Out in Theaters: UNDER THE SKIN

April 8, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Brian Glazer, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Stanley Kubrick, Under the Skin 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

Out in Theaters: CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER

April 3, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Anthony Mackie, Captain America: The Winter Solider, Chris Evans, Cobie Smulders, Frank Grillo, Marvel, MMU, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Robert Redford, Samuel L. Jackson, Scarlett Johansson, Sebastian Stan, Superheroes

“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

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.

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

March 29, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Anthony Hopkins, Darren Aronofsky, Emma Watson, Jennifer Connelly, Logan Lerman, Noah, Out in Theaters, Ray Winstone, Reviews, Russel Crowe 2 Comments

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

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.

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

March 28, 2014 by Chris Bunker Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Animated, Ernest & Celestine, France, Lambert Wilson, Out in Theaters, Pauline Brunner, Reviews 1 Comment

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

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

Animated

81 Mins
PG

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.

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.

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

March 27, 2014 by Chris Bunker Posted in Interviews Tagged Callie Harlow, Interviews, Prospect, Q&A, SXSW, SXSW 2014, Zeek Earl

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.

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

March 27, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Action, Arnold Schwarzenegger, David Ayer, Harold Perrineau, Joe Manganiello, Josh Holloway, Mireille Enos, Olivia Williams, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Sabotage, Sam Worthington, Terrence Howard

“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
R
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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SXSW Review: THE HEART MACHINE

March 26, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged John Gallagher Jr., Kate Lyn Sheil, Reviews, SXSW, SXSW 2014, The Heart Machine, Zachary Wigon

“The Heart Machine”
Directed by Zachary Wigon
Starring John Gallagher Jr., Kate Lyn Sheil, David Call, Libby Woodbridge, Louisa Krause, Halley Wegryn Gross, RJ Brown
Drama, Thriller
85 Mins
United States

Would you fall in love in the wild, wild west of romance that is online dating? What if you believe that your betrothed were living in a foreign country only to discover that they are instead a mere stone’s throw away? Would you get jealous? Angry? Violent? Director and writer Zachary Wigon provides his surreptitious take on the ‘romance as app’ generation in what can only be described as a romantic thriller in The Heart Machine. Read More

Out in Theaters: THE LUNCHBOX

March 26, 2014 by Jill Landon Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Foreign, Irrgan Khan, Nimrat Kaur, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Ritesh Batra, The Lunchbox

“The Lunchbox”
Directed by Ritesh Batra
Starring Irrgan Khan, Nimrat Kaur, Nawazuddin Siddiqui
Drama, Romance, Comedy
104 Mins
PG

Sitting in the theater for a screening of Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox, I overheard someone comment that it was a “nice little movie.” I would agree with that assessment, however, this is a very well done “nice little movie.” Being my first modern foreign film experience in a while, I found excitement in telling myself what would happen if this were a Hollywood movie and was delighted to see Batra subvert those expectations. The result is a subtle, layered, and realistic film about a lunch delivery service in Mumbai, famous for not making mistakes, making a mistake.

A neglected housewife, played by Nimrat Kaur, in the midst of trying to woo her distant husband through her culinary excellence, realizes that through a mix-up her lunch is being sent to a nearly retired, lonely, man, played by Irrfan Khan. Sharing their loneliness, they begin to write back and forth in lunchbox notes. This plot immediately calls to mind that cheesy, technologically outdated rom-com from the 90’s with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, but unlike the shallow clichéd musings of their e-mail’s, The Lunchbox’s messages give us an entirely human view of aging, fear, hope, and quiet disappointment. Our characters alienation is played up by a dingy, crowded, Indian backdrop, where they are slowly beaten down by repetition and tedious monotony.

While this description makes the film sound incredibly dark, it just goes to show that a film can contain authentic humanity, and still be comfort food. Instead of non-stop unrealistically happy moments, the moments of joy feel earned, as nothing is handed to anyone.

This script is beautiful in its simplicity. Outside the main characters, the only characters serve to enhance those main two. Saajan Fernandes (Khan) shows positive growth from his slump as a retiring introvert, while training the man who will take up his job. Ila (Kaur) gets advice from an upstairs neighbor who we never see, while occupying herself with her daughter. The notes they exchange give them simple pleasure, a pleasure much more relatable than the grand gestures of most love stories.

What I found brilliant, as someone who is completely jaded over Hollywood conventions, is how The Lunchbox doesn’t go for the easy drama. When Ila becomes suspicious of her husband’s infidelity, there is no confrontation – no fight. We just watch her grow to live with her suspicions, realizing that she is now more invested in this mysterious stranger than her own husband. Her passivity is a clue to how he has treated her, even though the film only shows them interacting a few times.

Our two main actors do a tremendous job, especially Saajan Fernandes. With hints of Ikiru’s Kanji Wantanabe in his portrait of alienation, he is completely convincing. Even as a young man, I related to his insecurities over aging. As more of his story is filled in, and we learn the source of his early bitterness, he portrays his character growth in a completely convincing fashion. Nimrat Kaur’s performance was heartbreaking, but slightly more monotone. For her character, however, it worked.

Rom-com conventions tell us that this story must end with a bang. When it doesn’t, we are brought to earth, reminded of how limited in scope this is, how insignificant our personal troubles are to the world around us. And that becomes the thing our characters must accept. Saajan is no different than the aging men he sees sitting on the bus, no matter how much he craves the adventure that Ila brings to his life. Ila relates to a woman driven to suicide by isolation, but realizes she must choose her own way, free from the ties of others. Nothing is defined in the simple black and white terms. There are no life and death struggle, just slight growth and simple pleasures. Even with its open-ended conclusion, it is immensely satisfying.

The Lunchbox is as good as a film of its ambitions can be. It is not a perfect film though. It’s a “nice little movie.” Still I struggle to think of anyone who would take nothing away from it or derive no small joy from it. The film in itself is much like one of the two protagonist’s notes. But like one of those notes, it will not change a life in any grand way. It’s hard to diagnose any flaws, because it is quite effective for a film of its scope. However, it will never be anything more than a “nice little movie.” Comfort food at its finest.

B-

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SXSW Review: SEQUOIA

March 25, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Aly Michalka, Demetri Martin, Dustin Milligan, Joey King, Joey Lauren Adams, Reviews, Sequoia, Sophi Bairley, SXSW, Todd Lowe

“Sequoia”
Directed by Andy Landen
Starring Aly Michalka, Dustin Milligan, Sophi Bairley, Todd Lowe, Joey Lauren Adams, Demetri Martin
Comedy, Drama, Romance
86 Mins
United States

Coming to terms with your own mortality is not something that a 20something should have to do. But disease has a will of its own. Instead of drifting off to sleep in some cushy bed at a ripe old age or being blindsided by a simple, but nonetheless devastating, twist of change, disease is the worst of fates because you have to live with the knowledge of what’s to come. Anyone with cancer or AIDS can look at where they’ll be a few months or maybe years down the line, how their humanity and agency will be whittled away until they are a shell of what they once were. This hellish circumstance demands a timeline marked with fates worse than fading away physically. It involves the slow death of self; the disappearance of what gives you meaning into a vacuous machine of needs, a pill-popping potato of tubes and drips. For the self-sufficient young adult, there is no crueler sentence.

In this Kevorkian-as-criminal age, people in this demoralized position are faced with only two options: sticking it out until the bitter end or taking their own lives. In both impossible cases, there is no dignity. We live in a generation where the ailing must suffer for their sufferings, where shame accompanies pain, where people who just want to crawl up like a dog under a shed and close their eyes are seen as criminals by the merciless laws of the gun-totting right. Instead, the victimized are strong-armed into dying penniless and in excruciating pain. After all, that’s the American way.

Sequoia tells the story of Riley (Aly Michalka), a 23-year old with irreversible oral cancer. Laid out with news that she’s entered the fourth and final stage of her affliction and faced with the reality that the next step in the process involves sawing off her lower jaw (even though the odds would still be 80% against her favor), Riley has decided to take her own life in the serenity of Sequoia National Park. She muddles up a few bottles of sleeping pills, spikes her water with it, and waits for the white light.

Along the way, she runs into Christian-on-a-mission Ogden (Dustin Milligan) who becomes an unlikely confidante. In the spirit of good Christian spirit, he agrees to accompany Riley through her final day after her plans with her younger, helplessly punk rock sister Van (Sophi Bairley) fall through. Ogden soon knows that Riley’s slurped down her deadly cocktail but the moral dilemma to follow overcomes him. Likewise, audience members are prompted to ask themselves where they side here. Is there a right choice or just a shitty situation no matter how the dice fall? Likely the latter, but again, that’s up to you.

Back at the homestead, Van crashes her dad’s car and is forced to spill the beans to her and Riley’s separated and heedless parental unit. Dad, Oscar (Todd Lowe), swallows the news like a sack of potatoes, choking on the idea of losing his daughter so imminently, while Mom, Bev (Joey Lauren Adams), aided by new psychologist boyfriend and resident douche Steve (Demetri Martin) shrugs it off as a cry for attention. Their little girl is going to off herself, Oscar pleads. They have to do something.

Instead of trying to come to terms with Riley’s lucid justification for suicide, they rush across the state to her side to try and stop her from fulfilling her one tragic wish. There’s no intellectual vigil to hold, no meditative stasis, their gut reaction is the instinctual response of an animal whose young is in danger. They protect witlessly, they defend without thought for what they’re fighting for.

Disease is the death of possibility, it’s being teether to an IV. It’s watching medical bills skyrocket past reasonable sums, the only will that you’ll then be able to pass on. It’s bearing witness to the forlorn faces of loved ones trying to remain strong for you. Suicide may be an escape but to call it cowardly in this circumstance is simple-minded and borderline pigheaded. Let’s just say that if there is a God turning those who have decided to take their own lives rather than rot from the inside out, I would love to give him a piece of my mind.

An old wives tale says that if you touch a baby bird, the mother will abandon it, leaving it to starve to death. Of course the anecdote is bogus, an invention of moms who don’t want their children poking around at nasty birds. In the animal kingdom, animals are irrevocably tied to their offspring (that is when they’re not busy eating them). No matter how many feathers may be ruffled on your young, most will battle against all odds until the bitter end. Old feuds fade, past wrongs erased, in the moment of trigger pulling, there is only the need to save your young. Ironically enough, at least in Riley’s case, this parental instinct becomes more a curse than anything. Instead of just letting her go the way she wants, they demand to keep her around, jaw or no.

Writer Andrew Rothschild said the idea for Sequoia came from a nightmarish period where he had himself convinced he was riddled with cancer. Thankfully, he did not. All his worrying was for naught. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case, a truth that Riley knows only too well. His helplessly affecting story is much a commentary on the US health care system as it is a solemn ballad to those who took their lives for just cause. It’s heartbreak city but at least it tries to laugh its way to the end of the highway.

With Rothchild’s tenderly biting words married to Michalka’s soul-melting performance, director Andy Landen proves there’s still a place for storytellers with a unwavering voice and a powerful message. He makes Sequoia painfully honest and emotionally gutting, wistful but never sentimental. Watching it unfold is like listening to your mom tell the baby bird story. Michalka plays the baby bird perfectly, putting in an absolutely devastating performance, marked equally with wry deathbed humor and a kind of frankness only someone on their way out the door can offer. Disheveled and morose though she may be, baby momma still brings the worm in the end, but at what cost?

A-

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Patrick Brice Talks CREEP

March 24, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Interviews, Uncategorized Tagged Creep, Found Footage, Horror, Interviews, Mark Duplass, Patrick Brice, SXSW

At the premiere of his debut horror/thriller Creep, director and star Patrick Brice took to the stage to put some A’s to some Q’s and give some context for his found-footage creeper. But Brice’s film;s greatest accomplishment lies in the performance eeked from Mark Duplass. He’s magnetic, unpredictable and an absolute joy to watch. From our review,

“No matter how valiant his intentions sound on paper, Joseph (Duplass) is an unreliable character from the get go. From his startling first appearance to the unsavory wolf mask, ironically called Peach Fuzz, he keeps stuffed in his closet, he’s a hard guy to get a read on. But that’s half the fun. Throttling between waxing on his own mortality and jumping from behind a doorway to startle Patrick (and by extension us), one thing is for certain: Joseph’s a weird dude. He’s always quick on his toes to offer some soundbite explanation for his abnormal actions but his backstory is about as reliable and consistent as Heath Ledger‘s Joker.”

Revealing his long standing friendship with co-star Duplass, Brice talked stalker behavior, the colloborative nature of Creep and how he went from an artsy filmmaker to directing a found footage horror movie. Read on to hear all he had to say.

——-———————————————————————————————————————

How did you get Mark involved in the film?

Patrick Brice: Mark Duplass and I are close friends. I just graduated from Cal Arts film school in 2011. He was kind of mentoring me and trying to figure out what the next project would be. We’d talked about working together on something. This project came out of those conversations. He just said, “Why don’t we go do something together?” So we went up to a cabin in the woods for five days and filmed an initial cut of this movie and ended up showing it to friends, doing some test screenings with filmmaker buddies – kind of refining it and toning it into the film that it is now. Eventually Jason Blum, from Blumhouse, watched the film, liked it, and agreed to kind of help us make it a little darker.

When you were writing it, was it tempting to turn it more into comedy and change the ending? Or did you know that you wanted it like this?

PB: We had no idea. There was like seven different versions of that ending. And I’m sorry I’m totally low blood sugar today. I’ve only eaten tacos for a meal. I can’t (EDITED FOR SPOILERS). I’m having an existential crisis. There was sort of a weird test, because we knew we wanted it to be funny and Mark’s insanely funny and gifted with improv. Jason saw it and was like, “You guys, this is teetering on the edge. Let’s bring this a little more into the realm of darkness.” It’s kind of a weird balance but hopefully it will work for some people.

Your movie reminds me of someone I know. I’m not even kidding.

PB: Mark and I, we love weird people and we love people that you can’t really get a serious beat on. We also are both the type of dudes who end up being friends with those people. This was kind of our exploration into that.

His behavior was kind of textbook stalker. How much research did you do on stalking behaviors and stuff like that?

PB: I didn’t do research whatsoever. One discussion we did have was talking about people we’ve known in our lives who are like pathological liars – just thinking about traits of those type of people and trying to express that.

I find it thrilling, because it’s clearly so stripped down and just like you have a great idea and a great story. You made it happen. I would love to hear what you shot on. Was it literally you and Mark? Did you have a small crew?

PB: We had a small crew and actually one of them is here, Chris Donlon, our editor. This guy’s a story genius and we wouldn’t have been able to do what we did, without him. We shot it on one of these Panasonic cameras that compresses to a small card. It was a great exercise for me. Coming out of film school, I was like, “I’m going to make very defined, formal films.” This was just like throwing that all by the wayside and saying, “Let’s just go run completely on instinct, and forget about aesthetic as much as we can and just try to make something that’s compelling and focused on characters.”

Were you holding the camera the whole time?

PB: Yeah. It was either me or Mark holding the camera the entire time.

How much of this do you guys do in tandem? Did you direct each other?

PB: Yeah. The film was a collaboration. When Mark was on screen, I was directing him and when I was on screen, he was directing me. Neither of us had any ego with that sort of thing. A lot of these takes were initially six or seven minute takes that have been cut up. So we would just run each take. We didn’t have a script. We had a ten page outline, we were just improvising all the dialogue, so we would run one of these takes, watch it, figure out camera placement and what we should say when, go back and do it over and over again. Because it was just a small group of us, we could do that.

Were you developing the characters as you went along?

PB: I had never acted before, so I was relying on Mark in terms of what was working and what was not. It’s super hard to be objective when you’re directing yourself. We kind of went scene by scene. It was a story we develop, in reaction to whatever nuances happened in the last thing we shot. We shot it all in continuity. But we still have that outline that was like, “This needs to happen within these parameters.”

All the paintings of the wolves, who did those?

PB: My best friend since I was 11 years old, his mom did all those. She just paints multiples of those wolves. That’s like what she does. I was so happy I got to include them. That’s something we used to always make fun of his mom about when we were kids. Now it’s like, “Jason, can I get like 50 of those paintings?”

I love how the end opens up all these side possibilities of what happens before and what happens after. One of the things I’m wondering about Mark Duplass’s character is: when you were developing a backstory for him, does he have a similar approach to all his victims? Does he take them all to the heart springs? Is this something you talked about at all?

PB: No. Not really. I think there’s a world of possibilities there. I don’t think he’s done this before. In my mind I like to think that he has something special for each person. Or maybe he doesn’t (SPOILER) everybody. Maybe it takes a special someone, to want to (SPOILER) them.

How did the concept for the movie come about?

PB: At first this movie was like a relationship movie, I guess. We weren’t necessarily thinking that it was going to go as far as it did, in terms of evil. We wanted it to be a balance between the two of us. I do think there’s something wrong with Aaron. Don’t do that.

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