Out in Theaters: AUTÓMATA

October 9, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Antonio Banderas, Automata, Birgitte Hjort Sørensen, Dylan McDermott, Gabe Ibáñez, Melanie Griffith, Out in Theaters, Reviews

I hadn’t even heard of Autómata when I was sent a digital screener but with its science fiction meets thriller description and a shaved-headed Antonio Banderas at the forefront, I figured I’d give it a go. From the get go, it reads iRobot meets Blade Runner, a lo-fi crossroads between wanna-be philosophical depths and bargain FX. And from the many borrowed circuits from many better movies, Autómata scraps together a fairly watchable though ultimately robotic piece of (English-language) independent science cinema.

Banderas is a Spanish Deckard in a post-apocalyptic world whose population is down by 99.7%. Only 21 million people remain – though that population scarcity is never intelligently touched on – and those that are alive have it kinda rough. Cardboard shanties line the outside of the fortress-tall enclosure that houses the privileged – again, we don’t get much insight into the divide between the haves and have-nots – where beggars set their bots to panhandle-mode to scrimp from the occasional passerby. “Please sir, my owner is hungry,” the flat-faced bots, (obnoxiously foreshadowingly) called Pilgrims, coo. Talk about the furthest extrapolation of human laziness.

It’s Jacq Vaucan’s (Banderas/no, it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue) job to settle claims of broken Pilgrims. Our first encounter with him sees a poverty-stricken family claiming that a bot had malfunctioned and killed their dog. Banderas contends it is not possible. After all, each Pilgrim is built with a protocol so that they cannot harm any living thing. They’re also prevented from altering themselves. The two protocols work in symbiosis to ensure that no Pilgrim ever offs a human or, say, a dog. So obviously the family killed their own dog, Vaucan assumes, because any alternative wouldn’t be possible. Because our hero must start his journey as utterly unwilling to see the feasible cracks in his worldview. Otherwise the parabola is incomplete. We wouldn’t want to watch a character only half arc. Fella’s got to start at the bottom.

With a baby on the way and only bleakness on the horizon, Vaucan tries to right the ship at home while working as said bot-checking appendage of a totalitarian government. But when he sees a robot, gasp, self-altering his entire world goes up in smoke and he’s forced to hit the road to upend the truth.

Along the way, there’s some frightfully bad acting. Wife Rachel (Birgitte Hjort Sørensen) is a trying actress who slurps through her lines like a kid with a juice box. Clocksmith Dr. Dupree (Melanie Griffith) one ups her in the awful actress department though, assuming the time-worn craft of acting is little more than emphasizing every other word and making an symmetrically enticing O-shape with her mouth when she’s not babbling. She too closely resembles a starlet on her knees trying to secure the “role of a lifetime”. Attempting to hack her way through technical jargon, she’s offensively bad. Even Dylan McDermott treats his role like a chew toy, slobbering all over it like he’s in a hurry to collect the paycheck to buy some more coke. Banderas is the only one trying to make it worthwhile so thankfully it’s mostly a one man show.

To his credit, Gabe Ibáñez knows Banderas is his strength and tries to pull him out of the ring of fire that is his acting counterparts as much as possible. Problem is, it takes him too long to figure out just where to put him. Accordingly, the pacing is all over the place and doesn’t really ever settle into something that feels relatively comfortable with itself into well into the back end of the second act. A scene where Vaucan drunkenly dances with a pink wig-wearing, doll-faced Pilgrim is maybe the best in the whole movie. It’s basically fan fiction between Deckard and a pleasure model Replicant. It’s weird and hollow and oddly affecting.

When stripped back to Zacarías M. de la Riva‘s percussive soundscape and a dusty gun battle, Autómata excels. When Pilgrim after Pilgrim refuse to fight back against the wanton violence of man, a honest note of emotion rings out. Sadly, those moments are numbered and often boxed in by wooden acting of the nth degree.

In a movie that’s supposedly, subtly about evolutionary superiority, it commits some Darwin Award worthy movie sins. Brutally convenient encounters between characters – waiting to die until in the arms of another character, everyone is always in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time, etc. – but these faults are almost less offensive than the punishingly poor acting in some key moments. Autómata wants so badly to be an adult rehash of dystopian themes but it’s undone by that can’t-put-your-finger-on-it spice of amateur acting. I’m a stickler for performance and nothing throws me off more than a couple really bad ones. Having said that though, I have to admit, the robots themselves are pretty dope. Now whether I congratulation the art department or the special effects department on that one is the real mystery.

C-

Follow Silver Screen Riot on Facebook
Follow Silver Screen Riot on Twitter

Out in Theaters: KILL THE MESSENGER

October 9, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Andy Garcia, Jeremy Renner, Kill the Messenger, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Michael Sheen, Out in Theaters, Ray Liotta, Reviews, Robert Patrick, Rosemarie DeWitt

Kill the Messenger is a magic bullet meant to assassinate – or at least tarnish – the reputation of the CIA for their uber illegal association with Nicaraguan Contra rebels. Their anti-communist war effort was funded in part by *gulp* distributing crack cocaine to Central LA ghettos, a network Webb contends the CIA was complicit – or at least complacent – in facilitating. And like the projectile from any effective firearm, the path it travels is straight and narrow. Lead Jeremy Renner is monstrous good as big-in-his-britches San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb, an ambitious journalist who sticks his nose where it doesn’t belong and ends up getting stung by the barbs of a well executed smear campaign, but director Michael Cuesta never lets the work truly take off. It’s a competent, A-to-Z biographical picture that misses the moments to really get in the head of a man pushed to the brink or elevate his tale into a thing of true artistry.

Cuestra spends the first half of the movie setting up Webb’s pending investigation and eventual damning story “Dark Alliance” that would win him the Bay Area Journalist of the Year Award, a celebration that lacked the fanfare he had once envisioned. Stumbling upon the trail without meaning to, Webb (Renner) is tipped off about a local drug kingpin with ties of the CIA. Upon digging into the shadowy association, Webb begins to connect dots that go deeper than he could have ever imagined and proposes that in order to wage an anti-Communist war that Congress had already voted against, Reagan and his inner circle conspired to fund the Nicaraguan Contras by knowingly allowing cocaine to be smuggled into the US and sold without penalty in underprivileged neighborhoods. According to Webb, this significantly worsened the crack cocaine problem that had become pandemic in African American communities in the 1980s.

Racing to find proof of this heinous allegations, Webb leaves behind wife Sue (Rosemarie DeWitt) and children to solidify sources in the thick of Central America. Not surprisingly, few officials are wont to rush forward and those that do aren’t necessarily in great standing (being drug dealers, slimy bankers or others involved in the black market lifestyle.) Upon publication of Webb’s record-setting article, outrage explodes across African American communities and general populations equally, until the spotlight is turned on Webb by a CIA scurrying to discredit everything about the man.

With a background in political slowburners like Homeland and Elementary and bloodlusters like Dexter and True Blood, Cuesta understands storytelling but has not adapted his style from the small screen to the big one perfectly. To get the bulk of the narrative onscreen, he’s simplified events done to the meat and potatoes version. We hit on each major point like SparkNotes, never really getting the time to dive into the intricacies that make everything so compelling. At just under two hours, it either feels too short or two long. An HBO miniseries would likely have been a better avenue. Without Renner’s captivating turn as Webb, the story would feel too much like a moving document; the cold hard facts of a national outrage turned media circus.

But in a time where the US has seemed as internally adversarial as ever (look at the recent outcry at Ferguson and prevailing Us vs. Them mindset of nationwide citizens and police forces), Cuesta’s telling of Webb’s story is worth remembering for the cold hard facts alone. Since his death – two gunshots to the head, deemed a suicide – Webb’s allegedly falsified charges against the CIA had been vindicated. While his controversial point ended up proven to be true, he wasn’t there to see his day of salvation. And this is the most important story of all: truth being met with brutality and the ease of which such can be covered up with the wave of a wand. Cuesta goes to show how the mere mention of conspiracy can sometimes be enough to transform an expert newsman into a theorist crackpot. That’s the tale here: man finds conspiracy, man validates conspiracy and man goes down in flames for it. It’s the equivalent of Loose Change confirmed ten years from now. Definitive proof that the moon landing was a hoax.

And yet for all the controversy Webb’s story whipped up, the end result is a man lying penniless in a hotel room with two bullets in his skull. Years later, official validation of Webb’s controversial story came and went like a summer breeze. The hive mind of Americana had moved onto a new scandal. Oval office blow jobs triumphed over one of the most damning government cover ups of all time. This is the story that Cuestra should have been telling, not something to leave until an end credits stinger.

A living reminder of our government’s readiness to desecrate an individual in order to escape ownership of past crimes, Kill the Messenger is a wake up call for a slacktivism-obsessed generation of American citizens. It’s a film about caged justice, about evil actually prevailing and the lengths to which our once great nation will go to validate each and every transgression of their past.

The picture this paints is not a pretty one. It’s one of deception distributed wholesale, of a blindly lead populace, of a mastermind behind the curtain pulling levers and blowing smoke to scare people into submission. Were the meek to inherit the Earth, we’d have a nation owed many inheritances. And the most frightening aspect of all is that the one behind the curtain is seemingly calling the shots unchecked. America the Great is as desperate, deranged and unpredictable as Oz. The fungus of corruption has infected her immune system. Nothing is left untarnished.

If she were a best friend, you’d send her kicking and screaming to a mental institution for delusions of granduer. If they were your employee, you’d fire them for flagrant misconduct. As a governing body that represents the will of 300 plus million people, truth, integrity and basic human values – the pillars upon which a nation should stand – have been relegated to the lowest wrung of the totem pole. The right to life, liberty and happiness comes with a big, blaring asterisk. The sad truth, when one man’s honest zeal is pitted against the reputation of one of the secret-coveting countries in the world, you better believe he’s going down in flames. This is the ugly picture that Kill the Messenger paints and the million discussions it will warrant afterwards. Though deceptively straightforward in its telling, it’s the aftermath of Michael Cuestra‘s film that should matter most.

B-

Follow Silver Screen Riot on Facebook
Follow Silver Screen Riot on Twitter

Out in Theaters: DRACULA UNTOLD

October 8, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Art Parkinson, Dominic Cooper, Dracula Untold, Gary Shore, Luke Evans, Out in Theaters, Paul Kaye, Reviews, Sarah Gadon

Let me tell you an untold story: a bunch of studio execs crowd in a room. The air is thick with the fumes of aged (pronounce age-ed) scotch, the carpet stamped in the cookie cutout of a Louis Vuitton heel. The unpaid Lambo payments and hefty beachside mortgages are palpable. “How can we play the franchise game without shelling royalties to a greedy parent company?” The question all kids dream of answering someday. The words hang. Their answer is a lightbulb: unlicensed public property characters. Like Hercules! Or Frankenstein! Pump out films about characters that’ve been around for infinity because easy money. There’s literally no one in that Wolfman family tree coming forward to claim a check when Benicio dons a hairy mask. “I know! What about Dracula?” Penny saved, penny earned. This seems about the extent of thought that birthed this (dis)passion project that is Dracula Untold. In the petri dish that is the studio system though, this revisionist take on a monster movie classic actually (amazingly) transformed into something half-worthwhile; an appropriately enjoyable bad movie. Read More

Out in Theaters: THE TWO FACES OF JANUARY

October 7, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Hossein Amini, Kirsten Dunst, Oscar Isaac, Out in Theaters, Reviews, The Two Faces of January, Viggo Mortensen

The Two Faces of January is a classical told crime caper centered around a pair of on-the-lamb scalawags and the one vixen they both are vying for. Directed by Drive scribe Hossein Amini and starring Viggo Mortensen, Kirsten Dunst and Oscar Isaac, January is a film that relies entirely on engaged, rapturous performances and, while much more slow burning than edge of your seat, delivers on that front mightily.

Here, Mortensen is Chester MacFarland, a wealthy con artist with a thick billfold and a handsome wardrobe, chased through the din of countless European cities by shadows and connected private detectives. He’s a cautious charmer. A snake undoubtedly. From his designer shades to the first-rate cut of his gib, he’s a man who demands admiration. At least, at first glance. Getting to know Chester is part of the game that Amini plans. Seeing the depravity to which he lowers himself, part of the tragedy. As Chester drains bottles, the man as suave as seersucker fades into an angry mule of a man, kicking aimlessly at the world around. Like with any role, Mortensen commits entirely, crafting a petty, often cowardly man that still isn’t beyond the reach of sympathy.

Dunst as Chester’s lovably rosy – though ultimately dim and complacent – wife is better suited as a fatted calf than a partner in crime. Don’t take that as a knock on her performance – which actually is quite solid – but a statement on her character. She’s the gold prize awarded on the pedestal somehow caught up amongst the peloton. She’s a trophy to be enjoyed after the victory lap that has found herself thick in the sweatfields of the race. Suited to costly champagne and shiny bangles, their recent life on the run is undoubtedly getting to her.

When an American traveler living as a Athenian tour guide, Rydal (Isaac), mistakes Chester for his own father, he offers his services as a guide of all trades. Immediately taken with Rydal, Dunst’s Colette accepts empathically, a union that intensifies when Rydal mistakenly witnesses Chester killing, err man slaughtering, off the PI hot on their trail. Matching Mortensen jab-for-jab, Isaac showcases his own knack for understated ferocity, bringing another misunderstood – though less misanthropic – character to life.

With their paths incontrovertibly tangled, the party seeks passage to a nearby country – any nearby country – and a brighter tomorrow. This narrative turn necessitates a fundamental move in something as basic as the nature of the film’s genre and makes for a much more flatlined stretch.

Once Chester, Colette and Rydal escape Athens, January turns from a broiling Hitchcockian thriller to a turgid road movie. And though their languishing trip over rail, bus lines and cobbled streets is imbued with gorgeous cinematography courtesy of the Greek coast and Marcel Zyskind‘s penitent eye, the affair quickly bores. As any train passenger would agree, train-side has the potential to be occasionally stunning but the repetitive character all but serves as nature’s Ambien. In those tedious middle minutes, I caught my head sinking into my chest and my eyes fluttering closed. It isn’t until the group begins to properly implode on themselves that things begin to heat up and intensify, leading to a fully satisfying though not unfamiliar final third.

Bearing no resemblance to some other projects he worked on (Drive) January proves the Iranian Amini has no desire to be written into a corner. Totally missing is the stylized, progressive zest of Drive, replaced by a humbled, deferential, even old fashion stance towards filmmaking. This isn’t a man trying to reinvent the wheel so much as marvel at the perfection of it.

What it does share in common is a collected sense of muted, disquieting scene work. His characters are flawed, moody but not without their charms. As Colette and Rydal’s flirtation turns from simmer to boil, Chester’s wavering acumen is a synonym of circumstance. As a writer, Amini confirms that more can be said by not saying anything at all. Though he doesn’t set out to affirm that all men are redeemable, in a roundabout way, he has. But the bumps along the road are many and the emotions are as fair-weather as often as they are belligerent. If I had a nickel for every time someone let a scowl slip across their face, I’d be 85 cents richer.

The film is deliberately set to the pace of Alberto Iglesias‘ smart score. His jumpy sonatas offers an appropriate overture for Amini’s drab thriller, giving it life in spots, taking it away in other. A somber, reflective romp like this almost demands Iglesias’s score to channel such an exacting and hectic mood. As further evidence of the monotony of the sagging middle parts, Iglesias’s musical touch fades to melancholic whimpering. Oboes croon like a large dog pining for attention. It’s not until his strings dash forward and the notes crescendo that the film does again.

With more in common with the films of the 1960s than the films of 2014, The Two Faces of January has a tendency to turn the pot to a low broil and lean on the actor’s oft mesmerizing performances to guide it through the humdrum elements. Nevertheless, there’s much to love about Amini’s effort and even more to admire. Top to bottom, January is an uncommon romantic thriller; a pretty picture cemented by actors on top of their game.

B-

Follow Silver Screen Riot on Facebook
Follow Silver Screen Riot on Twitter

Out in Theaters: GONE GIRL

October 2, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Ben Affleck, Carrie Coon, David Fincher, Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl, Kim Dickens, Neil Patrick Harris, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Rosamund Pike, Trent Reznor, Tyler Perry 9 Comments

I knew a guy in college who was accused of rape. He was a few years older than me and confided the tale over a joint and some cheap whiskey. The case didn’t go to court nor did he see the inside of a jail cell but the accusation alone stood as a scarlet letter. He became a bit of a pariah; an un-dateable. His side of the story admittedly painted a dubious picture – both of them were drinking, they fooled around, two weeks later it was reported as a rape – but I nonetheless felt uncomfortable swilling from the same bottle of Seagram’s 7 as him.

Like he had unintentionally Inceptioned me, the inkling of suspicion was planted, the possibility that this guy had physically and emotionally scarred a woman swarmed my mind and grew into an unpleasant garden of doubt. It almost didn’t matter who was guilty. The blood was in the water. So what if he were innocent? The idea had still taken hold. So what if all it took to break a man down to the studs was one simple, four-letter word? Tawana Brawley set a judicial precedent with her 1988 court case of such a nature, Crystal Mangum and the Duke Lacrosse Team proved such an occurrence was no novelty. You better believe that acquitted or no, none of those chums are going to be the next contestant on The Bachelor. And then what if we dial that up to murder? How many Grand Trial Juries see a case in which a wife is murdered and immediately assume the husband’s involvement? Gone Girl harnesses that destructive power of accusation, plants us in the eye of the storm and dares its audience to keep up with each and every turn, no matter how subtle or seemingly easy to dismiss. Brace for impact, it’s a hell of a ride.

Adapted from Gillian Flynn‘s Best Seller of the same name, Gone Girl is a movie I knew I was going to love from the opening credits, which is no short surprise for movie maestro David Fincher. The names of associated talent blip in bright white words to fade unnaturally quickly from focus. They supernova. In the background, staccato shots of perfectly framed suburban residences attack the audience, underscored by Trent Reznor‘s pulsing, foggy soundtrack. Mimicking the volcanic rumble of a natural disaster or, worse yet, demons trying to escape from hell, his gothic, almost science fiction-like soundscape rolls over all like a fiery wave. As if on a timer, the blue house with white trim jolts to a four-bedroom with a red door. A low synth note sustains. Suburbia never looked so menacing.

Day one, morning of. Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) enters a bar; his bar; The Bar. It’s only 11 but he fixes a whiskey, neat. Sister Margo, played with gusto by Carrie Coon, joins him. It’s his fifth anniversary. The “wood” year. Appropriate seeing that’s what his marriage now resembles. Margo makes disparaging remarks. Nick grants them. His wife’s a bitch. “Amazing Amy” is a farce.

A side story breaks in without warning. In swooping penmanship, Amy’s (Rosamund Pike) diary takes us back in time. In flashback, life looks promising. A storybook. Reznor’s tracks get playful, as if they’re played on a kiddy xylophone. Nick and Amy spar verbally, the flirtation of the intelligentsia, before kissing in a sugar storm. Their meeting is an Ivy League daydream. As a girl, Amy’s life had been massaged and melded into a popular kid’s series penned by her mother, “Amazing Amy”. Amy’s amazing counterpart always made the varsity team. She was a shoe-in for valedictorian. She had a dog because it made her relatable. Amazing Amy was a tough act to follow. But in the potpourri of a sugar storm, the crusty side of life is easy enough to forget.

Day one, afternoon. Nick returns home to find a bouquet of smashed glass and no Amy. After finding a trace of blood splatter, Detective Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens) is quick to rule this a missing persons case. The hunt for Amazing Amy begins. As the vigil lights spark, the curtain comes up on Amy’s ill-standing in the community. Even before her disappearance, she was a ghost. A New Yorker with her nose too high in the air to notice the Missouri (she pronounces the word startlingly like “misery”) locals around her. Nick registers as unfazed to the social community at large with TV personalities and town’s people alike taking turns to knock his untimely playboy grins and unbefitting calm.

By Day Seven, the incident has unraveled into a full scale media circus and Fincher’s direction chases the rabbit down the hole. Nick’s wrapped up in a chess game played with power sex and won by carnal obliteration. Staring into the furtive abyss of the death sentence, Nick associates with a high status defense lawyer, played by a surprisingly great Tyler Perry, as he tries to mount a case that goes beyond just proving he didn’t kill his wife. In the age of social networking, you also have to win Twitter. The murderer becomes a Bachelor contestant. Womankind nationwide have to get their jollies if he stands a chance at an acquittal. Nick’s a pawn, moved unwittingly across the board by a mastermind the likes of Bobby Fisher and Fincher knows exactly when, where and how much to show. Just watching is stressful. Alleviating yourself by sucking down Coca-Cola or smacking popcorn is self-defeating. You don’t even dare to take a bathroom break.

In large part thanks to the massively enticing performances, Gone Girl threatens to slack your jaw so low it could fall off. Though unlikely to see much award fanfare, the oft underrated Ben Affleck is perfectly on mark. He’s not the hero you want but he’s the one Fincher’s picture deserves. Above him, below him and all around him, Rosamund Pike is an explosion. She’s breathtaking. She’s the remnants of a shattered China Doll, self-repairing into a new, frightening form. Like Chucky. She’s brilliant. She’s my current front runner for Best Actress. If not at the Oscars, in my own awards. A scene in which Amy undergoes a fluid-soaked transformation is as startling as it is perfect. The phoenix rises from the ashes. The devil is in the details. Fincher’s camera eats it up like pudding. Like everything else in her life, Amy owns her scenes.

Let’s break down one bit in particular. Ex-boyfriend Neil Patrick Harris fantasizes about octopus and scrabble on the Greece coastline. Like Amy, the octopus feeds through a hidden maw. A cavernous web of teeth. Impossible to predict, its arms are a slippery tangle of deception. Before you even see the octopus coming, you disappear in their cloud of ink. They’re inconspicuous predators. Similarly, the best Scrabble players can find meaning in a mess. In that cloud of ink, they thrive. They whip things to their advantage, trading up for better letters. For better standing. For a better Amy. Octopus and scrabble. His fantasy is his undoing. He feeds right into Amy’s manipulative maw.

Gone Girl deals in accusations and historical gender circumstance. It’s a 21st century battle of the sexes; a tennis match played with grenades. Amy and Nick’s affair depends entirely upon existing gender roles. It festers because of the wobbly stature between mankind and womankind. It’s not feminist. It’s emasculating. It’s not progressive. It’s the end of times. It’s a pedagogical treatise on the anatomy of a broken marriage. Or maybe all marriage. Who can tell? And I guess that’s the point. It’s always going, going, gone (girl). David Fincher absolutely hits it out of the park. It’s one of the best, and darkest, visions he’s ever dished up. Always one step before the action, Fincher demands we race to catch up. Each shot ends just marginally too quickly. His vision is frantic by design. Things get lost in the dark that are never recovered. You just have to pretend along with it. Case in point, I never got to the bottom of that college guy’s story. And in the end, his reputation never really hinged on the truth at all. Just what people thought.

A+

Follow Silver Screen Riot on Facebook
Follow Silver Screen Riot on Twitter

Out in Theaters: ANNABELLE

October 2, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Annabelle, Annabelle Wallis, John R. Leonetti, Out in Theaters, Reviews, The Conjuring, Ward Horton 1 Comment

When all it took to turn a harmless doll into a demon possessed conduit was a drop of blood, I had already written off Annabelle. Poised as a spinoff of the critically acclaimed and totally terrifying The Conjuring, this fast-tracked prequel is, like most dolls, the product of industrialization. It’s horror by assembly line; an unholy congregation of uninspired pieces. With an economic cast willing to underwhelm at every turn, a rushed-feeling script laden with humdrum exposition and only one scene that conjures up any scares, Annabelle is DOA.

So who is Annabelle and where did she come from? Attempting to connect the dots for those who had forgotten the kickoff of The Conjuring, Annabelle opens with essentially the same tie-in: a handful of young adults bring the accursed object to professional demonologists claiming that shit been getting cray. But, once again, that’s not the story we’re told here, as the film then leaps back a year in time, in the hopes to save these supple young nurses and their Annabelle woes for a later installment down the line.

Instead we’re treated to the tale of Mia and John, two inconspicuous baby boomers who thumb wrestle in church and are expecting a baby. On the boob tube, news reports about Charlie Manson and his occult followers stir up a frenzy. John, played by Ward Horton (who you might remember in The Wolf of Wall Street as Rothschild Broker #3), turns off the tv. He soothes something to the effect of, “You don’t need this garbage rattling around your brain. Now go watch your soaps and sew another sweater.”

That’s kind of the character Mia (Annabelle Wallis who you’ll recall from Snow White and the Huntsman as Sara (uncredited) or from X-Men: First Class as Co-Ed) is. Easily controlled, even more easily manipulated. Bed rest, you say? YOU GOT IT! When a pair of scraggly cult members cloaked in mental patient white come a knocking in their neighborhood, Mia gets a knife to her prego belly as her beloved collector’s doll collects a curse. A drip of cult-member blood seeps into Annabelle’s eye and she animates. The amount of time the camera subsequently spends hanging on Annabelle could be counted by abacus.

Director John R. Leonetti (career DP and director of The Butterfly Effect 2) provided some astoundingly frightful cinematography for The Conjuring. He filled those haunted halls with atmosphere. His shadow play was alive. The darkness housed the unknown and the unknown was deathly unnerving. The setting here feels like a rehash of Mia Farrow‘s pad in Rosemary’s Baby, except nondescript. The camera work is shoddy at best, often seeming to only capture scary moments by accident. Add to that cheap-looking digital cinematography and sketchily rendered CGI and you have a movie that’s as visually flat as it is wholly non-frightening.

That’s not to say it’s entirely without scares. But they’re not the psycological horror that’ll hang with you after, just cheap bumps that sneak up and steal a shudder. Two sequences in particular will inspire a jump. 1) A young girl appears and runs towards the camera before turning into something else 2) A basement elevator that won’t move between floors in the pitch dark. If the eerie mood of the later had been maintained throughout, we might have had a really decent, fiscal thriller. As is, everything is baked in Leonetti’s excessive sunlight, too obvious and predictable to warrant even a pity watch.

The added disappointment of serializing a film whose horrors were without bound, Annabelle sullies the good name of the Warren’s demonology franchise. Peddling in doll stares and wanna-be ominous monotony, it’s a total waste. Leonetti’s makeshift product is a fundamentally defunct follow-up that squanders what could have been in order to churn out a low-budg crowd pleaser of the basest variety. Judging by the audience’s boisterous reaction last night, I’m left to assume this will work for some leagues but I can’t easily hide my contempt for this lazy, plodding prequel.

D

Follow Silver Screen Riot on Facebook
Follow Silver Screen Riot on Twitter

Out in Theaters: TRACKS

October 2, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Adam Driver, John Curran, Mandy Walker, Marion Nelson, Mia Wasikowska, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Tracks

Tracks sets out to prove how disgusting the camel really is. Like a teenager at their peak awkward years, the camel is unnaturally gawky, looming over others like Shaq on a Little People, Big World special. Sporting a kind of tattered t-shirt, the camel wears a patchwork of umber skin with the look of a shag carpet that mated with sandpaper. Even grosser, their patchy coat flakes off in massive strips of brown, furry dandruff. Factor in the disquieting amount of spittle gobs involuntarily weeping off the camel’s drooping lower lip and that’s enough to call the Camelus Dromedarius easily one of the grossest creatures ever. But since Tracks is a movie about shedding your skin and proving you can be more than people expect, we have to give some credence to these oafish beasts (and the unexciting movie that contains them): they know how to hold their water. (It’s a double entendre, gettit?!)

But enough on the camels. (The utterly disgusting camels.) Tracks, directed by John Curran, is a movie about overcoming adversity that very little adversity to overcome. Curran and scribe Marion Nelson assume that Robyn’s 1,700-mile unmanned trek through the West Australian desert will exert enough natural drama to make the voyage interesting but, against the odds, there is just so little to rise above. There’s a few feral bull camels that need to be shot. She loses a crucial item every once in a while (only to recover it shortly thereafter). But the danger is always 100 yards away and never in her personal space. The thought that she might not actually make it never crosses our mind and because of that the tension is so limp that even a fully dreaded slackerliner couldn’t cross it.

Let’s rewind and break down the story a little more. Mia Wasikowska is Robyn Davidson, a real life new-age explorer who journeyed nine month’s across some of the least populated stretches of the Australian desert with three and a half camels (babies count as halves right?) and her faithful sidekick Diggity the dog. After months shmoozing and working for “the man” in order to learn how to own and operate camels, Robyn plans to embark on her once in a lifetime crusade but doesn’t quite have the capital to make it feasible. Enter Rick Smolan (Adam Driver), National Geographic photographer, and a grant from his parent company and Robyn has the means to make her trek a reality. The only thing is she now has to meet up with the culturally heedless Smolan to complete photoshoots every month or so and she had wanted to do the whole thing alone. Pouty face.

The trouble is, Smolan or Nosmolan, Robyn runs into peps all up and down her journey. For someone who apparently spent months to years planning out this journey, she should have known that uninterrupted solitude was never an option. Every time the weight of isolation begins to pressure down on her though, when that creeping thought of giving up takes hold, something comes to talk her out of it. Whenever her stock runs dry, the magical bushman or a pair of salt of the earth farmers or Smolan appear to fill up her tank.

Surely, the monotony of her pilgrimage weighs on her mental state but the only way that Curran communicates that thematic, non-visual mental degradation is by making the film’s proceedings laterally monotonous. She walks, she unpacks, she makes camp, she sleeps. She walks, she unpacks, she makes camp, she sleeps. There’s a moment where she confides in one of her humped beasts that she doesn’t know why she keeps doing this. And we, the audience, don’t really know either. Something about her dad’s failings (both as an Outback explorer and as a father) and definitely something about a deep-rooted connection to the local animalia (you’ll learn why in act three). She’s the kind of person who says she hikes to find peace but I’m not convinced she’s not out there to put something to rest. Like a Tim O’Brien soldier, she lays one foot in front of the other, humps on and tries not to think.

But for how gross the camels are (and by God are they gross) and how tedious the narrative becomes, Wasikowska is always rock solid. She’s as strong as a camel is nasty. In a role that requires very little talking and often proffers even less sympathy, Wasikowska plays a misanthrope who you can feel for, even through the levy that is her tough exterior is never quite broken down. Sun-kissed and filthy, Wasikowska’s got a twinkle in her eye that sells Robyn’s trait to connect more with animals than humans as genuine and without her first-rate performance, the film would be without nearly as much worth. Though a drummed up psuedo-romance with Driver doesn’t fit the narrative in the least, the Girls star continues to show just how much he brings to the project he’s involved in.

The other undeniable star of the show, cinematographer Mandy Walker, may have a history shooting sandy Outback sprawls (she worked on Baz Luhrman‘s Australia) but her shots her are hypnotizing and mirage-like, ushering some stunningly desolate imagery out of the otherwise barren landscape. Her use of lighting frames the infinite against the finite and colors the vacuous sky into stunning oil paintings. In another more interesting movie, she top-notch work would stand out even more.

One thing is for certain: you won’t find more camel drool in any other movie to come out this year. And even though the journey doesn’t ever conjure up the emotional impact that such a tale of triumph should, it’s a film that’s easy to respect. The moment when the thematic elements come together involves Robyn trekking across a sacred stretch of land with a non-English speaking bushman. Though they can’t understand each other, he talks on and on, babbling about this and that without subtitles. It makes for some great scenes and really gets to the heart of who Robyn is but the language barrier is symptomatic of the project as a whole. It’s got a message but is speaking in another language. You can admire it from an emotional distance but won’t likely fall for it. And that’s really what Tracks comes down to: it’s a film that inspires much more admiration than love. Ironically, that will likely also be its undoing.

C

Follow Silver Screen Riot on Facebook
Follow Silver Screen Riot on Twitter

Out in Theaters: THE EQUALIZER

September 25, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Bill Pullman, Chloe Grace Moretz, David Harbour, Denzel Washington, Haley Bennett, Marton Csokas, Melissa Leo, Out in Theaters, Reviews, The Equalizer

The Equalizer is an action movie that thinks it’s dark drama poking fun at an action movie. There’s genuine moments of close quartered self-reflection with Antoine Fuqua‘s camera jammed tight in Denzel Washington‘s expressive face followed up by explosions so absurd they’d look ridiculous in a Michael Bay joint. It’s tense, silly, righteous and totally too long.

As this actioner-that-wanted-to-be-more slogs on – slog being the only word that suits this two-plus hour standoff – it quickly loses credibility, but points to an even more blaring truth: it’s as utterly confused about it’s own identity as the late Michael Jackson. But like Jackson’s greatest, The Equalizer – in most part thanks to the ever reliable Denzel – is a certified “thriller” with plenty of high octane and thoroughly entertaining action to match the ludicrously over-the-top, teenager-pandering ‘splosiongasms. There’s greatness in fits and starts, preceded at every turn by some of the most ludicrous turns in recent cinema. For every two steps forward, it takes a step back, but at least that’s better than the opposite.

The man who needs nothing more than his first name, Denzel is Robert McCall, a Home Depot-lite worker who is quite clearly more than he appears. At first glance, he’s an ultra-tidy lost soul/coffee shop bookworm more interested in getting through his bucket list of novels than the carnal pleasures that occupy the minds of the cretins swarming around him. At his preferred tea sipping spot, Robert often rubs shoulders with the wig-swappin’ Teri, a young and supple prostitute played by Chloe Grace Moretz. He updates her on his progress in “The Old Man and the Sea” and she swoons. She weeps, “If only I didn’t have to polish so many knobs, I would have loved to learn to read,” or something along those lines. Her corrupt innocence is played for such sympathy it’s hard to relate. As Robert Rodriguez sought to remind us last month with Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, young + dumb + whore = not a great character.

After Teri gets roughed up by her Russian pimp, Robert puts on his badass shoes and confronts a room full of mob men about buying her off. You know, so she can read Hemmingway and stuff. The ten thousand cash he offers doesn’t cut it though, as her Eastern Slavic hustler can still sell her as a virgin. And therein lies the real stinger. Not only is the guy a chick-beating, steroid-blasting pimp but he’s also hocking fake virgins. Woo be unto him. A sympathy shudder of pity unto his clientele. With dollar signs still singing in the eyes, the Russian jerk-o learns the hard way that Denzel Washington…er Robert McCall ain’t to be messed with, beginning a mile long trail of body bags that leads all the way up to the peak of corruption. Cuz when Denzel pops, he just don’t stop.

Eventually squaring off against Denzel wearing a Robert name tag is Marton Csokas as Teddy, a ruthless, excessively tatted up member of the Russian crime syndicate flown from Vodkaville, Russia to Shmucktown, New York to deal with the recent calamity that is Dead Pimps R Us. Don’t be fooled though, Teddy is no snuggly bear. Teddy’s introduction sees him choking out a prostitute colleague of Terri’s to figure out what went down at his club, now bad guy corpse storage facility. He’s menacing without ever raising his voice, both a salient businessman and a rancorous murderer and as he squishes windpipes like Go Gurt tubes, he’s pretty chilling. He’s Dexter Morgan sans plastic wrap, John Doe without the sadism. Beneath his blanket of tattoos, Csokas is a genuine terror, his fatal eyes and sharp suits deadly in equal measure. It’s his straight-faced characterization locked against Denzel’s that keeps Fuqua’s knack for MORE! from descending into absolute lunacy.

As Robert and Teddy circle each other like a Jets v. Sharks knife fight, the stakes rise to absurd levels, allowing for some genuinely great action sequences as well as some so illogical and wacky you’d think it were inspired by an episode of The Looney Toons. Several moments stick out – the dock-side Rube Goldberg explosion most of all – that could have been easily omitted to make things more cognizant and pertinent to the gritty, grimy realism that director Fuqua seems to want in fits and starts. It’s as if he wanted to make “Black Bourne” one minute and “Bad Boys 3” the next. That internal battle is The Equalizer. The mysterious “who dat now?” elements to Denzel’s character are so dragged out they resemble William Wallace‘s public execution by drawing and quartering. Had they been more fleet-footed and subtle, they could have actually been quite nice. But it’s Fuqua’s tendency to let the little fire-crusted flourishes fly fast and loose that really drag the whole thing down by its heels.

Coming in well over two hours, The Equalizer is a movie that would have greatly benefited from an extra session or ten in the editing room. The final tool-filled showdown has some genuinely thrilling moments – because what’s better than turning a Home Depot into a house of terrors? – but as the minutes drag on and on and on, we involuntarily lose interest in the next power tool-fueled assault. Nail gun to the face? Check. Barb wire noose? Double check. We don’t even get to see what he does with that sledge hammer. A tighter, faster edit would have brought so much more life to something that sorely needs more of exactly that.

But Fuqua never squanders his greatest asset, Denzel, showing that he knows how to milk every last drop out of his magnetic star power. Gone is the toothy, chatty Denzel we’ve seen more of in the last few years, his charisma tampered down to muted levels, allowing a darker, quieter, more dynamic side to rise free. His joyous moments are accented by pangs of regret. When he rages, it’s through a fog. Faced off against Csokas, there’s actually some serious acting that takes place. It’s that much more of a shame when Fuqua feels the need to throw a bucket of blood and a circus of explosions right in their faces.

C+

Follow Silver Screen Riot on Facebook
Follow Silver Screen Riot on Twitter

Out in Theaters: LILTING

September 25, 2014 by Chris Bunker Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Out in Theaters, Reviews

My Mom always wanted me to learn Mandarin. I guess it had something to do with being cultured. When I hit 7^th grade, she forcibly enrolled me in a Macalester College course for new Chinese speakers. Macalester College, home of the Scots, is a small liberal arts school in St. Paul, MN with notable alumni including former Vice President Walter Mondale, former UN secretary general Kofi Annan, and talent agent Ari Emanuel—yeah, the Entourage guy. Pretty prestigious stuff. She figured I might follow their footsteps.

What was supposedly a “college” course turned out to be just a course at a college. My Mom had enrolled me in a class for 4+ year-old Chinese children whose parents wanted them to learn formal Mandarin. Average age in the course? Six. And that was with me in it. Strangely enough, I only made it through about eight weeks until I’d had enough. In that time I learned that I was měiguó rén (American), which had a funky -zh sound my mouth couldn’t replicate. That’s about all I remember.

Lilting’s characters seem about as preoccupied with race as I was. There’s Zhōngguó or Yīngguó and a lot of animus in between. Junn (Cheng Pei-Pei) is the former, an elderly Chinese-Cambodian woman whose son Kai (Andrew Leung) has put her in an old folks’ home in Britain. When he visits her, she laments that he doesn’t visit enough, that he always forgets to bring her favorite CD, that she hates the home. At least she’s started dating Alan (Peter Bowles), an old British man who can keep her company. “My father was half-white,” Kai says. She scolds him. “Your father was Chinese.” Then Kai disappears.

Richard (Ben Whishaw, Skyfall), Kai’s white boyfriend, goes to visit her one day and we learn that Kai’s passed. Junn doesn’t speak any English, but she’s managed to find a way to hate Richard all the same. Of course, she doesn’t know that he and Kai were dating—only that the two lived together. So, Richard finds Vann (Naomi Christie), a translator who can help them communicate through their anguish. This only seems to make things worse: Richard and Junn’s tempers escalate as we learn more and more about Kai’s struggle to come out and his eventual death.

Lilting looks at life through rose-colored glasses, in the sense that every shot has been color-corrected pink. The insinuation here is clear: beneath the warm surface you’ll find a deep chill. The effect is jarring but in no way pernicious. Lilting fuzzes and blurs past and present. Junn and Richard’s memories of Kai slowly fade in the same way. Their sadness isn’t nostalgic, rather more tragic. Tears don’t ever fall—they evaporate as fast as Kai vanishes. Junn and Richard’s struggles act as therapy. They’re trying to keep Kai alive.

There isn’t a lot of bliss in Lilting. Every situation devolves into an argument when reminders of Kai dull any pleasure. But, despite the constant arguing, Lilting has a lot to say about culture and loss. Vann acts as the film’s pseudo-narrator. Translating English to Chinese and vice-versa, she bridges the culture gap. Through Vann, Junn and Alan learn that they don’t have as much in common as they thought, and their cultural differences seem too difficult to overcome. Though Richard can now communicate through Vann, he still can’t admit to Junn that Kai was gay.

Yet, Vann’s interpreter role is only cursory. She’s there to fill in the blanks, but the film would have worked just as well without her. This, in part, is due to the phenomenal acting by the entire cast, notably Cheng and Whishaw, who take on a brutal grief. Whishaw is aggressive and delicate all at once, like a flower that can’t figure out whether it should bloom. Cheng seems to know a mother’s grief from experience. She makes it feel real.

Lilting has two set pieces: the poorly lit elderly home and Richard’s apartment. Credit to writer/director Hong Khaou for making every moment interesting. The quiet moments are jarring and the loud moments are appropriately reserved. Perhaps the best line in the film was the most harmless: “I wish there was a Shazam for smell.” Every observation is just as keen, and holds a deeper weight. Whishaw and Cheng were so magnetic that Lilting could have worked sans any dialogue at all.

By the end I felt like I was in 7^th grade again, just trying to figure out where a simple měiguó rén might fit in all this confusion. Though Khaou’s film might have been filled with conflict, my judgment was never conflicted: Lilting will take you somewhere you’ve never been before. I wish there were a Shazam for emotions. Lilting flew me all across the spectrum.

B+

Follow Silver Screen Riot on Facebook
Follow Silver Screen Riot on Twitter

Out in Theaters: HECTOR AND THE SEARCH FOR HAPPINESS

September 25, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Hector and The Search for Happiness, Out in Theaters, Peter Chelsom, Reviews, Simon Pegg, Stellan Skarsgård, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Toni Collette

As innocent a project as Hector and The Search for Happiness is, no one asked for a British spiritual remake of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Daydreams and bottlenecked ambitions find both characters in a tidy world of their own design that, like fireflies trapped too long in mason jars, have run out of oxygen and run on the humdrum fumes of expectation. Both of these uplifting films see a worker bee break free of their employment imprisonment to “find themselves” in a globetrotting journey around the world. Popping in to foreign landscapes and cultures, Hector, like Walter, discovers that what he was looking for was always right in front of his face. It’s about as stale as such a concept sounds.

Hector and the Search for Happiness begins presumptuously with Hector’s loving but equally routine-oriented girlfriend Clara, Rosamund Pike, cinching up his tie for his cushy psychiatry job. Brandishing the metaphorical noose, he’s ready to hear the suburban sob stories of his well-to-do clients. It’s ironic because his position is one of a guide out of the forest of psychological duress and yet he has a bushel of his own issues, GET IT?!

His client’s increasingly “first world problems” drive him increasingly nutty, until during one fated session, Hector bursts. He berates a crestfallen housewife, painting her sunburnt suburban lifestyle for the city dwellers paradise he believes it to be. You have no idea what pain is, he shouts. Happiness comes from within, he bombards. So why is he so goddamn empty?

Reeling from the monotony of life and unsure of his clinical effectiveness, Hector seeks to discover what exactly it is that everyone else has that he doesn’t, so installs a reversible hat on his shag of thinning ginger hair and purchases a one-way, business class ticket to China to uncover the recipe for “happiness”. Onboard, Hector acquaints himself Edward, played by Stellan Skarsgård, a filthy rich businessman who seems to have his own little secret to happiness who takes the unassuming Hector under his wing as the first of many “spiritual guides”. And so begins Hector’s titular search that’ll take him onward to a shanty village in Africa and the left coast of America before plopping him right back in London he came from.

The biggest ball in Hector’s court is star Simon Pegg, without whom the picture would be nothing shy of utter failure. With Pegg’s bumbling magnetism giving a knee up to the whole shebang, we at least have a hapless character that we don’t mind rooting for, even if the larger picture carrying him is clumsy and miles from groundbreaking.

Known for his wry, farcically humor, Pegg tries on a more somber cloth here and it isn’t necessarily ill-fitting. In fact, much of the power of the Cornetto Trilogy (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World’s End) came from the earnest emotionality of the Pegg-Frost dynamic. So while Pegg doesn’t suffer under the weight of a more dramatic script, he does seem a bit naked without an arsenal of comic beats.

Some have gone to the lengths of throwing the label “racist” at Hector and his titular search but it’s one I don’t believe fits. Racially insensitive, sure. Poor diversity casting, absolutely. Racist? not really. Sure, everyone of importance whom Hector encounters around the world happens to be white – the exception being his black warlord captors and the Asian prostitute he nearly falls for. And while such might contribute to certain worldview stereotypes, it suits a picture which genuinely attempts to take nationality into account. If it’s racist to depict foreign cultures as foreign then sure, Hector might fit the buck. As it stands, it’s just a little white-washed.

Because in the end, a perceived culture of racism doesn’t really have much bearing on the overall quality of the film. What really takes Hector and Pegg down a peg is it’s complete lack of anything new to say. It’s a film about accepting your lot in life, about celebrating the routine rather than raging against it. It’s a photocopy of a film from just last year. It’s a film about being, well, ordinary. So in the end, who can really be all that surprised that a film about how being ordinary is ok is only ordinary.

C-

Follow Silver Screen Riot on Facebook
Follow Silver Screen Riot on Twitter