Film Reviews, Interviews and Articles
Many have tried to imitate the cinematic fine art that is The Evil Dead and few have been able to ape Sam Raimi‘s splatterhead mesterpiece with as much boundless, bloody guile as Peter Jackson. Yes, the blockbusting king of Middle Earth Peter Jackson. Though most know the frumpy Kiwi from his work on the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies, Jackson actually began his career making low-budget, amateur horror flicks using friends and recycled cameras. The more you know. Read More
OG Black Flag vocalist Henry Rollins has been lending himself out to little movie roles since he left the band in 1986. Arguably his most prominent and commercial appearance came out of his run on Sons of Anarchy as the muscle of white supremacist group the League of American Nationalists. In the role, Rollins hinted at a dangerous side – ok, “hinted” is a vast understatement – whereas with He Never Died, he pairs that dangerous edge with some delightfully droll humor. The combination keep the wheels turning in this laugh out loud funny and mostly compelling midnighter.
Operating under the assumption that less is more – and here, he’s totally right to – Rollins underplays the funny bits of Jack, a kind of fallen angel type who, you guessed it, never dies. Part of the fun is figuring out who/what Jack is – he is a vampire? a demon? a brainy zombie? – so I won’t spoil the fun for the uninitiated. I will however hint towards the fact that – as is made obvious by the film’s title – he’s no mere mortal.
When we meet Jack, he’s a self-inflicted hermit living a regulated life of dropping into church bingo, eating his three meals a day at a barely average diner and exchanging caches of cash for brown paper satchels of… something. Discovering what that something is begins to make Jack take form so again, its identity will go uncovered.
Despite his best efforts to live a life of solitude, Jack finds a young girl claiming to be his daughter, Andrea (Jordan Todosey), on his doorstep one rainy afternoon, disorienting his isolationist practices with her 21st century laid back attitude and casual nosing into his personal affairs. Just as Andrea begins to tweak his routine for the better – maybe talk to diner waitress Cara (Kate Greenhouse) who’s never had anything but warm looks to offer? – Jack finds himself wrapped up in a criminal plot courtesy of the mystery satchels that he wants no absolutely part of.
Regardless of the fact that Jack has no intention of stirring up trouble, he proves an incredibly effective killer – a favorable side effect of his immorality. Up against a group of criminal scum and assorted evildoers of the garden variety, Jack is a kind of unflinching, indestructible Bryan Mills type. He crushes his way through assemblies of armed men with his bare fists, regardless of how many bullets they plug into him. And though much more interested in getting back to the swing of normality than pursuing any kind of vengeful bloodlust, Jack will do whatever is required of him to ensure that Andre and Cara are out of harm’s way and not necessarily in a gentle manner. A fact that a corral of baddies can attest to.
As a kind of horror film noir, He Never Died cleverly thrives on the experience of watching Jack unfold. Though potentially one-dimensional, Jack benefits greatly from Rollins’ “man of few words” schtick. A goon winding up to punch Jack is told “Don’t”. After a real walloping, Jack barely flinches. “I told you not to do that,” he grumbles before snapping the man’s arm in two.
Jack’s brand of unaffected, “did you really just do that?” reactions lend the action a sense of categorical silliness. It makes for the kind of comedy you that if you know it’s not your cup of tea, you’re unlikely to react to any of the film’s budding charm. Budget constraints keep a lot of the action offscreen but when writer/director Jason Krawczyk is able to put the rumpus fights front and center, he makes sure to do so mostly in a comic manner. As far as He Never Died is concerned, this makes the proceedings gleeful and bemusing, if light on the genre’s signature bloodstained offerings.
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The Diabolical is the first – and oddly enough only – horror movie I’ve seen at SXSW that actually tries to be scary. More often than not at this year’s fest, we saw midnighters going for a creepy but never quite scary vibe (The Boy, The Frontier), attempting to be satirical (Ava’s Possessions, Excess Flesh) or just being batty, campy gorefests (Deathgasm, He Never Died, Turbo Kid). Though there are some potentially frightening aspects at play in The Diabolical, it fails to employ its scares effectively – opting for jump scares that rarely work out and a late stage science fiction twist that doesn’t come together either. The result is the most standardized and, by extension, the most boring midnighter of the fest, though definitely not the worst.
Ali Larter plays Madison, a single mother filing for bankruptcy and living under a possessed roof. As needy real estate goons (Patrick Fischler) haunt her with offers on her soon-to-be-foreclosed house, the real danger lies in three gooey spirits – all that look like Uruk Hai freshly born from their swampy wombs – who appear and disappear with the flash of a light. What are these spirits after, you may ask? Having seen the movie, I’m still not really sure. And herein lies the biggest problem of The Diabolical. After all is said and done, I’m still unsure of the point, the plot and some other factors to boot.
The Diabolical‘s most diabolical move was to make me sleepy (note however that I saw it in the middle of the day not after the midnight mark). And though my eyes may have fluttered through a detail of paramount importance, the questions the movie raises still feel squarely unanswerered. Consider, if one misses but a small detail and it rocks the rest of the film, what does that say about the movie itself?
Though admirable for its deliciously grotesque practical creature design, there’s no real compelling thread to keep you engaged beyond an exhaustingly clichéd tendency to try and “get ya” with jump scare moments. “It’s scary because you didn’t expect to see a monster there!” Gettit?
There’s a sweetly sad subplot between Madison’s tween-age son Jacob (Max Rose) and daughter Hayley (Chloe Perrin), the former of which has been seeing a guidance counselor after beating a classmate senseless and the later of which speaks to these haunting figures against the wishes of her mother and brother. You get a nice sense that these two – and momma – are all each other have, especially after the circumstances surrounding their dad’s disappearance.
At camp, a real Draco Malfoy of a bully (Thomas Kuc) picks on Hayley and Jacob whomps him real nice. Really serves him up a nice knuckle sandwich. The ol’ nose-splitting pie. Back at home, his mom pleads, “You can’t just going around hitting people,” though Jacob feels justified. After all, he was just defending his little sister!
Moves like this help to put the pieces in place for the final reveal but with director Alistair Legrand does lift the curtain, he attempts to shape shift the material to mixed results. Planting a bait-and-switch like this so late in the game, the mechanics of his world became even more lost on me and failed to properly piece together a reasonable timeline for the events of the film. Ambitious, no doubt, but ultimately fails to distinguish itself from the field.
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Ted (Jared Breeze) is a serial killer in the making. He’s only nine years old but all the warning signs are there in Craig William Macneill’s slow burning but explosively rewarding The Boy. Like the great unmade redneck prequel to The Good Son, The Boy shows the quiet transformation of ennui to psychosis as an immeasurably bored towhead graduates from coaxing animals to their death to killing them outright before finally setting his sights on his own genus and gene pool.
At first, Ted’s to-be murderous ways are red flag worthy but aren’t necessarily of the abandon all hope variety. You see, his hollow-eyed father John (David Morse) rewards Ted with a shiny quarter each time he scraps up a new piece of roadkill. I guess a dilapidated highway motel only stands to gain from less roadkill polluting their doorstep but it’s a grim job for any father to assign a son and is representative of the hands-off approach John has adopted towards his boy. In his notebook, Ted records each and every find – a “sqirl” on 5/14, maybe a “rebet” on 5/22 – and is nickel and diming his way towards a one-way Greyhound ticket to Florida, where his mother had run off to with a trucker years back.
Discouraged by a relative lack of progress, Ted glances at his pet rabbit and then out at the highway. Don’t do it, we plead and, thankfully, he doesn’t. But that doesn’t mean his thirst for mullah and, more distressingly, blood is satiated. By dumping trash and millet in the sparsely traveled highway outside his family’s all-but-abandoned motel, Ted realizes that he can spring a fairly effective and super duper redneck trap for the unsuspecting woodland creatures.
When Ted notes a deer ambling around his property, he dashes to the feedback and piles grain high in the road. As the sun is blotted out by an inky mass of night, a thunderous crash echoes across the motel. Ted dashes out to find William (Rainn Wilson), his car crumpled and scrapped, and his animal target, eviscerated in the road.
As Ted continues to up the ante of what he is willing to do – a family staying at the lodge by necessity almost finds out the hard way that Ted doesn’t play well with other children – we get a taste of true madness, regardless of the seemingly innocent vessel that is Ted Henley. Macniell plays with the idea of how sociopathic/psychopathic tendencies are incubated and exacerbated with his script (co-written by novelist Clay McLeod Chapman) providing feasible insight into how emotional neglect and wholesale boredom can drive people to some pretty terrifying lengths.
Sparsely dominated by scenes of heavy exposition – or rather any dialogue at all – Macniell is able to catch the quiet moments; the death stares, the purposeless shambling, the looks of silence. Clean, lumbering sound design operates to keep us invested in The Boy‘s emotionscape and its overarching feeling of dread. When it all comes full circle and Ted readies himself to emerge from his dark chrysalis, affairs take a middle ground stance between Hesher and Carrie and we are witness to a gorgeously haunting transformation of soul.
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Creative Control takes place in a world of technology just a few year’s out from today. Cell phones and computer screens are composed of sheer cuts of opaque glass and flicker with images only visible to their owner. Apps are controlled with the slightest wave of a finger, like a symphony composer directing his orchestra. Wearable tech has reached a fever pitch and though the big names like Apple, Google and Microsoft have name brand recognition working in their favor, a new product called Augmenta is the definitive future of how humans will interact with their technology. Read More
Fresno benefits greatly from the duel casting of Judy Greer and Natasha Lyonne as scrubby, flawed sisters who drag each other down a spiral of bad decisions. At the helm, Jamie Babbit makes her own series of bad decisions, often unable to get out of the way of a problematic script from Karey Dornetto and some off-putting and downright absurd character decisions throughout. It certainly has its moments of nigh inspired hilarity but the blistery chemistry between Greer and Lyonne can only do so much.
Fresno tells the story of two sisters who have just recently started working together in a not-so-idyllic position as hotel maids. Fresh out of sex rehab, Shannon (Greer) bears a chip on her shoulder and a hunger in her pants. She’s acerbic, mean-spirited and even cruel and Greer plays the eye-rolling indifference with an inbred intelligence. Even when her character is making disastrously immoral choices, Greer’s humorously numbed performance keeps us from completing hating the character, despicable though she may be.
On the other side of the fence is Lyonne’s Martha, the more responsible of the two and a hard-working, if easily influenced, ingenue who’s just been dumped by her gym instructor girlfriend. Martha either doesn’t notice that another gym instructor (Aubrey Plaza) has eyes for her or she doesn’t care but either way she wallows in the shoals of heartbreak and that makes her particularly susceptible to Shannon’s bad influence.
When a horned-up and ready to rumble Shannon decides to bang a sketchy guest and ends up caught by Martha, she claims that he raped her. Next, she ends up accidentally killing him when pushing him and his wobbly, confused dong. Despite all signs that they should immediately report the incident to the police, Shannon convinces Martha to help cover up the “manslaughter” lest she end up in the slammer. Because all registered sex offenders go straight to jail when they’re involved in an accidental death? Immeasurable moral quandaries raised here aside, Fresno plays the scene for laughs when it might benefit it to tread lightly around such potentially controversial and dangerous territory. Especially if the writing is going to be so thin.
The rest of the film revolves around the girls’ efforts to dispose of the body as they carry him conspicuously to and fro in a motel laundry bin. Some of the situations they get themselves into are genuinely funny – a literal bag of dicks, a bemusing Fred Armisen/Allison Tolman cameo, pretty much anything Greer says and does – but it skates around most of the real dramatic issues that it red flags to return to later.
It’s worth mentioning that the film is directed by a woman, written by a woman, stars two women and the conversation rarely traverses the likes of men so it passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors. Having said that, the product itself – if taken as a sort of blind taste test for cinema – should not be celebrated for its admirable gender composure alone, lest we provide handicaps that would ultimatley benefit no one. It’s a nice try but one that lingers too much in the kiddy pool.
Babbit has mostly played the home box office game, lending herself out to direct television shows from Malcolm in the Middle to Gilmore Girls to The United States of Tara to Girls. Babbit jump-started her career in 1999 with queer satire But I’m a Cheerleader, which (ironically enough) marked the first real lead role for Natasha Lyonne. It – like Fresno – also featured Lyonne as a lesbian. Unforuntuately, what works on television doesn’t necessarily work in a movie and we see Babbit’s tendency to make affairs episodic and even hollow. The absurdity of any given situation often lacks reasonable followthrough and this seems in large part due to Babbit’s familiarity with a sitcom medium that champions quick laughs and surface level depth.
The product as a whole is reasonably entertaining during its run time, and certainly has its fair share of chuckles thanks to its pissy leading ladies, but is mostly unmemorable in the grand scheme of things.
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To watch The Frontier is to take a drivers seat in the Delorean and dial the settings to 1971. It has a distinctively “homage” feeling to it – as if it were a previously unreleased Hitchcock movie, filmed a short peck after The Birds. Unlike The Guest or Cold in July, The Frontier doesn’t play with old movie tropes so much as it practices a brand of straight-forward imitation, aping the style of Vietnam-era genre films, much like Ti West has done with The House of the Devil. The result is as if A Simple Plans met Pyscho in a back-alley, early-70s country thriller. It’s not quite horror, not quite a western but Oren Shai‘s pulpy throwback is stylized beyond reproach, even if rather laid back narratively.
The Frontier is a motel in the middle of nowhere. This remote and rundown last resort of lodging plays a seminal role in Shai’s film and much like the Bate’s Motel, its crumbling facade, dinky rooms and hardly tidy cafe are the focal points of the action. Housing a small stable of overtly suspicious characters, The Frontier is a melting pot of people past their prime trying to make moves of fame and fortune.
Amongst that suspicious crew, Luanne (Kelly Lynch) runs the place, having semi-inherited it after her 15 minutes went tits up years back and she’s has been stuck here ever since. Shady business partner and all around scumbag Lee (Jim Beaver) is a kind of suspicious, take-it-or-leave-it type. He’s gruff and handsy in all the wrong ways and his all work and no play attitude makes him a dull boy on the verge of snapping. Jamie Harris plays a faux-debonair English playboy passing through with crassly ritzy wife Gloria (Izabella Miko) and the pair provide a fair measure of the film’s desert dry comedy. But the show belongs to Jocelin Donahue‘s Laine who arrives at the motel running from an incident that left her literally red-handed and with a ring of bruises decorating her neck. The pitying Luanne – who has seen her fair share of battered beaus – offers her a gig behind the cafe’s counter but Laine is hesitant. After overhearing a plot to thieve two million dollars though, she agrees to stay but clearly not for the reason she’s letting on.
Shot on Super 16mm to really highlight the dated aesthetic that Shai is looking for, The Frontier taps into the golden age of movies and not only in terms of its production design and costumes but in terms of its performances and screenplay. Harris in particular is delightfully hammy and Donahue herself could have been one of Hitchcock’s gals had she been around 50 odd years ago. And while it’s a simple joy to tap into a bygone era, one might find themselves underwhelmed by the story’s depth – or lack there of.
Written by Shai and co-writer Webb Wilcoxen, The Frontier can be a touch white bread-y in terms of its minimalism and narrative economy. There is a heist aspect to the film which is mostly underwhelming and bare bones. And though the aftermath of the film’s lynch pin event proves catastrophic, Shai and Wilcoxen could have invested more time into ironing out the subtle roles within the group. For a gang comprised of such archetypical Hollywood bits, there is little effort to make sense of how the group performs their criminal feat. Rather the tension is placed on how they do not gel with one another, mounting uneasy relationships that are quick to sour.
In some ways, this adds to the austere nature of Shai’s reverent tribute but it may prove a distraction for those used to more narrative twists and turns in their genre films. If there’s one thing that cannot be taken from The Frontier, it’s Shai’s manifest commitment to style. From the blustering deserts, their blood red sunsets, smoky shoot-outs and Laine’s distinctively dated and distinguishably awesome bangs, The Frontier seeps cool. Those looking for a stylish, sleek homage to way-back-then, The Frontier is your one stop shop.
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The comic combination of Nick Kroll, Rose Bryne and Bobby Carnavale is enough to sell this wry but formulaic family-member-moves-home farce wholesale. Ironic that Bryne and Carnavale just co-starred side-by-side in Paul Feig’s underwhelming Melissa McCarthy vehicle Spy as arms dealing peers and they here play another side to partners in crime as a husband and wife duo who must make room for Kroll when a failed business investment forces him out of the big city.
Kroll earned notoriety playing the supernaturally dickish Rodney Ruxin on FX’s hit The League before launching his own sketch comedy The Kroll Show. With the later on its final season (it only got four) and the former taking a huge dive in ratings this past season, Kroll has extended his acidic humor to the world of film and if Adult Beginners is any indication, he might have found a new home. Going into the feature, I worried that Kroll’s resume suggested an inability to play sincerity onscreen but Adult Beginners rights any lingering concerns about that. There’s even a potent scene where the Rux drops tear. An honorary Shiva trophy unto him.
Having dumped all his resources into wearable tech that his Chinese producers botched entirely, Kroll’s Jake drops out of the buzzy environs of the inner city and feels compelled to retreat to the suburbs to escape VM death threats and sky-high city loft rent rates. At his childhood home lives sister Justine (Bryne), her husband Danny (Carnavale) and their appropriately difficult 3-year old son. Though Jake wants to sulk and sleep through a few months of respite from high-stakes business, Justine and Danny agree to house him, but only if he’ll play babysitter. Playground accidents and the difficulty of getting personal pooping time challenges Jake but ultimately teaches him an invaluable lesson about family and commitment.
Yes, this sounds like a half dozen comedy/drama concepts we’ve seen before but Adult Beginners doesn’t attempt to distinguish itself by narrative uniqueness. Rather, it thrives on the strength and complexity of its adult characters and their complicated relationships. The comedy executed is smart and biting and Kroll employs his sharp-toothed, droopy eyed shtick whenever he can.
Bobby Moynihan appears in the middle of the film as a washed-up quite-not-former-friend of Jake to illicit what is easily the most chuckle-heavy scene of the film. His shameless line of questioning and oblivious nature towards what is and is not appropriate makes him supporting comedy gold. Conversely, Kroll’s League co-star Jason Mantzoukas fails to muster a laugh as a “manny” (male nanny) with a dad rock side project.
Though Jake and Justine begin their new relationship on estranged footing, director Ross Katz is never estranged from the strengths of Adult Beginners – a cast that can operate equally well in dramatic and comedic situations, a smart script from Kroll and genuine moments of emotional and intellectual progress.
As Jake is advised in a business meeting, there are two highways in life and the fast road to success is one you have to travel alone. In the past, Jake has always chosen the door to career advancement and dollar bills, ignoring the people who make life actually worthwhile. As Jake and Justine content with the ups and downs of their strained though improving relationship, Adult Beginners turns into a kind of rom-com between siblings. 60 years of rom-com history have told us that things always end up peachy but Adult Beginners is one of the rare few that actually earns its peachy flavor.
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The old “I could watch so-and-so read a phone book” adage speaks to an ability to turn the banal into something unexpected and has been liberally applied to the works of anyone from Bill Murray to Daniel Day Lewis. In a similar but distinctly different vein, there’s something mundanely alluring about planting Jason Schwartzman in a room and allowing him to made snide riffs on each and every thing. The Rushmore-starrer possesses uncommon command over his ability to make you feel lesser, even if he’s day drunk, mostly unemployed and in the middle of getting punched in the face and Bob Byington capitalizes insanely on his ability to do such.
7 Chinese Brothers – the title is taken directly from the REM song of the same name – relinquishes a fully-charged, fully-snarky Schwartzman upon an Austin, Texas that is none too welcoming of his indifferent ways and has very little to offer him in terms of escapism. Like a stationary Kerouac, Schwartzman’s Larry finds solace at the bottom of a plastic handle of booze, spending his time off of some lousy job or another to loiter in the gas station parking lot or pester his grandma (Olympia Dukakis) for a financial leg up.
Larry can be described in part by his inherent opposition to dashing but periodically deceitful best friend/his grandmother’s caretaker Norwood (TV on the Radio singer Tunde Adebimpe.) Sure, they both pop the odd stool softener to judge its effects when paired with an ale but while Larry ducks and weaves any semblance of actual responsibility, Norwood approaches the bar. At the saloon, Norwood lands the hot girl leaving wingman Larry to pick up the none too interesting scraps. His affection for Larry’s grams comes from a place of genuine empathy rather than the performed attentiveness of a potential inheritee. Even though Larry tries to scare her off by letting slip that Norwood has a prosthetic leg (he doesn’t), Lupe (Eleanore Pienta) – Larry’s new boss at the oil change station and love interest – has eyes for his Norwood, that great bastion of lower-middle-class hard work.
The film plays fast and lose with Schwartzman’s lippy mannerisms and there’s not a scene that he enters and doesn’t exit victorious. From braying at passerby veterinarians (“You don’t throw hats at cars”) to waxing on the French language with real-life dog Arrow, he is a low-pitched firecracker, taking everyone and everything down a notch under his breathe. But that doesn’t mean that he is a hostile or even unlikeable figure. 7 Chinese Brothers‘ Schwartzman is a pithy, blue-collar beatnik in the wrong place and the wrong time and even though a persnickety little shit, he’s far from the overbearingly bitter and caustic Schwartzman of Alex Ross’ Listen Up Phillip.
Director and writer Bob Byington must have had the Schwartz in mind for the role as each and every lick of his script seems designed for the preternaturally salty comic performer. Equally, Schwartzman is tasked with handling the subtle dramatics of 7 Chinese Brothers, ensuring that the whole spiel isn’t tipped into a clinical cynic show. He does so effortlessly.
For its constant employment of intelligent, off-the-cuff comedy and gentle ability to massage in a genuine message of city-slacking and “real life” reproach, 7 Chinese Brothers is a product of snappy smarts and comic girth. Schwartzman performs at the top of his game for a role custom fit for him and any fan of the acerbic funny man should consider this required viewing.
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In psychology class, you learn about the concept of diffusion of responsibility, a sociopathic event that explains that when more people are present or complicit in an unfavorable event, the less personally responsible that group will feel for its outcome. The public murder of Kitty Genovese – in which a woman was stabbed to death in NYC but not one neighbor alerted the police – is a tragic true-to-life example of this but no piece of fiction or nonfiction has better captured the ghastly phenomenon than Joshua Oppenheimer‘s The Look of Silence. Read More