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

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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

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A Flawless, Expert, Foolproof Ranking of David Fincher’s Films

September 29, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Lists Tagged Alien 3, David Fincher, Fight Club, Lists, Panic Room, Ranking, Seven, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Game, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Social Network, Zodiac

Seeing that Gone Girl screens here in Seattle tonight, I’ve taken it upon myself to go through and rank the films of auteur filmmaker David Fincher. Fincher is simply one of our generation’s greatest filmmakers, offering dark, twisted and thrilling dramas riddled with psychological horror and saddled with a tone so black, it’d make a crow look pale. He’s got a visionary’s eye, a penchant for working with great actors (including a close working relationship with Brad Pitt) and a knack for technical perfection, contributing some truly amazing films to the last two centuries of film cannon. Counting down his works in anticipation of the public release of Gone Girl, these are Fincher’s films ranked for your convenience. Read More

Weekly Review 56: SESSION, IT, SANGRE, MANHUNTER, PONTYPOOL, SLACKER, BORGMAN

September 28, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Weekly Review Tagged Borgman, It, Manhunter, Pontypool, Santa Sangre, Session 9, Slacker, Weekly Review

Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve gotten through all of Survivor on Hulu or I just have had more time on my hands lately but once again, I have a huge slate of movies for this batch of Weekly Review. Horror flicks from four decades made an appearance; some of which were great, some exhaustively terrible. In theaters, I caught Kill the Messenger starring Jeremy Renner which will be posted new week. So with seven films on the docket, it’s time for the hebdomadal Weekly Review.

SESSION 9 (2001)

Inventive, eerie and well paced psychological horror outing has more in common with The Shining than it knows, Session 9 spooks. Gordon (Peter Mullan) leads an asbestos abatement crew who’ve taken on the massive job of cleaning up an enormous abandoned mental facility. In a matter of days, the crew shows signs of wear with each undergoing their own form of mental break to various degrees. With only a paltry budget at his disposal, director Brad Anderson (who would go on to make The Machinist) milks the natural spookiness of the set’s locale, the true-to-life Danvers State Mental Hospital in Massachusetts, making Session 9 an exercise in making the most of what you’ve got. Considered a cult film, this frightfest is likely to leave you jittery and actually satisfied with the reasonable conclusion it arrives at. (B+)

IT (1990)

I had no idea that It was a made for T.V. movie until it was too late and I had already rented it at my local video store. Lo and beyond, It sucked. Goreless, indescribably long (three hours and 15 brutal minutes) and populated by stretches of terrible, terrible!, Little House on the Praire score, It fails to ever cross the line into being actually scary or a distinctive take on Steven King‘s frightful tome. With adult actors who are amazingly worse than their child actor counterparts – Tim Curry is fine as Pennywise the Clown, but hardly memorable – and a villain who’s overexposed to the point of being entirely ineffectual, It has utterly no oomph. The dialogue is aggressively cut rate – the apparent product of a discount script from an amateur screenwriter – but it’s astounding how poorly the hackneyed lines are performed. Worst of all, the pitiable direction is a wash, with absolutely nothing visually interesting going on…ever. It is almost to the extent of being without one redeeming aspect. In essence, the ponytail/mole combo on actor Richard Thomas (As the World Turns, The Million Dollar Kid) is a pretty spot on representation of the movie as a whole. (F)

SANTA SANGRE (1989)

As experimental and organic as a Werner Herzog film, Alejandro Jodorowsky‘s Mexican-Italian experimental horror thriller Santa Sangre explores themes of mental illness, circus politics and familial chaos. Deemed too immature, Fenix, the young lad dubbed the “Boy Magician”, lives in a despotic circus. His father is a womanizing brute, his mother a jealous, wrathful woman. When their elephant bleeds out its snout until it dies, Fenix’s father carves a massive phoenix tattoo into his chest because he was caught crying. Because that’s what makes men men: chest phoenix tattoos. What follows enters Psycho territory; the grim story of a man who becomes the hands of his mother, who’s forced to do battle with himself and his evil urges. Dark, unpredictable and utterly weird, Jodorowsky’s cult hit is a queer parade of violence and sex. It’s repulsive and sexual, often in the same scene. It’s a under-worldly nightmare that matches dark humor with brutal imagery and a cast of oddly hypnotizing characters. (A-)

MANHUNTER (1988)

The first film to feature pop culture icon Hannibal Lecter (here called Dr. Lecktor), Michael Mann‘s Manhunter (which shoulda been called Mannhunter) is very 80s and very inferior to the award winning installation, Silence of the Lambs, that came on its heels a decade later. Brian Cox plays Lecktor but only has one or two scenes in the entire movie. Instead the focus is on Will Graham (played half-heartedly by CSI‘s William Petersen) and is a direct adaptation of Thomas Harris‘ “Red Dragon”. Later adapted by Brett Ratner with Edward Norton, Ralph Fiennes, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Anthony Hopkins as Lecter, Manhunter can’t get outside of the shadow that is Silence of the Lambs. Plus, the almost total lack of Lecter leaves very few interesting characters who aren’t ever enough to keep us glued to the screen. Manhunter is a very sparse procedural, occupied by mediocre performances and a plot that I was already familiar with. Without my contextual knowledge, my experience with it may have been better but I cannot divorce the two in earnest. Amazingly enough, I prefer Ratner’s version to Mann’s (didn’t think that would ever be the case but I have to admit the truth. (C-)

PONTYPOOL (2008)

Pontypool is it’s own breed of horror movie. Rather than witness the violence first hand, we’re on the outskirts of the horror, listening in to the world breaking down from miles away. It’s a one location infection movie that puts us in the head place of the protagonists as they slowly, systematically piece together what exactly is happening outside their radio station doors. Stephen McHattie is Grant Mazzy, a controversial disc jockey who’s just relocated to the small rural town of Pontypool, which just so happens to be the victim of a bizarre infection spreading like wildfire through the county’s populace. Armed with a mic, a Marianna-deep baritone and sparse information from on-site reporter Ken Loney, Mazzy attempts to keep his cool while keeping the citizens informed of the outbreak. Using information depravation and long stretches of call-in auditory bits and pieces to ratchet up the tension, director Bruce McDonald uses psychological tactics on his audience brilliantly. The last act was a touch jumbled for me but the willingness to go somewhere completely new rather than go down a familiar route is to be admired. (B-)

SLACKER (1991)

Richard Linklater laid the foundation for all that would follow with wildly experimental stoner philosophy a la Slacker. As ADHD as the onslaught of characters running their mouth for their 15 seconds of fame, Slacker skips from one character to the next, allowing them to throw down some wild theory or perspective on life and then move onto the next. It’s almost anthological but the way that Linklater drifts his camera from one interaction to the other gives it a sense of place and continuity that a different approach wouldn’t have. Though he’d go on to make Waking Life which also allows characters to wax on the meaning of this or that, Slacker is a more compelling whole, a conscious journey through a cultural ethos, roaring with a sense of time and place. Although it gets a little long in the tooth towards the end – I wish he had shaved a good twenty minutes from the tail section – Slacker is a ferociously imaginative way to make a movie and, if you’re willing to turn your mind on, provides some really thoughtful (and sometimes really stonerish) reflections on life. (B)

BORGMAN (2014)

“What the hell did I just watch?” many will ask after watching Borgman, the enigmatic Dutch film nominated for the Palm d’Or at last year’s Cannes. And that’s part of the magic of it. Heads end up in concrete buckets, unregulated surgeries are never explained, characters fall under the spell of the mystical Borgman (Jan Bijvoet) while others appear to turn to hellish hounds and back. The story is simple enough and yet filled with mystery: a grizzled hermit living underground is ousted by a shotgun-wielding priest and his small band of townspeople. He takes to the street, knocking on door after door to try to find a bath. But his true intentions are far more sinister and far more veiled. Even by the end, we’re not exactly sure what Borgman and his crew’s intentions are but we know all that they’re capable of. This is part of the fun of Alex van Warmerdam‘s obscured goal; it’s not as simple as, “He was a vampire all along!” There’s something much more haunting about not getting the resolution we’ve been programed to expect. Another notch in the belt is the fact that even though it’s wildly weird and totally out there, it casts a spell that doesn’t allow you to look away. In the end, Borgman is confounding but not impenetrable, the kind of film that invites a few re-watchs and potential cult status. (B+)

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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+

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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+

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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-

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Out in Theaters: THE BOXTROLLS

September 22, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Alan Snow, Anthony Stacchi, Ben Kingsley, Elle Fanning, Graham Annable, Isaac Hempstead Wright, Jared Harris, Laika Studios, Nick Frost, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Richard Ayoade, Simon Pegg, The Boxtrolls, Toni Collette, Tracy Morgan 8 Comments

The Boxtrolls, Laika Studios‘ third outing, sees more of the fledgling studio’s highly-demanding, signature stop motion animation come to life onscreen, flush with smart, though not game changing, camerawork and charming characters aplenty. Directed by Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi with a script adapted from Alan Snow‘s “Here Be Monsters”, The Boxtrolls follows a orphaned boy growing up with in underground society of steampunk, gadget-friendly trolls, unfairly maligned by society overhead. Read More

Weekly Review 55: RASHOMON, JU-ON, SISTER'S, FIEND, ABYSS, HELLRAISER, POULTRY, SOPHIE

September 21, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Weekly Review Tagged Hellraiser, Into the Abyss, Ju-On: The Grudge, My Best Fiend, Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, Rashomon, Sophie's Choice, Weekly Review, Your Sister's Sister

This week has been a madhouse of sickness, screenings – The Boxtrolls, Tracks, A Walk Among the Tombstones, The Equalizer – and having nothing better to do than watch a bunch of movies at home. From 1950’s Akira Kurosawa to 2011 Lynn Shelton, I went on a tear of international and domestic, the old and the new cinema this week. Considering it’s still the beginnings of fall, I’ve been consuming horror movies like the sports oriented consume March Madness – though have admittedly slowed down since Kevin Smith‘s Tusk left me with harrowing nightmares. This week on the horror front though, the ones I expected to be good disappointed and vice versa. To quote The Kinks, “It’s a mixed up, muddled up shook up world“. Considering I ended up watching a lot more than I expected, let’s waste no more time and get down to business with this super duper long entry of Weekly Review.

RASHOMON (1950)

The very idea that a film’s narrative could be untrustworthy was a novelty to not only Japanese cinema in the 1950 but cinema around the world. A massively important film that brought Japanese film to the international stage, Rashomon sees Akira Kurosawa play with perspective in such a way that changed the game. Following an encounter between a bandit, a samurai and his wife, Kurosawa’s film plays with the idea of the unreliable narrator, presenting four interpretations of the same exact incident and forcing us to parse out a given character’s shaded motivations from the truth of their testimony. Considered a masterpiece, Rashomon, aided by Kazuo Miyagawa‘s groundbreaking and moody cinematography, holds up today for its inventive take on what makes a story believable in the first place and is certainly a much watch for fans of foreign cinema. (A-)

JU-ON: THE GRUDGE (2002)

Not very well acted or particularly scary, Ju-On: The Grudge fails to develop one single yarn worthy of interest. Instead franchise creator Takashi Shimizu essentially repeats the same gimmick over and over again with new victims in different locales. This wouldn’t be so egregiously lame if there weren’t seven additionally films in the series, all presumed scattershot and directionless. Broken down into six connected but disparate parts, Ju-On sees a bluish-white-tinged Japanese boy meow people to death and it just didn’t work for me at all. What evidently was horrifying for Japanese audiences and some horror fanboys failed to stir the slightest bit of intrigue or tension. Even the best scene – in which a spooky-faced girl awkwardly descends a staircase – is aped from an Exorcist deleted scene. (D)

YOUR SISTER’S SISTER (2011)

A definitively mumblecore effort from Seattle director Lynn Shelton, Your Sister’s Sister is a restrained, emotionally honest depiction of loss and love and the intersection between the two. Starring Mark Duplass, Emily Blunt and Rosemarie DeWitt, Shelton’s tale sees a man struggling to get over his brother’s death attempt to take a respite from society but ends up crossing paths with an unexpected relation… and maybe impregnating her. Funny, sensitive and well acted, Your Sister’s Sister likely represents the best of Shelton’s work and is certainly worth a watch for anyone looking for something light but not fluffy. Now available on Netflix. (B-)

MY BEST FIEND (1999)

Enough to convince me that were Kinski not a famous actor, he might have made quite a dictator, My Best Fiend attempts to get to the heart of the defunct relationship between German filmmaker Werner Herzog and his muse, actor Klaus Kinski. Filled with behind the scenes battles and Herzog poetically musing on events past, My Best Fiend seeks to answer how the two could have ever worked a day together, much less make five incredible films over the span of decades. I’d already been clued into the vanity and insanity that Kinski brought to set with him but watching the man in action is like having a front row seat to an atom bomb exploding. Hubristic, calculated and ultimately genius, Klaus Kinski is just one of those guys that comes around once in a lifetime and we’re lucky the madman stayed in front of the camera long enough to wrap a production…or 100. (B+)

INTO THE ABYSS (2011)

A show-stopping documentary from Werner Herzog, Into the Abyss takes a pensive look at capital punishment in Texas. By interviewing both the victims, the perpetrators and the families of both, Herzog’s pointed questions carry the expected brainwracking sensitivity that he brings to each of his endeavors. Rather than try to find a solution to the problem, Herzog characteristically tries to piece together the emotional impact of it all. From the executor to the witnesses and to the executed themselves, he helps us understand the mélange of messy thoughts running through their minds. It likely won’t change your stance on the death penalty – that’s not the point – because Herzog gives equal credence to both sides, even while making his own opposing views quite clear. A powerful, hypnotic documentary that’s likely to inspire a few tears. (A)

HELLRAISER (1987)

I had no idea how little the series iconic Pinhead would play into this gory horror affair as Hellraiser is a more much more interested in the idea of a twisted love triangle and human resurrection than it is with being a slasher of any sort. Clive Barker‘s 1987 British horror flick may have spawned a slew of lesser quality sequels and spinoffs but his original film – the only one which he directed – is actually quite a lot of fun. The practical effects are delightfully gooey and the love torn asunder plot line is marinated in equal amounts of Stockholm Syndrome and femme fatality. As a dated, creepy, yucky schlockfest, Hellraiser succeeds tremendously. (B-)

POULTRYGEIST: NIGHT OF THE CHICKEN DEAD (2006)

Carelessly racist, deplorably insensitive, greviously disgusting, obnoxiously homophobic, massively misogynistic, aggressively stupid and poorly sung to boot, Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead certainly accomplishes its goal of trying its hardest to be a bad movie. The totally childish sense of humor is actually fitfully funny but the juvenile charm wears off quickly, only to return in later portions where the gore is upped past 11 and the practical effects – though unconvincing – are enough to cull some laughs. Early on protagonist Arbie jokingly states, “My mom’s a retard and my dad’s blind”, which seems to kind of sum up the movie as an entirety. Attempting to skewer the genre in some kind of sadist, overblown way, Poultrygeist ends up the satirical equivalent of bukakke. (D+)

SOPHIE’S CHOICE (1982)

Outstanding performances from Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline make Sophie’s Choice an actor’s delight. Less admirable is the long-winded, onion-esque aspect of the two hour and thirty minute Holocaust opus. It’s a film in bad need of a narrative trim and even though the piece relies on our interaction and connection with the characters more than anything, such a pricetag of time never really seems called for or necessary. That being the case, the character work is still absolutely delightful – if you could throw such a cheery adjective as such a dreary film. Streep throws down one of her finest performances as a Polish Holocaust survivor, one that would go on to define the greatness she consistently brought with her to projects. From the perfect candor of her accent to the emotionality welling behind her fragile eyes, Streep is Sophie. Amazingly enough, co-star Kevin Kline almost threatens to overpower her when they share scenes together. While Streep took home the Oscar, Kline wasn’t even nominated – though he went on to win 6 years later for his (dramatically inferior) work in A Fish Called Wanda. (B+)

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Out in Theaters: A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES

September 17, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged A Walk Among the Tombstones, Brian 'Astro' Bradley, Dan Stevens, Lawerence Block, Liam Neeson, Mihai Malaimare Jr, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Scott Frank

Scott Frank‘s slick, sky-is-falling neo-noir may be sold as the next installment in the “Liam Neeson kicks ass and takes names” genre but it’s as far from Taken as it is from The Grey. Dedicated to telling an uneasy tale of grisly murder and off-the-record justice, A Walk Among the Tombstones is the perfect vehicle for Neeson’s defining intensity. Adapted from one of Lawrence Block’s many new-age dick novels, Tombstones is plump with a decadent sense of malevolence often missed in films of its ilk. At times, Frank’s dedication to being so relentlessly dark ends up wounding the film, but irregardless, you gotta respect his all-or-nothing commitment to such a bleak, uncompromised vision. Like New York City before Giuliani cleaned up the streets, this gumshoe yarn is as nasty as stepping on a dirty needle.

Neeson is Matt Scudder, an alcoholic gunman who’s worked as a private detective ever since an incident made him leave the police force eight years back. When an AA acquaintance asks his assistance in a family matter, Matt becomes wrapped up in a ghastly murder case that can’t be brought to the cops. His employer is Kenny Kristo (Dan Stevens) an independently wealthy man (read: drug smuggler) whose wife was kidnapped and ransomed. But even after Kristo paid the hefty bounty, his wife was sent home in pieces, packed like the very drugs he dealt. Even without a ton to work with, Stevens broods through his scenes sporting a spindly black caterpillar of a mustache, his intensity burning through his baby blues like rising fires.

Before you can say “Boo”, Matt has hit the ground running, unearthing a series of clues that trace the murders back to associates of the DEA. Considering the film is – for some reason – set in the dwindling 1990s with misplaced Y2K fears running rampant and technological ability the exception rather than the rule, cell phones are sparse and clue huntin’ involves actually going to the stacks. Plopped in a rain-pounded library, Matt meets TJ (Brian ‘Astro’ Bradley), a street smart and techno whizz homeless kid with sickle cell anemia. Teamed up little Short Round and Doctor Jones, they race towards finding the devilish duo behind these macabre homicides.

This aforementioned unorthodox partnership between Matt and TJ could easily have been a massive problem throughough, as any adult-teenager movie relationship tends to be, but it actually works by and large. Having a competent but vulnerable youngin under his wing gives Neeson an opportunity to flex some less predatory and more protective muscles. Surely, the sickle cell anemia aspect is a strangely cheap ploy for tension in a movie already thick with it but giving Neeson’s Matt a character to watch over ups his vigilant instincts to silverback gorilla levels. Plus it makes for some great one-liners.

An unexpected bonus of the film is Mihai Malaimare Jr.’s dreary, deferential cinematography which offers a variety of interesting angles and lighting choices that harken back to the action films of the 60s and 70s. The opening credits scene as well as a POV shot down the barrel of a 9mm bring particularly noteworthy visual flair to the picture, further assisting to distinguish it as noir rather than a simple humdrum, action movie. There’s poignancy to Malaimare’s shots that won’t necessarily be worked out the first time through. But even while Malaimare and Neeson largely succeed, there are elements to this lurid tale that turn towards the cartoonish.

The villains’ – both of whom are without an ounce of humanity – morbid fascination with crudely deconstructing the female body exposes the sickly nature of their violent crimes but threatens to almost push the envelope too far. But then again, we live in a world that’s already seen Se7en and, more recently, Tusk so “too far” seems almost obsolete in this day and age. Nonetheless, Frank’s taste for bloodshed may leave some viewers wishing for less.

When darkness devours all, we’re left not being able to relate, but maybe that’s the point of a film that warns that “people are afraid of all the wrong things.” On the surface, it’s a winking Y2K tech joke but I’d like to believe there’s something beneath the surface that’s only vaguely hinted at. Something that pertains to how the embodiment of evil may be what we fear most when instead it should be how we respond to evil or, even more simple, how we respond to any kind of strife. Giving into a need for bloodthirsty revenge or ill-plated justice is what we should fear most, not the “evil” itself. It’s just a theory but I welcome a film that gives the opportunity for filmgoers to make their own meaning of things.

In opposition to those intriguing, subtle elements at play, a late stage shootout amongst, you guessed it, tombstones plays off as far too heavy-handed, showcasing a strong directorial decision that doesn’t entirely work out. As bullets tear the night sky apart, Frank intersplices a 12 step AA moral message amongst freeze-framed images of lives lost and chaos asunder. It’s probably the easiest scene to point to that tries at something almost novel and falls on its nose. I can’t however deny my appreciation for Frank making that nonconventional choice, even though it, as I mentioned, doesn’t fully pan out. While not a total representation of the picture as a whole, the hit-and-miss aspect of doing something great and following it up by tripping over the shoelaces does neatly define the endeavor as a whole.

But from the categorically necessary duster to that retro first scene goatee, this is Neeson’s show. Instead of just another paint-by-numbers actioner where Neeson’s shoots, solves and barks, Tombstones flushes out some actual inner demons, allowing Neeson to balance his proven dramatic chops with his newfound action star persona. He’s so much more than a loaded gun and a bottle of whiskey, part and parcel of what makes this film ideal for a bushel of sequels if they approach it from the right angle.

With easy humor courtesy of Neeson’s growled quips, well-directed drizzly dramatics and a thick air of hardboiled, gloomy atmospherics, A Walk Among The Tombstones brings to life the aged marvel of a good noir. It’s not always perfect and may run a touch too long but it works heartily as a well-greased, appropriately artful affair. And for those expecting another Taken, don’t be scared off. This is miles better than Taken 3.

B

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