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/346859
JULY 16-22, 2014 UCW 21 WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM When watching the trailers for Edge of Tomorrow (113 minutes) I thought of classic science-fiction like Robert Heinlein and Poul Anderson. There is something about the aesthetic of the film and the concept that convinced me it was based on some obscure science fiction story from the fifties. Well, I was wrong. Turns out that the film was based on an obscure Japanese novella called All You Need is Kill. I'm guessing they changed the name because our sensitive American eyes object to seeing the word "kill" in the title of a PG-13 film. The movie opens with some pseudo-news about meteors striking the planet and then turning out to be killer aliens. It's a clever opening, focused on the human reaction rather than using gratuitous creature shots, and the audience doesn't even get to see the creatures close-up until well into the first battle. I half-thought the plot would involve some sort of psychoactive drug-making soldiers who believed they were fighting aliens so they would be more successful soldiers and the time loop narrative arc would be caused by a soldier getting a bad shot of the drug. Nobody bats a thousand, and that is not how the story developed, but I still think that would be a cool movie. Major William Cage (Tom Cruise) is a PR guy meeting with General Brigham (Brendan Gleeson, 28 Days Later). General Brigham wants him to embed with some military people engaged in active duty combat against the "Mimics" while Cage is a pretty boy who has no intention of risking his neck on the ground. Words are exchanged, blackmail is attempted and Tom Cruise ends up handcuffed on a military base getting kicked by an angry guy. Then, Master Sergeant Farell (Bill Paxton, in the role he was born to play) comes along to jerk Cage around while pretending to be helpful, as Master Sergeants are oft wont to do. Farell escorts Cage to J-Company. Cage goes into battle and manages to survive a transport explosion followed by about fifteen minutes on the ground before dying at the hands of a pretty cool looking alien. Then, he wakes up and starts the day over again from about the time he meets Farell, and lives through the whole day again, followed by his inevitable death. This is a good time to definitively state that there will never be another time loop movie as good as Groundhog Day (1993) and people should stop trying to make one. Cage lives through the day an indeterminate number of times, eventually meeting up with Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt) who helps him figure out what is going on. Interestingly, a key plot point is the number of times she gets to shoot him in the head, which I'm going to guess was a huge selling point for her to take the role. Overall, this was decent science fiction, certainly above average when considering the science fiction released in the last year or so. Of course, movies starring Cruise always get an automatic one star reduction for how completely ridiculous he is, turning a four star rating into three stars. Groundhog Day Was Better Edge of Tomorrow (Rated PG-13) by HEATHER GRIFFITHS HEATHER GRIFFITHS, Contributing Writer. COMMENTS? Editor@upand- comingweekly.com. 910.484.6200. Take My Husband — Please! A woman orders her husband to fool around in Married by DEAN ROBBINS Finally, after a summer's worth of awful new sitcoms, I'm laughing again. In Married, Russ (Nat Faxon) and Lina (Judy Greer) are a once-happy couple weighed down by three kids (Thursday, 10 p.m., FX). Russ is frustrated by their nonexistent sex life and Lina is frustrated by everything else. "Look," she says, with the kids screaming nearby, "I have to make everyone happy, then at the end of the day I have to make you happy. It's just too much." We understand where both of them are coming from, so we gladly suspend disbelief when Lina makes an only-in-a-sitcom suggestion: Russ should get his sexual needs met elsewhere. It proves to be a great premise because Russ is so comically bad at finding a mistress. He's a decent guy who's still in love with his wife but also in thrall to his libido. Encouraged and teased by friends with their own specific sexual backstories (John Hodgman, Jenny Slate, Brett Gelman), he bumbles into a misadventure with a woman who's both hot and troubled. A mensch at heart, Russ can't ignore her troubles and see her only as a sex object. If you had told me in May that there'd be a summer sitcom with world-class actors, nuanced writing and honest truths about relationships, I'd have called you crazy. Now I'll call you crazy if you don't tune into Marriage. Rush Thursday, 9 pm (USA) Will Rush (Tom Ellis) is a doctor who feeds coke to a date until she overdoses. He brutally beats one of his patients with a baseball bat. He does the bidding of a gang leader, then dispatches the gang to threaten another patient who won't pay up. Oh, and in the premiere episode of Rush, we're supposed to love him. This dramatic series falls all over itself trying to make its hero sympathetic in spite of his flaws. You get the sense of filmmakers so out of touch with humanity that they don't understand how irredeemably repulsive Will is. No, we're not going to warm up to him because he graduated first in his class at Harvard. No, we're not going to warm up to him because he gives a dollar to a bum on the street. I repeat: THIS IS A DOCTOR WHO BRUTALLY BEATS UP A PATIENT WITH A BASEBALL BAT! As a series about a man we're supposed to like, Rush is an unmitigated disaster. But as an example of Hollywood's haywire moral compass, it's utterly fascinating. Working the Engels Thursday, 9:30 pm (NBC) In this new sitcom, a pathetic woman (Andrea Martin) and her pathetic kids (Kacey Rohl, Azura Skye, Ben Arthur) must take over Dad's pathetic law firm after he dies. Your first inkling of script problems comes with the lame pun in the series' title. Working the Engels tries to find humor in the idea that "pro bono" sounds kind of like "boner" and that Mom calls Yoda from Star Wars "Yodel." Meanwhile, the score pumps out heavy guitar riffs as if this were the most happening party on summertime TV. It's always sad when a score is having more fun than you are.