‘DON’T WORRY DARLING’ Caught Between Sexy Paranoid Thriller and MAGA Utopia

September 10, 2022 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Carey Van Dyke, Chris Pine, Don’t Worry Darling, Gemma Chan, Harry Styles, John Powell, Katie Silberman, Nick Kroll, Olivia Wilde, Shane Van Dyke 1 Comment

Make America Great Again

Don’t Worry Darling reminds me of the controversial John Lennon song “Women is the N***** of the World”. The 1972 single is agitprop at its most blatant, employing the titular racial epithet as a means of offensive, highly-loaded language to unsettle, upset, agitate, and shock the listener into embracing the parallel Lennon and Yoko Ono are drawing. Much like director Olivia Wilde (Booksmart) in her sophomore film which, in keeping with the art of exploitation, uses the provocative images of women self harming, receiving electro-shock therapy, and just generally being told they’re being crazy. The meaning of Lennon’s homology is lost on none who listen, equating worldwide sexism with American racism, challenging the global problem of subjugation and control with regards to gender politics. It’s a demanding song, and hard to love for many reasons, but it sticks with you. The problem with Don’t Worry Darling is that at some point in the midst of the film, shock turns to shlock. The challenging Lennon refrain fades, replaced, almost without any explanation, with the more familiar ballad of Beyoncé’s girl power anthem “Run the World”. Read More

‘BOOKSMART’ a Sincere (And Sincerely Funny) Ode to High School Ride or Dies

May 17, 2019 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Beanie Feldstein, Booksmart, Eduardo Franco, Emily Halpern, Jessica Williams, Kaitlyn Dever, Katie Silberman, Molly Gordon, Olivia Wilde, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Sarah Haskins, Skyler Gisondo, Susanna Fogel Leave a comment

In August of 2007, Superbad hit theaters and the timing couldn’t have been more perfect. I had graduated from high school three months earlier and though I’d never sat in a ride along with infantile po-po, or forced to sing karaoke to a room full of coke heads, the theme of life’s defining crossroads and their inevitable effect on friendship struck a nerve. Underneath the playful sheen of a raunchy teen comedy, Superbad spoke to the challenges of an unknowable future and the tectonic shifts that crackle in the multitudinous friendships you’ve curated over the years. A few days after Superbad, I left for college. Read More

Out in Theaters: THE LAZARUS EFFECT

February 26, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Danny Glover, David Gelb, Evan Peters, Jeremy Slater, Luke Dawson, Mark Duplass, Olivia Wilde, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Sarah Bolger, The Lazarus Effect 2 Comments

There are some movies that are actively bad and others that are actively nothing. The Lazarus Effect falls in the later category. The tripping-over-its-own-feet script from Luke Dawson and Jeremy Slater is a hodgepodge of horror movie tropes that fails to deviate from the path most traveled. In following that oh-so-familiar road to nothingness, they prove they came prepared without anything new to say, much less add to the genre.

The characters within Lazarus are fine, more too-well-defined horror cliches, and are notably bolstered by a quartet of compelling actors including Mark Duplass, Olivia Wilde, Evan Peters and Danny Glover all giving the DOA material a faint jolt of life. As the bands research into coma patients and DMT begin to prove viable to reanimate animals from beyond the grave, the lazarus serum is born and a series of one-location events are set in motion.

Before long, the ragtag team of scientists – followed on camera by student documentarian Eva (Sarah Bolger) – are able to bring a pooch that had been put down back to life through the Frankensteinian power of electricity and potassium. Yay bananas. As its heart starts beating again, the dog’s aggression levels spike as does its ability to pull a Lucy and control 100% of its brain – whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. Psychic shit happens.

As you’ve probably gathered, the experiment goes even further awry and Olivia Wilde’s Zoe is killed by a surge of electricity because she (awwww) forgot to take off her engagement ring. Unable to resuscitate her, hubbie-to-be Frank (Duplass) slaps her on his science slab and demands the group assist in injecting her with their very much still-in-development serum. As one would anticipate from a mile away, his shoot-first-ask-questions-later approach to science has some nasty, horror-moviesque implications when Zoe wakes up and doesn’t quite feel like herself.

Up to this point, The Lazarus Effect has only committed the horror cardinal sin of, well, not being very scary. It has a few thing-appears-out-of-nowhere moments to surprise the crowd into a yelp or two but absolutely nothing actually scary or even worthy of note. But as the movie continues, it’s as if it actively tries to disarm its own internal sense of spookiness. Themes of science and the divine are explored in the context of hell but that plot-thread is all but abandoned before anything of worth comes from it. As for the inevitable kills, there is nothing imaginative or memorable in the slightest of ways, just a series of underwhelming, ashen disposals seemingly at the hands of a real pacifist .

The PG-13 horror movie hasn’t had a hit in a long while and with the MPAA stamping The Conjuring with a R-rating simply because it was deemed “too scary”, these all audience entries into the horror genre such as The Lazarus Effect and last year’s much worse Ouija make me question whether it’s even truly possible to have an effective PG-13 horror flick. Because if the bloodless, scareless nature of The Lazarus Effect serves as any indication, it surely doesn’t seem like it.

In the annals of horror past, the greats stand out in large part because of their inventive spirit. Something that Lazarus has almost none of. It’s Hollow Man (Hollow Woman) means Reanimator (ReanimateHer) and if the film didn’t have the good fortune of Duplass, Wilde and co. working for it, it would be even more dismissible and dopey. David Gelb was able to do something truly special within the documentary world with Jiro Dreams of Sushi making it just that much more of a shame to see him fail so acutely with his dull attempt.

Exiting the theater, one man turned to another and said, “It was alright but I can’t imagine paying $10 to see it” and that pretty much hits the nail on the head. At only 83 minutes, The Lazarus Effect is filmic premature ejaculation embodied, suffering from creative ED and hardly able to justify even half of its theatre asking price. For the real h-buffs, there’s nothing here worth seeing on the big screen so if you’re inevitably going to gobble it up, make sure you do so at home.

D+

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

Out in Theaters: HER

December 9, 2013 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Amy Adams, Best of 2013, Chris Pratt, her, Joaquin Phoenix, Olivia Wilde, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Rooney Mara, Scarlett Johannson, Spike Jonze 2 Comments

“Her”
Directed by Spike Jonze
Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johannson, Amy Adams, Rooney Mara, Chris Pratt, Olivia Wilde
Comedy, Drama, Romance
120 Mins
R

Spike Jonze has made a career out of thought-provoking eccentricity, strange tenderness, and powerhouse performances. Her is no change of pace. While both Being John Malkovitch and Adaptation found brilliance probing personal identity, infectious longing, and the delicacies of the human experience, Her strips back some of the junky, heady aspects (that comes hand-in-hand with working from a Charlie Kaufman script) to explore similarly heavy themes in this streamlined and entirely esoteric masterpiece.

In Her, Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) lives in the not-so-distant future of Los Angeles, a place where human interaction has nearly become obsolete. As Theo bumps through any given crowd, the many commuters he passes each have next-gen devises stuffed in their ears, reciting emails, updating global news, and dishing out the latest gossip scoop. For Theo, these future ear-products (which will likely be marketed in the next decade or so) are about as exciting as hanging out with your iPhone is nowadays, but it’s just about the only contact he’ll have all day.

Rather than paint him as a pathetic bumbleite, Jonze allows us to find ourselves in Theo. His crippling loneliness is an invention of instantaneous “contact” as the new highest order. Instead of bringing us closer, all this connectivity has led to a devolution of what it means to actually connect. When people become as dismissible as closing out of a browser, what it means to connect with someone has fundamentally changed.

A scene where a sleepless Theo voice “connects” with an equally restless vixen named SexyKitten (voiced by Kristen Wiig) sees a distant, instant voice embarks on a cat-based sexual tirade, get herself off, and bail out of the conversation. It’s evidence of a society that has ceased to be such. Society quite literally means “a group of people involved with each other through persistent relations.” [Wikipedia] This is no society. We need look no further than our own social media culture to see that this era of emotional distancing and the end of society is already upon us.

By day, Her‘s Theodore occupies himself working at a custom, hand-written card agency where he drafts letters “from” his clients to their loved ones. When an anniversary comes around, a husband pays a premium price for Theo’s handiwork. Christmas time? Theo’s writing thank you cards to Grandma. At that high school graduation, it’s not Dad who’s penned the heartfelt and tender note but Theodore Twombly, sitting in his cubicle. Theo’s got a preternatural knack for emoting warmth and his outpouring of caring sentiments put those buying Hallmark cards to shame. How tragic though that he’ll never meet these people he’s writing to. Almost worse is the fact that his clients need rely on him at all. Everywhere he looks, Theo faces a society that has come so far as to outsource emotion.

Enter her. She isn’t really a she though. She’s an advanced operating system (like Mac’s OS X or Windows) specifically designed to match Theodore’s needs. Imagine Apple’s Siri except everyone had a different one customized to their personal preferences. Voiced to perfection by Scarlett Johansson, this OS takes the name Samantha after “thumbing through” a book of baby names (a feat achieved in a mere microsecond) and begins to evolve beyond her wildest dreams, all the while stoking an accidental romantic relationship with Theodore.

Having closed himself off to the world after lifelong lover Catherine (Rooney Mara) set the scene for a divorce, Theo is a man halved. In relationships, Her reminds us, we pour ourselves into our counterpart and when that union ends, we lose something of ourselves. In the aftermath, we’re left haunted by these ghosts of lovers past. But as Theodore begins to unexpectedly fall for his OS, his haunting memories of Catherine change their tune. The melancholy melts away and the future becomes an opportunity rather than a sentence.

The early Sam is like a child, reaching out and trying to understand the many unexplained mysteries of life. Each day, her self-awareness and curiosity grows and she soon discovers the many wonders “surrounding” her. In Sam’s perpetual bewilderment and glowing enthusiasm, Theodore begins to rediscover his own love of life.

The romance that unfolds between Theodore and Sam may prove difficult for members of older generations or those with limited imaginative capacity to grasp (“He’s fallen in love with a computer?”) but for those willing to stretch their minds and let in something new, they’ll find an entity surprisingly earnest and exceptionally affecting. When this bi-species couple “consummate” their new relationship, the screen goes black and we’re left with a scene unspeakably powerful. Theo and Sam let each other, with moans of belonged need and physical desire, with such palpable love and affection that it’ll warm and break your heart simultaneously.

As she grows, Her gets more complex and begins to dig into some deeper issues of what it is to love and be loved. How much of love is about holding on and how much is letting go? With a cast spilling with talent, standout performances flow from everyone. Phoenix and Mara perfectly encapsulate the trauma of evaporating passion, while Amy Adams and Chris Pratt provide the necessary shoulders to lean on. Even Olivia Wilde as a nameless blind date turns in a quick but potent performance. But amazingly, the tippiest of the tip of the hat goes to Johannson as her performance here is a career best. Showing a range of emotion unthinkable for a limited performance of this nature, what Johnasson communicates with her voice alone provides some of the most commanding work of the year.

Anchored with a cast this talented that are each putting their all into each and every scene, Her is lightning in a bottle. Instead of feeling like this future world is strange, it feels entirely practical, a slightly scary yet peculiarity hopeful fact. And however weird the concept of falling in love with an operating system seems, when we’re in heat of the moment, it never feels weird. It just feels right.

A+

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