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Weekly Review 44: CHEAP, ESCAPE, GATTACA, BARTON, DRUG, JESUS

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

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I’ve realized that for every movie I cross off my To Watch list, I add three more. The sad reality: I’ll never watch all the movies. Nevertheless, I can try. In theaters this week, I caught Oculus and Dom Hemingway but skipped screenings of Heaven is for Real, Neighbors and Draft Day. As is, I’ll still have another chance to see Neighbors before it hits theaters and although it’s getting fairly high praise, I’m still not sold that it’ll be anything better than slightly entertaining. At home, I had a chance to hack through a few more films that I’ve had sitting on my list, including the earlier Fast and Furious movies (I’ve finally seen them all now) and another viewing of the joyous 12 Years a Slave.

You won’t find those included here though as there’s really nothing to say about them other than they exist. 2 Fast 2 Furious isn’t as embarrassing as the name suggests, Tokyo Drift is an absolute nightmare and the near “here we go again” Fast and Furious come noticeably shy of the seduction of the last few installments. Somehow, the Rock really changes the dynamic for the best (didn’t ever expect to say that one.) Anyways, onward to some films to discuss in more detail.

DRUG WAR (2012)

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A certifiable thrill ride through the Hong-Kong underworld, this tasty piece of Chinese cinema lines up just the right amount of standoffs, fireworks and nail-biting tension and snuffs it up clean. Drug War follows a captured meth manufacturer who flips sides and helps the police take down the top dogs of his former organization over a period of 24-hours. Though Chinese film hardly makes much of a splash overseas (financially or culturally), this is one of the finest examples of Chinese filmmaking from the past 20 years. It’s China via Tarantino Bay, a one-way trip from Hong Kong to LA. Irresistibly balls-to-the-walls, Drug War charges 100 miles an hour until the brooding, bruising final moment.  

B+

BARTON FINK (1991)

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One of the more contained Coen Bros films, Barton Fink explores the creative process while confronting Judaism, New York angst and a dastardly murder. Far be it for anyone to call one of John Turturro‘s roles “normal” but this is probably the closet we get to having him playing a straight character. Cranked up on his own instinctual discontent and self-loathing ways, he’s a vessel for the Coen bros to voice their own insecurities. Hollywood’s a bitch, their film screams. It’s where creativity comes to die. Thankfully, the Coen Bros, unlike Fink, don’t bend over and take the proverbial sacking of the studio system. It’s films like this, even though it’s not their greatest work, that make us thankful that these sardonic siblings exist.

B

CHEAP THRILLS (2014)

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Fear Factor left behind the rule book in E.L. Katz‘s ultra-violent parody on American economic desperation that mixes murky morality with a heavy twist of sadism. Pat Healy puts in a monstrous performance as the film’s lead, a man on his last financial leg who runs into old buddy Vince the same night he meets a man with deep pockets set to change his life… if he’s willing to go the distance. Unlike anything else, Cheap Thrills is an unrelenting descent into the depths of how low humanity will go for money. Whether it involves fisticuffs, B&E, sex, or even auto-cannibalism, Katz’s film asks, “What is your limit?” Anchored by rock solid performances all around and a general sense of happily suspended disbelief, Cheap Thrills is over-the-top alright but in the very best of ways.

A-

ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW (2013)

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A subversive project shot guerrilla-style in the manicured “paradise” of Disneyland tries to spin a nightmare out of regulated happiness, but ends up nightmarish for all the wrong reasons. From the drooping special effects to the unbearably written and acted characters – lead by an incessantly nagging wife/mother and her drunken hubbie with rapey eyes for a pair of Parisian tweens – there’s so much to turn you off that it’s hard not to turn the movie off itself. The fact that it all adds up to pretty much nothing doesn’t help either. A failed experiment that hardly justifies the risk.

D

JESUS CAMP (2006)

 

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Captivating and horrifying in equal measure, Jesus Camp is the epitome of Christianity gone wrong. Not to bring my views on religion into the mix, but the situations depicted in this documentary are exactly the reason why any kind of full blown commitment to an ideal can be absolutely terrifying. Hearing children talk about “the enemy” (Muslims) or crying out in tongues is surely provocative footage and works like a crowbar to unsettle an audience, even if the edit is a little too much of a one-sided portrayal to really gleam much other than shock and awe. Like the Westboro Baptists, surely this sect is the exception rather than the rule. It’s still a scary reality and one that deserved to be put under the microscope for one hot minute. In the end, it’s hard to walk away from this not thinking, “Fuck Becky Fisher. Fuck Fred Phelps. Fuck Jim Jones.” The fact that the documentary lead to the closure of this particular brainwashing camp though is more than enough to legitimize its existence as a potent exposé with surprising real-world application.

B-

GATTACA (1997)

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Gattaca may be dated but the racial analogies are still as pertinent and timely as ever. Ethan Hawke plays a natural born child in an age of gene manipulation that churns out genetically superior children. Since the technology exists to shape a fetus into their most perfect possible self, those born of natural causes are considered lesser and forced to take on the underling roles in society. Its thinly veiled take on eugenics and racial inequality may be too on-the-nose but it’s an incredibly thoughtful and risky sci-fi film, especially considering it was released the same year that Starship Troopers and Batman & Robin were trolling the box office. Add to that provocative performances from Hawke and Uma Thurman and a wonderful turn from Jude Law and you have a keeper. Minus points to House Gattaca though for brazen use of shameful voiceover. New Zealand director Andrew Niccol has gone to make such smut as The Host and In Time, making this the sure pinnacle of his creative spirit. It’s just a shame that after such a victory, he would pump out work that makes us question whether he himself is an “in-valid” after all.

B

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Talking With Nick Frost of CUBAN FURY

by Posted in Interviews Tagged , , , , , ,

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You might know him as the schlubby, stoner, best friend burnout from Shaun of the Dead or the hoodwinked, adolescent dunce of a cop in Hot Fuzz but you don’t know the real Nick Frost. Sensitive, kind and sharp as a katana, Nick dreamed up an unlikely passion project in Cuban Fury, a workplace/sports comedy orbiting around the world of salsa dancing. As the film’s hero and salsa dancing extraordinaire, Nick may not be the first person you’d think of with a name like Cuban Fury but, according to him, that’s the point. It’s all about going against expectations. After all, there’s something inherently funny about watching a man of his stature throw his body around like a 120 pound Latina woman.

 

Nick and I sat down to discuss the process of making the film, working with best friends Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg, what they might all do next, cameos, writing, Ant-Man, and the big Fox pilot he’s filming this month.

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The press notes claim that the roots of the film came from a drunken email you wrote pitching the idea of you doing a dancing movie. But when did that idea come to you and made you think it would make a great movie?


Nick Frost: I think I had that idea about three years ago, but it could have been five fucking years. I think after doing Shaun of the Dead and then Hot Fuzz and Paul, the genre specific, fanboy films, which I’m very proud of and that is me, I always kinda wanted to do a dance film where I was a dancer. If you want to do something completely different and out of left field of you as a performer, doing a dance film is it for me. So I harbored that idea and my gut instinct was that it was a good idea. Because it was a good idea, every time that it knocked on my consciousness, I would say, “Fuck off” cuz it’s a good idea. I’d drive it away with a pitchfork or a flaming torch back into my subconscious. I got back from a party at like 2am and sat there and was a bit belligerent  and was like, “I’m gonna do it,” and just pitched. I wrote what I imagined the film would be in a big long email and pressed send. I woke up the next day and didn’t remember but had this weird unease that one might have if you’d french-kissed an aunt. “What have I done?” So I put my computer up and saw a message in my inbox, essentially saying, “This is a great idea. Let’s have a meeting.”

So you came up with the idea but you did not want to write the screenplay. Why was that?

NF: I couldn’t be bothered, to be honest. The thing about writing a screenplay is that you are taken out of circulation in terms of acting. Paul took so long to write. It was bitty and piece-mealy. As much as I did like writing Paul, and I’ve written two since, I found my love for it again but the thought of sitting in a room on my own writing a screenplay held noi joy for me at all. So we found John Brown who wrote the thing and we sat down and I gave him a little bible of what the story should be and my character and potential other characters and that was it. John just went and did it, he was amazing. I don’t want to overestimate my part in that, it was not much at all. John went off and delivered a great first draft and we’d give it notes or not, because it was so nice. I’m not sure I could have been like this as a younger person but if you’re getting people like John Brown in, you let him write it. You don’t fiddle with it. He’s a craftsman, a skilled writer. You have to trust these people or shut up and write it yourself.

Do you see yourself writing another screenplay in the future sometime soon or are you kind of turned off from the writing process?


NF: I just finished. I guess you never really “finish” but I’ve finished the first draft about a thing called Cockney Lump, which is about a British wrestler being induced into the hall of fame.



Are you gonna play the part?

NF: Yeah. So that’s something I’ve been working on with Studio Canal for a year or so now. There’s a nice script now. I was in Boston over Thanksgiving this year and last year and I was shooting a film with Vince Vaughn and James Marsden and I have eight days off from shooting. I don’t know anyone in Boston. I’m in a hotel like this with a bar downstairs. What I didn’t want to be doing is everyday at lunchtime going out for something to eat and a drink. What kind of life is that? You’ve got eight days off in Boston. I set up alarm at 6am and I got up and wrote for ten hours every day. I just sat there and wrote. It woke up in me the love of doing that. Since that point, I’ve kind of finished a children’s book that I was doing and I’ve written a short film that I’m gonna direct later on in the year. Just kind of got it going again.

This being a dance movie of sorts, obviously you had to cut some dope moves on the rug. How much dance rehearsal did that demand of you? I’m gonna go ahead and assume you didn’t pull the front flip off the car?

NF: I did not pull the front flip, but that’s not technically dancing. I would say that 98% of all the dancing in the film is me. I trained for six or seven hours a day for seven months before we shot a roll of film.

So are you really comfortable as a salsa dancer now?

NF: We shot that before World’s End to be honest. I had a week between wrapping that and starting World’s End and I’ve done bits and pieces here and there too. If you’re doing it seven hours a day everyday, you’re an expert for that point. But it’s like language, the longer you don’t use it, the rustier you get at it. In terms of specifics, I’m kind of pretty bad at this point. But the fiery heart of beating Latino culture is kind of there for every.

It’s just the technical aspects that fade away.

NF: Yeah, I think I’d be better than most but I couldn’t do the dances I was doing.

So you’re not gonna go do Dancing with the Stars next?

NF: I wouldn’t want to to be honest.

I wouldn’t want to see you there.

NF: On a Saturday night my mother-in-law and father-in-law will come over and my baby loves it and the whole family will just sit there and eat a curry and watch Dancing with the Stars. I think it would spoil if it had my fat, horrible fucking face gunning over an American smooth.

Talking about The World’s End, that’s the last film that you’re doing in the Cornetto trilogy with Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright. I know that you guys had this idea forever of doing the three satire, action, genre movies and now that you’ve finished that out, I hate the idea of you not collaborating again. I’m sure that you do as well since you guys are such a fantastic team. Have you tossed around ideas of when you’re gonna work together next and what it might be on?

NF: Yes, we had a great idea on the plane, as we often do. Flying from Wellington to somewhere else or Sydney to here. I’m not gonna tell you what it is, but it’s a good idea. The fact is, Simon has Mission Impossible and he’s gonna do that this year. Edgar is doing Ant-Man. I’m doing a Fox pilot with Justin Long. If that gets picked up, I’ll be out of the game for a little bit. We could of made a decision just to make a film a year that go down in terms of quality because you’re just pumping shit out because you need to feed an audience’s expectations or you can sit on an idea for four years. If we only make a film every five or six years but it’s something that people really dig, I think that’s probably better than people going off you because you do too much.

Would the next thing that you guys work together on be a sort of thematic sequel to this or would it be a whole new direction?

NF: I think it’ll be completely different.

I’m so curious. I would have to see what you guys do next. Speaking of Simon, you guys have this great onscreen chemistry but in real life, you’re also dear friends.

NF: (Shows tattoo with SP (for Simon Pegg) and EW (Edgar Wright).

Well that is just fantastic. Anytime when you’re doing a movie, you other one cameos. Is that an unspoken agreement or is that a pact. Like, “If I’m in the movie, Simon is showing up.”



NF: This just seemed kinda right for it. It took us a while to shoot that you know because we did a bunch of different versions of it. There was a version where he slowed down and said to me, “What are you doing here? Who are all these people?” And you could see the crew. I think in the edit we looked at it so many different way and the best way was the fact that he quickly drifts through frame.

It seems like you’ve got a lot on your platter coming up. What are you most excited for?

NF: Well working with Justin Long. I’ve been a fan of his and we’ve known each other for a bit. I got sent this pilot script and it was great. This is something completely different for me. I’ve never done anything like this before.

So what’s the character?

NF: His name is Robert and he’s a high-functioning alcoholic who happens to be a powerful lawyer.

Lovely.

NF: He does something quite bad and is assigned a sober companion for 90 days.

Played by Justin Long?

NF: Yeah. And this is the story.

So are you still in the development stage?



NF: Well we’re shooting the pilot at the end of the month. It’s part of the pilot season machine and then we’ll find out in May if it gets picked up.

I’m assuming that that’s also more on the comedic side?

NF: Yes it is, absolutely but when the main character is a struggling alcoholic, you can’t ignore the fact that that destroys life and affects people around him. That will be given the screen time it deserves and not just do a wacky, balls-to-the-wall “here comes the drunk guy again.” I think it’ll work if both are.

Will you be playing a Brit?

NF: Oh yeah, I’m English.

Yeah, I’ve never seen you do an American accent.

NF: “Hey man, you want a hamburger” (in an “American” accent).

It just wouldn’t feel right.

NF: There are a million America actors if you want to give it to an American actor. This is probably a limitation in me as a performer but I kind of have that weird belligerent streak of “I’m an English actor!” I think if something is set now, there’s no reason in the world why they couldn’t be English. I get if it was set in 1860 but it’s now.

Have you ever thought about going straight drama, for example Chris O’Dowd, who you co-starred with in this, just did Calvary which was very dark and grim.

NF: Absolutely. I never was trained as a comedian. I’m not a comedian, I’m just someone who has always been a funny dick and now I just get to do that as a job. In terms of people and human beings, you can be both and that’s where a lot of truth is. The crossroads between tragedy and comedy. I call it putting the fun back into funeral. A lot of the funniest times I’ve had in my life are at funerals and after funerals. One minute, you’re crying because your grandmother has died and the next minute, a group of relatives are drinking Jamesons and howling at her memory. That’s real and that’s a really real place to be.

Obviously your collaborator who you’ve worked with quite a bit, Edgar is going off to Ant-Man. There was some talks that Simon might be in a leading role there. Did they ever approach the two of you?

NF: No, it was all bullshit. We knew that it was just Edgar’s thing. When we were doing press tours for The World’s End, the joke that the three of us would share is whenever someone would ask Edgar about Ant-Man, I would take the question. “I’ll take this Edgar. I’m really pleased to be playing Hank Pym.” It would really make him laugh. But it’s Edgar’s project really. Scott Pilgrim wasn’t a lesser film because me and Simon weren’t the vegan police.

Maybe it was…

NF: That film was fantastic without us in it and the same with Ant-Man, it’ll be fantastic without us in it.

Would you do maybe a high-budget, tentpole, Marvel-type situation? Could you ever see that in your future?

NF: Who would that be, if I’m just being pragmatic about it.

Well maybe not necessarily in the starring role.

NF: Well yeah, absolutely and I would love to do it. It would be a lot of fun. But in terms of playing a lead in something like that, who would it be? The Rhino?

Paul Giamatti’s already got that one.

NF: I think I need to be aware of my limitations as a human being and Hollywood’s expectation of what they’re willing to spend $150 dollars on.

 

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Out in Theaters: OCULUS

by Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged , , , , , , , , 17 Comments

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My girlfriend is afraid of mirrors once it’s dark. She’ll slink uneasily past them at night or throw a switch to blanket them in florescent light. When she’s staying in new places, she’ll turn foreign mirrors towards the wall before sleeping so they don’t dare reflect back under cover of dark. Early years spent reciting “Bloody Mary” have taken their toll.

Like a malevolent Cinderella story, once the clock strikes sundown, mirrors do take on an evil – or at least eerie – quality. In the absence of light, reflections don’t read true. Cast in shadow and peppered with hazy contortions, fear lives in not being able to see things clearly. It’s the absence of yourself – the shadowed dimples and half-worn portrait – in the mirror’s reflection that’s unsettling; the distortion of what ought be.

Years of horror shlock that made us shout, “Don’t close that mirror, there’s someone behind you!” – one of the oldest tricks in the book – have spoiled the mirror reveal. There’s always something that wasn’t there. Then it’s gone. We’ve been equally worn down on mirrored reflections changing their pantomime, refusing to mimic its subject and subsequently frightening them into a Hollywood favorite; the mouth-covering gasp. It’s old. Mirrors, in their slim margin of possibility, have been tilled into a desert of scares, all but relegated to the corner of slipshod horror no-no’s. Oculus sets to right the course.

Mousey children reciting folklore hymns have made the mirror the perfect vestige to express a cultural fear of the unknown and it’s this unknown that Oculus takes advantage of. While Obsidian mirrors date back to 6000 BC (Dragonstone mirrors? How could that not be creepy?), the mirror in question here looks oaken – strong, sturdy, old wood. It’s stained dark and carved with decadent inlay, curving and twisting like the horns of a demon. At first glance, it perfectly fits the part of haunted mirror, however absurd such a MacGuffin might be.

Though Oculus presents the fantasy of haunted mirrors as fact, it gives the audience credit in doubting said facts. Tim Russell (Brenton Thwaites) is the vessel for such doubt. After a traumatic event early in his and sister’s Kaylie’s (Karen Gillan) childhood, Tim is sent to a mental hospital to unlearn the “facts” that he had convinced himself of – that a haunted mirror possessed his father into killing his mother.

The stooges at the mental lockup have indoctrinated him otherwise (is there anything less trustworthy than a horror movie psychologist?) and his newfound predilection towards disbelief becomes the film’s first albatross. Kaylie sets out to show Tim that he was never crazy, having recently come into possession of the mirror and dead set on them destroying it once and for all.

But like anything haunted, it’s never as easy as just taking an axe to the thing and turning it to splinters. Instead, the mirror has a will of its own. And like the one ring to rule them all, it sets out to get what it wants by a form of unspoken mind control. Rory Cochrane as the father of the young siblings is the mirror’s first mark and his descend into madness harkens to the shuddersome ambiance of the Overlook. Emulating the best of Jack Nicholson’s iconic performance and the worst of sanity-slinking Jack Torrence, Cochrane’s performance is easy to have fun with. He is unsettling wallpaper as a vessel of psychological horror and domestic abuse both with his uneasy relationship with wife Marie (Katee Sackhoff) working to up the stakes scene to scene.

A tactful script from Mike Flanaghan (pulling double duties as director) saturates the reined-in proceedings with disqueting and sordid exposition. While Gillan’s airless portrait of Kaylie leaves little room for character growth, it paints a nimble picture of a sacrosanct devotee to her unpopular convictions. “What’s happening is real.” At least someone knows what’s going on. Like the great heroines of late, she’s a woman on a mission and listening to her report her findings is one of the many joys of Flanaghan’s insoluble narrative web.

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Though Tim’s journey is more arc-y than Kaylie’s, his is underwhelmingly performed. So it’s a bit of a disappointment that the franchise’s future lay at his feet. It’s hard not to look at his situation and quiver though. It’s like a life lived practicing forced atheism only to stare God in the face. Shitty.

The best scenes in the movie are born of this somewhat novel idea of auto-voyueirsm – where the characters are watching themselves, unsure of whether they are where they think they are or if they’re trapped in the bodies that they’re looking at. It sounds confusing but Flanaghan makes it work well on screen. This crafty visual twist presents a Shrodinger’s Cat issue. Once the mirror takes hold, there’s no way to tell what’s make believe and what’s reality and that opens a lot of doors for the audience.

Flanaghan’s other great achievement is in the pacing department as he’s born a film that slides along like its riding KY Jelly roller-skates. It’s also unlikely to gross you out which can be a bit of a double-edged sword in the horror community, in that it will only slightly satisfy horror buff’s effusive need for bloodletting. Smartly, it’s always ranking the huh? over the gore.

Every once in a while a movie comes along that’s so terrifying that it slips into your dreams, taints your nightmares and has you looking cockeyed at creeks in the night. Oculus is not that film. Happy to be a well manicured vestige of frights, where dread prevails over scares, it’s pecking order rightly starts at the noggin. It’s more Psycho in nature than Scream, heralding suspense and mood building as models of import over attempts to sporadically lift you from you seat with a bump and a shout.

Oculus does for mirrors what Hitchcock did for showers. We’re not afraid of them, they’re just a little creepier now.

B

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Out in Theaters: DRAFT DAY

by Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged , , , , , , ,

 

“Draft Day”
Directed by Ivan Reitman
Starring Kevin Costner, Jennifer Garner, Chadwick Boseman, Frank Langella, Sean Combs
Sports, Drama
120 Mins
PG-13

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Every year, one sports movie comes out of nowhere to become a classic. Last year, that honor belonged to Ron Howard’s Rush. This year, that honor might belong to Draft Day.

 

Rarely do I find myself enjoying Chris Berman’s blowhard baritone. Yet, something about hearing his voice as shots of the NFL Draft at Radio City in New York fly by made my heart beat. Draft Day, a propaganda film of the most subtle kind, calls upon an inner craving for America’s greatest sport in a time of absence: football.

Kevin Costner is back to star in another sports movie, this time as Sonny Weaver Jr., the Cleveland Browns’ general manager and chief decision-maker. Cleveland hasn’t been good at football, well, seemingly ever. With a top-10 draft pick and a chance to change the franchise forever, pressure mounts for Costner and his girlfriend Jennifer Garner, the team’s Salary Cap Manager who’s pregnant with his baby and salary cap knowledge.

Shit’s hitting the fan for Costner, who must decide between three players: the ‘local legacy,’ the ‘star QB’ and the ‘hardworking heart kid.’ Things start off pretty rough: he trades away three 1st round draft picks to get the 1st overall pick. Players rage over the decision, coaches applaud, Twitter explodes and the team’s owner (Frank Langella) tells Costner his job’s on the line.

Of course, there are other problems going on here too. Costner’s not ready to be a dad as his father just passed away, his secretary’s on vacation, and he just can’t figure out what to do with that top button on his dress shirt. To non-football fans, there’s enough fluff (a ticking clock, beautiful people and a decent romance) to make it worthwhile. Don’t get me wrong though: this movie is 100% football.

Aerials of football stadiums across the nation (notably CenturyLink Field in Seattle) fly you right into the action—there’s no better way to set the stage than a team’s home stadium and screaming fans. Coaches and General Managers cuss each other out over salary cap numbers, draft picks, and young football players with two first names.

Whether it’s incredibly real football highlights of young players concussing each other at game-speed or real-life talking heads going at it (the aforementioned Chris Berman, Mel Kiper, Jon Gruden and Deion Sanders to name a few), everything looks, smells, feels, tastes and sounds real. Filmed at the actual 2013 NFL Draft and on location at the Browns’ headquarters, NFL’s got its ‘authentic’ stamp all over it. Even NFL star running back Arian Foster shows up to act. Draft Day gets adrenaline flowing like Opening Day.

Only, watching Draft Day is like working your ass off all preseason only to tear your ACL stretching before the first game of the year—well, except for the excruciating pain part. There’s so much football that you’re left with a massive pair of blue balls once you realize that there’s no actual football in it. It’s more offseason than regular season: it’s a two-hour foreplay session with Kate Upton. Hey, at the end of the day you’re still hooking up with Kate Upton.

Draft Day wants you to lust after it—the fame, the flair, the football. Stadiums and team buildings are gorgeous, the actors are all handsome, New York’s lights shine off of players’ bleach-white teeth. It’s The Blind Side from the hind side, Jerry Maguire if Tom Cruise could sext.

Seriously, everyone’s in this movie. Kevin Costner, Jennifer Garner, Chadwick Boseman (Jackie Robinson in last year’s decent 42), Frank Langella, Denis Leary and P.Diddy/Sean Combs/Diddy Combs even pulls a Jay-Z to act as the potential number one draft pick’s slimy agent.

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Costner looks like Brett Favre and plays like Andrew Luck. He wields a football like a NYPD Chief brandishes a .45 caliber pistol. His grizzled look that didn’t work in 3 Days To Kill works well in the confines of a football compound, his cool demeanor amplifying as time begins to run out while rumors and numbers fly all around him. Costner’s calm in the huddle, a flawed but passionate quarterback leading his team through the tunnel. He makes random decisions on the fly, tosses draft picks around like hot cakes and lays his balls on the table at every moment. He’s so jittery and reckless you figure he might be high on painkillers: he’s Whim Irsay.

On the other side of the spectrum acting spectrum we find Garner, who seems completely out of place and out-matched by her peers. Garner’s repeated attempts at realistic football-speak end up sounding more like she’s reading factoids off the back of a Wheaties box. She brings the movie down.

Chadwick Boseman’s role is notable here. As Ohio State Linebacker Vontae Mack (the aforementioned ‘hardworking heart kid’), he’s thrilling. His manner is completely changed from 42, he’s much more light-hearted and clever. His relationship with Costner is almost father-son, calling on him for help when he needs it and throwing a tantrum when he doesn’t get what he wants. Boseman might be the best in this movie.

As the clock hits zero, Draft Day will likely go down as the year’s best sports movie. Though non-football fans might find it a hard pill to swallow, the elements of a great story are there in spades. For football fans, this film will be like watching the Food Channel on a diet. Draft Day always plays more like fantasy football than real football. It might be more addicting.

Another Sunday’s come and gone without pigskin. How many weeks till football?

B+

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Out in Theaters: UNDER THE SKIN

by Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged , , , , , , 2 Comments

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

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Out in Theaters: CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

C

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Out in Theaters: NOAH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

B+

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Out in Theaters: ERNEST & CÉLESTINE

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“Ernest & Célestine” 
Directed by Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar, Benjamin Renner

Starring Lambert Wilson, Pauline Brunner, Dominique Maurin, Anne-Marie Loop

Animated 

81 Mins 
PG

 

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 We all remember the stories our parents or grandparents told us when we were little. They’d tuck us in, put us to bed. But we wouldn’t sleep; we’d just shuffle and whine. Naturally! Who could blame us? Who could possibly fall asleep without a story? “Tell me a story. Just one. Please?” we’d beg. “Oh fine,” they’d say. “One story.”

Ernest & Célestine is a tale you never want to stop; a true love story, a lasting fable. And, just like any good story, it starts with a rhyme. An elegant rhyme that flows just as beautifully as the film itself: Qu’est-ce que tu dessines, Célestine? What are you drawing, Celestine? Among a throng of curious young mice, she’s sketching a bear and a mouse playing together. 

Blasphemy! they say. Bears and mice can never mix! It’s just not done!

The mice live in a charming, buzzing, underground city in constant terror of the bears overhead. Children are told stories about “the Big Bad Bear,” who eats young mice by the thousand, while above-ground, bears set up traps to keep the scurrying rodents from infesting their homes and eating their food. Each side fears the other, terrified of their differences and blinded by prejudice and history.

Célestine is an orphan mouse. She’s an artist: a painter, a dreamer. Her sketchbook is filled with reverie and pure daydreams. Ernest is the same way, a multi-talented musician and actor. They’re impassioned by the arts but society tells them that they have to be something else: Ernest is born to be a lawyer, Célestine a dentist. As such, they’re reclusive outcasts misunderstood for their divergence. These mice and bears might not be so dissimilar after all.

He’s big and bumbling, she’s small and fragile. Where he’s obnoxious and grumbling, she’s intelligent and crafty. Together, they complement each other perfectly. Their friendship starts as bizarrely as you would expect a mouse-and-bear companionship to spark: he tries to eat her. Once they realize they can help each other out, they form an unusual bond. Things work out well at first, until Célestine brings Ernest underground.

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Nominated for Best Animated Feature at the latest Academy Awards, this film puts Frozen to shame. Ernest & Célestine is a cute, bubbly animated film that explores social norms with a youthful innocence. What happens when we choose to follow our dreams, and not what society tells us to do? With cunning precision, directors Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar, Benjamin Renner paint a masterful canvas, full of beautiful images and even more stunning characters.

Visually, it’s splendidly simple. All the colors are faded like any old storybook’s pages might be: light red’s and maroons, worn yellows, soft greens, dull golds and browns. Scenes swirl together like a painter’s strokes. Ernest and Célestine’s rambunctious adventures pepper it with impasto. There’s texture everywhere here. Grainy at times, smooth and watert others. The artists’ wet brush strokes are emotional Haboku, a watercolor of feeling.

Vibrant amusement pushes this film at an astonishingly refreshing pace. The filmmakers involved have a glint in their eye, a skip in their step as they joyfully weave this elegant narrative. With comedy and goofy silliness to be found everywhere, it’s hard not to smile and laugh along with this peculiar couple as they rebel against their rash societies. Mice bench press mouse traps, bears and mice combine to do some terrible policing and a bear family runs a candy shop Ponzi scheme.

The illustrators weren’t the only artists in this picture. Voice work from Lambert Wilson (Ernest) and Pauline Brunner (Célestine) is charming, sweet and lighthearted. Like great storytellers, they bring the characters to life, delivering a masterful trance that rushes back a fuzzy nostalgic sensation. You could only dream to be tucked in by these two as they read a bedtime story and put you softly to sleep. They certainly make the experience a spirited fantasy.

Even the villains are fun in their exaggerated wickedness. Célestine’s orphan headmaster La Grise (Anne-Marie Loop), an old fat rat with two enormous front teeth, delights in frightening the children with her stories of the Big Bad Bear. With a raspy voice and a nasty wrath, she spits out her words until one of her incisors goes with them. Hilarity ensues: she rages on incoherently as the children break out into a massive pillow fight.

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And the music. Ah, the music. Glockenspiel, cello, xylophone, piano, clarinet, even tuba. All flow together like the paint that animates Ernest and Célestine. Floating about like a flower in spring or snow in winter, the soundtrack fills the film with life and heart. Yours beats along with it.

Ernest & Célestine is the same story that never goes away: bears and mice can’t interact. Well, why not? It’s just not… normal. And, as always, there’s so much more to this story than just a bear and a mouse. Ernest & Célestine strikes at oppression, bigotry and misunderstanding. Just as in any fable, there’s an underlying narrative, a story hidden in plain sight. France—the land of fables—delivers another refreshing one for the ages with deep morals to boot. This is my favorite film I’ve seen all year, and I don’t think that will change for a good while.

When your eyes water at the end, you’ll be wishing for a youth lost long ago. Why can’t everything be as candidly simple as this? Célestine asks Ernest: Et après celle-la, on en racontera d’autres des histoires, Ernest? After this one, are we going to tell more stories Ernest? Plein d’autres, Célestine. Plein d’autres. Plenty more, Célestine. Plenty more.

Wrapped up under those covers, way back when, your eyes close shut.

“Well, what story do you want to hear?”

“How about Ernest & Célestine? Tell me that one.”

A+

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Talking with Zeek Earl of PROSPECT

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After premiering at SXSW 2014 in the Narrative Shorts Competition, Directors Chris Caldwell and Zeek Earl have been generating a lot of buzz around this mysterious story and the possibilities for a new series. Following it’s online release on Vimeo yesterday, Prospect has garnered a lot of attention from filmmakers and fans alike and the reaction is near-unanimous: it’s definitely good enough to merit a feature.

 

Prospect takes concepts from various sci-fi: within you can find some Star Wars, a fistful of Gravity, even a touch of Elysium. While the lush green landscape might seem friendly, the goings-on within are anything but. Prospect imbues the film’s scenic indie beauty with an ominous threat, a mystery. There’s something out there that we can’t touch. This is a new frontier, a place full of mystery and madness.

The 13-minute short, which feels more like a preview of something greater to come, follows a father-daughter combination living on an unidentified foreign planet. They seek a mysterious “Orolack,” a goopy gook that perhaps hides some terrific power. Certainly, it has some greater value, but that isn’t what they’re here for. Something deeper spurs them onwards: a dream of a better life back home, who knows? They’re spatial forager, but bigger monsters are on the hunt.

The story is mysterious and just oblique enough to engender a curious inquisitiveness. Earl and Caldwell have created a short story that’s vividly complex. The truth behind everything is hidden beneath a layer of cosmic dust. It’s got that Jumanji feel to it: you’ve come across a strange story in the attic—your curiosity urges you to open it despite an ominous feeling of imminent danger.

“This is not our world. We are aliens here,” says the father. Prospect aims at humanity’s underlying fear, the hidden: where are we welcomed, if not here? What is our home? It may look friendly, but Prospect‘s visuals instill serene discomfort. Floating dust particles create a sense of rift, like this world was torn apart long ago. Maybe an alien race once lived here. Something terrible happened in this forsaken place: ravaged, all that is left is an element whose power is unknown, and the people who risk their lives to discover it. There is something here we have yet to see that needs salvaging; something in the depths and core of this landscape that tremors, leaving behind a world broken and decomposed.

Complete with a forested space-planet, cool space suits and a Cthulu monster, Prospect is absolutely worth the watch. There is much more than meets the eye with Prospect. So believes Director Zeek Earl, who has great passion for the project and even bigger dreams to achieve: a potential feature that might come of it. Read on to learn more about the local director’s genre exploration, filming on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, and the endless possibilities Prospect has to offer.

Q: The main thing about Prospect is the fact that it takes place on this “alien” world that we don’t know too much about. There’s this distance between us and them, there’s this strange existence on this planet. How much do you think it was an exploration of the beyond, and how much do you think it was an exploration of our own planet, of our own humanity and interaction?

ZE: I think you’re going the right places. It’s definitely an exploration of humanity. We’re playing around a lot with genre, in a certain aspect. To me, it’s really a Western… My personal definition of a Western is—or at least Western’s I like—there are environments where the absolute extreme ends of humanity end up, and why they’re there is really interesting to me. You have these really hostile environments that people go to for all sorts of reasons. So, in Prospect we obviously have the “prospectors:” people going there to get rich, who are willing to make that risk. But there are all sorts of people in that environment: they’re there for religious reasons, they’re escaping. That’s something that we’re excited to explore, perhaps with a feature version.

Q: A lot of people see Prospect as a Sci-Fi but I didn’t see it as fiction as much as it was an interpretation of reality.

ZE: Yeah. What we associate with Science Fiction now, or in general, are sort of big concepts. “In the future it’s going to be like this.” But our movie, I wouldn’t even necessarily say it is in the future. It’s in a different kind of world altogether.

Q: What kind of moral or ethical questions do you think that raises?

ZE: [Laughs] I mean it’s a short film, so you only get to do so much! I always feel limited. I feel like we started and let’s just think, it could get a lot more interesting. I think the essential crux is that there’s this girl who’s been dragged to this planet by her father, and at a certain point he’s taken out of the picture. Where we kind of get to in the short film is that she’s put in the driver’s seat. She’s in the position where she’s now making the decisions. She decides to go for the gold, and kill this guy, but where does that get her? We just start to tease at that. Again, hopefully in a larger film we can do a lot more.

Q: Why did you choose a girl, choose to have that father-daughter relationship? Obviously that’s been trending a lot currently, with stories like Divergent and the Hunger Games, just an exploration of the feminine side and their handle of social structure and loss. Why do you think you went that direction?

ZE: For us it goes back to the Western angle of it. It creates some more interesting situations, to have a young girl in this crazy environment. A lot of it is hard… [Laughs] It’s hard because there’s this whole feature thing that we’re trying to make too… I guess in a larger world—we only get to tease at it in the short—she’s an unusual character there. You generally have these rough, violent characters, so when they interact with her you can have these surprising things happen because she’s not the norm in that environment.

Q: You talked about these violent characters. One thing that I really liked is the antagonist in this, the kinda “Cthulu” character that you guys had—

ZE: [Laughs] Interesting that you mention that.

Q: What was the process behind creating the design and who this character was?

ZE: Yeah, his backstory. It’s a short film—[laughs] it’s the third time I said that! I just need to own it, it is what it is! [Laughs] We wanted to create this character that had been on the planet for a really long time. You don’t know why. Perhaps he’s not struck it rich as he hoped to, perhaps he got stranded there, perhaps he lost a partner or something. He’s been there too long and he’s turned to desperation. A lot of where our design nods were coming from is that his suit is less fresh; it’s been slowly eaten away by the environment. He has a much more complicated filter system because he’s had to alter it and do all these other things to it. Again, none of this is explicitly in the movie, it’s kind of queued in the production design. We wanted to create this more desperate character. He has that filter, he has a different air system. He’s sick, he’s not well. He’s trying to get off this planet and trying to get rich like everyone else.

Q: I actually thought he might have been the best acted of the group. He did a really good job with the suit and in general giving off that really ominous feeling.

ZE: [Laughs] It was a big endeavor to make that suit, for sure.

Q: Really?

ZE: Yeah! There’s not a huge film industry in Seattle, so we got lucky to run into a guy with some really amazing production design experience. I would say that, [laughs] possibly more production design was put into that suit than everything else combined. It probably wasn’t wise even, but we just got carried away, it kept getting more fun and we had more ideas and we got more of this built-out world. It took months and months. The father and daughter, they have space helmets that we bought off Ebay. They’re high-altitude Chinese flight helmets. But, the prospector’s helmets, and everything else is all custom-made. So, you know, we were making molds for his helmet pieces, he has this one “power arm” as we called it—the arm was like an accordion type apparatus—that was all hand-sewn. It took ridiculous time and effort but the two guys who were making it—Matt Acosta and Nick Van Strander—just went all out.

Q: That’s definitely what I’m most excited about if you guys do get to make a feature, to see all the different space-suits for all the different “Sectors” or atmospheres that come together and make this world a different place. You talked about production. $28,000: was that spent mostly on the costumes, was it spent on cameras?

ZE: Pretty much, it all went into production design and production support when we were actually shooting. My producer Chris and I, we run Shep Films which is a commercial company here in Seattle, so we actually have access to all the technical tools for the most part. Cameras and stuff were things that we already had invested in as part of our commercial business. Really, all of that money went into buying materials to make everything, we had to pay location fees, we were putting up transportation and housing and feeding our crew—which ranged from 18 to 25 people for four-five days. It’s funny, things pop up all the time. For example we only budgeted so much for radios, so we got these cheap radios that you get from REI or something, but then we tested them and they worked terribly in the forest. It was really important that our crew be able to communicate over distances in the forest, so then we had to rent these nice radios. Just little things that you don’t anticipate really add up.

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First-time actress Callie Harlow plays a rogue Prospector seeking wealth alongside her father on a far-off planet.

Q: What was the biggest challenge? You said you didn’t have much experience in After Effects, or at least making the dust particle effect we see in the movie. Was that the toughest thing or was it more the production itself?

ZE: When I think through making the film, it’s definitely a matter of what stage you’re in. We had really big challenges with production design: making little things, running out of time, running out of money. But then we completed that, so then we went to production. And that challenge was hugely logistical. Getting all these people organized and getting on set, managing time and everything. The weather was an obstacle, so we had to coordinate with all the weather patterns. We did all natural lighting, so that was challenging. And, as you pointed out in post-production, it was very tough to do this dust stuff. It was a very different type of challenge. It involved me sitting down, weeks on end, by myself, in front of a computer, not freaking out in the forest in a matter of hours. We edited in Premiere, color graded in Resolve and the dust and stuff were made in After Effects.

Q: You shot on Blackmagic Cameras. What did you like about that camera, what didn’t you like?

ZE: I really like the camera. We didn’t have the bones to shoot on Alexa, which is my favorite camera. But the Blackmagic is a good second: it has really great dynamic range, a really great texture. They’re crazy cheap for what they deliver. The cost difference between a Blackmagic and higher end cameras is just incredible. We jumped on them right away. I like the color profile better than the RED cameras, which are extremely more expensive. I prefer to shoot on Blackmagic than on a RED.

The challenge with Blackmagic: it has a pretty tight sensor, which turned out OK in the forest because you can generally just keep backing up as much as you need to. In the tent scenes, which were really tight, I felt like we weren’t in complete control of those. Now they make something called a Speed Booster—which we have, but it didn’t exist back then for this model—that widens the whole angle, makes it more similar to a 35mm perspective. That’s really awesome but we didn’t have that back then.

Q: When did you film this?

ZE: Uhh… [Laughs] April of last year. A long time ago!

Q: Well there you can get a perspective of how long it takes to make even a film this short.

ZE: Yeah, interestingly our first short film that we made actually took like two weeks to make and cost like no money. It’s totally based on the type of film you’re making. It’s interesting seeing the comments on the film. There are a lot of people saying, “Why did you make this film? Why did you take so long to make this film?” and they’re right. You can definitely make cool stuff for less money and less time, and we’re hoping to do that with a feature. But we are really trying to do something original with the production and design.

Q: How tough was it to film on the Peninsula?

ZE: The funny thing about filming in the rain forest was that it was supposed to rain the entire time we were there, and instead ended up being freakishly sunny. We had planned for rain including building custom rain gear for all the equipment. With the crazy weather change we decided to film at dawn and dusk instead… so the challenged turned from escaping the wet to having to get up really early. It was a lot of driving and long days, but it was such an incredibly beautiful place to hang out in we didn’t mind at all.

Q: What do you feel you learned the most from this project, going forward?

ZE: Oh man. For us, this was so much bigger than anything we had ever done. It involved so many more people, so much more planning. I can’t believe how much we burnt on every single facet. Assembling a crew, approaching production, approaching post-production, the whole thing just really showed us new stuff on every single level. I can’t even plant it. It was so across the board, we feel much more confident about making a film now than we did a year ago.

Q: What advice can you give to somebody who may be looking to make a short or a feature, who maybe has some lofty goals but doesn’t have money, or the time, or maybe the ambition? What would you say?

ZE: Well the ambition, I can’t do anything about. [Laughs] You’ve got to have the ambition. When you’re making a film, you have to have a tremendous amount of drive and perseverance. It’s not a casual endeavor. Our first short film, which really launched our career, was made for practically nothing. It’s called In The Pines and it was us just hiking around. We had one actress, and we hiked around in the woods for a couple of days. We built a concept around our limitations. We didn’t have money. We had a camera that could do limited things. We had this idea and it was a simple idea and we were able to execute it with practically nothing.

I’ve never been to film school, but you can’t just “Dream Big.” [Laughs] That might be the antithesis of what your goals should be for the future, but don’t dream big. You’ve got to figure out what you can do, and then do that really well within those limitations. People will admire what you can do with those limitations.

Another little bit of advice, the internet has been hugely important to our career. Our first short being a “Picked By Staff” on Vimeo really opened up a world of opportunities for us. Film festivals have been awesome and great but where we really see things happening now is online. Find your audience, find your niche, and make something for that niche. They’ll buoy you up.

Q: You’ve raised a lot of money on Kickstarter, would you like to stay grassroots, raising money online or are you looking forward to working with a budget maybe more studio-financed?

ZE: Both? We built up with Kickstarter, one of the bigger things that we got from it were the volunteers, the people who offered their services, time and connections that were even more valuable. I don’t think we could, very easily at all, raise the money for a feature on Kickstarter. We actually met with some people from the company down at SXSW. What they suggested to do was raise part of the money online, maybe for one element of production. We want to stay in control of our films, and the types of films that we want to make, we can make them very inexpensively from an industry perspective. We want to make a movie on our own terms, and make it in Washington.

Be sure to check out Prospect and other projects from Zeek Earl at ShepFilms.com, and don’t forget to catch the short online. 

http://vimeo.com/90049558

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Out in Theaters: SABOTAGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

B-

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