In Contention

Tag: Shia LaBeouf

  • Stone charges back with subprime ‘Money Never Sleeps’

    It’s taken me some time to get around to writing about Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” because watching the film was like have your bubble burst (no pun intended).  Where the director’s 1987 original worked from a tight, disciplined script that never took its eye off the ball, this follow-up is a loose, less refined piece of work with a forehead-smackingly bad ending.

    Also, due respect to Rodrigo Prieto (one of the best lensers working in the business), I feel there is something lost without Robert Richardson’s hand behind the camera.  The lenser hasn’t worked with Stone since 1997’s “U Turn,” but he gave the original film a palpable energy (as he does any film he shoots, whether it’s for Stone, Scorsese or Tarantino).  The energy on screen in the sequel is cooked up, awkward, false.  There’s an obsession with quirky transitions and visual flourishes (which comes to a head in an over-bearing closing credits sequence) that Stone can’t seem to relinquish.

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  • 8/31 Oscarweb Round-up

    • Peter Sciretta rounds up early reactions to Mark Romanek’s “Never Let Me Go.”  It’s across-the-board praise and admiration. [/Film]

    • Nathaniel Rogers takes note of one of the biggest Oscar sleepers: Jacki Weaver in “Animal Kingdom.” [The Film Experience]

    • Sasha Stone talks marketing in the age of cynicism, ending with a hope that the Academy can turn a blind eye to the snark of tweeners.  (It almost always does, no?) [Awards Daily]

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  • One more round

    Megan Fox may be an airhead and Shia LaBeouf may be a lightweight, but when it comes to speaking the truth, they deserve credit for having far more bracing honesty than most of the suck-ups who rule the business. Only in Hollywood is calling a lousy movie a lousy movie considered an act of sedition.

    From Patrick Goldstein’s most recent Big Picture post.

  • LaBeouf on dropping the Indy ball

    I have a new special place for Shia LaBeouf after reading his fearless ribbing of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” at Cannes.

    Via 24 Frames, the money quote:

    I’ll probably get a call. But he needs to hear this. I love him. I love Steven. I have a relationship with Steven that supersedes our business work. And believe me, I talk to him often enough to know that I’m not out of line. And I would never disrespect the man. I think he’s a genius, and he’s given me my whole life. He’s done so much great work that there’s no need for him to feel vulnerable about one film. But when you drop the ball you drop the ball.

  • SHORT TAKE: “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” (**1/2)

    Cannes Film Festival

    “Is greed good?” Gordon Gekko asks near the beginning of Oliver Stone’s glib, gleaming and endearingly trashy sequel to his 1987 corporate morality tale. Delivering the line, a looser-haired but stiffer-skinned Michael Douglas can barely resist licking his lips and winking; this is his earlier, Oscar-winning performance turned inside-out, emerging as lascivious pantomime, and he wants us to be certain he’s in on the joke.

    Provided you are, too, “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” is one of the more pleasantly surprising studio pictures of the year thus far, and a significant improvement on its po-faced (and, 23 years on, now fearsomely dated) predecessor. If the sequel could never have been deemed “necessary,” it’s certainly as handily timed as can be. As the original served as dumb but not ineffective allegory for the coke-fuelled iniquities of 1980s capitalism, the new film not only does the same for credit-crunch sobriety in the post-2000s, but allows Stone his “Toldja!” moment to boot.

    Not that the film is nearly as concerned with socio-economic commentary as it is with smirking self-parody: it arguably blew its best gag in the trailer, as Gekko’s bread-loaf-sized cellphone is returned to him on his exit from prison, but there’s plenty more idle fun where that came from, culminating in a slithery cameo from the original film’s star, a bronzed glamazon on either arm, that may as well have been credited: “and starring Charlie Sheen as himself.”

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  • Before the ‘Transformers’ slaughter…

    Transformers: Revenge of the FallenEmbargoes have long since crashed, but the mauling is still to come.  And though I don’t feel compelled to write a review of “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” I do feel it a strange duty to get off at least one or two positive remarks before tomorrow’s inevitable critical massacre.

    The film is better than the first.  The film makes great comedic use of actors Kevin Dunn and Julie White, almost begging for a sitcom spin-off.  The film’s action is creative and exciting, more fun than it had any right to be.  The kitsch is embraced with less apology than the first film, which takes the movie to this weird artistic level that I can’t even begin to place.

    There is a shot that will most definitely make it through to my annual “shots of the year” piece.   On that score, there are, in fact, more interesting cinematic ideas in the film than you’d expect.  Shia LaBeouf actually gives a damn good performance (seriously).  Megan Fox is filmed with delirious invasion to the point that it almost becomes commentary.  The “twins” that draw claims of racism could be strangely viewed as a separate commentary, on pop culture, given where the Autobots claim to have learned human communication.  And the material proves, once again, to be sound mixing and sound editing pornography.

    But…the movie sucks.  And that it can be all of those things and still manage to be worthless on so many levels is absolutely amazing to me.  Michael Bay is another breed.  Dare I say that deserves cherishing?

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  • 6/12 Web Round-up

    John Travolta in The Taking of Pelham 123(Wow…that week went by fast.)

    • Patrick Goldstein thinks the new “Shutter Island” trailer is overkill for those who don’t want everything spoon-fed. [The Big Picture]

    • More on the alleged misogyny of Lars von Trier. [CNN]

    • Shia LaBeaouf talks “Transformers” with John Hiscock. [Daily Telegraph]

    • Sarah Palin, the bold, the bright, turns her own daughter into a rape joke punchline.  Idiot.  (Sorry for the politics but it was worth conveying.) [Politico]

    • Is “Bruno” coming along at an inopportune time for the good fight? [New York Times]

    • Eight documentary dos and don’ts from Sundance programmer Basil Tsiokos. [indieWIRE]

    • Jeffrey Wells reports from a “Whatever Works” press conference in New York. [Hollywood Elsewhere]

    • Speaking of which, Jeremy Kay has something to say on the franchise glut. [The Guardian]

    • In honor of the out-dated plot of “The Taking of Pelham 123,” Christopher Campbell offers up 10 stock market scams from the movies. [Spout Blog]

  • 6/11 Web Round-up

    Preliminary watercolor for Mars Attacks!, by Tim Burton• Nathaniel Rogers and Katey Rich offer an early rundown of the best of 2009 thus far. [The Film Experience]

    • Breaking down the world premieres at the Edinburgh Film Festival, which yours truly will be covering. [Screen International]

    • Shia LaBeouf calls the “Transformers” sequel “literally the biggest movie ever made.” What a shame I won’t see it. [Daily Telegraph]

    • Tim Burton gets a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Freaky sketches included. [New York Times]

    • Anne Thompson asks why nobody will fund movies for mature audiences, gets Clint Eastwood’s thoughts on the matter. [Thompson on Hollywood]

    • Patrick Goldstein on the return (kinda) of Alexander Payne. [The Big Picture]

    • Random list of the day: 10 movies that didn’t need girls. (Sorry, but “Wedding Crashers” totally needed Rachel McAdams. Most movies do.) [Cinema Blend]

    • Okay, another list, but I really like this one: the 10 greatest multiple-role performances in history. (Yes, #1 is exactly what you think it is, and rightly so.) [Vulture]

    • Something belated for the “Bolt” fans: a video interview with Rhino the hamster. [The Guardian]

    • Not exactly new, and not exactly movie-related, but have you heard Scarlett Johansson’s duet with Pete Yorn yet? I dig it. [The Break Up Album]

  • ‘Wall Street’ sequel moving forward with Oliver Stone, Michael Douglas and Shia LaBeouf?

    Michael Douglas in Wall StreetNot long ago, what with the housing market on the fritz and certifiable capitalistic ruin staring down the face of America, not to mention stoke brokers being painted as the devils of the earth, it seemed a great time to revisit Oliver Stone’s 1987 film “Wall Street,” the Michael Douglas starrer that put “greed is good” into the lexicon of trade pushers everywhere.

    Back before the release of Stone’s “W.,” screenwriter Stanley Weiser talked about the prescience of “Wall Street.”  At the time, “Gekko’s character was written to create an engaging, charming, but deceitful and brutal being,” Weiser said.  “I have nevertheless run into quite a number of younger people, who upon discovering that I co-wrote the film, wax rhapsodic about it . . . but often for the wrong reasons.”

    The time for a sequel, likely with a much more pointed message, seemed at hand.  Then word came that Stone had dropped out of pursuing a follow-up in favor of the long dormant “Pinkville” project.  But today, Patrick Goldstein offers the following juicy (but sourceless) tid-bit:

    …Fox is now saying the movie has a green light again. Stone is back aboard as director, Michael Douglas will reprise his role as Gordon Gekko and the studio is in negotiations with Shia LeBeouf to play a young Wall Street trader under Gekko’s spell — a somewhat updated version of the character Charlie Sheen played in the original film. The sequel’s original writer was Stephen Schiff, who has now moved on, with Allan Loeb (“Things We Lost in the Fire”) having done a rewrite of the script. Fox hopes to have the film in production as early as sometime this summer.

    The film is now simply going under the title of “Wall Street 2,” having shed its original “Money Never Sleeps” moniker. No one is offering a lot of specifics about the storyline, except to say that the focus remains on the Gekko character, whose exploits will closely reflect much of the greed and chicanery seen in the past year on Wall Street.

    I’m not really sure how I feel about it.  Getting someone like LaBeouf seems like the obvious play, but Stone is also something of a master at making an impact with the obvious, so perhaps this could work.  Read the rest over at The Big Picture.  (UPDATE: There’s also this AP story with quotes from Douglas and Fox spokesman Gregg Brilliant.)

    Meanwhile, allow me to submit this: Could “Wall Street” be the most dated film of all time?  Seriously.  That cell phone!  The art work!  Darryl Hannah!  Anyway…

  • First review of ‘Crystal Skull’ lands in the Sunday Times

    It seems John Harlow of the Times of London has managed a screening of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” at some point in the last week, sure to rub a number of self-perceived entitled journalists the wrong way. What’s more, he’s gone ahead with a full review, a totally positive assessment of the flick.

    Here’s a look:

    The good news for Ford fans is that Indy may be older and greyer, but there’s still a spark to his repartee, and he still gets the girl in the end (the girl in question being Marion Ravenwood, played by Karen Allen, who was the love interest in the first Indiana movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark).

    Whether Ford’s charm will be enough to earn the film the $400m it is estimated to need to recoup Paramount Pictures’ investment remains to be seen. However, a preview attended by The Sunday Times last week suggested that the internet gossips who have doubted the film’s drawing power may be proved wrong.

    And about “it” boy Shia LaBeouf:

    Much has been made in internet chatrooms about LaBeouf’s potential impact on the film, and fears that he is merely a sop to lure teen viewers. Yet LaBeouf, who made a striking impact against computerised villains in Transformers, matches Ford quip for quip and leather jacket for leather jacket.

    Rounding it out:

    The real pleasure for series fans may lie not so much in the madcap action, the carnivorous bugs and the familiar perils of quicksand, but the restored romance between Ford and Allen, and the fatherly relationship that develops between Ford and LaBeouf, who is clearly the new pretender to his whip.

    Indy treats Mutt with the same sarcastic disdain that his own father, played by Sean Connery, lavished on him during the Last Crusade. You can probably guess how it all works out.