I went into the theater with a sense of nervous apprehension that can only be ascribed to a transplanted Southerner. I didn’t know much about Logan Lucky other than a few keywords: “NASCAR,” “heist” and “Channing Tatum.”
Oh, brother. Could it be yet another movie depicting a bunch of good ‘ol boys with poor excuses for a southern accent (my favorites include Canadian twangs, archaic Gone With the Wind Georgia drawls, and Joey’s Jamaican southern accent on Friends)? And will everyone have their teeth? Will I squirm in my theater seat, anticipating redneck hijinks that make my people look like buffoons with subpar IQs?
Enter: Jimmy Logan (Tatum), a seemingly down-home, hunky, divorced dad in West Virginia riding around in—what else—a pickup truck. He’s just lost his hard hat job because management noticed a hitch in his get-along (aka an old football injury) that might cause them liability issues. Job prospects in Boone County are grim, to say the least. Because he’s just trying to do right by his adorable, beauty-queen-pageant daughter, Sadie (Farrah Mackenzie), we don’t blame him at all when he decides the only option is to rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway in Concord, North Carolina.
Convenient to the plot, Jimmy’s former construction job let him in on the fact that the petty cash from race day (about $14 million) all flow through a system of pneumatic tubes into a vault. Well, shoot. Jimmy reckons he could pull this stunt off with the help of a few family and friends. Along with Clyde, his one-armed bartender brother (the equally hunky Adam Driver … yes, I went there) and his hairdresser sister, Mellie (Riley Keough), Jimmy sets out to make his fortune.
After “retiring” from film (with accomplishments such as Oceans Eleven, Out of Sight, Traffic and Magic Mike under his belt), Steven Soderbergh dropped this flick in theaters without much noise. He spent very little money on traditional marketing and instead focused on smaller target markets; billboards were only placed in certain regions of the country, trailers weren’t shown to focus groups and it was funded by presales and foreign advances. Soderbergh didn’t care about dropping major cheddar to rally a legion of moviegoers to this flick—but critics are loving this shit (Google it). It’s as though he’s in on a strategy that others haven’t figured out: market the movie where/how you damn well want to. Just like the ne’er do well characters of Logan Lucky, Soderbergh only wants us to know what we need to know.
Hell, we don’t even really know who wrote the screenplay for Logan Lucky—“Rebecca Blunt” gets the credit, but rumor has it that she’s not real. Soderbergh swears she’s a real gal in West Virginia, but who knows? Who cares? Whether Soderbergh’s characters are speaking from Blunt, Soderbergh’s wife, or Soderbergh himself—one thing is sure: they are relatable, funny and not as dumb as they seem.
A near-show stealer of this film is Joe Bang (Daniel Craig), an explosives expert that Jimmy plans to break out of prison just long enough to pull of the heist and then put him back before anyone notices. Not that the prison warden (hilariously played by Dwight Yoakam) would admit to any scandal in his prison. In fact, one of the funniest moments of this film happens during a carefully planned prison riot: one of the demands the prisoners make are copies of the last two Game of Thrones books. Applause to whoever wrote this screenplay—the relevance and timing of this joke is masterfully done.
And the heist? It’s accomplished with minor hitches and a very satisfying explosion made with gummy bears and bleach pens. The real meat of the story is the heist-within-a-heist—the head-scratching “twist” being that Jimmy gives all the money back. Or does he?
Turns out, Jimmy was working a side-hustle the whole time. The heist-within-a-heist works in his favor, all while the media dubs his stunt as “Oceans 7-11” and the “hillbilly heist.”
Despite a couple of Hee Haw-type brothers (that are initially depicted tossing toilet seats as horseshoes, sigh) that are only helping Jimmy because the Lord would want them to—Soderbergh manages to poke fun of the South without being disrespectful. He’s pulled off a fun story with only minor glitches (just like Jimmy’s heist. See a trend here?). However, these glitches have been deal-breakers to some: the underutilization of female characters (Katie Holmes as Jimmy’s ex-wife/baby mama and Hilary Swank as the FBI agent with an itch to scratch), and the overutilization of Seth MacFarlane as an obnoxious NASCAR driver left a sour taste in many a gummy bear-eatin’ mouth. But just like Clyde’s beloved prosthetic arm, this movie gets the job done one way or another, and all just in time to see Jimmy’s daughter sing a heartfelt rendition of her dad’s favorite song, “Take Me Home, Country Roads” by John Denver, at the county beauty pageant.
I’ll give this movie four out of five stars because it not only made me laugh, it made my inner redneck high-five my inner cultural snob. That’s all you need to know.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
It feels like a cold, hard winter without the kids from Hogwarts to bring children of all ages out to the cinemas, and the first installment of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit is still over a year away. For those in need of a literary hero translated to the silver screen, Sony and MGM offer Lisbeth Salander from the frozen north of Scandinavia. She may or may not be good with a wand or sword, but she has a whip-smart mind and is lethal with a Taser.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was the first in a trilogy of novels written by Swedish author Stieg Larsson. It was a wild international success throughout Europe, and even spawned a trio of foreign films starring Noomi Rapace (whom U.S. audiences can see in this holiday season’s Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows), all of which were released in 2009. Now, TGWTDT gets a well-deserved American remake–sort of–with Rooney Mara cast in the lead role opposite the most recent James Bond (Daniel Craig) and The Social Network director David Fincher at the helm. It’s the making of a perfect event film, the kind that you’ll discuss over the water cooler at your office on Monday, but if you’re expecting the usual Hollywood-style big action flick, you’ll be sorely disappointed.
Craig plays Mikael Blomkvist, a disgraced journalist who is hired by Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) to supposedly assist in writing a memoir. In reality, Henrik requires Blomkvist’s help in investigating the murder of Harriet Vanger, Henrik’s niece, who disappeared some 40 years ago. The investigation brings Blomkvist to an isolated island in northern Sweden inhabited by the Vangers and reveals the rich, reclusive family’s tortured and sordid past.
It turns out to be a difficult job, one that Henrik has more or less resigned to be futile. But when the trail proves warmer than anyone had thought, Blomkvist seeks help with his investigation. He eventually gets hooked up with Salander, whom the Vangers had hired to investigate Mikael before hiring him, and the two delve into a world full of Nazis, betrayal and Bible-thumping serial killers.
TGWTDT is the sort of movie that grabs you by the nostrils and shakes you around–at times quite violently. The frayed relationships between the members of the Vanger family–i.e. who refuses to speak to whom–is as difficult to keep track of as the myriad character names. Blomkvist even makes a wise crack about that very predicament as Henrik gives him a breakdown of the Vanger family tree. On top of that, the film hops back and forth between Blomkvist and Salander’s disparate plot lines, with him hot on the trail of an intricate mystery, and her forced to perform despicable acts in order to survive as a ward of the state. Fincher is asking you to trust him as he bombards you with twisted layers of intrigue, a menagerie of characters and scenes of violence that are difficult to sit through, without giving much of an indication where it all might be heading.
It’s a leap of faith, but luckily it turns out to be a rather rewarding one. The mystery that is at the film’s heart unfolds with great suspense, and once Salander and Blomkvist’s paths finally intertwine, TGWTDT bursts with frenetic energy. Craig and Mara are fantastic together. An odd couple of the highest order–he is clean cut, professional and cosmopolitan while she is donned always in black, her face pierced and shock of jet black hair–the two characters actually share a similar lost-in-the-woods quality. Blomkvist sees his career in ruins and is engaged in a long-standing affair with his boss, a married woman; meanwhile, Salander is a chronic outsider who craves a real human connection more than she’d probably like to admit.
To the film’s credit, the resolution of the mystery doesn’t mean the end of the characters. There is a long epilogue that follows that wraps up most of the loose ends while creating others. What all this does is make for one hell of a long movie–nearly three hours!–but there’s no reason for that to deter you. Get comfortable and enjoy. Baby, it’s cold outside.
Cowboys and Aliens
Universal Pictures
There is some truth in advertising. Cowboys and Aliens offers exactly what its title suggests. There are plenty of cowboys and aliens (more of the former than the latter–cowboy hats are cheaper than elaborate CGI sequences). Even cowboys’ more traditional foils, the Indians, are thrown into the mix. If Cowboys and Aliens were to follow in the footsteps of other matter-of-factly titled films, such as Snakes on a Plane perhaps, at the very least, there would be campy good times to be had. Instead, Jon Favreau’s latest action epic seems completely unaware of how ridiculous its premise is, and in this case ignorance is not bliss.
The film opens with Daniel Craig doing what he does best: kicking ass and taking names as a mysterious dark horse-type character. He wakes up in the middle of the desert with a strange metal bracelet fixed to his left wrist. He doesn’t know who he is or how he got there. A group of stock ne’er-do-wells surround him, and he swiftly dispatches them, even knocking one dude off his horse with a flying tackle. It was pretty sweet. We all eventually find out that Craig plays Jake Lonergan, a sort of Robin Hood-type bandit… well, maybe not as altruistic as the rogue of Sherwood Forest, but definitely not a jerk-type bandit either. He’s wanted for stealing some gold from Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford). Lonergan is incarcerated after an altercation with Dolarhyde’s worthless son Percy (Paul Dano) and is about to be shipped off to the federal marshal, but he avoids earthly prosecution–and Woodrow’s thirst for good ol’ fashioned lynch mob-style retribution–when aliens swoop in and raze the tiny Old West town and royally fuck up everyone’s shit. Because this is Cowboys and Aliens, not Cops and Robbers.
From there, Lonergan, Dolarhyde and an assortment of cardboard supporting characters tromp across miles of dusty, desert terrain on horseback so they may rescue their friends and loved ones and combat the superior technology of the alien horde. Sam Rockwell plays a barkeep named Doc, a man who saw his wife wrangled by an alien space ship and has never even fired a gun before; and Olivia Wilde plays Ella Swenson, a mysterious and beautiful woman who seems to know a lot more about all this alien business than she lets on.
It would seem like the perfect formula for a brainless but enjoyable romp, but Cowboys and Aliens is sorely lacking in the romp department. Mostly, it’s a bunch of panoramic shots of horseback riding (so much horseback riding) and people who’ve seen crazy shit in their lifetimes imparting gruff, no-nonsense words of advice to those who have yet to experience things like war or alien invasions–words of wisdom about keeping your gun close and what it means to be a man.
Unfortunately, this isn’t True Grit, not by a long shot. As far as explosions go, there are plenty, but other than a sequence where a still amnesiac Lonergan and company encounter the bandit’s old crew, there is never much in the way of fun. Cowboys and Aliens feels too heavy and dour. It never gives much of a wink or a nod to the audience to tell us we should just lighten up and enjoy the ride (via horseback, of course). This is quite a surprise with Favreau at the helm, though it may not be entirely his fault. Five people are given screenwriting credits (including Lost’s Damon Lindelof). Perhaps it’s a case of too many cooks. In any case, as director of the first two films of the Iron Man franchise, Favreau took a slightly less well-known comic book character (at least compared to your Spider-Mans or Batmans) and turned him into a household name. Whereas those films melded action and humor to appeal to even those who don’t proclaim to be comic book fans, Cowboys and Indians presents a stone face as if its mere insistence that this bullshit must be taken seriously will make it so. Word of advice: It didn’t.
