Last Vegas - DVD Review

Starring Michael Douglas, Robert DeNiro, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Kline, Mary Steenbergen, Romany Malco, Jerry Ferrara, Roger Bart, Joanna Gleason and Michael Ealy.
Directed by Jon Turteltaub.

★★

A movie with this cast would have been the must-see movie of 1989. Nowadays we know what we're going to get. Its humor is broad and safe. It reminded me of when Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas had their one last hurrah in 1986's Tough Guys. Nothing too demanding, and a lot of that may be because Hollywood has no idea how to write good parts for older people unless it involves dying.

So these four Academy-Award winners play four old friends who reunite for a bachelor party when the one of them who's never been married is finally getting married. Douglas is the lifelong playboy marrying a woman half his age; DeNiro is the widower who's closed himself off from life; Freeman's the bored grandpa who's tired of taking it easy after his stroke; and Kline is the persnickety one whose wife tells him he can have a freebie if he wants (as long as he doesn't tell her about it.)

So they party, they get drunk, they each have their epiphany, and we probably would have been more entertained listening to the four of them swap movie-making stories for two hours.

Ender's Game is #1

For the weekend of November 1-3, 2013.

1.  Ender's Game - $28 million - 1 wk (LG)
 . . . 3407 screens / $8218 per screen
2.  Jackass Presents Bad Grandpa - $20.5 ($62.06) - 2 wks (Par) -36%
 . . . 3345 / $6129
3.  Last Vegas - $16.52 - 1 wk (CBS)
 . . . 3065 / $5390
4.  Free Birds - $16.2 - 1 wk (Rel)
 . . . 3736 / $4336
5.  Gravity - $13.13 ($219.2) - 5 wks (WB) -34.8%
 . . . 3024 / $4342
6.  Captain Phillips - $8.5 ($82.55) - 4 wks (Sony) -27%
 . . . 3021 / $2814
7.  12 Years a Slave - $4.6 ($8.76) - 3 wks (FS) +115.5%
 . . . 410 / $11,220
8.  Cloudy with Meatballs 2 - $4.2 ($106.2) - 6 wks (Sony) -33.1%
 . . . 2430 / $1728
9.  Carrie - $3.4 ($31.97) - 3 wks (SG) -43.2%
 . . . 2252 / $1510
10. The Counselor - $3.25 ($13.37) - 2 wks (Fox) -58.6%
 . . . 3044 / $1068
11. Escape Plan - $2.28 ($21.6) - 3 wks (LG) -50%
 . . . 1966 / $1160
12. About Time - $1.1 - 1 wk (U)
 . . . 175 / $6286

Despite all the controversy around boycotting the movie, Ender's Game had a solid debut.  Last Vegas also has to be see as a success with its $28 million budget.  Now had it opened 20 years ago with that cast - Douglas, DeNiro, Freeman, Kline - it probably would have been one of the biggest movies of the year.

Free Birds had a weak opening but might benefit from being Thanksgiving month. Reviews haven't been kind.

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.

Random Movie Stuff - 4/18/12

- Michael Douglas and Robert DeNiro will play two of four 70-year-old buddies enjoying a bachelor party in Last Vegas.  Christopher Walken may be the third friend, and the fourth one's supposed to be an African-American Air Force vet (*cough!* Morgan Freeman? *cough*!)

- Darren Aronfosky (Black Swan) will direct The General, about George Washington, although they say it's more of an Unforgiven-type story than a straight biopic.  Aronofsky's currently in pre-production for his Biblical epic Noah, starring Russell Crowe.

- Dick Clark, the world's oldest teenager, is dead at age 82.  He's best known lately for hosting his New years Eve special every year, but also hosted American Bandstand and The $100,000 Pyramid.

And here's the trailer for People Like Us, opening June 29.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps - DVD Review

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Starring Michael Douglas, Shia LaBeouf, Josh Brolin, Carey Mulligan, Frank Langella, Susan Sarandon, Eli Wallach, Austin Pendleton, Vanessa Ferlito and Jason Clarke.
Directed by Oliver Stone.

The 1987 movie holds up surprisingly well, and this sequel is a pretty decent, timely follow-up to how a handful of greedy people can ruin the lives of millions. Shia LaBeouf, he who risks overexposure between Indiana Jones 4 and the Transformers franchise, does well here, playing a hotshot Wall Street type named Jake who actually has a pet project he believes in - green energy. He's also really good at what he does; he makes money.

This one hits some of the same stanzas as the first one, but Gekko is different. Still wily and untrustworthy, but he acts as a mentor to Jake, whom he learns will be his son-in-law.

The movie does an amusing job of making it look like the 2008 financial collapse was the responsibility of a handful of old men with pocket-watches in a room with finely varnished furniture. It also shows how another handful of men were able to make millions off short-selling and then buying stock in those companies whom the government bailed out.

I kept thinking about how math geniuses at Harvard don't invent tangible things; they get into Wall Street. They make millions of dollars off of nothing but credit defaults swaps and derivatives and market manipulation. But that's neither here nor there.

Stone is back to form here. He's had some indulgent projects recently (Alexander, anyone?) but the narrative is smooth and the editing is swift without feeling choppy. And it's an absolute pleasure to see Douglas revisit his Gekko role.