Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey - Movie Review

Also known by its original title:

BIRDS OF PREY (AND THE FANTABULOUS EMANCIPATION OF ONE HARLEY QUINN)

Starring Margot Robbie, Ewan McGregor, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Jurnee Smollett-Bell, Rosie Perez, Chris Messina, Ella Jay Basco and Ali Wong.

Written by Christina Hodson.

Directed by Cathy Yan.

★★★

First, the business. Much has been made that of this being the lowest opening for a DC comic movie in over a decade. To that, I’d say considering that the production budget was only $84 million, that’s okay. I’d also say the marketing for this was poor. The trailers didn’t look good. As I watched the actual movie, I sympathized with the marketing department a little more. It’s a good movie but how can one cut a trailer for it? Anyway, it did $200 million worldwide and probably would have squeaked out more if it wasn’t for the coronavirus killing all box office.

So, let’s get to the actual movie. It’s fun! They took the best character from the choppy, underwhelming Suicide Squad and gave her her own movie. It’s not groundbreaking or anything, but Harley Quinn seems to be DC’s answer to Deadpool.

Margot Robbie owns this from beginning to end. Robbie’s shown great range over the years, from The Wolf of Wall Street to Once Upon A Time in Hollywood to Bombshell, but THIS is her signature character. And she’s great. The surprise for me was how enjoyable Ewan McGregor was as the villain. Black Mask is dramatic one moment, neurotic the next, light-hearted the next. He really embraces his chance to be a comic-book villain here.

So now that we’re all quarantined, is this movie worth seeking out on streaming? Worth the $3.99 digital rental? Yes it is.

Beauty & the Beast - Movie Review

Starring Emma Watson, Dan Stevens, Luke Evans, Kevin Kline, Josh Gad, Ewan McGregor, Ian McKellen, Emma Thompson, Stanley Tucci, Audra McDonald and Gugu Mbatha-Raw.
Written by Stephen Chbosky & Evan Spiliotopoulos.
Directed by Bill Condon.

★★★

This movie for the most part balanced that fine line between being faithful to the original but finding parts where it can be its own thing. If anything, it's too faithful to the original, so that variances stuck out more.

Emma Watson is Belle, our French bookworm who longs for adventure. Dan Stevens is the Beast, a spoiled prince living in a cursed castle. One element they added that I appreciated was an explanation on why the townspeople didn't seem to know about this castle or this alleged prince.

The "Be Our Guest" number was a highlight, no small thanks to Ewan McGregor's capable vocals. Luke Evans as Gaston does the best among the human actors.

Jane Got a Gun - Netflix Review

Starring Natalie Portman, Joel Edgerton, Ewan McGregor, Noah Emmerich, Boyd Holbrook and Rodrigo Santoro.
Written by Brian Duffield, Anthony Tambakis & Joel Edgerton.
Directed by Gavin O'Connor.

★★

This is one of those projects that went through many cast members and directors before it finally got made, and there were so many troubles surrounding this movie that it was ultimately dumped in theaters in January.

Natalie Portman plays Jane, a frontier woman who's hooked up with an outlaw on the run from his old gang. When he comes home shot up, Jane looks to hire a mercenary to help her defend her home before the gang inevitably shows up. And the only man she can think of for the job is her ex-fiance (Joel Edgerton).

Most of the movie then has us, the audience, waiting for the gang to show up so we can have our showdown. We get flashbacks here and there that explains backstory and previous relationships. The leader of the gang is a dangerous man named Bishop (Ewan McGregor, doing an unconvincing Southern accent).

The showdown comes at night, and there were times I couldn't tell what exactly was happening. I have a soft spot for Westerns, as they rarely are profitable these days, but this suffers from the same flaw as Slow West. Not enough story in the first two-thirds before we get to the third act.

August: Osage County - Movie Review

Starring Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Ewan McGregor, Chris Cooper, Julianne Nicholson, Juliette Lewis, Abigail Breslin, Benedict Cumberbatch, Margo Martindale, Dermot Mulroney, Sam Shepard and Misty Upham.
Directed by John Wells.

★★★

You can tell this comedy/drama came from a stage play, and while some of its scenes are expanded out, most of it takes place inside the house, the deep house where three sisters grew up under a kind but alcoholic father Bev Weston (Sam Shepard) and a monstrous pill-popping mother Violet (Meryl Streep).

When Daddy goes missing, the three daughters - Barbara, Ivy, Karen - come home to offer support and dread the fights they know will happen.  Barbara (Julia Roberts) comes with her husband (Ewan McGregor) and teenage daughter (Abigail Breslin), though they are separated due to his recent infidelity.  Ivy (Julianne Nicholson) is the middle child who's never found anyone but plans to announce her new beau soon. Karen (Juliette Lewis) is the flighty youngest who's had numerous boyfriends/fiances but thinks she's found the right one (Dermot Mulroney), even though for him, she'd be Wife #4.

Violet's sister (Margo Martindale) comes with her husband (Chris Cooper) and son (Benedict Cumberbatch) as well, and meanwhile there's a Cheyenne housekeeper (Misty Upham) Bev hired right before he disappeared. Got our cast of characters straight?

Once everyone makes their way in and assemble, there's about a half-hour scene at the dinner table that's filled with verbal jousting and prodding, and years of resentment start to boil to the surface. Violet is an Oxycontin Joan Crawford, and she snipes sometimes just to see what the reaction will be.

There were times Streep was a little too hammy for me, but more often there are scenes where she just commands the screen, and yet she's a generous co-star. Every actor gets to have their moment, and most impressive to me was Julia Roberts. This is my favorite performance of hers to date. You can see all the anger and resentment from her childhood manifest in the vein popping on her forehead, and when she unleashes, there is genuine pain lashing out.

Another standout for me was Nicholson. She's mainly known for her TV work (Ally McBeal, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Boardwalk Empire) and here she's the wallflower/good-girl who's had enough of everyone taking her for granted. I would have been happy if she was a Best Supporting Actress nominee next to Roberts. (She'll also be on Sundance Channel's upcoming Red Road series with Jason Momoa.)

Maybe in the play Ivy was the oldest sister. There's a line in there where Barbara says Ivy is almost 50, and Nicholson's clearly younger than Roberts, so it pulled me out a bit. If they'd just changed the line to "over 40" it would've still been funny and I wouldn't be dedicating a pragraph to it.

Chris Cooper gets a great monologue in there. Cumberbatch shows off what a chameleon actor he can be. Martindale, Mulroney, Breslin, Lewis were all good. McGregor didn't quite work for me. He's just never been able to nail down an American accent and it's distracting.

Jack the Giant Slayer - DVD Review

Starring Nicholas Hoult, Ewan McGregor, Eleanor Tomlinson, Stanley Tucci, Ian McShane, Bill Nighy, Eddie Marsan and Ewan Bremner.
Directed by Bryan Singer.

★★

This movie is a prime example of an over-reliance on CGI to cover up problems with the actual story. The giants are fake, they look fake, and so there's no weight to them, cool as it may be to watch the humans run around on giant sets.

Hoult (Warm Bodies) plays Jack, the young man who eventually gets magic beans. A twist this time around is that the princess likes to travel in disguise among her people to get a taste of the real world (think Aladdin and Jasmine), but she is at Jack's when one of the beans accidentally gets wet and shoots into the sky.

There is some wonder building up to the meeting of the giants, but then when we do meet them, it's underwhelming.  They look like a cross between LOTR's cave trolls and ... the people of Polar Express.  If they're this humanoid, why not go for make-up and prosthetics and get some real-looking creatures to fight?  The 100% CGI-ness of the giants sucks out the wonder, and it sucked me out of the movie.

It's clearly made for children when it comes to the acting styles, but there's also enough heads getting bit off by giants that it earns its PG-13 rating.

The Impossible - Movie Review

Starring Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor, Tom Holland, Samuel Joslin, Oaklee Pendergast and Geraldine Chaplin.  
Directed by J. A. Bayona.

★★★½

Based on a true story.  The 2004 tsunami that struck southeast Asia was one of the deadliest natural disasters in history. Over 230,000 people died across 14 countries.  This movie focuses on the story of one family.  In real life, they're Enrique and Maria Alvarez from Spain, but in the movie they're changed to Maria and Henry Bennett from England. I know a handful of critics got their righteous-indignation danders up over the story of "white people!" in the tragedy, but I don't mind it. I've read the backstory, and Maria chose Naomi Watts herself to play her.  Other than that adjustment, the movie's remarkably faithful to what really happened.

To the movie!  Maria and Henry Bennett are vacationing in Thailand with their three boys Lucas, Thomas and Simon when the tsunami strikes.  The tsunami sequence is a triumph in special effects, and the immediate aftermath has us on the edge of our seats as Maria comes to the surface, fighting for air, being swept along by a debris-filled ocean wave crashing through what used to be dry land in Thailand.  She soon spots oldest son Lucas (Tom Holland), and they must fight to stay alive and find safety before another wave hits.

Watts and Holland are great in their roles. They draw us in, and their dynamic shifts when Maria's badly injured.  Lucas rises to the occasion, looking after his mother's health, trying to keep her safe.

The acting by the five family members works so well.  I'm happy Watts was nominated for Best Actress for this. The moment when Lucas tells her the rest of the family is dead, you see the shifts in her eyes of absorbing the pain of that but being strong for her son in front of her.  All three kids are great in the moments they have, and the scene where he borrows a stranger's cellphone may be the best acting Ewan McGregor's ever done.

Haywire - DVD Review

Starring Gina Carano, Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Michael Douglas, Channing Tatum, Bill Paxton, Antonio Banderas, Matthieu Kassovitz and Michael Angarano.  Directed by Steven Soderbergh.

★★½

The boast of this fairly standard thriller is that the fights scenes are more realistic. Gina Carano is an MMA fighter, and therefore her fights are a little more belieavable than those from DOA: Dead or Alive. Even then, though, there were a couple times where the sped-up editing felt like there'd been some CGI tweeks to what I was watching.

But they are good fights. They're fast, they're brutal, they have a more realistic choreography to them than what we're accustomed to from Hollywood.

Now I need to back up. The plot bears more than a passing resemblence to the Bourne series, though it is a little murky, in that Carano's an agent who's very good at her job, so why her government chose her to be the fall guy for an assignment gone wrong doesn't make sense. But hey, at least she gets to go on the run and beat up guys like Michael Fassbender and Channing Tatum.

The movie has its slow spots, and it's clear that some of the big name stars (Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas) only had a day or two of filming for their scenes.

Is Carano the next female action star? Meh. She needs to work on her on-screen charisma, but I'm willing to follow her, see if she improves from here.

I Love You Philip Morris - DVD Review

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Starring Jim Carrey, Ewan McGregor, Leslie Mann and Rodrigo Santoro.
Directed by Glenn Ficarra & John Requa.

Jim Carrey plays Steven Russell, con-man extraordinaire. It's based on true events, and while I'd wager what actually happened is much different than what we see, what we do see is a fun, zippy love story.

Steven is a gay man and once his wife (Leslie Mann) learns the truth, he leaves her to live the good life. Trouble is, Steven's not a rich man so he engages in identity theft to maintain the lifestyle. Once he gets caught he goes to prison, and there he meets Philip Morris (Ewan McGregor). Now Ewan isn't asked to do much in the movie besides be the cute love interest, but there's an earnest aw-shucksness to him where we can understand why Steven would be attracted to him.

Carrey's performance is all over the map here, and I don't mean that in a bad way. Some of Steven's cons are farcical, but there also need to be moments of genuine emotion, and Carrey pulls it off. It's the most interesting Carrey performance in years.

It reminded me a few times of Catch Me If You Can, between the cons and Steven being on the run, as Steven breaks out of prison over and over to reunite with Philip.