The Lost City: Don't bother finding it

The Lost City (2022) • View trailer

Two stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for violence, profanity, sexual candor and partial nudity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

After catching up with several dour, dreary and downright discombobulated films in anticipation of the Oscars, I looked forward to something light and larkish.

 

Old saying: Be careful what you wish for.

 

Sporting the least-practical onesie in cinema history, Loretta (Sandra Bullock) suddenly
realizes that she and Alan (Channing Tatum) have stumbled upon key secrets
regarding the "Lost City of D."

The Lost City is impressively dumb, even by the loose standards of such star-driven adventure flicks. The lack of continuity in this script — by co-directors Aaron and Adam Nee, along with three other hands — is matched only by plot holes large enough to drive this story’s MRAP vehicle through.

Mostly, though, all the actors try much too hard: as if adding overwrought emphasis to their line readings will transform a given scene into something meaningful. Or even slightly credible.

 

One wonders why The Brothers Nee were entrusted with such a large project. Nothing in their résumé suggests the slightest affinity for this genre.

 

And goodness; they certainly didn’t rise to the occasion.

 

In fairness, the premise has promise: Insufferably erudite romance novelist Loretta Sage (Sandra Bullock) owes much of her popularity to hunky cover model Alan (Channing Tatum), who has dedicated his career to embodying her heroic character, “Dash.” Personal tragedy has made Loretta a recluse; a rising awareness of how Alan’s tail is wagging her dog, has made her jealous and unwilling to meet fans.

 

How droll, then, that Loretta and Alan should wind up in the midst of an actual exotic and perilous adventure, much like the swooningly melodramatic escapades in her novels.

 

Matters kick off when Loretta is kidnapped, following the first disastrous stop of a book tour, by eccentric billionaire Abigail Fairfax (Daniel Radcliffe). Possessing just enough archeological knowledge to make him dangerous, Fairfax has long pursued the legendary “Lost City of D,” where he hopes to find a rare diamond necklace supposedly hidden within.

 

Loretta and her late husband, both well-versed in archaeology, once explored the region; her newest novel includes some of its ancient pictograph language symbols … hence Fairfax’s determination that she can help him find the treasure. And her unwilling abduction to a remote, jungle-laden volcanic island.

 

So far, so good. 

 

Back in the States, Alan tracks her movements via her Smart watch; he recalls an association with former Navy SEAL Jack Trainer (Brad Pitt), who dabbles in yoga and hostage retrieval.

 

Pitt’s brief involvement with this saga is — by far — the film’s high point: a well choreographed and audaciously skilled bit of Bondian derring-do.

 

After which, the script turns bone-stupid, and The Brothers Nee completely lose control of their film.

Ocean's 8: Larkish ladies of larceny

Ocean's 8 (2018) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, and too harshly, for brief profanity, fleeting drug use and mild suggestive content
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.8.18

As long as reasonable care is taken — sharp script, skilled direction, a competent cast — light-hearted caper thrillers can’t miss.

That’s definitely the case with Ocean’s 8.

With their compatriots "on assignment" at Cartier headquarters, the bulk of the team —
from left, Debbie (Sandra Bullock), Tammy (Sarah Paulson), Nine Ball (Rihanna),
Lou (Cate Blancett) and Constance (Awkwafina) — tracks progress via a computer monitor.

If this new film pales slightly when compared to 2001’s sparkling remake of Ocean’s Eleven, it’s mostly because the formula has lost some luster via repetition. Still, the well-designed gender switch compensates for such familiarity, and there’s no question that director Gary Ross — who also scripted this re-boot, with Olivia Milch — assembles the pieces with élan, and then guides them through a devious chess game laden with twists ... at least one of which likely will be a surprise.

Mostly, Ross delivers the necessary level of fun, which was so crucial to the 2001 predecessor’s success. We always had a sense that George Clooney & Co. were playing themselves, as much as their characters — which was absolutely true of the 1960 Frank Sinatra/Dean Martin original — and that added effervescent bonhomie to the action. These were guys with whom we wanted to share war stories over cocktails; the same is true of this Girls Just Want To Have Fun reworking.

And yes — just to be clear — this gender switch is far better, in every possible way, than 2016’s conceptually similar but otherwise misguided remake of Ghostbusters.

We meet Debbie Ocean (Sandra Bullock) — the equally larcenous sister of Clooney’s Danny Ocean — immediately following a prison stretch of five years, eight months and 12 days. Rather than accept this sentence as a lesson learned, Debbie spent the entire time devising, refining and perfecting what she now believes will be the perfect crime: the theft of the Toussaint, a unique diamond necklace valued at $150 million, which stays locked in an impenetrable vault in the bowels of the Cartier mansion.

All she needs is a crew.

Bullock’s Debbie is perky, poised and polished: utterly unflappable, and generally sporting a mildly self-confident smirk that potential marks immediately find disarming. This contrasts nicely with the wary and somewhat hardened Lou (Cate Blanchett), Debbie’s former partner in crime, who is less than enthusiastic when given the opportunity to resume their illicit ways.

Debbie mocks; Lou challenges. Bullock and Blanchett make an excellent team, and the script teases us with the possibility that their relationship might run deeper than mere professional camaraderie.

Our Brand Is Crisis: The result is distasteful

Our Brand Is Crisis (2015) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated R, for profanity and sexual candor
By Derrick Bang

This seems to be the season for transforming well-regarded documentaries into starring vehicles for Hollywood A-listers.

Jane (Sandra Bullock) watches smugly as her candidate picks up steam in the upcoming
Bolivian presidential election, which prompts rival campaign "fixer" Pat Candy (Billy Bob
Thornton) to whisper another round of Sun Tzu-esque imprecations in her ear.

But whereas Freeheld mostly retains the soul and warmth of its 2007 nonfiction predecessor, while highlighting sensitive work from stars Julianne Moore and Ellen Page, Our Brand Is Crisis is an awkward, bewildering mess that benefits not at all from Sandra Bullock’s presence.

She barely tries, falling back incessantly on the half-amused sidelong glance that has become her go-to expression in far better projects. Much of the time, in fact, Bullock appears to have forgotten her lines, and instead attempts to “cover” by flailing aimlessly.

This doesn’t speak well of director David Gordon Green, apparently unable to handle his leading lady. Or maybe Bullock didn’t like him. Whatever the reason, she just isn’t present ... even when lovingly framed, front and center — and too frequently in tight close-up — by cinematographer Tim Orr.

Bullock is far from this film’s only problem. Peter Straughan’s script is a mess: His effort to transform this serious premise into a satire is half-assed at best, but most often just clumsy. And when satire fails — particularly if the topic is based on actual events — the result becomes tasteless. And offensive.

Rachel Boynton’s 2005 documentary of the same title tracks the jaw-dropping degree to which the American consulting firm of Greenberg, Carville and Strum (GCS) did its best to rig the 2003 Bolivian presidential election on behalf of its client, Gonzalo “Goni” Sanchez de Lozada, who’d held that top spot from 1993-97, but had come to be seen as arrogant and out of touch with the common people.

Yep, you read that correctly: American political consultants plying their dirty tricks to affect the outcome of a presidential election in a foreign country. Clandestine U.S. involvement in foreign politics is nothing new, of course; what made this particular case so egregious was the degree to which GCS made little or no effort to conceal its activities. Hell, these guys were proud of their work.

The charismatic James Carville was the beaming public face of GCS; that’s the role assigned here to Bullock, playing burned-out campaign fixer “Calamity” Jane Bodine. Anxiety and a series of high-profile failures sent her into isolated retirement; as this film begins, she’s tempted back into the game by the opportunity for one more match against her longtime professional nemesis, Pat Candy (Billy Bob Thornton, who apparently based his look on Carville).

Minions: Banana-rama!

Minions (2015) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG, and needlessly, for cartoon action and brief rude humor
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.10.15

Thrusting supporting players into their own starring vehicle rarely succeeds.

Rarely ... but not never. In five short years, the Twinkie-hued, overalled lab subordinates in Despicable Me have gone from screwball second bananas to a genuine world-wide phenomenon ... and they more than hold their own, in the absolutely delightful Minions.

Having won a coveted spot as Scarlet Overkill's new henchbeings, our Minion heroes —
from left, Stuart, Bob and Kevin — eagerly await their first dastardly mission. Sadly,
they've no idea how shallow their new employer's loyalty is destined to be.

But their success remains an anomaly.

Although a more frequent phenomenon on television — where we (briefly) suffered through, among many others, Beverly Hills Buntz (from Hill Street Blues) and Joey (Friends) — the big screen has seen its share of sidekick disasters.

The reason is obvious, although it seems to elude studio execs. A successful ensemble character dynamic is as fragile as a soufflé: Each element is essential, creating a whole that is, to everybody’s delight, greater than the sum of its talented parts. You simply can’t remove one of those pieces, toss it into an under-written spin-off, and expect good results.

Steve Carell’s Evan Baxter was hilarious, supporting Jim Carrey, Morgan Freeman, Jennifer Aniston and Nora Dunn in Bruce Almighty. On his own, in the follow-up Evan Almighty ... not so much. Dwayne Johnson’s Scorpion King may have set up the action in The Mummy Returns, but he couldn’t manage the heavy lifting in his own film, a year later.

Jennifer Garner’s Elektra was the best part of the otherwise awful Daredevil — notwithstanding Colin Farrell’s maniacal villain — but no amount of fancy swordplay could have helped her starring vehicle, two years later. And let’s just try to pretend that Halle Berry’s toothless turn as Catwoman never happened.

(This phenomenon is far from recent. Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne’s Charters and Caldicott, the cricket-loving supporting players in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 classic, The Lady Vanishes, wound up in their own feature three years later. Nobody remembers Crook’s Tour today ... which is probably just as well.)

Why, then, have the Minions broken the curse?

It always comes down to the same basic element: the script. In this case, Brian Lynch — who had a hand in 2011’s droll Puss in Boots (another rare spin-off success) — has delivered a story that’s both clever and witty, granting these well-intentioned but disaster-prone subordinates both an origin story and their first chaotic adventure within the ranks of would-be super-villains.

Lynch doesn’t miss a trick. The results are cute, hilarious and wisely episodic: mini-escapades shrewdly stitched together in a manner that feels like a long single storyline. Co-directors Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda keep things moving at a lively clip, with editor Claire Dodgson also ensuring that this 91-minute film doesn’t overstay its welcome.

Gravity: Grim survival drama

Gravity (2013) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rating: PG-13, for dramatic intensity, disturbing images and fleeting profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.4.13

On Jan. 11, 2007, the Chinese military destroyed one of its orbiting satellites with a ground-based missile. Although China insisted that this was the best way to “retire” the aging satellite, visions of a surface-to-space missile race naturally alarmed more than a few nations around the world.

When things go wrong in space, they go very wrong, as Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra
Bullock) quickly discovers. Situations that would be bad enough on the ground, with
gravity operating in one's favor, quickly turn catastrophic in an environment where a
small space suit puncture likely would mean instantaneous death.

Saber-rattling aside, the much more serious issue was the orbiting “debris cloud” of up to 300,000 bits of satellite that resulted, which still could pose serious danger to other satellites or spacecraft en route to the moon and beyond. (NASA, worried about this since 1978, has dubbed the frightening possibility of cascading collisions the Kessler Syndrome.) For this very reason, the U.S. and the Soviet Union halted such anti-satellite experiments in the 1980s.

Clearly, filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón smelled an opportunity. The result, which he directed and co-wrote with his son, Jonás, is Gravity: one of the very few feasible space-based dramas ever released via conventional channels. (I say this to distinguish Cuarón’s film from numerous sci-fi and fantasy entries, or jes’-plain-silly action epics such as Armageddon and Space Cowboys.)

Gravity is both a suspenseful nail-biter and an impressive visual achievement: a studio production that comes close to the on-screen authenticity of an IMAX space documentary. The special effects are stunning, from the gorgeously depicted EVA mission that opens the story, to the weightless activity that takes place within a space station.

When Sandra Bullock “swims” her way from one end of the station to another, passing all sorts of floating debris along the way — not to mention little globules of liquid, or zero-G electrical sparks — everything looks absolutely real. We can’t help a “how the heck did they do that?” sense of wonder, despite our frequent ho-hum reaction to what CGI effects have wrought these days.

Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and visual effects supervisor Tim Webber — and the latter’s company, Framestore — have done stunning work. Indeed, their efforts are almost too good; at times it’s hard to focus on the story, since we’re so frequently dazzled by the on-screen visuals.

But only at times. Cuarón has orchestrated a taut survival drama that masterfully exploits claustrophobic terrors, not to mention related fears of drowning, suffocating or simply being hurled, alone, into the depths of space, able to do nothing but count down the seconds before the oxygen runs out.

The Blind Side: Touchdown!

The Blind Side (2009) • View trailer for The Blind Side
Four stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for one brief scene involving drugs, violence and sexual references
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.19.09
Buy DVD: The Blind Side • Buy Blu-Ray: The Blind Side [Blu-ray]

Some true stories are so wonderful, they simply beg to be made into films.

The saga of All-American football star Michael Oher is just such a story.

And the fact that The Blind Side represents the second half of the one-two punch re-igniting Sandra Bullock's career — following this summer's The Proposal — is the icing on the cake.

Young S.J. (Jae Head) takes it upon himself to crack the whip as personal
trainer and coach for his "big brother," Michael (Quinton Aaron); the result is
but one of many wonderfully uplifting scenes in this film.

Bullock must've gotten a better agent, or perhaps improved her own industry savvy. After a string of ill-conceived comedies and laughably overwrought melodramas — encompassing junk such as 28 Days, Miss Congeniality 2, The Lake House and Premonition — Bullock's career seemed on a slow swirl into the toilet.

Frankly, I couldn't understand why she kept getting hired.

But she has rebounded with pizazz, and then some. Her comic timing was perfect in The Proposal, and her work in The Blind Side stands with the finest of her career. Her performance as the aristocratic Leigh Anne Tuohy, who finds her soft spot after sheltering a homeless teen, is an engaging blend of tart one-liners, feisty compassion, grim determination and quite persuasive vulnerability.

Bullock makes Leigh Anne the original unstoppable force: a mama bear who'd do anything to protect her cubs ... even if one of them outsizes her by ridiculous extremes.

And Bullock is just one of this film's well-crafted elements. Director/scripter John Lee Hancock knows his way around an underdog sports saga, having similarly charmed us with 2002's The Rookie, and its uplifting tale of miracle pitcher Jim Morris. Hancock blends just the right amounts of poignance, suspense and gentle humor; The Blind Side — adapted from Michael Lewis' book — has plenty of chuckles, but never at the expense of its characters. We feel for them and laugh with them, never at them.

The story begins as the massive Michael — invariably dubbed "Big Mike" — is accepted, with considerable reluctance, into the high-tone (and very white) Wingate Christian School in Memphis, Tenn. The teenager is championed by coach Burt Cotton (Ray McKinnon, in a small but nicely modulated part), who sees potential gridiron glory. The trouble, alas, is that Michael's grades — barely north of rock-bottom zero — prohibit any sports activities.

And so the unusually quiet boy sits in class after class, not even trying to participate, while most of Wingate's teachers wonder why they're putting up with him.

The situation is even worse as Michael leaves school each day. Having grown up virtually abandoned in the poverty-stricken Memphis projects — cruelly called Hurt Village — the boy has no real home. But his peaceful, oddly regal nature is sensed by 10-year-old S.J. Tuohy (Jae Head, marvelously engaging and cute as a button), who makes an effort to befriend his much larger school mate.

The Proposal: Marry, marry, quite contrary

The Proposal (2009) • View trailer for The Proposal
3.5 stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for nudity, sexual candor and profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.19.09
Buy DVD: The Proposal • Buy Blu-Ray: The Proposal [Blu-ray]


Well, color me surprised.

After a career that has been spotty at best — and more recently threatened to crater completely, in the wake of misfires such as Premonition and Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Dangerous — my expectations for Sandra Bullock's newest venture in the romantic comedy genre were, shall we say, minimal.

Fully aware that his much-loathed boss' sham marriage scheme has shifted the
balance of power from its norm in their office environment, the under-
appreciated and oft-abused Andrew (Ryan Reynolds) agrees to participate only
if Margaret (Sandra Bullock) dazzles him with a heartfelt proposal ... delivered
on her knees, of course.

Bullock's bad films can be blamed on a lack of directorial control; much like Will Ferrell, the actress often tries too hard with pathetic material, and winds up looking desperate. Judging by its preview, The Proposal looked like more of the same.

Well, for once the preview undersold the film in question. Thanks to Peter Chiarelli's sharp and witty script, and the firm control of director Anne Fletcher (27 Dresses), The Proposal emerges as a deliciously entertaining battle of the sexes. Bullock hasn't been this good in years, and co-star Ryan Reynolds gets ample opportunity to display his deft comic timing. Indeed, he almost steals the film.

The set-up echoes classic 1930s screwball comedies, particularly those that involved bickering couples who suddenly discovered that they weren't actually married, or became estranged for some silly reason, and then spent the rest of the film arguing before deciding to tie the knot for real.

Tart-tongued, high-powered New York book editor Margaret Tate (Bullock) has a well-honed reputation as a soulless control freak whose every move is clocked by employees who scramble to look busier whenever she walks by. Margaret's impressively competent but long-suffering assistant, Andrew Paxton (Reynolds), has put up with horrid hours and weekend sessions for three years, in the hopes of one day being promoted to editor himself.

Chances of that day ever arriving seem awfully remote, until Margaret's failure to address what she perceives as an inconsequential detail — her U.S. citizenship — finally catches up with her. Suddenly threatened with deportation to her native Canada, which of course would mean losing her job, Margaret concocts an unlikely "solution" by fabricating a relationship with Andrew: a supposedly clandestine affair that she'll now be happy to consummate with a public marriage.

Andrew, surprised to say the least, reluctantly goes along with the scheme when Margaret dangles the promise of that long-desired editorship.