Posts Tagged ‘Seth Rogen’

The Fabelmans

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Seth Rogen, Judd Hirsch, Gabriel LaBelle, Julia Butters, Mateo Zoryan, Julia Butters, Sam Rechner, Oakes Fegley

Running Time: 2 hours 31 minutes

Film Rating: 9 out of 10

Oscar winning director Steven Spielberg (Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan) makes his most personal film by far, with the critically acclaimed film The Fabelmans which won the People’s Choice Award at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), a sure indicator of multi Oscar nominations.

The Fabelmans is a fictional account of Spielberg’s childhood and his idyllic love of cinema and focuses on a boy Sammy Fabelman brilliantly played respectively by Mateo Zoryan as a young boy and Gabriel LaBelle as the teenager and wisecracking Jewish kid who turns his hobby of filmmaking into a career choice.

With an excellent script by Tony Kushner (Munich, Lincoln), The Fabelmans focuses on a Jewish family in America in the 1950’s and 1960’s starting in New Jersey and moving across the country first to Arizona and then finally to California. Sammy’s parents Burt and Mitzi Fabelman are played by Paul Dano (Little Miss Sunshine, 12 Years a Slave, There will be Blood) and four time Oscar nominee Michelle Williams (Brokeback Mountain, Blue Valentine, My Week with Marilyn, Manchester by the Sea).

Michelle Williams finally deserves an Oscar for her complex portrayal of Mitzi Fabelman a slightly off kilter but talented mother who will do anything for Sammy and his three sisters but is willing to risk everything for true love.

Williams’s performance is mesmerizing in The Fabelmans and she creates the emotional centre for this film, particularly in the superbly acted scenes between Mitzi and her son Sammy as he negotiates adolescence and discovers a secret about his mother which will rip his family apart.

In between all the family drama, there is Sammy’s persistent love of cinema and his dedicated desire to film everything and in the end does capture every moment even the scenes that are not meant to be filmed. Even at high school besides being terrorized for being the only Jewish boy at a predominantly Christian school in Northern California he even films the Ditch Day at the Beach and makes one of his archenemies and school jock Logan Hall played by rising star Sam Rechner uncomfortable when he sees himself on screen.

Audiences should watch out for a superb cameo by veteran actor Judd Hirsch as Uncle Boris who influences young Sammy into following his dreams of becoming a film maker.

With superb cinematography by Spielberg regular and Oscar winner Janusz Kaminski (Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan) and excellent ensemble acting, The Fabelmans is a love letter to traditional cinema, to the art of film making while effortlessly exploring serious issues including anti-Semitism, infidelity and mental health.

The Fabelmans is a top class film: elegant, nostalgic and perfectly acted. Highly recommended viewing, this excellent film gets a film rating of 9 out of 10 and signifies Spielberg’s undisputed persistence of vision as a top calibre film director.

The Green Hornet

Masked Heroes in a Sleek Ride

The Green Hornet a subversive and explosive tale of a Media Mogul’s son Britt Reid who becomes a crime fighter in contemporary Los Angeles twists the usual superhero and sidekick relationship in a script treatment by comedian Seth Rogen, who also shed 18 kilos to play the titular role.

With a pastiche of car gadgets inspired by all the James Bond films from Goldfinger to Goldeneye, Rogen’s portrayal of an anti-superhero does not quite live up to the success of Robert Downey Jnr’s Iron Man franchise, which featured a terrific plot, superb casting and the right balance of action and anticipation.

The Green Hornet is too brash, badly paced and filled with unnecessary explosions, car chases and destruction overshadowing a storyline which if the cameo appearances by stronger actors  like James Franco and Tom Wilkinson had been given more screen time, allowing a counterpoint to Rogen’s obsession with his new found superhero status as The Green Hornet and his perplexing relationship with his sidekick, a Chinese martial arts motor mechanic Kato played by Jay Chao.

Whilst The Green Hornet, based on a radio series pokes fun at pop culture and the American obsession with superheroes, the media business and the increasing fascination with wealth and consumerism, the film fails to rise above its popcorn matinee status.

The international cast makes for a confusing motley crue of characters from Chinese star Jay Chou and Austrian Oscar Winner Christoph Waltz, fresh from his Nazi hunting role in Inglourious Basterds, playing the villian Bloodnofsky to Cameron Diaz who clearly portrays the anguish of an actress caught in the wrong film, with a crazy leading man.

The Green Hornet is saved by some clever dialogue by Rogen who also serves as scriptwriter but lacks the solidly plausible storyline of more impressive superhero films from Batman Begins to the Spiderman films. Then who ever said plausibility was required in any tale of a superhero?

As brilliant superhero films go, The Green Hornet dazzles with explosive action scenes but remains a rowdy, comical romp well below par of similar films in this saturated genre.

Return of the Hairy Man: Wolverine, Terminator Salvation and Zack and Miri make a Porno…

So in these time of global economic gloom, a clean-shaven, metrosexual is not your saviour. Besides all these good-looking, well-dressed beautifully groomed corporate types were the ones lending money out to those hapless citizens who were fiscally irresponsible. Investing in outlandish off-shores accounts, allowing an international unregulated banking system to flourish in a world where credit was supreme, and sensibilities had gone out the window. In the times of a crisis, strong hairy men are here to save the world!

That’s if the batch of summer blockbuster action and comedy films is anything to go from the archetypal X-Men Origins: Wolverine directed by South African Gavin Hood to the hilariously off the coffee counter, Zack and Miri make a Porno. Whether the world has come to a sticky and apocalyptic end in the monochromatic world of Terminator Salvation, with an unshaven Christian Bale as John Connor, all grown up and ready to take on Skynet or audiences discover the real origins of the gorgeously sexy hairy beast of a man, well, mutant, Wolverine who along with a band of fellow unshaven mutants is out to wreck havoc on an suspecting America, the truth be told that clearly the Hairy Man has returned!

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a fantastic action film appealing to the younger testosterone filled male generation, which tells of how Wolverine and his brother Sabretooth, an equally hairy and deadly character played with sinister panache by Liev Schreiber fight each other, the world and all those in between, including every major world war from the Napoleonic era to Vietnam. Even the normally clean-shaven Canadian actor, Ryan Reynolds is quite revealing in his role as Wade Wilson but then let’s not discount that Reynolds did appear in the Blade Trilogy.

Terminator Salvation paints a grim and grimy picture of a post-nuclear blasted world where the Skynet controlled Robots have wrecked havoc on America with the cities resembling industrial junkyards from hell. Christian Bale returns in another blockbuster but here again, as in the far superior The Dark Knight, it is his co-star that steals the shows. The Dark Knight, such a brilliant film of anarchy reigning supreme featured the flawlessly demented performance of the late Heath Ledger as the Joker and now in Terminator Salvation it is the more subtle less frenetic performance of Sam Worthington as Marcus Wright who is propelled into a future abyss only to discover redemption is beyond his electronic grip…

On a lighter note, and much more grounded in the present day recession-laden America is Kevin Smith’s fantastically funny and very raunchy film Zack and Miri make a Porno, about a couple of loser flat mates in Pittsburgh that realize that the financial crisis calls for more drastic measures. Seth Rogen saves the film as the unsexy but very hairy, Zack next to the gorgeous demurely (I kid you not) Miri, played by Elizabeth Banks. Rogen plays every type of hairy anti-hero with such effortless wit and perfect comic timing, who manages to save his reputation, make some underground cash and with the help of an extra-terrestrial cast make a Porno! Watch out for superb cameos by Brandon Routh (from Superman fame) and the delightful Justin Long at Zack and Miri’s reunion…

Although all three films are vastly different, it denotes a new fashion of fury heroes ready to save us from the grim realities of the strange 21^st century recession obsessed reality most Western nations find themselves in.