A Cure For Wellness

Scott Carty On 'a Cure For Wellness,' 'fist Fight,' 'the Great Wall,' 'dream Big

... you’re in for some good laughs. And, trust me, "Fist Fight" is rated R. "The Great Wall". How about a PG-13 East meets West mythical creatures’ popcorn flick, instead? "The Great Wall" is the visually exciting work of legendary Chinese director Zhang Yimou. Special effects and acrobatics keep you interested. Plus, a big star: Matt Damon. Yes, I said Matt Damon. There was a lot of confusion around Damon's being cast in this movie, but he took on the role in the “creature feature” (as he calls it) for two reasons: 1) he has always been a fan of Zhang Yimou; and 2) he’s never done a movie like this before. You have to go into T"The Great Wall" ready for an escape into fantasy and myth. Leave your critics hat at the door and just have some fun. "Dream Big". Treat the entire family to something very exciting on the IMAX screen at Pacific Science Center. The "Dream Big" documentary is narrated by Jeff Bridges. It ...

A Cure For Wellness Starts Creepy But Then Swoons

... really important in life before Wall Street eats his soul like it did his father’s. But with the introduction of a mysterious and childlike young woman, Hannah (Mia Goth), who bicycles around the grounds like a bizarro Alice in Wellnessland, the story railroads Lockhart into becoming Prince Charming to save the damsel in distress from the doctor’s clutches. And we’re given endless backstory to get to that point, even though the “mystery” is plainly obvious. As beautiful as it is to see this eldritch, virginal girl balancing barefoot on an old stone wall, backdropped by snow-capped peaks, her presence careens what starts out as a superbly chilling movie into a cheesy aristocratic melodrama that runs an interminable 146 minutes. Writer Justin Haythe (The Lone Ranger, Revolutionary Road) somehow finds a way to fit in an attempted rape in a candlelit catacomb, where Hannah’s bodice is ...

First 'a Cure For Wellness' Clip Finds Dane Dehaan Desperately Looking For A Way Out

... Action and adventure in the bright sunshine does not fit him as well. Image via 20 th Century Fox. That’s why the marketing campaign for A Cure for Wellness has grabbed more than a few fans that have recently abandoned Verbinski despite his continued sense of visual style. The first clip for the movie, which you can take a look at below, summarizes the moodiness that Verbinski has proven uniquely gifted at evincing over the years, utilizing pale blues, sickly greens, watered-down yellows, and whites to convey a feeling of unease. Dane De Haan, who plays the main character, is looking for an escape from what looks like a sanitarium, where he has gone to heal his seemingly exasperated nerves, only to be surrounded by menacing guards and Jason Isaacs‘ secretive doctor. From the look of the trailers, however, there are things far more frightening and ...

A Cure For Wellness , Fist Fight , The Great Wall , I Am Not Your Negro

... Bosses”) star as a pair of high school teachers who plan to duke it out on school grounds after one accidentally causes the other to get fired. Other faculty members include Christina Hendricks, Tracy Morgan, Dennis Haysbert, Kumani Nanjiali and Jillian Bell. 1 hr. 31; R. The Great Wall: Released overseas in December, this epic fantasy about a mercenary (Matt Damon, “Jason Bourne”) fighting monsters in medieval China has already earned back its $150 million budget. Helmed by veteran director Zhang Yimou (“House of Flying Daggers”), the film boasts one of the largest Chinese casts in film history. Andy Lau, Willem Dafoe, Pedro Pascal and Jing Tian co-star. 1 hr. 14; PG-13. I Am Not Your Negro: Named one of the top 10 films of 2016 by the New York Times, this Oscar nominee for Best Documentary Feature is based on an unfinished manuscript by writer and activist James Baldwin (1924-1987) entitled, “Remember This House.” ...

Jason Isaacs On His Enigmatic Role

... they believe in. You can only believe in people who think they’re right, so if you think about some of the biggest people in the world, the current world’s bogeymen. If you sat in here and had an interview with them, they can utterly justify and rationalize every single thing they’ve done whether they’re the President of North Korea or America or anywhere else… the head of the Ku Klux Klan…whoever you want. They’ll tell you why they’re right and there’ll be a bunch of people who think they’re right, too, and those are the kinds of parts I’m drawn to, because then you can start an argument. At least, you can get an audience member to recognize you as a human being, and only then can you begin to bother them. LRM: Dr. Volmer, who is the director of this spa, for all intents and purposes, he is a very caring ...

Here’s Everything You Need To Know About ‘a Cure For Wellness

... are revealed. What’s it about. When the CEO of a financial giant becomes ensconced inside an Alpine health spa, corporate executive Lockhart is dispatched to retrieve him. But what he thinks is a simple babysitting mission soon turns sinister. “Nobody ever leaves,” he is told by Hannah, an apparently permanent resident of the retreat and, when he tries to maintain his independence, he is involved in a freak road accident and wakes up back at what sells itself as a utopian facility. It’s from there that the true horrors of the wellness centre begin to reveal themselves: Lockhart discovers the extent to which its supposedly convalescent population have been made the subject of terrible and sadistic experimentation. Who’s in it. Dane De Haan of In Treatment, Chronicle, and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 comes in as an increasingly unnerved Lockhart, with BIFA nominee Mia Goth (The Survivalist, Everest) as Hannah. Jason Isaacs, now best ...

Trump And Putin Spotted At Swiss Resort: Now Fake News Is Being Used To Promote Major Film Releases

... figured out how to use fake news to their advantage. Twentieth Century Fox went so far as to create its own string of fake news sites, complete with made-up stories about US president Donald Trump and charged topics like abortion and vaccines, as part of a viral marketing campaign for an upcoming psychological horror film. The movie studio—owned by Fox Entertainment Group, the same company that owns actual cable-news outlets Fox News Channel and Fox Business News—reportedly launched the fake news sites to promote A Cure for Wellness, a movie about a phony cure that makes patients sicker. It ran ads for the movie, due out in US theaters on Feb. 17, on the sites and inserted references to the plot into the outrageous hoaxes. One headline read: “Psychological thriller screening leaves Salt Lake City man in catatonic state.” ...

The Cure For Wellness

... unravels slowly, as if the filmmaker felt he had a terrific mystery on his hands; yet everyone will know exactly what’s going to happen an hour before it does. So really, who cares how stylish it is, if it’s all crap? And believe me, it is. In fact, half of the things presented to us don’t make sense and never get explained. The only actor that’s of interest is Jason Isaac, who does well with villain roles. He’s the guy in charge of the place. There’s one young lady at the facility (Mia Goth). She’s odd, and you’re always wondering if romance will blossom. Well, what does finally blossom and happen with her is something that will probably disturb many. One scene with her that will make many laugh, but not intentionally, is when the two youngsters make a beer run to a Bavarian tavern. The thugs inside the place look like a combination of the Sex Pistols and the cast of West Side Story. The movie was overproduced and unfortunately, underwritten. I just kept thinking of what Cronenberg or del Toro would’ve done with this interesting story. ...

The Tasteless Intricacies Of A Cure For Wellness

... one capture the depths of existence in its surfaces, perceiving the pleasure and the power that goes into aesthetic control and the pain and degradation that it conceals. Wes Anderson is a director whose energetic characters, as dapper as they may be, display physical aplomb and bold violence. He blends aesthetics and action with a freedom akin to that of Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and James Bond, which is why he’s the very engine of current cinema, and the envy of directors such as Verbinski and, for that matter, Chad Stahelski, whose contract-killer agency in “John Wick: Chapter 2” is also an Andersonian derivative. The mediocrity of Stahelski’s film is that he has nothing to say. The awfulness of Verbinski’s is that he has something to say, but it’s of a stultifying banality, and he says it through a cinematic ...

A Cure For Wellness

... show, and that’s precisely the vibe director Gore Verbinksi appears to be going for in a movie that, while creepy, won’t do much to dig him out of the hole he made for himself with “The Lone Ranger.”. Unfortunately, it feels as if Verbinski has failed to grasp the most important lessons of that misstep, delivering once again an extravagant B-movie homage that is longer, darker, and more unwieldy than the genre demands, while failing to produce a character that audiences much care about at its center. Though Isaacs clearly has the movie’s meatiest role — the sort of scenery-chewing opportunity that might have gone to Vincent Price in a previous era — Justin Haythe’s screenplay is lopsided toward an irritating young man named Lockhart ( Dane De Haan ) who finds himself trapped in Dr. Volmer’s insidious clinic. But Lockhart is hardly an innocent himself. Like a cross between the characters Leonardo Di Caprio played in “Shutter Island” and “The Wolf of Wall Street,” he’s an unscrupulous and quite possibly unhinged young investment shark, dispatched to Switzerland to retrieve a senior partner who appears to have gone a bit crazy there. A more efficient version of the same ...