bourne ultimatum Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Crank: High Voltage comes out this weekend, which sends Jason Statham back into a frenzied pinball movie world that has his sweaty bald head running at top speed to keep himself alive ... again. So if you want to keep your levels pegged at 11 this weekend, you might want to consider one of these other movies that have pure Russian racehorse levels of adrenaline pumping through their veins. When we say adrenaline fueled, we don't just mean hyperkinetic, no-attention-span-editing and lots of boring action sequences. That might even qualify Hannah Montana: The Movie for this list.

No, we mean you're on the edge of your seat, neck and shoulders tense, and eyeballs propped open like Malco McDowell in A Clockwork Orange. Cinematical urges you to try this at your own risk, and does not recommend any artery-clogging snacks in the midst of your movie madness. You'll need those suckers wide open to keep the heartpump chugging away, and you can consider yourself exercised for the month of April if you make it through at least three of these movies by Sunday.

Crank

Before writer-directors Neveldine and Taylor concocted another way to brutalize Jason Statham onscreen, they originally did it in this underrated film from 2006. I went into Crank with zero knowledge of the movie, other than the fact that the guy from the Transporter movies, Snatch, and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels was in it. I'd hated the Transporter series, but loved the other two so I thought I'd give this a shot. 87 minutes later, I peeled my sweat-soaked back from the theater seat and staggered out to the car. This is non-stop, pure over the top action, and it's well worth seeing. Just take your meds before watching.

The British film fans have spoken, and their favorite flick from 2007 was (drum roll please) Paul Greengrass' The Bourne Ultimatum. Third entry in the very popular Bourne series (and the winner of three Oscars!), Ultimatum was picked (by the public) over Atonement, No Country for Old Men, and a whole host of "more prestigious" films.

According to Variety, the public vote arrives as part of the Richard Attenborough Film Awards, which dole out "normal" critic-type awards, but also open a vote to the general public. And, not surprisingly, the British people have responded by choosing ... a good movie! How cool is that? If we had this award in America, it'd no doubt go to Jigsaw, Tyler Perry or Larry the Cable Guy -- but in the UK, they dig the Bourne.

Other winners at the Attenboroughs include James McAvoy (Best Actor, Atonement), Cate Blanchett (Best Actress, Elizabeth 2: Frock Harder), [Sam Riley as] Ian Curtis (Rising Star, Joy Division) and a bunch more for Atonement.

Name a trilogy with no weak link: OK, Star Wars, sure. Lord of the Rings, obviously. Back to the Future? Sure, I dig the third one too. But as the years go by I really hope that Universal's Bourne trilogy achieves that sort of shelf life, because after the last several hours rediscovering the movies, I'm convinced it's one of the best trilogies ever made. The first (The Bourne Identity) was damn good, the second one (The Bourne Supremacy) was even better, and this third one (The Bourne Ultimatum) is now my favorite of the bunch!

Here's some thoughts from my theatrical release review:

Keeping things brief and spoiler-free, here's the plot: We pick up mere seconds after the conclusion of Supremacy, and if you thought the treachery ended with the demise of Ward Abbott (Brian Cox), then you probably haven't seen that many spy movies. Bourne's latest pursuer is CIA Deputy Director Noah Vosen (David Strathairn), who gives chase once Bourne is located trying to give a sympathetic reporter some crucial information. From there it's another supremely satisfying series of chases, escapes, brawls and betrayals. (And of course the filmmakers were smart enough to find something interesting for series regulars Joan Allen and Julia Stiles to do. Both women are quite excellent here.) For his part, Strathairn is as great as always, here displaying a Dustin Hoffman-ish weasel in authority. Other newcomers to the series (Paddy Considine, Edgar Ramirez, Scott Glenn, Albert Finney) add a lot to the mix, but I don't want to give too much away here...

Manhattan-born Tony Gilroy comes from a movie family. His father is Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Frank D. Gilroy (The Subject Was Roses), who also worked on numerous movies and TV shows. His brother is screenwriter Dan Gilroy (Two for the Money), who happens to be married to Rene Russo. His other brother John is a film editor. Additionally, Tony Gilroy found himself lucky enough to be aligned with Taylor Hackford, writing three films in a row: Dolores Claiborne (1995), The Devil's Advocate (1997) and Proof of Life (2000). When that partnership ended, he wound up with another steady job on the three Bourne films: The Bourne Identity (2002), The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007). He also wrote The Cutting Edge (1992), a cult classic among ice skating buffs, and co-wrote the blockbuster Armageddon (1998).

Lately, he's joined that enviable club of friendship with director Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney. Soderbergh produced and Clooney stars in Gilroy's exceptional directorial debut, Michael Clayton, about a law firm "fixer," who gets in over his head. Gilroy recently sat down with Cinematical to discus his new movie. And like a New Yorker who feels safe in his work, he was delightfully honest.

Cinematical: The thing I like best about Michael Clayton is the fact that it's filled with expositional dialogue, but it sounds like actual dialogue. It sounds like characters speaking with one another rather than just imparting information.

Tony Gilroy: No one ever talks about that. You could teach a fifteen-part course on that. It's such a huge part of what I do. I never realized until doing the second Bourne picture what it must be like to work on a TV series where you don't have to introduce people. All the time that you spend working so hard to try to bury that information was just there. What a relief! I don't have to set anybody up. Everybody knows who this guy is. No, I hate it, when you see something that's really bad. Or there are those first four pages of all the Chekhov plays, and you sit there for the first four minutes and you go: OK, tell me who you are. Tell me how you're related. And you just sort of... I'll sit back and relax after four minutes.

Every time I see an action movie with shaky, hand-held camerawork, I take a moment in my review to complain about it, but I never have the room to go into detail about why I hate it so much. Now that Michael Bay's Transformers (360 screens), Rob Zombie's Halloween (371 screens) and Brett Ratner's Rush Hour 3 (400 screens) have fallen into my humble lower domain, I'd like to discus it further.

The earliest example of shaky-cam I can remember comes in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964). Kubrick was known as filmmaker married to smooth, steady camerawork, using long takes, wide, deep compositions and slow, clean, traveling movements. So when he used the hand-held to emphasize the chaos of combat in Dr. Strangelove, it was an innovation. The scene has two important attributes: it's still recorded in long takes, so the viewer has a relatively good idea what's going on, but more importantly, in this particular scene, in this particular movie, it doesn't matter exactly what's going on. Only the larger concept of the fracas itself matters.

Today, just about every other Hollywood film uses shaky-cam, though European filmmakers generally prefer longer takes and less shaking. Since cameras get lighter and easier to use every year, it makes sense. With hand-held, it takes much less time to set up a shot. No more laying down track or mapping out every inch of camera movement. But hand-held has been quickly abused, and it's almost always used wrong. Bay's Transformers is a particularly heinous example. Each time a transformer switches from car to robot, Bay moves his camera right up to the action, as if it's taking place mere inches from our faces. Since the robots are several stories high, this is painfully disorienting. It's like trying to view the Empire State Building by waving a camera in front of a few bricks. Moreover, a filmmaker friend told me that, because the robots were created with CGI, Bay probably added his shaking camera after principal photography, with computers.

Zombie's Halloween should offer a pretty cut-and-dried case study. For dialogue sequences, Zombie keeps the camera fairly still, but when Michael Myers attacks, he begins jerking and lurching around. This does not emphasize the terror. It's more like riding a roller coaster and anticipating a ten-story drop before suddenly finding yourself thrown from the ride. Compare this to John Carpenter's masterful original, which was also filmed handheld, but via long, graceful, gliding Steadicam shots. Part of the problem with most shaky-cam work is that the director is forced to cut it together very quickly to hide the fact that very little is actually visible.

In my book, Ratner's crimes are a good deal worse. Ratner had the opportunity to direct Jackie Chan in his first big Hollywood-financed film. Chan is an exceptionally skilled martial artist. He choreographs his stunts and moves at lightning speed and razor precision. He has even established an emotional logic for his stunts, and he's a fairly good director himself, having made more films in Hong Kong than Ratner has here. Chan's method, and indeed the method of most Hong Kong filmmakers, is to choreograph the action first, then film it clearly without getting the camera in the way. Instead, in all three Rush Hour films, Ratner shakes the camera around and butchers everything Chan does. Nearly every martial arts star working in Hollywood has suffered the same problem, while -- ironically -- the talented Hong Kong directors, who know how to photograph action, have ended up making "B" movies with Jean-Claude Van Damme.

When we humans walk down the street, our heads and eyes bob up and down. But our brains automatically adjust so that our vision remains constant and smooth. If you're walking along a sidewalk and your gaze fixes on a car parked at the end of the block, the car does not jerk up and down. So when a filmmaker runs through the forest carrying the camera and filming the running movement, he's not actually capturing the feel of running. He's capturing chaos. The idea of making a movie is to get into the audience's heads. So by filming smoothly and cutting when necessary -- like the blinking of an eye -- the action should be closer to what everyone can relate to. Brad Bird's Ratatouille (393 screens) offers an excellent example of this. When his rat hero Remy explores the kitchen of the restaurant, Bird's "camera" swoops around the room at top speed, but it never loses the concept of the room. We're always aware of the room and our place in it.

That's the key: space. Even though Paul Greengrass's The Bourne Ultimatum is filmed entirely with shaky-cam, the space is always clear. The old-time Hollywood action directors like Howard Hawks and Raoul Walsh understood this instinctively. Let the audience see. Most of today's "action" directors, I suspect, very simply don't understand action, so they use the shaky-cam as a way to hide their ineptitude. The lack of action and choreography is covered up in the sludge of fast film and fast editing. What's even more perplexing is that nobody ever seems to notice or complain. (One of the most poorly made movies of all time, Gladiator, actually won a Best Picture Oscar.) Audiences are apparently used to shoddy work and wouldn't know good work if it bit them. We deserve better than what we're getting. All it takes is a taste of the good stuff before the bitterness of the bad stuff comes out.

Alright, all you movie hounds. We know you've spent all summer watching the endless slew of sequels, from Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End to Shrek the Third, from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix to The Bourne Ultimatum, from Spider-Man 3 to Rush Hour 3 -- it's been one long, hot, summer. But how well do you know your movie sequel history? Over at the Guardian, they have a nifty little quiz up with questions that will test your sequel mettle. I scored 70% on the first pass, not too bad, I guess (hey some of the questions are a little tricky, I'm not that up on my Leonard Part 6). Go check it out, then let us know how you did.

Now here's a little movie sequel pop quiz for you: Can you put the three stills of each of these series in order?



More after the jump ...

It was International Day yesterday at ShoWest, and while many foreign cinema reps were complaining about shrinking release windows, they were also treated to exclusive product reels previewing clips from this year's big releases. One of these reels was an extended action scene from The Bourne Ultimatum, and according to those who saw the footage, this sequel is going to be another great installment. The Latino Review describes the scene as a rooftop hand-to-hand fight sequence that once again sets the bar high. IESB.net was also excited about the scene and says the third film "is sure to get your heart pumping." Both sites also have praise for footage from Evan Almighty, The Kingdom, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End and Elizabeth: The Golden Age plus pans of previews for (I Now Pronounce You) Chuck and Larry and American Gangster.

The Bourne Identity franchise is a great series to look forward to because its installments don't have to adhere to any fan-base mythology or expectations, nor do they actually have to make much sense in the plot or plausibility departments. They just have to be action spectacles that are choreographed and photographed well and I will be happy. Matt Damon is a good enough actor to make anything else work well enough. Case in point: The Bourne Supremacy, which is even more ridiculous than the first film, especially because of how inane Joan Allen's character is, but is nonetheless one of the most entertaining action films of the past five years. The latest installment will arrive in theaters August 3, which isn't nearly soon enough for me.

Now that Paul Greengrass has won the hearts of American audiences and critics with United 93, he could easily keep hidden his political criticisms of the U.S. and hope for a prolific career in Hollywood. But he doesn't seem to want the easy life. Once the director finishes post-production on The Bourne Ultimatum, he is set to begin work on a film about the aftermath of the Iraq War. He will write a script based on Rajiv Chandrasekaran's non-fiction book Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, and then direct the film for Universal.

Greengrass is no stranger to Iraq. Ten years ago he made a movie for British television called The One That Got Away, about an operation during Desert Storm. His hand-held documentary style is perfectly suited for the discord of the region and its post-invasion events, though he will probably bring something original to the project that hasn't yet been seen in the actual documentaries coming out of the Iraq War.

Despite his putting out mostly apolitical work since arriving in Hollywood, he is typically a political filmmaker and we can probably expect a very critical position from him here. Chandrasekaran's book apparently reveals the failures of the U.S. occupation and presents the whole thing as a major historical disaster. The Washington Post journalist does depict some involved individuals in a good light, though. If Greengrass can keep it as honest and balanced, he might be able to keep some of his patriotic audience.

Just a few weeks ago, Erik was telling us about Gael García Bernal being offered the role of the bad guy in the latest Bourne flick, The Bourne Ultimatum, which is shooting in Tangier. Today, sadly, the website Cinematic Happenings Under Development (CHUD) reports that they have it straight from Bernal himself that he is not going to take the part. Bernal was in New York for a press day for Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu's Babel, when CHUD reporter Devin Faraci asked him what's up with Bourne. While Bernal reportedly said that he loves the Bourne movies, he's too busy at the moment finishing up his directorial debut, Déficit, to take on the role of the Bourne villain.

Personally, I'm bummed that Bernal isn't able to take on this role. He has great range as an actor, and he played it up a little rough in Babel. I'd love to see what Bernal would do with the role of an evil villain. I've loved him in everything I've seen him in, and while he does have a pretty face, what's to say a bad guy has to be rough and ugly? I'm also intrigued to see what Bernal does behind the camera with Déficit. Not a lot is known about the film yet, other than it's about a clash between social classes at a family gathering and that it's set in Mexico (and presumably is in Spanish). One of the things I like best about Bernal is his ability to bounce between different projects. If he turns out to be as good behind the camera as he is in front of it, I guess we can all get over not getting to see him in Bourne.

But still, wouldn't it have been fun to see Bernal and Matt Damon going at each other in some good old hand-to-hand combat? Too bad.

[ via Comingsoon.net ]