Weekly Review 47: ONCE, MARS!, FILTH, 2 DAYS, ABOUT

June 17, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Weekly Review Tagged 2 Days in Paris, About Last Night, Filth, Mars Attacks!, Once, Reviews, Weekly Review

I know, I know, it’s been a while since I’ve visited this list but with SIFForty stuffing my mouth full of films like I’m Takeru Kobayashi at a hot dog eating contest, I didn’t have time to do anything outside of the magical land of the international film festival. But now that that’s over and done with for the year and I don’t feel the pressure of consuming screener after screener, we’ll return to the most irregular regular segment we’ve got here at Silver Screen Riot: Weekly Review.

Last week was quite honestly one of the best weeks of cinema of the past year with screenings of How to Train Your Dragon 2, Snowpiercer, 22 Jump Street and The Rover all clogging up my cinema pipes with their epic awesomeness. Seriously, not a miss amongst them. As for at home watches, there wasn’t much that I was bowled over by, save for an effort from the always lovely (but always grumpy) Julie Delpy.

Once (2006)

After seeing Once land amongst the 17 Most Universally Agreed Upon Movies of the past 11 years, I felt that I had to check it out. And for all the singing of songs, blushing indie charm, belted powerful ballads, and intentionally miffed emotional connections, I just have to admit that it wasn’t my bad. It’s not a movie so much as a mix tape of sappy love songs caught on lo-fi footage and bustled out for the masses. Had there been more of a story and less of, uh, singing, I think this really could have worked for me but as is, I quickly found myself bored and ready for the crooning to reach a caesura before I had a seizura.

C

Mars Attacks! (1996)

A gleefully ridiculous genre take on 1950s B-movies, Mars Attacks! is as absurd as having an exclamation point at the tail end of your title but packs just the right amount of senseless fun to engage us for its running time. From Jack Nicholson inexplicably pulling double duty as two completely unrelated characters to Pierce Brosnan getting probed by aliens, Tim Burton corrals an eclectic group together, giving us a strange view of how the end of the world would affect difference peoples and classes. But that cone-headed alien’s trot all but makes up for other misgivings.

C+

Filth (2014)

As powerful as James McAvoy‘s performance in Filth is, Jon S. Baird‘s film of the same name is nothing short of a tonal nightmare that – like McAvoy’s character – doesn’t know what it wants, or needs, to be. Danny Boyle knew how to take on Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting) and his ironically black material but Baird gets things jumbled up quickly. It’s like he’s failed to properly parse the elements from each other; he’s mixed his reds in with his whites and ended up with a big heap of pink. Things only really start to heat up in the third act and when they do, they admittedly lean towards greatness, but without a solid foundation to rely on, even a finale this painful ends up feeling soggy and soft.

C-

2 Days in Paris (2007)

A smart subjugation of the romantic comedy genre, 2 Days in Paris sees Julie Delpy stepping into frequent collaborator Richard Linklater‘s shoes and approaching her film with his style of close quarters, unadulterated, matured grit. As her high maintenance American boyfriend, Adam Goldberg brings just the right measure of NYC chupatz to his fish-on-the-line routine, his increasing irk with her many encounters with exes is jealousy-ridden and yet sympathetic. Goldberg’s rocky relationship with Delpy – his bonafide meshugenah – drips the truth of a weathered relationship.

B+

About Last Night (2014)

A lazy, customary, cliched rom-com whose only twists and turns are that it takes exactly the twists and turns we expect it to make up this rom-com of rom-coms. Every once in a long while, Kevin Hart will crack a joke worth laughing at but About Last Night is a largely joyless affair, another tired relationship reckoning that’ll have you glad you don’t date anyone resembling these cardboard characters or deal with their laugh-tracked, sitcom problems. When Hart is your best asset, you can smell trouble a brewing and this is a movie where three out of four characters and unthinkably noxious. For my money, I’d rather spend two hours doing laundry than with these characters.

D

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Weekly Review 46: NOWHERE, ICHI, HOW I, ROBOCOP

May 18, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Weekly Review Tagged How I Live Now, Ichi The Killer, Reviews, Robocop, The Man from Nowhere, Weekly Review

It’s been a busy few weeks with SIFF starting and all. So far, I’ve caught 16 screenings at SIFF, all of which are summed up in glorious 75ish word recaps. At this point in the game, The Skeleton Twins, In Order of Disappearance, The Double, Starred Up and The Trip to Italy are the best new films I’ve caught at the festival so be sure to secure tickets to at least one of those if you’re in the area. I also got downtown to one big – some might say monstrous – screening: Godzilla, which I quite enjoyed. As for watching non-festival things in my spare time, I haven’t had a lot of opportunities in the past few weeks so things are sparse. Nonetheless, let us journey down the path of…Weekly Review.

THE MAN FROM NOWHERE (2010)

Another home run from the camp of South Korean cinema, The Man from Nowhere is a powerful parable on duty and family. Be it blood-born relations or artificially constructed circles, family is a reason to live, to fight, to survive and Lee Jeong-beom‘s film gets to the heart of how these connections guide our lives. Rife with powerful explosions of violence amongst the meaningful relationships it forges along the way, The Man from Nowhere navigates a curvy line between high drama and guff-less action spectacles.

A-

ICHI THE KILLER (2001)

Violent for the sake of violence, this Takashi Miike film takes psychosis a little too seriously, delivering a film that revels in its many bloodbaths – like a kid with rain boots in a crimson puddle – but ends up too tangled in entrails to satisfy. Maybe I’m at fault for getting the time lines confused but the trail is often unintentionally confusing and Miike’s blood-soaked touch leaves little to root for. With no heroes to speak of and an entirely evil ethos, Ichi the Killer is more snuff than cinema.

C-

HOW I LIVE NOW (2013)

Somewhere in How I Live Now a great film is trapped but it’s so repressed and hidden that it seems to have forgotten that it even exists at all. The film follows a small band of family who must stick together as WWIII breaks out in England. The sweeping cinematography is often stunning but polluted with Saoirse Ronan‘s pernicious monologuing. Even though it’s adapted from a novel, the fact that they plunged a hormone-throbbing teenager into the midst of an otherwise fascinating world event nearly ruins the entire affair. Her angsty outbursts makes us wish her amongst the piles of dead and robs us of any wistful emotional climaxes the film expects to impart.

D+

ROBOCOP (1987)

Having seen the reboot before this original “one that started it all”, I will say that I was more than a smidge let down by Robocop. Like a fan-fic of “What if the T800 had worked with the Detroit police?” this B-movie doesn’t really play around with the more interesting ideas of what makes a man a man? The effects though (aside from that very sophomoric robot chicken drone thing) are certainly appreciated, with all its over-the-top squib-bursting from many chests (many, many, many, many chests). It’s hard to parse my expectations of greatness from my overall disappointment but I can hardly come down on this with too heavy a gavel (for fear of internet pariahship) so a C it is.

C

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Weekly Review 45: DEVIL, PARANORMAL, DIVING, WOLVES

April 27, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Weekly Review Tagged Big Bad Wolves, I Saw the Devil, Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, Reviews, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Weekly Review

A relatively light week at the theaters in which I saw Chef (review to follow), Paul Walker‘s last completed project Brick Mansions (buhuh) and a half-way decent horror movie that’s failed to make much of an impression at the box office, The Quiet Ones. Aside from those you’ll find below, I also revistied The Amazing Spiderman at home to prepare for the screening this week and will briefly say that aside from the the smart casting of Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone, it really has very little to offer. The screwball plotline, Glasgow-grinnin’ Lizard and henious score alone are enough to retire this to the anals of the unnecessary (and thank God that Denis Leary‘s character is dead). Oh and I also quickly became obsessed with Comedy Central‘s Review, a brilliant comedy series in which Andrew Daly plays a man that reviews not food, books or movies but life experiences. Definitely check it out.

I SAW THE DEVIL (2010)

A deliciously devious tale of revenge, Kim Jee-woon‘s I Saw the Devil shows South Korea for the bold cinescape it truly is. Kaleidoscopically epic, hopelessly violent and ruthlessly vengeful to a fault, this two-and-a-half revenge saga tells the tale of a special ops agent, Kim Soo-hyeon (Byung-hun Lee) who seeks retribution against the twisted serial killer (Mik-sik Choi of Oldboy) who raped and decapitated his pregnant wife. As he becomes a bona fide hunter of the criminally lecherous, Kim loses himself in a battle with his own soul. The blood drips bright stripes of red, complimenting the engrossing, challenging and yet playful story from Hoon-jung Park. With each new South Korean film I encounter, I get more and more addicted. Next up: The Man from Nowhere, New World andThe Good, The Bad and the Weird.

A-

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE MARKED ONES (2014)

There’s not much to say about this newest installment/first spin-off of the Paranormal Activity camp aside from mentioning the fact that if you’ve liked/put up with the earlier installments, this is just more of the same. It fleshes out some of the mythology but in no concrete or truly satisfying way. It’s like the ending of a lesser Lost episode that just leaves you with more questions than answers. There are moments where it seemed like director Christopher Landon dared to go in a whole new direction (the Chronicle-esque subplot was easily the film’s best moments) but eventually turned into your standard, if not subpar, PA movie.

C-

THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY (2007)

Somber and brave, much like the film’s subject, The Diving Bell and The Butterfly takes the perspective of Jean-Dominique Bauby who suffered a massive stroke that resulted in a rare case of “locked-in syndrome”. If the name “locked in syndrome” sounds kinda shitty, you don’t know the half of it. Bauby didn’t lost any mental acuity but became so deeply paralyzed that he became unable to speak or move – that is, all but his left eye. With only the power of blinking, Bauby learns to communicate through long-winded sessions with a caring therapist. Julian Schnabel’s film charters the many lives he touched and how he went on to write a touching memoir, all through opening and closing his one bloodshot eye. More similar in tone and style to The Sessions than My Left Foot (and glisteningly ripe for a parody title of My Left Eye) The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a deeply soulful and philosophical venture that explores what it means to be human in wonderfully simplistic terms yet it never quite offers the caliber of showmanship, in front of or behind the camera, to muster up the tears – or emotional gut punching – you might expect it to elicit.

B

BIG BAD WOLVES (2014)

Quentin Tarantino named this Israeli thriller/black comedy the best film of 2013, earning it a place on many a movie buff’s radar. Perhaps the expectation of greatness and Tarantino’s stamp of approval led to my ultimate disappointment with the film but I’d like to think that it has more to do with quality issues than my going into it with preconceived notions. The story is certainly one that would catch Tarantino’s eye: a teacher framed for raping and murdering little girls is kidnapped and tortured by a victim’s father and a roguish detective. But the film runs aground a slew of narrative issues and is saddled with mostly poor performances from the Israeli crew, most notably from Rotem Keinan who plays “is he or isn’t he?” rapist/murderer Dror. Watching a man’s fingers gets smashed to bits by a hammer or his sternal charred by a blow torch should be torture to watch but Keinan always looks like a man who’s stubbed his toe. It just didn’t work for me. There’s enough intrigue and tension to keep affairs interesting throughout but it’s certainly not a film that I would run out to recommend to anyone unless they’re dying of curiosity.

C

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

April 13, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Weekly Review Tagged Barton Fink, Cheap Thrills, Drug War, Escape From Tomorrow, Gattaca, Jesus Camp, Reviews, Weekly Review

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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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Weekly Review 43: LIVES, CRONOS, FAST, VALKYRIE, SOMEWHERE, BICYCLE, INEQUALITY

March 23, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Weekly Review Tagged Bicycle Thieves, Cronos, Inequality for All, Reviews, Somewhere, The Fast and the Furious, The Lives of Others, Valkyrie, Weekly Review

They’ve been longer hiatuses from Weekly Review in the past but I admit that it’s been a while since I’ve posted about what I’ve been watching from home. Busy with SXSW and the many, many, many reviews to come pouring out of that, I honestly didn’t have a ton of time over the past month to watch much at home. There were a few here and there (accounted for in this list) but it wasn’t until this week that I really felt like I had much to talk about in the segment to follow. In addition to the films mentioned below, I also re-watched The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and my opinion on it hasn’t really changed since the first time I saw it, for better or for worse, and The Fly, which still continues to be one of my favorite horror movies and a shining example of why practical effects will always be scarier than anything CGI.

I dipped into the theater just once (to my relief, there were no press screenings all week) to catch up on a film that I missed whilst in Austin, Enemy, which Chris reviewed for the site. I absolutely loved it and it’s easily one of my favorite films of the entire year, especially if you only account for stuff in theaters and not just in the film fest circuit. I can’t get Enemy out of my head and that’s exactly the kind of movie I want to see more of.

In other news, I also decided I couldn’t wait and watched Nymphomaniac: Part 2 on VOD with a bottle of vino. Whether that was a good call or not, I can’t really say but look for a full review of that sometime next week. Other than that, I got into a bucket of classics, so take a trip down memory lane with me to visit a bunch of first time watches that have been lingering on my to watch list for far too long.

THE LIVES OF OTHER (2006)

Sitting high on IMDB’s top 250, Das Leben der Anderen takes a hard look at a frequently unexplored chapter of German facism. In the ideological cell of the eastern block, before sledgehammers were taken to the Berlin wall, Ulrich Muhe plays a government agent known for his no-nonsense enforcement of party-friendly ideology. Everything soon changes when he heads up an investigation into a local artist and begins to sympathize with what was once his opposition. It’s a moving and informative picture chalked with a fog-laden, almost nightmarish landscape and moral claustrophobia. Muhe is a revelation, putting forth a man swimming through the tumult of changing tides. As a character study and pseudo-biography both, The Lives of Others is not to be missed.

A-

CRONOS (1993)

Diving deeper into Guillermo del Toro‘s filmography, I found Cronos to be a wonderfully crafted little yarn that shows a different side of Toro. Working in elements of body horror and sci-fi iconography, this film feels more Cronenberg-esque than much of his later work: a contained picture of hubris, a tight story of man vs. mythos. Foreign film offers the chance to see frameworks that just wouldn’t fly on American soil so it’s nice to Toro flex that muscle. From having an older gentleman as the center piece – a true rarity for Hollywood genre flicks – to the mysterious scoops of mythology, this is classic new-age Spanish cinema.

B

THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS (2001)

I was always under the impression that I was not a big fan of the original installment in what was to become one of the biggest international franchises going. It was only until I actually popped the disc in (a DVD in all its low resolution glory) that I realized that I had actually never seen The Fast and the Furious. What I got was not quite what I expected (and boy has Paul Walker‘s Brian changed from the eager puppy he once was). And even though it shamelessly scammed on Point Break to an almost embarrassing point, it properly sets the thematic footing for the sequels to come. Family first baby, family first.

C+

VALKYRIE (2008)

Bryan Singer‘s foray into historical drama didn’t quite turn out as he imagined it. First of all, casting Tom Cruise as a one-handed, eye-patched German is a hard enough sell on on paper but works even less in execution. As an admittedly big fan of Cruise’s work, this is not the role for him and he sticks out like a sore thumb the whole way through. And that’s kinda the whole issue with the film on a larger scale. It seems strange that Singer, an American filmmaker, would helm such an apologetic project from a distinctly German lens. About a gaggle of high ranking German officials attempts to assassinate Hitler, Valkyrie feels like a story that ought to have been told from a German auteur, not some Hollywood showboater.

C-

SOMEWHERE (2010)

Sophia Coppola only makes movies about rich and famous people bored with being rich and famous. But none (not even Lost in Translation) hit the nerve of ennui as much as Somewhere. It’s a film that drains the sweet out of the sweet life, that makes fame look more like a curse than a gift. Ironically, it’s Coppola’s style of noncommittal narrative structure that makes Somewhere as good a movie as it is but also holds it back from being great. There’s style spilling over and Coppola’s use of long shots often transcend the boredom she’s trying to encapsulate, posing scenes that feel inescapably real and human. Elle Fanning offers a breakout role as Steven Dorff‘s young, independent daughter, showing up the seasoned actor at his own game of woes.

B

BICYCLE THIEVES (1948)

Vittorio De Sica‘s story of Post WWII poverty in Italy is asset rich with atmosphere and tone. It captures a time and a place with untempered clarity, offering a father and son relationship that may ring a touch uncouth in modern times but is unapologetically true to the epoch it represents. As much a tone poem about a devastated economy as it is a unblinking condemnation of the governing parties of the time, Bicycle Thieves deals enough moralistic gray zones to make for an intriguing watch.

B+

INEQUALITY FOR ALL (2013)

A smartly laid out indictment of the wealth disparity problem in the US, Inequality for All is as heartbreaking as it is informative. With former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich leading the charge, this is a must-see documentary that will confirm your worst fears about modern America. More terrifying than the scariest of horror films, Reich lays out a dire situation where the middle class lays victim to an ideological genoice. It’s An Inconvenienter Truth, Rich Dude Nation. It should not be missed by any American.

A

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Weekly Review 42: ZONE, BROKEN, CAPE

March 2, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Weekly Review Tagged Cape Fear, Reviews, The Broken Circle Breakdown, The Dead Zone, Weekly Review 1 Comment

This week brought a handful of screenings including the better than expected Non-Stop and Russian 3D epic Stalingrad, which likely won’t be seen by many Americans. I also caught an early press screening of The Raid 2 (holy hell is it good) but won’t be able to offer my full thoughts on that until I review for SXSW (where I might also have an opportunity to interview director Gareth Evans and star Iko Uwais so keep your eyes peeled for that). Chris saw Son of God and if you haven’t already, you’ll want to read his scathing review. Thank God, I did not attend that one. At home, I popped on a few comedies, re-watching This is the End (which didn’t hold up quite as well as I’d hope but was still enjoyable) and the always classic Borat. But rather than discuss those, let’s get into my thoughts on some first time watches.

THE DEAD ZONE (1983)

David Cronenberg tried his hand at this Steven King adaptation and proved he was no Kubrick. Paint by numbers and dull, this is more a showcase of when Christopher Walken‘s signature cadence goes wrong than anything else. Lacking in tension and anything defining of Cronenberg, this is filmed with the generic scope of a director for hire. When Emilio Estevez‘s character arrives on the scene, the affairs get a touch mire interesting but it’s too little, too late. More a chore than anything, this lame duck of a horror flick belongs back on the 80s shelf where it came from.

D

THE BROKEN CIRCLE BREAKDOWN (2013)

Powerfully acted love story gone wrong, The Broken Circle Breakdown is too glad to be the mayor of bummersville and for it is a bit of a burden to behold. Johan Heldenbergh and Veerle Baetens are both excellent in their leading roles and have to navigate some really harrowing waters. Watching them swirl around in love, conflict, grief and misunderstanding gives buckets of dramatic gravitas to the film and makes it a thematic cousin to the truly excellent Blue Valentine. But however difficult Valentine is, The Broken Circle Breakdown is twice as rough. Personally, I just can’t bear to watch a child wane at the hands of terminal cancer but that’s just me I guess. While I can’t discount the great performances, sensitive direction, and dollops of great folk music, I can only recommend this if you’re up for a certified downer.

C+

CAPE FEAR (1991)

It’s certainly not Martin Scorsese‘s best but Cape Fear is as delightfully genre as Scorsese gets. Though it doesn’t have the wild twists and turns (or the madcap performances) of Shutter Island, it’s an incredibly watchable thriller worth seeing if just to catch Robert De Niro sporting a southern accent and casting maniacal glares and to witness Nick Nolte playing a straight man. Juliette Lewis earned an Academy Award nomination for her work here and it’s a great breakout role for an actress who never disappoints.

B-

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Weekly Review 41: NEVER, SOLARIS, BACKBONE, HUDSUCKER, MONSTERS, SUICIDE, KILLS, BEAUTY

February 23, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Weekly Review Tagged Machete Kills, Monsters, Never Let Me Go, Reviews, Solaris, The Devil's Backbone, The Great Beauty, The Hudsucker Proxy, The Monuments Men, Weekly Review

I’m almost ashamed to admit how much media I’ve consumed in the past week. In addition to keeping up with recent episodes of True Detective (so good) and The Walking Dead, I polished off the most recent season of House of Cards…and that’s before any of the following movies. I only made one trip to the theater though for a screening of Pompeii on Tuesday and then again to the local second-run theater to catch a showing of The Great Beauty before it fights its way to the top of the foreign language films for next week’s Academy Awards.

NEVER LET ME GO (2010)

Well-acted drama with a sci-fi bent, Never Let Me Go deals with the impossibility of knowing your own fate. Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield each play clones raised to adulthood and then harvested for their organs, always aware that their end will come sooner rather than later and yet ever searching for a means to extent their short stint on earth. It’s occasionally powerful and offers all three of the actors a chance to stand in the spotlight but its shade is too relentlessly black and the absence of hope too primed to get its audience down.

C

SOLARIS (2002)

Dark and contemplative to a fault, this Steven Soderberg film deals in themes of humanity and society, guilt and hopelessness. George Clooney plays a troubled psychologist sent to a space station orbiting the eponymous, mysterious planet with strange powers, Solaris. In the furtherest reaches of human ambition, Solaris is manifest destiny to the Nth degree, it’s the extension of what we can achieve and at what cost. Sound vague? So is the film. As Clooney’s isolation is mimicked with the backdrop of the desolation of space, he encounters someone from his past that throws everything that he believes into the garbage disposal and turns it on high. It’s an eerie and unsettling film but never shakes the feeling that Soderberg is holding his hand back a little too far. We’re left too emotionally distant to feel the metaphysical welts he’s trying to deliver but good on Clooney for putting so much effort in.

C+

THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE (2001)

Guillermo del Toro made his name with horror dramas of this ilk and for good reason. The Devil’s Backbone is the perfect precursor for Toro’s later masterpiece Pan’s Labyrinth as both deal out horror in the confines of historically accurate, war torn landscapes. This time around, Toro sets his sights on the Spanish Civil War as he tracks Carlos, a 12-year old recent orphan, who encounters a child ghost. Toro is at his most atmospheric here, offering creepiness and tenderness in equal measure that all adds up to a rather intriguing feature.

B

THE HUDSUCKER PROXY (1994)

A slapstick farce of the absurdist bent, the Coen Bros channel Frank Kapra, reminding us of what makes satire satire and why Adam Sandler as Mr. Deeds is a completely futile effort. Biting lampoon of Corporate America at its most corruptible, the Coen Bros are on point moreso than not and deliver sidesplitting gawuffs in healthy dollops. The first twenty minutes or so are solid gold and it kind of peters out towards the middle but the kooky performance from Tim Robbins keeps it hustling along and keeps the laughs coming.

B

MONSTERS (2010)

A road trip adventure masquerading as a monster movie, Monsters is a razor sharp satire on border policy. Gareth Evans, the man responsible for the upcoming Godzilla film, directs with searing panache, putting the human drama at the forefront and letting the presence of “monsters” help to bring more gravitas to their spiritual venture rather than drive the action. It’s the kind of genre-defying film you don’t see coming and it’s well worth checking out if not just to acquaint yourself with Evans’ talent.

B+

MACHETE KILLS (2013)

On the wrong side of the satire fence, this grindhouse-born sardonic action flick is too heavy on exploitation and too light on payoff. Demian Bichir though almost singlehandedly makes it a must-see as his manic villain is a big standout in an otherwise star studded but phoning it in and hamming it up cast. While Robert Rodriquez‘s latest really tries to drive home the necessity of a sequel in which Machete kills again…in space, after this absolutely tanked at the box office (it made a hair over ten million on a twenty million dollar production budget) there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that Danny Trejo will ever wield a machete in full feature form again. Then again, that’s probably for the best.

C-

THE GREAT BEAUTY (2013)

Absolutely gorgeous cinematography frames what is sure to be this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar winner. Lead Toni Servillo is fantastic as fading writer but mostly uppity socialite Jep and he’s the perfect guide to stroll around the offerings of Rome with. Surreal and ponderous, Paolo Sorrentino‘s film is the kind that makes us see the trees for the forest, that begs us to realize that life is happening all around us, not something waiting to happen. Best of all, he doesn’t spoon feed any conclusions to his audience but allows them the breathing room to weave their own message from. There’s a little flack in the last act but it doesn’t take away from the monumental impact of this absolute wonder.

A-

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Weekly Review 40: SCANNER, TOUCHY, TROLL, POINT, ASSASSINATION

February 9, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged A Scanner Darkly, Point Break, Reviews, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Touchy Feely, Troll Hunter, Weekly Review

I’m trying to keep up the weekly part of this Weekly Review segment and since this week bought profoundly cold weather to the area, I found myself watching quite a few flicks at home. I decided to catch up on some of Richard Linklater‘s earlier stuff and having just read the Phillip K Dick story this summer, I popped on A Scanner Darkly and Waking Life but couldn’t finish the later in one sitting. Aside from that, I caught up on a handful of things, two of which starred Keanu Reeves, that I’d heard buzz about for some time but had never taken the time to see. Some were great, some not so much.

A SCANNER DARKLY (2006)

An entirely faithful and ambitious adaptation of one of Phillip K Dicks stranger and yet more emotional works. Robert Downey Jr is perfect as Barris, Woody Harrelson makes a great Luckman, Winona Ryder ideally fits the enigma of Donna and even Keanu Reeves is a component choice for our crumbling hero, Bob Arctor. Experimental to a fault, this Richard Linklater film is a piece of art to behold, with each hand drawn frame as texturally inspired and aesthetically vibrant as the last. Without dumbing down the material, it’s no surprise A Scanner Darkly didn’t find much of an audience in its theatrical run or otherwise but any fan of Dick’s memorable brand of sci-fi pulp is sure to love this.

A-

TOUCHY FEELY (2013)

Seattle native Lynn Shelton‘s dramedy tracks a pair of siblings as they change places in their respective worlds like its Freaky Friday. One’s a massage therapist, the other a dentist and in some strange, unmentioned twist of the cosmos, one loses their spirituality while the other gains it anew. Things turn weepy in a pitiless way and Rosemarie DeWitt’s character is a noxious tonic who’s hard to relate to and annoying to watch. None of this new age spirituality really comes together and the bumbling awkwardness that is the emotional framework never does enough to draw in the audience. It’s a fine work in the context of light independent cinema but hardly one worthy of note.

C-

TROLL HUNTER (2010)

Acid dry Norwegian wit, wry social commentary and shockingly impressive visual effects for a paltry budget, Troll Hunter is that rare mockumentary with purpose. As a trio of hunters follow a veteran troll hunter, they learn that trolls are indeed real, a fact actively covered up by the Norwegian government. The best thing about the film is how well conceived everything is and how painstaking thought through each detail is. Between the inventive machinery, gadgets and gizmos and the clever twists of biology that, on the surface, satisfy the existence of such malevolent fairy tale beasts, director Andre Ovredal weaves a compelling narrative that is far better than the silly name might suggest.

B+

POINT BREAK (1991)

Exciting and trend-setting action story partially ruined by Keanu Reeves‘ offensively bad acting, Point Break is popcorn-crunching 90’s nonsense. It’s miles from self-serious but Reeves can barely deliver a line without it feeling like he’s reading lines from his wrist, barely comprehending what’s passing through his lips. Co-star Patrick Swayze is in top form though and his shaggy beach thief has enough layers to keep us intrigued. An interesting start for Kathryn Bigelow who has since gone on to direct some very noteworthy pictures including Academy Award winner The Hurt Locker and 2012’s acclaimed Zero Dark Thirty.

C+

THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD

Lengthy and dense enough to warrant a viewing in two sitting, TAOJJBTCRF is an impeccably photographed, wonderfully acted Western character study. Brad Pitt plays iconic train robber Jesse James with his many folds of complexity and his deeply introspective persona that makes him such a mystery of a character. Not so much a tracking of what made James the criminal celebrity he was as it is about what becomes of his attempts to retire, Andrew Dominick‘s long-winded film gets it right with many aspects. One of which is Casey Affleck‘s Robert Ford. I’ll admit that in the past, I’ve been judgmental of the younger Affleck, calling his performance in last year’s Out of the Furnace the first time that I’ve ever seen him as a seriously talented actor. Here though, there’s no arguing that Affleck is phenomenal. Couple that fact with the picturesque cinematography and absolutely stunning use of light and you have many reasons to watch TAOJJBTCRF, even if the task can be a touch laborious.

B

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Weekly Review 39: HARD, CHOPPER, JAWS, RED 2, BUTLER, DIRTY, SQUARE, DAZED

February 1, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Weekly Review Tagged A Good Day to Die Hard, Chopper, Dazed and Confused, Dirty Wars, Jaws, Red 2, Reviews, The Butler, The Square, Weekly Review

Another period in which I haven’t posted Weekly Reviews for a stretch, this time due to my time spent at Sundance, this week I offer up eight (!!!) short blurbs on movies that I’ve watched in the recent past. Some good, some bad, some ugly, this Weekly Review segment features two of the Oscar-nominated documentaries (I’ve now seen all five) some lingering 2013 movies I finally got around to and the Oscar movie that couldn’t (The Butler).

A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD (2013)

One swift word can sum this all up: garbage. As if the name isn’t fair warning enough, A Good Day to Die Hard takes all the good grace for this lauded action series, tears it apart and erects a statue to stupidity in its place. Gone is the John McClane we’ve known and loved from the first four installments and in his place is a goon of a gunner. With cartoonish dialogue, a Russian villain eating a carrot, and no intelligence to speak of, this hard dying Die Hard allows McClane to be reduced to a bumbling old kook. He was once the life of the party, now he’s just a supporting character, a scaled down accidental hero. What a bore.

D

CHOPPER (2000)

Eric Bana stars as the real life Australian prisoner Mark “Chopper” Read who achieved fame in prison after penning a wacky autobiography. Bana does a great job at embodying a character but director Andrew Dominick is not quite as deft behind the camera. There’s a few great scenes but all in all it feels like a lesser version of Bronson, Nicholas Winding Refn‘s similarly themed prison character study. But if you’re looking for a good performance from Bana, this an early role in which he really holds the screen. Worth a watch but doesn’t demand one.

C

JAWS (1975)

It feels like it’s been a lifetime since I watched Steven Speilberg‘s game changing blockbuster and revisiting it proved a fun foray into my childhood shark angst. Pretty much the only memory I had of the film was the iconic music and the behemoth great white monster so seeing how long it took for Mr. Jaws to really reveal himself was an unexpected exercise in tension. Richard Dreyfuss is on fire here and Roy Scheider is immensely watchable as the old timey symbol of bygone, stoic masculinity. It’s a film that distinctly belongs to the 70’s and yet could have been made today and been just as great. All in all, Jaws is a well oiled how-to playbook for mainstream blockbusters.

B+

RED 2 (2013)

Noticeably more fun than the first installment, Red 2 seems to rely more on comic book sensibility than the first one. The action is goofy and fun, mimicking the out-of-control physics that only a video game or comic could provide, and the characters are oft-kilter shades of insanity. Bruce Willis is much more of an action hero, or arguable John McClane, here than he is ever is in Live Free or Die Hard and it’s good to see him turn his rootin’-tootin’ antics towards something that we can at least get a kick out of. Still much in need of a narrative overhaul and fresh direction, Red 2 is still just enough fun to warrant a watch.

C+

THE BUTLER (2013)

I was backpacking Glacier National Park when The Butler screened here in Seattle and somehow over the course of the year, I never really found the time to catch it in its theatrical run. After all the dust has settled though and The Butler missed out on even one Oscar nomination, I’m a little surprised that this film ever had the traction it did. Forest Whitaker is solid but his work is never immensely challenging, nor is it near the ranks of the many top-tier performances we’ve seen this year. Oprah Winfrey is fine but honestly the script spoon feeds her “Oscar moment” scenes and she doesn’t really elevate them to a point where I would consider her performance worthy of note. Drunk, struggling with race and suffering from a dying child, her role is a cocktail of awards bait and little more. The racial relations present here are certainly overshadowed by the might of 12 Years a Slave but Cecil Gaines’ story is none the less important, it just may be a few years too late. With Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom being an absolute failure, The Butler can be happy taking second place in the 2013 black historical biopic race.

B-

DIRTY WARS (2013)

An absolutely gripping documentary that starts with the investigation of an isolated massacre of women and children in Afghanistan and builds into the scariest reality America is facing today, Dirty Wars unfolds a scenario in which unbridled warfare is our country’s inevitable future. Rather than place blame on the many “enemies of the US,” investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill shows how through outsourcing our military might to JSOC we have created a need fulfillment system in which our list of enemies will always be growing, no matter how many names we scratch off through drone strikes and illegal and immoral acts of war. Dirty Wars is a must see documentary that’s been nominated for Best Documentary this year and is currently streaming on Netflix.

A

THE SQUARE (2013)

Another important (and Oscar-nominated) documentary that so happens to have a Netflix exclusive run, The Square deals with the aftermath of the 2011 Egyptian revolutions that toppled Mubarak’s long standing regime. While that story of overthrowing a nation’s ruler, a million man march and secular revolution amidst torrents of religious zealots was the hot topic issue across the world for the span of a few weeks, when the flash burned out, people’s gaze faced elsewhere. Egyptians though still faced an uphill battle of implementing real change. Documenting the two and a half year period following the events that changed political efficacy in the Middle East, Jehane Noujaim‘s powerful documentary is about maintaining hope and fighting for what you believe, no matter what the cause and no matter how futile.

A-

DAZED AND CONFUSED (1993)

I’ve seen portions of Dazed and Confused throughout my life but, somehow, I’d never watched it in its entirety. Richard Linklater, one of my favorite living directors, though focused on the lives of high schoolers in the 70’s, still has the same vision he does today for perceptive realism and dialogue driven earnestness. Regardless of the fact that a bevy of this where-are-they-now ensemble are high, drunk or too geeky to function, their observations about life, love and growing up are surprisingly acute for how red or glazed over their eyes are. More than just a dumb stoner movie, Dazed and Confused is smartly comedic and just dramatic enough to give it some emotional heft.

B

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Weekly Review 37: CANYONS, HOST, EPIC, THIEF, SIGHTSEERS, SCISSORHANDS, GRANDPA

December 22, 2013 by Matt Oakes Posted in Weekly Review Tagged 2013, Bad Grandpa, Edward Scissorhands, Epic, Identity Thief, Reviews, Sightseers, The Canyons, The Host, Weekly Review

The last of 2013 is upon us and I’ve been shoveling in just about as many films from the year as I can, building towards my awaiting best of/worst of lists and the second annual Silver Screen Riot Awards. At the theater, I closed out seeing the last films I would this year with Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, August: Osage County, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and The Wolf of Wall Street. Reviews for all three to debut soon. Also check newly published reviews of Saving Mr. Banks, Inside Llewyn Davis, and American Hustle. At home though, I saw some of the worst, most unadulterated trash I’ve seen all year. Just pure garbage. But amongst the filth, I found a few hidden gems and finally watched some old classics. This might be the last installment of the year as the Holidays loom large and my time is going to be severely crunched.

THE CANYONS (2013)

In this utterly terribly film, Lindsay “Dead-Eyed” Logan and James “The Actual Pornstar” Deen have the chemistry of a brick and a rock. Beyond their impressively poor performer’s chops, the rest of the acting is atrocious, with each amazingly managing to be worse than the last. Paul Schrader‘s amateur porn-level direction seems like it’s trying to be different but it’s just confused and, there’s no tiptoeing around it, downright awful. Bret Easton Ellis, a reputable author dabbling for the first time in the script-writing business, loves to pen these drab, empty, trust-fund scumbags but the script here is either DOA or entirely misinterpreted by Schrader’s incompetent hand. The soulless LA landscape occupied by depraved, despicable people, who occasionally take their clothes off and bang (as if that’s any consolation for the horror that is watching this monstrosity) is signature Ellis but it lacks any irony, substituting tits for wit, meandering in his usual loose moral cesspool. Either way, he ought to probably stick to writing because there’s a reason this was rejected from both Sundance and SXSW for “quality issues”

F

THE HOST (2013)

Absent on entertainment, The Host makes Twilight look like an art film. With a script that makes fan fiction seem like Pulitzer material by comparison and features lines like “Kiss me like you want to get slapped,” it’s impossible to not scoff your way through this wildly ineffective disaster of a movie. Even if you took the grating voice-over work out (*shutters*) you’re still left with a film where absolutely nothing happens. Most certainly one of the worst movies of 2013 and probably up their amongst the worst movies of all time.

F

EPIC (2013)

It’s almost amazing how flat this animated feature is. It’s got all the expensive looking animated design but Epic struggles to make you care about in the least bit about this retread story. Like Rio, the voice work is transparent and completely fails to make us forget the celebrity names behind the characters. Most importantly though, the film is boring, lazy, and just more “there” than anything. The whole good-vs.-evil conceit works fine so long as there’s something beneath them. Here, that’s just not the case. A couple of comic moments from Aziz Ansari and Chris O’Dowd help to break up the monotony but the rest of the voice performers are straight out of the vanilla convention (Amanda Seyfried, Josh Hutcherson). I’m left wondering where the hell the name Epic came from as well since there is nothing the least bit epic about this epic failure.

D

SIGHTSEERS (2013)

An out-of-the-blue effort from deep English director Ben Wheatley, Sightseers is an untamed hologram of a vacation gone horribly wrong. Going into this blind is going to really boost your experience with it so I’m just try and skirt around any significant details. It’s easy to spot that the film was made on a paltry budget and a shame to see that it didn’t even make $50,000 dollars in US theaters but what can you expect from notoriously choosy American audiences (who would rather spend their money on Lone Ranger or another junky Hobbit flick). Although the project at first seems the work of amateurs, it really settles into its own and manages to be a fun, horrifying, thoughtful, and succinct experience.

B

IDENTITY THIEF (2013)

There’s hardly anything to say about this comedy entirely bereft of laughs. Identity Thief is nothing more than a totally forgettable clunker set on cruise control and left on the shoulders of the goodwill of its popular stars. Jason Bateman once again squanders his comic talent, playing a straight man to Melissa McCarthy‘s unpalatable identity thief. But rather than inject any genuine humor into the thing, all the “jokes” are culled from McCarthy letting loose a string of expletives or throwing karate chops at unexpected vocal chords. Beyond the pure laziness masquerading as humor, the third act dissolves into the saccharine melodrama that has no place in an R-rated comedy. All in all, what a waste of time.

D-

EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (1990)

In the process of trying to acquaint myself with Tim Burton‘s early and much-beloved work, I’m discovering a man oozing with passion. His character and set designs are as gothic and home-grown as ever and there is undeniably heart living in this project. Furthermore, this is without a doubt a weird Johnny Depp character and yet he’s still more relatable than the slew of weird characters he’s played for the last ten years. Beyond the scars, makeup and scissored hands, he’s a gentle giant struggling with his pure-heartedness and society’s uneasy alliance with him; the Beast to Winona Ryder’s Belle. It’s a shame that Burton has since turned to cheap remakes and Depp to hackneyed characterization because these are two men who really seemed to understand each other and their audience.

B

JACKASS: BAD GRANDPA (2013)

Without the ADHD framework of bopping between segments where Johnny Knoxville and crew get charged by bulls, launched from buildings, or have their scrotums assaulted in the most heinous of ways, it’s a little harder for the Jackass crew to keep our attention. Bad Grandpa relies on sentimentality and a loose narrative structure to involve us beyond cringing reactions and uproariously laughter. And while seeing Knoxville rocking old man makeup as Irving and taking little Billy under his wing in this hidden camera comedy does show an inkling of emotional storytelling rarely present in Jackass’s finest work, the social commentary present in Bruno and Borat is largely absent here. It’s no surprise that the bits that’ll work your funny bone hardest mostly rely on the easy humor of sharts and male anatomy but seeing little Jackson Nicoll steal the show from Knoxville was definitely out of left field and a pleasant surprise.

C

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