Oh Hollywood. When will you ever learn that every time you put out another cheesy romantic movie, you’re causing the women in our lives to hold us up to ridiculously high standards?
Men, are your women way into romance flicks for YOUR own good?
From BQB HQ in fabulous East Randomtown, here are the top ten warning signs your girlfriend might be a romance movie fanatic:
10. She watched Serendipity then erased her number from your phone and wrote it down in a copy of the book, Love in the Time of Cholera. She sold the book to a used book store and then informed you that you will never talk to her again unless fate sees that the book with her number in it makes its way to you. You call her the next day and you are all like “Seriously babe I remember your number because we’ve been dating for years” and she’s like “Why do you ruin everything?”
9. Whenever she watches Sleepless in Seattle, she demands that you meet her at the top of the Empire State Building. After doing this once or twice, you sit her down for a talk in which you explain that while you do love her very much, you’re going to end up in the poor house if you have to take time off of work, fly to New York City and then stand around on top of the Empire State Building like a jackass every time Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan are on TV. She laments your total lack of Tom Hanks in his prime charm.
8. Ever since she saw Notting Hill she greets you with “I’m just a girl standing in front of a boy asking him to love her.” It seems sweet at first, but then she starts demanding you speak with a Hugh Grant-esque British accent. You could do it to keep the peace if you wanted to. It’s mostly just going “um um um uh” a lot but you refuse to demean yourself. You’re an American, dammit and she can take your regular voice or leave it. (Psst…she’ll probably leave it.)
7. My Best Friend’s Wedding leaves her disappointed if get togethers involving your family don’t break out in a spontaneous song and dance rendition of I Say A Little Prayer For You. You try your best to make it happen but your Aunt Edna can’t hit the high notes.
6. Her love of Say Anything requires you to stand outside her window in a trench coat whilst holding a boom box in the air. She won’t make any reasonable concessions about this. You still have to wear the trench coat in August and no matter how heavy the boom box gets, she won’t let you hold up your iPhone with Pandora blaring on it instead.
5. Chasing Amy has led her to believe your relationship would improve if a) she were to become a lesbian and b) you tried to look more like Ben Affleck. The lesbian thing is doable but the Ben Affleck thing is unlikely.
4. Ever since you two watched The Notebook, she asks if you’d spend a large chunk of your life in a depressed funk if she were to ever leave you. You realize it’s for your own good to say yes but deep inside, you know there are other fish in the sea. Most won’t require you to climb up the side of a ferris wheel like a dumb ass either.
3. She has long dreamed that you’d become more like Patrick Swayze in Ghost and sensually work a pottery wheel with her in perfect time with her hands. You try your best but the apartment just ends up covered with sticky gobs of clay. Part of you just wants to give her five bucks to go buy a damn ash tray, flower pot or whatever she’s always trying to make with that thing.
2. She made you watch Love Story. You’ve been on anti-depressants ever since.
She’s a big fan of Titanic, so much so that you often find her butt naked on the couch, breathlessly urging you to “draw me like one of your French girls.” You grab a paper and pencil and do your best to sketch a stick figure with circle boobs but she invariably just puts her robe back on and storms off in a huff. Seriously dude, take an art class.
Bookshelf Q. Battler here, still riding out the zombie apocalypse, but luckily I have Alien Jones’ space phone to stream stuff on, like the latest Star Wars: The Force Awakens Trailer:
My thoughts, in no particular order (and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong because many of these are predictions i.e. me just spitballing:
So we have two new heroes, a young male and a young female lead. The girl I believe is some kind of junk scavenger and I’m guessing the structure she is searching through is that big crashed Star Destroyer from the previous trailer. I’m assuming it is, in fact, the Star Destroyer where Luke had his final battle with the Emperor in Return of the Jedi. Could be wrong but I thought I read somewhere that the girl find’s Luke’s lightsaber or something. (Again, I’m just throwing stuff out there, I really have no idea.) Meanwhile, the male lead is a stormtrooper and apparently something happens that makes him renounce his stormtroopery ways.
We see/hear the female lead ask Han if the stories are true and he explains that yes, they are. Therefore, apparently much time has passed, the tales from the older films have become less real and more like legends to the people of the Star Wars universe, and assumably, Han, Luke, and Leia as old-timers will guide a new generation of heroes in taking on a new threat.
That threat comes in the form of some bad masked dude who’s checking out Darth Vader’s crushed mask, pledging to finish what Vader started. Didn’t he get the memo that Vader recanted his evil ways while he was dying and finally ended up being a nice ghost who chilled with Ghost Obi Wan and Ghost Yoda at the end of Return of the Jedi?
We see Leia – she looks sad, she appears to be hugging Han. I don’t know why she’s sad. Presumably because evil deeds or transpiring, or maybe she missed Han. Han said “Chewie, we’re home” in the other trailer, so assumably Han and Chewie went somewhere for a long time. Here’s hoping there will be some joke where Leia calls Han a scruffy nerf herder or something.
I’m sad to hear about all the “Boycott Star Wars” nonsense, i.e. claims that the movie is “anti-white” but on the other hand, if you check out the hashtag, it’s mostly people complaining that the hashtag was ever created. Food for thought – I get people are mad and want to vent but sometimes where the Internet is concerned, ignoring a dumb idea makes it go away faster whereas talking about it helps it gain steam, which, yeah, why am I talking about it then?
Ticket sales are breaking records as well as websites. People buying pre-sale tickets for a movie that’s 2 months away. I’ve never really cared about a movie before enough to buy tickets in advance but I might just for this one.
So we see Han, and Leia, where’s Luke? We only see his hand in the first trailer. I mean, Mark Hammil hasn’t had it easy when it comes to aging (but then again who does?) He was in a car wreck when he was younger and he wasn’t the best looking dude starting out (Kids there was once a time when Hollywood allowed people who didn’t look completely like Gods and Goddesses to be the leads in films, I know, amazing!) so I wonder if that’s it – but he was in the The Kingsman earlier this year and he looked fine. I hope they’re not going to do some Hollywood thing and cover him up with a cloak or something for half the film. I dunno. That’s all pure speculation.
OK. My two cents over. Again, don’t quote me because I’m just talking out of my butt. I look forward to seeing this movie. What do you nerds think?
Yup. I wasted valuable time and money to take in this movie.
OBLIGATORY SPOILER WARNING – though the trailer pretty much summarizes the best parts of the film:
Movieclips Trailers – Vacation
Oh Hollywood. Why must you continue to play it safe with reboots and sequels and so on?
Let me put it this way:
1) This movie doesn’t suck.
2) It only starts to suck when you start comparing it to the three original Vacation movies from the 1980’s that share this film’s name.
3) Though I can’t call it a guffaw-fest, there were a number of times where I did laugh.
The setup: Adult Rusty Griswold (Ed Helms), recognizing that his family is stuck in an unhappy rut, decides to pack up the clan and take them on a road trip to Walley World, just as his father Clark (Chevy Chase) did in the first film.
From there on, the film becomes a series of sketches, smaller vignettes that happen the family as they make various stops along the way.
Some jokes from the first movie are parodied or paid homage to (Rusty rents a Prancer, an Albanian car that far surpasses his father’s Family Truckster in suckage).
But to the movie’s credit, it pokes fun at itself, and an attempt is made to go off on its own rather than be simply a modernized carbon copy of the original.
Cameos aplenty, as I assume many of today’s actors have fond memories of laughing their butts off at a young Chevy Chase, as I do.
Chevy and Beverly D’Angelo make cameos as Grandpa Clark and Grandma Ellen. I feel like there might have been potential to do something funnier with them, but then again, had they been featured longer than they were, it’d of been a different movie altogether.
For fans of Community, it might be hard to not look at Chevy these days and think “Pierce Hawthorne.” Meanwhile, Beverly has definitely made some kind of supernatural anti-aging deal.
My favorite bit was the younger brother bullies the older brother routine. Every once in awhile, I’ll see that somewhere. It’s usually the older kid, who’s bigger, bullies the younger kid, but every so often you’ll see an older kid who’s polite and doesn’t want to hurt his miserable pipsqueak of a younger brother, even though he could totally knock him into next week for being a little jerk if he wanted to. That dynamic makes for some fun here.
As if there wasn’t enough in this film to make me feel old, Christina Applegate, who once played the uber hot Kelly Bundy in her youth (and who I oggled extensively in mine), now plays the uptight Mom trying to prove to everyone she’s still as fun as she used to be.
Oh time, please slow down.
Should you rush out to see it? Nah. Is it worth a rental when you have nothing better to do? Sure.
STATUS: Not shelf-worthy.
BUT – if you’re one of those younger people born with a cell phone in hand, you should check out:
Vacation
European Vacation
Christmas Vacation (I don’t know about you but I have to watch this at least once during the holiday season)
To Cruise’s credit, he’s a man who’s lived an extraordinary life, has nothing left to prove and yet, for our viewing pleasure, hooked himself up to the side of a flying plane.
Amazingly, there was all sorts of safety precautions taken, yet the final shot looks as though he was just holding on with nothing but his hands.
Would you strap yourself to a flying plane moving at 185 mph?
I would not. I would tell the writers they need to rewrite that shit. Those terrorists need to be foiled on the ground.
So kudos to Tom. You were married to Nicole Kidman, Katie Holmes, and now you’ve literally flown.
So, the setup. This go around it’s IMF vs. the Syndicate, an evil organization bent on bringing down the world.
To throw a monkey wrench into the works, Hunt has also cheesed off the CIA and MI6.
Fast cars, exotic locales, insane stunts…it’s an action movie that’s got it all.
I don’t know about you, 3.5 readers, but with these types of movies, I just go for the pretty colors and fancy special effects and don’t waste a lot of time getting bogged down by the plot. There’s so much explanation of how someone is going to break in to some place and blah blah blah, here’s how it’s going to happen and here’s what everyone is going to do.
Perhaps you sit there with your popcorn, trying to parse out all the details, but to me, it’s all just:
ETHAN: To break in, we’ll need the thing to do the thing and get past the thing.
BENJI: You’ll need a thing. But the thing has to be done with the exact thing or the thing will happen to the thing.
LUTHER: Nope. No way. You can’t do that thing with this thing. You’re going to need that other thing and when that thing happens, you’d better be ready to do that thing.
ETHAN: So it’s settled. We’re going to do the thing.
This is a big role for Rebecca Ferguson as Ilsa (not Elsa, no one sang, “Let it Go,”), the British agent who works with Hunt.
Sean Harris is exceptionally creepy as the film’s uber villian Solomon Lane while Jeremy Renner and Alec Baldwin get into a bureaucratic turf war over whether the CIA should absorb the IMF’s functions.
Last but not least, Simon Pegg, a nerd after my own heart, returns as Hunt’s tech savvy sidekick Benji.
It’s worth the price of admission with some awesomeness you have to see on the big screen.
I always look forward to these whenever they’re out. In this nerd’s opinion, when it comes to spy action movies, MI is second only to 007.
And by the way, there’s a great Spectretrailer before this one. Can’t wait for it.
Interesting side note: I noticed this movie was backed by the China Movie Channel and Alibaba Films. (Alibaba being the Chinese version of Amazon). Will the Chinese become major players in the American film industry? Eh, it seems new but then again Asia bridging the gap to Hollywood isn’t all that new. Japanese backed Sony has been around forever.
Liddie Laurent, 1940’s Starlet of Stage and Screen
LIDDIE: Darling 3.5 readers! How lovely for you to be here today! I’m positively…no, this won’t do at all. Cease production posthaste!
DIRECTOR: CUT! What’s wrong, Liddie?
LIDDIE: I do not understand this scene at all, Mr. Chesterfield. This role is dreadful! Someone get my agent on the telephone machine immediately!
DIRECTOR: It’s just a commercial, Liddie.
LIDDIE: A commercial? A COMMERCIAL! Sir, I’ll have you know I was the leading lady in One Kiss Till Midnight and yet you’d think so little of a performer of my talents as to subject me to a life of hawking toothpaste and toiletries to the cheap and tawdry masses?
DIRECTOR: It’s not a commercial for toothpaste and toiletries.
LIDDIE: It might as well be! This is how it starts you know. One minute I’m the star of Tap Dance to Toolaroo and the next minute I’m peddling television dinners for lowly house fraus too lazy to cook for their husbands!
DIRECTOR: Come on Liddie, get it together. All right, people! Let’s take it from the top. In 3…
LIDDIE: Oh I simply cannot work under these conditions! The complaint I shall file on this production with the Thespian’s Society shall be copious and voluminous and another thing…
DIRECTOR: …2…1…ACTION!
LIDDIE: Darling 3.5 readers! How lovely for you to be here today! I’m positively delighted to see you. Come closer so I might tell you the wonderful news. Pop Culture Mysteries is available on Wattpad. Now, you’ll have a second option to…no. No! No! NO! This simply will not do Mr. Chesterfield!
DIRECTOR: CUT! Liddie, what now?
LIDDIE: “Wattpad?” What in the name of the Kaiser’s pointy helmet is a Wattpad? This is gibberish sir! I don’t know who the charlatan is who wrote this rubbish but whoever he is he should be put back on the hobo train from whence he came, never to darken my doorstep again!
DIRECTOR: Wattpad. Wattpad. It’s uh..
LIDDIE: You have no idea do you?
DIRECTOR: It’s 1949, Liddie! How am I supposed to know?
LIDDIE: How absolutely wretched! I’m being asked to sell something and I have no idea what it even is.
DIRECTOR: It’s a wattpad! You know, it’s a pad you rub on your feet when they’re itchy or something.
LIDDIE: Mr. Chesterton! For shame, sir! For shame! You dare drag me…me?! The star of Sunshine is for Lovers, all the way to this abysmal shack you call a set and ask me to sell foot pads! No! Never!
DIRECTOR: Liddie, not for nothing, but I’ve got a line around the block of a bunch of younger, prettier broads who’d step over their grandmothers for this part.
(LIDDIE WALKS ACROSS THE SET AND SLAPS THE DIRECTOR ACROSS THE FACE)
LIDDIE: The nerve! I’ll have you know I’m not a day over twenty-five or I’m a monkey’s uncle!
DIRECTOR: Someone get her a banana.
(ANOTHER SLAP THEN LIDDIE WALKS OFF)
LIDDIE: Bring my car around, Lattimore! I shan’t be treated in this shoddy manner! Wait until the scandal sheets learn that the star of Save Luck for a Rainy Day was treated like common riff raff!
Liddie Laurent. Coming soon to Pop Culture Mysteries…assuming we can get her to chill out and be cool.
It’s original. It’s not a reboot of a remake of a sequel. It’s the breakout success of the summer. And it left BQB rolling in the aisles.
Bookshelf Q. Battler here with a review of the comedy/action film Spy.
OBLIGATORY SPOILER WARNING
Movie Trailer – Spy – 20th Century Fox
I have to admit going into this I wasn’t expecting much, so I love it when a movie leaves me pleasantly surprised and wanting more.
Melissa McCarthy’s great and all but for awhile I’ve felt her best performance was in Bridesmaids and everything else was just icing on the cake.
Until now.
McCarthy stars as Susan Cooper, a desk jockey CIA analyst who provides mission support for CIA agent Bradley Fine (Jude Law).
When the covers of the CIA’s top agents are blown, the situation calls for a real nobody to save the day, someone the enemy has never heard of before.
Or in other words, Susan Cooper.
Over the years, many films have tried to blend action with comedy with mixed results. Sometimes there’s a focus on the comedy and the action is watered down or vice versa. This film, on the other hand, provides the perfect mix of both. I was slapping my knee uncontrollably at all the funny bits but at the same time, was blown away with visual effects and fight scenes that rival any of the other action blockbusters out this summer.
McCarthy’s stock will no doubt rise after this picture. Not to give too much away, but she hilariously overcomes various lame cover identities to take control and bring down a scheme to sell a nuclear bomb.
What’s the key to a great comedy? For me, it’s uncontrollable laughter. Laughter is as real as it gets when it comes to emotional reaction. You either laugh or you don’t and I can’t remember a movie that left me guffawing like an idiot the way this one did.
Jason Statham shows a new side of himself as he provides a parody of every tough guy he’s ever played in the form of Agent Rick Ford. As a running joke in the film, Ford continuously regales Cooper with countless stories of dangers he’s encountered on the job. He’s been shot, stabbed, set on fire, and ingested one-hundred and seven varieties of poison, just to name a few.
Statham with a sense of humor. Who knew he had it in him?
As Rayna, the bad girl of the film, Rose Byrne proves that various dirty words said with a British accent become that much more hilarious.
British actress Miranda Hart plays Cooper’s sidekick Nancy, another CIA desk jockey who’s thrust into the thick of it without any prior field experience. I’d never heard of her before but her performance left me hoping to see more of her in the future.
Ultimately, this movie pokes fun at the James Bond films and yet, not only does it do that well, it becomes something special all of its own.
As you might be aware, Director Paul Feig and McCarthy are a comedic duo. Feig provides the film know how while McCarthy provides the laughs.
Up until now, the duo hadn’t provided a movie with intense action and special effects but if this film is an indication of what they are capable of, then this critic is resting a little easier knowing that the upcoming Ghostbusters reboot is in good hands.
Recently, one of my noble 3.5 readers accused this blogger of mincing words. I described San Andreas as “not the best film I’ve ever seen but not the best either.”
The aforementioned reader had a point. As a reviewer, I need to take a side.
Luckily, Cameron Crowe’s romcom Aloha makes it easy for me to be clear:
Bookshelf Q. Battler here with a review of one of the worst damn movies he’s ever seen in his entire life.
Aloha – Sony Pictures
Some movies are entrees – served up with expert precision, arranged on your plate in such a beautiful manner that you almost don’t want to eat them out of fear that once you do, the experience will be over.
Then, some movies are like a five dollar all you can eat buffet. You shove a little bit of everything in your cake hole and the only result is that you leave feeling bloated and gassy.
With several storylines that meander all over and never quite hit their mark, Aloha, I’m sad to say, is one of those buffet movies.
OBLIGATORY SPOILER WARNING
I’m sad to say it because it’s not the star studded cast’s fault. Bradley Cooper (Gilcrest) is charming, Emma Stone (Captain Ng) is adorable, and Bill Murray (Welch) is his usual zany self, though he’s more reserved these days as an elder statesman of comedy. Rachel McAdams (Tracy) aptly plays Gilcrest’s long lost love while John Krasinski provides one of the funnier (dare I say redeeming) scenes of the film as Woodside, Tracy’s husband who, despite his strong silent type demeanor is able to communicate all he needs to say to Gilcrest with a few looks and a shoulder grab.
Plot lines are tossed at the audience like they’re tennis balls stuffed into a serve-o-matic machine stuck on the automatic setting.
Gilcrest and Tracy have to deal with their baggage. Woodside has to learn how to communicate with his wife with actual words. Ng is all business and is a zealous defender of native Hawaiian culture, Gilcrest has to choose between his job or his new love interest. Welch is trying to launch his own space weapon in the guise of a communications satellite and those are just the highlights.
Character development isn’t the film’s strong suit. We’re shown a brief Afghanistan flashback scene where Gilcrest is so distraught over his life that he doesn’t care when he’s shot by (I guess they were terrorists? It wasn’t really explained). Welch lobs an accusation that Gilcrest took a hundred thousand dollar bribe during his time in Afghanistan and that enormous plot line is never fully resolved, thus putting me in the awkward position of being expected by Hollywood to hope that an alleged traitor to his country will overcome the obstacles standing between him and his new lady love in true sappily sweet romantic comedy fashion.
No thanks.
Sadly, the film has two important messages that get lost amidst all the tomfoolery:
1) All those vacation brochures you drool over that make you wish you could be in Hawaii right now are all well and good, but America isn’t in it for the macademia nuts and pretty scenery. Hawaii serves as the lynchpin of America’s sphere of influence in the Pacific. Seeing as how the islands play a vital role when it comes to U.S. global interests, we could probably do more to help the native people who call it home, many of whom aren’t exactly thrilled that we’re there.
2) Over the past several years, space exploration has moved from government to private business control, with the claim fed to the populace that this is somehow a great move, that the uber rich will be able to dump more money into space technology than governments can. That may be true, but as this film warns, people like Welch might use that power for unsavory purposes, though a billionaire trying to launch his own weaponized satellite seems like it’s more fitting in a James Bond film than a romcom.
Overall, the movie isn’t so much a cooked to perfection filet mignon so much as it is a bubbling over gumbo where Crowe, as chef, just tossed everything in his kitchen into the pot. Is this a story about one man’s attempt to find hope again after the world has put him through the ringer? Is it about love? Is it about the military industrial complex?
The best description I can give is that Crowe took his signature work, Jerry Maguire, mixed it up with one of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan novels, then went heavy on the romantic comedy angle, shortchanged the seedy, dirty military contractor angle and left the audience thinking that sadly, the no plot action film starring the ex-wrestler in the theater next door might have been the better choice this weekend…
And so many scantily clad dudes rolling around on the floor that I swear I caught Aunt Gertie staring at the screen just a little too longingly.
Bookshelf Q. Battler here after FINALLY having had the chance to catch last year’s Foxcatcher.
I’m loathe to use the word “SPOILERS” for a film about a horrific crime that’s nearly 20 years old but honestly, while I’d generally heard about the case, I didn’t know the specifics until I began reading about the film. If you’d like to find out on your own as you watch, you might want to rent it first and then read this review later.
Movieclips Trailers – Foxcatcher – Sony Pictures
Wealth. For some it’s a blessing. For others it’s a curse.
Throughout history, there have been people who have been born into great circumstances, their lives preordained before they even opened their eyes and took a look at the world for the first time.
Some individuals take the vast resources at their disposal and do their families proud, achieving new levels of greatness.
Others party hearty and are destined to become paparazzi fodder.
In the middle, there are folks who enjoy their riches, coast along and somehow manage to make jackasses of themselves.
Then there’s John du Pont. Heir to a massive chemical company fortune, he’s an odd duck to say the least. He’s socially awkward, almost painfully so. It’s like he knows what he wants to say but has a hard time expressing himself, assumably because he’s lived such a sheltered life.
The majority of the film takes place in the late 1980’s, when du Pont is in his late fifties. He lives on a sprawling estate which he dubs Foxcatcher Farm, fox hunting having been a popular activity for well-to-do visitors to the grounds.
The movie makes it clear – du Pont believes himself to be a great man and he wants the rest of the world to agree. He doesn’t really want to do anything to achieve that goal. He just wants to spend large sums of money and purchase the acclaim he believes he deserves.
At the heart of his need for glory? A rivalry with his mother Jean (played by one of the few remaining Old Hollywood stars Vanessa Redgrave) leaves him with a burning desire to prove his worth to her.
One gets the impression that the rivalry is one sided. Jean trains show horses on the estate and proudly displays her trophies in the family mansion. du Pont envies the horses and wants his mother’s attention. Despite being almost 60 years old, he’s like a little kid yearning for Mommy’s approval.
Meanwhile, brothers David (Mark Ruffalo) and Mark (Channing Tatum) Schultz have each won an Olympic gold medal for wrestling. Keep in mind we’re talking about real wrestling, the kind that involves knowledge of various moves and techniques, and not the scripted garbage on Monday night.
From the film, it’s clear the brothers have a deep love and admiration of one another, but while David has found happiness with a loving wife and family, Mark is alone, living on ramen noodles in a tiny house and at the start of the film, earning a twenty dollar gratuity for speaking at an elementary school (it’s made obvious that Mark needs that twenty bucks).
Mark feels that even though he’s earned his notoriety, anything he does is overshadowed by his brother. If he has success, the public attributes it to David’s mentorship of Mark and not Mark himself. Mark wants to accomplish something on his own, and to make matters worse, he needs money.
Enter du Pont with a miraculous offer for the Schultz brothers. du Pont wants them to come to his estate, select a wrestling team, train themselves to compete in the upcoming 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul and train their team mates while they’re at it. He’ll pay them and give them houses on his property to live in for free.
David, not wanting to uproot his family, isn’t interested. Mark, seeing a chance to break out of his brother’s shadow, takes the deal.
And for awhile he excels at Foxcatcher.
But alas, it is an understatement to say that du Pont is weird.
He insists that people refer to him as “America’s Golden Eagle.” He orchestrates a large awards ceremony for himself, and in a sad commentary about society, it’s well-attended by the rich and the powerful. He wants to be a wrestler too and organizes a senior citizen wrestling competition, only to pay off his geriatric competitor to take a dive.
That’s not all. du Pont purchases a tank with the ease that one might order a book from Amazon. When it arrives, he throws a fit that it doesn’t include a 50-caliber machine gun as promised and refuses to sign for the shipment.
He snorts cocaine with reckless abandon, takes his helicopter everywhere, and its not-so-subtly implied that his generosity towards the sport of wrestling might have been a front to allow him to roll around with young sweaty men.
Throughout his Pennsylvania community, du Pont is known as a gracious benefactor, a man who doles out the cash just so he can be a part of everything. The local police department practice on his shooting range and he shoots guns alongside them.
Poor and crazy? You’re crazy. Rich and crazy? You’re eccentric. Not to fault the movie, but if you perform a web search on du Pont, you’ll come up with an endless supply of allegations, many of which weren’t portrayed in the film. That’s not a knock on the film at all. It’s just that the man was so nuts that there just wasn’t enough time to capture it all on screen:
Some of the allegations I was able to find on the web that weren’t featured in the film:
That du Pont put razor wire in the walls of his house because he thought it was haunted by ghosts
He crashed multiple cars into a pond on his property
He bought a look-alike police car and pulled over people who drove near his property.
Believed that Nazis and Russian spies were frequenting the property, often demanding that his employees search for them.
Kicked black wrestlers off the team claiming “the KKK runs this place”
That du Pont, after his mother’s death, sets her horse barn on fire with the horses inside. The film only shows Carrell let the horses go. Perhaps horses being burnt up is too graphic for the screen.
Again, there wasn’t just enough time in the movie, but the film more than manages to portray the fact that the man just was not right in the head.
Steve Carrell is no stranger to playing characters who aren’t exactly grounded in reality. After all, he played the dimwitted bumbling boss Michael Scott on The Office for years. But while Scott’s antics were relatively harmless, du Pont’s instability is (and as we see later) a disaster waiting to happen.
Barely recognizable under gray hair and a large prosthetic nose, Carrell earns his Oscar nomination as he plays du Pont, capturing his overall style of a hopelessly depressed ego-maniac slash elderly man child.
If I keep going, I’ll give too much of the film away. It climaxes when du Pont, spurred on by his ongoing desire to achieve greatness (by letting others earn it for him) makes David an offer he can’t refuse to come be part of the Foxcatcher wrestling program. Mark, who’s been sucked into du Pont’s unhealthy drugging lifestyle, feels betrayed by du Pont (at one point du Pont tells Mark he understands and supports his desire to win on his own), that he’s lost his chance to win without his brother’s help, not to mention he’s under intense pressure from du Pont to succeed.
Later, Ruffalo as David makes a face as if he’s losing his soul when a documentary film maker du Pont has hired to produce a glowing film about himself asks David to say du Pont is his mentor. David is perhaps the most genuinely lovable character of the whole film, caring for his family, concerned for his brother’s well-being and at a crucial moment in the film, stands up to du Pont on Mark’s behalf.
SPOILER ALERT (Again, I hate using that term here but I have no idea what else to say.)
After losing in the 1988 Olympic games, Mark leaves the Foxcatcher program and the film ends with du Pont driving his car to David’s house.
Here’s the scary part. I’ve known for years that du Pont shot David Schultz just because it was a well-known, highly reported on crime. And I’ve been reading more about it since the movie came out.
Yet, even though I knew it was coming, I just wasn’t prepared for it and was startled anyway. While David is standing in his driveway, du Pont pulls up, asks, “Do you have a problem with me?” then shoots David.
An employee riding with du Pont who had no idea what his boss was up to tries to stop him. David’s wife comes out of the house and du Pont points his gun at her, sending her back in the house.
David struggles to crawl to safety but du Pont shoots him twice more in the back then drives back to his house to hole up.
The expressionless face, the clear lack of interest in the gravity of what he’s done…Carrell as du Pont arguably portrays a villain in that short moment that rivals Hannibal Lecter.
But while Lecter made it clear he wants to eat you, du Pont is one of those people who seems off, but no one realized just how off he was or what he was capable of until it was too late.
Accounts I’ve read online typically describe the situation in that du Pont was known throughout his community as being an oddball but his antics seemed harmless and people were happy to take advantage of the generous donations he offered, thus placating his bad behavior while failing to realize he was a ticking time bomb all along.
One can’t help but feel sorry for the Schultz brothers throughout the film. Olympic wrestlers are in a tough position. They’re paid no money to train and yet have to a) train all day in order to compete and b) still somehow find a source of income to pay their bills.
A benefactor swoops in and offers to pay them a salary and gives them houses on his estate to live in while they practice the sport they love?
Hell, be honest. You’d ignore the tank too.
If you’re interested in reading more about the case, here are two articles I found helpful:
Disney makes its own version of a Jason Bourne conspiracy thriller. (PG of course)
Bookshelf Q. Battler here with a review of a movie all dreamers will want to see.
SPOILERS AHEAD!
Movieclips Trailers – Tomorrowland – 2015
At the outset, this is a tough flick to review, 3.5 readers.
So much time is spent in the first half of the film building up the suspense (or “showing not telling” as we nerdy writer geeks might say, that I have to tread lightly lest I give the whole story away.
Tomorrowland is a magical place where artists, scientists, and assorted geniuses are allowed to brainstorm freely.
It’s also hidden from our reality, thus allowing freethinkers to do their thing without having their work abused by greedy business suits, corrupt politicians, or vengeful dictators.
In other words, it’s proof that the world could be a wonderful place if the best and the brightest were allowed to do their work for good instead of evil.
(So yeah, basically it really is a fantasy.)
As a boy in the 1960’s, Frank Walker (Thomas Robinson) is recruited by a girl named Athena (Raffey Cassidy) to visit this wonderful world. Everyone in the 1960’s version of Tomorrowland looks like an actual 1960’s person, thus leaving this reviewer to wonder if this wasn’t Disney’s attempt to poke fun at that old joke of, “Disney World gives us a glimpse of what the future will look like according to someone from the 1960’s.”
Flashforward to present day and Frank Walker, now played by George Clooney, is a grumpy recluse, displeased that he was ever offered a glimpse of a world he’s grown too jaded to believe could ever be possible.
Meanwhile, teenager Casey Newton (Britt Robertson) hasn’t given up hope for a better tomorrow yet. She lives in Florida with her father (played by country singer Tim McGraw), a NASA engineer and despite his objections, she gets in trouble whilst trying to prevent a NASA launch pad from being torn down.
(Or in other words, Disney’s not-so-subtle plea for the government to not abandon the space program, which this nerd agrees with, but that’s a whole other conversation.)
Grown-up Frank and kids Athena and Casey come together in a “surprisingly complicated plot for a Disney movie” to save Tomorrowland and our own world from obligatory villain Nix (the incomparable Hugh Laurie.)
To get into the how and why is to reveal too much info to the point that you probably wouldn’t bother seeing it if I did.
However, there are some great quotes along the way. Two that come to mind:
1) It’s hard to come up with an idea and easy to give up.
2) Casey tells a story about two wolves, one led by hope, the other despair. Who wins? “The one you feed.”
Honestly, my memory isn’t fresh and I might have mangled both of those quotes, but you get the gist.
This is a film made by dreamers for dreamers, discussing all the ups and downs of life as a person who thinks big.
It’s for older people like Frank, who once believed they could make a difference only to regret reaching for the proverbial stars in the first place.
It’s also for younger people, like Casey, who see nothing but opportunity on the horizon.
It’s for the young who are lucky enough to dream of a bold new world and for the old who tried to do their part to bring about that world only to experience one of those soul crushing setbacks that all too often force adults to give up on their dreams and settle for whatever means of providing a living they can find.
It tells the youngsters to keep dreaming and the old timers to pick themselves up, dust themselves off and get back in the game.
Is this movie one great big giant advertisement designed to lure kids into nagging their parents for a trip to Disney World, where they can visit Tomorrowland (a part of the Magic Kingdom)?
Of course.
But it’s also Disney’s attempt to convince dreamers of all ages to take big ideas and use them for good and not evil, to use inventions in ways that will cure the world’s problems, not cause more.
A grim apocalyptic future is coming our way if we don’t stop our petty squabbles and learn how to work together. That’s about as deep and meaningful a message as can be provided in a film produced by a company operated by a cartoon mouse.
From a movie buff’s perspective, it’s fun to watch two girls hold their own in scenes with Hollywood legend Clooney. (Between you and me, they even upstage him at times, but don’t tell George.)
Laurie delivers a fabulous performance as Nix and while I won’t give it away, feel free to generally post in the comments below if you think Nix’s viewpoint was wrong or right.
Are you a dreamer? Are you a nerd who dreams of a day when nerds will be allowed to work without seeing the fruits of their labor used for evil purposes?
If you’re a fan of this blog, then you probably are.
Oh Hollywood. When will you ever learn that every time you put out another cheesy romantic movie, you’re causing the women in our lives to hold us up to ridiculously high standards?
Bookshelf Battle 