Podcast Episode 35: Behold The FURY Of Marvel vs DC!

Last week was a doozy in terms of superhero movie news, with Marvel announcing that Robert Downey Jr. will be appearing in Captain America 3 to kick off their infamous Civil War story while DC finally announced their full slate of films through the end of the decade.  Along with the expected individual entries for characters like Wonder Woman, Aquaman and Green Lantern, WB also revealed the casting of Ezra Miller as The Flash, two Justice League movies filmed back-to-back, (but released two years apart) and a Suicide Squad movie to be helmed by David Ayer.  Due to a number of factors I didn't get a chance to write about any of this last week, so Bart and I decided to tackle all of these topics plus a few tangents (Might Will Smith actually play a DC villain?  Who's a better director, Zack Snyder or Joss Whedon?) in Episode 35 of the podcast.  As a result, this week's episode is a wee bit long and somewhat lopsided, but I think the conversation flows naturally so I didn't want to trim sections of it wholesale.

Eventually we get to talking about David Ayer's current film Fury, in which Brad Pitt plays a World War II tank commander fighting deep inside Germany at the tail end of the war.  Despite Pitt's star power, it's really an ensemble film and I think the work of Logan Lerman, Michael Pena, Jon Bernthal and yes even Shia LaBeouf really elevates the proceedings, as each character is extremely compelling in their own particular way.  There's also plenty of smartly staged tank combat, a style of warfare that seems well suited for cinema and yet feels largely underutilized by Hollywood.  But the action scenes, while intense, serve almost like release valves for the ratcheting tension that accumulates in the time between battles.  It's here where we see the true psychological horrors of war, which feel just as devastating as the physical toll wreaked upon the American GIs.

Suicide Squad was easily the most surprising title on DC's docket, but it's little wonder that the announcement was made just days before Fury hit theaters.  It's only too easy to connect the dots between this war film depicting some not-so-nice men on a mission and a movie in which comic book villains are enlisted by the government to go on suicide missions for the promise of amnesty if they somehow manage to survive.  In fact, it almost feels like Jon Bernthal's whole performance in Fury is an audition for that Suicide Squad.  We should be so lucky.  Still, with names like Will Smith, Tom Hardy, Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie all circling the film it seems all but certain that DC's first follow-up to Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice is not going to tread lightly.

Next Week: Keanu Reeves enacts puppy-vengeance in John Wick!

SyFy's Upcoming 12 MONKEYS Series Looks Surprisingly Not Terrible

My 12 Monkeys DVD is seriously calling to me.  First there was the totally sweet, totally trippy trailer for Terry Gilliam's upcoming The Zero Theorem.  Now we've got our first glimpse of SyFy's attempt to convert Gilliam's post-apocalyptic time travel story into an hour-long series and it actually looks pretty decent. Former X-Man Aaron Stanford looks to be filling the shoes of Bruce Willis as the man from the future trying to solve a mystery in the past while Amanda Schull plays Madeleine Stowe and Zeljko Ivanek may or may not be a ponytail-less David Morse.  Or perhaps he's Brad Pitt with a better tailor.  This point remains unclear.

I won't lie, I'm a little disappointed that the weird visual flourishes that defined Gilliam's film, stuff like Bruce Willis's clunky plastic suit and the council of future elders who gave him his orders, seem to be absent here.  Then again I'm not entirely surprised either.  Still, I'm always up for a good time travel story and if executive producers Travis Ficket and Terry Matalas can give us a compelling mystery using a stripped down version of Gilliam's story, I'm in.  Especially if they're really gonna play with the time travel stuff.  Might we actually get to see Stanford's James Cole jump into a bunch of different time periods?  I certainly hope so, mostly because I want to see 80's Zeljko Ivanec.

SyFy could use a marquee property that hearkens back to the glory days of Battlestar Galactica as opposed to all this Sharknado bullshit.  The series debuts in January of 2015, at which point the original film will be 20 years old.

Fuck.

Mexican Vacation Day 7: Remembering James Gandolfini With KILLING THEM SOFTLY

"America's not a country, it's a business.  Now fuckin' pay me."

Our exit out of Mexico went smoothly.  We returned our rental car after racking up close to a thousand fresh kilometers, grabbed a few bottles of mescal from the duty free shop, burned off our remaining pesos at the Bubba Gump Shrimp in our terminal and then flew home largely without incident.  We had a brief layover in Baltimore where we were able to grab some rich, delicious mac & cheese at an airport wine bar (a nice change of pace after a week of fried fish and tortillas) and then arrived home to find that our luggage never made it out of Maryland.  Considering that we handed off our suitcase after going through customs and then had an hour delay before finally heading back to Boston, I'm still rather mystified as to how our bag didn't make it onto our plane.  But Southwest was very accommodating and delivered the stray suitcase before I had left for work the following morning, so it certainly could have been much worse.

On the flight home I watched Andrew Domink's Killing Them Softly, which was actually somewhat appropriate since, unbeknownst to me, the film is actually set in Boston.  Strangely, no one ever actually says this out loud, probably because the film was shot in Louisiana.  So while there are plenty of local accents on display, there are no actual locations to be seen which makes the film feel reminiscent of the 90's, when there were plenty of Boston-set films but no one could afford to actually come shoot here.

I was a big fan of Dominik's verbosely titled The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, with its beautifully composed vision of the American west and a wonderfully nuanced performance from Brad Pitt.  I was therefore pretty psyched at the prospect of a crime drama with Pitt as a mob hitman going after a few low-level criminals who knocked over a protected card game.  Unfortunately this isn't nearly as strong an outing for either Dominik or Pitt.  While there are a few scenes that feature strong stylistic choices from Dominik, (notably Ben Mendelsohn's heroin-induced stupor, Pitt pulling a drive-by and the only scene/shot featuring Sam Shepard) most of the film is albatrossed by the near constant blaring of televisions featuring George W. Bush, John McCain and then-candidate Barack Obama discussing the impending financial collapse of 2008.  While the newsreels are supposed to mirror the same economic strife taking place in the organized crime world, which is now run by a group of hand-wringing, violence-averse white collar types personified by the always great Richard Jenkins, unfortunately the whole thing feels incredibly clumsy in its execution.  Everytime I heard a politician's voice, it was like Dominik was screaming at me, "These guys are like criminals!  And the criminals are like politicians!  Right?  GET IT?"  It also doesn't help that the script can't seem to settle on a protagonist, focusing first on Scoot McNairy's criminal Frankie and then largely abandoning him in the second half in favor of Pitt's Jackie Cogan, who spends most of his time on screen sitting around looking greasy and exasperated.

But the chief reason I wanted to watch Killing Them Softly when I did was because it was one of the last films featuring the recently departed James Gandolfini.  I've always been fascinated by the idea of an actor's legacy, particularly when someone dies unexpectedly and we're left with a final performance that doesn't exactly live up to the talent and reputation of a performer's full career.  (See: Farley, Chis and Almost Heroes.)  Gandolfini will obviously be forever remembered as Tony Soprano, but I never really got into that show, mostly because I didn't have HBO for the majority of the time it was on the air.  And yet I've always been a tremendous fan of Gandolfini's feature work.  He's just one of those guys who's always stood out, someone with an incredible capacity for both warm affability and deep, seething menace.  Gandolfini first popped for me as Bear, the stuntman turned bodyguard in the adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Get Shorty.  He's really only got a few scenes, but even with his bushy beard and ridiculous ponytail he managed to hold his own against both Delroy Lindo and a resurgent Travolta.  No easy feat.  He had some nice turns in stuff like Fallen, A Civil Action and Tony Scott's Crimson Tide, but the moment where I really bought into Gandolfini was when I first saw The Last Castle, where he played the sadistic commander of a military prison who engages in a mad power struggle with an inmate played by Robert Redford.  The film itself isn't amazing by any stretch, but it's one of those movies that I'll stop and watch whenever I find it playing on TV just to see the incredible mental chess match between the two leads.  It's really something.

Gandolfini's work in Killing Them Softly is strong as ever, playing an aging hitman facing a third strike and the end of his marriage who's all but given up on life and succumbed to the simple pleasures of booze and prostitutes.  Unfortunately the film utterly strands him, giving him two scenes to spin his wheels entirely independent of the plot.  As riveting as Gandolfini's performance is, he could be cut from the movie completely and it would have absolutely no impact whatsoever on the rest of the story.  It's a nice bit of character work, but in service of nothing.

Thankfully this isn't Gandolfini's last hurrah.  He also appeared in Sopranos creator David Chase's film Not Fade Away, (which I hear is an underrated gem) and he's got a fairly cute looking romantic comedy coming up in Enough Said, where he stars opposite Julia Louis-Dreyfuss.  But more than anything else, I'm excited to see what looks to be his final film performance, next year's Animal Rescue by director Michael Roskam.  Gandolfini stars alongside Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace and Roskam's Bullhead star Matthias Schoenaerts.  Here's hoping it'll be a fitting tribute to an actor who certainly had many riveting performances left in him before his tremendous heart finally gave out.


And thus ends my weeklong Mexican travelogue.  All in all, it was an excellent trip full of delicious foodstuffs and plenty of much needed relaxation.  It seems absurd that after living in Los Angeles for five years, I never actually made it south of the border until after I moved back to Boston.  But the important thing is that I went, and now I can't wait to go back again.


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Title: Killing Them Softly
Director: Andrew Dominik
Starring: Brad Pitt, Scoot McNairy, James Gandolfini, Richard Jenkins, Ben Mendelsohn, Ray Liotta, Sam Shepard
Year Of Release: 2012
Viewing Method: Redbox DVD

WORLD WAR Z Circles The Globe But Goes Nowhere (Spoilers)

"Movement is life."

You know that something has gone wrong when you walk out of a movie asking yourself, "What was the point of all that?" 

When it comes to World War Z, I guess the point was to give Brad Pitt a new franchise.

The book by Max Brooks is an oral history of a zombie apocalypse that has already happened, documenting past events and how different people and countries dealt with the crisis, some more successfully than others.  I started the book ages ago but never finished, although my understanding from those who have read it is that Marc Forster's film bears almost no resemblance to its supposed source material. Here we see a global zombie outbreak occur in real time, with Brad Pitt's UN investigator Gerry Lane immediately sent on a globetrotting mission to find "Patient Zero" in order to discover the source and perhaps even a cure for this worldwide calamity.

He doesn't.

Pitt certainly does travel to a number of exotic locales, following a trail of breadcrumbs that takes him from Philadelphia to South Korea to Jerusalem to Wales all in a few days.  Each of these set pieces is individually entertaining but only on a surface level.  David Morse tells us that North Korea's solution was to extract the teeth of everyone in the country, thus stopping the viral spread by preventing bites.  That sounds awesome!  Too bad we don't get to actually see it.  Israel intercepted some early intelligence reports describing zombies in India and, thanks to a completely absurd decision making process, ended up constructing a giant wall around the capital city.  And rather than turn people away, they've decided to turn the city into a haven for survivors, asserting that, "Every human we save is one we don't have to fight."  That got me curious: what kind of society would that become?  Surely they're bringing in people of different faiths and nationalities that weren't exactly getting along before the zombies showed up.  Will they all suddenly play nice and band together against the larger threat?  And what about scarcity of resources like food and clean water?  They are in the middle of the fucking desert after all.  That sound like a city with all sorts of interesting opportunities for drama, both large and small.  Too bad as soon as Brad Pitt shows up, a horde of zombies scales the wall and overruns the city.  Look, I understand the reason for shifting the time frame from the past to the present - theoretically it gives the proceedings a sense of immediacy.  But World War Z seems more interested in teasing us with provocative zombie scenarios than actually showing those scenarios play out on the screen.  Instead Forster seems content to mention something cool in passing before dropping us into another hectic zombie swarm. 

By now, everyone has an opinion about fast vs. slow zombies, and while my tastes tend to run more towards the slower side I will admit that the concept of zombies as a massive swarm actually feels pretty novel. But the cinematic zombie landscape is not what it once was.  In a world where one of the most popular shows on television is chock full of some of the goriest, most violent zombie attacks I've ever seen, audiences should demand more from their big screen tales of the undead. With a final budget hovering somewhere in the vicinity of $200 million, World War Z is without question the most ambitious and expensive zombie film ever made, but rather than try and compete with the likes of The Walking Dead, the film opts for a startlingly bloodless approach.  The zombies quickly overtake people but they never really chow down on human flesh.  Instead they just bite down and move on to the next sucker, thus eschewing gruesome death scenes and replacing the familiar rotting corpses covered in festering wounds with a grey-faced collection of contorted limbs.  After a while, the (mostly digital) creatures all sort of run together and become boring, which is pretty much the cardinal sin of zombie design.  

But there are also some serious narrative problems plaguing World War Z.  First and foremost, Brad Pitt is the only fully formed character in the whole movie, which means that whenever he gets tangled up in a zombie attack it's obvious that Pitt will survive and everyone else will die around him.  And poor Matthew Fox strangely shows up for literally 27 seconds of screen time as a faceless helicopter pilot with one line of dialogue. What a waste!  He's got a wife and daughters, but he shepherds them out of harm's way fairly quickly and then they're just sitting safe on a boat waiting for him to come home from his mission.  But therein lies the other narrative problem: about 3/4 of the way through the film, Pitt drops his search for Patient Zero when he develops a theory for a way to biologically camouflage people from the zombies.  After surviving a zombie attack on a commercial plane, he staggers off to a W.H.O. facility in Wales to test his hypothesis.  The film then slows down as Pitt stops jetting around the planet and spends the rest of the movie working his way through the Zeke-infested lab to get all the materials he needs.  It's some of the best stuff in the whole movie but it also feels terrifically disjointed from everything that's come before.  That's not surprising, considering that the studio ordered not just extensive reshooting, but also a complete rewrite of the film's third act by Lost writer Damon Lindelof and Cabin In The Woods writer/director Drew Goddard.*  

Taken on its own, the Welsh segment is top notch stuff, well conceived and smartly staged, but it feels like a completely different movie from the previous ninety minutes. What's more, the film's final montage makes it clear that Pitt's camouflage method is only a temporary stop-gap measure.  It's not a cure or a vaccine, its just a tool for survival.  And in case you're unclear whether Paramount was hoping for a sequel, (it's already in development) I'm pretty sure the last line of the movie is, "Our war is just beginning."  While this film is a jumbled mess of action and fractured storytelling, I actually feel as if there's some incredible franchise potential here if you hand over the reigns to someone totally nuts and really start exploring the weirder corners of this new world, like a whole country full of people with NO FUCKING TEETH.  

Hell, they might even be able to use something from the actual book.

*Apparently most of Matthew Fox's scenes were in the 40-odd minutes of footage excised from the end of the movie.

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Title: World War Z
Director: Marc Forster
Starring: Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, Daniella Kertesz, James Badge Dale, Fana Mokoena
Year Of Release: 2013
Viewing Method: Theatrical - Showcase Revere