Espionage thrillers have gone through some weird metamorphoses over the years. What started as cold black and white post-war pictures of malaise turned into stylized widescreen glob-trotting romps. But ever since Paul Greengrass’ Bourne Identity sequels, these movies have been about terrorism and government cover-ups, set in third world countries and filmed with shaky handheld cameras and blown out colour schemes. Safe House falls firmly into this camp, loaded with nods to dirty dealings and water boarding. It’s a fairly entertaining movie, just one that definitely feels like it’s coming out a few years too late. The Bourne sequels grabbed onto current events and scandals and spun them into blockbuster action flicks. Five years later, it feels a bit like dipping back into a well. Decent or not, we’ve seen all this stuff before and it’s not quite as exciting anymore.

Ryan Reynolds plays Matt Weston, an unproven CIA agent whittling away his time in a dead end assignment monitoring a US safe house in Cape Town, South Africa. He spends most of his time counting down the hours on the clock until he can hang out with his attractive French girlfriend. Then one day, it all goes to hell as tends to happen in these sorts of movies. A legendary ex-CIA agent Tobin Frost shows up in shackles, played by Denzel Washington in scenery-chewing mode. Frost used to be a top agent, but became disgusted by the practices of the organization and went rogue, determined to uncover their corruption. He’s managed to get ahold of a microchip detailing all of the dirty dealings of American and British special agents on the take and that lands him in the safe house. Within minutes a team of apparent terrorists show up to try and kill Frost, so Matt cuffs him and takes him on the run. The only problem is that now the inexperienced agent doesn’t know if he can trust his superiors with this sensitive information and his supposed enemy starts talking much more sense than the CIA.

It’s all pretty simple espionage stuff filled with double agents, dirty secrets, sudden bursts of violence, and an underlying sense of post 9/11 government skepticism. Swedish director Daniel Espinosa (Snabba Cash) tries to out shaky-cam Greengrass at his own game, staging elaborate shootouts, car chases, and fistfights with that special brand of hard-to-see verite styled intimacy. In theory, that should lead to an action packed thriller with a brain, and I suppose in a certain sense that’s the case. The problem is that these flicks are quickly becoming generic. Seeing a movie star get waterboarded in a blockbuster doesn’t feel subversive anymore. It’s almost as familiar as an elaborate Bond villain deathtrap. The filmmakers get points for effort, but are a few years too late to qualify for originality or relevancy.

The performances are definitely strong across the board. Reynolds is a good actor and does the struggling hero thing well, even if it’s still hard to distance him from his comedic persona. Washington knows how to play a bad guy with a conscience and is almost incapable of delivering a bad performance. On the supporting front, Robert Patrick gets to play government tough guy for the first time in years, while Vera Farmiga, Sam Shepard, and Brendan Gleeson (sporting a distracting American accent) play top CIA officers in a control room who take turns acting suspiciously like the film’s secret villain. The actors all do what they were hired to do (except for Nora Arnezeder’s painfully generic girlfriend who is mercifully only in a few scenes), and David Guggenheim’s script offers a nice balance of paranoid suspense and bone crunching action.

As an entertainment machine, the movie’s ok. It just never transcends into something special or even memorable. Everything the filmmakers do well has just been done before and better.. This is cookie cutter studio genre filmmaking that takes a successful formula and repackages it with new faces. I guess if you haven’t seen a politically charged action movie from the last 10 years, it will seem exciting. Otherwise, Safe House is best suited to watch hungover on cable to a rousing response of “Oh, that was better than I thought it would be.”

When considering whether or not you want to watch Journey 2, the only question you have to ask yourself is: “Do I desperately need to see The Rock play a ukulele and bounce berries off his pecs in 3D?” As far as I can tell, those two scenes are the only reason for the film’s existence. The rest is a hodgepodge of half-baked sci-fi ideas, cartoony CGI spectacle and sickly sweet family sentiment that should have even the most forgiving children on a sugar-high rolling their eyes in disbelief. The whole thing smacks of desperation with the filmmakers struggling to stretch a forgettable blockbuster into a franchise and a cast of recognizable actors barely trying to conceal the fact that they signed up for a well-paid tropical vacation that just happened to involve a film shoot. It feels more like a souped-up direct-to-DVD sequel than a marquee studio release.

Now, Journey to the Center of the Earth was never a great movie, but at least it delivered some breezy entertainment. With the new-fangled 3D still in it’s infancy when that flick came out, it played more like a 90-minute theme park attraction than a movie, showing off the fancy pop-out-of-the-screen technology with an seemingly endless series of set pieces that never got bogged down with concerns like telling a story or crafting memorable characters. It wasn’t great, but it was a good showcase for 3D when it was still a novelty and that’s all the movie had to be. But it’s sequel time now, and with audiences already tiring of 3D, that isn’t enough to carry a movie anymore. Nope, 3D flicks have to work on their own merits now and sadly the folks in charge somehow dreamed up an even less compelling story this time.

The movie opens John Hutcherson’s teen protagonist Sean from the last movie escaping from cops on a dirt bike clutching a stolen broadcast that he hopes is from his grandfather. You see, Sean is a Vernian, a special breed of people convinced that everything Jules Verne wrote about was fact. Given his last adventure, he has good reason to feel that way and is convinced his grandfather is stuck on Verne’s Mysterious Island. Thankfully, he’s got a new stepfather played by The Rock whose navy training gives him the necessary skills to decode the message and kick some mythical creature ass. They head off to the coordinates they were sent and meet up with Luis Guzman and teen love interest Vanessa Hudgens as the father/daughter team who takes them there via a rickety helicopter. Shockingly, they end up trapped on the island with Sean’s grandpappy Michael Caine as their guide. Cue a series of CGI set pieces involving volcanoes of gold, riding giant bees, learning lessons about connecting with parents, and for some reason finding the Nautilus from 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.

Right off the bat, the 3D in this movie is fairly lackluster. While Journey 1 featured scenes with characters spitting into the camera every few minutes to take advantage of the new dimension, in Journey 2 it almost feels like an afterthought. Sure there are plenty of perfunctory action scenes, but they never really take advantage of 3D, which kind of seemed like the whole point of this franchise. The giant lizards and tiny elephants that populate the island are kind of fun, but honestly the trailer gives away every expensive sequence, so you can’t even count of getting some sort of minor joy or surprise there.

The cast is good in theory, they just have nothing to work with. The Rock knows how to charm and beat things up, but he’s grasping at straws with a boring, caring stepfather character. He does get to play the ukulele though, which is weird as hell to see, but it might be best to wait until the inevitable and numerous YouTube videos that will arise from the scene to catch it. Luis Guzman flails around and pulls pratfalls like a silent movie clown, while Hutcherson and Hudgens are stuck with drab pretty teen archetypes with little to no personality. Then there’s Michael Caine. You might be asking yourself, “What the shit is Michael Caine doing in Journey 2?” Well, he claims it’s for his grandkids, but this movie was shot in Hawaii and I’m sure that Caine had a nice relaxing time because he certainly wasn’t burdened with much acting to worry about.

So, as you probably worked out by now, Journey 2: The Mysterious Island is a bad movie. There’s really nothing in here you haven’t seen done better before and even Dwayne Johnson has a healthy list of movies on his resume that are better than this (and yes, that includes The Tooth Fairy). To be fair, this movie is for children and I suppose that if you’re taking along a youngster who hasn’t seen many adventure movies or isn’t exhausted with 3D, the little tike could have a good time. The kid would probably have a better time with 80s family cheese like The Goonies, but that wouldn’t get him out of the house, so I can sympathize. Just bring along a pillow for yourself. You’re going to need it.

It’s simultaneously mind-boggling and easy to see why director Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin was snubbed and shut out of so many potential accolades this awards season. Despite having a stellar lead performance from actress Tilda Swinton as a mother at the end of her wits, Ramsay’s film might be looked down upon as just another genre film with a high gloss. That’s sad, since it’s one of the best and most outright terrifying bits of familial horror from last year.

Swinton stars as Eva Khatchadourian, a broken down, gaunt looking mother of a monster. Her son Kevin (Ezra Miller) has been imprisoned and awaits trial for a heinous crime that he feels no remorse for. The film looks back at the events in Eva and Kevin’s lives that lead to the present, where Eva at times seems completely put off by the fact that her son ruined her life long dreams of travelling the world. Then again, Kevin (also played by Jasper Newell as a younger child) seems to be almost pure evil; cold, calculating, manipulative and uncaring. It doesn’t help that Kevin’s father (John C. Reilly) acts completely oblivious to anything potentially being wrong, and prefers to act more like a best friend to Kevin than an actual father.

Cinematic provocateur extraordinaire Ramsay returns to feature filmmaking after nearly a full decade away, but she hasn’t lost a single step. Every shot and camera angle in Kevin is immaculate and expertly crafted with a fine attention to detail and a sometimes overzealous eye for symbolic imagery. The film’s almost over-the-top eye for art direction, speaks to Ramsay’s firm grasp on the material in Lionel Shriver’s best selling novel. By not following her admittedly somewhat overrated source material to the letter, Ramsay frees herself to tell a chilling story with real emotional weight to it.

Swinton gives another strong performance in an already stacked career as Eva. A lot can be said about actors forgoing make-up and losing weight for a more “natural” appearance, but even in flashback sequences Swinton uses her looks and mannerisms to show just how taxed Eva feels before she realizes her son is crazy and he hates her. In the sequences staged in the present, she plays Eva as a shell of her former self and someone still so deeply shocked by what her son did that she’s had no time at all for any sort of personal introspection. Eva is the same person in the present as she was in the past, but now she simply acts out of instinct to fend off becoming catatonic.

Miller and Newell also do great jobs of playing a purely evil little shit devoid of feeling. Their performances do belong up there with similar performances in The Bad Seed and The Omen films. John C. Reilly also turns in a pitch perfect performance because there are few people more adept at conveying someone as oblivious as Eva’s husband. It’s a great case of hiring the perfect person for the job.

While the film probably aspires to be a higher form of art than it really is, Kevin stands out as a shining example of a horror sub-genre that sometimes manages to rub people the wrong way. People will gladly read about atrocities committed by children and teenagers, but few audiences ever seem to want to watch how these things ultimately play out. Kudos to Ramsay for not flinching when it comes to the uncomfortable nature of her pulpy material. It feels like a film that couldn’t have been made by anyone else.

Making an independent movie on a modest budget with some big name actors working well below their pay scale would be hard for anyone. One would think that being related to a huge name in filmmaking like Michael Mann would help out quite a bit, but Ami Canaan Mann had to make her second feature film (and first in the director’s chair since 2001) with the same struggles, production woes, and butterflies as everyone else.

For her latest film Texas Killing Fields (now available in Canada as a DVD/Blu-ray combo pack), Mann, screenwriter Don Ferrarone, and an all star cast including Sam Worthington, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Jessica Chastain, and Chloe Grace Moretz tell the story of a pair of cops in Texas City, Texas investigating a series of murders all leading to a notorious plot of land where all locals fear to tread.

Mann talked to Dork Shelf recently about the challenges of making a true crime thriller based on a story that’s still evolving, getting together a cast of heavy hitters, and what it’s like working with family.

The film is based on a real life series of cases. How did you come across the story and how did the script come to you?

Yeah, it’s a series of over fifty cases. Some of them were solved, some of them were not, some of them the bodies haven’t even been identified. These are cases that have happened since 1969 in the same area and the last crime was the murder of two prostitutes in 2006 or 2007.

How did you come to focus on the one particular time period in the case instead of trying to include everything going back to the beginning?

Yeah, I think that was a really smart decision made by Don (Ferrarone) to tell the story. This is something he wrote ten or eleven years ago, and unless you’re doing a really in-depth documentary of everything that’s happened, there’s no real way to do any of these stories true justice. The solution was to pick and choose elements from certain cases and then focus on giving an impression of the phenomena of crime that’s occurred over the past 40 years. That was a really smart way to approach. There are certain parts of certain crime scenes where it’s an amalgamation of the real life events.

You worked on this film with a couple of family members. Your father produced and your sister Aran worked even more closely with you as a production designer.

My sister is brilliant. She did such an incredible job because all our locations were practical. We were never on a stage, and many of them were completely gutted out houses that had barely any floors, animals living in the ceiling, and insulation coming down, and she built the kitchens, the bathrooms, the living room, and made every little tchotchke that you see in the house. She’s just got an incredible eye for detail and an amazing ability to do research and then pull it all together with very little money and very little time because it was very much an independent film. She’s terrific.
You’ve assembled quite the cast for the film and it seems like you caught everyone at just the right time in their careers. How did the cast come together?

I feel very lucky to have this cast. It’s just full of incredible, incredible talents. You know Don had spent quite a bit of time on the script and when we were happy with what we had, we sent it out, and the first person to read it was Sam (Worthington). So I sat down and met with him two weeks after Avatar had come out, so he was literally in what was about to become the highest grossing film in the history of cinema and he agreed to do this tiny little movie with a completely unknown director, for which I will be forever grateful.

Everyone else came through really interesting ways. Chloe Moretz auditioned for me and I knew immediately within fifteen seconds that she was the one. Jeffrey Dean Morgan was someone I wasn’t really familiar with his work, but just from meeting him he had this warmth and gravitas that I thought was a perfect ancillary component to Sam who has kind of this brusqueness. Jessica (Chastain) had done a lot of work, but none of her movies had come out yet. The only film of hers that I had of her’s to watch was this little film called Jolene and I thought she was perfect, so we talked on the phone and she agreed to do the film, but I had no idea. Tree of Life hadn’t even happened yet. All of them, I got very lucky to get them.

This is actually quite a different role for Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and he does a really excellent job in the film.

Yeah, I mean, he’s got a lot of charm, and a lot of his other work shows that, but what I like about what he did here is that he lets himself be quiet, and strong, and angry. For me I think his character was incredibly powerful, but without a lot of bravado. He did a great job letting that come across.

Did you have Sam or Jeffrey do anything in particular to prepare for their roles in the film?

(laughs) Oh my God, we did so much it would be, like, hours to talk about it all. The brief recap is that I took them to the LA morgue and had them spend some time with LA homicide detectives, particularly retired sheriffs and people who specialized in paedophilia. We did go to actual crime scenes, and we got lucky one day when two bodies were discovered in an SUV. I think it was in either City of Commerce or in LA, and we got to watch them work the crime scene, which was fascinating and incredibly helpful. Then Sam got to spend some time in Texas City, and eventually we all did, and we got to spend some time with the two real detectives we were basing the film around and we even talked to some Texas City ex-cons. Then we spent some time in Louisiana, because crime in the South and crime in Los Angeles are totally different, as are the detectives. It’s about getting the real subtle differences in these cultural techniques. I think we went to three different facilities to talk to different wardens, cops, and inmates. We did a lot.

Even Chloe, James (Herbert), Sheryl (Lee), and I all went to a safe house for people that used to cook meth. Not that it’s ever really mentioned in the film, but that was sort of their back story and to get to know it and how it pertains to the South and Louisiana because that’s a specific kind of animal there. We did a lot of research and I was really happy to have the kind of cast and crew that was willing to do this kind of research that doesn’t exactly show up on the screen, but it does give a sense of accuracy of tone. We really just wanted to pay respect to the reality of the world we were trying to create. We were very aware that we were telling a story of real people that had suffered through real tragedy. We just wanted to respect that as much as we could.

I have to bring this up, since you directed my favourite episode of one of my favourite television shows of the past twenty years, Friday Night Lights. (She directed season four’s tenth episode titled “I Can’t.”) What are the differences for you between working on television and working on film, particularly since with this one you find yourself telling a very different story taking place in Texas?

Thanks for the compliment, by the way. It was great doing that episode and I felt lucky I got that story. You know, it’s strange, for some reason on television I tend to have shorter time frames. On that episode, we had to shoot it in five days, which is a real testament to that whole Friday Night Lights crew that I never once felt pressed for time. As you know, there’s some really big scenes in that episode and we got them all. That was just an amazing crew.

In terms of production, I feel lucky that I had that experience because that was exactly the kind of pace we had to have on Texas Killing Fields. On this film, the mood is hopefully something that sneaks up on you. It sort of starts slow and hopefully in the first third you get caught into the flow of the film, but when you break it all down and go to shoot it, there wasn’t a day where we didn’t have a car chase, or someone getting stabbed in the chest or being set on fire, or a small child being assaulted, and there are all these production logistics that made for some really tight days. And again, it’s a testament to that crew that we were able to bring it all in on budget. But the pacing in terms of shooting for television and doing this film was really similar. It was an easy transition.

You have worked with your father quite closely on some of his productions in the past. Was there every anything that you took away from him or took to heart when you started making films of your own?

You know, weirdly enough, I think the biggest advice I ever got from him was just actually coming through just being so close to him and just watching him work. It was less what he said and more watching what he did. You know, it’s funny. There’s some professions where you see other people do your job, but with directing and writing you rarely get such an opportunity to see other people do it when you’re just starting out. I’ve been lucky. I got to work with Robert Redford, who’s a very different kind of director, on A River Runs Through It when I was in college, and then I got to work a year and a half on Heat, and I got to watch Michael make that movie from the beginning and all the way to the end and through the release. I feel really fortunate where I had those experience to be close enough to observe their methodology and their techniques and their attitudes towards storytelling and their persistence of vision. That was really the best learning experience I could ever have.

The 2008 comedy/action movie Journey to the Center of the Earth was one of the key titles that introduced modern 3D to audiences that was thankfully red/blue headache free. The adaptation of Jules Verne’s classic adventure story was a hit, proving that Brendan Fraser could mug for the camera in a whole new dimension. Now that film has become a franchise with Journey 2: The Mysterious Island. Another Verne novel (conveniently titled The Mysterious Island) served as the inspiration this time out with Josh Hutcherson’s precocious, adventurous teen returning for another reality-bending adventure, this time joined by the likes of Michael Caine, Luis Guzman, Vanessa Hudgens, and of course Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

It’s another slice of over-the-top 3D action spectacle very much in keeping with the first film, only this time with a new director. Gander, Newfoundland native Brad Peyton got the call to helm the blockbuster sequel after a string of family hits on TV and his previous 3-D and effects based work on Cats & Dogs 2: The Revenge Of Kitty Galore. Dork Shelf recently got a chance to chat with the Canadian family filmmaker, delving into subjects like the challenges of shooting underwater, adapting Jules Verne, being in awe of Michael Caine, and getting The Rock to play the ukulele.

You’re very experienced in directing films for children. Did Journey 2 fit into that category naturally or did you have to alter it at all?

It has the right sensibilities. My taste luckily isn’t about being gratuitous or anything, especially for this type of movie. Even when I did really dark stuff, it was the heart behind the darkness that was interesting to me; the juxtaposition between sensitivity and darkness. For me a movie like this is a rollercoaster ride. It’s fun. It’s an adventure film. Could it get scary for a little kid? Maybe, but then I’ll make you laugh five seconds later and that’s the balance. That juxtaposition is what’s interesting to me. And when you look at adventure film, it’s probably the most interesting aspect of them. Harrison Ford falls into a pit of snakes and then goes, “Why did it have to be snakes?” In real life, tension creates comedy. You know what I mean? A lot of times when people are in danger they crack jokes because they’re just so tense. So, I tried to…it sounds a little bit silly because it’s a big fun adventure film, but you try to make it a little bit human. You try to ground it. You try to have real emotions. And I said this to the producers early on, the more ‘popcorn’ the movie is, the harder we have to work to make it an emotional story and ground the characters. Otherwise its just spectacle and no one will care.

So, I guess the Indiana Jones movies were a major influence in that respect?

Yeah. To me, I loved Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, and I found those to be inspiring movies because I cared about Indiana Jones. After Indiana Jones gets punched 400 times, what do they do at the beginning of the third act? They shoot him. And that shows the audience he can get hurt. So what do I do? I break Josh’s ankle. And it’s funny because you go to the meeting and say, “I want him to break his ankle” and they say, “Well, how’s he going to finish the movie?” Exactly. That’s the question you want the audience to ask. So that kind of interplay is the interesting aspect of making a movie like this. That’s what allows you to try and make it a little more specific and less generic.

How did you approach entering this franchise that was already in swing?

I looked at the movie as an opportunity not just to do a sequel, but to try and reboot a franchise. So you look at Journey to the Center of the Earth and you go, “Ok what did it do well?” It had great 3D, it was fun, it had a great tone. But I want to make a movie that would inspire audiences in the same way I was inspired when I saw Indiana Jones. So that’s why I said, “Ok, let’s get off the sound stage and go to Hawaii so we can shoot there as long as possible.” You know, put the actors in the dirt, make it as real as possible. Give the island a character and also get a scope and scale that you just can’t get on a sound stage. So I had to do all those things like bring a great 3D experience, but I had to kind of make it my own as well. And then obviously we lucked out and got this amazing cast, so then you have this snowball effect where it’s like, ok now we have a real shot now of making a movie that’s going to pop out. It’s weird, but for me since the 80s they haven’t really made these fun adventure films as much. The Pirates of the Caribbean movies are probably the closest thing. Pirates is four times the size of our movie though. Their budget is just massive, massive, massive. But, I’m pretty ambitious and wanted to see if we could make a movie like this that harkens back to a classic adventure film with the money we had.

Did you have to teach The Rock how to play the ukulele or did he come to the set with that skill?

The Rock is not going to be taught anything. Here’s the thing with Dwayne. You meet Dwayne and you realize right away that he’s Superman. He’s the nicest guy in the world, but if you punch Superman he’s going to get angry. He’s also 6 foot 5, 270 pounds. If you think about the history of wrestling arena, how few guys have gone from being at the top of that game and successfully become legitimate movie stars? Not many and you wonder, what are the attributes it takes to do that? Dwayne is incredibly passionate, incredibly driven, when he does something, he commits to doing it 100%.

When Dwayne came on the movie, he was like “Brad I want to pitch you this 3D idea.” In my head, I’m like “Is he going to say punch the camera?” And then he describes the pec pop of love. He’s sitting there waiting to see how I’d react and I’m like, “Oh my god that’s amazing!” I never thought he would say that in a million years and that’s the take away scene of the movie for a lot of people. You’ve just never seen that before. And Dwayne’s a big 3D fan so he’s like, “If I’m going to do a 3D movie, I’m going to do it Dwayne Johnson-style.” He brings himself into the movie that way.

And the ukulele scene, to get back to your question, is the same thing. It was Dwayne saying, “You know, I love playing guitar, I love ukulele, I wonder if we could do that?” I was already looking for a scene where we could bond the characters and so I thought, “This is great.” And what’s interesting about that scene is that it’s almost the perfect analogy for this type of family film or adventure film. You get this totally disarming scene playing into the charisma of a movie star where it’s this little tiny guitar and a really big guy. But what the scene is really about is Dwayne and Michael and Josh revealing the fragileness of their characters and getting on the same page. The last shot of the scene is the push in on Michael Caine where he realizes that he hasn’t been there for Josh, but Dwaye has, the same guy who he’s been criticizing for the whole movie. That’s the theme of the movie and that scene completely makes you absorb that without being heavy handed at all. And that’s the joy of doing an adventure film. You can say these things and do these things without people even realizing. It’s meant to be subtle. It doesn’t need to be overdone. By the way that shot where Michael Caine acted that made me feel like a giddy five year old. It’s pure Michael Caine acting. I went up and was like, “Wow! Look what you just did!” and he was like “Oh, ha ha ha, I do that all the time.” I’m like, “Cool, I don’t.”

How much of the banter between the characters was improvised. Were they playing off each other at all?

Most of it was written. 90% of their stuff was written, though my process with the actors was to get them to Hawaii, get them to the hotel, and get through their scenes. I’d break down the script for each character and then do a morning with just Luis and Vanessa and their scenes. Then I would get some time with just Josh and Dwayne and just do their scenes. So I was looking at the movie just through those individual character’s story arcs and making sure they all played. A lot of the improvisation and the discovery was done in those sessions.

By the time we got to the set, thankfully we’d already had those discussions. We’d gone through the exploratory stage with the actors. And it also allowed for a certain comfort on the set. We’d walk through it and say, “We’ve done this scene.” You know there’s a sense of familiarity with the scenes already, so all we were doing was blocking it for the camera. Once you get it up on its feet, really emotionally up on its feet, then it’s just about tweaks. You know, “Maybe we should change this line, maybe we should break this line in half.” Those little moments you can only do when you’re there watching the
scene.

Was it nice to have a talented cast who you could depend on to play with the material like that?

For me, working with a cast like this ultimately comes down to collaboration. They’ve done it so many times and the only way that I can figure out how to excel as a director is to work with people who have done it more and are much better. So, I like to collaborate and I make rules. Like early on my rule with Luis Guzman was that we’d always do one take for fun. I’d do six or seven takes for me and then he’d get one for fun. And that immediately takes the tension out because he knows that no matter what, he has an opportunity coming where he can contribute an idea. That frees them up. And they know I respect them and value them and I’m not there to wag my finger and make them do what I want. I find that’s how you get the best out of people.

So Luis Guzman added a lot to his character?

Oh yeah. The thing about Luis is that he’s a real character actor. Whether it’s comedy or whether he’s playing a thug or whatever, Luis understands people. He understands comedy. Louis and I completely hit it off. We’re friends and when I go to New York, I hang out with him now. He’s a good dude. He’s a really good guy and he accesses people in an honest way. He really commits to his characters, no matter what you’re asking him to do whether it be the over-the-top comedic guy or the thug who never blinks. It was a great experience and I needed to use [his character] Gabato in two ways. He’s the comedic relief, so he’s in a way the broadest character in the movie. But I also needed him to really get scared, to really run when the monsters are chasing him. But I had to still make it real on some level and Luis is perfect for that because you can say to him, “You’re really scared here. I know you’re playing it funny, but let’s do one where you’re really scared.” And he’s like, “Ok, I can do that.” So he is able to make it both broad and funny and grounded in the same time.

The movie has a lot of intense action, was there anything particularly difficult to shoot?

Yeah, this is the type of movie where there isn’t a small day, like “Oh I can’t wait to shoot that little lizard chase. That’s going to be really easy.” Everything in it was pretty complex. The hardest stuff was probably the underwater photography. That’s really tough. The communication level is just ridiculous. We build a 700,000 gallon tank and we put it on a stage in North Carolina. It’s about 2.5 stories tall and there’s a deck on top of it. So I’m up there with a crane arm that we built with a case that goes under the water. Then I’ve got the top underwater camera operator in the world down there with a second camera. Then I’ve got 20 ex-Navy Seal scuba guys as a safety crew. Then I have the deck of the Nautilus that I built and had lowered in there. Then I’ve got decks of lights we had to try and figure out the best location for so that I don’t have to move them underwater. Then I’ve got the cast down there, submerged for a minute to two minutes at a time with no goggles and guys swimming up to give them oxygen so they can stay down there.

So with all that, I’m communicating through a stunt coordinator who’s communicating through a mic in the water to the cameraman. We had to develop a complex system to talk to the actors just to do one take. I’m so impatient, so it was a real pain to sit there and set it up and then to get the shots right. Plus we had to get the harpoon hit and the Vertigo shot. I wanted to get the first 3D Vertigo shot so I had to shoot it a certain way to get the green screen in certain way and ugh! You’re just like, “Holy crap, this is going to take forever!” But it’s funny because the movie was shot in 62 days and if you go to research how much time Michael Bay takes to shoot Transformers, you can triple that number.

How do you approach making a film of this scale over such a tight schedule?

Part of what I brought to the table as a director is efficiency. I’m ambitious but that’s a funny word because it’s normally only used for failure. How many times have they said, “Oh it’s ambitious” and they succeeded? So I looked at it like, “I am going to try and achieve a lot with the budget I have, with the time I have, and with the cast I have, because we need to be the younger brother to Pirates.” That’s the attitude you have to have when you go into a movie like this. You’ve got to maximize the opportunity. So whatever the challenges were, you have to be able to step up to the plate and have a plan that no one is eventually going say, “That was ambitious, but you had seven days and you couldn’t do it.” I’m not like that. I pre-visualize and I’m constantly looking at my iPad to try and find shots to cut. I try to figure out what I think will end up on the cutting room floor and then not shoot that. So when a producer says, “Oh we lost a day” I’m like, “No worries.” And they’re like “What do you mean, normally directors are panicking?” and I’m like “No, I saw this coming and I’ve already dumped a scene in my head.” And you know, that’s just one of the difficulties that comes with shooting a big movie.

With all of the technical demands, how much were you actually able to shoot on location?

Pretty well the whole thing. 70% of the movie was shot in Hawaii and 30% was shot in North Carolina. The only green screen sequence was with the bees.

Right, that would have been tough to do practically.

Yeah, it’s pretty tough to get gigantic bees in a studio or find them at all. But you know, we shot the actors on a stage and then we went out and shot the backgrounds ourselves in Hawaii with a little helicopter camera that actually ran into a tree. I still have that take on my computer. But anyways, it was very much Return Of The Jedi-style. I will say this though, trying to make a movie that has a reality to it when there’s nothing real on the screen is a tough challenge, and we’ve all seen movies where you just don’t buy it. One of the things that I had conversations with the physical effects team about was that everyone has seen that moment in a movie where the guy is riding on a motorcycle and the bike leans and then he leans afterwards. That happens and you’re like, “What the hell? That wasn’t real!” So I had them design the bucks that stood in for the bees so that in order to turn them, the actors had to do it themselves. So you see this reality. When Dwayne leans on the buck, he really has to lean. It was about finding a way to make even the most unreal situations in the movie seem real. So even when the bee is put in and all the backgrounds are there, all of the digital fanciness is added, there’s a certain level of humanity in some part of the acting and the action.

Why did you decide to re-imagine this particular Jules Verne classic?

Well, part of the Journey brand is Verne. So it’s not like I can ignore that. I kind of have to develop from that. This franchise promises two things, a really great 3D experience because the last one was the first modern live action 3D movie and then Jules Verne. And that’s what separates us from other blockbusters: understanding what Verne represents and looking at his work not as a retelling, but as a reference point. Hollywood already did an adaptation of The Mysterious Island. It’s from the 60s and it was a great movie with a great score from Bernard Herrmann. I respect that stuff, but I’m not trying to do that again. I’m trying to build on the mythology that he wrote, but under the pretense that it was real on some level and the story can grow from there. So you’re using it as an inspiration point. I feel like as long as I can be respectful to Journey to the Center of the Earth, the book, the original source material, and the movies that came before me, then I’m ok to venture off into my own version. You’ve got to respect it, but you’re not tied to it in any particular way.

So which was more difficult, this movie or wrangling those Cats And Dogs?

I’ll say that was. I’d much rather direct Dwayne Johnson in anything than a bunch of cats and dogs. That’s more difficult. A lot more.

Lady and the Tramp (1955, Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, & Hamilton Luske) – While Lady and the Tramp has languished somewhat as one of Walt Disney’s most slept on animated features, the stunning Blu-ray transfer of this simple, heart-warming classic reasserts the film as the game changer it truly was at the time. The first ever animated film to be presented in the CinemaScope aspect ratio (2:55, even more than the standard Scope ratio of 2:35) and more than 18 years in the making by the time of its release, this was the project Disney was overseeing at the same time he was watching Disneyland being built. The hard work shows through and Walt’s fingerprints are all over this one despite what must have been constant distraction and numerous long days.

The story of a young female dog of means befriending and falling for a street mutt that always stays one step ahead of the pound keeps things simple, but Lady and the Tramp actually comes across as one of Disney’s most adult features. Themes of animal and child endangerment and a potentially failing marriage are all out in the open for audiences to see, but it’s all tempered by a sweet story full of love, warmth, and most importantly a message of kindness and respect towards every living creature.

The picture quality on the Diamond Edition Blu-ray (which comes with DVD and Digital copies of the film) looks better than anything Disney has attempted with their catalogue titles thus far. The streets and backgrounds pop and the old school hand drawn animation doesn’t look cheap even when blown up onto a huge screen, a common problem with some older titles finding their way to Blu. The 7.1 sound mix doesn’t really add a heck of a lot and might be slight overkill, but it’s still sharp and crisp.

Much like with Disney’s recent release of Real Steel, Lady and the Tramp makes use of the Second Screen feature which allows users with a laptop or portable device to view conceptual drawings and 360 degree looks through the Disney archives while watching the film uninterrupted on their television, but the real treat to the Second Screen this time around is a branching feature that allows viewer to actually hear and see what the story meetings for the film were like. It’s a treat almost unprecedented for Disney completists and animation fans. Also included are all of the special features from the original DVD release, which include numerous featurettes, trailers, and assorted goodies. It’s a must have for fans of the film and definitely worth a look to the passing consumer.

Texas Killing Fields (2011, Ami Canaan Mann) – Coming direct to DVD in Canada following a limited release in US cinemas last fall, Mann (daughter of famed director Michael Mann, who produces here) delivers a heartily reliable crime procedural about a real life case involving an extremely inhospitable bit of land just outside of a small Texas town.

Former New York City detective Brian Heigh (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) has recently moved to Texas City, Texas with his family and finds himself partnered with hard-nosed local homicide detective Mike Souder (Sam Worthington). While in the middle of investigating a homicide and dealing with a young girl from a rough family that’s constantly wandering the streets at night (played by Chloe Grace Moretz), the partners receive a call from a detective in a neighbouring community (Jessica Chastain) about something that will eventually bring them all face to face with the same people, the same problems, and a notorious dumping ground for bodies where even the cops fear to tread.

While the film gets off to a fast and almost disorienting start that makes it hard to keep the relationships between the characters straight, it settles into a more conventional and even handed groove, with Mann deftly sublimating a lot of genre clichés in the process. The NYC cop is the religious one, while the local is the devout atheist, and the female cop is smarter and stronger than both of the males in many respects. The cast all rises to the material with Worthington and Moretz delivering capable and engaging performances. Chastain is still as great as ever, and she even gets to throttle as many people here as she did in The Debt. The real standout here, however, is Morgan who gives the best performance of his career as a man becoming not so much corrupted by the case, but just increasingly burnt out and aggravated. The camera loves Morgan here and it’s almost impossible to take one’s eyes off him for any reason while he’s on screen.

Not a lot to talk about on the technical side of this one. No special features aside from an interesting director’s commentary, and the picture and sound quality are as good as one would expect from someone who started learning filmmaking at the hands of Michael Mann.

Anonymous (2011, Roland Emmerich) – The idea that famed disaster film auteur Roland Emmerich would make a competent film about the controversy behind the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays isn’t as crazy as it sounds. Sure, it isn’t the most historically accurate thing in the world and he still manages to work explosions into his film, but regardless of the name truly behind the world’s most famous plays, Shakespeare was a populist in an oddly similar way to how Emmerich is perceived today.

Pulling one story from a myriad of possible conspiracy theories surrounding the true identity of the Bard from Stratford, Emmerich and writer John Orloff settle upon telling the tale of Edward DeVere (Rhys Ifan), who because of his nobility as the Earl of Oxford and a past sexual relationship with Queen Victoria (Joley Richardson as a younger woman and Vanessa Redgrave in old age) found himself unable to stage and take credit for his written works. Instead DeVere delegated to perceived firebrand and local enfant terrible Ben Johnson (Sebastien Armesto), who then put the name of a drunken, borderline illiterate actor (Rafe Spall, having a ball as the “real” Shakespeare) to the works to avoid jail time of his own.

Emmerich and Orloff craft a unique and compulsively watchable tale of intrigue and deception, but it’s hard not to shake how hokey it all comes across at times. Emmerich doesn’t do subtle well (then again, neither did Shakespeare), but no matter what side of the scholarly debate one comes down on, they can all agree that it’s a bit much by today’s standards. Orloff’s script has the melodramatic drive that would’ve made this a smash hit on the big screen fifty years ago, but I actually mean that as a compliment. It’s a very “old timey” sort of over the top to the point where it almost feels classical by default.

There aren’t a lot of extras on the stand alone Blu-ray, but there are a few deleted and extended scenes and some nifty featurettes about the film’s casting and visual effects. The commentary track from Emmerich and Orloff is mostly self-congratulatory back slapping, but at times Orloff is able to get the usually reticent and distracted Emmerich to give a few nice tidbits of information. A featurette featuring the cast and crew chiming in on their thoughts regarding Shakespeare holds more useful insight than the commentary does. The disc also has a glorious transfer that really brings out the gorgeous production design and natural lighting of the film, with even the dirt and grime coming across crystal clear.

A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas (2011, Todd Strauss-Schulson) – One would think that it shouldn’t be very hard to make a good looking Blu-ray out of a film that was shot digitally and was only in theatres three months ago, but apparently not. Forgoing the usual “wait until next year to put a Christmas movie on video” philosophy, the latest adventures of cinemas new favourite stoners arrives in a cheap, dispiriting package in the middle of February. It’s a severe shame because the movie itself is quite good and far better than the treatment it’s being given here.

After six years apart and after finding new best friends, Harold (John Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn) are brought together again at Christmas by a package addressed to Harold mistakenly delivered to his former roommate. The present, a giant joint, ends up accidentally burning down the prized Christmas tree of Harold’s overbearing and threatening future father-in-law (Danny Trejo), leading the duo to team up on an all night run through New York City to find an exact replacement before Harold’s future family comes back from midnight mass. In their travels they run afoul of a Ukranian mob boss (Elias Koteas), get drugged by some teenagers, get a baby hooked on cocaine, turn into claymation characters, inherit a creepy waffle making robot from their old, cracked out friend Neil Patrick Harris, and they shoot Santa out of the sky.

It should do without saying that the film doesn’t play as well at home to begin with unless you have a 3-D television and grab the 3-D Blu-ray, since a lot of the gags rely quite heavily on the technology. Subplots involving Harold and Kumar’s new best friends (Amir Blumenfeld and Thomas Lennon) aren’t very funny in comparison to what the stars normally do on their own, but the best parts of the film involving the Wafflebot, NPH, and the generally sweet and believable interactions between Harold and Kumar remain intact. It doesn’t match the original film, but it’s still a considerable improvement over the duo’s second outing.

However, despite how decent the film remains, this package doesn’t do the film the slightest bit of justice. The sound is just fine, but the digital transfer is inexplicably abominable. Occasionally the film will seem slightly pixelated or fuzzy for no good reason even in scenes that didn’t utilize the 3D gimmick. It’s a Blu-ray that looks almost like bootleg quality, and the bigger the screen the more noticeable and maddening the flaws will seem. As for the extras, the “Extra Dope Edition” Blu-ray houses an extended cut of the movie running seven minutes longer that the theatrical cut, but it’s all just added dialog and extensions to the claymation sequence and a bit more with NPH in heaven pissing off Jesus after seemingly dying in the previous film. The added scenes are noticeable even to those who haven’t seen the film since there’s a noticeable difference in audio quality between them and the rest of the film. The special features aren’t all that special. There’s three go-nowhere deleted scenes, a bunch of fake, unfunny rants from Thomas Lennon, and a whole three minutes devoted to talking about the claymation sequence that says nothing more than “Whoa guys, we made a claymation sequence!”. This one probably should’ve waiting until the holidays to be released and maybe it will get cleaned up before then, but in this condition there’s nothing particularly jolly about it.

Also out this week: Look guys, I know Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part I gets released this week. I know that’s the star attraction, but the truth is that I couldn’t procure a review copy of the film before the column had to go up. If you guys really want me to do Twilight, leave a comment and I’ll consider throwing it in for next week if I can get a copy.

Robert Bresson, one of the most important names in classic French cinema, is often overshadowed by the New Wave filmmakers who followed in his footsteps. His filmography is often unjustly relegated to the confines of film studies classes and the shelves of Criterion DVD collectors. The TIFF Bell Lightbox hopes to bring new eyes to Bresson’s work by featuring all thirteen of his films in a retrospective called The Poetry of Precision: The Films of Robert Bresson.

‘Meticulous and deliberate’ best describes Bresson’s films. His shots are steady and carefully selected. The films themselves are often driven more by static images and editing than sensational plot or performances. In fact, Bresson had a tendency to use non-actors, keeping them nearly expressionless in some cases, allowing the sequence of images to get the heft and emotions of the story across.

Bresson’s career spanned forty years, from 1943 until 1983, and in that time he directed only thirteen features. Hardly a prolific output, but the thoughtful craft of his films suggests he took his time to develop ideas and stories that would best suit his style. There’s a stark quality to his films; a sense of untarnished reality. His mode is stylized, but more in perspective and situational mood than visual expressiveness. Close-ups are a big part of Bresson’s visual vocabulary, and the number of shots of hands in his films is probably unmatched by any other filmmaker. His shots often linger on characters or objects, directing the focus deliberately while allowing the audience to soak in the meanings and emotions of each situation.

Les anges du péché, Bresson’s first feature, is the story of a nun who works to rehabilitate female convicts. One woman is unwilling to accept help because she claims to be innocent of her charges. The story leads down a dark path involving revenge and murder, and while the film is perhaps Bresson’s most conventional in many ways, this actually makes it a great place to start in order to ease into his later work. The film uses professional actors, a rarity for Bresson, who would limit that after his next film, but this helps to draw in the uninitiated. Though the acting may be more normal and expressive, the plot follows a more classic structure. The major themes that would pop up in his later films are all here. The Catholic religion and the guilt associated with it; human suffering and misery at the hands of others; tragic, violent acts; attempts at redemption and salvation. The simple and direct style of filmmaking is also present, though not quite as bold as would be seen in future Bresson films.

1951’s Diary of a Country Priest is the film that would then cement Bresson’s core style. This story of a small parish priest, too young for his work and afflicted with illness, fits in perfectly with the themes already established. The cruelty he encounters in people is dismaying, and in the one case where he does help ‘save’ a woman, her untimely death gets blamed on him. His strict moral code doesn’t help him, and he’s essentially cast out by the society he so desperately wants to help. This was apparently a huge influence on Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese when they made Taxi Driver decades later.

In Bresson’s next film he uses his now fully established style to tell a strictly mechanical story. In A Man Escaped, a POW in a Nazi jail mounts an escape. There isn’t much more to it than that, but the devil lies in the details. The film gloriously exemplifies the power of human perseverance, and this comes through most clearly during a sequence in which the protagonist slowly and methodically chips away at his wooden door until he can remove enough boards to actually step out of his cell. The film isn’t bombastic about the escape — Shawshank this ain’t — but in its quiet and direct nature we get a sense of how difficult even such a mundane task would be.

The subject of his next film, Pickpocket, also makes great use of Bresson’s directness, but much like Diary of a Country Priest, the results are surprisingly emotional. The film is about a pickpocket with a dying mother who is evading arrest and still finds time to fall in love with a girl. This is also the film where Bresson first goes nuts with close-ups. If pickpocketing is like magic, with sleight-of-hand being the main tool of the trade, Bresson’s magic trick is to use close-ups to follow the hand movements of the pickpocket. The film would almost be a lesson in pickpocketing, except that even with such close scrutiny, the delicacy of the skill still makes it look like magic. The scenes of theft are ingeniously tense and fascinating all at once. Once scene in which the main character, Michel, plans and attempts to carry out a wallet theft on a subway train is extremely involving and fun to watch.

Au hazard Balthazar is like the anti-War Horse. It’s the story of a girl and her donkey separated by circumstance and treated to the cruelty and suffering that can only be felt at the hands of other people. What little hope there is in the film’s presentations of love is knocked cold by the sheer weight of the ongoing tragedy. As the donkey is passed from one owner to the next he’s a victim of society and humanity, as is the girl. The way the donkey so innocently and nobly goes through all this torment alludes to the purity in the suffering of Christ, and a thorny crown makes this all too clear. But Balthazar the donkey doesn’t suffer for the sins of humanity. Instead he suffers because of those sins. It’s a dark story, and about as depressing and affecting as any film ever made.

Not to be outdone by his own work, Bresson’s next film, Mouchette, continues the darkness and depression of Au hazard Balthazar without missing a beat. Mouchette’s father is a mean drunk and her mother is sick and dying. She’s mocked by her fellow students and bullied by her teacher. She’s taken advantage of by an older man and raped, and worse still she is judged harshly for that sexual activity. Her abusive father quashes the one ray of hope she sees when she meets in a nice boy at the fair, and when her mother passes away she finally has nothing left. It’s a difficult film to sit through and made all the more devastating by the way Bresson’s camera refuses to become emotionally involved. That distance only serves to pull the audience in, to live in each horrible moment.

Lancelot du Lac is a unique departure for Bresson, not in style, but in content. He takes the classic Round Table story and presents a highly revisionist take on the love between Lancelot and Guinevere. While his previous films often contained violence, the sheer level of gore on display in parts of this film is quite stunning. Without any sort of build-up, the film opens with images of gruesome killings and decapitations. The love story in the film gets treated with little romanticism, but complete seriousness.

Bresson’s final film might be his most amazingly prescient. L’argent begins by following a counterfeit bill as it’s passed from a rich kid to a storeowner and then to a gas man. That gas man, Yvon, tries to pay for a meal with the bill only to be arrested. His arrest essentially leads his entire life to complete ruin with extremely violent ends. The indifference and cruelty of the rich and the upper class comes to weigh down and destroy the lower class man who then resorts to needless cruelty and violence. The film is a pretty brilliant exploration of the power of money and classes in society, and how very often the misdeeds of the wealthy hurt and warp only those least fortunate. In this post-financial crisis world, L’argent proves a surprisingly relevant work on both an intellectual and human level.

The Lightbox will be presenting screenings of every one of these films and more. If you haven’t seen any Bresson or you’re already a big fan, surely these screenings are not to be missed. If you’ve never been exposed to Bresson before, it’s probably advisable to take things a little slowly. His style can take some getting used to, but as evidenced by the breadth and relatively consistent quality of his work, Bresson is a director very much worth sinking your teeth into. And what better way to begin an education in Bresson than by seeing his films presented on the big screen at the Lightbox?

The Poetry of Precision: The Films of Robert Bresson begins February 9 at 6:30 PM with University of Toronto professor Bart Testa presenting a brand new restoration of A Man Escaped. For showtimes, titles, and tickets, please visit TIFF.net.

I remember a day, back in the late 90s, when I bought a VHS copy of The Rock for my brother’s birthday. It was his favourite movie, if I remember correctly. But I inevitably ended up watching it multiple times. Each time, I gained a little more understanding regarding John Mason’s (Sean Connery) claim, in Scottish burr, that he spent his time in prison “reading philosophy, avoiding gang rape in the showers… though, it’s less of a problem these days. Maybe I’m losing my sex appeal.”

But rewatching The Rock in 2012, a lot struck me about what we expect from a blockbuster. The plotline – a group of elite rogue Marines (led by Ed Harris!) take hostages at Alcatraz prison and threaten to kill hundreds of thousands with stolen chemical weapons unless millions are handed over to them from a Pentagon slush fund that comes from illegal weapons sales – is pretty contained for an action film. If this were made in 2012, it wouldn’t be directed by Michael Bay, it would be directed by Joe Carnahan, it wouldn’t cost $75 million (in 1996 dollars, the actual budget), it would probably cost around $40 million (in 2012 dollars), it wouldn’t run a bloated 136 minutes, it would run a slim 100, and it wouldn’t star Nicolas Cage… actually, it would probably star Nicolas Cage, but he wouldn’t hop in a Ferrari and chase Sean Connery (in a Hummer) through San Francisco in a Ferrari.

But let’s be thankful that he did, because that shit rules.

Yes. Nicolas Cage rules. In 1995, Cage made Leaving Las Vegas with experimental director Mike Figgis. In hindsight, Cage’s performance in Las Vegas is a truly horrifying descent into addiction and the idea of suicide by substance abuse, and people recognized. He was an eccentric actor willing to work with weirdo auteurs – the Coen Brothers, David Lynch – and also make weird movies with less well-known filmmakers – like Vampire’s Kiss and Red Rock West. In 1995, he paid his dues and gave one of the performances of his life. For Leaving Las Vegas, he won an award which would give him the freedom to do whatever he wanted. He could be anyone. What did he do?

He said “FUCK YOU, NERDS” and made The Rock. Explosions! Physics-defying action scenes! A Ra-Ra celebration of militarism! Jerry Bruckheimer! Michael Bay! Boom! Pow! Bam! Whoosh! The chance to ask a question “in the name of Zeus’s Butthole!” The chance to call himself a “chemical superfreak!” Nicolas Cage is superfreaky! Little green balls of poisonous gas that melt people’s faces! Bizarrely placed references to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Pulp Fiction! Money! Lots and lots of money!

How the fuck else is Nic Cage gonna afford them dinosaur heads and Bavarian castles that he so sorely needed to inspire him for his craft? But more than that, Nic Cage gets to be AWESOME on screen. He gets to sit in a chair shirtless with a guitar playing along (badly) to the Beatles before he tells his girlfriend that it would suck if she got pregnant. How else is he gonna get lessons in Badass from James “fucking” Bond himself? How else is he gonna shove a green ball of highly dangerous poison into some crazy Marine’s face before saving himself by stabbing himself in the heart with a giant syringe and then saving 81 hostages by holding garish green flares up as five planes fly by while awesome guitar-laced elevator music plays?

Some people might criticize Cage for choosing to become fucking movie star, but really, even if I like to watch art films and read philosophy, if someone gave me the choice to gain weight and play a fat neurotic writer, or to go to the gym and become an action star who gets laid and kicks ass on screen,  what do you think I would choose? Sure, it’s regrettable that Bay’s style of action is really dated 16 years later, and it kinda sucks that Bay can’t represent a minority without resorting to some offensive comedic stereotype (unless he’s making a Bad Boys movie, and even then…)

The morale of the story is: Cage is a badass. Cage made a badass movie. And if you don’t like it, you’re a hater. Shut up. Also, Quentin Tarantino apparently did a re-write on this film, and that really awkward Elton John “Rocket Man” joke is sooooo his. Just sayin’.

If I had to sum up what most stories are about in one word, it would be “underdogs.” Ultimately we go to the movies for a chance to see the unlikely succeed, as this is a fantasy rarely realized in real life. As far as real life underdogs go, they don’t get much lower than the Canadian feature film. This is why anytime one manages to get financed, completed and then actually distributed, those of us concerned with this kind of thing watch with trepidation because we know that a Canadian film getting a second week in theatres is like an amateur boxer making it to round two against the champ. This makes Moon Point an underdog story in every sense, and while it struggles in places, it ultimately succeeds, at least on the fluffy entertainment level.

Our protagonist is Darryl, a 23 year-old underachiever with the meanest family on earth. Determined to prove he can get a date for his cousin’s wedding, Darryl sees a call for extras in a B-horror film starring his childhood crush as a chance at redemption. To do this he has to travel several towns over to a place called Moon Point, and with no other mode of transportation, Darryl literally hitches his wagon to his only friend’s electric wheelchair.  Perhaps my favourite aspect of this film is the idea of it being about the world’s slowest road trip, as it takes them days to cover what somebody with a car could have done in a couple hours. They quickly acquire the damsel in distress from the side of the road whom we know will ultimately come between them at some point.

While these three fresh faces do an acceptable job throughout the film, particularly Nick McKinlay in the lead, it’s the crazies they meet along the way that provide most of the laughs. The supporting cast is made up of an ensemble of Canadian talent whose names you likely wouldn’t recognize, (Art Hindle, Jayne Eastwood, Linda Kash, Laurie Elliott, Jessica Holmes, Christian Potenza, James Hartnett, anyone? Bueller?), their faces however have become familiar from dozens of commercials and comedy specials.

The writer commented that he was trying to capture the feeling of some of the John Hughes films he loved as a teenager, but I didn’t really get that vibe from Moon Point. The road trip aspect of it combined with the sometimes-too-broad humour reminded me more of a Farrelly brothers film, while the sugary ‘twee’ touches over-sentimentalized other parts. Needless to say there were several uneven tonal shifts, primarily caused by too much make-up/ break-up drama between the three main characters.

Unfortunately, like most real-life underdogs, this film will not overcome the odds and break into the mainstream, but at least first time distributor IndieCan is giving it a chance to be seen by some, most of whom I’m sure will get a kick out of at least a few parts, and that puts this one in the plus category of Canadian movies. It’s cuteness and romantic elements are well timed for Valentine’s Day and the holiday’s imagery is sprinkled throughout, let’s just hope Moon Point can still be seen by the time February 14^th comes around, otherwise all of the above becomes a moot point.

Just one month after The Devil Inside seemingly ruined the found footage film for everyone, along comes Chronicle, a sci-fi tinged powerhouse of a movie that single-handedly saves the sub-genre to stand as quite possibly the best example of the format. Even more than the iconic Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, Chronicle dares to tell a dark and bold story that actually feels painfully real and heartbreaking despite being somewhat of a superhero origin story.

The film opens as unflinchingly as possible. Shy and emotionally damaged Seattle teenager Andrew Detmer (Dane DeHaan) has recently bought a video camera to document attacks by his abusive, drunken father and the final days of his mother, who’s in the final stages of terminal cancer. Andrew brings the camera everywhere he goes almost as if it’s a security blanket for him to inoculate himself from the outside world. His only real “friend” is his pseudo-intellectual cousin Matt (Alex Russell), who seemingly thinks everything “cool” is beneath him.

One night outside a rave where Andrew nearly gets the crap beaten out of him for accidentally filming some drunken bro’s girlfriend, Matt and the coolest kid in school/future shoe-in for class president Steve (Friday Night Lights’ Michael B. Jordan), force a worried Andrew into using his camera to document a mysterious cavern deep in the woods that houses a giant glowing crystal. After coming in contact with the crystal, the boys begin to develop telekinetic powers allowing them to move and manipulate matter. At first, they strengthen their powers with an escalating series of silly dares and childish pranks (as teenagers are naturally wont to do even without superpowers), but when the more mature Andrew begins to question his friends commitment to doing something with these powers, fissures in their close friendship quickly begin to develop leaving Steve and Matt to question Andrew’s very sanity.

First time feature director and co-writer Josh Trank and writer Max Landis (son of Blues Brothers director John) have crafted the best thought out found footage movie ever created. They know the scope of their film is bigger than simply having one camera statically shoot everything, so they take the time of creating other ways for footage to be incorporated into a film. Unlike many film of this nature, the question of who actually edited the footage for this film becomes refreshingly vague and something that a satisfying debate can actually be made from. The film beautifully incorporates digital video, cell phones, security cameras, military cameras, and in the bravura finale every camera type known to man floating all around the main characters.

The technical specs of Chronicle are marvellous considering how little the film probably cost to make. Most of the budget seems saved up to mount one of the most dazzling, show-stopping endings to a film in recent memory, but even simple sequences where the boys discover they can fly and they use their power to goof off and play football in the clouds are just as gorgeously rendered. The concept that Andrew can also let the camera float in mid-air and move it leads to some stunning cinematography and the most shocking and subtle payoff in a found footage film ever.

While the technical merits of Chronicle could be doted on for days, Landis and Trank’s script delivers the much needed emotion that a thousand camera tricks could never cover up. While not exactly a “slow burn,” things escalate quite quickly and suddenly down the stretch of the film’s taut 84 minute running time. The pacing works beautifully since the character the film is based around (Andrew) lives a life of constant torment at home and bullying at school. Andrew only finds fleeting moments of reprieve from his daily life before something brings him crashing down to Earth. As Andrew’s personal life gets worse and worse, the movie takes on a vastly different, but wholly appropriate tone.

The three leads all sell the tone extremely well. Jones does the whole “sympathetic jock and consummate politician” routine with real, unforced sympathy. Steve might very well be the most genuine human being of the three. Russell fills the role of “put upon best friend” nicely, and gets to show some real range when he’s unwillingly forced into taking action against Andrew. The movie, however, belongs to DeHaan for making Andrew one of the most sympathetic and occasionally frightening characters to grace the screen in some time. The movie’s effort to show the full arc of DeHaan’s character in almost painful detail – especially from a format meant to show only brief moments in the lives of people – allows the actor to commit fully to his performance. It’s easily the best performance ever in a found footage film.

Chronicle works because it makes the uncanny feel like it’s actually happening in front of the viewer’s eyes. Even the film’s more cinematic moments come after viewers have been eased into an escalating situation. The characters are lush without being Hollywood constructs of teenagers. Despite having more familiar faces than most found footage film, one forgets they are watching actors. These feel like real people, with real problems, and extraordinary powers. These are people any of us could know, and by the end of the film that feeling will be both a comfort and a curse. In short, there’s too much great about this movie to spoil it any further and really nothing at all that can be said against it.

If The Woman in Black is any indication, Daniel Radcliffe will be very savvy when it comes to choosing his post-boy wizard roles. A pitch perfect bit of period horror with menace to spare, this is exactly the kind of film that Harry Potter fans who grew up with the actor would just be starting to get into at their point in their lives. While not reinventing the wheel in any way, director James Watkins has crafted a thoroughly efficient and thrilling genre exercise that evokes favourable comparisons to the works of Wes Craven and Sam Raimi.

At first, it might be a little surprising to see just how much Radcliffe has grown up in the role of Arthur Kipps. Radcliffe not only plays an adult here, but a young, widowed father of a young boy. Arthur is an early 1900s legal aide forced by his boss into getting back to work by sending him from London to the coastal countryside to go over the paperwork of an estate currently up for sale. Upon his arrival in the village where he intends to stay, the locals do everything in his power to send Arthur away before he even makes it to the secluded former estate of Alice Drablow. Driven by the desire to provide for his son and to keep his currently tenuous job, Arthur presses on and learns the hard way the tragedy that befell the residents of Marsh House.

All great horror forces the audience to pay extremely close attention to the frame. No one wants to be made a fool of and knowing audiences will be quick to spot exactly where the film’s requisite scares will come. Watkins (who previously directed the little seen, but hard to watch gem Eden Lake) gets his Craven on by knowing exactly what the audience is looking for. Much like Craven with his Scream films, Watkins plays into the viewers’ expectations only for so long. When Arthur looks around a corner to see there’s nothing there, Watkins gives the audience what they want by not having anything there and by not immediately following it up with a scare or shock effect. He’ll give it a few moments before the real scare comes. Watkins’ sense of pacing borders on uncanny as this might be one of the most well crafted haunted house movies in quite some time. His attention to period detail and an incredible art department also deserve a special nod of merit.

The echoes of Raimi come in via writer Jane Goldman’s adaptation of Susan Hill’s novel, which was previously a stage play and a 1989 BBC made-for-television production. The story gains favourable comparisons to Raimi’s well-liked Drag Me to Hell. This is another tale of someone forced into taking a job for the sake of monetary gain that is then drawn into the world of the occult. As the events of the film become more and more intense, the comparisons to Raimi’s work intensify, but whereas Drag Me to Hell was ostensibly a comedy, Woman in Black is deadly serious, making for a more satisfying viewing experience.

As for Radcliffe, large parts of the film require him to be stranded at the Marsh House by himself for long periods with no one to play off of. While his soulful performance as Arthur serves him well playing opposite the townspeople (especially a terrific Ciaran Hinds as the town’s sole skeptic and Arthur’s only ally), it’s the scenes of relative solitude that makes the performance come together. Hardly speaking, he has nothing to do but actually create an entire character arc for the middle part of the film simply with actions and glances.

It’s a no-brainer for Radcliffe to take such a difficult role in a relatively safe genre. The film aims for the older audience that made him a star, and certainly not the younger crowd. Without spoiling some of the film’s best scares, anyone who brings a young child to see this film is clearly out of their mind. Then again, this is the stuff teenage nightmares are made of. It’s the kind of movie that it feels just slightly naughty to be watching in someone’s basement or sneaking into after buying a ticket for something else. Mainstream horror audiences have been craving something original for quite some time, and Radcliffe and Watkins are more than happy to give it to them.

Daniel Radcliffe at the Toronto premiere of The Woman in Black

Much to the dismay of tween girls and fake plastic glasses manufacturers everywhere, the Harry Potter film franchise is officially over. However, for the child stars we watched grow up on screen through a decade of witchcraft and wizardry, their career is really just beginning. Case in point would be Daniel Radcliffe, the then untrained 11 year-old when he landed the iconic role is now a 23-year-old international movie star trying to launch an acting career unburdened by his one-Potter-per-year schedule. Radcliffe popped up for a few interesting non-boy-wizard roles over the years like a filthy-minded condom-slinging version of himself on Ricky Gervais’ Extras and a horse-loving fool in a stage production of Equus.

However, it’s this week’s chilly British ghost story The Woman in Black that will be Radcliffe’s first major test as a solo star. He plays a suffering father (I know that’s weird, but he’s older now so we have to get used to the idea) who must travel to an isolated haunted mansion like so many unfortunate morons in horror movies before him. The Hammer Horror revival is a pleasingly dark romp packed with jump scares that presents a more mature and magical-free version of Radcliffe for a new audience. Dork Shelf got a chance to catch up with the actor during a press appearance in Toronto and found out all about the new movie, his future plans, and his recent experience hosting SNL.

After Harry Potter you must have been offered many roles, what drew you to this one?

The main thing about this film was the story. It was so compelling that I wanted to be a part of it. It was that simple. Obviously the part was really interesting and when I met James (Watkins, the director) that became an incentive as well. And also because of those little art house movies I made, people would be going in specifically to try and see bits of Harry in the performance. I thought with a film like this, which has an incredibly strong story, after the first ten minutes they would forget about what they came in there to try and see.

Did you find that doing Equus was your first way of breaking free from the baggage of Potter?

I think so, it’s interesting. Somebody said to me the other day, “Do you think your Harry Potter fans will stick with you in this film?” I was like, if they stuck with me through Equus, they won’t mind this. It’s nothing in comparison to that. So, I’m not worried about it. It’s a very good first step. I was under no illusions that people would see this and suddenly go, “Oh Christ, he’s not Harry Potter anymore. He’s completely transformed.” I didn’t ever think that was going to happen. But I think it’s a good first step in terms of, I look very different and I’m playing a man rather than a boy. It’s a different type of film to be in and I think all that stuff is very useful at this point for an audience to see that I’m going to try to do different stuff. We all are, Emma and Rupert and Tom and everybody, we want to do that. But also it’s interesting. People ask us those questions a lot. “Why are you searching so different? Are you intentionally trying to be diverse?” Yes, I am, but I don’t think that’s specific to someone coming out of a franchise. Any actor worth their salt wants to show as much versatility as they possibly can. So, over the next couple of years it’s going to be about doing as much work as possible and making it as varied as possible.

I read that you aren’t so enamoured with horror movies personally.

No, I mean I was terrified of them. A lot of modern horror can leave me cold. And also I’m not good with blood and gore and all that stuff. I’m really not. It’s not fun for me. There’s nothing entertaining about watching a film like that.

Was it strange to be in one?

A bit. During all those days where you just play terrified reactions for hours, I found it useful to take myself over to a corner of the set and just pace and mutter insanely to myself and work myself up into a frenzy. This is why I’m really desperate to have a process as an actor. You know, I used to joke and say I’m a point and click actor. My whole process has really been about trusting my instincts and hitting my mark. Which is why I love the stage, because the nature of filming is that it’s really broken up. So you can be innately something one minute and feel really in the moment, but then if you don’t have a solid process you’ll come back to it in the next take and be vaguer in what your intention is. Whereas on stage, you just have to go on and look and listen and it will all happen. There’s no room for self-consciousness to creep in like there is on film. So the next few years and I’ll keep looking for a process in lieu of training.

Because this is associated with the new Hammer Horror Films label, did you go back to look at some of the classic Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing movies?

Yeah, the first Dracula movie that they made is the one I know well. I think I’m probably the last generation in England to have sort of grown up with that. It was on TV a lot when I was a kid, but also I think the first time I watched it was when I was at school. It was an end of term sort of thing when teachers can’t be bothered to teach you anymore. One of our teachers brought that in and played it and everyone in my class wanted to be Christopher Lee, except for me who wanted to be Peter Cushing because I thought he was really cool and there’s no doubt that had The Woman in Black been made 30-40 years ago he would have beaten me to this part ten times out of ten.

Daniel Radcliffe buried in a sea of fans at the Toronto premiere of The Woman in Black

I heard that you avoided seeing the play version of The Woman in Black, but you did track down the original book’s author. What did you learn from speaking with her?

Well, it was mainly about just making sure I was on the right track. The script is an adaptation and it’s very different both in terms of the character of Arthur and the entire framing of the story. I was very keen just to make sure that I wasn’t doing anything that would piss her off, so I just ran a certain things by her. I spoke to a couple of friends about depression and the nature of depression and one of the things that I found kind of fascinating and in the kind of exploitative actor’s minds that we have useful, was the fact that they both said how physically exhausting true depression is. How it is a serious effort just to get out of bed in the morning physically and mentally. So that’s kind of where I started with Arthur, just that he is completely physically and mentally depleted and has been for five years. He’s just putting one foot in front of the other in the hope that something will change or maybe death will come. I wanted to just make sure that would line up with the vision of the character that she had. It did, so I was fine and I was told that I could carry on along those lines. I didn’t see the play because I’m a terrible mimic and I didn’t want to be influenced by all that. But, generally speaking I took my cues from James my director rather than Susan.

What other work did you do to prepare for this role?

Well, I spoke to a bereavement counsellor one day for a few hours and read a couple of books on grief and loss. I know I can never fully imagine myself into the head of someone who lost somebody, so I think it was important just to furnish myself with as much information as I possibly can. That way when I’m on set without having to think too much, that stuff just kind of naturally informs your choices. One of the things I concentrated on with Arthur was that I have this very excitable energy and Arthur should not and it would be completely wrong for the character. So, James was keen to, as he put it, “take the fizz out of the bottle and let it go flat.” It was about stripping away my natural zeal and showing somebody who has been devastated by a loss to the point where they’re in a state of emotional paralysis.

It seems that you enjoy the mechanics of acting nowadays as opposed to where you were as a child when you were kind of being rushed along into it. Do you feel like you’re starting to catch up to where you want to be as an actor?

Possibly, but there’s no blue print to where I should be. I see myself as a young good actor who still has a lot to learn. I think that’s where most actors who are my age are. There is nobody who at any point in their career is the finished article. So the next couple of years for me are really going to be about finding people to work with who really want to push me. I’ve never trained, so the only why I can get better is by taking risks and working with people who I think are going to improve me. So that’s what the next couple of years are going to be about.

Does that include playing Alan Ginsberg?

Yes, that’s the next project. It starts filming in March. It’s a first time director. I’m terrified, but very excited.

Through the Potter franchise you worked with some of the finest British actors alive, so who is still on your wish list in terms of English actors you’d like to work with?

Um, Judy Dench, never got her in. Seems amazing, but we never got her. There’s loads of young British actors that think are fantastic who I’d really like to work with. Ben Whittle. I’ve seen him on stage many times and he’s wonderful. Aaron Johnson. Helen Mirren. Russell Brand, actually. I’ve always thought he’d be fantastically entertaining and really great to work with. I don’t know who else. There’s so many.

Did you get any advice from the actors you worked with in the Harry Potter movies that you’ve tried to apply to your career?

Um…not particularly. They were all just very supportive and generous with their time. Alan Rickman particularly was amazing this year. He was in New York quite a lot, so he came to see the show twice and took me out for dinner. I don’t think any of them would really have wanted to give me advice, but they certainly were generous with their time. Actually, Alan has given me some advice, but you know some things sound amazing in Alan Rickman’s voice and if I said them to you they wouldn’t have nearly the same impact and wouldn’t seem quite as profound.

I’m wondering what role a director plays for you since you’ve had the opportunity to work with some incredible international directors already. Have any had a particularly strong impact on your work as an actor?

Um, it’s interesting. I rely very heavily on the director, absolutely. When I get a lot of direction, I do better, I think. I like having a close relationship with the director. Alfonso Cuaron is a gifted filmmaker and I would love to work with him again now. Because now I feel ready and could really appreciate it. I do absolutely stick close to the directors and it’s interesting because the director who I’m about to work with has already shown me an entirely new way of working that I never knew existed before and it’s kind of amazing to me that nobody ever told me this stuff. So we’re working with action verbs and loads of different techniques and I’m very happy to be doing that. I feel that I’ve been very lucky in terms of having the right directors come along at the right times to take me where I needed to be. Alfonso was one, Thea Sharrock, who directed me in Equus, was one and I think John is going to be the next one. It’s funny because everyone is talking about The Woman in Black now and it’s a slightly horrible feeling in a way because we filmed this movie a year and a half ago and I think I’ve come a long way since then. It’s sort of like my current ability and potential is being based on my work from a year and a bit ago, which is a very strange thought. It’s quite hard to come to grips with that. But yeah, I think over the next couple of years I’m going to improve by leaps and bounds. I want to work with people who want to stretch me.

How did you find the Saturday Night Live experience a few weeks ago?

Fantastic. I just had the best time. I’m someone who thrives off of fear and panic and chaos, so for me that was perfect. I liked the fact that someone said, “ok there’s been a slight change, just look at the cards.” Love that. Those are the situations that I live for. In the reactions to it people didn’t feel like it was the strongest episode or whatever, but I had a blast. That’s the thing, the people who are a bit scathing about SNL and for me that’s very lazy. Because they have no concept of what is actually going on. They put on an hour and a half music and comedy show from scratch in a week and actually it’s two and half hours if you include what you do at the dress rehearsal. So I just loved it, the fact that you’ll do a sketch and someone will grab you and run you to another quick change. It was great. I said to them at the end, “Ask me back any time I will run across oceans I don’t care.” And also, the Casey Anthony Dog sketch was possibly one of my favorite things I’ve ever done. I had a great time. They all were very kind. I have to see what’s impressive about that show is that there are people who have been there for 21 years who say, “There is nowhere I would rather be.” That’s speaks highly of the cast and the crew. It’s a really cool atmosphere.

The Woman in Black opens this Friday, February 3rd, in theatres everywhere.