Sir Christopher Lee dies at 93

Posted on June 11, 2015 by reelentropy

Christopher Lee, after an acting career spanning almost 70 years, died in a hospital Sunday morning due to respiratory and heart failure.

Known for his deep, sinister voice and high cheekbones, Lee had a storied career of villainous roles, most famously as Dracula in the 1958 film and its many sequels and as Francisco Saramanga in 1974’s Bond film, The Man with the Golden Gun. Prominent roles in this century include Saruman in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies as well as Count Dooku in episodes II and III of Star Wars. These famous roles barely scratch the surface of a more than 200 film career that includes such roles as Frankenstein’s monster, both Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes, Comte de Rochefort and Death.

Before his film career, Lee served in the Royal Air Force in World War II. He was one of the initial volunteers providing aid to Finland during the Winter War in 1939, but returned home before the war reached England’s shores. He was told that he could not fly due to an optic nerve failure at the end of his training, and spent most of the war working in intelligence in the North African theater and up through Italy and Germany, eventually serving on the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects before retiring as a flight lieutenant in 1946.

Though not widely known for his charity work, Lee was a consistent supporter of Cinema for Peace and UNICEF.

Lee experienced a renaissance in fame in 2010 when he began his death metal career. Having long sung for soundtracks, Lee sung on a duet for the Rhapsody song “The Magic of the Wizard’s Dream,” which released in 2004, and it turned out to be a match made in metal Heaven. Lee released his own complete album, “Charlemagne: By the Sword and Cross,” in 2010, winning that year’s Spirit of Metal award. He would spend the rest of his life recording heavy metal covers, starting with a Christmas album in 2012. One of those tracks, “Jingle Hell,” made it to no. 18 on the Billboard Hot 100, making Lee the oldest artist ever to appear on the chart at 91.

Lee continued to release EPs every year until his death. When discussing “Darkest Carols, Faithful Sing” in last December, Lee said, “At my age, the most important thing for me is to keep active by doing things that I truly enjoy. I do not know how long I am going to be around, so every day is a celebration and I want to share it with my fans.”

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Insidious 3 focuses on correct lead, still tame, predictable

Posted on June 10, 2015 by reelentropy

Elise Rainer, the best part of the first two movies, finally gets her own feature here. Photo courtesy Focus Features.

So if they’re titling the movies like chapters in a book, shouldn’t this one be called Insidious: Prologue?

The deceptively titled Insidious: Chapter 3 takes place a few years before the first movie and chronicles Elise Rainer (Lin Shayne) coming out of retirement to save Quinn Brenner (Stefanie Scott), who is haunted by an asthematic demon called the man who can’t breathe after inadvertently calling out to him while trying to contact her recently diseased mother. Rainer had retired when she started being haunted herself by the woman in black, who similarly responded to her when she tried to call out to her own lost husband.

Insidious 3 is just as repetitive and not really that scary as the rest of the series and about eight times as derivative. The apartment is straight out of The Shining, the man who can’t breathe is Hannibal Lector with Darth Vader’s breathing apparatus, the plot is straight out of Poltergeist for the third straight time and references to J-horror, movies that have grown so similar themselves it’s hard to single out which scenes are referencing what, become more prominent as the film goes on. But even so, it’s well executed and difficult to take eyes off the haunting sequences. It holds attention. The formula is the formula for a reason.

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A tale of two McCarthys

Posted on June 5, 2015 by reelentropy

Scorsese casts Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio in all his movies, Feig casts Melissa McCarthy. There really is a world of difference here. Photos courtesy 20th Century Fox.

At Spy’s world premier in May, star Jason Statham called writer/director Paul Feig “The Scorsese of comedy.” To really understand the gravity of this comment, you have to take the time to watch all those classic Scorsese/Statham collaborations. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Spy stars Feig’s muse, Melissa McCarthy, as Susan Cooper, a CIA analyst who works with Bradley Fine (Jude Law), watching his back through missions via satellite and drone and keeping him safe. Despite her best efforts, Fine is killed early in the film by Rayna Boyanov (Rose Byrne), doughter of a multi-national terrorist kingpin with a tactical nuke for sale. Cooper gets her chance to prove her mettle in the field tracking Boyanov, since she knows all active operatives by name and face. Rick Ford (Statham) scoffs at the decision, and tails her through her reconnaissance mission.

At the start, it’s a clever spy satire brought down by more of the same from McCarthy. The Bond aesthetics are on point, and Ford and Boyanov are perfect spoofs of the stereotypical spy movie hero and villain, respectively.

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Show about vanity and entitlement becomes movie about vanity and entitlement

Posted on June 3, 2015 by reelentropy

Phone calls! Damn, I knew there was something I forgot to count. Photos courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

Entourage is the whitest, broiest TV show that ever bleached a white bro’s bro-hole, and anyone expecting anything different from the movie was setting themselves up for disappointment.

The movie picks up with Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier) partying after annulling his series-ending marriage, since, who needs a ball and chain, right? After bringing the entourage onto his giant sex boat, he gets a call from agent-turned-studio head Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven) offering him a role. To shake things up, Chase requests to direct.

An immediate eight month timeskip robs viewers of seeing this process, though they do get a long middle finger in the form of a 10-minute exposition newsreel. No, this isn’t a movie about Chase struggling with new challenges and evolving as an artist and a character. Instead, it’s a movie about financier Travis McCredle (Haley Joel Osment) being jealous of his awesome sex life, among many other subplots to make the other characters seem important.

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San Andreas toppled by wobbly foundation

Posted on June 2, 2015 by reelentropy

If nothing else good can be said about the movie, it was at least a huge victory for Dwayne Johnson, who has finally proved indisputably that he can bring in upward of $50 million basically by himself. Photos courtesy Warner Brothers Pictures.

San Andreas gets immediate points off for opening with the Warner Bros. logo transitioning into the New Line Cinema logo, triggering traumatic Hobbit flashbacks.

It follows this up at once by making viewers listen to most of Taylor Swift’s “Style.” This movie has, dare I say it, a very shaky start.

San Andreas mostly follows Ray Gaines (Dwayne Johnson) through an agonizing 45-minute act one, then through multiple earthquakes stemming from California’s San Andreas Fault. Gaines’ wife, Emma (Carla Gugino), has left him for real estate mogul Daniel Riddick (Ioan Gruffuld) and has already moved into his castle-like mansion with their daughter, Blake (Alexandra Daddario), though she waited until early in the movie to serve him divorce papers for the audience’s convenience. A rescue worker with more than 600 confirmed rescues, Ray Gaines is on his way to help relieve a smaller, related earthquake in Nevada, inexplicably unaccompanied in the world’s worst helicopter, when The Big One hits Los Angeles. Gaines gets a call from his wife, gives her terrible earthquake safety advice, then completely abandons his duty to rescue her. From there, they head to San Francisco to rescue their daughter, who was laying over in the city with Riddick on her way to college.

Meanwhile, California Institute of Technology seismologist Lawrence Hayes (Paul Giamatti) develops and proves a reliable method of predicting earthquakes a full half a minute in advance, which is actually a cool and interesting accomplishment, but doesn’t have anything whatsoever to do with the rest of the movie.

First thing’s first — let’s go through all the terrible, stupid things characters do in this movie. These actions and statements make these characters unsympathetic, and can make viewers not care what happens to them.

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