The new films this week start and end with the future. From the imaginary to the widely predicted. Both pretty grim. How about some good old male camaraderie then? We’ve got three examples, plus a bizarre rock “n” roller and a Canadian drama set in the far north.
Here’s the list:
The Giver: 2 ½ stars
Frank: 4
The Trip to Italy: 3 ½
Land Ho: 3
The Expendables 3: 2 ½
Uvanga: 3
Expedition to the End of the World: 3 ½
Let’s Be Cops: --
THE GIVER: Years before books like The Hunger Games and Divergent, there came this vision of a dystopian society aimed at and featuring young people. This one was published in 1993 and now the film version arrives into a field that’s become quite crowded, with more on the way. Maybe that’s why this one seems so unexceptional, even with Meryl Streep and Jeff Bridges in the cast. And the brief and unremarkable film debut of Taylor Swift. We’ve seen most of it before. It plays out exactly as we expect it to. Except dumber.
It is “after the ruin”. A new society has been established. Harmony is the ideal; differences aren’t allowed. Neither are dancing, music, color, love or, apparently, free will. Everybody is assigned a job and a role in society at a school graduation ceremony. Streep plays the chief elder who hands out the jobs and pops in now and then as a hologram to check up on how things are going. Brenton Thwaites (most recently of Maleficent) gets a special assignment “Receiver of Memories.” Mandatory daily injections have wiped out people’s memories of the past. Only Jeff Bridges as a crusty librarian still has them.
He’s the “giver” who will pass them along. Why? If society doesn’t want them known because they recall war, strife and discord, why are they being preserved? More questions will come to you as holes in the story show up. Thwaites sees the past in trance-like flashbacks and through them leans the grim truth about his society. Not surprisingly he turns into a rebel. Although it’s stylishly designed and efficiently directed by Phillip Noyce, the film already feels old. (International Village and suburban theatres) 2 ½ out of 5
FRANK: Want something funny, endearing and bizarrely wacko? Try this glimpse inside the music business in England circa late 70s when new wave offered a DIY style with a sense of humor. This film gives us Michael Fassbender as a semi-fictional version of a musician who enjoyed a brief popular ride without showing his face. He always wore a papier-mâché mask that covered his head.
He was real, though. He called himself Frank Sidebottom and had created the character to promote a video game but found an audience beyond it. In this film Domhnall Gleeson plays an aspiring songwriter who is invited into his band, spends a year with them in a farm house recording an album and travels with them to Austin Texas to play for a perplexed crowd at the South by Southwest music festival. Maggie Gyllenhaal, as the band’s theremin player, is hostile to him but he stays, determined to learn “Frank’s secrets.” The film is based on a magazine article by the real-life songwriter. It captures the mood perfectly of an ensemble with a leader charismatic and mad enough to say “feel the galactic vibe” and tell his band mates to “push to the furthest corners and unlock the music hidden there.” Fassbender is inside that mask almost the entire film and yet makes Frank believable as an artist driven to find something new. It’s a comedy with insight. (Rio Theatre) 4 out of 5
THE TRIP TO ITALY: The first of two male-buddy travel pics (see also Land Ho). This has Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon on the road again to sample the cuisine. Three years ago they ate and bantered their way through northern England. This time they’re in charming Italian villages from Tuscany, past Rome, down to Capri.
In one sense it’s the same movie again. They do impressions as they eat, of Pacino, Hopkins, De Niro, Brando, a hilarious Tom Hardy. Also Michael Buble and Gore Vidal. They listen to and comment on Alanis Morisette and Avril Lavigne and discuss Lord Byron’s indiscretions during his years in Italy. Very funny, droll stuff. This time though there’s a parallel story line—their less-than-ideal family lives. Coogan has phone conversations with his estranged son, who shows up personally late in the film. Brydon has cool phone chats with his wife and spends a night with a tour-boat woman. All that flips the two men’s characters—Coogan was the horn in the first film. The result is more self-deprecating irony that plays on and with their image. And makes you wonder: is it real or another impression … of a version of themselves? (5th Avenue) 3 ½ out of 5
LAND HO: This one’s perfect for summer vacation time. This amiable film will have you feeling the travel bug yourself while reflecting on the nature of friendship, old age and the contrasting personalities of a couple of geezers. It’s funny, bittersweet and easy to take.
Mitch and Colin were brothers-in-law and great friends before they drifted apart. Now, with Colin gloomy after a divorce, Mitch leads him on a trip to Iceland to cheer him up. That’s about it for plot, but what happens on the way is delightful. They’re a mismatched pair. Colin (played by Seattle actor Paul Eenhoorn) is sober with a hangdog demeanor. Mitch is loud, always cheerful and always talking. He’s played by a part-time actor from New Orleans who also happens to be a cousin of Martha Stephens who, with Aaron Katz, directed the film. She wrote perfect, often bawdy, dialogue for him and also allowed him room to improvise. The film breathes with life, or as Mitch puts it, they were “getting’ our groove back.” They smoke pot, skinny dip with a former Torontonian (Alice Olivia Clarke) and generally counteract their advanced age amidst some spectacular scenery. (International Village) 3 out of 5
THE EXPENDABLES 3: The cast list tells it all. This is Sylvester Stallone’s third party with big-name (most of them former) action stars: Dolph Lundgren, Wesley Snipes, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jason Statham, Randy Couture, Terry Crews, Mel Gibson, Harrison Ford, Antonio Banderas, Jet Li, and Kelsey Grammer. Huh? Him too? Yes, but only as a liaison figure to all that brawn. Those guys, and there are more than ever before, do even bigger impossible missions while pausing now and then to consider the problem of creeping old age.
It’s Stallone, who also wrote the script, who carries that burden. He disbands his team and brings in a younger bunch (Glen Powell, Kellan Lutz, Rhonda Rousey, et al) only to see them captured and in need of rescuing. Of course, he calls back the old guys. These films are principally about camaraderie after all. The villain is an old friend himself, now an international arms dealer, played with sneering glee by Mel Gibson. He’s the most vibrant character in here. Stallone, who’s told to capture him for a trial at the international court, proclaims this fascist sentiment: “I am the Hague.” I wonder how many in the audience will get that and if Neil Young likes that his song “Old Man” is on the soundtrack.
The film, to its credit, holds back on showing brutality and blood while racking up a big body count. The best sequences are right at the start, first an exciting rescue from a speeding train, then a crashing shootout among the shipping containers in a Somalian port. In contrast, the final action sequence which should top them all is confusing with excess. And there’s off-screen drama. Parts 1 and 2 together made over a half a billion dollars at the box office. This one has already been pirated and illegally downloaded millions of times. (Scotiabank and suburban theatres) 2 ½ out of 5
UVANGA: We still don’t get enough Canadian stories in the movies. Here’s a good one, small and modest, but with an ambience of authenticity and more than a little strangeness. And humor too.
A woman from the south arrives in a far-north Inuit village with her son, we think to show him how people live there. Most of it, including eating raw fish, is quite a shock to him but slowly we learn he belongs there. His mother was there as a teacher, had an affair with a local man, got pregnant and left. A woman drunkenly yells at her calling a slut. Gradually we learn who she is, her circumstances now and what happened in the past. It’s a tangled story involving the death of the boy’s father some time ago and the mysterious rumors about that. More important though are the background issues the film so ably illuminates: north-south, city-remote, white-Inuit, short term visitor vs resident. Co-directors Marie Hélène-Cousineau and Madeline Piujuq Ivalu, who run a video workshop for woman in Nunavut, bring them forth with a cast of mostly local people. (VanCity Theatre) 3 out of 5
Playing in tandem with …
EXPEDITION TO THE END OF THE WORLD: Here’s a neat trick. This documentary plays like an entertainment while the people in it –and you watching –turn to thinking about downer stuff like climate change and the mass extinction we’re bringing upon ourselves. It’s a fascinating hybrid.
A Danish ship heads into a newly ice-free fjord in northern Greenland, bringing scientists, artists and photographers to study what global warming is doing. They drill into the permafrost, watch a glacier crack and almost accidentally shoot a polar bear. As they do they chat almost matter-of-factly about the future. “Mankind adapts,” one says. No, says another. Humans are now changing the environment faster than they can adapt. They go on to reflect on the meaning of life itself. Life is robust. We’re just one form and can be replaced. The film captures all the dialogue, momentous or casual, humorous or grim, while elegaic choral music or Metallica play over some pretty great scenery. Beautiful. (VanCity Theatre) 3 ½ out of 5
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LET’S BE COPS: This film tried to get a jump on the weekend competition. It opened Wednesday; some places Tuesday night. And I still haven’t seen it. I hear though it’s fairly funny and often tense and riffs on the buddy-cop movies like Lethal Weapon or its sillier cousin 21 Jump Street. Damon Wayans plays a video game designer who brings home a couple of police uniforms. Jake Johnson plays his roommate who finds a police cruiser on EBay and before they realize that impersonating cops is not a good idea as well as illegal, they have gangsters coming after them. (International Village and suburban theatres)