A Bunch Of Blu Rays & DVDs That Have Been Stacking Up

I haven’t posted as much as I would’ve liked this summer because of two big distracting factors: #1. My wife and I moved from our house in Raleigh to Clayton (roughly 20 minutes outside of Raleigh), and that was really exhausting. #2. I’ve had a few health issues over the last few months including an inflammation and a blood clot – and that’s been pretty painful.

While I’ve been recovering I’ve been making my way through a bunch of Blu rays and DVDs that have stacked up in my office over the last few months. Most of them are from the world of VOD (Video On Demand), and had either limited or no theatrical release, so you may not have heard of them. Most of them aren’t very good either, but there were a few halfway watchable ones. Let's take a look at a handful of 'em, shall we?

First up, there’s Philip Martin’s THE FORGER, starring John Travolta as, yes, a master art forger who makes a shady deal to get an early release from prison, but in return he must pull off “one last job.” So it’s a heist movie, and with Christopher Plummer as Travolta’s father, and Tye Sheridan as Travolta’s dying son both in on the caper, it highly resembles FAMILY BUSINESS, a less than stellar ‘80s comic thriller that starred Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman, and Matthew Broderick in the grandfather-father-son roles. 

Set in Boston with bad accents to boot, THE FORGER is a competently dull collection of clichés that’s a good example of how much Travolta’s been treading water in his film career since, well, probably HAIRSPRAY (his hair was more realistic in that too). It also resembles FAMILY BUSINESS in that it deserves to be forgotten.

Another fail of a thriller follows - this one coming from Canada - Atom Egoyan’s THE CAPTIVE starring Ryan Reynolds, Scott Speedman, Rosario Dawson, and Mireille Enos. Reynolds and Enos play a couple whose daughter is kidnapped by a pedophile trafficking ring. Dawson and Speedman play a pair of detectives that are on the case that lasts over 8 years. The more than capable cast try their darnedest, but the material is crazy convoluted, and the score by Mychael Danna overreaches as it annoyingly builds suspenseful strain on top of suspenseful strain only calling attention to how unsuspenseful the whole thing is. The fractured narrative that skips back and forth in time just makes it confusing too. A murky misfire on every level. Next!

Matt Shakman’s CUT BANK is a more inspired thriller than THE CAPTIVE, but it’s no great shakes either. The directorial debut of Shakman, who has directed episodes of scores of notable TV shows including Six Feet Under, The Good Wife, Weeds, House M.D., and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, it stars Liam Hemsworth as a small town dreamer – dreaming of getting out of the small town naturally – who accidently captures the murder of the local mailman (Bruce Dern) on videotape. Hemsworth hopes to use the reward money offered by the U.S. Postal Service to finally escape with his girlfriend (Teresa Palmer) from their dead end existence there in Cut Bank, Montana, but, of course, things aren’t that simple. 

John Malkovich as the town’s sheriff, and Billy Bob Thornton as Palmer’s father have their suspicions, and a creepy taxidermist who everybody thought was dead (Michael Stuhlbarg) starts looking into the matter as well. It twists and turns through a mess of schemes and scams in the tradition of both the movie and TV show versions of FARGO (Shakman directed two eps of that too), but it never twists and turns itself into anything but a watchable throwaway. Shakman should stick to TV.

Henry Hobson’s MAGGIE, another directorial debut, is one of the few here that got more of a theatrical release (it actually came to my area), and it’s obviously because of its star, Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s another zombie apocalypse scenario, with Schwarzenegger as a farmer in the Midwest taking care of his daughter (Abigail Breslin) who’s been bitten. 

The father struggles with how to handle the situation as the country doctor (Jodie Moore) tells him he has three options: take her to quarantine; give her a drug cocktail that leads to a slow, painful death; or “make it quick.” It largely feels like a stand-alone episode of The Walking Dead - one of the uneventful ones on the season set on the farm maybe - but it has a nicely restrained performance by Schwarzenegger in his uncharacteristic role, there’s a lot of genuine effort by Breslin in embodying her infected character, and the eerie grey tone is effective. I got fairly bored in the last half hour, but fans of the genre and of Ahnold will probably be more into it.

At the beginning of this just under feature length (68 minuntes) documentary a scroll tells us that HATING OBAMA is an attempt to document the pure hate towards President Barack Obama while asking the central question: “Is Obama hated more for his policies or because he’s black?” It’s a fair question, and there’s some interesting chitchat from a bunch of articulate talking heads here, but Marquis Smalls’ doc doesn’t elaborate on anything we didn’t know already. It mainly plays like a greatest hits of the times Obama has been disrespected, touching on such incidents as when Republican House member Joe Wilson yelled “you lie” during the President’s Healthcare speech, with interspersed commentary mostly from supporters who do indeed think there’s racism at play.

There is significant time given to some anti-Obama voices, such as conservative political activist Derrick Grayson and Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson, but it’s telling that at the end writer/director Smalls shares with us his poll of all his interviewees and 82% of them approve of Obama. A doc like this can’t help but be biased, but the thesis needs more work. HATING OBAMA is a watchable, well constructed conversation of a video essay, but it has no real conclusion - it just throws the question back at us at the end.

Finally, there’s Michael Almereyda’s CYMBELINE, which is another one of those gritty modern adaptations of Shakespeare much like Baz Luhrmann’s ROMEO + JULIET, Ralph Fiennes’ CORIOLANUS, and Almereyda’s own HAMLET, as this re-unites the director with that film’s star, Ethan Hawke. The setting is again New York, but this time in the world of urban gang warfare with the ever crusty Ed Harris in the title role of the king of the Briton Motorcycle Club, who are battling the corrupt cops of the Roman Police Department. Hawke plays the villainous, agitating Iachimo, Milla Jovovich plays Harris’s queen, Anton Yelchin is her son, and, of course, there’s a pair of star-crossed lovers - Dakota Johnson (FIFTY SHADES OF GREY) as Harris’s princess daughter and Penn Badgley (Gossip Girl) as her secret commoner husband. 

All the film's dialogue comes from the original text, albeit trimmed down to the essentials, and it’s fun to see folks like John Leguizamo (as Badgley’s servant) put such effort into their recitations. The old school manner of speaking is an amusing anachronism in this Brooklyn crime-lord context, but you really have to pay attention to follow it or it can get pretty confusing - especially with all the bloody, layered plotting. I appreciated several of CYMBELINE’s set pieces, particularly one in which Jovovich sings Dylan’s “Dark Eyes” (much in the manner of Patti Smith’s version), but it’s far from an easy, entertaining viewing. Like his HAMLET, Almereyda’s take on the Bard here is initially an interesting experiment but one that’s hardly essential.

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Heist Scenes in the Movies: How Plausible Are They?

This is a guest post by Brandon Meagher:

There are countless classic moments in cinema that feature jaw-dropping heists, robberies and crime capers. While watching these shockingly memorable scenes, some viewers might catch themselves wondering, “Could that really happen?” Others, however, might think, “That’s literally impossible!”

Although we could argue both sides of this debate indefinitely, here’s the main point to remember: it’s only a movie. Reality often gets suspended when seen from Hollywood’s exaggerated lens. A blog piecefrom Atlanta Lockmaster states it best by explaining that movie criminals are the career/veteran like crooks while in reality the majority are young petty thieves looking to make a big score.

In fact, based on recent studies conducted around bank heists and robberies, would-be thieves stand a higher chance of receiving a payout in the movies than out on the streets.

Real Bank Heists vs The Heists in the Movies

According to 2009 research compiled by the FBI, an average robbery payout in the U.S. totaled roughly $4,000. You were probably expecting a much larger sum, right?

That assumption likely results from films such as Ben Affleck’s entertaining crime drama, THE TOWN (2010), for example. In the opening scene, Affleck and his gang of Boston thugs steal well over $4,000 with automatic assault rifles and frightening masks. Watch this scene and determine for yourself if such a reckless feat could be successfully replicated off-screen.

Criminals Opening Safes On Screen -- I Can Do That...Right?

Another scenic moment many moviegoers love is an intense safe cracking sequence. Our eyes bulge and spines stiffen as we intently watch the sweat dripping down a character’s face while he or she forces open a deposit box, full of valuable jewels or cold hard cash. One such scene particularly stands out as classic edge-of-your-seat cinema -- Charlize Theron’s pulse-pounding heist from THE ITALIAN JOB (2003). With her enemies on hot pursuit, Theron’s character still manages to crack a safe and escape with the loot in stacks of gold in under two minutes.

In actuality, however, the process of breaking into a lockbox is more complex and time consuming. The World Champion safecracker takes an average time of 5 minutes to open a secure bank vault. You can view his impressive performance on the Discovery Channel.

Moreover, the world’s most secure bank vaults require around 15-30 minutes for even the most experienced safecracker to break open.

Beating The Motion Sensors -- They Make it Look So Easy!

Fans of the crime genre also tend to enjoy scenes involving motion sensors such as this iconic moment in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (1996) when super-spy Ethan Hunt, played by formidable action star Tom Cruise, repels down a secure vault and catches his own sweat to avoid motion detection.

After watching this far-fetched exploit, you might be shaking your head at the sheer lack of believability. Nevertheless, Cruise’s fictional stunt actually served as inspiration for a real-life robbery in 2010. This case involved a group of South Brunswick, New Jersey, thieves who pulled off a Mission Impossible-esque heist at a local Best Buy. Using power tools, they cut a hole in the store’s roof, repelled through that opening and stole $26,000 worth of laptop computers, while managing to avoid touching the floor. This enabled them to evade both motion sensors and security cameras.

It’s Just a Movie

Although a rare circumstance, this elaborate crime caper suggests that, while they seem virtually improbable, some film heists should not necessarily be discredited as sensationalized box-office drama.   

Regardless of how unrealistic these sequences appear to you, many moviegoers still agree that the image of a stealth crook breaking into bank vaults, avoiding motion detector lasers and walking away with a million dollars is undeniably entertaining.

Are there any scenes from your favorite “Hollywood Heist” that we haven’t analyzed? Tell us about it in the comment section below!

Sources:

http://business.time.com/2012/06/14/thinking-about-robbing-a-bank-read-this-first/

https://www.safeandvaultstore.com/blog/breaking-into-a-safe/

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2010/03/acrobatic_thieves_hit_nj_best.html

About the Author

Brandon Meagher, a graduate from Georgia State University with a Bachelor of Arts in Film, is a self proclaimed movie junkie and enjoys watching, talking, and blogging about everything film related. You can check out more of his work here at Movies on the Mind. He currently resides in Southwest Florida.

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A Stoner Finds Out That He's A Super Soldier In AMERICAN ULTRA

Now playing a multiplex near you (at least for a week or two):

AMERICAN ULTRA (Dir. Nima Nourizadeh, 2015)

With its hyperkinetic editing, head-banging score, and high body count I kept thinking that this amped up, noisy action comedy must be based on some graphic novel I’ve never heard of.

That its hero (anti-hero?), a shaggy stoner named Mike played by a Jesse Eisenberg, draws cartoons about a monkey astronaut also added to that impression, but no, this isn’t based on any pre-existing property of any kind. So, for a summer movie, it’s got that going for it.

The scenario that on the surface, Eisenberg’s Mike is a small town slacker convenience store clerk, but underneath he’s actually a highly-trained CIA assassin, is, as many critics have pointed out, a one-joke premise. As such, I really dug the set-up, but wasn’t so hot on the punchline.

Mike, who lives with his girlfriend Phoebe (Kristen Stewart, who was also Eisenberg’s love interest in ADVENTURELAND) in the fictional burg of Liman, West Virginia, doesn’t know he’s a genetically engineered killing machine because he’s been “de-activated.”

But when two black-ops gunmen approach him in the parking lot of the Cash-N-Carry where he works, and he is able to swiftly disarm and kill them - with the help of a cup of soup and a spoon, mind you – he knows something is up.

Mike has been re-activated by Connie Britton as CIA agent Victoria Lasseter because her young assholish boss Adrian Yates (Topher Grace) has decided to end the Ultra program - the government experiment that had brainwashed Mike to begin with - and our pot-smoking protagonist is tagged for termination.

So the movie becomes a manhunt for Mike, with he and Phoebe being pursued by a bunch of Ultra operatives, including the creepy Walton Goggins and stand-out stunt woman Monique Ganderton, through a police station shoot-out, a raid at their drug dealer friend Rose’s (John Leguizamo) pad, and finally a box store climax where things get more than messy.

The bombardment of the second half’s series of shoot-outs, fight scenes, and chases got very tiresome as there have been so many movies about indestructible bad-ass with unique sets of skills, and there’s only so much of seeing Eisenberg offing attacker after attacker that I could be amused by.

There is a funny thread about Mike trying to pick the right time to propose to Phoebe amid all the chaos (Eisenberg sells this sort of neurotic, lovesick stuff much better than the killing machine material unsurprisingly), and a batch of good lines sprinkled throughout (like “They had guns and knives and they were being total dicks!”), but there’s not enough of a spark of real inspiration to make this a truly memorable experience.

Screenwriter Max Landis may have thought that the love story part of it would give the rest the gas to power it on through, but I really wasn’t buying Stewart’s role particularly when it came to the big reveal about why she’d stay in a long term relationship with such a deadbeat.

AMERICAN ULTRA is an ultra violent mash-up of THE BOURNE IDENTITY and PINEAPPLE EXPRESS, with a fair amount of the comic carnage of KICK-ASS (minus the superhero angle) mixed in as well. It has its moments, but I wish Max Landis’ screenplay took more chances, and didn’t just stick to a done to death formula. The idea that a stoner comes to find out that he’s a super soldier in secret is a good one; if only they had one or two more good ideas for it to rub up against.

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