The Reel World

"It's called The Ultron Program."

Remember when you were a kid and one of your friends would come over and ask if you could come out and play? You would head for the door with a grin from ear to ear, because you knew you were about to have a blast. You might not have had any idea what it was you were going to do. Often you made it up as you went along. It didn't matter. You just knew fun times were on the other side of your front door. That's exactly how I felt going to catch The Avengers: Age Of Ultron. It was as if Joss Whedon had come to my house and asked me to come out and play. And it wasn't just Joss. He brought a whole bunch of his cool friends, and they brought a ton of really cool toys. From that point it didn't matter so much to me what was going to happen exactly. Phasers were set to good times, and I knew I was going to have fun. Age Of Ultron did it to me just like the many Marvel films before it. I didn't want it to end. I often joke that the only thing wrong with instant gratification is that it takes too long. Now I have to wait another year before most of these characters will assemble once again in Captain America: Civil War.

"The following is kind of based on a true story, a little bit." 

In 2005 British folk singer/songwriter Steve Tilston found out something amazing had happened to him but he never knew it. John Lennon had written a letter to him in 1971 providing him with some career encouragement and his home phone number. It was after an interview with the musician in ZigZag Magazine revealed that Lennon was one of Tilston's idols that got the attention of the former Beatle. Of course, Lennon didn't know how to reach the musician, so he sent it to the offices of the magazine where it was intercepted by someone who saw some value in the letter and sold it instead of passing it along. It sounds like one of those stories that's just too wild to be true. The event provides the inspiration for the latest Al Pacino film Danny Collins.

Most true life stories are remarkable in some way. If you can get to the truth of real-life history, it almost always unearths treasures of understanding. Art is the process of revealing hidden truth and beauty in real life. Woman In Gold is the story of a painting that was sold for $135,000,000 in 2006 to an heir of Estee Lauder. It was the highest price for a painting at the time. There is a remarkable story that takes place around the painting. It involves the Nazi theft of art in World War II. A previous film, Monuments Men, tackled the subject a couple of years ago. The challenge that both films faced is making the subject of art important when mixed with the chaos and horror involving human life during the period. Then there is the painting itself, which is so iconic that it was called the Austrian Mona Lisa.

Woman In Gold covers a lot of ground from the creation of the work itself (also known as Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I) by Gustav Klimt in 1907 through the traumatic and catastrophic war years to the eventual battle to find justice and closure.

When Divergent ended, it planted the seed for the sequels that would follow.  I really enjoyed the first installment and our introduction into the factions that supported this society.  What I enjoyed most after revisiting the film is how the film handles the budding relationship between Tris (Shailene Woodley) and Four (Theo James), never too sappy but being a couple we could root for since they were both outsiders to their community.  Now that the factions and the characters have all been set up, and with the rebellion beginning to take shape at the end of the first film, Insurgent wastes no time in jumping into the story and delivering one of the better sequels in some time.

To be fair, Insurgent really is its own film. We’re no longer watching our characters train and play capture the flag, or take part in simulations to pass a test.  Things are ramped up, and our heroes are being hunted down by Jeanine (Kate Winslet) and her followers.  The charm and the innocence we saw in the first film where Tris is wide-eyed with excitement with her training is all gone, and we see this in an overly symbolic scene where we watch Tris cut off those lovely golden locks of hers.

“Have courage and be kind.”

Those words — repeated many times in this newest version of Cinderella — serve as both the title character’s mantra and the film’s unofficial tagline. The message is elegant in its simplicity in a way that mirrors this refreshingly old-fashioned adaptation, which resists the prevailing urge to modernize and/or revise a classic story.

“Tell everyone to get ready.  Jimmy is coming.” 

If someone were to tell me while walking out of Schindler’s List that 20 years later Liam Neeson would be an action star, I would have thought they were out of their mind.  Between the trio of Taken films and numerous films that seem to be cut from the same ilk, Liam Neeson seems to be walking in the same footsteps as Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood as being the go-to everyman that just so happens to be a badass with or without a gun.  It’s that odd bit of typecasting that in many ways hurts Run All Night; after all, the trailers give us the vibe that this is nothing more than am action film where yet again his family is in peril, when really it has so much more going for it.

Unfinished Business starring Vince Vaughn, Tom Wilkinson, Dave Franco, Sienna Miller, James Marsden and Nick Frost is a raunchy comedy. I say that because it is the most important thing I can say that would make people want to see this movie. It is raunchy, but it is mixed with so many other issues and tones that the raunchiness and comedy sometimes get lost in the mix. The film is really more about anxiety and failure. There are so many elements mixed in that this emotional rollercoaster of a movie is so full of strange turns that it is difficult to enjoy the ride. All the performers are capable of great work and may even be doing great work here, but it gets lost. The cumulative effect is a sense of confusion, but I believe that there is a good movie here that could come out if everyone went back and did the whole thing again. The director Ken Scott is best known for having made the successful French Canadian comedy Starbuck, which was later remade as The Delivery Man starring Vince Vaughn. I assume that is how this whole project ultimately came together.

The original title for Unfinished Business was Business Trip, which would have been better since it gives focus to what's going on. Dan Trunkman (Vaughn) quits his job to start a new company in the opening scene of the movie. The opening scene of an argument in the break room with his boss and future competitor, Chuck (Sienna Miller) gets things off to a good start. Many people have expressed confusion about what the actual business is, and I think it would have helped early on to have included a funny scene explaining the mechanics of selling aftermarket metal waste for recycling. He immediately takes on two new employees in the parking lot in a typical heart-of-gold fashion. One is an employee let go because of age. Timothy McWinters (Tom Wilkinson) is only 67 and still feels he has a lot of living yet to do. The other major character is a problem from the outside. Mike Pancake (Dave Franco) is such a confusing mix of negative and positive qualities that any normal person would have instinctively said, “Sorry, I can't help you”. That Dan doesn't do that immediately makes you wonder if there isn't something terribly wrong with him as a businessman embarking on a new venture.

Despite the twinge of disappointment I felt as I exited the theater after seeing Elysium, I still believed writer/director Neill Blomkamp was more than a one-trick pony with District 9. Now two years after the release of Elysium, Blomkamp is set to release Chappie, a sentient-robot film that from the trailers evokes comparisons to Robocop and Short Circuit, which could mean either that could be a hit or another disappointment.  A disappointment could be trouble for Blomkamp. After all, his concept images and storyline for an Alien sequel has relit excitement for a franchise that many had felt died after the third entry.  I look at Blomkamp’s film and feel he is what the sci-fi genre has needed, a creative party who isn’t making films just because he can. Blomkamp is a fresh voice that the genre has desperately needed.  A voice that is willing to tackle social issues but entertain the masses at the same time.  When it comes to Chappie, despite my concern, despite all the naysayers, Blomkamp has made a film that takes many risks, and he comes so close to knocking it out of the park.

Chappie takes us into a world where the days of human police officers working the street has become a thing of the past.  It’s an experiment we’ve seen explored before, and most will think about Robocop in many of the early scenes.  As I watched, I couldn’t help thinking, was this nothing more than an attempt on Blomkamp’s part to show he should have been the one to helm the Robocop remake?  We even get a glimpse of another robot that is being designed by a mullet-brandishing Hugh Jackman that looks just like the ED-209, only this version is called the Moose.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

“That’s what you get when you hire a con man.”

As much fun as it is to watch clever, cagey characters try to outsmart one another on screen, the real appeal of movies about con artists is watching filmmakers try to pull the wool over the audience’s eye. It’s an especially tricky proposition when you consider that — thanks to the Internet — moviegoers might be more sophisticated than ever in terms of knowing how movies are supposed to work. (Or at least *thinking* they know how movies are supposed to work.)