Logan Lucky

Visit here to read and post all the latest Daniel Craig-related news, TV/VCR(DVD) alerts, etc.

Moderator: Germangirl

User avatar
CheekyNandos
Posts: 473
Joined: Thu Mar 17, 2016 8:12 am
Location: Liverpool, UK

Post by CheekyNandos »

The press screenings for this were today and apparently the embargo is lifted on Monday for reviews :)
Germangirl
Moderator
Posts: 47065
Joined: Sun Apr 29, 2007 5:05 pm
Location: Germany

Post by Germangirl »

Puh, always a worry moment. Let's hope...
The top notch acting in the Weisz/Craig/Spall 'Betrayal' is emotionally true, often v funny and its beautifully staged with filmic qualities..

Image
User avatar
Jana66
Posts: 5872
Joined: Fri Sep 28, 2007 1:06 am
Location: mostly lazy on Anse Lazio

Post by Jana66 »

...I am not 100% sure that Logan Lucky will find its way into my local German cinema. So I maybe have to wait for the DVD.
Image
Red-Snow
Posts: 694
Joined: Mon Jun 22, 2015 2:57 pm
Location: Australia
Contact:

Post by Red-Snow »

The first reviews of 'Logan Lucky' have been published today, and so far both are very positive, especially about DC.

http://variety.com/2017/film/reviews/lo ... 202504091/

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review ... ew-1023775

http://www.empireonline.com/movies/logan-lucky/review/
Last edited by Red-Snow on Mon Jul 24, 2017 6:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Sylvia's girl
Posts: 11961
Joined: Thu Oct 08, 2009 11:57 am

Post by Sylvia's girl »

If you Check Rotten tomatoes....there are 14 reviews all positive.
User avatar
Jana66
Posts: 5872
Joined: Fri Sep 28, 2007 1:06 am
Location: mostly lazy on Anse Lazio

Post by Jana66 »

...in advance, it sounds good, very good...esp for Daniel :thumbup: !
Image
Germangirl
Moderator
Posts: 47065
Joined: Sun Apr 29, 2007 5:05 pm
Location: Germany

Post by Germangirl »

Thanks Red and Sylvia. :D so good to hear.

But I can't open them on the cell phone and that's all access I have at the moment. Can someone pretty please copy and paste them for me?
The top notch acting in the Weisz/Craig/Spall 'Betrayal' is emotionally true, often v funny and its beautifully staged with filmic qualities..

Image
Germangirl
Moderator
Posts: 47065
Joined: Sun Apr 29, 2007 5:05 pm
Location: Germany

Post by Germangirl »

Looking forward to his press tour
The top notch acting in the Weisz/Craig/Spall 'Betrayal' is emotionally true, often v funny and its beautifully staged with filmic qualities..

Image
User avatar
Vanquish
Posts: 846
Joined: Fri Nov 16, 2007 3:32 am

Post by Vanquish »

VERY positive review from The Playlist:
http://theplaylist.net/logan-lucky-review-20170724/

They rave about Daniel in particular :D :D :D
bubita
Posts: 3635
Joined: Thu Nov 05, 2009 5:54 pm
Location: Santiago,Chile

Post by bubita »

From what I´ve read, our Dan steals the show.
:D :D :D
not confirmed release date here in Chile, but a few pages say end of October.
Germangirl
Moderator
Posts: 47065
Joined: Sun Apr 29, 2007 5:05 pm
Location: Germany

Post by Germangirl »

Could I please ask again to copy and paste the reviews, so I can read them? PLEASE?
The top notch acting in the Weisz/Craig/Spall 'Betrayal' is emotionally true, often v funny and its beautifully staged with filmic qualities..

Image
User avatar
Dunda
Administrator
Posts: 22947
Joined: Mon Mar 19, 2007 12:08 pm
Location: Germany

Post by Dunda »

Red-Snow wrote:The first reviews of 'Logan Lucky' have been published today, and so far both are very positive, especially about DC.

http://variety.com/2017/film/reviews/lo ... 202504091/]
Steven Soderbergh's first feature film in four years is a low-down, high-spirited redneck heist yarn that's got something to say about the current state of NASCAR (read: Trump) country.


Steven Soderbergh’s “Logan Lucky” is a high-spirited, low-down blast. It’s a let’s-rob-the-racetrack heist comedy set in that all-American place that even rednecks would have no problem calling redneck country: the land of NASCAR and child beauty pageants, spangly long fingernails and roadside biker-bar brawls, and — these days being what they are — chronic unemployment and spiritual stagnation. (Hey, nothing’s perfect.) The script, by Rebecca Blunt (it’s her first, and it’s a beauty), exploits the Southern gift for turning something as basic as a series of freeway directions into a tall tale. And Soderbergh, directing his first feature in four years (his last one was the superb HBO Liberace biopic “Behind the Candelabra”), plays, with an invisible wink, off the natural-born comedy of mile-wide drawls that veer from the charmingly folksy into a kind of good-ol’-boy theater (lying about your alibi, it turns out, is even more effective when you do it from behind the armor of a chicken-fried accent).

“Logan Lucky” turns out to be a sharply observant tall tale all its own, a movie that taps into the shifting dynamics of Trump country (though the T-word itself is never mentioned). After a prologue that features the twin fetishes of John Denver nostalgia and pickup-truck repair, the action gets set in motion when Jimmy Logan (Channing Tatum), a beefy divorced dad who lives in a tin-walled shack in Boone County, W.Va., loses his latest hard-hat gig, all because someone from human resources spied him walking with a slight limp, which could signal a pre-existing condition, which could prove actionable. Actually, it’s just an old football injury, and yes, he should have mentioned it on his application form (though in that case he probably wouldn’t have gotten the job). Yet the timely corporate injustice of this here-today-gone-tomorrow layoff tells you all you need to know about the prospects for Jimmy’s future: There are none.

That’s why he feels utterly justified — and so does the audience — when he decides to go for broke by robbing the Charlotte Motor Speedway in Concord, N.C. That’s where he was driving a bulldozer underground to repair sinkholes when he made a startling observation: All the money that comes into the racing complex gets moved through an old-fashioned pneumatic tube transport system (PTT), a network of snake-like cylinders that wind their way underground and funnel the money into a steel bank vault. Because of the repair work, the vault’s seismic-sensor alarm system has been turned off. And those tubes? They’re the all-too-easy way in.

Soderbergh, of course, is the king of the contempo movie heist caper, and “Logan Lucky” is an obvious cousin to his “Ocean’s” films, though it’s hardly “Ocean’s Fourteen” in white-trash drag. The heist is diabolically clever, but only rarely does it feel movie clever. It has a homemade, gimcrack, screw-top quality that marks it as a pure product of the down-home Southern imagination, and the way that Soderbergh has directed the movie, rooting it in an authenticity of locale, manners, and economics, it could almost pass for a true-life crime drama, like the Lufthansa heist in “GoodFellas” (even though this one is all made up).

When directors become rich and famous, they often lose their ability to dramatize the lifestyles of the poor and ordinary. But Soderbergh, as a filmmaker, has never lost touch with the transcendent pulse of everyday experience, and in “Logan Lucky” his feel for cracker-barrel screw-ups has a mordant vivacity. Logan puts a team together to commit the heist, starting with his younger brother, Clyde (Adam Driver), a sad-sack bartender who lost his forearm during one of two tours of duty in Iraq. The two share a sense of living out “the Logan curse,” a community legend that basically boils down to the fact that they’re both ne’er-do-wells who’ve been on a downward slope since high school. Clyde, who wears the legend heavily, is a conspiracy nut who speaks with robotic gloom, and Driver makes him a sympathetic semi-crackpot who’s attached, in more ways than one, to his fake arm (it’s his best friend).

The movie fills in each of the Logans’ backstories in about a minute, and that’s all you need: Jimmy the fallen jock king who never made it to the pros (only to discover that the world of honest blue-collar labor had evaporated), and Clyde the little brother who envied Jimmy so much that he went to Iraq just to live up to him. At times, the two could be a scragglier version of the brothers in “Hell or High Water,” committing robbery to fight The System. Only in this case they can’t do it alone.

Their key accomplice is Joe Bang, an explosives expert played, with a savagely fast and funny spark, by Daniel Craig as a snaky hillbilly varmint in a platinum-blond buzzcut. Since Joe is serving a prison sentence, they have to break him out of the slammer and then back in with no one noticing, a plan that proves nearly as complicated as the heist itself. But it’s worth the effort, since only Joe — a hayseed chemistry wizard — would know how to build a bomb out of bleach tabs, fake salt, and Gummy Bears. In just about every heist film, we’re told what the plan is before it’s hatched, but in “Logan Lucky” we watch the robbery unfold without having any idea where it’s going, and that gives it a jerry-rigged quality that’s at once hilarious, suspenseful, and plausible (well, sort of).

There are other offbeat and engaging characters, like Jack Quaid and Brian Gleeson as Joe Bang’s siblings, who complete the heist team (they’re even further down on the backwoods totem pole); Seth MacFarlane as a skin-crawlingly obnoxious British sports-car magnate; Katherine Waterston as the roving health-care professional who sees what a diamond in the rough Jimmy is; Dwight Yoakam (cast hilariously against type) as a prison warden who sweeps his petty scandals under the rug; Hilary Swank as an FBI agent who, in her strait-laced way, proves as doggedly eccentric as Marge Gunderson from “Fargo”; Katie Holmes as Jimmy’s scalding ex-wife; Farrah Mackenzie as his Rihanna-fixated daughter; and the magnetic Riley Keough as the Logans’ flaky but radiantly uncursed hairdresser sister. They’re all terrific company, and so is the movie, even when it takes a last-act twist that heightens its vantage but deflates a bit of its energy. Still, that’s a minor quibble. “Logan Lucky” is Soderbergh in mid-season form, and there should be a solid summer niche for a movie that’s this much ripsnorting fun.

Steven Soderbergh's Southern heist comedy stars Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Daniel Craig, Katie Holmes and Hilary Swank.

Logan Lucky is a redneck Ocean's Eleven. For his first feature film in four years, Steven Soderbergh has snuck back in on a back road with a goofy and steadily amusing tale of born losers in West Virginia who try to hit the jackpot by divesting an auto raceway of a few million bills. This loose and shambling tale with a very attractive cast is highlighted by a wonderfully wacky, show-stealing turn by Daniel Craig as a down-home career criminal.

There is definitely an audience for this likeable but no-big-deal film and probably even two — aficionados of the director and cast, as well as good-time-seeking Middle Americans — so the onus is on the very indie distributors to find it; this would be a great August drive-in picture if many outdoor screens still existed.

Working with a script by first-time writer Rebecca Blunt, Soderbergh has made the sort of breezy, unpretentious, just-for-fun film that scarcely exists anymore, one almost anyone could enjoy. In terms of milieu, it overlaps with the two Magic Mike outings, that being the working-class South (Soderbergh hails from Georgia and Louisiana, it should be remembered), and it gives off the same sort of gently rollicking good-time vibe.

And they all star Channing Tatum, who this time turns up a few steps lower on the socio-economic ladder — and even further down the IQ scale — as Jimmy Logan, a heavy equipment operator who loses his job in the opening scene, has forfeited all custody rights to his daughter with ex-wife Bobbie Jo (Katie Holmes) and has no prospects when he heads over for a drink at the roadside bar tended by his Iraq War vet brother Clyde (Adam Driver), who has a prosthetic lower left arm he doesn't always manage to keep attached; it's the first casualty of a funny set-to with an obnoxious British race car driver (with the Thomas Pynchon-worthy name of Max Chilblain), played by a virtually unrecognizable, frizzy-haired Seth MacFarlane.

So what do these down-on-their-luck good ol' boys do to turn things around for the Logan family after several generations' worth of abject, poverty-ridden, impressively sustained failure? It might just be time to try their luck on the wrong side of the law. Jimmy's bright idea is to rob the mother lode of NASCAR, the Charlotte Motor Speedway, during the Coca-Cola 600 on Memorial Day weekend. And just how do they intend to pull this off? Well, it so happens that Jimmy worked construction on the infrastructure of said-same race track. Therefore, he says, “I know how they move the money,” which is through an elaborate system of tubes in the bowels of the giant stadium.

While not nearly as well dressed as the Ocean's gang, an ace team is assembled to pull off the unlikely heist. Given their range of associates, the brothers must start in jail, which is where they track down the one-and-only Joe Bang (Craig), a man known for blowing up bank vaults; no one inquires as to whether or not Bang is his real name. Of more immediate interest, however, is how the once-and-possibly-still-future James Bond has been decked out with short-cut white hair that makes him distinctly resemble Robert Shaw in From Russia With Love, so this is the closest the actor will ever get to playing a Bond villain.

The fact that Joe still has five months to go behind bars presents no problem, as he reassures his cohorts that he can break out of prison and then back in again before anyone is the wiser. Making the operation even more of family affair is the sister (Riley Keough) of Jimmy and Clyde (that could have been an alternate title). With this crew running the show, further mishaps inevitably ensue, including one very big one — and at two hours, Soderbergh perhaps does let the whole thing go on a few minutes too long, even if the final twists hit the spot.

Blunt's script is full of giddy inventions and gives the actors some good stuff to play with, but there is the sense that one more serious pass at it might have made it a bit tighter, more spirited and authentically low-down. A few moments, particularly early on, also betray a whiff of condescension to the characters.

The actors seems to be having a great time, however, and this proves contagious. Craig, Tatum and MacFarlane all find good comic grooves and stay in them. Driver's reserved sincerity is perhaps intended as an underplayed contrast, but in practice just means that the actor doesn't come off as winningly as do his co-leads. Hilary Swank pops in late-on as a special agent who tries to get to the bottom of the heist, while Katherine Waterston is wasted in a nothing part.

Still, this is a good-times film that doesn't put on airs, dress to impress or pretend to be something it isn't. It just aims to please, and does a pretty good job of it.


West Virginia miner Jimmy Logan (Channing Tatum) loses his job; desperate, he enlists his brother Clyde (Adam Driver) to plan a robbery on the Coca-Cola 600, one of the biggest NASCAR races of the year.

?????


Did anybody really believe Steven Soderbergh was retired? Certainly not people who watched The Knick, which was more ‘cinematic’ than most theatrically released films. And now the pioneer of ’90s indie makes a welcome return to theatres with this well-acted, slickly directed, if somewhat familiar redneck heist flick — and after last year’s dull Masterminds, Lord knows we needed a good one.

Channing Tatum is on loveable beefcake duty once again, this time as a West Virginia miner with a surprisingly convincing accent. As things go in these films, once laid off for the proverbial pre-existing condition, he promptly decides to rob the local NASCAR track’s biggest day of the year. He enlists the usual band of misfits, including his brother played, in a piece of casting that stretches familial-likeness credulity, by Adam Driver. Nevertheless, the two have cracking chemistry, and Driver’s slow-talking but sharp-witted barman, who lost an arm in Iraq, would be Logan Lucky’s standout performance, were it not for the presence of one Daniel Craig.

Playing a boiled egg-loving con with bleached-blond hair and lashings of explosives expertise, those blue eyes of his — so cold as Bond — are here bulging with lunacy. He’s hilarious and totally convincing as someone far from the officer-class stylings of his day job; it’s a pleasure to be reminded of what a good character actor Craig can be. Throw in some would-be computer hackers and the team is complete. Now, what about the plan?

Heist films are all about the process, so it would be a crime to give too much away, suffice to say that Soderbergh and writer Rebecca Blunt are careful to dole out enough info to make sure we can follow what’s going on, but are equally careful to keep a few surprises to drop along the way.

If this is all sounding a little Out Of Sight getting it on with the Ocean’s trilogy and their baby growing up in Trump country, that’s because it is. There’s an unavoidable feeling that Soderbergh is playing the hits here — although it’s odd how much a character-driven crime flick is now such a rarity it feels like an exercise in turn-of-the-millennium retro.

More irritatingly, as with a lot of Soderbergh (Side Effects, The Good German), there’s the lingering suspicion we’re another draft or so away from something special, but his frenetic working pace didn’t allow for it. Seth MacFarlane certainly wasn’t given enough time to perfect his ‘English’ accent. But a late-entering Hilary Swank as an FBI agent (with Blue Ruin’s Macon Blair on sidekick duty) goes nowhere, as does an extended cameo from Katherine Waterston, who shows up to make a sledgehammer point about the US healthcare system only to disappear once she’s done so. And while not everything has to have a bow on it, Logan Lucky doesn’t quite have the impactful ending the build-up deserves. But it’s such an enjoyable ride to get there, that can be forgiven.

Even if it needed one last push to make it truly exceptional, there’s a lot to enjoy here. And Soderbergh once again attracts a cast it’s a pleasure to spend time with.
Image

Visit the forum at www.dedicatedtodaniel.com
User avatar
Dunda
Administrator
Posts: 22947
Joined: Mon Mar 19, 2007 12:08 pm
Location: Germany

Post by Dunda »

Vanquish wrote:VERY positive review from The Playlist:
http://theplaylist.net/logan-lucky-review-20170724/

They rave about Daniel in particular :D :D :D
‘Logan Lucky’ Is A Whip-Smart, Laugh-Out-Loud Funny Romp

Since coming out of a brief retirement from filmmaking following the release of his Liberace biopic for HBO “Behind the Candelabra,” Steven Soderbergh has been awfully busy. Amongst his many projects, he shot, edited, and directed two entire seasons of Cinemax‘s overlooked medical drama “The Knick,” directed an off-Broadway play called “The Library,” edited and shot male stripper sequel “Magic Mike XXL,” and released a series of weird fan edits of famous films, including “Heaven’s Gate” and “2001: A Space Odyssey,” plus “Psychos,” a mirrored mash-up of both Alfred Hitchcock‘s original film and Gus Van Sant‘s remake. What started off as a retirement quickly felt more like a hiatus. With “Logan Lucky,” Soderbergh has returned to the medium and a genre he’s clearly comfortable with, but with an added confidence and a renewed investment in character as well as craft. It’s good to have him back.

In “Lucky Logan” Channing Tatum and Adam Driver play brothers who decide they’ve had enough and are going to do something about it. Tatum, as Jimmy Logan, is fired from a construction job repairing the infrastructure underneath a NASCAR track because an injury has made him a liability; he’s got a young daughter who is prepping for a beauty pageant and an ex-wife (Katie Holmes) who hates his guts. Driver is Jimmy Logan, a bartender who is missing half of his arm thanks to an injury sustained fighting overseas. They hatch a plan to rob the NASCAR stadium, on a slow day, with the help of their sister Mellie (Riley Keough) and Joe Bang (Daniel Craig), an explosives expert currently incarcerated in a federal penitentiary. Of course, the foolproof plan soon goes to hell and everybody involved has to find a way to wriggle out of it.

Soderbergh has said that one of the things that drew him to the script (initially given to him so that he could suggest potential directors) was that it was the anti-“Ocean’s Eleven;” that it was hardscrabble and rough where those movies were slick and glamorous. (In one of the more self-reflexive moments of the movie someone describes the heist as “Ocean’s 7-11.”) And it’s true: these are characters who barely know how to use computers, who communicate via payphone because they haven’t paid their cell phone bills on time, and whose idea of stealth infiltration involves throwing a homemade grenade at something electronic. It’s refreshingly lo-fi and charming and the film never gives off the sensation that Soderbergh is looking down on these salt-of-the-earth characters. There’s never any condescension and the truly unforgivable characters are the people in power who make those under them feel unwanted (like a terribly miscast Seth MacFarlane as a pompous race owner).

And really it’s the performances that do a lot of the heavy lifting in “Logan Lucky.” Both Tatum and Driver (as men obsessed with the supposed unluckiness of their family) are terrific leads, sympathetic and warm, with Keough turning in one of the more surprising roles as their motor-mouthed sister. The central trio are surrounded by a constellation of supporting players who are just as game to be goofy and humanly flawed (notably Jack Quaid and Brian Gleeson as Joe’s dumb-ass hick brothers and Sebastian Stan as a Zen NASCAR racer). Other actors (like Hilary Swank, Katherine Waterston and Dwight Yoakam) just seem happy to be invited to the party.

But amongst these amazing performances, Daniel Craig really needs to be singled out. You’ve never seen Craig like this before, both literally (with his hair cropped and died into a spiky blonde fin) and in terms of his personality. In “Logan Lucky,” Craig has shed all the brooding gloom that has followed him around like a tiny raincloud since signing up for his ultra-serious Bond. He gets to be bouncy and buoyant, everything he does seems charged with electricity that only Craig has access to. What’s more – he’s actually having fun. It’s impossible to not fall in love with him and it’s hard to think of the last time one of his performances had that kind of impact. It feels revelatory. Soderbergh’s jokey “And introducing …” credit for the actor feels oddly appropriate; this is Craig reborn and renewed.

As for Soderbergh, this isn’t much of a departure stylistically. He’s continuing his post-“Che” run of making artistically ambitious, commercially appealing enterprises. (It should also be noted that Soderbergh’s new distribution company, Fingerprint, will help with “Logan Lucky’s” release.) If anything his visual palette has gone through a slight shift; the wintery blues and grays of “Contagion” and “The Knick” have been swapped for sunnier golds and yellows, and he’s placed a greater emphasis on character over plot. (There’s a remarkably touching moment that rivals “Okja” for 2017’s most heart-tugging sequence set to an old John Denver song.) And while there’s no explicit political text or subtext, it’s hard not to read into a story about a bunch of country boys who, exhausted and let down by both the government and private enterprise, strike back by crippling a symbol of shit-kicking entertainment. More explicitly, this is a movie about the people who voted Trump into office only to have the rug pulled out from under them in a continued and sustained effort to old serve those at the highest rungs of power. What other choice do they have than to rob the fuckers back?
There are those that will undoubtedly find “Logan Lucky” too breezy. There is the assumption, of course, that Soderbergh returning to cinema will be some sort of paradigm shift. That just isn’t the case. This is more of a victory lap than anything else. It’s a filmmaker who has gathered performers at the top of their game (and Seth MacFarlane) to play. And play they do. This is a brilliantly constructed, whip-smart, and laugh-out-loud-funny romp from a filmmaker whose precision and craft is nearly unparalleled. It’s hard to think of a movie this year that has been as singularly delightful, one that, with each passing moment, reveals something charming or odd or real. It hasn’t been that long since Soderbergh stopped directing movies but it feels like forever. And with “Logan Lucky,” he beautifully exhibits everything we’ve been missing.
Image

Visit the forum at www.dedicatedtodaniel.com
Germangirl
Moderator
Posts: 47065
Joined: Sun Apr 29, 2007 5:05 pm
Location: Germany

Post by Germangirl »

Wow, thanks so much. Pleasure to read. :D
The top notch acting in the Weisz/Craig/Spall 'Betrayal' is emotionally true, often v funny and its beautifully staged with filmic qualities..

Image
Red-Snow
Posts: 694
Joined: Mon Jun 22, 2015 2:57 pm
Location: Australia
Contact:

Post by Red-Snow »

Steven Soderbergh's New Movie Writer Likely Doesn't Exist
www.hollywoodreporter.com/rambling-repo ... st-1023915

Logan Lucky reviewers did not receive a press kit, which typically highlights the back story of key participants in a project, and only were given a bare-bones list of credits as they appear in the film. Also unusual, there is no press junket planned, despite the fact that the film is receiving a wide release on Aug. 18 and features a high-profile cast of movie stars that also includes Katherine Waterston, Riley Keough, Katie Holmes, Seth MacFarlane and Hilary Swank.

A representative for Bleecker Street, the company that is releasing the film, declined comment.
Post Reply