Trailer: Charlies Angels
Posted on June 27, 2019 at 9:57 am
Elizabeth Banks directs the new “Charlie’s Angels,” starring Kristen Stewart, and it looks like a blast. Literally.
Related Tags:
Trailer: Equals
Posted on April 26, 2016 at 8:00 am
Nicholas Hoult and Kristen Stewart star in a futuristic story about a time when emotions are outlawed and love is the worst crime of all.
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2
Posted on November 15, 2012 at 6:00 pm
The “Twilight” series comes to a close with the fifth film based on the four-book supernatural love story from Stephenie Meyer. This one is for the fans, with a loving farewell that includes a romantic recap series of flashbacks and final credits bringing back all the stars of the series. It will be less satisfying for non Twi-hards, who will have a hard time ignoring the ludicrousness of the storyline.
In the last chapter, Bella (Kristen Stewart) at long last (well, not too long, she just finished high school), married her one true love, Edward (Robert Pattinson), a vampire. They had a wonderfully romantic but bed-breaking wedding night, and she got pregnant, a surprise to everyone because it was thought to be biologically impossible. The pregnancy left Bella so frail that childbirth would have killed her if Edward had not kept her alive by turning her into a vampire. “Breaking Dawn, Part 1” ended with her eyes opening, vampire-ified to electrified amber with a kind of permanent mascara. “I didn’t expect you to seem so..you,” Jacob says. “Except for the creepy eyes.”
In the past, we saw the “other” world of vampires and wolf-people like Jacob (Taylor Lautner) through Bella’s brown human eyes. Now we see everything through the hyper-charged senses of the ultimate predator. Ironically, it is only as a vampire that Bella feels most purely herself — strong, confident, capable. This is the fork in the road where the fans will stay with it but everyone else may take a detour. One reason for the sensational popularity of the books is the way they so perfectly capture a young teenager’s fantasy. That works better when the characters are themselves teenagers. Trying to project them into the adult world, even one as skewed as the vampire world, is a tougher stretch.
Bella and Edward have an idyllic existence of eternal adolescence, with a life free from work, struggle, and parents. They do not have to eat or sleep. They do not have to do anything but have wildly energetic sex and conversations about who loves who more, with banter like “We’re the same temperature now.” You may ask, “Wait, isn’t there a baby with some kind of nutty name?” Yes there is, and her name is Renesmee (after the two grandmothers, Renée and Esmé). When Jacob calls her “Nessie,” Bella gets angry because that’s the Loch Ness monster’s nickname, though it seems likely that it is just another of Jacob’s protective instincts, her birth name being something of a burden.
Bella and Edward-style parenting is not very demanding. The baby has a full-time staff of loving vampire relatives and an imprinted wolf-guy. And it turns out that vampire/human children grow in dog years. The movie, unfortunately, moves rather slowly, with a lot of time bringing in 18 new vampire characters from all over the world to help persuade the vampiric governing body, the Volturi, that they have not broken the law and produced an “immortal child” who could put the community at risk. All of this leads up to a grand battle across a snowy field, the motley crew of good guy vampires and the robed Volturi.
The endless procession of new characters gets tedious except for a Revolutionary war veteran played by Lee Pace (“Lincoln,” “Pushing Daisies”), who talks about his time with General Custer and has far more electricity on screen than the vampiress who catches his attention with her super-tasing power to jolt anyone. I also liked Rami Melek (“Night at the Museum,” “Larry Crowne”) as a vampire who can control the elements. But the sheer volume of new characters made having to remember each one’s special talent like trying to keep track of the Smurfs.
We’ve spent a lot of time with these characters and it is good to see a satisfying resolution to their story. But I couldn’t help feeling that Meyer had run out of ideas and just tossed in everything she could think of. My primary reaction at the end was relief that this was the end.
Parents should know that this movie includes vampire violence with battles that include graphic decapitations and other disturbing images, characters injured and killed, sexual references and situations with some nudity, and some language.
Family discussion: What are the biggest changes in Bella’s outlook and abilities from the first installment to the last? How much should she tell Charlie? If you could have one of the special gifts of the characters in the film, which would it be and why?
If you like this, try: the other “Twilight” movies and the books by Stephenie Meyer
More From Comic-Con: “Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2” Panel
Posted on July 16, 2012 at 9:52 pm
It was the first last press conference when the cast of “Twilight” got together to talk to the fans and the press about the last episode and the journey that brought them to this moment. Following their appearance at the enormous Hall H, with fans who had been camping out for days, the actors and author Stephanie Meyer met with the press. Kristen Stewart told us about the transformation of her character, Bella, who has some major changes in store after she becomes both a vampire and a mother in the last moments of “Breaking Dawn, Part 1.” She said her reaction to her new persona was, “I’m a sportscar; let’s break her in. Even the way she walks into a room is different.” As for filming the sex scene compared to the tender, if energetic honeymoon scene in the last one: “We’re not even humans any more. We tried and it was rated R, . He was trying not to get his white paint on me and I was trying not to get my brown paint on him.”
Kellan Lutz talked about how his character, Emmett, has to battle Bella. “To see the little things she would change was fun.”
They were all glad to be together again and enjoyed reminiscing about the earlier films. Stephanie Meyer said that the first time she saw Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, and Taylor Lautner they were in costume already and “they were all dressed up as my imaginary friends.” They appreciated original director Catherine Hardwicke’s casting choices, and how well they held up as the actors had the unusual opportunity to create characters who have four times as long as the usual movie to explore their journeys.
When they made the first film, some of them were underage and they laughed that “we had some monitoring.” The boys and girls stayed in different hotels. They laughed about their “cat classes” and said that like their characters, they felt they were surrounded by protectors, the cast and crew all looking out for them. They especially enjoyed scenes where many characters were involved because “everyone has covers” (shooting the same thing over and over from different angles), so it meant they had more time together. They laughed as they described the “dance-off” choreographed as a surprise treat for director Bill Condon by cast members Mia Maestro and Toni Trucks. They were sentimental about the way “the fans have grown with us”
As for the last chapter, there are “a lot more vampires this time around.” Jackson Rathbone says his character, Jasper, was “tweaked out, like a junkie going through withdrawal, but now gets more comfortable, more at ease.” Nikki Reed said she finally got to smile — “a big deal! I look forward to having the audience root for Rosalie a little more.” Ashley Greene says that Alice, always “lovable, friendly, upbeat, gets to act more vampire, gets more of an edge.” Elizabeth Reaser said the events of the final film force Esme “into a different lifestyle. She’s a pacifist forced to be a powerhouse. She doesn’t have a choice; she has to betray her sense of herself in order to protect her family.” Peter Facinelli laughed that the biggest change for him was instead of dying his hair blonde, he wore a wig. And he joked about how much he will miss the woods–and the contact lenses.
Lautner said that in the final chapter it has” become less complicated. Instead of a triangle, it’s a square.” “No,” said Stewart, “it’s a perfect circle.”
Snow White and the Huntsman
Posted on May 31, 2012 at 6:06 pm
Director Rupert Sanders is known for making television commercials that look like fairy tales, with angels falling from the sky for a guy who uses Axe body spray and a boy battling samurai warriors with Excalibur to sell X-Box game consoles. With his first feature film he has made a fairy tale that looks like a commercial, with every frame filled with eye-popping images and a lot of dramatic posing. A 30 second version would have made a great commercial for perfume or skin cream. As a movie, it is just so-so, with uneven performances and dodgy pacing. After over 100 movie versions of the classic fairy tale about the girl whose lips are red as blood, skin is white as snow, and hair black as ebony and the evil stepmother who orders her taken into the woods and killed, the Disney animated version is still the fairest of them all.
Like Tarsem’s superior “Mirror Mirror,” released earlier this year, this version makes Snow White into an action heroine, leading the battle against her evil stepmother. Charlize Theron plays Ravenna, who literally bewitches a king grieving for his late wife. She murders him on their wedding night, taking over his kingdom with the help of her creepy brother/henchman Finn (Sam Spruell) and locking the young princess in a grubby tower. Ravenna cares for just one thing — eternal beauty. She swans around looking haughty in fabulous Colleen Atwood costumes that can best be described as haute predator couture, with all kinds of intricate spikes and skulls. Everything is either sharp or poisonous and laced-up tightly, with talon-like finger-armor. She stalks and flounces nicely but when it is time for her to get ferocious she is all eye-rolls and screeches, a bad version of Carol Burnett doing Norma Desmond.
Ravenna has an enormous gold mirror that looks like giant frisbee hanging on the wall, and the robed creature who lives inside assures her that she is the fairest in the land. She also gets some reassurance from skeevy Finn, with whom she shares the creepiest brother watching his sister take a bath scene since “Bunny Lake is Missing
While Ravenna is bathing in thick cream and literally sucking the life out of young women, Snow White (Kristen Stewart) is still locked in the tower. For years. But she stays so pure that when the birds come to perch on her window, she does not grab and eat them. She just allows them to show her a loose nail she can use as a weapon, which comes in very handy as Finn arrives shortly to indicate some predatory tendencies and take her to the queen. The mirror guy has informed Ravenna that Snow White has come of age. Her purity is so powerful that she alone has the power to destroy Ravenna, says the mirror. But her power is so great that if Ravenna can eat her heart, she will no longer need touch-ups and refills. Her beauty will stay as it is forever.
When Snow White escapes into the Dark Forest, where everything is creepy and scary and even Ravenna has no power. The only person who knows the Dark Forest well enough to bring her back is The Huntsman (no name), played by “The Avengers'” Thor, Chris Hemsworth. Ravenna promises to bring his dead wife back to life if he will capture the prisoner and he agrees to go. But Snow White isn’t the only one who gets tripped up in the forest. Sanders gets much too enmeshed in all of the tree-branches-turning to snakes-style special effects and the forest section of the film goes on much too long, with at least three too many set-ups and confrontations, including the return of Finn. And it gets worse when they emerge into a sort of Light Forest fairyland, when the story really starts to go haywire, with a whole “chosen one” theme that had people in the audience groaning. Stewart is out of her league. She is fine playing characters like the vulnerable Bella in “Twilight,” but when called on here to inspire the troops, she sounds like she is ordering pizza.
And then there are the dwarfs. It is hard to imagine that in 2012 anyone could think it is appropriate to cast full-size actors, no matter how talented and no matter how persuasive the special effects, as little people. It is a shame to see Bob Hoskins, Nick Frost, Ian McShane, Toby Jones, and others in roles that should be played by little people. By the time they show up, the plot has fallen apart, with an unnecessary love triangle and a preposterous encounter with a troll. Nearly everyone’s accents waver, some of the dialogue is truly awful, and I am certain no one in a fairy tale should ever use the word “okay.” Recasting Snow White as the hero of her own story is long overdue and production designer Dominic Watkins creates some real magic. But this is not only not the best Snow White; it’s not the best one in the last four months.
Parents should know that this film includes fantasy and battle violence with many characters injured and killed, and some graphic and disturbing images including bloody wounds, bugs, and snakes. There is brief partial nudity and some scenes of a brother watching his sister bathe and then suggestively touching a young woman in a predatory manner.
Family discussion: How did Ravenna’s costumes reflect her character? How did the three drops of blood spilled by both characters’ mothers show their connection?
If you like this, try: Some of the more than 100 other movie versions of this story including the recent “Mirror Mirror” and the Disney animated classic