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Out in Theaters: UNDER THE SKIN

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Of the many masters of cinema, Stanley Kubrick bulges out an esoteric monolith; an unbound vision of dystopian tomorrowland. Knowingly or no, he redefined cinema and still has a hulking influence over modern pictures. He started making movies in the age of Hays Code, a totalitarian, aggressively Calvinist model of censorship that restricted the depiction of such things as “pointed profanity”, “any licentious or suggestive nudity – in fact or in silhouette”, “illegal traffic in drugs”, and other horrors like “white slavery” (…). According to the master himself, these stringent policies ruined his 1962 adaptation of the controversial novel Lolita, a source riddled with sexual affront unsuitable for the likes of pre-Vietnam War gentleladies and gentlemen. Read More

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Out in Theaters: CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER

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“Captain America: The Winter Soldier”
Directed by Anthony Russo, Joe Russo
Starring Chris Evans, Samuel L. Jackson, Scarlett Johansson, Robert Redford, Sebastian Stan, Anthony Mackie, Cobie Smulders, Frank Grillo, Emily VanCamp, Toby Jones
Adventure, Action, Sci-Fi
136 Mins
PG-13

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Growing up in the 1940s gives Steve Rogers an excuse to not understand the mechanics of speed dial. But when neo-Nazi’s threaten the freedom of the entire world, you have to wonder why he’s not more focused on contacting his nuclear suit-wearing chum, Tony Stark, or the bad Shakespeare in the park actor/Norse God, Thor. Unless he’s gone on some spirit journey to be explained away in extra Blu-Ray bonus material, Tony’s probably just shambling around Stark Towers in his drawers. His billionaire skyline must be literally cast in shadow by the helicarriers of doom that Captain America’s trying to take down with the only weapons at his disposal: record-breaking sprinting skills and a shield.  The fate of the entire world is at stake and here’s good hearted Steve clearly taking a hell of an ass-whopping and he still doesn’t see fit to call up his Avengers pals? Or at least try? I’m sorry but you lost me there.

The one thing that Kevin Fiege and his Marvel Movie Universe croonies tend to get right is they suit the adventure to the adventurer. The threats Iron Man faced in his third outing were largely personal. A wronged colleague becomes a viable villain, he’s forced to deal with PDST from a near death experience and his personal arsenal of humanoid WMDs transforms him from a private citizen into national defense mascot numero uno. There were larger implications at play had he not gotten his guy but Stark at least felt well equipped to handle the charge. Thor’s arc in The Dark World involves intergalactic worm holes, gigantic frost monsters and 8-foot tall Dark Elves. But Thor wields a hammer forged in a dying star that gives him the ability to fly around like a blonde, bearded Superman. Being, you know, a god, Thor was the Avenger best equipped to handle such a mark. Sure, having other Supers alongside wouldn’t have hurt but this was a mission that suited Thor’s pedigree. Equipped only with a hunky body, a pure heart and strips of pure sinew for legs (made for putting fellow long distance runners to shame), Captain America (Chris Evans) just seems out of his depths.

Look at him in The Winter Soldier. His big mission involves a retread task (one we already saw a version of in The Avengers) that he’s simply unfit to handle because, well, his superpowers aren’t really that super. His third act heroics necessitate a flying wingman because he’s simply not equipped to handle the mission solo. Joining him is snarky sidekick Anthony Mackie as Falcon, an ex-Marine with a winged exoskeleton, because calling up Tony Stark or Thor was just… out of the question?

Part and parcel of enjoying these Marvel movies is digesting them with a spoonful of salt, especially when we’re looking at them from a logical standpoint and not a logistical one. Omissions are necessary from a budgetary standpoint and we have to be willing to overlook that… to some degree. But rather than make these shortcomings apparent, smart screenwriting would try to mask the need for the whole gang. This is where Captain America: The Winter Soldier fails hardest; an especially sad reality when contrasted to the contained spy thriller that it’s established as.

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Since the events of The Avengers, Cap and his shield shield S.H.I.E.L.D. Before this, Iron Man 2 was the first MMU film to tackle the build towards The Avengers head on and got far too bogged down in the goings on at that shadowy organization to stand as a film itself. The Winter Soldier has becomes it’s Phase 2 predecessor. Like Iron Man 2, it suffers from a fatal diagnosis of teaser syndrome. It’s all about what’s to come, not what’s happening in the now. By the end of the film, the chapter isn’t closed, it’s just beginning. Even it’s titular character, that mysterious Winter Soldier (played by a hollowed out Sebastian Stan), is relegated to a minor role with only an inkling of character.

If only Marvel would realize that not ever venture needed a third-act calamity, that millions must not be dumped on visual effects and that telling a self-contained story is a virtue in itself, then this could have been a rousing triumph. As it is, Cap 2 works so much better when its sights are centered on the smaller scale, when Steve and Scar Jo‘s Black Widow are traipsing around hunting for clues, trying to put a name to faceless villainy.

Give me more super-noir, less hapless explosions. Give me the humor and tragedy of Cap being a man lost in time. Screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely show savvy sneaking in some current political hot buttons as subtext but fail to tell the more personal story of a lost man adapting to a whole damn new century. But this is bane of the Russo Bros’ film; it takes one step forward, two steps back. Every cheer is followed up with a few jeers. With character resolution left dealt with in post-credit stingers and a third act that may as well have been helidropped in from some other movie, the modest enjoyment one gets from Captain America: The Winter Soldier just doesn’t justify the $170 million dollars spent. It’s too busy shoulder tapping you to go see The Avengers 2.

C

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Out in Theaters: NOAH

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“Noah”
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
Starring Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Anthony Hopkins, Logan Lerman, Emma Watson, Ray Winstone
Adventure, Drama
138 Mins
PG-13

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Glenn Beck has spoken. “Noah is just ridiculous,” Beck preached, going so far as to call the message contained within Darren Aronofsky‘s biblical blockbuster “danger disinformation.” Wise words from a man defending a story involving “the Creator” committing genocide against humankind, save for a 600-year old hero and his family (Genesis 7:6). For the creationist talk show host, ridiculousness exists only outside the confines of the Bible. But Beck is onto something.

No matter which side of the religious fence you fall on, you gotta admit that the story of Noah is more than a touch on the absurdist side. Even those interpreting the text at face value have to scrunch their face at Noah’s epic longevity. I mean the oldest man recorded on Earth weighed in at a whopping 123-years old and he can barely move, much less build an arc the size of the Empire State Building. At over five times that age, Noah puts your buff gramps to shame.

In what is one of the most well known Bible verses, Noah actually sets sail in his iconic arc on his 600th birthday. In Aronofsky’s film, Noah is played by 49-year old Russell Crowe, who during the duration of the film rifles through four different hair styles (a ploy to maximize action figures, I hope). Though 21st century scientists claim that a vegetarian diet will help you live longer and healthier lives, I’m seriously doubting that Noah’s hardcore vegan sensibilities led him to such preposterous supercentenarian status. Then again, his contemporaries do tear live animals apart by the chuck and seemingly consume them raw. Let’s just say, it’s a rough society.

Seeing that people are such dicks in Noah’s day, “the Creator” (who is never actually referred to in Aronofsky’s film as “God”) decides to put an end to the experiment that was humans. While his plans to cleanse the Earth with a devastating flood are explicitly stated in the Bible (“I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth.” Genesis 6:13), this Noah’s communion with God involves more foreshadowing nightmares and less bright light and disembodied voices. Noah even has to visit grandpappy Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins) and trip out on some mushroom tea to realize “the Creator’s” design. Again, Crowe’s got it much harder than the Noah of the bible, for whom God lays out a list of materials and all the dimensions needed to build an arc capable of surviving his super hardcore flood. Apparently, God is quite the carpenter. Like father, like son.

But while Noah’s passage in the bible lasts only a handful of paragraphs, Aronofsky’s film stretches past the two-hour mark, allowing him ample opportunity to probe themes of good, evil and redemption. Though Genesis’s brief layout of Noah’s saga makes no mention of what actually went down in the year-long period where Noah and his family vegged out on the arc or how a guy six centuries old and his small, nuclear family could construct a boat big enough to house not only every single animal on earth but two of them, this is where Aronofsky gets imaginative.

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With so little information to draw from, he’s got a license to frill. And though his interpretation may be hard to swallow for Bibleites and non-believers alike, remember, Aronofsky’s is a thematic fable. Rock monsters may invoke cries of nonsense in the real world but have their place within the framework of Aronofsky’s tale of redemption. Without the word of God whispering how to turn a magical forest into a big ass boat, it’s no wonder that Noah’s final product looks more like a wood shipping container than the arc of lore. Even the titular hero himself is a far cry from the bent-back and bearded saint from story books and Veggie Tales VHS’s. Instead, he’s a victim of his era, traumatized and dangerously devout.

From the grassroots inception of the film, Aronofsky talked at length about how he saw Noah as the world’s first environmentalist and environmentalist he is. Thanks to the lack of communication between Noah and “the Creator,” we see a man driven mad by his interpretation of His superior will. One could make the argument that Noah’s an eco-terrorist. Just about willing to commit infanticide for the good of the animals, the guy would make a great PETA president. He’s a man caught between divine will and his own humanity and the crossroads takes its toll. In this trademark reveal of fleeting sanity, Aronofsky puts his stamp on an ageless story.

Even though Russell is shown up at times by co-star Jennifer Connelly, and the film (like Noah) could use a good shave here and there, Aronfoksy and his crew of technical wizards are never off the mark from a visual standpoint. The tested and proved time lapse shot is often effective for imbuing a sense of passage but what they’ve done here is next level: painterly and epic, an epitaph to natural beauty. Even the CGI is used in fitful splashes, more the result of necessity than Aronofsky succumbing to overkill.

Noah lacks the signature claustrophobia of Aronofsky’s finest work but the eerie character turns we’ve come to expect from him are most certainly in play. His auteur touch and rich investigative storytelling gives life to a tale that could have been as dead as the bloated corpses we see polluted the sea. As Aronofsky tries to make sense of an emotional parable, often achieving such in stunning visual terms, Noah is a messy, disaster epic that works as a character study and red-blooded fantasy both.

B+

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Out in Theaters: SABOTAGE

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“Sabotage”
Directed by David Ayer
Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mireille Enos, Sam Worthington, Olivia Williams, Joe Manganiello, Josh Holloway, Terrence Howard, Harold Perrineau
Action, Crime, Drama
109 Mins
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Arnold Schwarzenegger hasn’t been in something as good as Sabotage for more than twenty years. In fact, this may be the best performance we’ve ever seen from the California-governing, “It feels like I’m cumin” body-building, Austrian-American action actor guru. Ever since his tenure as the Governator, Arnie’s been busy punting around DOA ideas that rely on his faded muscular glory. He’s more comfortable dog piling onto projects with old buddies rounding out their sixties (who look equally shabby firing large caliber rounds in the revealing light of slow motion.) All the black gear in the world can’t disguise the onslaught of nature’s clock.

Now attached to the Terminator reboot, a third Expendables movie and a preposterous follow up to Twins called Triplets (in which Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito realize they have a third sibling in the form of Eddie Murphy…seriously), Arnie’s star hasn’t fallen so much as hitched itself to the good will of his former A-list image. In so much as Schwarzenegger has become a hackneyed impression of himself, director David Ayer‘s willingness to work him into a straight-faced leading role is the first feat of bravery to run from Sabotage‘s gates. Arnie may get one masturbatory scene of pumping absurd amounts of iron but his role is never one of sinewy commando. Instead, he’s left to do the heavy lifting character-wise. It’s a novel idea: Arnie the actor. As the film races on, Ayer takes an increasingly sigh-inducing action behemoth and directs him back to relevance.

That feat is achieved with a pinch of reinvention and a chill gust of sobriety. Arnie’s dropped the shtick, lost the catch phrases and not relied solely on people’s collective memory of some impossibly jacked action hero. He does though, like the rest of his crew, go by a smarmy nickname: Breacher. He’s a rough and gruff veteran who chews on his cigars as much as the scenery, haunted by a gruesome snuff video that opens the film. In the grainy lo-fi of a dusty den, we watch Breacher watch a woman plead for her life, clawing in terror, calling out the name of her would-be savior. Her fear is absolute. The knife goes in clean, comes out stained.   

There’s no context for what we just saw, just the arcane knowledge that it’s supremely fucked up. ‘8 Months Later’ flashes on the screen and we pick up in the midst of a DEA raid on a Cartel drug mansion. Surrounded by a motley crew of B-list gold including, but not limited to, Sam Worthington, Joe Manganiello, Josh Holloway, Terrence Howard and a scene stealing Mireille Enos (each with their own goofy, 80s homaging handle) Schwarzenegger is the cadence-garbling brains behind their lock-and-load-’em brawn. Charging through the confines of what resembles Tony Montana’s compound, Breacher and Co. off baddies without batting an eye. An army of squibs erase the need for cheap looking, post-production digital blood painting. Ayer’s use of practical effects are a sigh of relief for any adrenaline junkie tired of violence as a CGI exercise.

Ayer instead directs the chaos like a boxer, tucking into the action and ducking out into fisheye landscape pans. He compliments bloody close-ups with composition shots that keep the frenetic setting, with its many window dressings, established and consistent. With action shots this clean, you’d think he’s filming on a Swiffer. And never one to downplay the gruesomeness nature of violence, Ayer hangs viscus like a horror show. His revenge train is a trail of sanguine, a bouquet of grisly moxie. At the expense of satisfying character development, Sabotage is Ayer’s gift to the action nut, wrapped in a steamy shawl of intestines, large and small.

Playing with so much camp, the proceedings can become bumbling and even dumb at times, but that comes with the territory. Sabotage is an homage to the action delights of the past; campy, twisty, and at times noodle-brained but always enjoyable and usually about one step ahead of the audience. In the battle of tipping the hat to classic action movies, Ayer proves he knows what he’s doing best. In a John Breacher vs Jack Reacher showdown, the later doesn’t stand a chance. The only real unforgivable aspect is they never fit the Beastie Boys anthem in there somewhere.

B-

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SXSW Review: THE HEART MACHINE

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“The Heart Machine”
Directed by Zachary Wigon
Starring John Gallagher Jr., Kate Lyn Sheil, David Call, Libby Woodbridge, Louisa Krause, Halley Wegryn Gross, RJ Brown
Drama, Thriller
85 Mins 
United States

Would you fall in love in the wild, wild west of romance that is online dating? What if you believe that your betrothed were living in a foreign country only to discover that they are instead a mere stone’s throw away? Would you get jealous? Angry? Violent? Director and writer Zachary Wigon provides his surreptitious take on the ‘romance as app’ generation in what can only be described as a romantic thriller in The Heart Machine. Read More

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SXSW Review: SEQUOIA

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“Sequoia”
Directed by Andy Landen
Starring Aly Michalka, Dustin Milligan, Sophi Bairley, Todd Lowe, Joey Lauren Adams, Demetri Martin
Comedy, Drama, Romance
86 Mins
United States

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Coming to terms with your own mortality is not something that a 20something should have to do. But disease has a will of its own. Instead of drifting off to sleep in some cushy bed at a ripe old age or being blindsided by a simple, but nonetheless devastating, twist of change, disease is the worst of fates because you have to live with the knowledge of what’s to come. Anyone with cancer or AIDS can look at where they’ll be a few months or maybe years down the line, how their humanity and agency will be whittled away until they are a shell of what they once were. This hellish circumstance demands a timeline marked with fates worse than fading away physically. It involves the slow death of self; the disappearance of what gives you meaning into a vacuous machine of needs, a pill-popping potato of tubes and drips. For the self-sufficient young adult, there is no crueler sentence.

In this Kevorkian-as-criminal age, people in this demoralized position are faced with only two options: sticking it out until the bitter end or taking their own lives. In both impossible cases, there is no dignity. We live in a generation where the ailing must suffer for their sufferings, where shame accompanies pain, where people who just want to crawl up like a dog under a shed and close their eyes are seen as criminals by the merciless laws of the gun-totting right. Instead, the victimized are strong-armed into dying penniless and in excruciating pain. After all, that’s the American way.

Sequoia tells the story of Riley (Aly Michalka), a 23-year old with irreversible oral cancer. Laid out with news that she’s entered the fourth and final stage of her affliction and faced with the reality that the next step in the process involves sawing off  her lower jaw (even though the odds would still be 80% against her favor), Riley has decided to take her own life in the serenity of Sequoia National Park. She muddles up a few bottles of sleeping pills, spikes her water with it, and waits for the white light.

Along the way, she runs into Christian-on-a-mission Ogden (Dustin Milligan) who becomes an unlikely confidante. In the spirit of good Christian spirit, he agrees to accompany Riley through her final day after her plans with her younger, helplessly punk rock sister Van (Sophi Bairley) fall through. Ogden soon knows that Riley’s  slurped down her deadly cocktail but the moral dilemma to follow overcomes him. Likewise, audience members are prompted to ask themselves where they side here. Is there a right choice or just a shitty situation no matter how the dice fall? Likely the latter, but again, that’s up to you.

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Back at the homestead, Van crashes her dad’s car and is forced to spill the beans to her and Riley’s separated and heedless parental unit. Dad, Oscar (Todd Lowe), swallows the news like a sack of potatoes, choking on the idea of losing his daughter so imminently, while Mom, Bev (Joey Lauren Adams), aided by new psychologist boyfriend and resident douche Steve (Demetri Martin) shrugs it off as a cry for attention. Their little girl is going to off herself, Oscar pleads. They have to do something.

Instead of trying to come to terms with Riley’s lucid justification for suicide, they rush across the state to her side to try and stop her from fulfilling her one tragic wish. There’s no intellectual vigil to hold, no meditative stasis, their gut reaction is the instinctual response of an animal whose young is in danger. They protect witlessly, they defend without thought for what they’re fighting for. 

Disease is the death of possibility, it’s being teether to an IV. It’s watching medical bills skyrocket past reasonable sums, the only will that you’ll then be able to pass on. It’s bearing witness to the forlorn faces of loved ones trying to remain strong for you. Suicide may be an escape but to call it cowardly in this circumstance is simple-minded and borderline pigheaded. Let’s just say that if there is a God turning those who have decided to take their own lives rather than rot from the inside out, I would love to give him a piece of my mind.

An old wives tale says that if you touch a baby bird, the mother will abandon it, leaving it to starve to death. Of course the anecdote is bogus, an invention of moms who don’t want their children poking around at nasty birds. In the animal kingdom, animals are irrevocably tied to their offspring (that is when they’re not busy eating them). No matter how many feathers may be ruffled on your young, most will battle against all odds until the bitter end. Old feuds fade, past wrongs erased, in the moment of trigger pulling, there is only the need to save your young. Ironically enough, at least in Riley’s case, this parental instinct becomes more a curse than anything. Instead of just letting her go the way she wants, they demand to keep her around, jaw or no.

Writer Andrew Rothschild said the idea for Sequoia came from a nightmarish period where he had himself convinced he was riddled with cancer. Thankfully, he did not. All his  worrying was for naught. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case, a truth that Riley knows only too well. His helplessly affecting story is much a commentary on the US health care system as it is a solemn ballad to those who took their lives for just cause. It’s heartbreak city but at least it tries to laugh its way to the end of the highway.

With Rothchild’s tenderly biting words married to Michalka’s soul-melting performance, director Andy Landen proves there’s still a place for storytellers with a unwavering voice and a powerful message. He makes Sequoia painfully honest and emotionally gutting, wistful but never sentimental. Watching it unfold is like listening to your mom tell the baby bird story. Michalka plays the baby bird perfectly, putting in an absolutely devastating performance, marked equally with wry deathbed humor and a kind of frankness only someone on their way out the door can offer. Disheveled and morose though she may be, baby momma still brings the worm in the end, but at what cost?

A-

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Patrick Brice Talks CREEP

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At the premiere of his debut horror/thriller Creep, director and star Patrick Brice took to the stage to put some A’s to some Q’s and give some context for his found-footage creeper. But Brice’s film;s greatest accomplishment lies in the performance eeked from Mark Duplass. He’s magnetic, unpredictable and an absolute joy to watch. From our review,

“No matter how valiant his intentions sound on paper, Joseph (Duplass) is an unreliable character from the get go. From his startling first appearance to the unsavory wolf mask, ironically called Peach Fuzz, he keeps stuffed in his closet, he’s a hard guy to get a read on. But that’s half the fun. Throttling between waxing on his own mortality and jumping from behind a doorway to startle Patrick (and by extension us), one thing is for certain: Joseph’s a weird dude. He’s always quick on his toes to offer some soundbite explanation for his abnormal actions but his backstory is about as reliable and consistent as Heath Ledger‘s Joker.”

Revealing his long standing friendship with co-star Duplass, Brice talked stalker behavior, the colloborative nature of Creep and how he went from an artsy filmmaker to directing a found footage horror movie. Read on to hear all he had to say.

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How did you get Mark involved in the film?

Patrick Brice: Mark Duplass and I are close friends. I just graduated from Cal Arts film school in 2011. He was kind of mentoring me and trying to figure out what the next project would be. We’d talked about working together on something. This project came out of those conversations. He just said, “Why don’t we go do something together?” So we went up to a cabin in the woods for five days and filmed an initial cut of this movie and ended up showing it to friends, doing some test screenings with filmmaker buddies – kind of refining it and toning it into the film that it is now. Eventually Jason Blum, from Blumhouse, watched the film, liked it, and agreed to kind of help us make it a little darker.

When you were writing it, was it tempting to turn it more into comedy and change the ending? Or did you know that you wanted it like this?

PB: We had no idea. There was like seven different versions of that ending. And I’m sorry I’m totally low blood sugar today. I’ve only eaten tacos for a meal. I can’t (EDITED FOR SPOILERS). I’m having an existential crisis. There was sort of a weird test, because we knew we wanted it to be funny and Mark’s insanely funny and gifted with improv. Jason saw it and was like, “You guys, this is teetering on the edge. Let’s bring this a little more into the realm of darkness.” It’s kind of a weird balance but hopefully it will work for some people.

Your movie reminds me of someone I know. I’m not even kidding.

PB: Mark and I, we love weird people and we love people that you can’t really get a serious beat on. We also are both the type of dudes who end up being friends with those people. This was kind of our exploration into that.

His behavior was kind of textbook stalker. How much research did you do on stalking behaviors and stuff like that?

PB: I didn’t do research whatsoever. One discussion we did have was talking about people we’ve known in our lives who are like pathological liars – just thinking about traits of those type of people and trying to express that.

I find it thrilling, because it’s clearly so stripped down and just like you have a great idea and a great story. You made it happen. I would love to hear what you shot on. Was it literally you and Mark? Did you have a small crew?

PB: We had a small crew and actually one of them is here, Chris Donlon, our editor. This guy’s a story genius and we wouldn’t have been able to do what we did, without him. We shot it on one of these Panasonic cameras that compresses to a small card. It was a great exercise for me. Coming out of film school, I was like, “I’m going to make very defined, formal films.” This was just like throwing that all by the wayside and saying, “Let’s just go run completely on instinct, and forget about aesthetic as much as we can and just try to make something that’s compelling and focused on characters.”

Were you holding the camera the whole time?

PB: Yeah. It was either me or Mark holding the camera the entire time.

How much of this do you guys do in tandem? Did you direct each other?

PB: Yeah. The film was a collaboration. When Mark was on screen, I was directing him and when I was on screen, he was directing me. Neither of us had any ego with that sort of thing. A lot of these takes were initially six or seven minute takes that have been cut up. So we would just run each take. We didn’t have a script. We had a ten page outline, we were just improvising all the dialogue, so we would run one of these takes, watch it, figure out camera placement and what we should say when, go back and do it over and over again. Because it was just a small group of us, we could do that.

Were you developing the characters as you went along?

PB: I had never acted before, so I was relying on Mark in terms of what was working and what was not. It’s super hard to be objective when you’re directing yourself. We kind of went scene by scene. It was a story we develop, in reaction to whatever nuances happened in the last thing we shot. We shot it all in continuity. But we still have that outline that was like, “This needs to happen within these parameters.”

All the paintings of the wolves, who did those?

PB: My best friend since I was 11 years old, his mom did all those. She just paints multiples of those wolves. That’s like what she does. I was so happy I got to include them. That’s something we used to always make fun of his mom about when we were kids. Now it’s like, “Jason, can I get like 50 of those paintings?”

I love how the end opens up all these side possibilities of what happens before and what happens after. One of the things I’m wondering about Mark Duplass’s character is: when you were developing a backstory for him, does he have a similar approach to all his victims? Does he take them all to the heart springs? Is this something you talked about at all?

PB: No. Not really. I think there’s a world of possibilities there. I don’t think he’s done this before. In my mind I like to think that he has something special for each person. Or maybe he doesn’t (SPOILER) everybody. Maybe it takes a special someone, to want to (SPOILER) them.

How did the concept for the movie come about?

PB: At first this movie was like a relationship movie, I guess. We weren’t necessarily thinking that it was going to go as far as it did, in terms of evil. We wanted it to be a balance between the two of us. I do think there’s something wrong with Aaron. Don’t do that.

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SXSW Review: CREEP

by Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged , , , , , 1 Comment

“Creep”
Directed by Patrick Brice
Starring Patrick Brice, Mark Duplass
Comedy, Horror, Romance
82 Mins
United States

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Mark Duplass has had quite a run in the fledgling stages of his career. From small roles in the likes of Oscar baity films, such as Zero Dark Thirty and, le sigh, Parkland, to larger roles in unsung indie hits Humpday and Safety Not Guaranteed, and simply as the reliably affable straight man, Pete, on The League, it’s easy to admit that Duplass has got range. He dips his toes in the pools of all different genres and mediums, working as an accomplished dramatic actor and solid comedian to boot. It’s then such a surprise that perhaps the greatest work he’s done is in a found little footage horror movie called Creep.

Captured in what has become the oh so familiar first person POV framework, Patrick Brice takes on dual responsibility as the film’s lead and director. He is our window into the events to unfold, a fluctuating moral guide through a stew of character grays. Brice is Aaron, a videographer gun-for-hire who responds to a mysterious Craigslist ad claiming it will take one day of his time and pay a cool grand. Up in the mountains, he meets a Joseph, a man with claims of imminent death, making a farewell video for his unborn son.

No matter how valiant his intentions sound on paper, Joseph (Duplass) is an unreliable character from the get go. From his startling first appearance to the unsavory wolf mask, ironically called Peach Fuzz, he keeps stuffed in his closet, he’s a hard guy to get a read on. But that’s half the fun. Throttling between waxing on his own mortality and jumping from behind a doorway to startle Patrick (and by extension us), one thing is for certain: Joseph’s a weird dude. He’s always quick on his toes to offer some soundbite explanation for his abnormal actions but his backstory is about as reliable and consistent as Heath Ledger‘s Joker.

Brice and Duplass love playing with the idea of the unreliable narrator as they fill the film with palpable moments of transitioning allegiances. There are times when Duplass feels like the titular creep, other times when it’s Brice. There’s even some fleeting moments where we turn the mirror on ourselves to see if we’re the ones prescribing oddness to an otherwise savory and sweet situation. Could there actually be nothing wrong at all (save our unsavory expectations?) What am I talking about, this is a movie called Creep, of course some creeping is bound to go down. And go down it does.

When a film backs itself into a corner like Creep does about sixty minutes in, it usually becomes increasingly reliant on familiar tropes. The fringes of possibility become a picket fence and the audience is able to pick off the thread count like floating sheep. There are only so many ways to wrap things up in a horror movie and we usually know which of those endings will transpire when we’ve got about thirty minutes to go. But when Creep seems like its reaches the last track, it smartly changes things up, transforming from what may have dissolved into an unsatisfying slasher into a whole new type of paranoid tension machine.

From his backlit framing to the long, empty, awkward silences that fill the air like smog, Brice plants all the seeds of doubt required to make his audience want to stand up and shout “Don’t go in there!” at the screen. Thankfully, his characters are rarely dumb enough to go the way of the slasher victim. It may not subvert the horror genre, but at least it doesn’t sink down to its level. And though Brice does his fair share of leaning on genre mainstays to milk some frights, he remains true to his characters throughout and they’re what made it interesting in the first place.

B-

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Weekly Review 43: LIVES, CRONOS, FAST, VALKYRIE, SOMEWHERE, BICYCLE, INEQUALITY

by Posted in Weekly Review Tagged , , , , , , , ,

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They’ve been longer hiatuses from Weekly Review in the past but I admit that it’s been a while since I’ve posted about what I’ve been watching from home. Busy with SXSW and the many, many, many reviews to come pouring out of that, I honestly didn’t have a ton of time over the past month to watch much at home. There were a few here and there (accounted for in this list) but it wasn’t until this week that I really felt like I had much to talk about in the segment to follow. In addition to the films mentioned below, I also re-watched The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and my opinion on it hasn’t really changed since the first time I saw it, for better or for worse, and The Fly, which still continues to be one of my favorite horror movies and a shining example of why practical effects will always be scarier than anything CGI.

I dipped into the theater just once (to my relief, there were no press screenings all week) to catch up on a film that I missed whilst in Austin, Enemy, which Chris reviewed for the site. I absolutely loved it and it’s easily one of my favorite films of the entire year, especially if you only account for stuff in theaters and not just in the film fest circuit. I can’t get Enemy out of my head and that’s exactly the kind of movie I want to see more of.

In other news, I also decided I couldn’t wait and watched Nymphomaniac: Part 2 on VOD with a bottle of vino. Whether that was a good call or not, I can’t really say but look for a full review of that sometime next week. Other than that, I got into a bucket of classics, so take a trip down memory lane with me to visit a bunch of first time watches that have been lingering on my to watch list for far too long.

THE LIVES OF OTHER (2006)

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Sitting high on IMDB’s top 250, Das Leben der Anderen takes a hard look at a frequently unexplored chapter of German facism. In the ideological cell of the eastern block, before sledgehammers were taken to the Berlin wall, Ulrich Muhe plays a government agent known for his no-nonsense enforcement of party-friendly ideology. Everything soon changes when he heads up an investigation into a local artist and begins to sympathize with what was once his opposition. It’s a moving and informative picture chalked with a fog-laden, almost nightmarish landscape and moral claustrophobia. Muhe is a revelation, putting forth a man swimming through the tumult of changing tides. As a character study and pseudo-biography both, The Lives of Others is not to be missed.  

A-

CRONOS (1993)

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Diving deeper into Guillermo del Toro‘s filmography, I found Cronos to be a wonderfully crafted little yarn that shows a different side of Toro. Working in elements of body horror and sci-fi iconography, this film feels more Cronenberg-esque than much of his later work: a contained picture of hubris, a tight story of man vs. mythos. Foreign film offers the chance to see frameworks that just wouldn’t fly on American soil so it’s nice to Toro flex that muscle. From having an older gentleman as the center piece – a true rarity for Hollywood genre flicks – to the mysterious scoops of mythology, this is classic new-age Spanish cinema.

B

THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS (2001)

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I was always under the impression that I was not a big fan of the original installment in what was to become one of the biggest international franchises going. It was only until I actually popped the disc in (a DVD in all its low resolution glory) that I realized that I had actually never seen The Fast and the Furious. What I got was not quite what I expected (and boy has Paul Walker‘s Brian changed from the eager puppy he once was). And even though it shamelessly scammed on Point Break to an almost embarrassing point, it properly sets the thematic footing for the sequels to come. Family first baby, family first.

C+

VALKYRIE (2008)

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Bryan Singer‘s foray into historical drama didn’t quite turn out as he imagined it. First of all, casting Tom Cruise as a one-handed, eye-patched German is a hard enough sell on on paper but works even less in execution. As an admittedly big fan of Cruise’s work, this is not the role for him and he sticks out like a sore thumb the whole way through. And that’s kinda the whole issue with the film on a larger scale. It seems strange that Singer, an American filmmaker, would helm such an apologetic project from a distinctly German lens. About a gaggle of high ranking German officials attempts to assassinate Hitler, Valkyrie feels like a story that ought to have been told from a German auteur, not some Hollywood showboater.

C-

SOMEWHERE (2010)

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Sophia Coppola only makes movies about rich and famous people bored with being rich and famous. But none (not even Lost in Translation) hit the nerve of ennui as much as Somewhere. It’s a film that drains the sweet out of the sweet life, that makes fame look more like a curse than a gift. Ironically, it’s Coppola’s style of noncommittal narrative structure  that makes Somewhere as good a movie as it is but also holds it back from being great. There’s style spilling over and Coppola’s use of long shots often transcend the boredom she’s trying to encapsulate, posing scenes that feel inescapably real and human. Elle Fanning offers a breakout role as Steven Dorff‘s young, independent daughter, showing up the seasoned actor at his own game of woes.

B

BICYCLE THIEVES (1948)

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Vittorio De Sica‘s story of Post WWII poverty in Italy is asset rich with atmosphere and tone. It captures a time and a place with untempered clarity, offering a father and son relationship that may ring a touch uncouth in modern times but is unapologetically true to the epoch it represents. As much a tone poem about a devastated economy as it is a unblinking condemnation of the governing parties of the time, Bicycle Thieves deals enough moralistic gray zones to make for an intriguing watch. 

B+

INEQUALITY FOR ALL (2013)

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A smartly laid out indictment of the wealth disparity problem in the US, Inequality for All is as heartbreaking as it is informative. With former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich leading the charge, this is a must-see documentary that will confirm your worst fears about modern America. More terrifying than the scariest of horror films, Reich lays out a dire situation where the middle class lays victim to an ideological genoice. It’s An Inconvenienter Truth, Rich Dude Nation. It should not be missed by any American.

A

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Out in Theaters: NYMPHOMANIAC: PART 1

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“Nymphomaniac: Part 1”
Directed by Lars von Trier
Starring Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stacy Martin, Stellan Skarsgard, Shia LaBeouf, Christian Slater, Uma Thurman, Sophie Kennedy Clark
Drama
118 Mins
NR

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Charlotte Gainsbourg plays Joe, a woman looking back on her life with deep-seated scorn, hounding for condemnation, beaten and broken. We meet her lying on the knotted facade of a cobblestone street corner, caked with dark, unexplained bruises, limp and abandoned like a dove craddling a broken wing. To the head banging tune of Rammstein‘s thumping German heavy metal, Seligman (Stellan Skarsgard) spots Joe crumpled under a gentle but deadly snowfall. After attempts to contact the authorities are met with threats of her fleeing the scene, he takes her home for some bed rest and a steamy cup of Earl Grey.

Upon his bed, she finds in Seligman’s comfort a private confessional for her laundry list of lustful sins. Seligman is her priest, her unwavering forgiver, her absolver of indecencies past and present. From the first chapter of her life of loose sexual morals, Seligman is compassionate and curious towards Joe. It’s a first contact moment, like an alien interviewing its first human. The only way he knows how to approach her is by relating her carnal conquests to the deft arts of fly fishing.

Seligman seeks to understand the instinctual explanations behind her erotic urges, quickly transforming into a dual supporter and therapist for Joe. As she attempts to rap off her worst transgressions,  Seligman is there with a sound interpretation of why she’s not really to blame. Their offbeat relationship is entirely unique, a perversely complex dance of savior and saved, all anchored by Gainsbourg and Skaarsgard’s wonderfully grounded pair of performances.

While Gainsbourg prattles off her top of the charts, worst of the worst list of dirty deeds like a dark fairy tale narrator, Stacy Martin guides us through the experiences firsthand. From the inklings of her sexual self-discovery to her playing a game of “who can bang the most dudes on this train ride,” Joe is a force of nature and Martin’s fearless performance paves the way for her undying depth of character. Though the older, more embittered version of Joe brews with regret and self-hatred, young Joe is full of life. She wants the whole world of men, in every shape, size and color.

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Joe’s sexuality is her weapon and she wields it like a long sword. Having managed to completely divorce sex from emotional connection, as her list of suitors grow so does her heartlessness. Eventually managing entire relationships by the roll of a dice, Joe gets tangled up in a hysterical middle chapter led with brutish force by an unbound Uma Thurman. It’s been years since Thurman has put her name to something so iconic and unforgettable. And in a film stuffed with fantastic performances, hers is an implausible highlight, impossible to ignore. Her brief vignette brings humor and hardship to the table, serving them up as the same dish, indistinguishable and essential as one and the same.

In this marriage of comedy and tragedy, Trier mines the unparalleled success of Nymphomaniac. Captured through an admirable stripped down cinesphere of grubby locales and queued with a truly bipolar score, the technical aspects surrounding the film are a deft house of cards. Without cinematographer Manuel Alberto Claro‘s grim but provocative pictures, the uninviting hospitality of Trier’s landscape would lose its oddly captivating appeal. In a way, Joe’s scarred humanity is a victim of circumstance, a product of his European bleakness.

Through all, Joe’s often brutal, cold mentality is accented by Trier’s uncharacteristically warm and understanding direction. For all her self-deprecation, we’re left wondering what to make of her tidal wave of remorse, especially in a patriarchal society. Would an older gentleman display such penitence? Obviously not. Is her unscrupulous vaginal record the fault of her ice queen mother? A few hours in, we haven’t yet pinpointed the source of Joe’s despondent temperament but we’re beginning to understand. And though old Joe may be depressive, Trier’s film most certainly is not.

An oddball combination for sure, it’s truly a wonder that Nymphomaniac works as well as it does, especially considering that this is only the first part of an ongoing saga (and you definitely feel the punch of a truncated story). One might have thought that nearly five hours of sexual confession (and one montage of penises) is too much. After seeing the first two hours though, all I can say is bring on part 2.

A-

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