text:
Blog Archives
Thoroughbreds (2018)
Thoroughbreds is a dishy, tart little treat that kept me squirming, laughing, and gleefully entertained. Olivia Cooke (Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl) and Ana Taylor-Joy (Split) are outstanding as privileged teenagers trying to resuscitate their former friendship through collaborative murder. Cooke plays Amanda, a sociopath who cannot feel anything, who is incurably honest, and has stopped caring what others think. Taylor-Joy plays Lily, a self-involved young lady that feels overwhelmed by life and is skilled at dissembling. Together, the girls scheme to kill Lily's boorish stepfather and enlist the aid of a hapless small-time dealer with big plans (Anton Yelchin, in his final performance) through blackmail. The story from writer/director Cory Finley is immediately engaging with how it naturally reveals the complicated histories between Amanda and Lily as well as what makes each questionable. These are two very interesting people and just watching their probing push-and-pull was entertaining enough, especially with such strong performances. The characterization of a sociopath without a heavy moral condemnation was refreshing. We assume Amanda will be the bad influence but it really becomes the other way around, with Lily faking for her own purposes. Thoroughbreds is more dread-filled and unsettling than conventional thriller, and while there are some gallows humor to be had from the abnormal characters, this is less a dark comedy. There are drawn out tracking shots and methodical push-in camera movements meant to build audience anticipation, and they're mostly effective. The first half is a bit more engaging than what it ultimately delivers as a climax. It's still satisfying and well handled, but Finley throws in some misdirects that don't add a rising sense of stakes. The stakes are really more personal, which works since the crux is on the relationship between the girls and whether they are being honest or manipulative with one another. By the end, I thought I could argue either way who was manipulative and when. Small irony: the last scene you see of Yelchin is him as a valet parking other people's cars.
Nate's Grade: B+
Tragedy Girls (2017)
I wanted to enjoy Tragedy Girls. I really did. There's a good starting point with a story about two self-involved teenagers who turn to murder to raise their social media profiles. I like the lead actresses, Alexandra Shipp and Deadpool's Brianna Hildebrand, and the film has a quirky sense of style by co-writer/director Tyler MacIntyre. The opening is even great where Hildebrand purposely lures a lover to his sacrificial death in order to trap a familiar slasher film-styled villain. Where it all goes wrong is that Tragedy Girls doesn't have enough substance or commentary to outweigh its arch nihilism. The message is very flimsy (millennials are shallow, social media is harmful) and the film wants you to revel in the girls' violent, gory murders but also be repelled by them. It's a sisterhood of slaying. There are some interesting story ideas that don't feel better attended. The girls are clumsy at their murders and luck into some absurd Final Destination-worthy kills, but the film doesn't embrace this concept and makes them untouchable. They kidnap a local serial killer in the opening and demand he train them, but the guy refuses and is shoved to the side for almost the entire movie, stranding another interesting possibility. The high school characters are thinly designed and unworthy of their demises, though that's also the point. Tragedy Girls doesn't earn its candy-colored nihilism. It ultimately left a bad taste in my mouth and I found it off-putting and empty. It thumbs its nose with prickly devil-may-care attitude but without anything to really say.
Nate's Grade: C-
The Hitman's Bodyguard (2017)
The Hitman's Bodyguard feels like a 90s Tarantino knockoff remake of Midnight Run, and I don't mean that in any pejorative sense. This is a movie that knows exactly what it aims to be and strikingly new and original isn't one of those qualities. When you deliver a late summer movie that has this much depraved entertainment and energy, I don't mind.
Michael Bryce (Ryan Reynolds) is a disgraced bodyguard-for-hire who lost a high-profile client to an out-of-nowhere sniper. Stuck shielding coked-out white-collar traders, he still knows more than a thing or two about keeping a client safe. His former flame, Interpol agent Amelia Roussel (Elodie Yung), is tasked with getting notorious contract assassin Darius Kincaid (Samuel L. Jackson) to the International Criminal Court at The Hague. Kincaid is the only living witness who can testify against Vladislav Dukhovich (Gary Oldman), a former Belarus military dictator. Coincidentally, all of the witnesses and evidence against him seem to always disappear. Roussel's team is ambushed and she reluctantly seeks out Bryce for assistance. He has 24 hours to keep Kincaid alive and transport him to The Hague, but Kincaid has some ideas of his own, like arguing, escaping, and visiting his wife (Salma Hayek). It's a battle of wills and a healthy deployment of the versatile F-word.
When it comes to genre filmmaking, especially in action or horror, the level of entertainment is much more related to the singer and not the song. Sure a well developed script with interesting characters, organic complications, and memorable set-pieces connected with payoffs are still desired, but often it's execution that separates the brashly fun bombast from the dreck that dots late night cable. The selling point of this movie is its central pairing of Jackson (Kong: Skull Island) and Reynolds (Deadpool). Hell, both of them aren't straining too hard from their familiar big screen personalities, Jackson the gleefully stubborn badass and Reynolds as the incredulous smart-alleck with the quick wit. Some critics will chafe and say that the actors are stuck in stale riffs and acting on autopilot. I look at this as a certain virtue of the film. They hired Jackson and Reynolds and let them do exactly what we demand that Jackson and Reynolds do. They were hired for a specific reason. Their crackling repartee keeps the movie alive even as the first half feels too sludgy getting everything going. The comedy can be a tad forced (riding on a bus with chirpy nuns! Gatorade bottle of pee?) and exaggerated at times (really, a fart joke, sound designers?) but this isn't a film for subtlety, and Jackson and Reynolds, who can outdo just about every working actor for sarcasm and volume, are at their best when they're big and broad. The rapport elevates even moments that would otherwise be redundant.
I thought the action scenes were going to take a backseat to the Jackson/Reynolds buddy road trip, popping up here and there to move things along and kill off an antagonist or two. To my great surprise, the action in The Hitman's Bodyguard is uniformly great. Director Patrick Hughes (The Expendables 3) makes each action scene its own story and he thankfully varies the scenarios so they nicely stand out. There's a terrific motorcycle chase through Amsterdam's canals and streets, smashing things to bits in the most exciting ways. The action is often divided into two parallel points following Jackson and Reynolds, which allows the film to pair the right sequence for the right character. There's a late foot chase that's filmed in refreshing long takes (newest Hollywood action trend?) that stops into the back kitchen of a restaurant and then a hardware store. Each location is well utilized to provide a unique opportunity for the fight choreography and use of props. The movie does a very successful job of approaching action by thinking how to use geography, character, and purpose to plot. Hughes also has a solid inclination when to punch for humor with visual gags, including a few gems involving a minivan. When the comedy wasn't completely working, I knew I could rely upon the dependable thrills.
The movie also has one of the dumbest attempts at injecting urgency into a story. The plot hinges upon Darius Kincaid arriving at The Hague at an exact time to testify against Oldman's dictator. In a moment that made me blurt out laughing, an expositional device/news lady informs us that if nobody comes forward to testify then The Hague has to drop all charges, Oldman's dictator goes free and apparently becomes the president of Belarus immediately again, and probably the end of democracy. First, this false sense of urgency requires witnesses to arrive at a court. That's not how testimony works. You can give a sworn statement anywhere. You can appear in court via teleconference. The location is not the problem here. And then his testimony is aided by (slight spoilers) photographic evidence of the dictator's genocide… except it's all digital pictures. This entire movie hinged on the mad rush to get Jackson to The Hague when he could have just made an email attachment with the incriminating pictures at any wifi spot. There's also the factor that if it was one second after five or so the court would not accept any testimony. I don't think courts work that way, especially when it's a decision over dictators and due process. And yet a wall clock is treated like the ticking clock on a bomb detonator. It's so dumb I question whether the filmmakers were self-aware and making a satirical riff.
While being an enjoyably profane experience, The Hitman's Bodyguard doesn't know when enough is quite enough. It has problems walking away and routinely falls upon overkill in several elements. There's almost way too much plot here. Every character has a back-story that nabs a lengthy flashback with an ironically chosen pop song. There are obvious betrayals that the film thankfully doesn't belabor in revealing the culprits, but did we need them anyway? Hayek seems to have said yes just to be a vulgar badass that would attract Jackson. It's fun but her shtick gets old quickly. She's all unchecked exaggeration. Hayek's character is just here to provide a counterpoint for Kincaid to wax poetic about romance and relationships, to nudge Bryce to "man up" and realize what he's let slip away. The romantic elements are presented on the same wavelength as the comedy, meant to be a shoulder-shrug of cocksure cool. When they try and get earnest on their own terms it doesn't quite work out tonally. The movie also runs rampant with false endings, going from one escape to another just as it should be winding down. It's like the filmmakers were having so much fun they didn't know when to walk away from their story.
I think every ticket-buyer knows what they're getting when they walk into The Hitman's Bodyguard. It's two actors doing what they do best, in an action vehicle that cribs from Midnight Run, and with a sense of style and attitude that resembles a bluntly ironic return to 90s R-rated action excess. Fortunately, the execution of these genre tropes and elements lead to one of the more profanely entertaining popcorn flicks this summer season. It's a movie that doesn't take itself too seriously, coasts on above average action and the charged comic chemistry of its two loud-mouth leads. It's a movie that doesn't require much thought and rewards you for the effort. The Hitman's Bodyguard is everything you want it to be, and if that's good enough for you, then you'll find satisfaction here.
Nate's Grade: B
The Bad Batch (2017)
Days after viewing writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour's The Bad Batch, I'm still contemplating what I just saw. That can be the sign of a good, thought-provoking movie, or it could be further proof that The Bad Batch is really an empty experience.
In a not-too-distant future, the United States has found a unique solution to crime. Those deemed irredeemable are tattooed with "bad batch" and abandoned into the American Southwest. It's a dusty land of outlaws that the U.S. doesn't even recognize. Arlen (Suki Waterhouse) is deposited into the wastes of the Southwest and she is abducted by cannibals who make a meal out of her right arm and leg. She escapes and finds Comfort, a small outpost where she can heal and find community. The makeshift leader of Comfort is The Dream (Keanu Reeves), a messianic figure who doles out free drugs to the townspeople. He also has a harem of pregnant women. Miami Man (Jason Momoa), one of the hunkier cannibals, loses his daughter and forces Arlen to help him.
I'm going to summarize the sparse two-hour plot, dear reader, to share with you just how little there is to this film (will keep spoilers mild). Arlen gets kidnapped. She escapes. Months later she kills one of the cannibals. She quasi-adopts a little girl. Her father goes searching for her. Arlen loses the little girl. The father finds Arlen. They find the little girl who was unharmed. They eat a bunny. The end. Now admittedly any movie can sound rather flimsy when boiled down to its essential story elements (Star Wars: "Space farmer accepts call to adventure. Rescues princess.") but the counterbalance is substance. Characters, world building, arcs, plot structure, setups and payoffs, all of it opens up the film's story beats into a larger and transformative work. That's simply not there with The Bad Batch. It's a vapid film that has too much free time to fill, so you get several shots that are simply people riding motorcycles up to the camera. I grew restless waiting for something of merit to happen. Arlen simply just walks out into the desert like three different times, and this is after she was captured by roving cannibals that are still out there in healthy numbers. If you went to a store and the owner captured you and cut off your arm, would you venture back in that direction? Maybe there's a commentary about victimhood and the cycle of abuse and exploitation, or maybe I'm left to intuit some kind of grander implication out of a filmmaker's lack of effort. There's just not enough here to justify its running time. It feels stretched beyond the breaking point.
If the film is meant to be about immersion, something that holds together via hypnotic Lynchian dream logic, then it better work hard to hold my attention since plot has already been abandoned. This is where The Bad Batch also lost me. It's just not weird enough, though even weird-for-weird's-sake can be insufferable, like Harmony Korine's Gummo. Amirpour (A Girl Walks Home at Night) has an innate feel for visual arrangements and little quirky touches that can burn into your memory, like the sight of Arlen sidling next to a magazine clipping of a model's arm she taped to a mirror or a well-armed pregnant militia. The most interesting elements of the story are left unattended though. This is a vague dystopia where the government has decided to let the "bad batch" fend for themselves in a desert. It screams neo-Western with a lawless land populated with criminals and killers. There are only ever two locations we visit: the cannibal's junkyard and the outpost of Comfort. Do we know anything about these locations? Are they at war? Is there some kind of understanding between them wherein Comfort offers sacrifices for protection? Is there an uneasy peace that could be spoiled thanks to Arlen's vengeance? It's all just vast wasteland, but even when they get to actual places, it still feels like empty space. How can you make something about dystopian cannibals be this singularly boring?
The characters just aren't worth your attention and ultimately don't matter in service of story or even a potential message. Arlen is much more of a figurehead than a person, and perhaps that's why the director chose Waterhouse (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) as her lead. The former model certainly makes a visually striking figure and knows how to arc her body in non-verbal ways to communicate feelings. However, I don't know if there's a good actress here. There's no real reason to take away her arm and leg except that it looks cool and edgy. Initially it presents a visceral vulnerability for her and a disadvantage of escape, but after she arrives in Comfort, it's as if she's just any other able-bodied character. It feels like the director just liked the look and thought it would grab attention or say something meaningful. Momoa (Justice League) has a natural intimidating screen presence but he's given so little to do. He's just on glower autopilot. Miami Man is a killer and we watch him cook people's limbs for some good eats. It's almost like the movie wants you to forget this stuff when his paternal instincts kick in. Rather than embracing the light-and-dark contradictions, the movie just has him shift personality modes. There's no confrontation or introspection. Reeves (John Wick 2) gets an idea of a potentially menacing character but even he isn't presented as an antagonist. The Dream is living large thanks to the cooperation of those in Comfort. He has a harem of willing ladies for breeding but he doesn't seem dastardly. He's like the grown-up rich kid throwing the party that everyone attends. Then there are near cameos by Giovanni Ribisi, Jim Carrey, and Diego Luna, which make you wonder why they ever showed up.
The depressing part is that The Bad Batch starts off with a bang and had such potential. Amirpour is so assured early on and draws out the terror of Arlen's plight in a gripping and satisfying manner. Her drifting is then met by a futile escape, and then we witness the relatively tasteful dismembering of our heroine. It's disorienting but establishes the conflicts of the scene in a clear and concise fashion. The odds are against her and Arlen uses her captors underestimating her to supreme advantage. The opening twenty minutes are thrilling and well developed, presenting a capable protagonist and a dire threat. And then the movie just drops off the face of the Earth. I haven't seen a movie self-sabotage an interesting start like this since perhaps Danny Boyle's Sunshine. The first twenty minutes offer the audience a vantage point and set of goals. We're learning about Arlen through her desperate and clever acts of survival. The rest of the movie is just bland wandering without any sense or urgency or purpose exhibited in that marvelous opening (hey, the amputated limbs special effects look nice).
Vacuous and increasingly monotonous, The Bad Batch valiantly tries to create an arty mood piece where it re-purposes genre pastiche into some kind of statement on the broken human condition. Or something. The story is so thinly written and the characters are too blank to register. They're archetypes at best, walking accessories, pristine action figures given life and camera direction. It's flash and surface-level quirks with distressed art direction. It feels like it's trying so hard to be a cult movie at every turn. I'm certain that, not counting Keanu's cult leader, there might only be 100 words spoken in the entire film. I feel like The Bad Batch is going to be a favorite for plenty of young teenagers that respond to its style and general sense of rebellion. Until, that is, they discover movies can have both style and substance.
Nate's Grade: C-
Free Fire (2017)
I don't understand the praise and hype heaped upon filmmaker Ben Wheatley. He's got a nice eye for visuals but whenever I see his name attached as a screenwriter, my expectations sink. His 2016 film High Rise was on my list of the worst films of last year. To my mind, Wheatley is Nicolas Refn (Neon Demon) lite, and I don't even care for Refn. With that being said, the premise and star power for Free Fire looked enough to even out my immediate hesitation about watching another Wheatley film. It looked like fun. How could it not be? Well I'm now debating whether I disliked Free Fire more than High Rise, a scenario with no real winner.
In 1978, two gangs meet in a Boston warehouse to make an exchange of guns and drugs for money. Things go wrong, tempers flare, and bullets are exchanged. Both parties are pinned down, fighting for cover, and looking to come out alive and on top. There's Cillian Murphy, Oscar-winning Brie Larson, Armie Hammer, Michael Smiley, and Sharlto Copley among this dingy dozen.
Exiting my theater screening, I got into a discussion with my pal, Ben Bailey. He was adamant that the story premise of Free Fire could not be done as a feature film and was, at best, the sort of material for a 20-minute shoot-em-up short. I argued that with the proper development there could be a scraggly feature film here but the key phrase is "proper development," something that is sorely lacking from Free Fire. Ultimately it feels more like Ben's assessment: 20 minutes of thin material and thought stretched out to an interminable 85 minutes.
Once the shootout commences, it feels like Wheatley just succumbs to the cacophonous confusion of the action and more or less gives up. For a solid twenty minutes or so, the movie is nothing more than a series of disjointed shots of people firing and people taking cover from wooden boxes and planks, rarely if ever coalescing to produce a sense of direction, momentum, and geography. I didn't know where anybody was and especially in relationship to anyone else. That is a crucial factor in action sequences especially in a limited location action sequence. You need to know who is where and establish different mini-goals and new challenges. Wheatley only introduces new elements late into the proceedings, and when he does they are anticlimactically resolved. When complications do arrive they are brushed aside and we go back to shooting. Why not involve the guns in those crates as something to be fought over to gain extra leverage? That seems like an obvious goal but not to the characters on screen. I lost track of which characters were with which side, and the movie even tries to make the same joke, as if knowingly acknowledging this aspect forgives Free Fire for its plotting misfires.
As minute after minute of blind shooting went on, I started making connections to a question I have had with Terrence Malick (Tree of Life, Song to Song) movies, namely how does one edit these things? If you've never seen a modern Malick movie, first consider yourself fortunate, but the man is known for his whispery, stream-of-consciousness spiritual connections with nature. My question with Malick movies: how does someone know that this shot of light through the leaves needs to be here, and definitely before this shot of a caterpillar moving along a tree branch? How do you edit what is bereft of a traditional coherency? I wondered the same question during Free Fire. Without those mini-goals, how does one edit just gunshot after gunshot after gunshot without any credible change in the story's impetus as guidance?
Compounding my boredom and general confusion is the reality that these criminal lowlifes are dull characters and not worth the investment. Wheatley and co-screenwriter Amy Jump fail to provide interesting personalities or quirks or anything memorable to enliven these tough-talking bad-shooting bad guys. Some of them have accents, one of them is a woman, one of them likes to smoke pot, but really they're all slight variations on the same excitable, profane, and shallow archetype, the kind of character that gets their own poster in marketing with a nickname like "The Kid" or something cool-sounding like that, but it's all posturing. I thought that Free Fire might be reminiscent of the rise of Tarantino knockoff films in the 90s (The Big Hit, 2 Days in the Valley, Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead, Suicide Kings) but this movie actually made me yearn for a Tarantino knockoff.
These people are so lifeless. I didn't care who lived and who died. They were all boring. Some faces are recognizable like Hammer and Smiley and Murphy but a majority of the characters are not, at least initially visually distinctive. It's a failing of creativity to separate them, make them distinct. Much of the acting is just reacting to squibs going off and squirming on the ground. If you have a fetish for Brie Larson (Kong: Skull Island) wriggling, this is your film. By default the best actor is Copley (Hardcore Henry) as he seems to be on an uncontrollable improv stint, rapidly saying whatever things comes to mind. Something has to fill the audio between gunfire.
Free Fire wants to be a scuzzy, crazy, fun movie that knows it's trashy and revels in its bad taste and loony characters with nose-thumbing glee. Instead, Free Fire is a nihilistic and tedious enterprise lacking entertaining characters, coherent action, and most importantly any general sense of fun. Watching characters that are unmemorable, who you don't care about, fire guns indiscriminately for a long time is not a movie, and it's most certainly not a good movie. It's a glorified training manual for firearms. Free Fire takes too long to get started with poorly developed characters and when it does kick into action the movie doesn't really improve too much. Free Fire is a Tarantino knockoff that doesn't have the courage of its own B-movie convictions. It thinks just dressing the part is enough, substituting style and a blithe attitude for not even substance but the appearance of substance. It only has one truly memorable, queasy death, so even when it comes to bizarre violence it falters. This is one movie that wants to look cool and irreverent but ends up merely firing blanks.
Nate's Grade: D+
Logan (2017)
The Wolverine solo films have not been good movies. The 2008 first film was widely lambasted and while it made its money it was an obvious artistic misfire. The second film, The Wolverine, directed by James Mangold was an improvement even though it had its silly moments and fell apart with a contrived final confrontation. The Wolverine movies were definitely the lesser, unworthy sidekick to the X-Men franchise, and this was a franchise that recently suffered from the near abysmal Apocalypse. Mangold returns for another Wolverine sequel but I was cautious. And then the cheerfully profane Deadpool broke box-office records and gave the Fox execs the latitude needed for a darker, bloodier, and more adult movie that's more interested in character regrets than toy tie-ins. Thank goodness for the success of Deadpool because Logan is the X-Men movie, and in particular the Wolverine movie, I've been waiting for since the mutants burst onto the big screen some seventeen years ago. It is everything you could want in a Wolverine movie.
In the year 2029, mutants have become all but extinct. Logan (Jackman) is keeping a low profile as a limo driver and taking care of an ailing Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) south of the border. Xavier is losing his mind and a danger to others with his out-of-control psychic powers that need to be drugged. Caliban (Stephen Merchant) is also helping, a light-sensitive mutant with the ability to innately track people across the globe. Logan is ailing because his healing power is dwindling and he can't keep up with the steady poison of his adamantium bones. A scared Mexican nurse tries to convince Logan to help out the little girl in her care, Laura (Dafne Keen, feral and a better non-verbal actor). She's an angry, violent child and built from the DNA of Logan. She too has unbreakably sharp claws and a healing ability. Bounty hunter Pierce (Boyd Holbrook) is trying to recapture the runaway merchandise/science experiment, capturing Caliban and torturing him to track his prey. Logan goes on the run with Xavier and they try to make sense of what to do with Laura, a.k.a. X-23. They're headed north to Eden, a hypothetical refuge for mutants to sneak over into freedom in Canada, and along the way are deadly hunters who aren't afraid of leaving behind a trail of bodies to get their girl back.
It feels like it shouldn't haven taken Jackman's reported final outing for the execs to realize that a guy with freaking knives attached to his hands might be a concept that would work in the more grisly, more adult territory an R-rating creatively affords. It's about time this man got to fully use his claws, and it was a joyous explosion of violence and gore built up for fans such as myself for a long time coming. It feels like Fox has been planning for this event as well, as if they stationed a production lackey to devise all sorts of grotesquely fun ways that Wolverine might skewer his competition in bloody beauty ("Finally, your preparation will not be in vain, Ronald"). There's one scene in particular where a bunch of armed henchmen are psychically frozen in place and Logan struggles to move past each, and we get to anticipate just how each one will be viciously stabbed. For a series that has shied away from overly gory violence, Logan certainly celebrates its new opportunities with bloody glee. The fact that the first word spoken is an f-bomb and there's a gratuitous moment of drunken sorority girl boob flashing is like the producers trying to directly communicate to the millions of ticket buyers and saying, "Hey, we're sorry it took so long. Hope it was worth the wait." Oh dear reader, it was worth the wait.
It's not just the action that's invigorating but the emotional core of the film is deeper and more compelling and ruminative than ever before, and finally these great actors are given material to deliver great performances worthy of their talent. Stewart and Jackman have never been bad in their respective roles even if and when the movies have been. They just have never been called upon for much more than genre heroics, anguish, and pained moral dilemmas. With Logan, both actors are finally given meaty material that affords nuance and ambiguity, and they are excellent. Charles Xavier is losing his battle with Alzheimer's and ALS, which is a major concern when his mind is considered a weapon of mass destruction by the government. He's going through his own end of life deliberations ("You're waiting for me to die," he groans at Logan) and it brings out a far different Xavier than we've ever seen, even with the youthful cockiness from James McAvoy. This is a cranky, defiant, and doddering Xavier, someone who is barely outpacing his sense of grief, guilt, and depression. There's a tragic back-story we only get a glimpse of but it's suitably devastating for a man who has devoted his life to others. He's looking for a few last moments of grace and looking to hold onto something by journey's end.
Thanks to his healing ability and the star wattage of Jackman, there was little fear that anything serious would ever befall Wolverine in his many previous film appearances. Sure bad things happened to him and he lost plenty of female love interests, but you never feared that he wouldn't be able to ultimately handle himself. That's not the case in Logan, which opens with a Wolverine who has clearly lost more than a step or two. He's tired, rundown, and his adamantium skeleton is slowly poisoning his body. His healing powers are slowing down and he's not as berserker fast and agile as he used to be. For once there's an uncertainty attached to the character and a vulnerability. This turn greatly increases the intensity of the fight sequences and the greater stakes of the drama. The comparisons of the samurai were rife in The Wolverine and now the comparisons to the aging, lone gunslinger are ever-present in Logan. He's drawn into a conflict that he was not seeking and he's found a little bit of his remaining humanity and compassion to do right in the face of overwhelming odds and near certain destruction. There's a subtle moment that the film doesn't even dwell on that stuck with me. It's after an accident, and in the thick of confusion, Logan is trying to save his mentor but he's also worried that Xavier will think he betrayed him. "It wasn't me," he repeats over and over, not wanting this man to suffer more. It's a small moment that doesn't get much attention and yet it really spoke of their relationship and the depth of feeling during these fraught final days. This is the first Wolverine movie that feels like the characters matter as human beings just as much as purveyors of punching and kicking (now with gruesome slashing at no extra cost). Jackman showcases more than his impressive physique this go-round; he delivers a wounded performance that's built upon generations of scars that he's been ignoring. It's the serious character examination we've been waiting for.
I also want to single out Merchant (Extras) who gives a performance I never would have anticipated from the awkwardly comedic beanpole. He even gets a badass moment and I never would have thought Stephen Merchant would ever have a badass moment in life.
Mangold's film plays as a love letter to Western cinema and uses the genre trappings in ways to further comment on the characters and their plight. This is a bleak movie. It's not a dystopia. In fact it resembles our own world pretty closely with a few technological additions; automated machines and trucks, the common knowledge that mutants have been wiped out like the measles. Knowing that it's reportedly the end for Stewart and Jackman playing these characters, I was anticipating the film to strike an elegiac chord. His past and legacy are catching up with Logan. He becomes an unlikely guardian to Laura and explores a fatherhood dynamic that was never afforded to him before. The unlikely partnership, and it is a partnership as she's a pint-sized chip off the block of her tempestuous father, blossoms along a cross-country road trip for a paradise that may or may not exist, while desperadoes and powerful black hat villains are out to impose their will upon the weak. This is explored in a leisurely pit stop with a working class family (welcome back, Eriq La Sale) that welcomes Logan and his posse into their home. We get a small respite and learn about greedy landowners trying to pressure them into giving up the family farm. It's completely reminiscent of something you might see in a classic Western of old, just transported to a new setting. There's even an extended bit where Laura watches 1953's Shane on TV, and when those final words come back in expected yet clunky fashion, I'd be lying if they didn't push the right emotions at the right time.
But when it comes to action, Logan more than satisfies. The action is cleanly orchestrated by Mangold in fluid takes that allow the audience to readily engage. The film doesn't go overboard on the Grand Guignol and lose sight of the key aspects of great action sequences. There's a refreshing variety of the action and combat, and the action is framed tightly to the characters and their goals. It makes for an exhilarating viewing. If there is anything I would cite as a detriment for an otherwise incredible sendoff, I think the movie peaks too soon action-wise. The emotional climax is definitely where it ought to be (tears will be shed whether you like it or not) but the third act action doesn't have quite the pop. Also, while Holbrook (Narcos) is an entertaining and slyly charismatic heavy, the villains in the movie are kept relatively vague as is their overall plan. The vacuum of villainy is kept more one-dimensional, which is fine as it allows more complexity and character moments to be doled out to our heroes, but it is a noticeable missing element.
One of the best attributes I cited from last year's Captain America: Civil War is that the full weight of the character histories was felt, giving real emotional stakes to all the explosions and moralizing. When our characters went toe-to-toe, we felt a dozen films' worth of setup that made the conflict matter. Logan carries that same emotional weight. We've been watching Wolverine and Professor Xavier for almost two decades and across nine films. These characters have gotten old, tired, and they carry their years like taciturn gunslingers looking for solitude and trying to justify the regrets of their lives. It's a surprisingly emotional, serious, and altogether mature final chapter, one that provides just as many enjoyable character moments and stretches of ruminative silence as it does jolts of gritty, dirty, hard-charging action and bloody violence. It's as much a character study as it is a superhero movie or Western. I cannot imagine this story as a watered down, PG-13 neutered version of what I saw on screen. This is a movie for adults and it pays great justice to the characters and the demands of the audience. The final image is note-perfect and can speak volumes about the ultimate legacy of Wolverine and by extension Xavier and his school for gifted youngsters. Logan is the second-best X-Men movie (First Class still rules the roost) and a thoughtful and poignant finish that left me dizzy with happiness, emotionally drained, and extremely satisfied as a longtime fan.
Nate's Grade: A-
Noirvember: Double Indemnity (1944)
Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity is a classic film noir and a classic crime drama about bad people doing bad things and doing them badly. It's a rich narrative environment that has been explored in droves before and after. Double Indemnity was a box-office sensation, critical hit that was nominated for seven Oscars, and solidified Wilder as one of the most creative and daring writing and directing voices in cinema. This was only his third directing effort and it provided the freedom to make his own way through Hollywood. There's a certain danger in going back to cinematic classics. It's easy to see their influence in a sea of imitators and sometimes the accomplishments can be taken for granted just because the viewer is too removed from the initial splash the film made. Double Indemnity is a sharp, surefooted, and highly influential film that still resonates with suspense and intrigue. The formula was refined with Wilder at the helm and his genius can be readily recognized.
Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) is a mid 30s insurance salesman in Los Angeles. He gets into some big trouble when a prospective client, Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), intimates that she would like to bump off her husband and profit from the act. Walter is appalled but also intrigued, drawn to the charms of the sexy Mrs. Dietrichson. He agrees and says they're going to do it right. She takes out a hefty insurance policy on her husband that pays double for rare accidents, which spurs Neff to stage a phony accident where the injured Mr. Dietrichson (Tom Powers) fell to his death off a train. The scheme is elaborate, with alibis, swapped identities, hiding places, and a minimal of public interactions. It seems perfectly executed that is until Neff's boss, Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), starts inspecting closer feeling something is amiss. Neff must outwit his boss and co-workers and keep the scheme from getting further out of control.
"I killed him for money – and a woman – and I didn't get the money and I didn't get the woman."
Thanks to the morally and creatively restrictive Hays Code, it's easy to see all the roadblocks that could have sabotaged the movie from getting made, let alone becoming a great film. It's a movie not just about adulterers but they're also murderers, and the script places you in their perspective, clinging to hope they might succeed in their scheme. Admittedly, the characters are punished for their misdeeds by the film's end as the Hays Code would demand, but the film experience was different, and Wilder made it so early on. Within minutes, as Walter Neff dictates his confession in his boss' empty office, he admits to being a killer, to killing Mr. Dietrichson, and in doing so out of a desire for Mrs. Dietrichson. By the very fact that he's slumped over, panting heavily, and confessing in sordid detail, we can rightfully assume that he did not get away with it. What's left for the audience to discover? Wilder has already established the major turns of his story for his audience and seemingly robbed us of any notion of surprise. But that's where Wilder's storytelling prowess emerges, because it's not so much a story of whether something was done or would be done, it's a story of how and how to elude capture.
We're locked into Neff's perspective, and with it as an experienced insurance salesman, he knows the proper way to stage a murder, make it look like an accident, and not get caught. It's in the details that Wilder hooks us, and as we watch the trap unravel, the movie becomes an exercise in nervous tension wondering what will trip up our lovers. An audience generally gravitates to smart characters trying to outwit others, appreciating the wiles but also, perhaps, wanting to see if the scheme can be accomplished. It pushes the audience into an interesting position of rooting for our murderer. There's a wonderful scene right after Neff and Phyllis have deposited the body of her dead husband. They've hopped in her car and are ready to flee the scene of the crime, and that's when her car won't start. Wilder simmers in the moment, luxuriating in the encroaching panic as key turn after key turn only results in the sounds of a stalled engine. Finally, it starts, but during the sequence you empathize with the killers and their panic. Wilder and company have done their job and at least some part of the audience is pushing for them to escape. What happens later tests audience loyalty, but we're still firmly in the perspective and in the shoes of the film's killer, the only killer in the picture at that. He's our man.
"I think you're rotten."
"I think you're swell – so long as I'm not your husband."
The staples of noir cinema really came alive with Wilder's excellent crime drama. The visual signifiers we associate with the genre are all here in accordance, like the chiaroscuro lighting that bathed the actors in swaths of invading darkness. The lighting does a great job of reflecting the sordid schemes of our lovers. As soon as Walter accepts, the lighting changes drastically and the layers of dark creep in on the actors' faces. The dialogue by Wilder and Raymond Chandler (his first screenwriting gig in Hollywood) has that robust rat-a-tat rhythms of hardboiled genre fiction that we love. The twists and turns keep an audience glued even though we have already been told the major plot particulars. The inclusion of Mr. Dietrich's twenty-something daughter Lola (Jean Heather) from his previous marriage presents an intriguing complication. She suspects her wicked stepmother might have something to do with her father's death as well as her mother's death. Walter Neff keeps tabs on her as a means of trying to dissuade whom she tells her suspicions to, as a means of manipulating her, but then when Lola reveals that her ex-boyfriend has been seeing Phyllis on a nightly basis, we don't know what to think. Is Phyllis setting up her own scheme to kill Neff? Is Lola knowingly manipulating Neff to enact vengeance against her hated stepmother? Is there anyone a guy can trust? It's a fine character and played sincerely by Heather (Going My Way) almost to the point of ache. She stopped acting altogether in 1949, to the detriment of us all.
But the ultimate femme fatale is Stanwyck (The Lady Eve). I think what makes her work is the fact that she doesn't immediately leap to mind as a femme fatale. She's not the most gorgeous actress in Hollywood, though clearly still an attractive woman. The stiff blonde wig they saddled her with doesn't help on that front. She's a temptress that doesn't sizzle off the screen so much as step from the mind because she feels more realistic. Working within the repressive confines of the Hays Code, Stanwyck still knows how to provide a sexy smirk to things left unsaid with her character. There are a few looks she employs that could make you melt. A standout scene focuses entirely on her face. Her husband is being murdered just off screen. That violent act is left to our morbid imaginations while we watch Stanwyck's subtle expression of satisfaction cross her face only to dissolve when she knows better. I wish MacMurray (The Absentminded Professor) was a better scene partner with her. He seems overly stiff like he's trying harder to get out the stylized dialogue in the tone the director wants. Wilder finds ways to subvert the actor's tendencies but I feel like he's at best a likable but limited dolt of an actor.
"You're not smarter, Walter… you're just a little taller."
Phyllis is a classic femme fatale figure and Stanwyck plays her with a beautifully controlled sense of menace, but I want to offer a different theory as to what kind of twisted love story inhabits Double Indemnity. I think Walter Neff was never in love with Phyllis, though he acknowledged her beauty and general seductive effect. This much is clear from his first meeting with her where the insurance veteran can't help himself with how forward and transparent his flirting is. He's interested, though he's also interested in getting a sale, and then when she floats the idea of life insurance, his tone immediately changes. The flirting stops cold and he promptly sees himself out. But he can't stop thinking it over. I propose he isn't drawn to Phyllis so much as he's drawn to the intellectual challenge of pulling off the "perfect crime." He considers himself a clever man and this would put all his skills to the test. He knows what agents look for to suss out foul play. He knows what the police ask about. Now he gets to see if he can fool them all. In this interpretation of mine it's not Neff's love for the dame that gets him but his love of his ego. There's a cold manner in how often he calls Phyllis "baby," lacking apparent affection and instead seemingly turning the pet name into something dutiful. Oh, but you'll argue, his voice over goes into great detail about the magnetic and sexual appeal of Mrs. Dietrichson, and that's the point to remember, that it's his voice over. Neff is retelling this story, knowingly dictating his confession, and perhaps he's playing into a narrative that removes some of the emphasis from his true intentions. I propose Neff is an unreliable narrator. Since it's from his perspective, his words are all we know about Phyllis and her assumed seductress ways. Having the final word on his story would provide a perfect opportunity for Walter to alter the story as best he sees fit, shifting some blame onto the woman who done him wrong. I believe that in the end it was Walter Neff's desire to prove he could outsmart the world of law enforcement and get away with murder that drove him onto this wayward path and not a woman as fetching as Stanwyck and her anklet may have been.
There's a very unexpected emotional current that surfaces fully by the conclusion of Double Indemnity. Edward G. Robinson was at a transitional point in his career, having been the lead in a slew of older crime pictures. An audience was prepped from association to consider Robinson a disreputable character, just as they had prepped to consider MacMurray's character a likeable fellow from his previous comedic roles. Wilder's film flips audience expectations to great effect. MacMurray is the cunning murderer and Robinson is the moral center. Keyes is exceptionally skilled at insurance fraud and it naturally should be him that unknowingly tightens the noose around his beloved employee as he gets closer and closer to the truth. He just can't see it; Walter Neff is so close he inhabits a blind spot. When Keyes does discover the truth, his crushing sense of disappointment he tries to hold back is an emotional moment that hits hard. It's the professional and loving relationship between these men that helps to add something more to Double Indemnity; it's got the noir staples we come to expect nowadays but it also has a surprisingly sweet and affecting father/son relationship between mentor and student. Robinson is terrific in the bravado moments like when he unleashes a torrent of statistical categories on suicide types and methods and he also sells the quiet hurt of a proud man who must admit he placed his trust in the wrong recipient.
"I couldn't hear my own footsteps. It was the walk of a dead man."
Double Indemnity is a film classic that holds up thanks to deft plotting that puts the audience in the place of the killers, solid twists and turns, and a clear understanding of the strengths of the genre. It's a standout film noir that still stands rather tall. It's always reassuring when the great pieces of art can still transport, still excite, and still resonate with the same feeling that communicates why they deserve their decades of plaudits and acclaim. Wilder was one of Hollywood's greatest storytellers who could hop genres like few others. His foray into noir cinema left a long lasting legacy for the genre and its fans to follow, and Double Indemnity is still the crackling crime thriller it was under the Hays Code. Perhaps the scrutiny of censorship forced Wilder and Chandler to get more creative, and the finished product is a taut and stylish imprint that others eagerly copied. There's just something inherently interesting about bad people doing bad things badly no matter the best intentions of the moral crusaders of its day.
Nate's Grade: A
The Accountant (2016)
How much do I have to pay for Ben Affleck to do my taxes?
Christian Wolff (Affleck) is autistic and one of the top accountants in the world, able to quickly penetrate stacks and stacks of numbers to analyze trends and problems. His clientele varies from an older couple trying to save their family farm to the mob. He's also a very dangerous assassin who takes out bad guys with exacting precision. As a young boy, Christian's autism caused great anxiety within his family, and his father was determined that his son would be able to fight back against a world that didn't accept him. Ray King (J.K. Simmons) is a retiring Treasury agent trying to track down the identity of Christian and possibly bring him to justice for his vigilante status. On the run from hired guns, Christian decides to stay and fight rather than flee and start a new identity because a co-worker, Dana (Anna Kendrick), is also targeted. Together they must stay one step ahead of killers and the ensnaring investigation of Ray King.
It would be easy to dismiss the movie as an autistic Bourne imitation, except that The Accountant is exactly that and takes ownership over its more ridiculous plot turns. The major problem with the Bourne series, which I believe is only now fully coming to light now that Jason Bourne has run out of legitimate past memories to remember, is that its lead character is a bore. Jason Bourne is a pragmatic and resourceful killing machine, but you wouldn't want to talk to him at a party. He's a boring character who is only interesting when he's moving forward and inflicting damage. The Accountant has a lead character with the same set of skills but it also makes sure that he's compelling even when he's not killing the bad guys. Christian Wolff is a compelling lead character because he doesn't fit in, he doesn't relate easily to others, and he has social and emotional vulnerabilities that make him easy to root for while also serving to ground him. I'm not saying that those on the autism spectrum would make the world's greatest assassins, though the job does require a dispassionate, detail-oriented mind. I was amused just watching Christian talk to others because I didn't know how he would respond or how others would respond to him. He acts differently and it makes regular interactions interesting, and that's before he becomes a superhuman assassin later. He's leading a double life, and that provides just about every scene with an extra layer of irony, mystery, and intrigue. Christian is an intelligent warrior, working through strategy and improvisation but also luring his opponents into traps. He's deadly but also efficient. He goes for headshots and dutifully moves along. He doesn't play around and neither does the movie. When Dana is trapped in her bathroom with a hired killer on the other side, she takes the toilet lid and smashes the guy's hand. That's exactly what a thinking person should do in this life-or-death scenario. I appreciated that even with the action thriller heroics that the actions of the characters were still credible to their behavior.
The larger world is also populated with interesting characters and a complex story structure to match. I'll readily admit that the screenplay by Bill Dubuque (The Judge) doesn't need to utilize all of the subterfuge it does. We open on one perspective, circle back later with a richer understanding, jump around in time, and then we even sit down with Ray King and the movie takes a 10-15 minute pit stop to explain everything. It's a strange moment where Ray gives us his full back-story, which is unexpected and unnecessary in the overall big picture but I enjoyed the commitment to larger world building. Another great addition was Brax (Jon Bernthal), treated as a parallel storyline for the first half of the film. In two very effective scenes he's introduced with menacing efficiency and he's a memorable foil we know will have to be faced later. I recently watched the atrocious revenge thriller I Am Wrath that was filmed in my city of Columbus, Ohio. There wasn't one enjoyable moment, memorable villain, or even memorable death. In one scene with The Accountant, where Brax convinces his target the reasons why he should kill himself with an insulin overdose, I had an interesting and intimidating foe. The impression is immediate and unmistakable and in one scene you establish his danger. There's a level of detail that isn't seen that often in these kinds of films. There are several storylines and timelines and lingering questions but by the film's end they're all reasonably put back together and the audience is left satisfied. There will be some twists that a quick-witted viewer will be able to anticipate knowing the economy of characters but that doesn't take away from their impact.
Affleck has rightfully earned serious acclaim as a director and screenwriter during his career rebirth but the man deserves his due for his acting as well. By most accounts, he was the best thing about the steaming pile that was Batman vs. Superman, and this is after the Internet exploded in apoplectic fits over his casting. With The Accountant, he gets to play a superhero and a socially challenged outcast, which must seem like the best of both worlds for an actor. Affleck is wonderfully dry and matter-of-fact as Christian. When he jumps into action he has a disciplined sense of purpose that can be fascinating. It's a great lead role for Affleck and he finds interesting ways to demonstrate various emotions through an unorthodox lens. Christian doesn't break down and blab his feelings, nor does he necessarily process emotions in the same conventional sense. He commands the screen whether he's talking or running and shooting bad guys, and that's all I can ask for.
After leaving The Accountant, I desperately wanted more adventures with this lead character and this world, and I was even dreaming up the idea of adapting this concept into a weekly TV crime procedural. It's rare that a movie leaves me wanting more, and it's even more rare when a movie leaves me wanting to watch a weekly variation of Christian Wolff living as whiz kid accountant by day and enforcer of justice by night. Director Gavin O'Connor (Jane Got a Gun) has given me a glimpse of a world that has plenty of shades of moral ambiguity but still dishes out the action thriller goods. It begins like A Beautiful Mind, shifts into a Bourne adventure, and then concludes like a mixture of Haywire and O'Connor's own Warrior. There is far more action than I thought there would be. It blends the influences and tones without losing its own sense of identity as well as its pinpoint sense of what an audience craves for entertainment value. The movie doesn't treat those on the autism spectrum as freaks or as "others." It feels far less exploitative or borderline manipulative with its inclusive message than, say, Rain Man. The reason he's a super assassin isn't because he has autism but because his insane father trained him to be Batman to combat his autism. The non-linear narrative doesn't need to be as purposely hard to follow but it does keep the audience guessing until the climax. The Accountant is a character study, a twisty thriller, an exciting action movie, an overall satisfying slice of good vs. evil, and a world that I need weekly adventures, please.
Nate's Grade: B+
The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Obviously the new Magnificent Seven remake was never going to be as good a Western as the 1960 original, or as good an action movie as its source material, Akira Kurosawa's legendary Seven Samurai. Once you accept that, the question becomes whether simply being an enjoyable Western action movie qualifies as a success given its storied pedigree. If you can't do better than the original, why bother making it as my friend Ben Bailey would question. The answer is of course blunt (money) but the conundrum is how does one improve on classic film masterpieces? I think the new Magnificent Seven found its footing by accepting its unquestioned ceiling and instead going down a different path, instilling the essence of what made the older films so superb, and just trying to be the best B-student it can be with its new set of guidelines for broad entertainment.
The dusty town of Rose Creek falls under attack by ruthless industrialist Bartholomew Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard), who wants the land for his mining company. He installs loyal toadies as lawmen for the town and to ensure any troublemakers are put to "justice." Emma Cullen (Haley Bennett) wishes to avenge her fallen husband and recruits a famous outlaw, Chisolm (Denzel Washington). He agrees to help and rustles up a powerful posse of gunslingers to defend the town from Bogue and his cruel forces.
There's a reason this story still works as well as it does and that's because the structure is ready-made for payoffs and audience satisfaction if the director and actors are capable. Act One establishes the threat and our two main roguish heroes, and then Act Two starts off with the gathering of the team, routinely one of the greatest sequences in screenwriting, and then the Act Two midpoint involves toppling the corrupt thugs controlling the town, and Act Three is the culmination between the forces of anti-hero good versus evil over the ultimate battle for the town. It's an against-all-odds underdog tale with good but possibly doomed forces against a villain used to steamrolling through vulnerable citizens. I don't care whom you are, that story structure worked then and it still works now. Fuqua and company don't break a winning formula and know what strengths they have and how best to maximize them for top entertainment value.
The biggest asset is this glorious cast, headlined by Washington and Chris Pratt (Guardians of the Galaxy). There isn't admittedly much to these characters from a development standpoint. They're given back-stories, though some of them are fairly airy and provide a bare minimum of effort. Red Harvest (Martin Sensmeier) in particular just kind of shows up and everybody shrugs and says, "Why not?" more or less. Also, while on this subject, it's a bit contrived that when the bad side has their own villainous Native American that the script has to conspire for the only two Native Americans to face-off, especially when we've been given no history or connection between them prior to this climactic showdown. Back to the main cast, Washington settles into his suave badass persona we've come to expect from the man. He even fades into the background at times, ceding space for the other characters to have their moments. Make no mistake, though, because Washington's character is a strong central anchor for this movie and even on autopilot this actor still produces attitude with style and gravitas. There's also the simple pleasure of just watching Washington in a Western. The man was made for this setting of taciturn badasses. The brightest star of the picture is Pratt, expertly cast as a charming rogue with a big personality. What the characters lack in development they make up for in colorful personalities, which is acceptable in a genre that rewards memorably outsized figures of entertainment. Pratt is a fun rascal with a penchant for sarcasm and playing around with his prey. Every minute Pratt commanded the screen was a minute that captured my full attention.
The rest of the cast is solid and make the most of their screen time, putting in memorable supporting performances to compliment the stars. Vincent D'Onofrio (Jurassic World) is basically like a human equivalent of a bear or yeti. He's this massive and animalistic creature and I appreciated D'Onofrio's gusto in embracing the peculiarities. In a film of great casting and memorable characters, he nearly steals the movie. Ethan Hawke (Boyhood) has one of the more credible character arcs in the film as well as the best name (Goodnight Robicheaux). He's haunted by a lifetime accumulation of killing. His flinty co-star Byung-hun Lee (RED 2) is the strong silent type and the two of them have a nice gunslinger chemistry, nicely contrasting but still a believable brotherhood in arms. Bennett (Hardcore Henry) is going to break out in a big way in 2016. She has a very arresting face (it's her eyes) and an instant screen presence, which is hard to do with these guys soaking up much of the oxygen. She also gets to prove her mettle and not be treated as a romantic object, so hooray. My one concern with Bennett was that the costume designer had let her down, as it seemed the top of her gown was dangerously close to slipping off her shoulders at several key points. I understand this is designed to squeeze in a slight surge of sensuality for what is very much a PG-13 action flick but it became distracting with its obviousness. Bennett deserved better, though she might be another figure of T&A with her role in The Girl on the Train. We shall see (maybe much). The only sore spot is the villain, a wasted Sarsgaard (Black Mass) who never quite lives up to a diabolical nature worthy of the attention of our colorful cadre of anti-heroes. He's a bully but he doesn't seem formidable enough or that interesting.
Fuqua (The Equalizer) hasn't been the most consistent stager of action with his up-and-down career but he puts out all the stops with The Magnificent Seven to great effect. The action sequences are robust and shot with great attention to geography and escalation. I knew exactly what the stakes were with each sequence and gun battle, and I knew the different people and their placement and the goals. With a crew of seven and counting, it can be difficult to adequately find room for each of the fighters to be well utilized and have at least a moment that matters (just look at what happened with Suicide Squad). The second half of Act Two is our team plotting how to compensate for the overwhelming forces coming down their way, and the plotting produces plenty of opportunities as the audience watches the setups and waits for the payoff jamboree. There are little payoffs, big payoffs, crowd-pleasing payoffs, character arc pleasing payoffs; it's an action movie that knows the climax should be the best part, and it doesn't disappoint. The town may be in rubble and strewn with corpses by film's end, but you'll be happy and content from the wealth of tense and smartly directed action. Helping things along, Fuqua's Wild West photography is often strikingly beautiful with its use of natural light.
The Magnificent Seven makes up for its lack of originality and rich characters in colorful personality and the sheer scope and intensity of its action. It can't contend with John Sturgis and Akira Kurosawa, but what modern movie can? I don't fault the movie for failing to live up to the standards of two classics in two different genres. I instead credit the movie for knowing its strengths and knowing how best to develop and deliver them for maximum mass appeal enjoyment. The cast is wonderfully selected and given fun characters to dig into, and the onscreen camaraderie of our seven might not rise to the level of magnificence but it's pretty good by all accounts. That's a rather keen summary of the movie writ large; with modestly recalculated expectations, the movie may not be magnificent but it's plenty good and plenty entertaining. Washington and Pratt are stars making full use of their broad star appeal. The action sequences are well staged and peppered with payoffs, and it's worth congratulating the team on having several parallel lines of action and keeping all of the shifting particulars understandable for its audience. The Magnificent Seven is about as good as I expected any remake to be, and while it doesn't rise to those storied heights it does achieve its goals with vigor and style.
Nate's Grade: B
Suicide Squad (2016)
After watching the debacle that was Batman vs. Superman, I said it had killed my hope for the larger DC film brand. Thanks to writer/director David Ayer, and by extension Zack Snyder's ongoing influence, Suicide Squad reconfirms every bad step they're down on this bad road of anti-entertainment.
Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) is worried about national security in a world where a certain Kryptonian has upended our sense of priority. She wants to assemble a team of bad guys who can do some good. Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) is placed as the commander of a "suicide squad," a black ops team of super villains that are injected with devices to make their heads go kablooey if they disobey. Among the ranks is Deadshot (Will Smith), a paid assassin who never misses, Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), the former psychiatrist and lover to The Joker (Jared Leto), an Aussie named Boomerang (Jai Courtney), Diablo (Jay Hernandez), a guy with the ability to control fire, a human-crocodile hybrid named appropriately Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), and the Enchantress (Carla Delevigne), a thousands-year-old spirit inhabiting the body of Dr. June Moone, who also happens to be Flag's girlfriend. Assisting Flag is Katana (Karen Fukuhara), a masked swordfighter with a tragic and mystical past. The Squad is thrown into harms way and have to work together as a group if they plan on surviving.
The tone and structure of the movie is like an unholy marriage of Stephen Sommers' (The Mummy) sense of careless plotting and archetypes, mish mashing tones, and Joe Carnahan's (Smokin' Aces) sense of wanton violence, killer cool killers, and militaristic fetishism. It's a problematic pairing of tone that almost sort of works in the opening twenty minutes as it sets up the various bad guys with their requisite little slices of backstory. Primarily Deadshot and Harley Quinn are the spotlight characters, and it helps that the two most charismatic actors play them. The first twenty minutes doesn't exactly push the narrative forward in a meaningful way as it involves Davis digressing with an armada of high-energy flashbacks, but it's almost forgivable. Her pitch to the government for a black ops team of super villains seems credible enough in this anxiety-ridden world, so Ayer has at least started off not quite well but well enough. And then it all goes downhill so fast into a vortex of suck and cannot recover.
It was at the first act break that I knew this movie wasn't going to recover and get better. You see the advertising has been very secretive about who the true antagonist is for this movie, which is none other than the Enchantress. The introduction of this Jekyll/Hyde character and her power is initially interesting, though she certainly stands out in a world of meta-humans. The problem is that this character is obviously far more powerful than everyone else in the movie, as evidenced by Waller's "show off" moment having the Enchantress teleport and bring back nuclear secrets from a hostile foreign nation. I think Ayer realizes this and so he quickly, and I mean quickly, positions the character as the Big Bad of the film. Dr. June Moone whispers the word "Enchantress" and she appears, and then she whispers it in her sleep and, oh no, the wicked witch lady is out and nobody seems to have any contingency for this. How has nobody thought about the risk of her accidentally saying this one word? Should she be sleeping with some sort of gag?
Enchantress steals the other ancient idol containing the spirit of her brother, which is just hanging around for some unknown reason, and the two of them are distraught that mankind, which once worshiped them, has moved on. They're going to destroy the world by making a vague world-destroying machine, which basically comes across as a giant energy portal. The brother becomes the primary villain, a giant heavy with dumb tentacle weapons, and the two of them take human beings and turn them into a faceless army of disposable soldiers thank to the power of Enchantress kissing them. It's at this point that the movie reminded me of Sommers' Mummy Returns sequel where the goofy tone and careless development swallowed the movie whole, shrugging and saying, "What more did you want from us?" The villains are quasi-Egyptian gods who want to destroy the world. The last act finally positions the Enchantress as the one to topple, and our anti-heroes are attacking her with guns and baseball bats. It's just laughable and not in the good way. The entire Enchantress as villain storyline is a swirling CGI mess and her army of faceless henchmen inspire no interest or dread.
You would rightfully think that a movie about a ragtag team of kooky anti-heroes would be darkly comic and have a whimsical sense of fun, much like what James Gunn achieved with Guardians of the Galaxy. I walked out of Suicide Squad dumbfounded and muttering to myself, "How… how do you screw this up?" I think the movie has confused snark with humor. There is precious little that comes across as funny. The characters have some one-liners but that's about it, and they grow tiresome after a while. Suicide Squad is a classic example of trying too hard; it's all empty posturing and posing, asking for plaudits about how edgy this cut-and-dry PG-13 movie must be with its mall Goth aesthetic and irreverent sense of good and evil. It tries so hard to be edgy that you can see the onscreen flop sweat. Case in point: the avalanche of music selections. In the first ten minutes or so it feels like there is one needle-drop music selection mere seconds after another, and Ayer chooses a mixture of artists for their on-the-nose lyrics. "You Don't Own Me" for Harley Quinn especially, "Come Baby Come" just for a scene involving a bat with the choice lyrics, "swing batter batter batter," a cover of Nirvana's "Lithium" because it has "friends in my head" as a lyric, "Sympathy for the Devil" for many obvious reasons, "Spirit in the Sky" when the gang is airborne, "Seven Nation Army" when the gang is put together, and so on. If there were a handful of on-the-nose music selections, it would be passable, but it's almost like the overzealous music director worked overtime to provide as many selections as possible to cover-up the movie's empty sense of fun.
No character symbolizes the film's ethic of trying too hard more than Leto's (Dallas Buyers Club) rendition of the Joker. Admittedly Heath Ledger's performance was iconic and cannot be replicated, but Ayer's script doesn't even justify the character's presence. There is no standout or memorable scene with the Joker to help signify just what kind of character he is, how he's far different and more dangerous than your everyday psychopath. If you called this guy a different name you would swear it's a different character because they fail to make his inclusion meaningful. We see Joker in flashbacks relating to Harley Quinn, and it's in these short moments that the character plays best, in particular a high dive into a vat of chemicals all in the name of twisted love. Through Harley, we get a fleeting sense of a Sid and Nancy sort of courtship that could be interesting. However, alone, Leto's Joker is a wash, intimidating guards with lackluster "crazy talk" and maniacal giggles. There's a shot of him lying on the ground surrounded by a carefully constructed circle of weapons. It's a small moment but it makes him seem more OCD than scary.
Joker's storyline is trying to free his girl from prison, but the larger problem is that Harley Quinn is a worse character when she's with her "puddin'" Mr. J. She loses her independence and just becomes arm candy and settles into The Girlfriend in Short Shorts. She elevates him and he drags her down. That's a direct problem with characterization. The Joker is a distraction to the other characters and his small scenes tracking her down do not excuse the detour. Leto snarls and struts but it feels over conscious and dull. There is a better way to use the Joker: make him the target of the Squad. That pushes Harley Quinn directly into the center of the story and provides plenty of internal conflict for her to wrestle with her tortured psyche and sense of adoration for a man who had tortured her and abandoned her. That would be more interesting. In the Snyder universe, we have a Batman who has no compulsion against killing his enemies, so why the hell is the Joker still alive to terrorize? It seems bizarre that Affleck's Batman would let this guy go unless the fan conspiracy theory that the Joker is secretly a disturbed Jason Todd, a former Robin, was accurate. That would make the character instantly more intriguing and provide some needed depth to what is a shallow character that is all exaggerated attitude. He's the worst modern Joker but not the worst part of the movie.
The characters are just not that interesting and the far majority of the Squad teammates are meaningless background players. Killer Croc, Boomerang, Slipknot, and Katana are utterly useless in this movie. They fill out space and kill some faceless bad guys, but their plots could just as easily been attached to the other Squad members. Katana in particular is another one that feels like she's been pulled in from a different movie entirely. She's introduced as this killer assassin and Flag says, offhand to the point of hilarity, that her sword captures the souls of the men it kills. There's a later moment where she's swearing her love to the trapped soul of her husband in the glowing blade, and I just couldn't hold back and started laughing. I'm sure this point is directly taken from the comics, but it's thrown in without any care, any setup, and its tone is directly conflicting with the snarky nogoodniks. Diablo is given a boring and predictable arc but he at least has a dollop of characterization outside "zany" or "menacing" because he wants to not use his fire-starting powers. These characters just don't matter to the story, and the actors aren't given anything close to resonant character moments to make them matter to us. The Batman cameos are completely superfluous as well. There's no reason that our criminals couldn't have been brought in from other circumstances. Batman also has a creepy moment where it seems like he's forcing himself on Harley Quinn to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It's such an off-putting and curious moment I kept waiting for Bruce Wayne to wake from another dream sequence.
I think back on Captain America: Civil War again and how the filmmakers were able to deftly integrate a bevy of heroes and make them matter, giving each one a small moment to be fleshed out, providing arcs, and incorporating them in exciting and satisfying ways into combat that would let them show off their stuff. Suicide Squad is not that.
There isn't one good action sequence in this whole movie, and with the Enchantress army of monster goons, it starts to feel like an extended episode of the Power Rangers but with an oversight of firearms. What's the point of bringing in a bunch of weird characters with super powers if all they get to do is one gunfight after another? Once the Squad lands in Raccoon City, er, I mean whatever city ground zero is, the movie is one long slog to eventually confront the Enchantress. It's one abandoned street filled with goons to get shot down after another. Repetition settles in and Ayer doesn't use the opportunity to have his characters do something fun or different. The action doesn't excite and the characters don't excite, and everyone trudges, head down, to their dire destination in the sky. It feels like a shadowy warzone without a clear objective, direction, or understanding of the threat. There is one interesting aspect of the action that's never developed as it should be, and it's the Squad's vulnerability to losing Flag. Not only does he have the control to make their heads burst, if he is killed in action then the Squad dies too. Deadshot realizes that the team has to defend Flag and out-rightly rescue him a couple of times. It reminds me of a video game escort mission but Ayer never really does much more than having his characters recognize this dynamic. As much thought is put into the action as put into the antagonists, which is to say little. Some of the action is so poorly edited and choreographed that I just hit my head against the back of my chair and waited for it to be over.
There are a few bright spots in the film, mostly provided by the lead actors. Smith (Focus) is still one of the world's most charismatic actors even if he's saddled with the rote "I wanna see my daughter" storyline to humanize his remorseless assassin. Smith relishes his anti-authority figure and settles into a comfortable and appealing groove. Robbie (The Wolf of Wall Street) is delightful and her character's zany non-sequiturs are more often funny than grating. You can tell Ayer is also a fan, as his camera lovingly oogles her body. It's a performance that whets your appetite for more Harley Quinn that the movie doesn't seem to be able to deliver, especially when it starts to go down a route that presents her almost sentimentally. Davis (The Help) does a fine job selling her badass tough guy moments as the leader of the program. I don't quite buy the "government/jailers are the real bad guys" angle the movie consistently presents to elevate its Dirty Dozen. The "worst of the worst" can't be all that bad considering we're working under the mandate of a mainstream PG-13 rating. They're villains with gooey centers and moral codes.
It's not at the punishing level of disaster that Batman vs. Superman wrecked, but this is a movie that is plenty bad, and not in the good way, or the fun way, just in the bad way. Even things that should be saving graces for a comic book movie about antiheroes, the fun personalities and visuals, are lacking. Ayer doesn't know what to do with his overabundance of characters once he gets them assembled and he doesn't have the visual dynamism of a Snyder. Ayer has talent with writing machismo characters and can even be a fine director of action as he proved with the sturdy WWII tank movie, Fury. It certainly feels like this movie got away from him. If this is trying to be an over-the-top B movie, it fails. If it's trying to be a flashy and stylish diversion, it fails. If it's trying to be a subversive take on super heroes, it fails. It just doesn't work. It wants to thumb its nose at super hero movies and dance to its own anarchic, nihilistic beat, but you never believe the movie's own convictions. It feels like empty posturing, confusing attitude and costuming for edge. It felt like some film exec pointed at Guardians of the Galaxy and said, "Make us one of those." The sad thing is that Batman vs. Superman wasn't good but it was at least ambitious, having to set up multiple franchises, serve as a sequel and reintroduce Batman. Suicide Squad had to do considerably less with the easy task of making a group of crazy anti-heroes as popular entertainment, and it flounders. It's going to be a long wait until 2017's Wonder Woman, the next DC movie in their larger plan to compete with the Marvel big boys, and the howls from dissatisfied moviegoers will echo until then, providing a pessimistic landscape for every new scrap of footage and trailer. Remember that the Suicide Squad trailer looked mighty good too and the actual movie is well and truly awful. Sometimes the packaging is the best part and sometimes it's the only part.
Nate's Grade: C-


text:
Delayed deliveries delight: Global LNG shipping - fleet database update
You can pay by card or invoice
Report summary
Just two-thirds of the 39 vessels scheduled for delivery in 2016 had been delivered by early December; bringing some relief to owners struggling in an over-supplied market. The 26 vessel already delivered have expanded fleet capacity by 6.6% in 2016; if all the other 13 scheduled vessels are delivered in December fleet capacity will expand 9.9% in 2016. Without further ship retirements or delivery slippage, fleet capacity will grow 9.6% in 2017 and 8.5% in 2018. Five new LNG ships have been ordered so far in 2016. Further details of these new orders and recent changes to the current fleet ownership and employment have been captured in our updated LNG fleet database; which can be found in the related Excel download.
What's included
This report contains
Table of contents
- Executive summary
Tables and charts
This report includes 2 images and tables including:
- Orders and deliveries v. short-term charter rates
- Deliveries by size v. fleet development
You may be interested in
Global LNG shipping - fleet database April 2016
Global LNG shipping - fleet database July 2017
Global LNG shipping - fleet database July 2018
Questions about this report?
Europe:+44 131 243 4400
Americas:+1 713 470 1600
Asia Pacific:+65 6518 0800

subset: commoncrawl


text:
A situation in which Private Fee-for-Service Plan providers (doctors or hospitals) can charge and bill you 15% more than the plan's payment amount for services.
Learn more about medical coding and billing, training, jobs and certification.
© Copyright 2018, AAPC
Privacy Policy | Terms & Conditions | Contact Us
Call 877-290-0440 or have a career counselor call you.
Call 877-524-5027 to speak with a specialist.


text:
Charles Scicolone (above) is one of America's most respected and beloved Italian wine experts.
From his encyclopedic knowledge of the wines of Italy, his many years tasting the best in Italian wine and traveling in Italian wine country, to his old-world charm and New York chutzpah, Charles enjoys a unique station among his Italian wine colleagues and peers.
We couldn't be more thrilled to discover that he has shared his impressions of the wines of Cantele on his blog.
Thank you, Charles!


text:
6900 E WILDCAT Drive Scottsdale, AZ 85266
Hi, Eric Johnson.
My name is
and I have a question about 6900 E WILDCAT Drive Scottsdale
You can respond by either emailing me at
or call during
My Question Is:
Estimated Monthly Payment$5,051
- Photos
- Location
- Questions
- Share
- Mortgage Calculator
- Status: Active
Listing courtesy of Realty Marketing Group
REDUCED AGAIN * BEST DEAL IN THE AREA * LOCATION * LOCATION * LOCATION * FANTASTIC 2.14 ACRE LOT FOR THE BUYER LOOKING FOR A LOT WITH DRAMATIC MOUNTAIN VIEWS * EASY ACCESS * CUSTOM HOME COMMUNITY * UTILITIES AND WATER EASILY ACCESSIBLE * GREAT OPPORTUNITY FOR YOUR DISCRIMINATING BUYER LOOKING FOR PRIVACY AND A GREAT LOCATION TO BUILD THAT DREAM HOME WITH HORSE PRIVILEGES * BUYER TO VERIFY ALL INFORMATION IN MLS * WILDCAT DR HAS A COATED SEALANT TO ENHANCE THE ROADWAY * A MUST SEE LOT WITH LOCATION, VIEWS AND OPPORTUNITY..., Directions SCOTTSDALE RD & WILDCAT DR WEST TO THE SUBJECT AT THE CORNER OF 69TH ST & WILDCAT DR...
Interior Features Include:No Information Available.
Exterior Features Include:
Fence None
Acreage: 2.1400 Acres
Description Corner Lot, North/South Exp, Mountain View(s)
Other Features Include:
Water: City Franchise
Sewer: No Sewer/Septic
James Eric Johnson, PLLC
Cell: (623) 628-8543
Work: (623) 628-8543
Email: email@example.com
Information provided by the Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service, and is deemed reliable but not guaranteed accurate. Copyright 2009 Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service, Inc. All rights reserved. Indicates a property listed by a real estate brokerage other than the owner of this site.


text:
Hotels in Echem, Germany
Search & Compare Echem Hotels
Save up to 40%!
Get instant savings with Secret Prices
Best hotels in Echem
Echem overviewMake it a point to see sights like Furstengarten and Golf Resort. Echem is an inviting destination that has something for everyone.
Where to stay in EchemWhether you're planning to stay for a night or for the week, the area around Echem has accommodations to fit every need. Search for hotels in Echem with Hotels.com by checking our online map. Our maps display the areas and neighborhoods around all Echem hotels so you can see how close you are from landmarks and attractions, and then refine your search within the larger area. The best Echem hotel deals are here with our lowest price guarantee.
How to get to EchemFly in to Hamburg (HAM), 30 mi (48.2 km) from downtown Echem.
What to see around EchemSome highlights of the area include:
- • Furstengarten
- • Golf Resort
- • Totenhaus von Tesperhude
- • Monastery Luene & Textile Museum
- • Luene Abbey
When to visit EchemWondering what time of year to travel, or what clothes to pack? Here are seasonal norms to help you with your planning:
Seasonal temperature averages
- January-March: 50°F day, 30°F night
- April-June: 72°F day, 36°F night
- July-September: 74°F day, 45°F night
- October-December: 58°F day, 31°F night
- January-March: 0.20 inches
- April-June: 0.24 inches
- July-September: 0.28 inches
- October-December: 0.24 inches


text:
By Chris Mabonga
When Mowzey Radio shot the 'Kyuma' Video featuring the sexy diva Spice Diana little did he know it would turn out to be the last time he ever stepped on a camera set.
Only known to God, when his time finally came, he had to pass on but he left with us a gift we shall always cherish.
Not because he didn't have other amazing videos but the 'Kyuma' video was his very last piece of music video he shot before his demise and that means quite a lot emotionally to music lovers.
Ladies and gentlemen, we introduce to you the most anticipated 'Kyuma' video


text:
Red Fish Grill News - Print This Page
NOLA Bred, NOLA Fed
By Paul Oswell
What's the idea behind one of the most respected culinary names in New Orleans? Simple. "Serving Louisiana's bounty gives the soulfulness to every dish."
Ralph Brennan knows of what he speaks. For a man with five acclaimed restaurants, culinary prowess that runs in his genes, and a literal lifetime of experience, you'd suspect there's more to the formula. And there is another key aspect that drives his work: pleasing customers.
"I'm in the people business," says Brennan. "I tell every staff member at all of my restaurants that we're there to deliver a total dining experience. It goes beyond the food, and I tell them they should strive for the thrill of making our customers happy."
Of course, you don't become a legendary restauranteur in a town like New Orleans without a nod to some incredible food. Food matters here even more than it does in gastronomic hot spots such as New York or San Francisco.
"Food is ingrained in New Orleans life," says Brennan. "It's in the culture if you live here. And if you visit, it's what you do when you arrive."
To read more, follow the link provided.


text:
At least one-fourth of all American families deal with some form of serious brain disorder. Liz Spikol tells it plain.
Liz Spikol is a senior contributing editor at the Piladelphia Weekly. She manages bipolar disorder with medication. This is her story about electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). At eleven minutes, it is longer than the average Youtube clip but well worth the watch.
Saturday, July 19, 2008
The Skeleton in Your Closet
at 4:31 PM
Labels: bipolar disorder, ECT, Liz Spikol
No comments:
Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)


text:
Calling all TradingScreen friends in Paris!
Please join us in The City of Light on November 17, 2015 for our 2nd Annual European Buy Side Trading Forum. The full day conference includes a packed schedule of discussions, panels, networking and is followed by a cocktail reception. If you are interested in attending, please register now, as space is limited.
Click here for registration and information


text:
"With the Cato platform, Cloud Sidekick is innovatively expanding the on-premise cloud automation options available to Eucalyptus customers for simplifying application deployments."
- Rich Wolski, CTO, Eucalyptus Systems
Atlanta, GA (PRWEB) May 07, 2012
Cloud Sidekick, creator of the open source Cato Cloud Orchestration Platform, today announced the Early Access Program release of Cato Enterprise Edition (EE), which extends the open source Community Edition (CE) by adding Storm Deployment Automation and support for High Availability management server configurations. Storm is a new declarative provisioning feature that enables cloud developers and operations staff to create AWS CloudFormation compatible deployment configurations that can be deployed into Eucalyptus private clouds as easily as the AWS EC2 public cloud. Cato EE also enables a high availability architecture for increased management server scalability and fault tolerance.
The Cato Cloud Orchestration Platform is the culmination of more than 10 years of development work managing application lifecycles in complex, distributed data center environments such as T-Mobile USA. Cato delivers a proven, cost-effective and open source alternative to manage deployment and operations for public cloud, private cloud and data center resources with fully on-premise cloud management servers.
Deployments are managed from Ecosystem Templates that govern resource provisioning, configuration, operations and access control for user self-service. Rather than placing yet another agent on managed instances, Cato employs an agentless architecture that automates real-time, interactive sessions with IaaS clouds and application resources (servers, credentials, volumes, objects, etc.). To simplify operational automation, Cato enables resource tagging within private clouds and provides a central library of parameter-driven automation routines with comprehensive scheduling flexibility.
"Cato was architected to help DevOps teams cost-effectively automate and orchestrate best of breed configuration management, runtime automation and monitoring solutions to manage cloud applications without requiring additional agents on the managed servers," said Dennis Ehle, CEO of Cloud Sidekick. "With Cato Enterprise Edition, customers can now choose their preferred configuration management tool like Chef or Puppet and their preferred monitoring tool like Zabbix or Zenoss and orchestrate them from the Cato platform. Just as within AWS deployments, managing private cloud deployment automation with CloudFormation compatible Ecosystem Templates allows for simplified, modular instance configurations as the configuration management tools no longer need to address multi-server orchestration. At the end of the day, Cato fills a market gap between labor intensive and potentially fragile do-it-yourself cloud deployments and the expensive, hosted cloud management options at the other end of the spectrum."
"It's up to each customer to choose their tools and approach for deployment, monitoring and management of cloud applications based on individual requirements," said Rich Wolski, CTO of Eucalyptus Systems. "With the Cato platform, Cloud Sidekick is innovatively expanding the on-premise cloud automation options available to Eucalyptus customers for simplifying application deployments. Eucalyptus customers see the value in automating application deployment configurations. AWS CloudFormation-compatible templates offer customers a standard and repeatable way to support public, hybrid, and private cloud deployments on AWS and Eucalyptus cloud infrastructure."
Eucalyptus and Cloud Sidekick are hosting a webinar on Thursday, May 31st to demonstrate a single CloudFormation template being used to provision and configure the same multi-tier application on both AWS public and Eucalyptus private clouds. The webinar will also address how IAM can be used to dynamically create application specific access controls for highly secure configurations. Click here to register.
About Cloud Sidekick
Cloud Sidekick enables organizations to provision, configure, orchestrate and manage their applications on cloud and data center infrastructures with its proven, open source Cato Cloud Orchestration Platform. Cato was created to help DevOps teams cost-effectively automate and orchestrate best of breed configuration management, runtime automation and monitoring solutions to manage cloud applications without requiring additional agents on the managed servers. Cato additionally leverages AWS CloudFormation compatible JSON templates to extend the AWS compatibility of Eucalyptus private clouds to include declarative application deployment automation. With Cato, a single template can define the resources, cloud mappings and parameters needed to provision, configure and manage multi-server deployments in both Amazon and Eucalyptus clouds. The net result is transparent, repeatable, automated cloud deployments without giving away the keys to the kingdom. To learn more about Cato, call 678-251-4205 or visit http://www.cloudsidekick.com.
# # #


text:
To better protect and serve their populations, many local, regional and national departments and agencies are looking to Valmont for reliable poles, towers and sign structures for public safety applications.
Get started now. Connect with Valmont on your next traffic monitoring or public safety project.
Building on a strong heritage with proven results, Valmont offers robust traffic structures for mounting traffic cameras, installing emergency siren poles and creating custom-built structures for Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) Signs to facilitate traffic flow and convey dynamic messages.
For essential infrastructure designed to stand firm when it is needed most, contact your local Valmont representative.