ewan mcgregor – Pop Culture Nerd

Movie Review: BEAUTY AND THE BEAST

Does anyone need a refresher on the plot of this “tale as old as time”? The one about a girl whose kindness saves a selfish prince and his household from a curse? No? OK, great. I can jump straight into details you may not already know about this latest version.

Yes, Emma Watson can sing. She doesn’t have the widest emotional range as an actress, but her natural intelligence, pluck, and sense of decency make her perfect as Belle, the bookworm who wants more than a provincial life.

Dan Stevens, playing Beast, can sing, too, but his performance isn’t especially memorable. Out of hairy makeup, he’s Generic Pretty Prince. Robby Benson left a stronger impression with only his voice in the 1991 animated classic.

This live-action retelling is faithful to that previous version and has moments of splendor, but it doesn’t improve on the ’91 film so I’m not convinced its existence is justified.

The ballroom scene with Belle in her golden gown? Lovely, but no better than the iconic iteration. The “Be Our Guest” number? Looks more like a typical, splashy musical number here than an enchanting moment with a singing, dancing candelabra and his dinnerware friends. (Ewan McGregor does a fine job voicing Lumiere but I really missed the late Jerry Orbach in this scene.)

One thing that is different is the “gay moment,” as it’s been dubbed in the media. I was pleasantly surprised by it (saw the movie before director Bill Condon’s comments were made public). It’s funny and sweet and just a quick bit, neither in your face nor so ambiguous it leaves you wondering. It’s not a big deal. At all. The hullaballoo and boycotts are much ado about nothing, people judging the movie before they see it.

Oh, and also? Luke Evans, who perfectly embodies Gaston, is openly gay in real life but that didn’t stop the studio from casting him as the alpha male and Belle’s most ardent suitor. Disney is gettin’ with the times, yo.

Another difference is the running time. The animated movie is less than 90 minutes, but this one is about 2 hours 10, which might be too long for little kids to sit through. And this Gaston is more violent toward Beast than I remember the previous Gaston being. Yet this movie is rated PG. Who is its intended audience?

This inconsistency between themes and running time and rating perhaps means the new Beauty and the Beast is trying to be all things to everyone, but as the prince eventually realizes, bigger spectacles don’t equal more substance.

Nerd verdict: Competent if not quite magical Beauty

1 Comments

HAYWIRE Q&A with Steven Soderbergh and Cast Members

From L: Soderbergh, McGregor, Fassbender, Carano, and McHale

Last November, Haywire was the secret screening at the AFI Fest, with a Q&A session afterward with director Steven Soderbergh, Gina Carano, Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, moderated by Joel McHale. I discussed the movie back then with my contributor Eric Edwards, but since the movie is opening tomorrow (Jan. 20), I thought I’d post some highlights from the lively Q&A.

McHale asked Soderbergh, “How’d you find Gina?” Soderbergh said, “I watched her fights on CBS on Saturday nights…I just thought, ‘Wow’—somebody should really build a movie around this woman…She’s a natural beauty and she beats people into a pulp in a cage.” He’d just been fired from a movie (he didn’t say which one but it’s believed to be Moneyball), he’d always loved early Bond films, so he decided to combine a spy film with “this new thing” because “why is Angelina Jolie the only woman currently who’s allowed to run around with a gun?” When Carano said yes to the movie, he called screenwriter Lem Dobbs (The Limey) and mapped out a plot outline about revenge, with the directive: “She needs to beat her way through the cast.”

And beat them she did. Ewan McGregor was asked about his fight scene with her. He told a story about how he was supposed to throw a punch over her head at one point, but instead, “I punched her in the head. She came straight up and said, ‘Are you okay?’…I really f**king hurt my hand! She didn’t even feel it!”

Soderbergh said he approached Fassbender and asked, “How would you like to get your ass kicked by a woman?” Fassbender replied, “It’s one of my fetishes in life.” He said his brutal fight scene with Carano in a hotel room took two days to shoot, after which “I went back to my room and puked. I put it down to a bug and not getting my ass kicked by Gina.”

McHale asked Carano about her experience fronting the movie, surrounded by such an impressive supporting cast. She said, “It was surreal. I felt more vulnerable than I’ve ever felt in my life.” There’s been press about how her voice was electronically lowered in the movie, and though she sounded softer in real life—probably due to being nervous as a newbie doing Q&A in front of a film audience—she didn’t sound drastically different than she did as Mallory Kane.

In the movie, Carano sports cornrows at one point and McHale jokingly wanted to know if she was doing a Bo Derek homage. “I fight in cornrows,” Carano said, explaining that it keeps her hair out of her face while she’s working. McHale quipped, “I know. I work at E! Ryan [Seacrest] is always punching me in the knees.”

Speaking of hair, McGregor’s character has a geeky cut that’s “based on a guy who owns a private army,” the actor said. He declined to identify that person.

McHale moved on to Fassbender, asking about the roots of his surname. The Irish-German actor said, “In English, it means Cooper, which is someone who makes binding for barrel carts.”

News of the Kardashian divorce had recently broken back on the day of this screening, so McHale asked Soderbergh, “How do you feel?” Soderbergh said, “I almost didn’t come tonight. We’re all in a period of mourning.” He added, “I’ve been on some miserable shoots and 72 days is a long time.” Judging from the good humor and camaraderie of the cast, I’m guessing Haywire‘s shoot wasn’t one of those.

Photo: Jason Merritt/Getty Images

2 Comments

Movie Discussion: Steven Soderbergh’s HAYWIRE

As part of the AFI Fest presented by Audi going on here in Los Angeles, there’s a secret screening that’s announced on the day of the screening. Organizers revealed hours before the Sunday night event that the secret movie was Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire (to be released January 20, 2012), an action-thriller starring Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Channing Tatum, Bill Paxton, Michael Angarano, Antonio Banderas, and Michael Douglas. But the anchor of the movie is mixed martial arts star Gina Carano as Mallory Kane, an operative with a private contractor who does dangerous work for the government. A journalist she successfully rescues in Barcelona ends up dead and she’s framed for his murder, becoming the target of assassins almost as lethal as she is.

I was at the 9:30 screening with my trustworthy contributor Eric Edwards, so we decided to discuss it afterward in lieu of a regular movie review.

Pop Culture Nerd: Carano is badass for sure, completely convincing as a tough chick who beats the crap out of everyone. I didn’t think the movie was entirely successful, though. The fights were amazing, but some of the non-physical scenes were clunky.

Eric Edwards: I really enjoyed it. The story was very much a low-rent spy thriller but the cast makes it work. Usually producers hire a star or two and fill out the rest of the cast with lesser stars. What Soderbergh did was hire a non-actress and fill even small supporting roles with stars and well-known actors so she wouldn’t have to carry the movie by herself.

PCN: But it’s obviously a showcase for her, and everyone else just came along for the ride. She’s kinetic to watch in the fight scenes, but you can tell she’s less comfortable in the ones when she’s just talking (Carano admits that in the post-screening Q & A). Some of her line readings sounded like just that—someone reading from a page. But she’s beautiful, and I like her, and that’s why I wanted her to be a better actress. I suppose that will come with time and more experience if she does more movies.

EE: For me it was simpler than that. She’s sympathetic because her character is being screwed over. In every fight scene, she’s going up against a guy who’s bigger than her—

PCN: Except for Ewan McGregor.

EE: Hey now, don’t pick on Obi-Wan.

PCN: Just sayin’. Now, Michael Fassbender is a formidable opponent. He’s ripped, and their fight scene is the best.

EE: Yup. Hands down. I still don’t know how either one of them survived that.

PCN: Fassbender said he puked after two days of filming it!

EE: I’m surprised he didn’t puke while shooting. Did you see how many times her knee went into his gut?

PCN: And elsewhere. You know, for a brutal fight flick, there was very minimal blood, and I appreciated that. It wasn’t injury porn.

EE: Yeah, surprisingly little blood, but I felt every one of those hits, didn’t you?

PCN: Not really, ’cause I’m not a man and I don’t have balls. I was exhausted after each fight.

EE: Yeah, her style of fighting was breathtaking.

PCN: I liked that they didn’t try to make it pretty. It was raw and dirty. She fought to survive.

EE: And you were always rooting for her.

PCN: I thought the pacing lagged whenever the action stopped. There were weird pauses and drawn-out moments that I felt could have been more tightly edited.

EE: I disagree. The flashbacks worked well as a device to explain what was going on. Soderbergh showed us the backstory without making Carano fill us in. I think it was a smart move to give her fewer lines and let her shine elsewhere.

PCN: I got a little bored when it was just dudes explaining stuff.

EE: It was necessary!

PCN: Let’s talk about the music. Did it sound to you like it was from a cheesy ’70s action film?

EE: Yes, but I think Soderbergh did that because the story felt that way in general. It was a wink to the audience.

PCN: Why do you think Soderbergh was trying to evoke cheesy ’70s movies?

EE: Because it’s kind of retro cool. Maybe he’s trying to reinvent the B-movie by making one with an A-list cast.

PCN: He said in the Q & A he was going for a kind of early Bond movie so I guess the score needed to go back at least another decade.

EE: Well, it worked for me, and I don’t think there’s anything like this movie out there.

Nerd verdicts: PCN—Haywire but enjoyable. EE—Haywire is a cinematic haymaker.

Soderbergh, McGregor, Fassbender, and Carano participated in a hilarious Q & A afterward moderated by Joel McHale. I’ll post a recap of that, as well as reviews of other festival films, within the next week. AFI Fest continues through November 10.

5 Comments

Movie Review: AMELIA with Hilary Swank

Having seen the gorgeous trailer, I attended a screening of this movie expecting to be uplifted and inspired and all those other positive adjectives. Alas, it didn’t quite happen. Though this is not a bad movie by any means, it lacks some of the passion I imagine Amelia Earthart had for flying.

If you’re looking for insight into how she got that passion, you won’t find it here. We’re simply told that Earhart wants to fly so she can be free. From her alcoholic father? A miserable childhood? I don’t know because the film doesn’t address that part of her life, and I haven’t read the books—Susan Butler’s East to the Dawn and Mary S. Lovell’s The Sounds of Wings—on which Amelia is based. But fly Earhart does, in many spectacularly shot sequences that almost made me run out and sign up for flying lessons, forgetting for a moment I have acute acrophobia.

The movie does cover her rise to celebrity status and romances with both G.P. Putnam (Richard Gere) and Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor), though they’re depicted quite chastely (the Vidal affair was extramarital), as if to say Earhart’s true love was in the skies, not with any man.

Hilary Swank turns in a respectable performance but she’s hampered by Earhart’s mannerisms and cadences. I’m a huge fan of the actress’s spunky, forthright acting style when she’s playing scrappy characters. Here, portraying an iconic real person from the 1930s, she’s forced to stay within certain boundaries and therefore doesn’t get to unleash her usual fire. McGregor, on the other hand, is sexier and more handsome than I’ve ever seen him (though his screen time is limited), while Gere does his usual squinty-eyed thing. Christopher Eccleston offers prickly but stouthearted support as Earhart’s navigator, Fred Noonan.

The thing I recommend most about this movie is its cinematography by Stuart Dryburgh. The scenes with Swank soaring through clouds, over luscious green hills and blue oceans, put viewers right in the cockpit and clearly illustrate why Earhart loved to fly. There’s a sense of wonder and elation about those moments I wish the rest of Amelia has. The sequence showing her final flight contains some suspense, but the movie about a woman who took risks and broke barriers mostly plays it safe and ends up breaking no new ground at all.

Nerd verdict: Amelia doesn’t soar as high as it could have

All photos by Ken Woroner/Fox Searchlight

Subscribe to Pop Culture Nerd by Email

15 Comments