Out in Theaters: WILD TALES

March 12, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Damián Szifrón, Foreign Film, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Wild Tales 1 Comment

Damián Szifrón‘s unabashedly violent anthology Wild Tales is total guano. The nutrient-rich, black market, Ace Ventura “they use it to make everything” guano. That is, Szifrón’s smokin’ opus is batshit in all the rights ways – it’s ironic, smart, blisteringly funny and downright brutal. It’s a concoction of true madness and borderline genius, shaken up and exploding onto the screen in gory, imaginative splashes.

Like any anthology, you’re always going to have some segments that succeed more than others and that fate doesn’t escape Szifrón. His best material is used up first with a trio of fast-paced, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sketches that set up the hilariously violent and deeply serendipitous world that Wild Tales takes place in. Though the closing sequence is one of the most masterfully constructed, even it cannot match the decadent fun of that initial three step tango.

The first segment, which can be loosely considered a twisted prologue, is called “Pasternak” and deals in the currency of coincidence. Having consumed it, just the name “Pasternak” is likely to induce a smile. Soon after boarding a flight, two passengers discover that they have a peer of sorts in common. It just so happens that neither of them ended their relationship with said peer on particularly pleasant terms. When a third and fourth passenger reveal that they too know the party in question, events quickly veer towards black humor at 600 mph. To reveal anymore about this high-flying farce would be to rob “Pasternak” of its punch but let’s just say that it sets the bar improbably high.

In my screening, Pasternak evoked fits of rampant laughter amongst my audience, a group of mixed ages who were positively tickled. I admittedly was as well. The dark humor and sly satire is presented with a smarmy self-awareness that totally summons the delightfully offbeat tendencies of director and Wild Tales producer Pedro Almodóvar (The Skin I Live In). You can feel the hot, toying breathe of Almodóvar all over this Argentine-Spanish feature.

Rat poison, road rage, tow trucks, hit and runs and a supremely botched wedding all follow with each “wild tale” tucking into the deliciously devious nature that Szifrón has brewed up to various extent. Each short explores a different theme but is done with such a tongue-in-cheek, satirical form that you might be too busy laughing to catch the point. Many deal with the notion of “the breaking point,” be that in a professional-sense, with the government or with a random passerby. What is that final straw that tips up towards madness? What motivates us towards revenge? Is there ever such thing as a clean getaway? Szifrón doesn’t plan to answer these questions so much as raise them as one might an eyebrow.

While I would be hard pressed to deem any of the shorts unworthy, the middle portion of the film hit a bit of a lull with “The Proposal”, a segment that provided a low point in terms of creativity and comedy both. As the most straight-faced of the bunch, it sticks out as melodramatic, save for a heavily forecasted twist of Grecian fate in its closing moments. With so many other fantastic elements in the film, “The Proposal”‘s existence within its middle makes the tail end drag and forces the film beyond the two hour mark. Were a more time-conscious editor on board, I would think it would have crash landed like a certain pilot onto the cutting room floor.

Although the anthology film has seen a bit of a revival of late withiin the horror genre (three V/H/S films, ABCs of Death 1&2), Wild Tales seeks to raise the bar on the narrative gimmick like he’s James Cameron in a South Park episode. Gone are the multiple directors and in its place is a much more focused, singular vision. No Szifrón doesn’t define his feature by narrative consistency but much like the BBC’s Black Mirror, the shorts are stitched together through their overarching sense of exaggerated realism. In Black Mirror, this narrative trope can be seen in the explorations of technology’s pitfalls and the dangers of our reliance on such. Wild Tales also exaggerates the idea of violent and revenge but is much more nonchalant about its purpose. In large part due to this, Szifrón is able to comment like a certified peanut gallery member. He truly has his cake and blows it up too.

A-

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Out in Theaters: CHAPPIE

March 6, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Chappie, Die Antwoord, Hugh Jackman, Neill Blomkamp, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Sharlto Copley, Yo-Landi

Chappie star Yolandi Vizzer said of the “Zef” movement that defines Cape Town rave-rap group Die Antwoord, “It’s associated with people who soup their cars up and rock gold and shit. Zef is, you’re poor but you’re fancy, you’re sexy, you’ve got style.” Her home-on-the-Afrikaans-range expressionist sentiments on Zef appropriately sum up Chappie, a mouthy sci-fi lark that manages to exist in the schizophrenic space between philosophy class and the thug lyfe. Narcotic in design, Chappie has the ability to be thoughtful, sardonic, batty, stupid, far-fetched, irreverent, intoxicated and absurd in the same sentence. To get a feel for what’s in store, imagine Chappie grabbing his robot junk, slouching like a gangster and wiping at his nonexistent nose before rapping on the heady notions of psychological impermanence and the potential of conscious transference. Those of lesser imaginative are damned to misunderstand the intent in such a film, a “how did this even get made” kind of product whose deranged sensibilities are delirious by design, but that’s their problem. In the “in” circles, they pity such handicapped imaginations. So hollers the hip-hopper handbook, haters gonna hate.

Much like Christopher Nolan and Hans Zimmer worked in tandem on Interstellar – Nolan gave Zimmer “feelings and themes” he wanted the film to communicate without ever revealing to Zimmer the genre of Interstellar. Zimmer then cooked up the backbone of a score and his work went on to influence Nolan’s developing script, etc. etc. – Chappie and Die Antwoord are intrinsically unified. They’re brothers from another mother. Droogs of the same breed. To drawn a line in the sand between the perfectly ironic poppiness of Die Antwoord’s counter-culture movement and the Hollywood blockbuster construct of Chappie is a hopeless exercise that I don’t seek to understand. Basing estimations of Chappie on existing models and traditions of big-budget (Chappie‘s was apparently 50 million) filmmaking is impossible since those models and traditions have been promptly, purposefully rocketed into space like they’re Ellen Ripley at the tail end of Alien. Neill Blomkamp‘s screenplay for Chappie talks about evolution and, ironically, it sails so much in the face of traditional movie-making models that it in itself is a kind of a quasi-evolution of the movie-making game. It’s so f*cking meta.

The Antwoord duo preserves their stage names in Chappie because why not? Ninja (played by Ninja) sports his customary military mullet – a hairstyle that came to him in a dream – and slurs his way through chunky Afrikaan slang not too far off from the head-scratching lexicon of Clockwork Orange or, more recently, Attack the Block. Expect a BuzzFeed article titled “What the What Do These 21 Chappie Phrases Mean?” Female-half Yolandi rocks the same violently pink “Who Wants Tits?” belly shirt she does in Antwoord’s deliciously off-color “Baby’s On Fire” music video. A later wardrobe change has her sporting a “CHAPPiE” crop top. Even robo-Chappie himself has got a not-so-subtly spraypainted “ZEF” tramp stamp. Blomkamp’s movie self-promotes both itself and Die Antwoord like a hungry hip-hop artist. It’s so f*cking metal.

We’ve rapped about Chappie as counter culture in film form but in the same vein, it’s also very much Blomkamp’s attempt to define a foreign zeitgeist in a very specific place and time. His efforts to justify, or rather rationalize, South African’s prominent underground civilization to the world appears lost on many and I would like to assume that that’s also part of the point. Not everyone’s going to get it but no worries here. Good riddance. In that line of thinking, Chappie is an intentional affront to good taste. Where we expect our hero robot to zag, he zigs. We expect him to mature out of a pubescent state but he’s too busy twisting up zig-zags. What Mad Max did for dystopian MCs, Chappie does for punk-samurai robots. What Star Wars achieved for flowy robes, Chappie pulls off for in-your-face neon. If you boiled down the guttural madness of the Matrix Reloaded rave scene, dosed it with some golden-toothed slang and outfitted its doltishness with automatic weapons, you’d have something resembling Chappie. “Radical” attempts to describes it but I think only “Zef” can properly sum it up.

But what the hell is Chappie about, Matt? Well anyone who’s heard the electronic mumblings of “I am Chappie” through their radio waves know that Blomkamp’s third features a robot. Anyone who’s seen a Chappie poster knows that said robot sports bling bling. Peeps who be trolling the trailers are probz aware that Hugh Jackman‘s skull sprouted a maybe-mullet for the film and he’s basically the heavy here, though very much not in the way you might at first have thunk. What you don’t know is that Chappie is not in the least bit the film you expect it to be. Especially if you’ve tapped into the overwhelming negative reception of the film. Chappie is way more weird, way more bonkers, way more gaga than you would anticipate of a movie with this kind of budget and backing. Were Chappie to meet ET, he’d ask him to politely bite the curb. If he paired up with Mac, he’d put his deformed visage gently “to sleep.” If you thought Matt Damon in a mech suit was wackadoo, wait until you get a load of Chappie. He’s so f*cking manic.

And that’s really what it comes down to, Chappie as a character is worth the price of admission alone. With Sharlto Copley voicing the character, he’s got more grit to him than a offroader’s fender and is far from the innocent robot the promotional material paints him as. Sure, he initially wields paintbrushes instead of PPKs but his jive-talking mannerisms arrive with a limited learning curve and soon enough he’s parroting the gangbangin’ verbiage of his too-so-Kosher mommy and daddy. Comedy cometh.

In an age that is so obnoxiously focused on franchise world-building, Blomkamp excels in the thematically exacting specificity of his future-set pasquinades. He’s clearly having fun but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t also have an agenda. In District 9, we got a taste for an “inventive” history of South Africa in Blomkamp’s straight-faced satirical portrait of refuges. Camps thick with burned trash and thin on food rubbed up against legal boundaries blurred by racist governmental ordinances. Blomkamp recently ousted himself for “f*cking up Elysium” though I’m not willing to dismiss that work just yet as it provided one of the more provocative pictures of the institutional evils of bureaucracy. And (did I mention??) had Matt Damon in a mech-suit. Chappie gets to ideas of bankrupt corporate morality and existential crises that also stops to ask how we can live with the knowledge that we will die? I’m…intrigued? It also features a kind of ED-209, appropriately named the Moose, stomping on a character and pulling him gorily in half. It’s about something until it’s not. It’s self-involved and batshit until it’s genuinely provocative. It’s that improbably rare, inimitable kinda “WTF was that?!” movie.

Look, I’m not here to convince you that you’re going to like Chappie because in earnest, this is not a movie with the masses in mind. It’s the kind of “hey, welcome to the party” film that attempts to ask big questions but winds up with concepts infinitely more silly – a la how many Playstation 4s does it take to house a person’s consciousness – but that doesn’t derail the intrigue that exists there in the first place. At least not for me. We cannot dismiss the stoner without at least hearing him out. Sometimes, he has a hell of a point. Occasional narrative poverty gives way to a much more important feeling of style, expressionism and innovation – the “gold and shit” – in what is most assuredly a one-of-a-kind, totally berserk robot gangster misadventure for the anals of f*cking history. On the coolness/acclaim axis, Chappie‘s lightning in a bottle existence gangsta leans towards being impenetrably hip and so be it. My mom doesn’t understand hip hop and that’s ok with me. I don’t bother trying to convince her because that’s missing the point. If you’re not in on the whole shebang, that’s your problem.

B+

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Out in Theaters: THE LAZARUS EFFECT

February 26, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Danny Glover, David Gelb, Evan Peters, Jeremy Slater, Luke Dawson, Mark Duplass, Olivia Wilde, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Sarah Bolger, The Lazarus Effect 2 Comments

There are some movies that are actively bad and others that are actively nothing. The Lazarus Effect falls in the later category. The tripping-over-its-own-feet script from Luke Dawson and Jeremy Slater is a hodgepodge of horror movie tropes that fails to deviate from the path most traveled. In following that oh-so-familiar road to nothingness, they prove they came prepared without anything new to say, much less add to the genre.

The characters within Lazarus are fine, more too-well-defined horror cliches, and are notably bolstered by a quartet of compelling actors including Mark Duplass, Olivia Wilde, Evan Peters and Danny Glover all giving the DOA material a faint jolt of life. As the bands research into coma patients and DMT begin to prove viable to reanimate animals from beyond the grave, the lazarus serum is born and a series of one-location events are set in motion.

Before long, the ragtag team of scientists – followed on camera by student documentarian Eva (Sarah Bolger) – are able to bring a pooch that had been put down back to life through the Frankensteinian power of electricity and potassium. Yay bananas. As its heart starts beating again, the dog’s aggression levels spike as does its ability to pull a Lucy and control 100% of its brain – whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. Psychic shit happens.

As you’ve probably gathered, the experiment goes even further awry and Olivia Wilde’s Zoe is killed by a surge of electricity because she (awwww) forgot to take off her engagement ring. Unable to resuscitate her, hubbie-to-be Frank (Duplass) slaps her on his science slab and demands the group assist in injecting her with their very much still-in-development serum. As one would anticipate from a mile away, his shoot-first-ask-questions-later approach to science has some nasty, horror-moviesque implications when Zoe wakes up and doesn’t quite feel like herself.

Up to this point, The Lazarus Effect has only committed the horror cardinal sin of, well, not being very scary. It has a few thing-appears-out-of-nowhere moments to surprise the crowd into a yelp or two but absolutely nothing actually scary or even worthy of note. But as the movie continues, it’s as if it actively tries to disarm its own internal sense of spookiness. Themes of science and the divine are explored in the context of hell but that plot-thread is all but abandoned before anything of worth comes from it. As for the inevitable kills, there is nothing imaginative or memorable in the slightest of ways, just a series of underwhelming, ashen disposals seemingly at the hands of a real pacifist .

The PG-13 horror movie hasn’t had a hit in a long while and with the MPAA stamping The Conjuring with a R-rating simply because it was deemed “too scary”, these all audience entries into the horror genre such as The Lazarus Effect and last year’s much worse Ouija make me question whether it’s even truly possible to have an effective PG-13 horror flick. Because if the bloodless, scareless nature of The Lazarus Effect serves as any indication, it surely doesn’t seem like it.

In the annals of horror past, the greats stand out in large part because of their inventive spirit. Something that Lazarus has almost none of. It’s Hollow Man (Hollow Woman) means Reanimator (ReanimateHer) and if the film didn’t have the good fortune of Duplass, Wilde and co. working for it, it would be even more dismissible and dopey. David Gelb was able to do something truly special within the documentary world with Jiro Dreams of Sushi making it just that much more of a shame to see him fail so acutely with his dull attempt.

Exiting the theater, one man turned to another and said, “It was alright but I can’t imagine paying $10 to see it” and that pretty much hits the nail on the head. At only 83 minutes, The Lazarus Effect is filmic premature ejaculation embodied, suffering from creative ED and hardly able to justify even half of its theatre asking price. For the real h-buffs, there’s nothing here worth seeing on the big screen so if you’re inevitably going to gobble it up, make sure you do so at home.

D+

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Out in Theaters: FOCUS

February 25, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Focus, Glenn Ficarra, John Requa, Margot Robbie, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Will Smith

Focus lacks almost entirely in its namesake, flopping from one light-fingered narrative point to another, despondently coasting off the star power of its two sugary leads until its thinly veiled, ill-constructed story finally peters to an unsatisfying halt. As a discernible comeback vehicle for Will Smith‘s equally stalled career, Warner Bro’s one hundred million dollar gamble is just that; a hundred million dollar gamble. The blue chips come piled high on Smith’s stock but all the flash and pizzaz in the world can’t distract us from the real pressing questions at hand: where did all that money go?

A motif of Focus is to keep your eyes on the prize but the sheer impenetrable nature of Hollywood budgets is more than sufficient to keep us from ever being able to answer that posed question with any degree of clarity. As Focus attempts to pull off a magic trick on screen, the only slight of hand I see is transforming a hundred million dollars into this utterly disposable lark. Though undeniably stylish and as easily digestible as baby food, Focus ultimately lets down the intoxicating and downright sexy promise of Will Smith and Margot Robbie with blasé character arcs and vapid twists that come nowhere close to conjuring the imaginative, cunning power they ought.

As with any film predicated on gambits, a ruse can only be as astonishing as it is purchasable. The prestige only works if we sign off on the pledge. You can’t properly make the turn when the road is this straight and narrow. Focus gambles on its intelligence, assuming it’s slick enough and smart enough to shake off our suspicions. But upon entering, we taste the rank stench of bankrupt storytelling on our tongues the air is so thick with it. For all ye who enter, surprised ye shall not be.

Trying to pull the wool over our eyes is Smith’s tactfully reckless Nicky Spurgeon. Operating solely on a vast ocean of charisma, Nicky is a notoriously cold-blooded machine running on pilfered Rolexes and swiped wallets. Maintaining a mild empire of looters and cheats, Nicky’s illegal enterprise runs as smoothly as a Mercedes-Benz assembly line, flipping nabbed billfolds and eBaying stolen iPads to the syncopated beat of a factory whistle. The arrival of amateur con-artist Jess (Robbie) threatens to overturn Nicky’s emotionless ways as he takes her under his wing to teach her the tricks of the trade and ends up with more than he bargained for.

The official synopsis of Focus describes Nicky’s latest scheme interrupted by a femme fatale from his past. What it fails to mention is that the history between Nicky and Jess is established in the first 60 minutes of the film and the whole “latest scheme” thing is a rushed hustle that gets less than half of the film’s run time. Thusly, the meat of the picture is contained in Focus‘ final 44-minute helping, a frustratingly humdrum afterthought of a narrative appendage that is tasked with the impossible function of making up the second and third act. By the time the laughably lengthy introduction flips its “Three Years Later” card, it feels like the movie has already ended. And our patience is more than well worn.

Tit for tat, Focus isn’t all bad though. For every misstep writer/director team John Requa and Glenn Ficarra take, Smith and Robbie amp up their alluring sorcery to compensate, selling their product as a genuine Fudgsicle when we can tell it’s really a dressed-up poopsicle. Smith’s cocky charm is a suit that fits him nicely and it’s nothing short of a relief to see him back on the big screen trying it on again while Margot Robbie continues to shape herself into a coveted Hollywood figurine. Powered by so much more than just her angelic looks, she oozes chemistry like a broken DIY science kit.

With enough charm in the tanks to partially power a date night, Focus intermittently manages to overcome a narrative buckling under its lack of realism and forethought but only in periodic fits and starts. Will it be enough to jump start Smith’s downward-trending career? Probably not. Though he hardly comes out of the wholly lackluster picture blemished.

C-

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Out in Theaters: HOT TUB TIME MACHINE 2

February 19, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Adam Scott, Chevy Chase, Clark Duke, Craig Robinson, Hot Tub Time Machine 2, Josh Heald, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Rob Corddry

Hot Tub Time Machine 2 doesn’t quite make you wish you could go back in time and stop yourself from attending…and then its characters rape each other. Yes, I mean that literally. Puerile, potty-mouthed and purposeless, this five-years-later sequel has the audacity to jettison the whole “likable losers” appeal of the original in favor of three wash-outs crashing parties in the future, solving a hackneyed murder mystery. When John Cusack can’t be bothered to join the reunion party (last year, he had four films score 10% or lower on Rotten Tomatoes), you can assume the settings are off but little can prepare you for how uninspired and piecemeal this never-should-have-happened follow-up is. Set phasers to shun.

In the aftermath of Hot Tub Time Machine, our characters have settled in nicely using their knowledge of future events to make themselves rich and famous. Lou (Rob Corddry) ripped off some Motley Crew songs (renamed *sigh* Motley Lou) before inventing Lougle (yes *sigh* that’s a rip-off of Google) to the tune of someodd billion dollars. Craig Robinson‘s (at least marginally affable) Nick has gone on to rip off countless artists from The Black Eyed Peas to Nirvana and for it is a celebrated artist struggling with identity issues. Well no shit you thieving hack. Cusack, as mentioned, is nowhere to be seen – there’s a brief mention that he penned a popular sci-fi book about Time Lords or whatnot – and we’re lead to believe that Clark Duke‘s baby-faced Jacob just vegged out on the couch and didn’t pursue fame and fortune like his other time traveling cohorts.

Corddry’s Lou is an absolute dick of a human being and a test to withstand. He’s reprehensible in a most off-putting way, so much so that I couldn’t remember if he was this much of a churlish asshole in the original or if his obnoxious, off-putting nature had been ratcheted up to fit the sequel quota of “bigger is better”. Nevertheless, his dickishness leads to his near immediate demise (in a lights-flickering thunderstorm no less) and the trio is forced to travel back in time (more on this soon) to solve his murder before it ever happens.

It stands to reason that a movie with “hot tub time machine” in the title doesn’t make any sense but the time travel aspects of this film are even more misshapen and whacked out than they once were and our “heroes” wind up in the future – but a future that is still their past. Or something like that. They need to get blackout drunk in order to operate their sudsy time machine, unless screenwriter Josh Heald deems that there’s not enough time to get into another pill-popping, cocaine-eating montage and then it just works with the press of a button. And did I mention that the characters at one point are forced to rape each other? And I don’t mean implied rape, I mean bent-over, screaming-at-the-top-of-your-lungs rape. I just don’t know what to say…

Perhaps the most distracting element of the film is the one that sums it up best: the arrival of the etherial repairman. In the role, Chevy Chase throws down one of the worst cameo appearances of all time, reprising his shtick as a “grandfather time” figure in what might just be the least enthusiastic onscreen appearance of the last decade. You couldn’t have paid him money to make him look less happy to be there. But that pretty much sums up the film in its entirety though: a bunch of people wondering what they’re doing in the midst of a completely defunct comedy. It’s not really a shock that director Steve Pick (Hot Tub Time Machine, About Last Night) falls so hard on his face but it’s nonetheless embarrassing to watch.

Robinson, newcomer Adam Scott and even Corddry give it their all – and do manage to cull some immature laughs with their frequent, obviously improvised riffing – but it’s just far too little in a film that’s far too creatively barren. The actors hack at each other as best they can but their comedy is crude, mean-spirited, cheap and often just sad. In summation: the characters are forced to rape each other.

D+

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Out in Theaters: MCFARLAND USA

February 19, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Carlos Pratts, Kevin Costner, Maria Bello, McFarland USA, Morgan Saylor, Out in Theaters, Reviews

Apparently there’s a place in America called McFarland. Home of the “pickers”, flatlands of the Meheecans, McFarland is California-as-fly-over-state and the perfect staging grounds for an inspirational underdog story. Almost Steinbeckian in its desperate position of agricultural purgatory, McFarland is a training grounds for drop-outs and inmates, the kind of small town that plants their state pen adjacent to their high school with traffic between the two state institutions resembling the systematic marching of ants. But the days of crop picking woes are thrown out the window when a white man sport (cross country running) rears its dignified head and the white man (Kevin Costner) saves the day.

Hollywood has a long history of the flipping the noble savage equation on its head, planting a savior of a white dude in a pit of assorted-colored serpents and seeing what happens when you mix things up. Cool Runnings did it with Jamaicans and bobsleds, James Cameron did it with CGI and the Na’vi, Stand and Deliver did it with James Olmos and Math. In McFarland USA, Disney does it with distance-running Mexicans. It’s the seventh son of a scheming formula that’s as crowd-pleasing as it is emotionally manipulative. And if anyone does emotionally-manipulative right, it’s Disney. Sometimes.

Costner is Jim White, a high-school football coach who gets the proverbial boot when he hucks a cleat at a sassy quarterback and ends up knicking his country club face. It’s one of those classic coaching accident. No pain, no gain right? Unfortunately Coach Taylor’s “clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose” doesn’t really apply when you rough up the ol’ student athlete population. Fired and marked with the scarlet letter of “abuser of children”, White has few options on his once silver platter and is forced to uproot his family of four. Arriving in the dusty nowhere of McFarland, the Whites – if this weren’t based on a true story, the choice of last name would earn far more commentary – are faced with the harsh reality that their the only white face in a hundred mile stretch and the only chow joints in town are taquerias. And they don’t even serve burgers.

The White family fits into the town like pepperoni pizza into a tamale. Realizing they’re in hostile territory when a bunch of low-riders cruise by bumping the bass (a terrifying prospect), White vows to wife Maria Bello that he’ll get his family out of his Mexican-inhabited lion’s den with two shakes of a lamb’s tail. Playing the oh-so-intriguing role of “supportive wife”, she backs Jim out of his fight-or-flight instinct with the calm rationale that he’s about as desirable a teacher as Mama June is a bikini model. She might have suited up just fine back in her heyday but nowadays the prospects of such a fit aren’t so hot.

As is expected with these kinds of films, Costner’s White becomes an integral part of the community in less time than it takes a Kenyan to clock in a mile, recruiting himself for a position as a cross country coach (met with your standard issue ignorancia response of “cross country what?”) and assembling a sextet of hardworking, fast-running Mexican students because “Damn, look at that boy run!” When he locks down casual sprinter/day-laborer-in-the-making Thomas (Carlos Pratts) – who also serves as a low-broiling love interest for White daughter Julie (Morgan Saylor; 21 playing 15) – the prospects of a McFarland cross country team begins to bloom. The dustbowl of a town sees its first true spark of promise rising like the harsh sun above their endless fields of cabbage.

The ups and downs of McFarland USA are as calculatedly high and low as the mounds of discarded almond shells that the runner boys practice on. Dramatic tension is invented for no reason beyond an assumed need for dramatic tension – the Quinceañera parade scene being an aggressive offender of bait-and-swing melodramatic hogwash AND a complete editing miff – while various character arcs are forecast from the moment they arrive on set. A roguish hero with a troubled past overcomes the odds to become a champion, you say? How novel.

That isn’t to say that it doesn’t actually work though. In fact, McFarland USA can be downright rousing, with Antônio Pinto‘s soaring eagle score (complimented by Terry Stacey‘s flag-brandishing cinematography) borderline forcing you at sonic gunpoint to tearfully cheer on its underdogs, even through hard-trained knowledge that McFarland‘s outcome will be as predictably cheerful as a Quinceañera in Beverly Hills. It’s the kind of heart-warming Disney sports movie that serves up its schmaltz in thick, gooey gobs, the brand of pick-me-upper to bring your little league team to but never bother to dig into the meaning behind it. Because beyond the surface layer of faux inspiring hooey balooey, there really isn’t much else there. After all, McFarland USA, or How Kevin Costner Saved the Mexicans From Picking More Crops, doesn’t actually concern itself with going beneath the skin. Even if it did, there really isn’t much else there that needs to be said. Or seen.

C

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Out in Theaters: WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS

February 18, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Ben Fransham, Cori Gonzalez-Macuer, Jonathan Brugh, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Rhys Darby, Taika Waititi, What We Do in the Shadows 1 Comment

From 1984 to 2006, Christopher Guest lampooned perplexing cultural phenomenons from dog shows to community theater. Guest was quick to caricature and mock but never did so in lieu of creating earnest characters. Rather, his work paired the easy-to-poke-fun-at ludicrousness of small town obsessions with the genuine earnestness of their salt-of-the-earth makeup. For every Meg and Hamilton Swan and their posh Weimaraner, there was a Harlan Pepper and his basset hound. Were Guest still making movies today, one might expect his signature mockumentary stylings to take on child beauty pageants or vocal protest groups. Or vampire flatmates. Read More

Out in Theaters: FIFTY SHADES OF GREY

February 12, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Dakota Johnson, E.L. James, Fifty Shades of Grey, Jamie Dornan, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Sam Taylor-Johnson

When I’m in the mood to do the pant’s dance, you won’t find me reaching for airport smut the likes of Fifty Shades of Grey. Rather, I prefer my sex with a little, uh, sex. I have been told the crop of humans that find this lewd drivel titillating are mostly repressed housewives and jittery virgins. Even then I find it hard to believe that the virginal palette is whetted by domestic abuse dressed up as BDSM and that housewives crave the kind of punishment on display in Fifty Shades of Grey. I imagine the more apt female fantasy involves turning the table and gaining the whip rather than submitting to an older, powerful, pain-obsessed billionaire. I’m willing to admit that maybe I just don’t get it but I have an inclination that I’m standing on the right side with this one.

Fifty Shades of Grey is fifty shades of shady. It’s porn for people who don’t watch porn – filled with nudity (you even snag a glimpse of shaft-top), playroom tools (Mr. Grey keeps his own personal, in-house red light district stocked to the brim but never gets around to using any of his actual instruments. When he does finally turn to his tool box of BDSM trinkets, he uses an ordinary belt? Really? But you have a wall STOCKED with sick canes?!), and waiting – but the film is improbably light on actual sex. And, more importantly, sex appeal. For a movie that’s two hours of contrived tension and nothing in the way of plot, the payoffs suffer creative erectile dysfunction en masse and fail to tick the arousal dial even slightly clockwise.

It’s no surprise to learn that the concept from Fifty Shades was explicitly born from “Twilight” fan fiction. Doing my best to know as little as possible about these kinds of things, I had no idea this was the case when I turned to my girlfriend during the screening and said, “This is just Twilight without the vampires”. After over two hours of Fifty Shades though, I was begging for Twilight. That should give you a sense of just how putrid a product Sam Taylor-Johnson‘s adaptation of E.L. James‘ bestselling romance novel truly is. At least Twilight had a story.

Starring two nobodies that no-one cares about – Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan – Fifty Shades of Grey purports the telling of a peculiar love story but to call what unfolds a story is unfittingly generous. A story involves characters being forced to make choices and subsequently developing because of those choices, their relationships thickening as various circumstances swirl around them, pushing them hither and thither. Fifty Shades revolves around one choice – whether Ana will submit to the dominant Mr. Grey – and only by curtain time has our character made her choice. It’s 125-minutes of will-they-or-won’t-they BDSM-lite cinematic garbage and to spent any more time discussing the “plot” is a waste of resources, yours and mine both.

Perhaps what is most off-putting about the whole affair is (my admittedly personal) perception that the sexual acts that take place are in no way, shape or form sexy. Their bumping uglies is either as awkward as losing your V-card or as painful to watch as sitting through Blue is the Warmest Color with your parents, and Taylor-Johnson has little to offer in terms of variety to spice things up. Surely she was handed a pile of narrative yuck so it’s hard to put the blame on her for trying to dress that yuck up as pretty as she could. In the midst of the second act, the movie appears as if it might switch gears and turn its engines to full steam ahead but just piddles out shortly thereafter and gets back to the will-they-won’t-they grind.

Not having read the source material, I genuinely wonder if this kind of novella smut could have ever made a good movie. The plain truth of the matter is Fifty Shades of Grey just isn’t a story. There’s no three act structure. There’s hardly characters so much as denuded cardboard cut-outs sticking themselves into each other, brewing with overt undertones of sexual violence.

Damian Grey’s misunderstanding of consensual sexual congress comes cloaked in contracts, a fact that should be an immediate red-flag for any self-respecting female. “Oh, I need to sign my rights away in order to bone you? Sounds legit!” When asked what she gets out of the deal, Grey purrs, “Me”. Fucking spare me.

When Mr. Grey does let his demons out of the closet and sparks the engines on his lingering dungeon tools, his coital playbook is closer in form to The Rapes of Wrath and Ho-piercer than the soft femininity of Nicholas Spark’s The Throatbook. Even then – in the midst of an aggressive buttocks bludgeoning – I had trouble feeling anything towards the lip-biter on the receiving end because she asked for it AND had a carefully-outlined safe word prepared. If only there had been a safe word to make this movie stop.

Those sexually-repressed tittering housewives looking to get their jollies off in the biggest budget, softest soft-core porno ever, will find their faces fully flushed, hooting and hollering as the hot bodies on screen run their whips across bared flesh and eventually insert themselves in one another. Those who’ve gotten lost in a Borders to find themselves surrounded by self-same covers of disposable romantic novels – those with the bare-chested hunks and the impossibly helpless damsels dangling from them – and have run screaming, those poor few ought prepare for the absolute overdose of senseless smut that is Fifty Shades of Grey.

At the screening I attended, they distributed Fifty Shades fashioned blindfolds before the showing. You wouldn’t be worse off wearing it during the film.

D

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Out in Theaters: KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE

February 12, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Colin Firth, Dave Gibbons, Kingsman: The Secret Service, Mark Millar, Matthew Vaughn, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Samuel L. Jackson, Taron Egerton

Absurdist superspy farce that tips its top-hat to the JB’s (James Bond, Jason Bourne, Jack Bauer) while rampantly assaulting its way into the 21st century, Kingsman: The Secret Service is filmic reassurance that ridiculous fun can still be had in the theater. Over the past decade, the spy spoof (Austin Powers, Spies Like Us) has mostly gone the way of the Crocodile Dundee (unless we’re counting the underwhelming, geri-action Red films. Note: we shouldn’t be). Leave it to genre revivalist Matthew Vaughn to inject that tired and trying genus with the same eye-widening, pulse-quickening hit of adrenaline that he’d previously brought to the superhero and crime genre with Kick-Ass, X-Men: First Class and Layer Cake. Brimming with tactful homage and just enough youthful zest to make its balls-to-the-walls-ness truly one-of-a-kind, Kingsman is a shining, shimmering, splendid example of why we go to the movies.

In Vaughn’s murderous opus, the titular Kingsmen are a copacetic society of mustache-twirling gentleman/gun-totting acrobats renown for their secrecy, military effectiveness and hand-tailored suits. When world leaders want the job done right, they hire the Kingsman and if everything goes according to plan, you don’t hear peep about their success in the papers. One might assume from the cut of their jib that the Kingsmen are a group of pacifist nancies but Vaughn wastes little time conveying just how deadly his crew of well-dressed gentlemen is.

The stage is set with a fortress under siege, explosions tumbling block letter title cards to Dire Straight’s pounding “Money for Nothing″. Through a window, a masked agent informs an Arab man bolt-strapped to a chair that he will count down from ten and if he doesn’t have the information he needs in that time frame, ten will be the last thing he ever hears. There’s no deliberation, no hesitation, just counting. At five, he caps both the captive’s knees. There’s no breathy drawls, no pregnant pauses. This ain’t that kind of movie, bruv. Harry Hart, code name Galahad, counts down like a metronome.

Caught unawares, Galahad is too late to stop the prisoner from pulling the pin on a stashed grenade, but finds himself and his fellow Kingsmen saved when a fellow super-agent in training throws himself on the explosive. Seventeen years later, Galahad feels indebted to his savior and, with a recently opened spot on the team, seeks out the promising-but-problematic son of the man who saved his life so many years ago, Gary ‘Eggsy’ Unwin (Taron Egerton). Eggsy is a kind-hearted ruffian, loyal to a fault and entangled with the wrong crew because of his mother’s not-so-cunning choice of gentlemen friends.

What transpires next involves a global climate change world domination plot, X-Men: First Class-style training montages, an ultra-violent blitzkrieg in a church that will assuredly go down as one of the year’s most memorable and visually-arresting sequences, Samuel L. Jackson playing a despotic billionaire with a lisp and a soft stomach for blood using the subterfuge of free data plans to “clean the slate” and loads of not-so-subtle James Bond references. If the above does not at least pique your interest, Kingsman is probably not the film for you.

The film again pairs Vaughn with the authors of the comic book source material on which Kingsman is based; Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons (Kick-Ass). So again if you weren’t won over by the wacky, violent antics of Kick-Ass, this is likely not going to amuse you. And though shy a Hit-Girl, Kingsman has plenty of fun, memorable characters to play with, most notably Colin Firth as Galahad. Liam Neeson reinvented himself as an action hero in his twilight years so why not the King with the lisp? asks Vaughn. Firth makes the most of his pithy dialogue and provides an adroit aging action hero – a lovingly rendered throwback to the age of the smooth-talking British spy. Engaged in a carousel of gun shots and knifings, Firth shines in the action scenes too, even if it’s a fair gamble to say that most of his stunts are mostly the work of computer animations.

There are a few notable sequences that feature spotty CGI work (Eggsy’s mid-air, knife-tipped shoe stab makes him look like a plastic action figure) but in the center of Kingsman go-for-broke, give-em-all-ya-got approach to breathless bombast, it couldn’t matter less. The eyebrow-raising smarm and au courant irreverence of Vaughn’s rhapsodical vision just make for one hell of a show. Plus, there’s nothing quite like capping off your film with the prospect of slamming the back door of a princess. In the end, isn’t that the point of this whole spy venture anyways?

A-

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Out in Theaters: LEVIATHAN

February 12, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Alexeï Serebriakov, Andrey Zvyagintsev, Elena Liadova, Foreign Film, Leviathan, Oleg Negin, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Roman Madianov, Sergueï Pokhodaev

Leviathan is the work of an artist struggling with his heritage. Hailing from Novosibirsk, Russia, Andrey Zvyagintsev paints a Roman tragedy with Biblical implications into the modern seascape of Northern Russia’s Barents Sea and the result is staggering. Interpersonal power struggles and structural corruption pollute the scenery of Zvyagintsev’s vision presenting a modern man’s saga of David and Goliath as a simple mechanic faces down an nefarious but forceful mayor.

Russia’s official selection for the 87th Academy Award for Best Foreign Film (and a strong contender for the win) also took home the prize for Best Screenplay at last year’s Cannes Film Festival in large part due to the many layers of Leviathan’s searing and potent critique. Zvyagintsev’s pages cut deep emotional and intellectual slashes, destined to linger long after the curtains are drawn. Aided by Oleg Negin, Zvyagintsev has written a screenplay that reveals itself a piece at a time, delicately peeling back layers of a narrative onion until we’re at its nasty center and likely as tearful as after dicing an onion.

The plight of Zvyagintsev’s characters – each a flawed shade of simpleton doing their best to get by – give emotional weight to his cold, procedural dealings but it’s what he does with the idea of institutional extortion that really transforms Leviathan into a foreign epic worth remembering. After all, when is red tape an equal villain to a vodka-slugging Mafioso?

Kolya (Alexeï Serebriakov) leads an earnest life with new wife Lilya (Elena Liadova) and son Roma (Sergueï Pokhodaev) as a part time auto-repair mechanic. Recently under one roof, Roma and Lilya have yet to come to an understanding about their newly forged stepson-stepmom relationship, forcing Koyla into an unwelcome focal point between two occasionally feuding forces. Pressure from corrupt major Vadim Shelevyat (Roman Madianov) only further yaws their domestic equilibrium and an all out land war erupts in the form of paperwork, blackmail and eventual murder.

Zvyagintsev’s curt and gloomy voice shines through in every scene, lending a pessimistic but pragmatic air to the overwhelming fogginess of his feature. Hope is a long shot but events never feel forcibly grim. Even when they are, there’s an understanding that Zvyagintsev courts his catastrophe with a fair potion of verisimilitude. No matter how black and bleak his world becomes, he approaches despondency from a position of hard-won credibility; credibility that can only be won first-hand from a lifetime of institutional injustice.

This begs the question: is Zvyagintsev’s film a condemnation of his country? According to his own statements, no. “I am deeply convinced that, whatever society each and every one of us lives in, we will all be faced one day with the following alternative: either live as a slave or live as a free man.” Zvyagintsev continues, “And if we naively think that there must be a kind of state power that can free us from that choice, we are seriously mistaken.” A chilly message blasting like a bullet from an even chillier film, and one seriously worthy of your attention.

B

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