Valerian & the City of 1000 Planets - Movie Review

Starring Dane DeHaan, Cara Delevingne, Clive Owen, Ethan Hawke, Rihanna, Herbie Hancock, Kris Wu, Sam Spruell, Rutger Hauer and John Goodman.
Written & Directed by Luc Besson.

★★½

The director of The Fifth Element gets even more crazy in this visually wonderful, narratively clunky movie that goes to some weird corners of the galaxy to tell its unique tale. In many ways, I admire some of the original avenues it wanders down, though ultimately its shallow story and questionable casting prevents it from being a hit.

I'm debating whether or not to even explain the plot. The plot doesn't really matter. We see an alien homeworld where everything is peaceful, like the Na'vi on a beach. Then a space battle above results in ships crashing into their ocean, on to their shores. Most of them are wiped out. That's the prologue. We cut to Valerian and Lauraline, a boyfriend-girlfriend unit where he also outranks her, and they're basically space cops. Eh, it doesn't matter. It's an excuse to go from world to world, retrieving a Macguffin to save the universe. Something like that.

The fun parts are the detours. Ethan Hawke popping up as some sort of space pimp, introducing Valerian to a shape-shifting erotic dancer whose favorite form happens to look just like Rihanna. There's another scene where Lauraline gets stuck in the cosmic kitchen from hell. There's a dimension-hopping chase scene. This is a video game I want to play.

Dane DeHaan is usually best as creeps. He doesn't have the Young Indiana Jones charisma the role of Valerian would call for. Let's just say Cara Delevingne as Lauraline fares better here than she did as Enchantress in Suicide Squad. There's not much chemistry between them, and I would have been cool with Valerian getting killed off halfway through and letting Lauraline finishing the adventure herself. I should be rooting for these two like Han and Leia, or Wesley and Buttercup, or Clark and Lois. Didn't really care.

If you missed it on the big screen, and you still want to see it, see on the largest TV or monitor you can. Otherwise you'd miss its point of existing.

Regression - DVD Review

REGRESSION (R) Starring Ethan Hawke, Emma Watson, David Thewlis, Dale Dickey, David Dencik, Devon Bostick, Lothaire Bluteau, Aaron Ashmore and Peter MacNeill.
Written & Directed by Alejandro Amenabar.

★

I had hopes for this psychological thriller from the man who made 2001's The Others. But since I was able to guess the ending in the first few minutes, it wound up being a suspenseless atmospheric slog.

Circa 1990, Ethan Hawke plays Bruce Kenner, a detective investigating a child molestation case. A father (David Dencik) is accused of molesting his 17-year-old daughter Angela (Emma Watson) as part of a satanic sex-abuse ring. Her psychiatrist (David Thewlis) engages in regression hypnosis, and it helps his patients remember more and more of what they're suppressed. Soon Kenner himself is having nightmares and visions about satanists infiltrating the police force.

The film has the gauzy sheen of a 1990 celluloid film, not to mention a score that'd be at home in Kiss the Girls or Taking Lives. Hawke knows how to make middle-grade thrillers semi-work (The Purge, Sinister), but he can't pull this off. I don't know if anyone could.

Maggie's Plan - DVD Review

MAGGIE'S PLAN (R) Starring Greta Gerwig, Ethan Hawke, Julianne Moore, Bill Hader, Maya Rudolph and Travis Fimmel.
Written by Rebecca Miller & Karen Rinaldi.
Directed by Rebecca Miller.

★★½

This winsome film has a rom-com premise but it's done in a Woody Allen/Noah Baumbach indie style that makes it feel different. Gerwig plays Maggie, a woman who's decided to get artificial insemination. But right after she does, a co-worker (Ethan Hawke) professes he's madly in love with her, and he leaves his wife for her.

The movie lives or dies on how charismatic you find Greta Gerwig (Frances Ha), and I thought she was fine, if familiar. I was most interested in Julianne Moore as the jilted ex-wife.

The Magnificent Seven - Movie Review

Starring Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Vincent D'Onofrio, Byung-Hun Lee, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Martin Sensmeier, Haley Bennett, Peter Sarsgaard, Luke Grimes, Matt Bomer and Cam Gigandet.
Written by Nic Pizzolatto & Richard Wenk.
Directed by Antoine Fuqua.

★★★

Did we need this remake? No, but might as well have some fun with it.

It's a great story, told over and over, from the original Seven Samurai to the Yul Brenner/Steve McQueen classic to Three Amigos to A Bug's Life.  People in peril from someone powerful and evil seek help from outsiders.

This movie features the robber-baron Bartholomew Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard), the hammiest mustache-twirling villain you're going to see this year, counting the animated movies. He's bought off the law to the point that he and his men can just shoot a few people in broad daylight and set fire to their church, and no one does anything. After her husband is killed, Emma Cullen (Haley Bennett) enlists the help of bounty hunter Sam Chisolm (Denzel Washington). The town scrapes together what possessions they have left so Chisolm can recruit who he needs to in order to kill Bogue. (And Chisolm's bounty hunter scenes reminded me a lot of Django Unchained.)

This is where the movie really picks up. We're given enough time to meet the recruits one by one and have enough time with them that we care whether all of them will survive the inevitable showdown. Faraday (Chris Pratt) is the wise-cracking gambler. Vasquez (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) is the bandit. Goodnight Robicheaux (Ethan Hawke) is the legendary Civil War sharpshooter, and Billy Rocks (Byung-Hun Lee) is his knife-wielding companion. Jack Horne (Vincent D'Onofrio) is the expert mountain man. Red Harvest (Martin Sensmeier) is the Comanche who finds himself without a tribe.

The third act, after the Seven have fortified the town and trained the remaining citizens the best they could, is the money part of the movie. I loved the set-up and execution of the final half-hour battle.

It's not particularly deep, and I would argue it doesn't take itself too seriously. For a movie where almost 200 people get killed.

Random Movie News - 8/15/13

- Warner Bros has ended its deal with Legendary Pictures, and Universal has moved in on a partnership.  This means that Universal is trying to find a new release date for the fantasy adventure Seventh Son, starring Jeff Bridges, and it also means they'll distribution on 300: Rise of an Empire (3/7/14) and Godzilla (5/16/14).

- Foxcatcher will now open in limited release December 20 to make it Academy-Award eligible. It's directed by Bennett Miller (Moneyball) and stars Steve Carell as eccentric millionaire John du Pont, who was convicted of murdering his friend Dave Schultz, to be played by Mark Ruffalo.  Channing Tatum, Sienna Miller, Vanessa Redgrave and Anthony Michael Hall will also star.

- Lionsgate is pushing forward with a sequel to Now You See Me. The surprise summer hit has grossed over $230 million worldwide on a $75 million production budget.  No word yet on how many original cast members will return or if director Louis Letterier will return.

- Ethan Hawke is reuniting with his Hamlet director Michael Almereyda for Cymbeline, based on the Shakespeare play but will be set in 21st century.  Ed Harris and Milla Jovovich will co-star.

- Simon Helberg (The Big Bang Theory) will write, direct and star in We'll Never Have Paris, about a man who screws up on a transcontinental level trying to win back "the one."  Maggie Grace (Lost, Taken) and Jason Ritter (The Event) co-star, and Helberg's wife Jocelyn Towne will co-direct.

- Abigail Breslin (Zombieland, The Call) will star in the zombie thriller Maggie, about a father (Arnold Schwarzenegger) dealing with his daughter who's been infected with a walking-dead virus.

The Purge - Movie Review

Starring Ethan Hawke, Lena Headey, Max Burkholder, Adelaide Kane, Edwin Hodge, Rhys Wakefield and Tony Oller.  
Directed by James DeMonaco.

★★

This is a terrific Twilight Zone premise that raises some interesting questions, but it never really explores them as it devolves into a choppy house-under-siege movie.

It's America 2022.  In 2017, the "new Founding Fathers" voted on The Purge, a 12-hour period where once a year, all crime is legal, including murder (with exceptions for high government officials).  Hawke is the dad here with the job of selling security systems to rich people who want to protect their homes from the Purge each year.

Hawke's family chooses not to participate, rather they stay in their home and watch the news, but when the son lets a homeless man inside, it attracts the crowd of murderous youth who'd been in pursuit.

Now there's plenty of subtext going on, with class warfare, the haves and have-nots, human nature.  The movie hints that the reason the law passed was so rich people would have an excuse to kill poor people, because most rich people secretly just want to kill.  What we actually get is a house with the power killed, so there's a lot of movement lit by nothing but flashlights, as psychotic rich kids dance and laugh while they wait to get their bloodlust satiated.

I don't mind that a sequel was greenlit, because there's so much more filmmakers could do with this premise.  The reality of what the movie is is a letdown from what the movie could have been.

The Sessions, Sinister, The Man with the Iron Fists - DVD Reviews

THE SESSIONS (★★★) - Starring John Hawkes, Helen Hunt, William H. Macy, Moon Bloodgood, W. Earl Brown, Rhea Perlman, Robin Weigart and Adam Arkin. Directed by Ben Lewin.

Very well-made dramedy based on the true story of a man rendered virtually quadriplegic by polio who sets out to lose his virginity at age 38.  John Hawkes (Winter's Bone) has to do all of his acting with his face and voice, and he's great.  Helen Hunt gives her best performance in years as his "surrogate" who works with him for six sessions to get him to the point where he can achieve sex. Tons of casual nudity in this movie though.  There were times it might have been more polite for the movie to just film the bedroom door and give them their privacy.

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SINISTER (★★★) - Starring Ethan Hawke, Juliet Rylance, Fred Dalton Thompson and Vincent D'Onofrio.  Directed by Scott Derrickson.

Here comes a movie with some genuine spooky moments.  It stars Ethan Hawke and his sweater as two beings hearing things go bump in the night.  Okay, the sweater has no sentience, but it became about as much of a character as Johnny Depp's ratty robe from Secret Window.

Hawke's a true-crime author studying some horrific murders that happened in the backyard of his new house.  Of course, he doesn't tell his wife and kids that they're living in the very house where people were killed.  That might alarm them.  One day he investigates in the attic and finds some Super 8 film reels and a camera, and lo and behold he finds a recording of that very murder, as well as some others.

A malevolent, supernatural force is behind the murders, and for some reason every time Hawke hears something go bump in the night, he doesn't turn the lights on.  He might grab a flashlight occasionally, but is it so hard to just flip the switch right next to the door...?

This built nicely, like The Ring where you just know there's something big and scary waiting for you at the end of this movie.  It didn't quite have that final punch I was hoping for, and maybe that's because I had the ending guessed too early.  But it's a good script from C. Robert Margill (aka Massawyrm) and if they greenlight a sequel (and the door's left wide open for one), I'd be interested in seeing where it goes.


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THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS (★★) - Starring Russell Crowe, RZA, Lucy Liu, Rick Yune, Jamie Chung, Daniel Wu, Dave Bautista, Byron Mann, Cung Le and Pam Grier.  Directed by RZA.

"Quentin Tarantino Presents" is the first credit in this movie, and you know, I like the stuff he directs, but the stuff he "presents" can be quite questionable.

This is a martial-arts mish-mash that plays like a cross between Iron Monkey and Mortal Kombat 4: The Sequel You Never Asked For.  Having Lucy Liu show up as one of the main fighters just reminded me that oh yeah, she was in Kill Bill, and oh yeah, that was a much better movie.

You have WWE/MMA physican specimen Dave Bautista show up as a guy who can turn his skin gold and therefore be impervious to pain or damage.  Pretty neat power-up if you can get it. It's like Colossus never found the X-Men and decided to try a life of Chaotic Evil for a while.

You have RZA as the man who eventually gets Iron Fists.  You have Russell Crowe wander in from another movie as a British scallywag who's pretty bloody deadly in his own right.  These two are the good guys and they team up with Rick Yune, who's pretty much playing Ryu from Street Fighter, to fight the baddies.  Hi-YAA!

The action's not that well choreographed and I couldn't get into the silliness of the story.  It's junk food action with different moving parts that have all been executed better in other movies.  But at least kudos to Crowe for energizing any scene he's in.

Movie Release Date Changes

- Some release-date updates: 

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3D has been pulled from Lionsgate's release schedule. In repsonse, Summit has moved their horror flick Sinister, starring Ethan Hawke, to October 5.

Les Miserables will now open December 14 opposite The Hobbit.   Based on the Broadway smash, Les Miz will star Hugh Jackman as Valjean, Russell Crowe as Javert, Anne Hathaway as Fantine, Amanda Seyfried as Cosette, Eddie Redmaybe as Marius, and Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter as the Thenardiers.

Identity Thief, starring Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy, will open May 10, 2013.

The RoboCop reboot will open August 9, 2013. It stars Joel Kinnaman (The Killing).

Cloudy 2: Revenge of the Leftovers (sequel to Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) will open December 20, 2013.