Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/271369
MARCH 5-11, 2014 UCW 19 WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM You're Oscar winner Cate Blanchett. Your agent stops by and tries to sell you on a part in Monuments Men (118 minutes). I imagine the pitch went something like this: "Hey Cate! You're a talented actor and you're gorgeous, but you're over 40 so you can't get parts playing actual humans. Can we sign you on to play a poorly written character that sometimes hates Matt Damon but then other times doesn't hate Matt Damon and wants to have an affair with him? As a bonus you get to illustrate what a good man Matt Damon plays because you will randomly try to seduce him at some point and then he will turn you down because he's married." To which Cate probably replied: "I don't know. Can we also make sure that none of the most interesting parts of the character's story actually make it on screen? Providing too much detail about her involvement in the French Resistance would probably bore the audience and take away too much screen time from all the dudes bonding over art and how awesome it is." And that right there pretty much summed up my main issue with the movie. Oh, it wasn't a bad movie. It was made with love and good intentions and Bill Murray, all admirable things. Unfortunately it was also made with poor pacing and a severe case of tunnel vision. The story lacks any innovation, instead serving as a piece of nostalgia that will be most effective with the few remaining representatives of The Silent Generation, and the first half of the Baby Boomers generation. During World War II, Frank Stokes (George Clooney) convinces the U.S. that the hostilities in Europe are endangering priceless works of art and asks to assemble a team devoted to art preservation. As a result, Stokes assembles an Army unit nicknamed the Monuments Men (there were about a dozen women as well). Historically, the Monuments Men started as a group of about 30 people but the film focuses on just seven guys. The task force includes James Granger (Damon), a married museum curator that will definitely not have an affair with Claire Simone (Blanchett), his art contact that hates him in newly liberated France. Donald Jeffries (Hugh Bonneville from Downton Abby) is a disgraced British Army guy who ends up heading to Belgium to protect Michelangelo's "Madonna and Child" sculpture. Richard Campbell (Bill Murray), an architect, pairs up with Preston Savitz (Bob Balaban), an all-around art guy they find at a ballet. They are tasked with preserving the Ghent altarpiece by Van Eyck and have wacky hijinks because they don't get along very well. See, Preston is very serious while Richard is a bit wackier — they're the original odd couple! It's like, why would their commander make them work together when they're total opposites! Finally, Walter Garfield (John Goodman), a sculptor, and Jean Claude Clermont (Jean Dujardin), who is a specialist in being French, get sent off together to make jokes and get shot at and learn about brotherhood, or something. Meanwhile, Claire is won over by the way James returns looted art to an empty apartment building where it will almost certainly be stolen or simply adopted by the next people who inhabit the space. She hands him the records she secretly kept of which art got stolen where. Not that we get to see any shots of her art museum spycraft. Well, she spits in someone's glass. Does that count? Overall, the movie didn't suck. It was a mildly entertaining action history drama, much better than some of the garbage I've had to sit through lately. Star Power but Little Else The Monuments Men (Rated PG-13) by HEATHER GRIFFITHS HEATHER GRIFFITHS, Contributing Writer. COMMENTS? Editor@upand- comingweekly.com. And a Little Child Shall Lead Them A 10-year-old savior goes on the run in Believe TV by DEAN ROBBINS A 10-year-old girl named Bo (Johnny Sequoyah) has extraordinary powers, along with being extraordinarily cute. She can see the future, control nature and even save the world – that is, if the bad guys don't kidnap her for their own nefarious purposes. At the start of the new series Believe (preview on Monday, 10 p.m., NBC; regular timeslot Sundays at 9 p.m.), Bo's mysterious overseer (Delroy Lindo) busts death-row inmate Tate (Jake McLaughlin) out of prison to guard her on the run. "Why me?" Tate asks, trying to understand the strange situation he's landed in. He doesn't learn the answer in the pilot. But we do, and it's a doozy. Believe is executive produced by cinematic wizards J.J. Abrams (Star Trek) and Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity), with Cuarón himself directing the first episode. Not surprisingly, it leaves most TV thrillers in the dust. Cuarón creates exciting action sequences with every tool at his disposal: evocative sound, fluid camerawork, dramatic montage. He clearly enjoys the small-screen medium, and his enthusiasm is infectious. Heck, even the villains seem to be having a good time. The actors are well cast, particularly Sequoyah as Bo. She is believable as both a normal kid and an abnormal specimen. I don't know if she'll end up saving the world, but she will undoubtedly save Sunday nights. Sirens Thursday, 10 pm (USA) Co-created by Denis Leary, this new paramedics comedy has its mind in the gutter. I like the gutter as well as the next guy, if you can find laughs down there. But Sirens doesn't establish a satisfying context for its stream of raunchy sex jokes. There are no memorable characters, no interesting relationships; there's barely even a premise. Three paramedics (Michael Mosely, Kevin Daniels, Kevin Bigley) simply talk about Internet porn, compare penis sizes, and observe perverse sexual encounters. All the characters — even the very unconvincing female characters — are obsessed with clearing the history on their computers to get rid of the icky images they've downloaded. I wish I could clear the history on my brain to get rid of Sirens' icky images. Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey Sunday, 9 pm (Fox) Fasten your seatbelts for the greatest planetarium show of all time. The 13-part Cosmos is an update of the legendary Carl Sagan series that brought the universe into our living rooms. The new version is hosted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who has Sagan's gift for explaining abstruse scientific theories to a mass audience. But Tyson has an advantage over Sagan: cutting-edge computer graphics. Not shy about hamming it up, he boards a cool make-believe spaceship to take us into the far reaches of space. He dons a pair of sunglasses to observe the Big Bang and puts his hands over his ears when an asteroid wipes out the dinosaurs. His most stunning effect is conveying the vastness of space and humans' relatively tiny place in it. Rather than making you feel insignificant, however, his presentation fills you with awe at the wonder of the cosmos. "Now come with me," Tyson says at the end of episode one. "Our journey is just beginning." I can't imagine anyone in the known universe turning down that invitation.