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Off-Target, Annoying ‘NEXT GOAL WINS’ Misses Wide 

How far the once bright star of Taika Waititi has fallen. Just a few years ago, Waititi was amongst the freshest new voices in the industry, having cut his teeth with heartfelt and genuinely endearing comedies like Boy and Hunt for the Wilderpeople, as well as the sleeper vampire-comedy banger What We Do in the Shadows. His pivot to more commercial enterprises saw him direct a Marvel fan favorite in Thor: Ragnarok and earn a number of Oscar nominees for his Nazi satire Jojo Rabbit. His last few projects have been…less appealing. His return to the MCU with the fourth Thor film, Love and Thunder, was a true misfire, an early indication that the once-never-miss studio was on truly shaky ground, and his latest film, a half baked underdog sports drama once thought to have awards considerations, Next Goal Wins, has garnered the New Zealand native the worst reviews of his career.  Read More

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Out in Theaters: ‘THE SNOWMAN’

The Snowman, Tomas Alfredson’s (Let the Right One In) adaptation of Jo Nesbø’s Norwegian best-seller of the same name, is an icy cold movie. Frigid to the touch, there is no spark of life to be found in this desolate frozen tundra of a film nor is there anything resembling a mere flicker of intelligence. A detective joint that cannot stand up under the slightest bit of scrutiny, this mindless slog tries to follows in the footsteps of films like Seven or The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, what with its random explosions of grizzly violence and salty procedural backbone, though nothing of that sort ever comes to pass. Instead we’re victim to a mopey, faux-edgy, pseudo-gritty, sulking, snow-blasted post-mortem noir impersonating smarter, sexier, more engaging entries from the often beloved genre. To call it freezing cold garbage is only the icing on this frosty cake of shite. Read More

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Out in Theaters: ‘ALIEN: COVENANT’

One thing’s for certain, Alien: Covenant is a Prometheus sequel. Ridley Scott doubles down on the 2012 prequel’s cerebral but ultimately sloppy storytelling, reveling in yet another cast of characters who make stupid decision after stupid decision in a misguided attempt to hoist ideology above character. In essence a film about discovering meaning, Prometheus failed to define its own, collapsing under the weight of its admirable ambition by throwing too much at the screen and having too little stick. By the end of that venture, everything remained a bit of a head-scratcher but Scott, for what it’s worth, attempts to make up for such here in Alien: Covenant. For its faults, Covenant brings the message of this deeply intertwined prequel series into focus here and its irreverent thesis is far darker than we might have anticipated: creation is nasty business. Our makers can be monsters. Gods and Devils are one and the same. Read More

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Out in Theaters: ‘THE LIGHT BETWEEN OCEANS’

With The Light Between Oceans, Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine) fancies himself both a ballerina and a first responder. The fine line between drippy sentimentality and earnest adult drama is a tightrope that Cianfrance tip-toes with all the testy bravado of Philippe Petie, loading his screen with moody tableaus of bereaved faces and decadent sealand landscapes. With great finesse, he probes the dour depths of the human spirit, framing a lurid moral no-no within a heartrending saga of romantic turmoil. Bottling the melancholy and adding pathos-laden Mentos until it erupts into a geyser of emotion, he applies the jaws of life to his audience, breaks open the collective chest cavity, steals your heart and tap dances all up on it. Read More

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Out in Theaters: ‘X-MEN: APOCALYPSE’

“Everyone knows the third one is always the worst,” a young Jean Grey (Game of Throne’s Sophie Turner) ironically reports, exiting a 1983 screening of Return of the Jedi. She’s right of course: Jedi is the lesser of the original Star Wars trilogy. But to her larger point: the culmination of trilogies often results in some degree of disappointment, sometimes even sullying the good name of that whence came before it. Take Godfather: Part III, The Dark Knight Rises, The Matrix Revolutions, Spiderman 3, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, ALIEN3, Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome, Terminator: Rise of the Machines and of course, Brett Ratner’s quite bad X-Men: The Last Stand. Jean’s remark, planted as it is in what is the third film of this newfangled X-Men trilogy, is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, perhaps both a potshot at Ratner’s derided 2006 entry to the franchise and a preemptive snarky parlay to the film’s inevitable detractors, because believe me when I say, X-Men: Apocalypse proves Jean Grey’s point. Read More

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Out in Theaters: ‘MACBETH’

Macbeth, an extremely well-made adaptation of one of Shakespeare’s most revered tragedies, boasts inspired cinematography and voracious performances though is unlikely to win over anyone who’s not already a ravenous student of the Bard’s distinctly tricky prose. The film from director Justin Kurzel (The Snowtown Murders) is Shakespeare for Shakespeare buffs, one that – not unlike The Snowtown Murders – will inevitably shed casual viewers for the sheer indecipherableness of its composition. Read More

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Out in Theaters: ‘STEVE JOBS’

A sweetly sour punch of cinematic vitality, Steve Jobs is alive, it’s kinetic and it’s an intellectual kick to the shins. With a soaring foundation in Aaron Sorkin’s lively script, the dramatic biography hums along in real time, deconstructing the mythology of a recently controversial figure, the eponymous Steve Jobs, as he navigates his way to the top of the personal computer heap. From top to bottom, no detail has been spared as Danny Boyle’s signature aesthetic doddlings add a certain touch of magical realism to the affair while Michael Fassbender’s award-worthy central performance grounds the film in a degree of stone-washed, near-robotic cynicism. It’s an odd marriage of misanthropic megalomania and surprisingly salty sentiment that works for almost every minute of its run time. Read More

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Sundance Review: SLOW WEST

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Michael Fassbender
is a welcome addition to any film marque – independent or otherwise. From the jaguar-like way he carries himself to the silky, chop salad baritone of his voice, his dangerous presence is inimitable and essential (even through a paper-machie helmet.) Like the great Western heroes of lore, he saunters on spurs, a meaty cigar never far from his tobacco-stained mouth. He’s a gunslinger even when he’s not armed. In Slow West though, he is. He’s very armed, and deadly cool. Read More

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Out in Theaters: ‘X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST’

The X-Men franchise has always confronted big themes: tolerance, shame, homosexuality, even genocide. At its greatest hours, the series has relied on ideas of deontological ethics and ideologies of self-worth winning over flashy spectacle – although the vast display of superpowers were always welcome icing on the cake. Even the much derided Last Stand shoulders a message of coming together to defeat a greater enemy – about differences paling under the looming shadow of fascism – but that’s hardly something new to a series that juggles laser sight in with race extermination. Days of Future Past takes its place in the crossroads between bold ideas and blockbuster pageantry and though maybe it’s not the most outright fun X-Men film to date (that honor goes to First Class), it might be the most important. Read More

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Out in Theaters: 12 YEARS A SLAVE

“12 Years a Slave”
Directed by Steve McQueen
Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Lupita Nyong’o, Brad Pitt, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Dano, Paul Giamatti, Quvenzhane Wallis, Sarah Paulson
Biography, Drama, History
132 Mins
R

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12 Years a Slave opens somewhere around a decade into Solomon Northup’s enslavement. He’s mushing blackberries to a paste, attempting to write a letter home using a whittled mulberry stick. Scribbling like a fugitive to the crackle of candlelight, this is the first time he’s put pen to paper in years, and must do so under the cover of night. For all the horrors he’s suffered and witnessed, the most impossible task is keeping his true identity, and intelligence, under wraps. For a learned slave is a troubling slave and a troubling slave is a marked man – a truth he’s seen manifested many times before.

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More than a decade gone for something as simple as not being allowed to produce his “free papers,” Solomon’s journey draws empathy from the audience like water from a well. More than just a story of the horrors of slavery, this is the story of a man who knew a better life – he abided the law, owned a house, had a family, and was a respected part of his Saratoga, New York community – and yet, down in the bowels of the hellish South, was stripped of his humanity like tattered clothes from his back.

Director Steve McQueen is a particular type of dark visionary. Employing patience and human degradation as a litmus test of how much we can emotionally bear, McQueen peels back all the curtains of our collective American history, revealing the inky black turmoil stirring in the human soul. But torture is no new game for McQueen.

In his first film, Hunger, McQueen explored a prison-bound hunger strike but his craft was not yet refined, too raw, cold, and indulgent to raise the welt he was hoping for. In Shame, he arm wrestled sex addiction out of romanticized glamor and into a pit of emptiness and human despair. Although fantastic acting and gruesome body horror prevailed, it continued the same dour tendencies that make his films so hard to sit through. In his third go around, he’s perfected his art, making a film that’s both impossible to watch and impossible to look away from.

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However difficult 12 Years a Slave may be to watch, it’s absolutely necessary watching. It’s long been positioned that it’s our American duty to process, or at least understand, slavery. As a means to sift the political hand of slavery from those participating in it, McQueen demands you to think long and hard about what you would do in a similar situation. Even the good men in this film, such as Benedict Cumberbatch‘s Ford are stained by the cultural pollution manifest in slavery. It may just be impossible to be a moral man in a land drained of morality, McQueen’s film says.

As Solomon adopts his new name and role as Platt, he holds onto hope – however tucked away in a dark corner it must remain; hope that someday he’ll be reunited with his family, hope that one day he’ll meet a white man who wants more for his than a closed mouth and fast working hands, hope for freedom. In a Kafkaesque metamorphosis, Solomon becomes Platt, his days transformed from living to surviving.

Despite the barbarity of Solomon’s unlawful enslavement, the mentality intact in the age is a scourge most difficult to stomach. Packaged in caravans like sardines, sold stripped nude, and man handled at every turn, there is little to distinguish slaves from live stock.

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Chiwetel Ejiofor
leads a sensational cast that brings Solomon’s true story to the screen with deadly seriousness. As our guardian through this hellish descent, Ejiofor is stunning from start to finish. His decision to play Solomon as a stone gradually pared by the tide of slavery rather than a thistle bending at the first breeze will cement an Oscar nomination. His final heart-rending scene will secure the win. Michael Fassbender is similarly committed to his role as devilish plantation fiend Edwin Epps. Despite his character’s despicable traits, he’s an equally complex man, torn by his own sinful passion for Lupita Nyong’o‘s Patsey. Expect Oscar nominations, if not wins, all around.

Wowing cinematography from Sean Bobbitt (Shame, The Place Beyond the Pines) is haunting yet beautiful. Gorgeous waterfront properties impose their menacing statue – demonic in their association with America’s great shame. Captured under Bobbitt’s lens, the land itself takes on a stifling quality. No matter how scenic the willows peppering the plantation are, they always seem to weep – graves of the crushed souls haunting the confederate flag-totting South. 

12 Years a Slave will make you want to run the retributive justice of Django Unchained but the sad truth is, this is more fact than fiction. Even when freed, American blacks were paid the respect of subhumans. You want Solomon to strap dynamite to his prison, to rip it down to the studs and burn it but you know that it’s not that type of movie. No, it’s too gravely serious for that, for this is an epitaph to American slaves, penned centuries late.

A+

Playing locally at the Regal Meridian 16 and Guild 45th Landmark Theater

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