G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009) - Sommers tries to fire up Hasbro's second, less interesting movie venture

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A sexually suggestive, fire-and-ice-color-schemed concept define this character-filled poster for Stephen Sommers' G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

A team of international, secret super-soldiers, the G.I. Joes, get their work cut out for them, when a new so-called nanomite weapon gets stolen by its very evil, Scottish manufacturer.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, based on the Hasbro comic strip series which began in 1942 and the G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero action figure toyline (1982-94), is written by Stuart Beattie (I, Frankenstein (2014)), David Elliot and Paul Lovett (Four Brothers (2005), both), with Michael B. Gordon (300 (2006)) and director Stephen Sommers (The Mummy (1999)) contributing story elements. 
The completely idea-vacuumed Joe universe only becomes less engaging from the fact that is consists of an enormous ensemble of characters who are all one-sided and colorless. Channing Tatum's (Stop-Loss (2008)) cheating 'hero' characters takes the cake. Marlon Wayans (The Ladykillers (2004)) and Byung-hun Lee (The Influence/In-peul-loo-eon-seu (2010)) have charm and improve matters some.
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is a huge-budgeted monstrosity; SPOILER in its almost constant barrage of mostly CGI-based action, the scene of the destruction of the Eiffel Tower of Paris was, to my eyes, a spectacle. But it can't change, however, that this is a braindead dud.

Related posts:

2009 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED IV]
2009 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED III]
2009 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED II]
2009 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I] 

Watch a trailer for the film here

Cost: 175 mil. $
Box office: 302.4 mil. $
= Big flop
[G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra premiered 27 July (Tokyo) and runs 118 minutes. The film had been in development for about a decade and only moved into production following the success of Hasbro's first feature franchise, Transformers (2007). Shooting took place from February - June 2008 in California, including Los Angeles, the Arctic, the Czech Republic, including in Prague, in Tokyo, Japan and Paris, France. The film opened #1 to a 54.7 mil. $ first weekend in North America, where it spent its first 4 weeks in the top 5 (#1-#2-#3-#5) and grossed 150.2 mil. $ (49.7 % of the total gross). The 2nd and 3rd biggest markets were South Korea with 15.9 mil. $ (5.3 %) and the UK with 10.3 mil. $ (3.4 %). Roger Ebert gave the film 1.5/4 stars, translating to a star harder than this review. The film was nominated for 6 Razzie awards, winning one for Sienna Miller as Worst Supporting Actress. Though the huge-budgeted movie didn't recoup its costs theatrically, it undoubtedly sold plenty of tie-in merchandise. In its first week of home video release in North America, it grossed 40.9 mil. $ from sale of 2.5 mil. discs. A 2013 sequel, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, was also critically panned but made more financially smart, grossing 375 mil. $ on a 'mere' 93 mil. $ budget. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is rotten at 35 % with a 4.6 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra?

The Wind Rises/風立ちぬ [Kaze Tachinu] (2013) - Miyazaki's beautiful but languid last film

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The North-American poster for Hayao Miyazaki's The Wind Rises is very zealous in making us recall the directors past glories

Our hero Horikoshi has had a great interest in airplanes since childhood and grows up to become a plane designer as planned, while his country Japan enters the lunacy of World War II.

The Wind Rises is the swansong of Japanese animation master writer-director Hayao Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke/Mononoke-hime (1997)), who retired in its wake. As an innocent-looking animation, it is an odd bird; too adult for most children, and too conflict-averse and languid for most adults. It is clear that Miyazaki has sought to make an uplifting, beautiful film without the horrors of war or any darker, more complex nuances in the characters, - and the film is then set in relation to the two world wars. The plan thereby comes to seem like a feeble tripping around the real dilemmas.
The Wind Rises is still worth seeing, because it is a sweepingly beautiful animation with tremendously fine music (by Joe Hisaishi (Ponyo/Gake no ue no Ponyo (2008)) and sensory sound design (by Koji Kasamatsu (Ponyo). It is a farewell to a master who has simply grown too soft with age. It is based on Miyazaki's own same-titled 2009-10 manga and is a fictional biopic of Jiro Hirokoshi, the maker of two Mitsubishi airplanes used by Japan during WWII, inspired by Tatsuo Hori's same-titled 1937 short story.

Related reviews:

Hayao Miyazaki: Howl's Moving Castle/ハウルの動く城 [Hauru no Ugoku Shiro] (2004) - Miyazaki's hugely successful, gibberish fantasy
Spirited Away/千と千尋の神隠し [Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi] (2001) - Miyazaki's highly Japanese, enormously weird story of a girl

 

Watch an official trailer for the film in the English dub version here

 

Cost: 30 mil. $

 Box office: 136.4 mil. $

=  Big hit

[The Wind Rises was released July 20 (Japan) and runs 126 minutes. Miyazaki originally wanted to make a Ponyo sequel and thought his Wind Rises manga unfit for children, until a staff member said to him that "children should be allowed to be exposed to subjects they are unfamiliar with." The film opened #25 in 21 theaters to a 0.3 mil. $ first weekend in North America, where it peaked in 496 theaters at #13 and grossed 5.2 mil. $ (3.8 % of the total gross.) The film's biggest market by far was its native Japan with 119.5 mil. $ (87.6 %). The 2nd largest was France with 5.4 mil. $ (4 %), and North America was the 3rd largest. The film was nominated for the Best Animation Oscar, which it lost to Frozen, and the corresponding Golden Globe, also lost. The Wind Rises is certified fresh at 88 % with a 7.9 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of The Wind Rises?

Snowden (2016) - Stone's inflammatory political thriller is a powerful must-see

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+ Best Biopic of the Year

Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the gentle title character on a sleek poster for Oliver Stone's Snowden

 

Snowden is the 20th fiction feature from great New-Yorker filmmaker Oliver Stone (Born on the Fourth of July (1989)). It is written by Stone and Kieran Fitzgerald (The Homesman (2014)), based on two novels: Luke Harding's (WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy (2011)) non-fiction The Snowden Files (2014) and Anatoly Kucherena's (We Cannot Do Without Bloodshed (2003)) fictionalized Time of the Octopus (2015).

Edward Snowden, a precarious but deeply dedicated young American male, finds out that he can best serve his country by using his prodigal computer skills, working for the NSA and CIA. Over the course of several years, he is increasingly distraught by the covert tactics of his government, leading up to his becoming a whistle-blower for The Guardian in 2013.

Stone, once again, succeeds with a controversial, highly relevant and political current issue, - namely that of Edward Snowden and the mass surveillance and privacy infringement and espionage perpetrated by the US government. His film is arguably more important, inflammatory and needed than any other he has done in decades. As such, it is this year's The Big Short (2015); a thrillingly substantial outlaying of outrageous recent history; eye-opening and assured in its conviction: That Snowden is no suspicious expat that deserves decades behind bars or to rot in his involuntary refuge in Russia, but is, in fact, an American hero, a brave friend of the common man and an excellent citizen.

Cinematically, Snowden isn't as innovative as Big Short. But it's solid all-around, deftly illuminating the problems of mass surveillance in the digital age while letting us ever closer to its title protagonist and his struggles as a loyal citizen with increasingly burdening knowledge and feelings of complicity.

Thanks to a stellar cast that Stone has managed to gather, the film becomes a riveting encounter: Joseph Gordon-Levitt (10 Things I Hate about You (1999)) has a smugness that peaks through his otherwise impressive performance; he really embodies Snowden credibly. Shailene Woodley (The Fault in Our Stars (2014)) is, once again, excellent, here as the very normal, loving girlfriend. Rhys Ifans (Another Me (2013)) and Nicholas Cage (Drive Angry (2011)) appear and are great in minor but pivotal parts, and the cast is full of exceptional actors; young up-and-comers like Scott Eastwood (Diablo (2015)) and Ben Schnetzer (Pride (2014)) and more seasoned actors like Timothy Olyphant (Deadwood (2004-06)), Joely Richardson (101 Dalmatians (1996)), Tom Wilkinson (RocknRolla (2008)), Zachary Quinto (Star Trek Beyond (2016)) and Melissa Leo (Flight (2012)).

Don't go into Snowden expecting a break-neck paced conventional thriller. - Its hero is a geek, and it's about technology and the real world, which is thrilling in another way. - But no less thrilling, mark you. Snowden is a must-see.

 

Related posts:

 

2016 in films - according to Film Excess [UPDATED III]

2016 in films - according to Film Excess [UPDATED II]

2016 in films - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I]

2016 in films - according to Film Excess

 

Watch an official trailer for the film here

Cost: 40 mil. $

Box office: 22.7 mil. $ and counting

= Too early to say

[Snowden premiered September 9 (Toronto International Film Festival) and runs 134 minutes. Stone was working on a film about Martin Luther King's last years with Jamie Foxx starring when he started getting contacted about Snowden and eventually went to Russia and met him. Stone allegedly paid 0.7 mil. $ for the rights to Harding's book and 1 mil. $ for the rights to Kucherena's, scrapping the King biopic. Financing proved tough: Stone and his producer financed the film themselves until 8 days before production, when French and German financing came through: Probably due to its controversial content, it was not possible to get American financing for Snowden. The film was shot in 62 days from February - April in Munich, Germany, Moscow, Hawaii, Washington, D.C. and Hong Kong. The budget was so tight that when Stone's mother passed away, he had to miss her US funeral, because the production couldn't afford any delay. Fears of surveillance and hacking by the NSA made the cast and crew adhere to special precautions during production. Gordon-Levitt, who had also gone to Moscow to meet Snowden and his girlfriend to prepare for his part, donated his entire salary to the production. The release was pushed out from a December 2015 release until the fall of 2016. The film opened #4, behind Sully, Blair Witch and Bridget Jones' Baby, to an 8 mil. $ first weekend in North America, where it spend its 2nd week in #5 and then left the top 5 and has to date grossed just 18.8 mil. $. The film has yet to open in several important markets like France, Germany, Spain, the UK, Italy and Japan, and hopefully it will still gather the much larger audiences it deserves, and avoid becoming a major flop. Snowden is fresh at 63 % with a 6.3 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of Snowden?

Hesher (2010) - Susser's immature, rebel-centered debut

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1 Film Excess nomination:

Best Child Actor: Devin Brochu (lost to Kiernan Shipka for Mad Men S4) 

The poster for Spencer Susser's Hesher emulates old heavy rock styles just as the film itself does

The boy TJ gets bullied crudely and is neglected at home by his grief-stricken father, when the crazy, stoned out individualist Hesher moves in with them, unannounced and uninvited.

Hesher is the feature debut for co-writer/director Spencer Susser (Lana Del Rey: Summertime Sadness (2012, music video)), a very strange, downbeat and violence-preoccupied dramedy. Its main quality might be the impressive cast, Susser has managed to gather in it: Piper Laurie (The Crossing Guard (1995)), Natalie Portman (Black Swan (2010)) who also co-produced it, Rainn Wilson (The Stream (2013)) and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Premium Rush (2012)) as the dubious title hero. The boy actor Devin Brochu (Rubber (2010)) stands out in the bunch; he is very good and cinematic in Hesher.
Under scrutiny, the film appears incredibly immature and unreal. It is a slight affair that may attract some young audiences. Susser co-wrote it with David Michôd (Animal Kingdom (2010)), based on a story by Brian Charles Frank (Wolfpack of Reseda (2012), TV-series).

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2010 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED III]
2010 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED II]
2010 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I]

Here's a trailer for the film

Cost: 7 mil. $
Box office: 0.449 mil. $
= Box office disaster
[Hesher premiered January 22 (Sundance) and runs 105 minutes. It was filmed May - June 2009 in California. It opened #36 in 42 theaters to a small 126k $ first weekend, its widest weekend in North America, where it grossed 382k $. It made 66k $ in Italy but other international grosses are not made public. The catastrophic performance of the film probably accounts for Susser's not having made a film to follow it up yet. Hesher is rotten at 54 % with a 5.7 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of Hesher?

Don Jon (2013) or, Over-sexed 2013

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+ Best Debut Movie of the Year

Hype on top of Joseph Gordon-Levitt's smug smile on this poster for his own directorial debut, Don Jon

Jon is a New Jersey player, who one night in the club eyes the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. They become a couple, but Jon also has a very close relationship to his porn that now becomes problematic.
 
Writer-director-star Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Mysterious Skin (2004)) and Scarlett Johansson (Lost in Translation (2003)) are both super charming here, although she plays a pretty bitchy young lady here, - she fits well with his self-involved, shallow nice guy Jon.
Gordon-Levitt's directorial feature debut burns its way outward and onward on a lot of youthful energy, busy editing and the likely stars at the center. Julianne Moore (The Kids Are All Right (2010)) is well cast as the woman SPOILER who teaches Jon about two-sided lovemaking.
The porn addiction is not examined in depth, and it isn't allowed to get too destructive for Jon, inhibiting the film from really going places. The story is wrapped up with a smile on its (your?) face like a neat little package, but it can't completely escape the shallowness of its characters and portrayals.

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Joseph Gordon-Levitt: 2013 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED VI]

2013 in films - according to Film Excess [UPDATED V]
2013 in films - according to Film Excess [UPDATED IV]
2013 in films - according to Film Excess [UPDATED III]
Looper (2012) - Time travelling assassinations have never been hipper or more exciting! (actor)
50/50 (2011) or, Dude's Got the Big C (actor)
(500) Days of Summer (2009) or, Cute and Cuter (actor)

Sexy Scarlett Johansson meet sexy Joseph Gordon-Levitt in his Don Jon

Watch the excellent trailer for the film, which surfs high on Good Vibrations

Cost: 6 mil. $
Box office: 30.4 mil. $
= Big hit
[The remarkably low budget probably hides the fact that star-salaries were invested into the film or held until release, and/or that the friends in the cast were only paid scale salaries. In any case, Don Jon got a warm reception at Sundance and earned almost all of its dough in the States, (only 5.9 mil. $ internationally).]

What do you think of Don Jon?
What would you like to see Joseph Gordon-Levitt tackle for his second movie as director?

Looper (2012) - Time traveling assassinations have never been hipper or more exciting!

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Cool poster for Rian Johnson's Looper

QUICK REVIEW:

30 years into the future: Assassinations for future clients are carried out by 'loopers', who in the end have to kill their own future selfs and retire. But our hero misses his own future self's execution, who does not want to be executed yet.
Confused? The movie straightens it out, (if you can keep up with it.)
Looper is an original, hard-hitting and sophisticated science fiction action thriller. With a high pace so that the few questions along the way are quickly forgotten again, it blasts itself through to its audience with a mix of visual and intellectual artistry that is a pure joy.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt leads Rian Johnson's Looper, playing a young Bruce Willis, and nails it

Bruce Willis (Die Hard (1988)) is cool as action hero (once again) with a heart, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Mysterious Skin (2004)), Emily Blunt (The Devil Wears Prada (2006)), Paul Dano (L.I.E. (2001)) and Jeff Daniels (The Squid and the Whale (2005)) are each of them also very good as hard-skinned individuals.
Especially the plot-line about the little boy is cool and fascinating and very well achieved.
Looper impresses also with its cool photography by Steve Yedlin (Brick (2005)). It was a welcome surprise in 2012, a very consistent time travel movie. - Woof!
It is both written and directed by Rian Johnson, the writer-director behind Brick (2005) and The Brothers Bloom (2008). Surprisingly, considering Looper's massive success, Johnson doesn't have a new project yet. (Ed. note 08/01/14: He now does, and it is no less than Star Wars: Episode VIII and IX!)

Watch the awesome trailer for the very cool movie Looper here

Budget: 30 mil. $
Box office: 176.5 mil. $
= Big hit

What do you think of Looper?
Have you seen some of Rian Johnson's other films, and if so, how are they?
Are they as clever and exciting as Looper?

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) or, Batman and the Storm, Darkness, Anarchy, Evil, Depression

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Christian Bale in his impressive suit on the poster for Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises should undoubtedly attract people with leather and/or domination kinks

Batman has been a depressed hermit for 7 years, having retired Batman, in which time his business has gone to hell. Now a young woman steals a pearl necklace from his safe, and a lunatic by the name of Bain threatens Gotham City ...

Rises is impressive, partially shot in IMAX, and it has scenes, - especially action scenes and those featuring its futuristic vehicles, - which pack a wallop. The production values are top notch, and the huge budget involved here wasn't lost on CGI excesses.
The ensemble cast is huge and also overly so; the film suffers from too many characters and a running time that is way too permissive; the film should have lost about 40 minutes.

Hans Zimmer (Inferno (2016)) has created another rumbling, excitement-awakening score full of chanting and war drums, and Rises also has first-rate sound work. English master co-writer/director Christopher Nolan (Inception) wrote the movie with his brother Jonathan Nolan and David S. Goyer, trying to tie a highly mythical ending to the Nolan Batman trilogy, while introducing several new but familiar characters (namely Catwoman and Robin), and it becomes too much.
Tom Hardy (Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)) is menacing as the kind of super-terrorist madman Bain, but the Nolans have kept way too much of his gloom and doom speeches in their final movie. This also makes the film too dark and heavy for a superhero movie. (The film's overly dark mode was made an even more pregnant fact around the time of its summer release, when a young, deranged man shot 12 people and wounded 58, wearing a Bain-like gas mask at a midnight showing of the film in Aurora, Colorado. He later called himself the Joker. The tragedy pulled a heavy, dark shadow over a movie that already had too much darkness in itself.)
Despite its many good elements, Dark Knight Rises is a disappointing end of this Batman, and it also has a nonsense ending, SPOILER in which Batman's death is mourned, after he has sacrificed himself for Gotham in a nuclear explosion; only to mysteriously survive this impossible ordeal and pop up in Florence.

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2012 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED V]
2012 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED IV]
2012 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED III]

Tom Hardy is fairly unrecognizable as the angry, strong, merciless Bain, in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises

Most of the principal characters of The Dark Knight Rises on display in this appropriately dark as !#?¤ artwork

Watch the trailer here

Budget: 230 mil. $ (after tax reductions)
Box office: 1 bl. $
= Mega-hit, 10th highest grossing film of all time

What do you think of The Dark Knight Rises?

50/50 (2011) or, Dude's Got the Big C

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A poster for Jonathan Levine's 50/50, featuring a still from the film's one-take head-shaving scene

A young man is diagnosed with spinal cancer and prepares to die. The chemo is tough, the girlfriend cheats, his best friend is infantile, his mother fusses over him, and his shrink is an amateur. But a sweet amateur. - Will he kick it?

After it's over, 50/50 feels like it should have been something more, but it does accomplish a realistic feel. Screenwriter Will Reiser (Brooklyn Castle (announced)) wrote it based on personal experiences with the subject matter, himself having survived cancer. Ironically, Seth Rogen (Neighbors (2014)), who plays the Reiser-based protagonist's best friend, (who was also Rogen in Reiser's own real-life experience), just works better in more straight comedies, I find, but both Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Manic (2001)) and Angelica Huston (Seraphim Falls (2006)) as the fussy mother are good here.
But 50/50 does become touching, and it has an especially fine hospital scene. Considering its pedigree, it is a hard little movie directed by Jonathan Levine (The Night Before (2015)).

Watch a trailer for the film here

Cost: 8 mil. $
Box office: 41.1 mil. $
= Big hit (returned 5.13 times the cost)
[50/50 premiered 12 September (Toronto International Film Festival, Ontario) and runs 100 minutes. James McAvoy was supposed to play the protagonist but bowed out due to his becoming a father at the time of shooting. Filming took place in Washington and British Columbia, Canada from February - March 2010. The film opened #5, behind Dolphin Tale, Moneyball, The Lion King (re-release) and Courageous, to an 8.6 mil. $ first weekend in North America, where it stayed #5 for a second week before leaving the top 5, grossing 35 mil. $ (85.2 % of the total gross). Its 2nd and 3rd biggest markets were the UK with 2.3 mil. $ (5.6 %) and South Korea with 0.8 mil. $ (1.9 %). The film was nominated for 2 Golden Globes. Levine returned with Warm Bodies (2013). Gordon-Levitt returned in The Dark Knight Rises (2012), Rogen in For a Good Time, Call... (2012), Anna Kendrick (Elsewhere (2009)) in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 (2011). 50/50 is certified fresh at 94 % with a 7.7 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of 50/50?

(500) Days of Summer (2009) or, Cute & Cuter

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The refreshing, eclectic poster for Marc Webb's (500) Days of Summer

A greeting card writer, Tom, falls for his boss' new assistant, but their romance becomes problematic, because while he believes in fate and love, she believes in keeping things casual. 

(500) Days of Summer is one of those films where the end is revealed in the title, - and the narrator makes this even clearer at the onset. The film's indie-cool parameter is blinking red; what with protagonist Tom's unlikely, creative vocation, the animated sequences, and even a dance scene in a park, - along with the casting of two of the day's cutest actors, talented Joseph Gordon Levitt (Lincoln (2012)) and indie-folk singer/actress, Zooey Deschanel (Our Idiot Brother (2011)).
Marc Webb (The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)), a music video director, makes his feature debut here with an original script by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (The Fault in Our Stars (2014), both). They have chosen the uncommon LA as background for this romance, and succeed in making the city, which is widely regarded as flat, huge and not very romantic, seem both interesting and romantic.
The film also benefits from lots of smart editing, (the scene with expectations vs. reality is especially fine), and fine supporting performances from Geoffrey Arend (Worst Friends (2014)) and Matthew Gray Gubler (Beautiful Girl (2014)) as Tom's friends, who bring liberating laughs to this sweet little pearl of a film.

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Marc Webb: The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) or, The New and Unimproved Spidey
2009 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED III]
2009 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED II]
2009 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I] 

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel practically battling each other in cuteness in Marc Webb's (500) Days of Summer

Watch a trailer for the film here

Cost: 7.5 mil. $
Box office: 60.7 mil. $
= Huge hit (returned 8.09 times the cost)
[(500) Days of Summer premiered 17 January (Sundance Film Festival, Utah) and runs 95 minutes. Neustadter has revealed that the script is based on a real romance and breakup of his. Filming took place from April - July 2008 in LA, using several notable buildings in the city. The film opened #12 to a 834k $ first weekend in 27 theaters in North America, where it peaked at #9 and in 1,048 theaters (different weeks), grossing 32.3 mil. $ (53.2 % of the total gross). The 2nd and 3rd biggest markets were the UK with 7.5 mil. $ (12.4 %) and Australia with 4.3 mil. $ (12 %). The film appeared on several critical top 10 lists of the year and got nominated for two Golden Globes and 3 Independent Spirit Awards, winning for Best Screenplay. Webb returned with 8 short and TV-series episodes before he hit theaters again with The Amazing Spider-Man (2012). Gordon-Levitt returned in Women in Trouble (2009), Deschanel in 6 short and TV-series credits before Our Idiot Brother (2011). (500) Days of Summer is certified fresh at 85 % with a 7.6/10 critical average on Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of (500) Days of Summer?