
But those are minor quibbles, rendered barely worth a mention by how expertly the bulk of the film segues between the charming and the profound. THE PEANUTS MOVIE is a small, almost absurdly delicate thing in a world where even Dr. Seuss adaptations tend to become bloated, freewheeling pyrotechnic displays. But in it's own way it's an epic, understanding (in the way that only the very best movies about children and childhood do) how a "snow day" can feel like a miracle, how Summer can feel like a countdown, how time can compress and expand from fleeting the endless and back again between the seasons, or how things like a book report, a minor public embarrassment, the approval of a friend or the loyalty of a pet can be (if only for a moment) the most important thing in the world. It's a monument to that moment in time when the expanse between home, school and the playground was the breadth of the universe, and a reminder that there's a chance for even the chronically unlucky to be happy there - if only for that moment.
Hello again, Charlie Brown. And Snoopy. And all the rest. I missed you so much. Please don't stay away so long again.
NOTE: Publication of this review is possible in part through contributions to The MovieBob Patreon.
Yeesh. What a bucket of suck this thing is.
I'm sorry. I try as best I'm able to save the more colorful witticisms for the video reviews, but some bad movies are exactly bad enough in such a particular way that it feels unjust to approach them with more civilized verbiage. BURNT, featuring one of current Hollywood's most overexposed performers inhabiting the apotheosis of his own most tiresome stock-persona in one of the most annoying recurring narratives of the last decade or so (the mercurial ultra-driven muy-macho auteur-badass who really is so damn good at his vocation that world is just going to have to learn to deal with it, bro!), is practically the Platonic ideal of this very type; with Bradley Cooper mugging, shouting and hard-staring his way through an "I'm a troubled genius, give me an Oscar!!!" turn that asks its audience: "Sure, you loved RATATOUILLE - but wouldn't you love it more with an abusive, too-cool-for-school douchebag whose talent justifies his every flaw?"
90% of what you need to know about BURNT is that it was originally titled simply "ADAM JONES," the name of Cooper's self-consciously cocky master chef who alternately stomps or strides through every scene like a nightmare-offspring of House M.D. and Bobby Flay. The story is ostensibly about Jones rebuilding his reputation as a world-class chef by retooling the upscale London restaurant of an old pal (Daniel Bruhl) and chasing an elusive Third Star from the Michelin Guide; but it's immediately apparent that the only story it has any real interest in telling is "Adam Jones is the coolest motherfucker walking the Earth, and Bradley Cooper totally deserves a Best Actor nomination for informing you of this fact."
Yes, Jones strut the streets (except for scenes where he drives them on a "borrowed" motorcycle), stalk back-alleys and stride through brushed-metal kitchens of London in a leather jacket and daytime-sunglasses like a mid-90s Zucker Bros parody of an early Tom Cruise role; but that's just for openers. He also flips tables in fits of artistic torment, shakes and shoves his underlings like a drill sergeant (which only makes them respect him more, naturally), flamed-out in glorious rock star fashion (he did all the drugs, you guys) because even he couldn't handle his own awesomeness yet has only become more ruggedly-handsome as a result. He righteously eschews fancy modern cooking devices in favor of classical techniques (no namby-pamby test-tube nerdery here, yo!), dodges/absorbs-blows-from the henchmen of an angry druglord, and returns from self-imposed exile only after completing a perfectly Hemmingway-esque blue collar self-flagellation ritual of shucking exactly one million oysters in a New Orleans steam-shack (no, really.)
It's the sort of "hero's journey" pastiche where nearly every character, friend or foe, is built with what they're words and actions can reinforce to us about Adam Jones as their sole and sufficient foundation. Sienna Miller's put-upon single mom and sou chef repays his bullying her (physical-assault included) into becoming her best possible self by falling in love with him. His arch-nemesis (Matthew Rhys) rescues him from a post-all-is-lost-moment bender and nurses him back to health because (I am not making this up) he needs a rival as potent as Adam Jones to make his life worth living. Uma Thurman's cameo as a food critic lasts exactly long enough for her to inform us that she set her lesbianism aside for at least one night to bed him, while Daniel Bruhl's quietly-reserved maitre'd is revealed as gay midway through the story exclusively so we can be assured that he, too, is along for the ride because he's desperately in love with Adam Jones.
I'll be honest: All this self-sustaining hero worship (the goddamn AVENGERS movies don't spend this much time establishing the awesomeness of their protagonists, and one of those guys is a literal god) had me longing for the (relative) subtlety of CHEF; which I'll remind you was about how Jon Favreau was such a transcendently great director chef that his post-Marvel movies cuban sandwiches were so scrumptious as to turn film food critics into business partners and no less than Scarlet Johansson and Sofia Vergara into salivating coital supplicants. At this rate the next "kitchen-skills-as-cock-size" vanity piece will be about an ex-Navy SEAL black-belt whose artisanal tilapia dumplings are capable of putting an entire stadium's worth of Victoria's Secret Angels into immediate post-multiorgasmic comas by their aroma alone.
Some of this might be forgivable if BURNT was at least stylish or had a modicum of humor about itself, but neither is the case. The proceedings are flatly directed John Wells, also responsible for the not-bad COMPANY MAN and the frankly embarassing AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY. Wells is mainly known as a celebrated TV producer, and there are spots where one can see where BURNT might have worked as a series where the peripheral characters could have more going on than reassuring us of what an incredible guy Adam Jones is. But even then, the casting is likely an impossible hurdle: Adam Jones is so perfectly a Bradley Cooper Role that Bradley Cooper should never have gone near it.
Cooper isn't a bad actor (he's pretty good, in fact) but his seemingly-natural cocksure persona has made him the latest actor thrust into the role of replacing "lovable asshole" titans in the vein of Bill Murray (or Harrison Ford) and he just doesn't have the sense of gravity (or mileage) about him to make it work. There's never enough "natural" depth to his turns in this vein to make him tolerable without some extra layer of mitigating distance (i.e. being the "Chaotic Neutral" member of THE HANGOVER or being a space raccoon in GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY) to let us regard him beyond the surface. Maybe an actor with a more authentically rough-feeling edge (Ryan Gosling, maybe?) or a built-in "opposite" persona to put us off guard (a teddy bear like Kevin James?) could've turned Adam Jones into someone sort-of worth following around for 100 minutes or so.
But as for Cooper, this isn't the one that's going to get him "there;" and should probably stop saying "yes" to screenplays that sound written with his headshot from THE HANGOVER taped to the wall.
Hey! Turns out this was Episode 50! For those of you playing at home, that means AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D now has approximately 30-50 more episodes to go before it hits "syndication ready" numbers and Disney/Marvel even considers taking it off the schedule - ratings or no ratings.
SPOILERS FOLLOW: So! Andrew Gardner - Agent May's ex-husband, top S.H.I.E.L.D advisor and counselor of newly-turned Inhumans - is also Lash, the musclebound monster whose been hunting and killing Inhumans since the start of the season. That's a good, well-managed "gotcha" on the series' part. Yeah, I figured it out, but the way it makes perfect sense in the context of what we already knew (on a series that too often executes surprises in the form of: "Surprise! And now here's some stuff from the comics and movies to make it look like this actually makes sense!")
But it's also fun because of the downright devious wrench it throws into the good-team/bad-team dynamic regarding the Inhumans situation: So far, the tension in S.H.I.E.L.D's uneasy alliance with the ATCU has been (in most of the Agents and especially Daisy's view) that S.H.I.E.L.D is looking to counsel, aid and show new purpose (via Coulson's "Secret Warriors" project) to newly-turned Inhumans while the ATCU seems to regard them as a threat and has been spiriting those they find off to... somewhere. This is classical X-Men stuff (which is the point - The Inhumans are filling in for Mutants until Marvel can wrestle the rights back from Fox) and it was really easy to but into it as the "obvious" pattern for the show...
...but now it turns out to be a lot more complicated: While May was busy learning that her ex is basically an alien-werewolf; Daisy, Mack and a temporarily-grounded Hunter wound up surreptitiously spying on Coulson finally getting his tour of ATCU's holding-facility - where it turns out they haven't been hurting Inhumans, but they have been putting (supposedly) dangerous to self/others examples into a version of cryo-freeze while they work on a "cure" for Terrigenesis. Now, that's bad... but it's more misguided than "evil" and Rosalind (Price, ATCU's head) at least seems to have her heart sort-of close to the right place i.e. wanting to help people she sees as afflicted. Meanwhile, S.H.I.E.L.D - whose first instinct will likely be to get self-righteous about this - are the ones with a murderous Inhuman-hating monster on their payroll. Awkward.
Otherwise (read: before all those final-act twists) the episode was largely concerned with May and Bobbi tracking down Werner Von Strucker - the old-HYDRA heir who went AWOL after failing to kill Andrew because... well, Lash. Some of this is classic AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D misdirection (Werner is the one who reveals Andrew's nature to May), but it also serves to intro a new heavy to the proceedings: Powers Boothe, stepping out from the shadows as one of the nameless Security Council members from THE AVENGERS to reveal himself as... somebody bad. It's not exactly clear yet, though his dialogue with Ward is meant to suggest he's either HYDRA or HYDRA-affiliated. They don't even say his name (it's Gideon Malick) yet.
Almost as surprising as the Big Reveal, though, it's how much the "boss-to-boss-crush" dynamic with Coulson and Price actually works once it gets room to breathe. The "aww, Coulson is human after all" stuff has really only ever worked in small drops seeping through the slick-operator routine in the past, but the gag is endearing (they're both working a middle-aged middle-manager version of 007-style seducing-for-intel, but also both kind of "into" it for real) and you could feel the writers having a good time with the kind of low-key stuff that you'd use to lull Coulson into a false sense of security (take-out burgers and a vintage autographed baseball bat as opposed to champagne and lingerie.) I'm not really on the "Mr. & Mrs. S.H.I.E.L.D" bandwagon yet by any means, but it was fun for an episode.
BULLET POINTS:
Well, that takes care of the "what" and the "who" for Andrew/Lash. Presumably next up will be the "how," "when" and "why." Has he been Inhuman this entire time or did he go through Terrigenesis recently? Does he want to kill other Inhumans because he doesn't find those unwittingly-changed "worthy" like in the comics, or is it something else? Since I'm pretty sure AGENTS is not going to get to set the "rules" for the broader INHUMANS franchise this far ahead of the movies, I'm guessing "something else."
Who is Gideon Malick? So far, I'm hoping the clue is in the name: In the Comics Universe, Albert Malik was the name of the second man to call himself The Red Skull.
Regarding said Red Skull, keep in mind: The Marvel movie AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D will eventually be intersecting with this season is CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR. Part of the fallout from the comics' version of that story (over in the Cap books) was that a high-placed official turned out to be "possessed" (long story) by The Red Skull.
NEXT WEEK: Andrew has some explaining to do in "Chaos Theory." Won't be surprised if they have May try to get it out of him first in lieu of letting the whole team in on the secret in order to keep the tension up.
A documentary about a series of debates between two rival intellectuals largely made up of grainy archival footage from nearly half a century ago may sound like Boring City to some, but I seriously bet that many more will be highly entertained by this thoroughly engrossing breakdown of the televised feud between the conservative William F. Buckley and the liberal Gore Vidal in the late �60s.
Directors Morgan Neville (whose excellent 2013 doc 20 FEET FROM STARDOM won the Best Documentary Oscar) and Robert Gordon succinctly set the scene: in 1968, ABC, being the lowest rated of the three networks, decides to spice up what they were calling their �Unconventional Convention Coverage� of the Republican and Democratic national conventions by hiring Buckley and Vidal to do live commentary.
The background of both men was remarkedly similar as both had come from privileged upbringings, went to posh New England boarding schools, became acclaimed authors but failed politicians, had powerful political connections, and both spoke in haughty upper class accents, but their ideologies clashed like crazy.
Imagine two Frasier Cranes, one right-wing; one left-wing, pitted against each other, which shouldn�t be too hard as the filmmakers have Frasier himself, the conservative actor Kelsey Grammer, reading selected writings of Buckley�s (left-wing actor John Lithgow reads for Vidal) to fill in gaps in the presentation.
The debates themselves, which commence at the Republican National Convention in Miami in August �68, are juicy, edgy affairs in which Buckley and Vidal viciously argue about the candidates, Vietnam, crime, poverty, and the civil rights movement among other incendiary issues.
Buckley several times deridingly indentifies Vidal as the �author of �Myra Breckinridge�,� referring to Vidal�s controversial sexually satirical novel that many conservative critics, including Buckley, considered pornographic.
For his part, Vidal gets in some quips such as that Buckley is �always to the right, I think, and almost always in the wrong,� and that he�s the �Mary Antoinette of the right wing.�
But it was the ninth debate in Chicago in which the two really came to a head.
In a heated discussion of the climate of the Democratic convention in which Buckley�s defense of the strong-arm tactics deployed by Mayor Richard Daley's police against anti-Vietnam War protestors causes Vidal to call him �crypto-Nazi.�
Buckley loses it: �Listen to me you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I�ll sock you in the goddamn face and you�ll stay plastered!�
This shocking moment - these things were simply not said on TV at the time - was dissected in pieces written by both men for Esquire about the episode, which resulted in lawsuits (Buckley sued Vidal for his insinuation in his response article that Buckley was a closeted homosexual; Vidal countersued) that went on for years before being settled.
Buckley biographer, and interview subject, Sam Tanenhaus claims that Buckley �couldn�t let this thing go,� while Vidal�s close friend and editor Matt Tyrnauer talks about watching a VHS copy of the debates several times with Vidal until Tyrnauer felt like they were �edging into SUNSET BOULEVARD/Norma Desmond territory.�
Gordon and Neville convincingly posit that the Buckley/Vidal debates were the dawn of the era of pundit TV, in which corporate media entities like FOX News and MSNBC have taken those original commentators� techniques to the bank, while no argument comes anywhere close to be resolved.
To further make their case, clips of talking heads shouting at each other conclude the film, including the now famous clip in which The Daily Show�s Jon Stewart goes on Fox News� Crossfire knockoff Hannity & Colmes in 2003 and tells them that they�re �doing theater when you should be doing debate.�
It�s a great capper to this must see poli-doc that takes us back to when a couple of incredibly articulate men who as one of their debate moderator, ABC anchor Howard K. Smith, puts it �demonstrate how the English language ought to be used� - that is, before their intense hatred for one another got out of control.
That�s when it became the theater that Stewart bemoaned, but unfortunately that�s also when it was decided by the powers that be that it was good TV. The real takeaway here is that the Buckley/Vidal debates was the last and only time that that sort of theater was good TV.
Special Features: Interview with Directors Neville & Gordon, over an hour of Bonus Interviews with Commentators including Christopher Hitchens, Dick Cavett, James Wolcott, and Andrew Sullivan; and Theatrical Trailer.
