Movies

He plays the most lethal sniper in American military history

Anyone who has seen the Hangover movies knows Bradley Cooper was already in great shape. But in order to play the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history in American Sniper, he needed to add 40 pounds of muscle.

“He was eating about every 55 minutes or something like that, and I want to say it was about 8,000 calories a day,” the film’s writer-producer Jason Hall recently told People. The actor also worked out four hours a day for several months and trained with a Navy SEAL sniper to learn to shoot.

American Sniper follows the real-life story of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, who completed four tours in Iraq and earned the nickname “Legend” before being killed by a fellow vet in 2013. It’s directed by Clint Eastwood and hits theaters on Christmas Day.

[People]

Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels return as the idiot prankster pals in this the Farrelly brothers sequel that's almost not worth getting annoyed at

I wish I could put as little thought into writing about Dumb and Dumber To as the Farrelly brothers did in making it.

Or maybe Peter and Bobby honed and fussed over the crude humor in the 20 years since Dumb and Dumber introduced Jim Carrey as Lloyd Dunne and Jeff Daniels as his pal Harry Christmas in a display of idiot friendship. That roughhouse farce earned nearly $250 million at the worldwide box office — about $470 million in today’s dollars — and benefitted from Carrey’s white-hot stardom; he was on a roll that began with Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and The Mask and crescendoed with his roles as The Riddler in Batman Forever (yes, that Val Kilmer movie was a hit) and the lawyer in Liar Liar. Carrey’s manic rubbery verve played nicely against Daniels’ doofus sluggishness, and handed the Farrellys a smash with their first feature.

In the intervening two decades, the major participants’ careers have cooled a few kelvins, but all are eager to apply the same deranged energy to the sequel, from a screenplay by Sean Anders and John Morris. (Their script credits include She’s Out of My League, Hot Tub Time Machine, We’re the Millers and the forthcoming Horrible Bosses 2, so their comedy IQ level is simpatico with the Farrellys.) With Carrey, now 52, and Daniels, 59, still playing the kind of 12-year-olds who’d spend most of their school days in Detention, Dumb and Dumber To opens a new trunk of pranks on the old, the blind, the morbidly obese, the physically handicapped and — the Farrellys’ primary victims — the audience.

For the 20 years since the first movie, Lloyd has been hospitalized in a coma, obliging the visiting Harry to change his friend’s diaper and urostomy bag. Surprise! Lloyd is fine, and this is his most elaborate prank. Even Harry has to admit: “The shock treatments? The partial lobotomy? That takes commitment.” The Farrellys’ commitment to stupid human tricks inspires equal awe or dread, as Harry searches for a relative to donate the kidney he needs to stay alive. Hearing that he has a daughter Penny (Rachel Melvin) by his long-ago girlfriend Fraida (Kathleen Turner), he and Lloyd visit Penny’s adoptive parents and land in the middle of martial intrigue that sends them to El Paso for a Ted-like conference of science geniuses. Cue the Stephen Hawking joke.

As an impartial reporter, I must mention what I thought were a few good laughs: 1. The lads have left their pudgy cat with a blind guy who collects parrots. After devouring them, the cat farts bird feathers. 2. Harry riffles through 20 years of old mail, opens one letter and says, “I got accepted at Arizona State.” 3. At the funeral home where Fraida works, the boys get thirsty and start drinking a blue liquid. Fraida: “That’s embalming fluid!” Lloyd: “Does it have Aspartame?” Fraida: “No.” So they gulp it down. 4. In his fantasy of fathering, Harry is sipping red wine when the 12-year-old Penny appears with evidence of her first menstrual blood. Harry helpfully offers her the wine cork.

The richest gag, which the Farrellys somehow got the MPAA classification board to participate in, is that Dumb and Dumber To is rated PG-13. That means anyone of any age can see the movie, unaccompanied by parent, guardian or enabler. Which is probably advisable for parents, since they then don’t have to explain to their kids why Fraida’s surname is Felcher, or the part of an old lady’s anatomy Lloyd’s hand is probing when she tells him she’s stashed a cache of diamonds, um, between her legs. As Harry observes elsewhere: “God’s got a pretty warped sense of humor.” God and the MPAA.

With no children to fret over, I’m not really concerned if this movie warps their fragile little minds. I just want to laugh, and Dumb and Dumber To rarely coaxed me to that state of obscene bliss. Like the Farrellys’ recent botched attempt to revive the pummeling shenanigans of The Three Stooges, this movie breaks not only the canons of etiquette but of how to make people laugh. The usual methods are wit and surprise; the brothers go for aimless, charmless shock. That may make them subversive of a high order. Or possibly filmmakers who, 20 years on, have run out of funny.

Stick around for the end of the closing credits and you’ll find a teaser for “Dumb and Dumber For — coming 2034.” Another 20 years till the next one? I can wait.

In his make-good bio-pic of an Iranian-born journalist's imprisonment by the thugs of the Islamic Republic, the Daily Show host points to a major flaw of dictatorial regimes: They can't take a joke.

You know it’s Oscar season when you see a slew of new movies based on true stories whose resolutions you can find in three seconds on Wikipedia. Last week The Theory of Everything offered a history of the marriage of Stephen and Jane Hawking. In a fortnight, Benedict Cumberbatch will star as another Cambridge mathematician, Alan Turing, in the World War II spy saga The Imitation Game. This week Foxcatcher, which depicts the fatal meeting of Olympic wrestler Dave Schultz and zillionaire John du Pont, goes up against Rosewater, documenting the brutal interrogation of journalist Maziar Bahari in an Iranian jail just after the June 2009 election. Of all of these worthy bio-pics, Jon Stewart’s movie is the one that admits a saving sense of humor and proportion to the ordeals of its real-life protagonist.

You may recall the Iranian citizens’ plangent protests against the “landslide victory” of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over the challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi. The story had everything: peaceful masses colliding with the political-religious complex, 21st-century gadgets like Twitter used to defy a medieval regime and the image of a gorgeous martyr in Neda Agha-Soltan. The uprising saturated cable news for a week — until Michael Jackson died. Instantly, like a Pixar dog distracted by a squirrel, the networks forgot about Iran and went all Jacko, all the time.

One of the incidental atrocities of the Islamic Republic that year was its imprisoning of Bahari. Born in Iran, schooled in Canada, based in London and covering the Iranian election for Newsweek, Bahari committed the crime of sitting for a Teheran interview for Jason Jones of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. Jones, posing preposterously as an American spy, asked the London-based Bahari, “Are you a terrorist?” Bahari: “No.” Jones, smugly: “That sounds like something a terrorist would say.”

In a location piece at the time, Jones explained, “We’re not making fun [of the Iranians]. We’re kind of being ironic.” In the film, when Bahari is shown the Daily Show piece by his captors, he says, “It’s supposed to be funny,” adding sensibly, “Why would a spy have a TV show?” But irony is something that gets lost in translation from the satirists in a democracy to the enforcers in a theocracy. Recall D.H. Lawrence’s observation that “What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another.” To Bahari’s interrogator Jabadi (Kim Bodnia), nicknamed Rosewater for the cologne he wears, the straight-faced laughter of Jones and Stewart is the I-know-it-when-I-see-it obscenity of sedition. Pornography is Jabadi’s word for the DVDs of The Sopranos and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema that he finds among Bahari’s effects. And the Daily Show interview surely proves that Bahari is working for “CIA, MI6, Mossad, Newsweek” — as if three spy agencies were indistinguishable from a newsmagazine.

“For Lubitsch,” critic Andrew Sarris famously wrote of director Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 anti-Nazi farce To Be or Not to Be, “it was sufficient to say that Hitler had bad manners, and no evil was then inconceivable.” For Stewart, it was enough to say the Iranians can’t take a joke. Well, not quite enough for the TV host to spend the summer of 2013 making a movie of Bahari’s 2011 memoir Then They Came for Me. Stewart felt chagrined, and perhaps a tad culpable, that the facetious interview Bahari gave Jones contributed to his imprisonment. (The Egyptian TV comedian Bassem Youssef endured the cancellation of his Daily Show-inspired program after Stewart and 60 Minutes highlighted him.) So you may consider Rosewater an elaborate make-good for that transgression.

More important, the first time adaptor-director has created a fine film with few surprises but a genuine grasp of the director’s craft. Shot in Jordan by ace indie cinematographer Bobby Bukowski (The Messenger, The Iceman), the movie has a sharp grasp of time and place, as Maziar navigates the clogged streets of Teheran on the bike of his friendly driver Davood (Dimitri Leonidas) and listens to the voices of peaceful insurrection. Staying with his fierce, saintly mother Mollojoon (Shohreh Aghdashloo), he is haunted by the ghosts of his father Akbar (Haluk Bilginer), a prisoner of the Shah in 1953, and his sister Maryam (Golshifteh Farahani), tortured by the Ayatollah’s minions; their faces are projected on walls and shop windows as Davood speeds Maziar through the city.

Undergoing Jabadi’s ham-fisted interrogation, Maziar manages to retain his sense of the absurd, as if realizing that Kafka wrote bleak black comedy about humankind’s awful unfairness. Ties to his family (in imaginary conversations with his dead dad) and to Western culture (as he moves to Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love”) both flirt with derangement and keep him sane. Getting into the spirit of his imprisonment, Maziar toys with his captor’s ignorance of the U.S. by inventing insidious tales of New Jersey massage parlors. The torture victim can play mean tricks too.

You may quibble with the international caste of Stewart’s casting: the Mexican García Bernal as Bahari, the Danish Bodnia (from Nicolas Winding Refn’s Pusher) as his chief interrogator, the Anglo-Greek Leonidas his driver and the Turkish Bilginer (star of this year’s Cannes prize-winner Winter Sleep) as his father. Only Aghdashloo, an Oscar nominee for House of Sand and Fog, and Farahani are native Iranians. Do all foreigners, or Farahanis, look alike? That question matters less, given the strong and expertly judged performances all around — especially García Bernal’s nuanced juggling act of anger and anguish, hope and despair.

The virtue of this movie is its commitment to political ambiguity and emotional truth. If you expect a Jon Stewart film to sputter with cogent rage, as Stewart often does on TV, you will be disappointed. This film could be the work of Stewart’s more serious alter ego, Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz (his real name). Though not really a comedy, Rosewater is a demonstration of the creed behind The Daily Show: belief in the crucial need for impious wit against entrenched power. The freedom of the press is also the freedom to depress, and to inspire. That’s a message that can outlive any Oscar season. It would be nice if it could also overcome any regime.

Spike Jonze pal Lance Acord will make his directorial debut on the new film

Correction appended, Nov. 12

Disney is revisiting its 1991 film White Fang, which was based on the classic Jack London novel.

An updated version of the adventure film will get a screenplay by Academy Award-nominated writer Jose Rivera (for The Motorcycle Diaries), the Hollywood Reporter said. And long-time Spike Jonze pal Lance Acord, who did the cinematography on Jonze’s ex-wife Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, will make his directorial debut at the movie’s helm.

The ’90s adaptation of the story by Jack London followed a young man, played by a fresh newcomer named Ethan Hawke, who befriended a wolf-dog and set off on a number of adventures through Alaska during the Gold Rush. The Hollywood Reporter said there’s no word on whether the new film version will adhere more to the book, which told the story from the wolf-dog’s point of view.

[THR]

Correction: Due to an editorial error, the original version of this story misstated the director for Lost in Translation. It was Sofia Coppola.

Jennifer Lawrence is still splendid, but her Katniss is mostly a passive spokeswoman in this throat clearer for the Hunger Games finale

If you were hoping for less doom and gloom, you're going to be a little disappointed

Just an average day for Tris, saving her mom from a flying and burning house

"Honestly, it was like we just did it yesterday and boom, we were back in it"

LOS ANGELES — Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels made another “Dumb & Dumber” film because fans asked for it, and the two actors said making the sequel was more fun than working on the 1994 original.

“We were kind of just meeting each other as we were doing the first one,” Daniels said in a recent interview. “You got two different acting styles going on — is it going to even work? And the first one, we guessed right, and it did …

“Now it’s just a lot easier. We know more, we know what’s funny, we know the two characters well — all the stuff we didn’t know in the first one we already know in the second one, so we just get to do it again, only we hope better.”

“And we were blood doping,” Carrey added. “So that made it easier.”

Daniels and Carrey reprise their roles as painfully dim pals Harry and Lloyd in “Dumb & Dumber To,” opening Friday. Reuniting on a sequel 20 years after the original wasn’t hard, Carrey said.

“Honestly, it was like we just did it yesterday and boom, we were back in it,” he said. “It was a fantastic, familiar feeling.”

Daniels was delighted to return to comedy after spending the past three seasons starring in the Aaron Sorkin TV drama, “The Newsroom.”

“Comedy is a joy,” he said. “There’s a freedom to it. There’s a fearlessness to it that you don’t get in everything else. It was a thrill to do.”