Out in Theaters: DUMB AND DUMBER TO

November 13, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Dumb and Dumber To, Farrelly Brothers, Jeff Daniels, Jim Carrey, Laurie Holden, Out in Theaters, Rachel Melvin, Reviews, Rob Riggles, Steve Tom 10 Comments

Dumb and Dumberer To threatens – at multiple intersections – to sidestep its truly manic, childish comic sensibilities for a gargantuan black hole of doo-doo jokes. “Smell my finger” gags, “lock in the fart” physical comedy and even the dreaded diaper change all rear their ugly fecal heads throughout the film. It’s as if the Farrelly Brothers were contractually obligated (by Charmin perhaps?) to insert a poo-based beat every 20 minutes. Some of it is scoff-worthy, other segments, truly face-palming. But what is miraculous about this long-gestated Dumb and Dumber sequel is that between the farts (a sentence reserved only for the likes of this breed of low-brow comedy), there is comic gold. To borrow an age-old phrase, it totally redeems itself. Read More

Out in Theaters: DUMB AND DUMBER TO

Coming a full two decades after the first installment, Dumb and Dumber To doesn’t miss a beat reestablishing its titular dullard duo. Having gone into a “full retard” coma after being turned down by the ravishingly ginger Mary Samsonite, Lloyd is a scraggly-haired (with frontal bowl cut still intact), diaper-clad, catheter-wearing potato. Harry, played by Emmy winner Jeff Daniels, makes routine visits to cheer the spirits of the now vegetablesque Lloyd.

If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ll know that his twenty year stay in a mental institute was all a gag to “get” Harry. Or at least that’s what Lloyd claims, shaking his head like a spring rider. But what make the first Dumb and Dumber stick is its venomous (and often under-appreciated) dark humor. In the first film, it wouldn’t be a far stretch to read Harry as a suicidal maniac on the brink of offing himself. If you wanted to, you could even make an argument that Lloyd (like Ferris Bueller) is little more than a figment of Harry’s crumbling imagination; a loony toon ghost of Christmas past (damn right the pun was intended). Taking this into account (the dark humor, not my baloney “Lloyd isn’t real” assertion), it could easily be understood that Lloyd did indeed suffer a mental break after his odds of being one in a million turned to dust in his palm. Grim, I know, but I think the idea that Lloyd is actually incarcerated at a mental institution adds weight to a story that often defies gravity and needs much more grounding. More likely, it’s just a comedy and I shouldn’t be thinking that hard about it.

When Dumb and Dumber struck theaters like a rubber chicken in the face, Jim Carrey was riding high on the success of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and The Mask. He was the comedy “it” boy de jour; a new face of physical extremism; the harbinger of buckshot, go-for-broke, face-morphing farce. It would appear that he would do anything for a laugh. He was willing to make the most annoying sound in the world. Willing to speak out of his butt. In the years since, he’s produced a number of other comic gold standards amongst offering a surprising amount of adroit dramatic performances. To see him step into the shoes of a bonafide moron again though is something truly special. In that bowl cut and chipped front tooth, Carrey is home and he couldn’t be more committed.

Daniels continues to play second fiddle but he really is the true numb nuts of the two; the dumber of the dumb. Lloyd could almost be described as a sadomasochistic sociopath. After all, he did rat out Harry to Seabass with the loyalty of Benedict Arnold Palmer. With Harry, there’s none of the depth of intention. He’s a fly by the seat of his pants breed of stupid. A kind of stupid that’s quick to anger and even quicker to blame. Lloyd and Harry both need to nestle their emotions in a bottle. Make no mistake, these are dark characters. They just so happen to find solace in soiled drawers and funny suits.

Where Dumb and Dumber To both succeeds and falls flat is in the script’s understanding of the true nature of their stupidity. When the dynamic two-o are by themselves, sharing a hotdog or explaining why Harry named his cat butthole (“Good name. Totally fits.”), they shine. When we move into the second act and more characters arrive that we’re supposed to care about, things become hairier and tend towards the hit-or-miss department. What makes Harry and Lloyd memorable is their general misunderstanding of the world around them – they’re more zoo animal than human – not their low IQ level and sexual misadventures.

If there’s one complaint that cannot be lobbed at the screenwriter committee (there are six credited writers) it’s that they don’t hold anything back. From old ladies private parts to finagling free booze, they throw every strand of comedy spaghetti at the wall and see what will stick. As Dumb/Dumber Dos loses steam in the second half, you can taste the jokes souring in a haze of lazy and uninspired old farts. But that doesn’t overwhelm the fact that there are many things to cherish: Carrey going tête-à-tête with a barking German Shepard, Harry’s new astronaut roommate (a celebrity cameo you’ll likely miss), Lloyd’s obsession with a certain picture. Farrellys and Co. do manage to sneak in some of the subtle (pronounced sub-tull) humor of missed pronunciation and cultural ignorance. They also plant Easter Egg references to the original with the delicacy of a giant holiday bunny. But whatever, I still laughed.

Amongst the new additions to the cast include a fair number of faces you won’t recognize by name alone. Rob Riggles (Anchorman) all but steps in for an ulcer-pill swallowing Mike Starr while the gorgeous and fairly affable Rachel Melvin plays is-she-or-isn’t-she offspring of Harry. Laurie Holden (The Walking Dead‘s deceased Andrea) is the vixen foil, Steve Tom as the genius Dr. Pinchlow, her body-weathered mark. That Harry and Lloyd eventually end up with a mysterious package that they must deliver across the country could be interpreted as either a throwback or lazy carbon-copying. I’m willing to contend a little bit of both.

So was the wait worth it? Yes and no. Clearly Carrey and Daniels held the keys to ignition on this one and they waited until they had the means to hold up the laugh factory. Twenty years on though is a long time to wait and the field of comedy has changed a lot (for better or worse). And though it’s far from perfect, they have achieved their ultimate goal: to make us laugh. It takes a rapist wit to pull off a comedy so recklessly dumb, derivative, harebrained and ultimately inspired and yet the Farrelly’s, Carrey and Daniels do it, even when they have to kind of drag their asses over the finish line.

So long as you’re willing to turn off your mind, relax and float downstream, you’ll realize it’s not the comedy itself that’s dulled. Rather, those of us raised on Jim Carrey one-liners have grown old and tired. Armpit farts just aren’t funny anymore (though I’m not convinced they ever were…) But dumb is as dumb does and the Farrellys do dumb like dumb needs to be done (write that in a John Deere letter three times.) I’m not quite willing to say that “I like it a lot” but I cannot deny the truckload of laughs it had me bellowing.

If you appreciated the original (and still find that it holds up today), you’ll find a lot to love in this sequel. Dumb though it may be, and offensively stuffed with toilet humor, there’s enough wit, more than enough commitment on the part of the actors and just enough new one-liners to give the Farrelly’s, and Jim Carrey’s comedy career, a new lease on life.

C+

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Out in Theaters: THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING

November 13, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Benoît Delhomme, Charlie Cox, Eddie Redmayne, Emily Watson, James Marsh, Jinx Godfrey, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Simon McBurney, Steven Noble, The Theory of Everything

To take a man’s life and dilute it down to a 123-minute biography might not be quite as daunting a task as coming up with a singular formula that describes and unites all things in the universe but it is not without its challenges. James Marsh takes on these theoretical hurdles with the problem-solving gusto of a seasoned mathematician. He attacks from all angles: emotional, intellectual, spiritual and metaphysical; delivering a film that not only gets to the core of who Stephen Hawking is but gives equal credence to the unsung plight of wife Jane Hawking. With Marsh working the material with the finesse of a Swedish masseuse – adapted from Jane’s 2008 memoirs “Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen” – into something both uproariously funny and endlessly emotional, The Theory of Everything is, like its subject, a film that defies the constructs to which it ought adhere. Like Hawking, Marsh has created a film that rises above the expectations placed on it and outlives its macabre sentencing. It is quite simply an emotional powerhouse; a near flawless example of a fine-tuned biopic boasting a performance for the ages; a stunning tour de force that overcomes its crowd-pleasing elements with earnest wit and genuine, hard-won emotionality.

Behind his quirked smile and mop of ginger-brown hair, young Hawkings is a goon and Eddie Redmayne plays him with the breezy charm of a Powerpuff before his infamous affliction strikes. Aloof and smarmy, his performance is one of spot-on precision; a testament to Redmayne’s emerging talent and ability to replicate a character with physical and emotional exactitude. Hawking is a Type-A smarty pants who doesn’t study but still aces the tests and all Redmayne needs to do is cock a wormy grin to communicate the limitless knowledge trapped within that scrawny frame. Part-Goofy and part-Einstein, he’s a goober of a scholar with a heart of gold and aspirations over the moon. And there lies Jane Wilde, a wily co-ed softly won over by Hawking’s gun show of braininess and obsessively chartered persistence. After all, one can only be asked to croquette so many times before they finally submit.

There’s a delightfully stagy homecoming ball that, while slightly hokey, showcases the humanity before the affliction; the affair preceding the infirmity; the courtship preceding all this trials and tribulations business. Hawking uneasily admitting he’s no dancer is both charming and heartbreaking – a winning equation graciously prescribed to most key junctions in the film. If Hawking’s arc is one into physical oblivion and intellectual transcendence, The Theory of Everything‘s is about overcoming hardship and finding peace in adversity.

But as the scene sets on Benoît Delhomme‘s magnificently sweltering starematography, Cinderella’s carriage turns to a pumpkin and Hawking is hit with the heavy news that he’s got less than two years to live. On the brink of his PhD and brimming with grand ideas screaming out to be proven, Hawking is a pitiable mark of the Maggie Fitzgerald degree. He’s a fighter with a flunkie body. Though Jane’s undying devotion to Hawking isn’t necessarily fleshed out in full pre-ALS diagnosis, Jane spends the rest of the movie convincing us of the earnestness of the near angelic gesture. This is after all a love story.

As acclaimed physicist Stephen Hawking continues to hunt down his titular theory of everything, we’re given a glimpse into a kind of personal reactionary spiritualism that only peeks its head into the oeuvre of film every so often. There’s no “this is the way it is”, just a lot of “what ifs?” Hawking at first refutes the existence of God. At one point, he admits to Jane that He could be plausible. Later, he’s weary and generally indifferent. He’s a character who, though stubborn in his resolve and thrust for intellectual expansion, is never adamant about being “right.” And what could be a more important figure than a man willing to go to war with his own theories? In a time of steadfast absolutism, Hawking waged war with himself from an armchair. And then a wheelchair. A man both fundamentally hubristic and humbled, Hawking’s acute generosity of spirit paired with his occasional callousness towards those closest to him helps to make him such a scrumptiously compelling character.

It takes a skilled filmmaker to get the tear ducts working early and Marsh is so queued into fine tuning our emotional clock that he barely has to breathe to twist the knife in our side. Only thirty-odd minutes into the film, he pulls back the curtain on this whole diagnosis drama sans a lick of sentimentality and yet still beckons showers of sniffles. Hawking (understandably) throws a pity party, but Marsh never does. Flipping the formula on its head, he mines tragedy in humor, allowing the most heart-rending moments to play over beats drenched in legitimate dark comedy. Even past the ability to speak, Redmayne invites guffaws that you would never even expect to experience in a film about a handicapped physicist. This guy is going to sarcastically flip his head into an Academy Award nomination.

The performance really is next level. He’s so good, he’s gorilla glue. Taking your eyes off his work for even a moment is impossible. You might as well be eyelidless Alex, you’re watching him so hard. Confined to a wheelchair for the later half of the film, we nevertheless view him through the filter of abject understanding. Without words, he’s able to communicate novels. It’s a testament to both Redmayne’s mighty take and Marsh’s voyeuristically watchful eye that once Hawking’s words turn into blinks and eventually into robotic responses, we never lose a dollop of interest in him as a character. Nor does he lose his bite as a comedian.

Matching Redmayne blow for blow is Felicity Jones, offering a performance that delivers nuance, pathos and barrels of complexity. Though no simple task to take on the mantle of Hawking, Redmayne’s task is clear cut. Jones on the other hand has an arguably more difficult mountain to climb; she must make Hawking’s counterpart as compelling and complex as a guy who wrote a best selling novel about f*cking time. I mean seriously, if the guy can make a theory about time (of all things) into a New York Times best seller, you better believe his woman is a certifiable magnet.

Each and every scene she flutters into and out of, Jones is a force to be reckoned with. She’s left to grapple with the plight of domesticity; to battle the oft ferocious tedium of raising a family single-handedly. Jones parries with Redmayne’s monstrous portrayal with bravado, providing a fulcrum point that grounds the extenuating circumstances of their extraordinary home life into something relatable and “normal.” He’s the scientist, she’s the soul. It’s her that makes everything relatable.

At one point, she explodes, “We’re not a normal family!” And while we know that she believes this sentiment to be true, her family – and her relationship with Stephen’s – was never defined by a conformity to society norms. From the get go, their romance was a harbinger of bucked normalcy. Not just anyone would marry a ticking time bomb. It’s upon her shoulders that the success of Theory rests and Jones handles her characters transformation with a kind of poetic ease that’s stoic and touching, motherly and equally sexual. She’s basically Imhotep the way she gains layers scene to scene. An Academy Award nomination is assuredly in store.

What’s possibly the biggest surprise of The Theory of Everything is just how winning every aspect of Marsh’s tale truly is. It functions on so many levels, attacking so many sectors of what we look for in a film. It’s futile to resist its supreme good taste.

Marsh spares us the gory details of how time actually works (new homework assignment: read “A (Brief) History of Time”) but thanks to adroit editing work from Jinx Godfrey, we’re never really worried about how it works. It just does. Add to that a nimble and whimsical score from Jóhann Jóhannsson (another nomination ought to be assured here) and nifty costume design from Steven Noble and you have a film whose technical aspects rival its visceral impact. There are bits and bobs that don’t measure up – grainy “camera footage”, underdeveloped secondary characters – but for a movie equally given to quirks, quacks and quarks, the bumbling never detracts from the charm. Marsh’s brief history of Hawkings is at once timely and timeless, matching intellect for emotion and absolutely thriving on two stunning performances. For all the accolades it’s destined to receive, The Theory of Everything is deserving.

A

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Out in Theaters: ROSEWATER

November 10, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Claire Foy, Dimitri Leonidas, Gael Garcia Bernal, Jon Stewart, Kim Bodnia, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Rosewater, Shohreh Aghdashloo

Jon Stewart‘s directorial cinematic debut is appropriately politically astute but throws his signature satirical edge out the window, resulting in a competently made, educationally sound – if not entirely entertaining – biopic. But such can be expected from a filmmaker who’s primary goal seems to be to shine a light into a dark place and report back on what he finds. That Rosewater lacks excitement in its followthrough is a misgiving worth forgiving in the face of strong performances and sound directorial spirit but you can’t help but wish the energy of the first half stretched through the later half’s long, tepid prison stay.

Longtime “The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart tells the true story of Iranian-Canandian Maziar Bahari, a Newsweek political reporter falsely incarcerated in Iran’s Evin Prison for 118 days under suspicion of espionage. The story is told with care and precision by Stewart, making for an all around safe debut from a “reporter” noted more for his bitingly satirical comedy than his on-the-nose reporting. In all accounts, Stewart edifies us, relishing the minute details of the story and blowing them up into elements of larger import, but the material from which he’s working makes that process of expansion akin to blowing a 4×6 into a poster. He shots for specificity but loses it amongst an almost cliche prison tale.

The film opens on Bahari’s arrest, with a troop of Iranian policemen storming through his family house in Tehran and looting through his personal belongings like human paper shredders. From DVD bootlegs of The Sopranos to old Jazz records, these secretive Iranian officers are quick to label each and everything Bahari possesses as pornographic. When they discover a Maxim magazine, Bahari is willing to admit, “Ok, maybe that one is.” Soft chuckles ensue. The few instances of subtle humor are far from the side-splitting stuff of Stewart’s sharp “Daily Show” satire but even these moments are mistakenly few and far between. When held up against similar true life imprisonment stories, Rosewater can barely hold a candle to the type of enduring trauma of, say, Midnight Express and without a honed sense of political irony (perhaps Stewart’s most cherished aspect as a tv personality) it feels like it has too little of a personality of its own.

Going back in time to give more of an overview of the events that led to Bahari’s arrest, Stewart’s screenplay – based on Bahari’s memoirs “Then They Came for Me: A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival” -introduces us to a small platter of supporting characters that will invite minor shifts in the narrative to come. Bahari’s traditionalist and seeming nihilist mother Moloojoon (Shohreh Aghdashloo), personal driver and underground political activist Davood (Dimitri Leonidas) and wife Paolo (Claire Foy) each provide a different fulcrum point upon which Bahari’s mental state will balance while jailed; each representing one of the three elements that his book is named after. We see the pull of love, of honor, of survival all play on Bahari’s mind and can’t help but retreat from him slightly when he makes what some would deem the “cowardly” choice.

As a screenwriter and director, Stewart wastes little time getting into the politics of the piece, allowing Bahari’s coverage of the controversial 2009 presidential election between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Mir-Hossein Mousavi to guide us towards a deeper understanding of an “old news” hot topic. Shortly after capturing stirring protest footage and releasing it to the world media under an anonymous title, Bahari is identified by the Iranian government and taken with extreme prejudice into the confides of military solitary confinement. It’s in this cell that we spend the later half of the film. While Bahari receives massive media coverage in the United States, with government officials as high up as then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton demanding Bahari’s just return, he festers in the concrete belly of an Iranian prison. It’s here that his soul is tested and the film stagnates.

As Bahari, Gael Garcia Bernal creates a character worth caring for. Stacked with charisma, charm and intelligence, Bahari’s imprisonment is unequivocally wrong but Stewart’s real interest lies not in condemning but quantifying the how of it all. In such, the intrigue of the film lies in how Stewart deals with the two sides of this coin. On the other side of the equation is a man known only as “The Specialist” (Kim Bodnia) – later nicknamed “Rosewater” – an Iranian interrogator with limited understanding outside the Muslim political state stuck on the notion Bahari is an American spy who’s infiltrated Iran and plans to disseminate disquieting information.

When Bahari finally counters with details of the “vices” of the Western world – particularly the many pleasures of the massage parlor – Bodnia’s taken aback reaction again taps into Stewart’s comedic sensibilities and the film thrives. When Stewart dips into the metaphysical level and Bahari’s deceased father makes a number of wisdom-laden appearances, the film suffers. As for the whole reporter/spy vs. specialist/massage parlor obsessive, the chemistry between these two inherently opposing forces at one point threatens to become uncommonly personal but still never reaches into a realm beyond that which we’ve seen a number of times before.

Furthermore, the “brutality” to which Bahari is subjected isn’t a kind that necessarily works well on screen. His torture is one of relentless boredom and unfortunately, we laterally become a victim of this too. Seeing that Bahari’s incarceration and subsequent “brutal interrogation” falls squarely on the side of mental degradation and involves practically no physical harm makes for material that isn’t as necessarily as jarring or visceral as it seems to think it is. Please don’t take me incorrectly here, I have no doubt that rotting away in a jail cell for nearly four months would undoubtedly be torture. I just don’t find it necessarily compelling on film. You likely won’t either.

Thankfully, Bernal is up to the challenge and emotes wickedly even when blindfolded and pacing his calcified cage. Though Stewart’s screenplay often mistakes adversity for inherent drama, Bernal is there to make sure that his character’s arc is as rock solid as prison walls sealing him away from the world and his family. Though not the sinfully funny, culturally smarmy debut that one would hope for with Stewart mounting the director’s chair, Rosewater is a perfect History class film; an educational and well acted showcase of media tragedy ballooning into a thoughtful and humanizing story.

C

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Weekly Review 62: DEVIL, EVERYONE, PHILIP, FORCE, LOW

November 9, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Weekly Review Tagged Force Majeure, Listen Up Philip, Low Down, Me and You and Everyone We Know, Reviews, The Devil's Rejects, Weekly Review

Another fairly lax week at the theater held screenings of Interstellar and Big Hero 6 – both of which I had high hopes for (the former far more than the later) and was fairly disappointed by both. At home, I had some time to catch up with a few new screeners (bringing my cume of 2014 films to a whopping 198), none of which impressed me more than the Swedish avalanche drama currently making the rounds in limited release. As far as films opening this week, it’d probably be the one I’d most recommend. Chris sat down with Michel Hazanavicius and Berenice Bejo to chat The Artist and their upcoming film The Search. It’s a great interview so be sure to give it a look. Otherwise, let’s boogie down with some Weekly Reviews.

DEVIL’S REJECTS (2005)

A mild improvement over Rob Zombie‘s debut effort House of 1,000 Corpses, The Devil’s Rejects is an unreservedly more cinematic sequel. Moving outside the circle of abject grossness stuffed in leaky caves and dark tool sheds, Zombie moves his marks into the desert to cook up some sun-baked horror the aesthetic likes of Natural Born Killers. There’s a semblance of social commentary churning within Devil’s Rejects but it’s too half-baked to ever truly make heads or tails of. Nevertheless, it signaled the development of a filmmaker that has since descended into lesser material. All in all though, an interesting, if repetitive, watch and one worthy of seeking out (next Halloween) for genre fans that have passed it over. (C+)

ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW (2005)

An oddball little indie film ensemble piece, Me and You and Everyone We Know is like a successful version of this year’s Men, Women and Children (overbearingly long title accounted for.) John Hawkes plays a shoe salesman whose wife has just flown the coup and is surrounded by a menagerie of strange cityfolk all with their own quirks, secrets and peculiarities. Miranda July‘s debut showcases comedy consistent in its gentle biting nature – more a thing of misunderstood awkwardness than anything – but it’s got a genial heart to match. July’s strange little piece packs an undeniable heartbeat and isn’t suffocated by its girthy cast of characters, even though it’s all rather weird. (B-)

LISTEN UP PHILIP (2014)

One of the more decisive films of 2014 (many loved it) is also one of the hardest to really feel anything towards. Jason Schwartzman plays a misanthropic writer who rages and alienates his way through New York City until he meets novelist idol Ike Zimmer (Jonathan Pryce). The two swirl in a whirlpool of self-pity, self-importance, intellectual superiority and ultimately regret, eventually driving one another towards that most extreme state of NYC misanthropy. Schwartzman’s Philip may be hard to care for because of how much of a douchebag he is but he’s also not a very interesting character. Wallowing arrogance is only arresting in short bursts and Philip long outstays his chilly welcome. (C)

FORCE MAJEURE (2014)

To call Force Majeure a dramedy would be to misrepresent what it is, but I can’t think of another term to describe the hazy mixture of deeply uncomfortable comedy and shrill, sometimes even heart-breaking, dramatics. Ruben Östlund‘s Swedish vacation film follows a family of four as they holiday in the stunning French Alps until a life-threatening event changes the course of their vacation and their relationships. As the familial tension mounts, you’ll find yourself quietly cackling one moment and alarmingly affected the next. A great display of foreign cinema taking greater risks than we’re used to stateside, Force Majeure studies the effects of a near-miss on the rocky ethos of a nuclear family and does it all while threading a narrow thematic needle. (B)

LOW DOWN (2014)

John Hawkes plays a talented jazz musician who moonlights as a heroine slinger and deadbeat Dad to competent daughter Amy-Jo (Elle Fanning). Like jazz, Low Down wanders almost aimlessly, riffing here and there on the strong father-daughter relationship at its center and amidst themes of the cyclical nature of co-dependence, but is still without a strong narrative center point. If Llewyn Davis is a tone poem about a time and a scene, Low Down is a k-hole of the destructive spiral of musicianship and drugs. Not entirely without worth (the acting from Fanning, Hawkes, Glenn Close and Lena Headey is rock solid), Jeff Preiss‘ biopic of esteemed pianist Joe Albany is a narrative desperately in need of a through line. (C-)

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Out in Theaters: BIG HERO 6

November 7, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Alan Tudyk, Big Hero 6, Chris Williams, Damon Wayans Jr., Disney, Don Hall, Genesis Rodriguez, James Cromwell, Jamie Chung, Marvel, Maya Rudolph, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Ryan Potter, Scott Adsit, T.J. Miller

In the past, I’ve been something of a bitch when it comes to animated movies. The Pixar classics are notorious for beating down my manliness and summoning up the tears – Up, Toy Story 3, even f*cking Ratatouille all got me going. Something about the to-the-bone earnest family connection gets this child of divorce waterworking. It’s clockwork. Minute 82 and I’m Niagara. The last animated movie to move me: How to Train Your Dragon 2. The Mom stuff. The Dad stuff! Whew. Color me teary.

In Big Hero 6, the tragic beats are there – dead parents (c’mon, it’s not a Disney movie without dead rentals), another family member who bites the dust in a ghastly explosion and, yup, a close friend and confidante who also eats the proverbial bullet. The kids in my audience gulped palpably and cried out in waves of concern.

But where was the lump in my throat? Had I grown too cold and calloused to experience my fair share of emotional woes? I felt like Palahniuk’s narrator stuffed into Bob’s meaty bosoms, post-Marla. What the eff was going on?! And then I realized, the fundamental issue was this was more Marvel movie than animated flick. The deaths were without meaning. The sacrifices just temporarily absences; a normative formula via disappearing act that’s taken hold in sequel culture. The offings were like watching Agent Coulson die in The Avengers (spoiler, whoops) or Sam Fury die in Cap 2 (whoops, more spoilers). You just don’t really care. Worse yet, you don’t believe it. This symptom of emotional weightlessness is part and parcel of the pricklinesslessness (not a word) that is the Marvel-verse. Everyone is safe, everything works out. If I had a nicket for every faked death in the MMU, I would have like a full quarter. This consequencelessness (also, not a word) leaves me cold and indifferent. With Big Hero 6, I laughed heartily, I generally enjoyed myself, but I never felt a single thing. Nor did I ever feel a sense of danger.

And that’s why I’m struggling to conjure up words to properly describe my experience with Big Hero 6. It was pretty good. It made me smile. But that’s kinda all one can really say. It’s a hearty head shake; a smiling nod. You can recommend it to just about anyone and they wouldn’t be offended by what they’ve seen. They’ll likely enjoy it quite a bit. It’s got plenty of funny moments to boot, the actions sequences are beautifully realized and colorfully captivating and there is a heart to it, it’s just more robotic than of flesh and blood. But once it’s all over (and with an inevitable load of sequels on the way) there’s really nothing to talk about; nothing that sticks with you.

The latest from Disney is adapted from an under-sung Marvel comic created by Steven T. Seagle and Duncan Rouleau in 1998. The first collaboration between Marvel and Disney since Disney acquired Marvel almost five years back, Big Hero 6 tells the story of 13-year old Hiro Hamada (Ryan Potter), a robo-tech genius taken to back alley bot battles. After a narrow escape from one black-market moonlighting or other, Hiro is seduced by older bro Tadashi to go legit and enroll in a prestigious engineering program promising to hone his robotic skills. Decidedly won over by Tadashi’s classmates, his state-of-the-art workspace, his just-finished invention and the winning Professor Calahan (James Cromwell), Hiro decides to win the science fair and earn a place among these up-and-coming science wiz-kids.

Set in the hyper-futuristic San Fransokyo, the superhero saga sees Hiro team up with medic-bot Baymax (Scott Adsit) and fellow students Wasabi (Damon Wayans Jr.), Honey Lemon (Genesis Rodriguez), GoGo Tomago (Jamie Chung) and Fred (T.J. Miller) to take down a mysterious super-villain who’s stolen Hiro’s next-gen microbots and has nothing short of evil intentions for them.

The script has a massive nine credits (!!!) to its name, which accounts for the rigidly structured and carefully manicured movements of Big Hero 6, but co-directors Don Hall and Chris Williams find ample opportunities to let the jokes waft from the otherwise stenchy grasp of formulaic mediocrity. The humor flows liberally from the emotionally stinted Baymax, a plushy bot who’s more Wall-E than Vision. From fist bumps to mixed colloquialisms, Baymax’s journey to figure out the human world – and the associated emotions that come with it – is flooded with moments of laughter and genuine warmth. Of the seis big heros, he’s the only one anyone’s going to be talking about exiting the theater. Trouble is, outside of this smiley Stay Puft marshmallow man, the film is inflated with flat characters and narrative breadcrumbs all leading to an overdone and overblown ending you could see from miles away without a super scanner. So while it is paint-by-numbers, the colors used are at least rather pretty.

Big Hero 6 is like a Nilla Wafer; yummy going down but nothing to write home about. It’s funny and entertaining in a bland, gingerbread kind of way. It’s the taste of the scrumptious substancelessness (not a word) that defines the Marvel cinematic universe now bleeding into Disney. I don’t doubt that you’ll like it, maybe even love it, but I challenge you to remember this movie five years down the line. You know, once the Avengers 4 is out.

C+

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Out in Theaters: INTERSTELLAR

November 4, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Anne Hathaway, Casey Affleck, Christopher Nolan, Hans Zimmer, Interstellar, Jessica Chastain, Jonathan Nolan, Mackenzie Foy, Matthew McConaughey, Out in Theaters, Reviews 1 Comment

Don’t be fooled, Interstellar is no blockbuster. Nor is it the critical darling think piece so many expected it to be. It seems crafted to engulf the minds of the critical community in nit-picky debates about minute details; destined to conjure up various theories and interpretations (a la Inception) but I don’t see that happening. For all its loopholes, space travel and time relativity, it’s relatively straightforward. Almost shockingly so. That’s not to say that it doesn’t aim for something more; for something meant to transcend your usual theatrical experience. Christopher Nolan reaches for the stars. He comes up short.

There’s no battles, no aliens, no ticking time bomb. Interstellar‘s a film about blackness and bleakness; dust storms and global scarcity; destiny and family. A gun doesn’t once appear on the screen. There’s not even really a villain so much as an antagonist with a competing view of the greater good and a finer tuned sense of self-preservation. The villain is in a sense time itself. And Planet Earth. And dust.

At a critical juncture, Matthew McConaughey‘s Cooper convinces Anne Hathaway‘s Amelia that time is a precious resource. With a nearly three hour running time and a bulk of scenes this guy deems unnecessary, Nolan tends towards squandering said resource. Establishing shots are at first spent on Earth; Cooper’s a retired NASA pilot and now a farmer. His children Murph (Mackenzie Foy, later Jessica Chastain) and Tom (Timothée Chalamet, later Casey Affleck) have only known a world of ashes and dust. Crops around the world have become infected and extinct. Corn is the last consumable vestige of survival on Earth and its kernelly goodness is fast fading. But as time bends onward, the whole scarcity act is swallowed up by the impending doom of super blustery dust storms; the harbinger of phlegmy coughs; humankind’s asthmatic nemesis. The corn supply isn’t quite in top shape but there’s apparently enough to go around to serve meals of corn fritters, corn on the cob and corn bread. The classic corn triple play.

When a gravitational anomaly sends Cooper and Murph to a top secret NASA base, Cooper is recruited to man a mission into the intergalactic unknown in hopes of discovering new resources and, ultimately, salvation for humankind. About as little time is spent on the logistical rationale behind Cooper showing up and shipping off within what seems like a matter of days as it is on Professor Brand’s (Michael Caine) uncompromising over-reliance on this has-been pilot. It makes about as much sense as Rambo showing up on the White House’s doorstep and being asked to lead the president (who in this case is obviously 1997 Harrison Ford) to the front lines of an ISIS mass beheading assault. I mean it’d be cool and all but what?

Utterly enraptured by the poetry of Dylan Thomas, Brand is all about doing things the “ungentle” way. He’s so Thomas-esque, the man is basically rage against the machine. So after one (1) meeting with ol’ Cooper, Brand’s got him strapped into a (must have been) multi-billion dollar top-secret aircraft set on a world-saving mission. Because anything that’s roughly as logical as Armageddon is apparently good to go for screenwriter bros Christopher and Jonathan Nolan.

And this comes down to the main issue of Interstellar: the Nolan Bro’s screenplay. For a usually straight-laced, sober duo, their scribemanship here has a prevailing feeling of being one bong rip too deep. It’s hard – if not entirely impossible – to defend some of the Nolans’ more hokey moments – the “love connection” speech, obviously telegraphed dialogue, the debatable “fifth dimension” scene, that ending… – and it all winds up feeling like a mixture of trying too hard and not trying hard enough. It’s at once Nolan’s most shamelessly sentimental film, but also his most emotionally honest. Only when it tips into a wholly saccharine realm, it turns entirely unbecoming. Once those thematically iffy moments bind themselves to the finale and become inextricably germane to the larger themes at play, Interstellar shows itself for being a half-baked, if fully beautiful, failed experiment in synthesizing the inimitable success of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

That’s because Interstellar is an exercise in blue balls. It keeps getting so close to giving us what we wants and then shies away at the last moment; revealing a much less sexy underbelly as it goes. It’s an intimate human voyage through time and space, beset with little to no set pieces and made picture perfect with a massive budget and technical wizards hammering out intergalactic spacescapes the likes of none other. The pieces are all right; the whole just doesn’t come together as it should. You can almost smell its desire to be something more. The sting of it letting you down is palpable as it closes up shop and that’s partially what makes it the laudable misfire it is.

Seeing the film in one of seventy-one 70mm IMAX screening around the world imbued me with a great sense of privilege until I saw the actual picture. On Earth, it’s dusty. Grainy. Sometimes inexplicably unfocused. In space, it’s unreal. Otherworldly. Wormholes have never looked so sexy. The one hour of full-blown, in-your-face, pants-pissin’ IMAX shots does come around to save the day – justifying the costly asking price – though Hans Zimmer‘s theater-rumbling score often crosses the threshold into full blown audio assault if experienced in the large-picture, super-duper loud format. His low throbbing Gothic bass notes declare all out war on your eardrums as they crescendo and decrescendo. Turned down a notch lower, it’s one of the finest aspects of the film (a film that is more often than not a visual treat.) But like candy, the FX-heavy landscape doesn’t nourish a greater sense of thought-provoking reflection so much as sheer awe; nonetheless, it’s a thing to enjoy in all its savory nutritionlessness.

Nolan swings for the rafters and ends up splicing it just at the perfect angle where you can’t quite tell if it’s gonna be a home run or a foul ball. You hang in anticipation. And right at that moment of truth – in that prevailing reverent silence – the ball disappears into a wormhole. It’s hard to confirm whether Nolan’s latest is really an instance of Casey at Bat or, like 2001, his sci-fi opus will take years to fully digest, appreciate and understand. But I would tend towards the later not being the case. It is just heady and barely open-ended enough to stomach an argument for the other side. Though I’d have to likely also be offered corn bread.

The success and/or failure of Interstellar is hard to quantify. It’s grand and self-aggrandizing. It’s often more numb than it is smart. It’s a visual feast to behold with the emotional stakes to match. The talent both in front of and behind the camera (visual effects teams in particular) is rapturous and almost entirely engrossing. Though the “who’s who” of talent doesn’t ever pretend that Interstellar is a true actor’s film, McConaughey has a few scene where he dusts off his Oscar and lets it all hang out. When he does, hearts will break. But like a kid who ate too much candy and puked on a Picasso, Interstellar is only truly beautiful once you wipe all the muck off.

One thing seems certain: this will likely be the last time the studio system cuts Nolan a blank check to do with as he will. His directorial carte blanche will expire when it inevitably disappoints at the international box office. His license to kill will all but be revoked. It’s almost tragic but, time being a flat circle and all, it’s also inevitable. If only the Nolans bros had let Rust Cohle free to wax on time and stuff when they do decide to unleash their philosophical digressions. Apparently that’s just too much to ask.

With Interstellar, Nolan rages against the dying of the light, but like a theater minor without the proper know-how, he rages just a little too hard.

C+

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Weekly Review 61: HORNS, ABCS, BEGIN, CANNIBAL, SNOW

October 31, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Weekly Review Tagged Begin Again, Cannibal Holocaust, Horns, Reviews, Snow on Tha Bluff, The ABCs of Death, Weekly Review

Halloween is upon us (and by the time you’re reading this, will have already passed) so the time for horror is taking its spot in the rear view. Sayonara! Nevertheless, I popped on a slew of horrors at home, including a double Nosferatu showing; both the 1922 original and the “what if this was how it was made?” docu-fictionalization Shadow of the Vampire. No Halloween is complete without the obligatory Evil Dead 2 watch, so the wonderful caws and coos of Bruce Campbell graced my household as I turned a pumpkin into Nosferatu. This week had only one (!!!) screening, a rare thing in this rat-racing line of work but thankfully it was one for the books, Nightcrawler. Easily among my favorite of the year, Nightcrawler showcases Jake Gyllenhaal in a role that deserves all the awards. Hopefully he actually gets nommed on. At home, I had the chance to watch one of the worst movies of the entire year, which we’ll get to in just a wee moment. So strap in and let’s Weekly Reviews.

HORNS (2014)

You pretty much just need to learn the name of the lead character of Horns – Ignatius Perrish – to understand the egotistical, sloppy dreck that is this film shit show. Laughably dumb all the way through, Horns is a wildly ill-conceived movie that doesn’t apparently understand what movies are and how they function. Overtly reaching for metaphors and widely missing over and over again, Horns is one long, confused religious parable about who knows what; a masterpiece of allegorical shittiness, a master’s class on how not to make a movie. Daniel Radcliffe gives it his all as a shifty man on trial in the court of public opinion for allegedly murdering his girlfriend but the abortion of a screenplay leaves him very little room to act in any convincing manner or emote without making us want to laugh. All in all, I’ll chalk this one up to a director way, way in over their head, a screenplay dripping with no-no’s and actors confused into thinking that their onscreen work was important and not just a joke, which is all this ghastly film ultimately is. (F)

THE ABCS OF DEATH (2012)

A freakish collection of short entries to the time-honored horror genre, The ABCs of Death is anthology filmmaking epitomized. The good and the bad come mixed, with some absolutely dreadful entries – F for Fart (coming from Japan, naturally) – stirred up with some rather smart and effective ones – D for Dogfight is von Trier-lite, L for Libido is monstrously unsettling, N for Nupitals is worth a laugh, and X for XXL might just be the best of the bunch. Filmmakers at the forefront of the genre like Adam Wingard, Ti West, Ben Wheatley and the always unsettling Srdjan Spasojevic make appearances against newcomers like cartoonist Kaare Andrews and claymation man Lee Hardcastle. There’s segments that’ll have you hanging your head in your hands in disbelief and those that will ramp up the energy and inject enough life to keep at the two-plus hour engagement. Calling it a mixed effort is really the only way to sum it up but, for me personally, there’s enough to enjoy to make the venture somewhat worthwhile. (C+)

BEGIN AGAIN (2014)

Feel good gobbledygook caked in flaky melodrama, Begin Again is essentially an American remake of Once – from the same director – with a little less music, bigger cast names and a larger production budget. It’s fluffy and light and airy, the cinematic equivalent of popcorn, and just about as nourishing. There isn’t much to dislike, so long as you’re willing to swallow hokey, whimsy and the miracle of TRUE LOVE! It sounds as though I hated this film (I didn’t) but I can’t deny the soapiness had me smiling in places. Stupid soapy smiles. HOW DARE YOU MAKE ME SMILE SOAPY SMILES JOHN CARNEY?! Mark Ruffalo is as charming as always as a drunken, down-on-his-luck record guy, Keira Knightley is as effortlessly rapturous as ever as his songwriting savior, and even “rockstar” Adam Levine is tolerable as clean-cut d-bag heartbreaker. It’s just that the combination feels as inorganic, staged and slick as a Maroon 5 song. (C-)

CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST (1980)

An effectively horrifying descent into the green inferno, Cannibal Holocaust is a film that’s difficult to recommend on any rational level, and equally as hard to “enjoy,” but it’s an avante garde film who’s unblinking devotion to its contrarian cause I can’t help but respect. It also basically gave birth to the found footage subgenre – later popularized with Blair Witch. Cannibal Holocaust follows a group of sinful documentarians who enter the Amazon to track down some of the last remaining vestiges of untouched civilization in two warring cannibalistic tribes: the Ya̧nomamö and the Shamatari. The violence is shaking and brutally graphic, with accusations at the time of release that actual local tribesmen and women were murdered onscreen. The footage is so convincing, it took a three year examination to prove otherwise. While the film was later vindicated, Ruggero Deodato off the hook for murder and bans on the flick largely lifted, the absolutely stomach-churning cruelty to animals on-screen was never in doubt: it is all staggeringly real. Turtles are flayed, monkeys decapitated, a lemur cruelly stabbed to death. Any animal lover will close their eyes (I did) but their squeals still pierce your mind. At least now I understand the need for PETA. While Cannibal Holocaust enters the realm of film I would hesitate to recommend to even the most seasoned of stomach, it’s nonetheless an extremely well made and entirely thought-provoking film. (B-)

SNOW ON THA BLUFF (2011)

What did I just watch? How much of it is reality, how much is fiction? These are the kinds of questions Snow on Tha Bluff will inspire. The film starts jarringly when a hustler (Curtis Snow) bamboozles a trio of privileged college students, duping them into thinking he’ll sell them “two eight balls and ten rolls” and then robbing them at gunpoint. He snatches the co-ed’s camera and decides to let it roll on to capture his life dealing in Atlanta. The film doesn’t let up from there. Drive by’s, robberies, slinging drugs and the cold-blooded murder of “characters” – clearly stand-ins for real life people – make up just a part of this fascinating look into a cultural on the brink of collapse. Filmed guerrilla style, it’s almost impossible to parse out what is real and what is artifice and you’re left with the sinking feeling that even if nothing is real in the sense we’re thinking of, this is as close to reality as we’re gonna get. After the film’s release, Snow was arrested of charges depicted on camera, if that gives you any sense of the reality of the flick. It’s all one big tragic mess, a peek into a civilization rotting from the inside out. The thug life is as much a cause of self-perpetuation as it is of societal construction and we’re there to witness the cycle first-hand. A scene where Snow splices up crack rocks with a razor blade as his four year old plays with a balloon nearby, detailing how he experienced this exact same scene when he was a child, is perhaps the most real moment of the film. There’s no doubt Snow is a shaken man. Snow on Tha Bluff is that rare piece of cinema that – while occasionally willing to descent to moments that feel operatic and stagey, even in all its lo-fi presentation – is most effective at getting the cogs to churn in your mind, leaving you racing with questions that spill out into the real world. (B-)

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Out in Theaters: NIGHTCRAWLER

October 30, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Best of 2014, Bill Paxton, Dan Gilroy, Jake Gyllenhaal, James Newton Howard, Nightcrawler, Out in Theaters, Rene Russo, Reviews, Riz Ahmed

With a name as innocuous as Louis Bloom, you wouldn’t initially suspect the lead character of Nightcrawler to be so dangerous. But the virulent Lou is the kind of guy who dissolves into shadows; who feeds vampirically in the darkness. He’s not a villain so much as a force of nature. Silent but deadly. His politeness is alarming, starkly juxtaposed by the edgy vibration of his piercing, bulbous eyes. His word choice; precise as a bone saw. His demeanor; direct but detached. Like a drone. He’s a bug-eyed Terminator sans the metallic endoskeleton; a top-knotted Patrick Bateman without the 401K. In the role, Jake Gyllenhaal is angelic. He’s equally demonic. He’s perfect mopping up uncomfortable silences, guttural laughs and wry grins like a janitor in a milking cow factory.

Caught in the high beams of a night patrolman, Lou materializes from the shadows like an apparition. A ghoulish grin masking his face. He notes his trespassing is accidental. He also notes the pricy hunk of watch adorning the wrist of the Paul Blart eying him with petulant suspicion. The next scene, it’s Lou wearing the watch.

Throughout the film, Lou’s facial expressions percolate with a kind of serpentine other-worldliness. As if his tongue could dart from his mouth at any moment to nip at the night air. It doesn’t. He remains squarely within the realm of the human. No matter how inhumane he is. A testament to Dan Gilroy‘s narrow degree of restraint and Gyllenhaal’s tightrope-walking ability.

When we meet Lou, he’s a drifter; fencing fences and manhole covers. Begging for jobs with an armory of interview-friendly terminology and all the manicured motions of a “respectable” human being. At a car crash, he yanks his beatermobile to the shoulder to observe its burny grotesqueries and runs into Joe Loder, a TV news freelancer who roams the nights to capture domestic implosions on film. Loder (Bill Paxton) says the job is hell. The next scene, Lou has camera in tow, hunting down the next suburban calamity. It isn’t long before he’s whipping up his own crime scenes and hiring a slacky intern (Riz Ahmed).

In his junker motorcade of journalistic un-tegrity, Lou rips a hole through the banality of the LA night, hunting down the next big tragedy like a slobbering machine, manipulating it when need be and selling it off to the news producer running the graveyard shift, Nina (Rene Russo). Camcorders are his business cards. Bloody car crashes his boardrooms. Murdered families, the money shot coup de grâce to end a good night on.

Nina knows the business is blood sport. Local news is nothing but modern day gladiatorial work. She’s titillated by promises of gory plane crashes. B&E’s are her bee’s knees. She wets herself over triple homicides. Russo holds the performance together by the skin of her teeth, refusing to reveal weakness behind that modernized beehive and liberal thrashing of makeup. As the tension mounts between Lou and Nina, a new dynamic takes shape: one that’s uproariously creepy and carnally delicious. Watching Lou sic Nina is watching the hungry wolf lick his chops before he preys.

Piggybacking on my earlier Patrick Bateman comparison, Nightcrawler deals in a similar brand of corporate black humor as American Psycho, taking aim at the blanket sensationalization of news and, to a lesser degree, our woeful economic state. It’s wickedly funny in a deadpan, threatening kind of way – like Nick Nolte – with Gyllenhaal’s knockout performance informing the laughs like a conductor with a rosewood baton. He is the slaughterer of the lamb, we the vultures come to pick the bones. And if you’re anything like me, you’ll eat up the meaty sarcasm like roast beef on Christmas.

To see the transformation of the shmuck with the Wall Street name from lowly drifter to certifiable media mogul is enough reason to see the film, even though it drags along some basic fixer-uppers that stick out uncomfortably. James Newton Howard‘s score – the man responsible for music-ing such clunkers as Maleficent, Parkland, After Earth, Snow White and the Huntsman, Green Lantern, The Green Hornet, The Tourist and more – often feels out of place, as if it were teleported in from an entirely different movie from an entirely different genre. Howard was scoring a straight thriller as we watched a brutally dark comedy unfold. It’s never in junction with the piece so much as it detracts from it with blast after blast of heavy-handed straightforwardness and a tonal lack of understanding the subtle transformations of character. Were Trent Reznor or Cliff Martinez behind the music, it would have stood out that much more.

Further, the film lacks an entirely solid starting and finishing point. The meat in between is so tender, so perfect, but it kind of drifts in and drifts out without the slap in the face that I both wanted and expected. Come on, punch me. I can handle it. But I guess it makes metaphorical sense for a movie of this nature to creep in and creep out without warning. If not for those few minor miscalculations, Nightcrawler could have driven itself into a sheer state of perfection.

A nightcrawler, not to be confused with the blue Russian teleport from the X-Men comics, is a bottom feeder. A succubus. A drive by job with a camera. They find you in your weakest moments – battered, bloodied and broken – and display it for the world to see. There’s no scruples in the line of work; no lines. It’s a brawl. A exploitative, invasive, harrowing brawl. And the public eats it up like pigs at the stye. They feed on it like vampires. They need it. The supply and demand chain is self-fulfilling. The watchers become the watched. Karma’s a bitch. Nightcrawler finds its target audience like a lumpy tumor, poking it and prodding it with the precision of a surgeon. It’s often equally as brilliant. Lou likes to say that if you’re seeing him, it’s the worst day of your life. Quite the opposite can be said about this film.

A

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Weekly Review 60: BLIZZARD, STRETCH

October 24, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Weekly Review Tagged Reviews, Stretch, Weekly Review, White Bird in a Blizzard 2 Comments

Taking a break from the horror to settle into some 2014 On Demand fare, I looked to make up some ground with a couple new limited release arrivals. Seeing that I did a lot of what is colloquially known as raging this weekend, I didn’t quite get as many down as I had anticipated but with a packed week of screenings, there was no shortage of films to be had. After a public reading from Chuck Palahniuk on Monday (something I would highly recommend), I settled into screenings of the action packed but one-note John Wick followed up by the pitiful Ouija (which also landed with a thud with audiences, who rewarded it a lowly “C” CinemaScore) and unleashed reviews for what may be the year’s best, Birdman, the limited release but worthy of seeking out, The Heart Machine as well as local Seattleite Lynn Shelton‘s ultimately disappointing Laggies. Chris also piped in with his thoughts on the morally confused Dear White People, a film whose heart is in the right place but the execution is just a wide miss. So, all-in-all, a very busy week and time for some Weekly Reviews.

WHITE BIRD IN A BLIZZARD (2014)

Gregg Araki delivers this somber piece of caged domesticity in odd fashion. First off, the piece introduces us to its central conundrum: Kat’s (Shailene Woodley) mom has gone missing. The tension is slow played, the disappearance surprisingly never suspect. But then again, Eve she was always a bit of a drinker, always a bit of a loosey goosey. She’d saunter around the house in provocative lingerie when Kat’s boyfriend would visit. Always with a glass of wine in hand. She was a minx trying to prove her worth through her sexuality, a role that Eva Green has come to embody again and again. And like always, Green absolutely owns it. When she up and disappears, Kat assumes she just picked up and left while others in town suspect more devious misdeeds. Throughout the film, there’s an awkward amount of sexuality energy in the young Kat that’s unleashed upon those that she encounters -as if she herself is growing into her cougarish mother – a metamorphosis from child to sexual being. But her budding sexual symbolism ends up seeming just as weird and unsexy as barely sprouting boobs. White Bird in a Blizzard packs a potent ending and a trio of fine performances but I’m still not convinced that there’s not a superior cut to the picture lying around somewhere, one that would actually piece all the disparate parts together into a more satisfying whole. (C+)

STRETCH (2014)

A bonkers, adrenaline-fueled, nonstop shit show, Stretch has no intention to play it safe. It features gun fights, cocaine baggies, wanksters, hookers, butt plugs (plural) and Jason Mantzoukas. Patrick Wilson plays a down-on-his-luck limo driver who’s up to his eyes in debt with a local mob syndicate claiming they need payment by the end of the night. This lands Stretch (which is both his nickname and the kind of vehicle he drives) in the outlandish arms of client Roger Karos. Karos, played brilliantly by Chris Pine, is an eccentric Richard Branson-meets-Russell Brand billionaire type. Pine’s nonsensical mumbling and shining eyes make him just as much of a pirate as Jack Sparrow and his performance is off-the-walls and absolutely hilarious. To see Pine outside of his regular wheelhouse is to see him thrive. Joe Carnagan broke the mold when he made Stretch and it would of been a thing of beauty to behold in theaters (I’m guessing the multiple butt plugs deemed it theater unfriendly?) and though everything’s a little quirky, a lot oddball and totally full of shit, it’s the kind of shit I’m willing to eat up. With a smile on my face no less. (B)

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