Opening Weekend: 'Extraordinary Measures,' 'The Last Station,' 'Creation,' 'Petropolis'

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, January 21, 2010 at 7:34 PM - 1 Comment

Harrison Ford in 'Extraordinary Measures'

Now that the Golden Globes are done and we await the Oscars, it’s the shoulder season, a time when Hollywood dumps the movies deemed not quite good enough to release in time for Academy consideration. This weekend we’ve got three pictures based on true stories, though in each case stagy melodrama upstages the truth. Two of them feature heroic scientists—Extraordinary Measures and Creation—and the third, The Last Station (opening in Toronto only this week) tracks the final days of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. But there’s another, smaller film opening in limited release (Toronto only for now) that I cannot recommend too highly—Petropolis: Aerial View of the Alberta Tar Sands, by Canadian filmmaker Peter Mettler. This mesmerizing documentary reveals Canada’s most controversial natural resources as it’s never been seen. In the tradition of Edward Burtynsky, it finds a terrible beauty in grand visions of environmental devastation. It’s a must see film. But first the mainstream choices:

Extraordinary Measures

What ever happened to Harrison Ford? This A-list heavyweight has not aged gracefully, and I’m not referring to his looks. Ford seems to be in fine physical shape, and still game to play the battered action hero, as he did in the most recent Indiana Jones sequel. But as an actor he seems to have atrophied. That righteous stare of paranoid intensity, which might have been suitable for The Fugitive, has become a stock gesture, and seems both contrived and inappropriate for his latest role, as a maverick research scientist in Extraordinary Measures.

Similiar to Lorenzo’s Oil, but not as good, Extraordinary Measures is a drama about the race for a medical cure in which the fate of the protagonist’s kids hangs in the balance. It’s based on a book by Pulitizer-Prize-winning author Getta Anand’s book, The Cure: How a Father Raised $100 Million – and Bucked the Medical Establishment – in a Quest to Save His Children. The film tells the story of how John Crowley (Brendan Fraser) takes a huge risk by quitting his well-paying job to team up with a scientist (Ford) to find a cure for a fatal disease afflicting two of Crowley’s three children. It’s a fascinating tale. And as with Lorenzo’s Oil, the most thrilling moments are the stuff of science. But thanks to an over-torqued script, and the less-than-subtle direction of Tom Vaughan (What Happens in Vegas), dramatic contrivance tends to get in the way of a good story.

Fraser is the protagonist and plays the lead, but he’s clearly not the star, which poses a problem. Ford, who executive-produced the film, throws the balance of the drama off-kilter with his over-written part as the curmudgeonly scientist with a heart of gold—the renegade who blares ’70s rock in the lab and hates the pharmaceutical suits with such a passion that he jeopardizes the project, yet comes through heroically in the end. Ford’s character, Dr. Stonehill, is actually a composite of several real-life scientists, and he comes across that way, as one of those vanity creations that seems custom-designed for the star, with a luxurious repertoire of behavioral tics. And you have to wonder why this academic hermit, who commutes between the lab and the local pub, looks so pumped in his form-fitting t-shirts—less like a lab rat than a movie star who assiduously keeps himself toned for the next lead role. Ford could take a lesson in shape-shifting from Matt Damon in The Informant. Always the ex-carpenter, Harrison likes to talk about how he’s a team player and how everything he does is in the service of the story. His talk-show mantra is that, even though he’s a star, he doesn’t act like one.  Maybe that was once the case.  But not here. Continue…

Spinning global guilt from the Golden Globes

By Brian D. Johnson - Monday, January 18, 2010 at 11:58 AM - 21 Comments

This is a live-to-tape blog. Written in real time offline while watching the Golden Globe Awards and cleaned up (and tarted up) the morning-after so it’s less boring and at least semi-coherent. Gotta love the Globes. Acceptance speeches keep getting undercut by dark hints that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) is one of the more corrupt awards outfits on the planet, a cabal of obscure junketeers who are (ahem) prone to influence, even if it’s just face time with a superstar. But Hollywood has appropriated the HFPA’s event as a party and a publicity orgy. And for the stars, this dress rehearsal for the Academy Awards is way more fun and less formal than Oscar night. They can get loaded on champagne then let the emotions fly on the podium. Plus it brings together film and TV, even though the TV folk get treated like minor league players.

Our host, a TV genius who has made the jump to the big screen with a movie unrecognized by the Globes (The Invention of Lying), is Ricky Gervais. He comes out swinging. Takes repeated shots at Steve Carell, then plugs a boxed DVD set of The Office, his breakout BBC series, which he says is better than Carell’s U.S. spin-off. Carrel mouths “I’m going to kill you,” making a joke of it, but frankly, he looks unamused.

“I will be making the most of this opportunity,” says Gervais. “I’m not used to these viewing figures. Another is NBC.” [This will be the first of many swipes at the train-wreck network. The other constant reference to NBC is in the frequent pleas to donate to the Haiti relief effort. Presenters ritually ask viewers to go to NBC.com. So this morning I did go to NBC.com, expecting some serious hype for charity. What do you know, amid all the glitz ads promoting Jay Leno and various NBC programming triumphs, I found a tiny, unadorned "Donate to Haiti Relief" box , which takes up maybe two percent of the NBC home page.]

Gervais’s nothing-to-lose monologue veers into blue territory as he praises the great work done this year . . . by cosmetic surgeons, then talks about his penis reduction surgery. “Just got the one now. And it is very tiny.  But so are my hands. So when I’m holding it, it looks pretty big. And let’s face it I usually am holding it. I wish I was doing that now, instead of this, to be honest.” Continue…

The high price of celebrity—in divorce court

By Susan Mohammad and Rachel Mendleson - Tuesday, April 14, 2009 at 6:10 PM - 4 Comments

Mel Gibson’s split from Robyn Moore, his wife of 28 years, is expected to be one of Hollywood’s most wallet-emptying divorces. If there isn’t a pre-nup (as some speculate), Moore, who married the Braveheart star before his career took off in 1980, could walk away with half of the actor’s US$1.2 billion in assets.

See how Mel and Robyn might stack up against eight of the biggest celebrity splits:

Madonna and Guy Ritchie

Kevin Costner and Cindy Silva

Harrison Ford and Melissa Mathison

Ron Wood and Jo Wood

Steven Spielberg and Amy Irving

Morgan Freeman and Myrna Colley-Lee

Neil Diamond and Marcia Murphey

Michael and Juanita Jordan

Harrison Ford, Raider of the Lost Sweatshop

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, March 12, 2009 at 6:15 PM - 1 Comment

Harrison Ford and Alice Braga in 'Crossing Over'

Crossing Over

Pity the poor immigrant. That’s Harrison Ford’s job in Crossing Over. He plays Max Brogen, an Immigrations and Customs officer who raids Los Angeles sweatshops to round up illegal migrants. He has a soft spot for pretty young women, and deliberately lets them slip through his fingers. But it’s strictly paternal. This crusty veteran is a good cop, just trying to eke some altruism out of a dirty job—unlike Ray Liotta, who’s typecast as a sleazy bureaucrat who fast-tracks a citizenship application in return for sexual favours. They are just two of the multiple protagonists riding the eight-lane narrative freeway of Crossing Over, an L.A. ensemble piece that’s derivative of Crash and Babel, but not in the same league as either. Employing realism as a style while undermining it with cliche, it’s heavy-handed, moralistic and confused. The movie is not unlike Ford’s tormented character, as it tries to expose and aggrandize the American Dream at the same time.

Sometimes it takes a while to figure out what’s wrong with a film. With Crossing Over, the viewer’s heart sinks in the first few lines of dialogue a hard-boiled colleague establishes Ford’s character for us with a clunky line-reading: “Jesus Christ, Brogan! Everything is a goddamn humanitarian crisis with you.” This is not a Harrison Ford movie. He just keeps his head down and does the job—acting with that one-note level of total intensity that he likes to bring to Serious Drama, as if he’s haunted by more backstory than we could possibly imagine. His job in this ensemble is to track down a Mexican factory worker (Alice Braga), who has escaped during a raid. He doesn’t want to rescue her, just reunite her with her son, and get her to safety. His colleagues make cracks about him lusting after pretty young things, but that innuendo is left undeveloped. It makes you wonder if Harrison, who’s been known to refinish his scripts, has a clause in his contract exempting him from non-virtuous behavior. Continue…

Cannes Encore

By Brian D. Johnson - Monday, June 9, 2008 at 10:21 AM - 0 Comments

For two weeks each May, a quaint town on the French Riviera becomes a Hollywood fantasy in the flesh. Throughout the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, I blogged video clips. In the aftermath, I’ve edited a montage of highlights, an impressionist trip through the beauty, vulgarity, hysteria and chaos that is Cannes.

Film review: Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, May 22, 2008 at 8:25 AM - 0 Comments

Only a few days have passed since Sunday’s Indy IV premiere in Cannes, but it already feels like eons. And I’ve already spilled a fair amount of web ink on this mega blockbuster in previous blogs— Indy vs the indies: Indiana Jones in the Kingdom of Cannes and The Second Coming of Steven Spielberg: Indy Encounters of the Fourth Kind — so forgive me if I betray signs of Indy fatigue.

In a nutshell, the movie, like a lot of things in life, is great fun at first, turns into be a bit of grind in the sagging mid-section, then picks up at the end with a graceful flourish. If you plan to see this movie, and don’t want anything spoiled stop reading right now. I won’t give away any major plot twists, but with this sort of entertainment, it’s probably best to have it hit you as fresh as possible, right from the opening shot, especially when there’s so much hype out there in the first place. Continue…

Indiana Jones and the Death of Journalism

By Brian D. Johnson - Sunday, May 18, 2008 at 8:01 PM - 0 Comments

Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett et al face a horde of professional fans at the press conference for the Cannes premiere of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull:

For more of Brian D. Johnson’s videos go to http://www.youtube.com/bdjfilms. All 2008 Cannes footage is shot on a Sony HDR-SR12 camcorder, on loan courtesy of Sony Canada.

The Second Coming of Steven Spielberg: Indy Encounters of the Fouth Kind

By Brian D. Johnson - Sunday, May 18, 2008 at 3:50 PM - 0 Comments

There was the predictable mob scene as the media horde surged between narrow barricades, clamoring to get into Indy IV. I got in without being crushed and can report that the movie went over pretty well with the crowd. But some of those same journalists who fought so hard to get a seat began their exodus as early as 20 minutes before the end of the film—so they could beat the mob scene that would converge on the Indy press conference after the screening. I stayed to the end. I’ll save a full scale review for the eve of the movie’s May 22 opening. But in a nutshell I can say that I enjoyed first half hour, a pastiche of witty touches and old-fashioned chase scenes; I got a bit dozy in the middle as the plot churned through the kind of byzantine details that are de rigeur with this franchise; then I got re-engaged towards the end.

This Indiana Jones premiere marks Spielberg’s first visit to Cannes since he launched E.T. here 26 years ago. At the press conference he said the only two movies people have ever asked him to do sequels to are, in fact, E.T. and Indiana Jones. For some reason, he says, “No one ever asks me if I’m going to make another A.I or 1941.” As Lucas us yesterday, in pushing for a fourth Indy movie, “Harrison was the impetus. Steven was the one who didn’t want to do it. I was the one who couldn’t think of anything to do.” Or, as Spielberg explained it, ““I was the hold out. I was the person saying, ‘I don’t know, I’m in my dark period, making all these historical dramas.’ Then I made Jurassic Park and thought, gee that felt good. It took us a long time to find the story.”

Continue…

Indy vs the indies: Indiana Jones in the Kingdom of Cannes

By Brian D. Johnson - Sunday, May 18, 2008 at 6:12 AM - 0 Comments

Today is Indy Day. This afternoon, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull will be unveiled for the media horde, followed by the the red carpet premiere tonight. And what’s billed as the biggest blockbuster of the summer, if not the year, will be launched. It won’t be unleashed in commercial theatres until Thursday. But there will be not stopped the floodtide of early reviews. In this case, many critics will break protocol. With a movie this size, a review becomes a news story. They’ll post and publish instant reviews worldwide immediately after this afternoon’s screening.

Which is why Paramount did its preemptive promo interviews early. Usually we see the movie, then interview the stars. This time around, as with The Da Vinci Code, we were asked to interview talent before seeing the movie. That doesn’t necessarily mean the movie is bad. It’s just that the studio wanted to control the media coverage as much as possible before it became overwhelmed by one story: how good is the movie, and just how big will it be at the box-office?

So yesterday I joined selected journalists for group interviews on the top floor of the Carlton Hotel with the stars of Indiana Jones and its writer George Lucas. There were about a dozen of us in our two sessions, which were staged like mini-press conferences in a room draped in black cloth. The first session was with Harrison Ford and Karen Allen, the second with Cate Blanchett, Shia LaBoeuf (who must have a great time in France dining out on that name), and writer George Lucas. I had a seat in the front row, almost awkwardly close to the talent, who sat on a little stage. It felt like a toy press conference. The stars seemed too big for the room.

It was especially odd to be sitting just a few feet away from Cate Blanchett, this luminous creature, and watching her think when the others were talking. Dressed in a filmy black dress that bared her endless legs, she looked amazing for someone who had given birth to her third son just five weeks ago. But she had a faraway look in her eyes. You got the sense that she would rather be somewhere else, with her new baby perhaps.

Continue…