Posts Tagged ‘Movie Reviews’
It’s a crazy, mixed up world and we are thankful for movies that offer proof. Slashfilm’s Weekend Weirdness examines such flicks, whether in the form of a New York premiere for a provocative indie, a mini review or an interview.
Animal Collective’s ODDSAC premieres in NYC
On March 2, I downed a couple Bushmills and walked to the fine Visual Arts Theatre in Manhattan for a sold-out screening of ODDSAC. I assume by now most of the column’s readers have heard of the abstract release—likely while visiting Pitchfork or encountering a scarf-clad obeyer of Pitchfork—or as it’s described in the trailer above, the first “visual album” from Animal Collective and their video director buddy Danny Perez.
Said to have taken four years to complete and running an hour long, ODDSAC has more in common with a postgrad’s well-funded idea for a Merry Pranksters acid test-as-nightmare than with the socio-scope of traditional drug films like Alan Parker’s The Wall or Ringo Starr’s The Magic Christian. On a few occasions, the entire screen became a Rice Krispies-like wigged-out blanket of squirming hot colors—a bit ironic given how many hipsters refer to Avatar as Screensaver: The Movie.
To the film’s credit, instead of cuing visuals to last year’s hit Merriweather album, Animal Collective created all new music. ODDSAC’s first 25 or so minutes are organic and promising—particularly the layered moments incorporating a rocky embankment, evergreen wilderness, and an isolated drummer. But then the film attempts to jar the viewer with gory scenes like one around a bonfire wherein roasted marshmallows turn mouths and faces into sticky goo. The possible homage to Sam Raimi continues with shots of accelerated Evil Dead-like moons and wilderness carnage. The ending bottoms out in a string of loud and devolved antics that conjure a Harmony Korine aper recreating an episode of Monsters. Worth a look but overhyped, I do hope more bands follow Animal Collective’s lead/intent and explore non-narrative cinema as a creative outlet and cultural time capsule.
Links: ODDSAC site / ODDSAC Twitter / Visual Arts Theatre
Actor David Sherrill on playing Skank in The Wraith and a possible sequel
A recent installment of Weekend Weirdness reflected on the 1986 cult classic The Wraith and its Special Edition release on DVD. After receiving emails from a number of new and diehard fans, I decided to follow-up with a Q&A with actor David Sherrill, who played the film’s memorable punk huffer, Skank, pictured above with the neon faux-hawk.
Hunter Stephenson: Hi Dave. Skank was your first credited role in a theatrical film. The character is one of those great ’80s goons whose style appears heavily influenced by bad punk music and L.A. trash. What and where did you pull from to make the character your own?
David Sherrill: I was into to punk rock and the punk lifestyle in the early ’80s in Los Angeles, so I had seen a lot of different styles and attitudes. I was a big fan of Alex Cox’s Repo Man and especially of Dick Rude who appeared in the film. After reading the script, I felt that Skank was not so much a “punker” as he was a good ol’ boy—a gearhead type who liked to look that way because he thought chicks dug it.
The production’s hairstylist, Leslie Anderson, and I came up with the colored mohawk and make-up artist, Kathy Logan, added a touch of Alice Cooper and Comanche war paint. The clothing and accessories were purchased in Melrose by costume designer Marylin Vance. That stuff was amazing—I still have some of it. The end result yielded the cow-punk tweaker idiot I was shooting for. I actually wore the leather pocket vest later in an episode of 21 Jump Street.
On the new DVD, the director says The Wraith was a rushed and sometimes strenuous shoot. He also discusses a battle between him and the suits, who wanted to tame down your character. Can you share any memories or opinions on the making of the film?
David Sherrill: Well, I thought [director] Mike Marvin did a great job given the schedule and the scope of such a small budget location film. And he gave each of us a lot of range in which to work. My favorite memories involve the cast as a whole. We were all fairly young and new to the scene. Everyone hit it off immediately. I distinctly remember all of us on the plane ride from L.A. to [the set in] Tucson…We were seat-hopping and as excited as a group of kids on their first trip to Disneyland.
Another memory is meeting up with Jamie Bozian, who played Gutterboy, so we could get to know one another before the shoot: I show up at his apartment in North Hollywood and he immediately takes me to an old auto junkyard where he just wanted to walk around and “get into the vibe.” When it comes to character development, Jamie leaves no stone unturned. I love that guy.
Cool. Speaking of Gutterboy, the idiotic and chaotic relationship he shares with Skank is similar to and predates Beavis and Butt-Head’s. Ever notice this? And in the years since, have you and Jamie reunited or revisited the duo?
David Sherrill: There is obviously a long line of comedic duos, but I think The Wraith definitely had some influence on pop culture through the years, from various films to T.V. commercials. I would like to think Skank and Gutterboy inspired Beavis & Butthead because I love those guys. But in reality, who knows? It could have been part of a bigger ’80s trend, remember Bill & Ted? Jamie and I to this day are best friends and he was in my wedding last August. We are actually working on re-writes to a script I wrote for a Wraith sequel. I don’t know if it will ever see the light of day but we are having a blast bringing Skank and Gutterboy and all the other characters back to life.
Links: David Sherrill on Facebook / Weekend Weirdness on The Wraith
The Melvins cover “Dies Irae” from The Shining
Since rock titans The Melvins recently announced summer tour dates, why not feature a YouTube vid of them performing “Dies Irae,” the opening theme to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, synced to that respective, serpentine segment of the film? If any commenters are wondering, that was a long rhetorical question.
Links: The Melvins’ tour dates/ Melvins’ Buzz Osbourne on VBS / “Dies Irae” on Wiki / Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landing
Neil Hamburger’s game show needs our help
For a second, it looked as if the pained career of one of our favorite–actually, he fucking sucks—stand-up comedians, Neil Hamburger, had found the green light at the end of the tunnel of our pointless existence. Supported by those generous and ever-popular fellows, Tim and Eric, Hamburger had spent months developing a game show called The New Big Ball for [adult swim]. However, the program was inexplicably scrapped, leaving Hamburger with nothing to do of late except shit on Tim Burton on Twitter and tour with Faith No More in Australia. But there is hope yet. A handful of equally downtrodden fans recently formed a Facebook group to attempt push The New Big Ball up the hill of reality and back into the fake void of the boobtube—where it will promptly curl up with a jug of alcohol and die.
Links: The New Big Ball Charity Group on Facebook / Neil Hamburger on Twitter / Neil Hamburger’s terrible interview with Slashfilm
More Links on the Brink
A new film festival for action movies, appropriately called Actionfest, will take place in Asheville, North Carolina on April 15-18. According to a press release, the festival has dibbs on the world premiere of Neil Marshall’s Centurion and will see Chuck Norris arriving in person to scoop up a Lifetime Achievement Award. Dear South, impressive. We placed a collect call to Chuck the Truck from The Foot Fist Way for a comment on the blatant Lifetime Achievement snub, but apparently he’s in rehab.
The original youth culture clothiers at Stussy have produced a three-part documentary, available online, about the late hip hop producer and visionary J. Dilla. Part one is above. For more info on the artist: Stones Throw Records
For previous installments of Weekend Weirdness, here.
Hunter Stephenson can be reached on Twitter. If you’d like to send him a screener, or a screening invitation: h.attila/gmail.
Weekend Weirdness’ favorite J.C. directed a nearly three hour epic about The King starring his main man Snake Plissken, and until this week, the project felt like it was on the verge of being forgotten by younger generations. How could this occur when the movie in question, John Carpenter’s Elvis, is arguably a better country music biopic than Walk the Line, and exudes an unpretentious but fetching style reminiscent of Hal Ashby’s Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory? Well, until this week, Elvis was never made available on DVD, and the film’s prior home video presence was spotty at best.
Originally made and aired as a high profile ABC mini-series in ’79—only two years after Elvis Presley had exited Earth for the celestial kingdom to join his momma—the project remains an anomaly for Carpenter in terms of genre and medium. Like several of our readers, I was moderately aware of the film’s existence in the past but figured, “It’s probably a rather safe family deal. No rush.” And yet Elvis historically marked the first collaboration between Carpenter and Kurt Russell, sparking a legendary partnership (The Thing, Big Trouble Little China, Escape from New York) and making this too-probable footnote an important one.
Carpenter—who would be in my top five directors of all time simply for making They Live—was not a rookie going into the production. He had wrapped Halloween shortly before Elvis and has claimed over the years that his celebrated score to Halloween is what landed him the gig. (To hear him tell it, Elvis producers apparently found his ability to craft unsettling synth jams qualification enough.) Included on the new DVD is a grainy on-the-set featurette, wherein a longhaired Carpenter in dark sunglasses states that he’s a longtime fan of Elvis Presley and his music. He adds that he was intrigued by the man’s gradual transformation into a mythic icon, and one might infer a certain empathy via heady ambition and artistic brilliance.
At film’s start, my eye for Carpenter’s signature attitude and dedication to cool was registering high, and almost thrillingly so. We are introduced to The King half-slouched in a hotel room of rich reds as he watches fictional cowboys and Indians war it out on television. Russell, then an electric 27 years old, is playing The King in 1969, later into Presley’s career, but he more than looks the part: jet black hair, thick ‘burns, gold rings, gold watch, gold jangle, quivering upper lip on a break.
In these introductory scenes, Russell stares with intense quiet out of Presley’s gold plated sunglasses, the iconic and vain shades connoting a double-minted Vegas deity. It’s evident in just minutes that Russell is playing the man larger-than-life and reveling in it. (If you’re a Carpenter fan, it’s easy to imagine the director doing back flips at finding the perfect actor/vessel to channel his acute punkish energy.) When the television set switches to a not-so-favorable news report about Elvis’s vitality in current pop music, Elvis stays calm, reveals a pistol, and proceeds to shoot the screen. It shatters in prolonged close-up. In other words, Carpenter is saying, “we love Elvis as much as you, but don’t get too comfortable.”
We then fade to Elvis’s impoverished childhood in Mississippi, where a very young Elvis is shown visiting the makeshift grave site of his twin brother. Immediately after, we see young Elvis speaking near the site to his deceased twin by way of his own reflection in shallow water. An obnoxious, ginger-haired bully then accuses Elvis of talking to himself like a weirdo and lays into him. It might sound like routine stuff, but the next scene, of young Elvis running under a canopy of trees against the wind, before a storm in hushed silence, is as staggeringly beautiful for its vinyl-cover-art composition as its rebel-romanticism.
The above scene exemplifies what was and is so great about Carpenter: he embraces the fun, indulgent imagery and comforting beats of populist genres and entertainment—whether it be horror, sci-fi, a gang picture, or the televised All-American biopic—and perfects them right in the face of high culture snobbery. (In a later scene, Elvis’s momma takes a sharp jab at the biased, fair-weathered write-ups of “Yankee” critics at The New York Times.)
Before he strikes fame and riches, Russell’s Elvis is constantly shown combing and primping his hair, in bathroom mirrors or in a movie theater. It makes no difference. He drives a working-class-truck, spends his work breaks observing black blues musicians, and loves to shop for flamboyant silky pink shirts. Seeing old images of Elvis performing in concert during my youth (my mom is a fan), I definitely noticed his heavily tended appearance; Elvis Presley is likely the first male artist I was consciously aware wore a female’s amount of make-up. Carpenter’s Elvis feels masterfully fresh today for depicting how the character developed tastes in style and image to suggest the later rise of glam-rock.
Elvis Presley’s well-documented and obsessively c0-dependent relationship with his mother (nicely played by Shelly Winters) slowly takes on an Oedipal-like structure and dysfunction. The conservative standards for primetime T.V. in the ’70s aside, the film explores the “Pelvis Elvis” cultural sensation, using well executed shots of girls going bananas at stage front like fainting cattle, and seems to deliberately exclude any scenes that would imply a real hetero sex drive for the star.
Elvis has a fair string of girlfriends in the film, but they are almost always kept at a distance or forgotten. One such girl memorably calls his fashion tastes “peculiar,” and if one criticism of the film is how little these females/romances are fleshed out, including Priscilla Presley, I’m not sure it wasn’t intentional. (As in real life, Presley didn’t marry until after his mother had died.) I have to wonder if fans of Elvis’s gospel roots weren’t irked by a few scenes with minor homoerotic subtext, particularly one encounter in a high school restroom in the first half.
Shots of period-accurate automobiles cruising in downtown Tennessee add to the movie’s dreamy sense of atmosphere. When Elvis hits the ground running in the studio at Sun Recordings, Carpenter begins to entertain the role of fate and foggy predestination in his life. We see an overworked Elvis falling asleep at the wheel and veering into an oncoming lane, a moment meant to induce alternative outcomes, no doubt resulting in a montage of spinning newspapers with tragic headlines. A separate nighttime chase has a built-in televised innocence, but there is a spooky quality to it. (A coinciding shot of headlights reminded me of the poster and scenes from Carpenter’s 1983 Stephen King adaptation, Christine, about a homicidal ’58 Plymouth. Christine, it should be noted, similarly featured suggestive scenes of bromance.)
The strength and investment of Russell’s performance, admittedly too briefly discussed here, must be seen, especially in the film’s numerous musical numbers and reenactments. There might be too many musical interludes for viewers with no appreciation for the subject’s hits, but the overall effect is a life lived fully in performance and thus prematurely exhausted. The film ends where it starts, in 1969, before Elvis’s “fat and troubled years” really took a toll. (He died in ‘77.)
Elvis contains one of the best performances of Russell’s career, and as with Johnny Depp and Hunter Thompson or Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Terminator later, he was fine with not completely shaking off and being associated with the character’s mannerisms for years afterward. The film ends on an image of The King staring out into an applauding but unremarkable audience, an image open to interpretation, which Carpenter makes sure stays with the viewer. It may have taken a few decades to experience, but it will surely last for decades more.
/Film Rating: 8.0 out of 10
Hunter Stephenson can be reached on Twitter.
Weekend Weirdness’ favorite J.C. directed a nearly three hour epic about The King starring his main man Snake Plissken, and yet the film was at risk of being forgotten by younger generations. How could this occur when the movie in question, John Carpenter’s Elvis, is arguably a better country music biopic than Walk the Line, and exudes an unpretentious but fetching style reminiscent of Hal Ashby’s Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory? Well, until this week, Elvis wasn’t available on DVD, and the film’s prior home video presence was spotty at best.
Originally made and aired as a high profile ABC mini-series in ’79—only two years after Elvis Presley had exited Earth for the celestial kingdom to join his momma—the project remains an anomaly for Carpenter in terms of genre and medium. Like several of our readers, I was moderately aware of the film’s existence in the past but figured, “It’s probably a rather safe family deal. No rush.” And yet Elvis historically marked the first collaboration between Carpenter and Kurt Russell, sparking a legendary partnership (The Thing, Big Trouble Little China, Escape from New York) and making this too-probable footnote an important one.
Carpenter—who would be in my top five directors of all time simply for making They Live—was not a rookie going into the production. He had wrapped Halloween shortly before Elvis and has claimed over the years that his celebrated score to Halloween is what landed him the gig. (To hear him tell it, Elvis producers apparently found his ability to craft unsettling synth jams qualification enough.) Included on the new DVD is a grainy on-the-set featurette, wherein a longhaired Carpenter in dark sunglasses states that he’s a longtime fan of Elvis Presley and his music. He adds that he was intrigued by the man’s gradual transformation into a mythic icon, and one might infer a certain empathy via heady ambition and artistic brilliance.
At film’s start, my eye for Carpenter’s signature attitude and dedication to cool was registering high, and almost thrillingly so. We are introduced to The King half-slouched in a hotel room of rich reds as he watches fictional cowboys and Indians war it out on television. Russell, then an electric 27 years old, is playing The King in 1969, later into Presley’s career, but he more than looks the part: jet black hair, thick ‘burns, gold rings, gold watch, gold jangle, quivering upper lip on a break.
In these introductory scenes, Russell stares with intense quiet out of Presley’s gold plated sunglasses, the iconic and vain shades connoting a double-minted Vegas deity. It’s evident in just minutes that Russell is playing the man larger-than-life and reveling in it. (If you’re a Carpenter fan, it’s easy to imagine the director doing back flips at finding the perfect actor/vessel to channel his acute punkish energy.) When the television set switches to a not-so-favorable news report about Elvis’s vitality in current pop music, Elvis stays calm, reveals a pistol, and proceeds to shoot the screen. It shatters in prolonged close-up. In other words, Carpenter is saying, “we love Elvis as much as you, but don’t get too comfortable.”
We then fade to Elvis’s impoverished childhood in Mississippi, where a very young Elvis is shown visiting the makeshift grave site of his twin brother. Immediately after, we see young Elvis speaking near the site to his deceased twin by way of his own reflection in shallow water. An obnoxious, ginger-haired bully then accuses Elvis of talking to himself like a weirdo and lays into him. It might sound like routine stuff, but the next scene, of young Elvis running under a canopy of trees against the wind, before a storm in hushed silence, is as staggeringly beautiful for its vinyl-cover-art composition as its rebel-romanticism.
The above scene exemplifies what was and is so great about Carpenter: he embraces the fun, indulgent imagery and comforting beats of populist genres and entertainment—whether it be horror, sci-fi, a gang picture, or the televised All-American biopic—and perfects them right in the face of high culture snobbery. (In a later scene, Elvis’s momma takes a sharp jab at the biased, fair-weathered write-ups of “Yankee” critics at The New York Times.)
Before he strikes fame and riches, Russell’s Elvis is constantly shown combing and primping his hair, in bathroom mirrors or in a movie theater. It makes no difference. He drives a working-class-truck, spends his work breaks observing black blues musicians, and loves to shop for flamboyant silky pink shirts. Seeing old images of Elvis performing in concert during my youth (my mom is a fan), I definitely noticed his heavily tended appearance; Elvis Presley is likely the first male artist I was consciously aware wore a female’s amount of make-up. Carpenter’s Elvis feels masterfully fresh today for depicting how the character developed tastes in style and image to suggest the later rise of glam-rock.
Elvis Presley’s well-documented and obsessively c0-dependent relationship with his mother (nicely played by Shelly Winters) slowly takes on an Oedipal-like structure and dysfunction. The conservative standards for primetime T.V. in the ’70s aside, the film explores the “Pelvis Elvis” cultural sensation, using well executed shots of girls going bananas at stage front like fainting cattle, and seems to deliberately exclude any scenes that would imply a real hetero sex drive for the star.
Elvis has a fair string of girlfriends in the film, but they are almost always kept at a distance or forgotten. One such girl memorably calls his fashion tastes “peculiar,” and if one criticism of the film is how little these females/romances are fleshed out, including Priscilla Presley, I’m not sure it wasn’t intentional. (As in real life, Presley didn’t marry until after his mother had died.) I have to wonder if fans of Elvis’s gospel roots weren’t irked by a few scenes with minor homoerotic subtext, particularly one encounter in a high school restroom in the first half.
Shots of period-accurate automobiles cruising in downtown Tennessee add to the movie’s dreamy sense of atmosphere. When Elvis hits the ground running in the studio at Sun Recordings, Carpenter begins to entertain the role of fate and foggy predestination in his life. We see an overworked Elvis falling asleep at the wheel and veering into an oncoming lane, a moment meant to induce alternative outcomes, no doubt resulting in a montage of spinning newspapers with tragic headlines. A separate nighttime chase has a built-in televised innocence, but there is a spooky quality to it. (A coinciding shot of headlights reminded me of the poster and scenes from Carpenter’s 1983 Stephen King adaptation, Christine, about a homicidal ’58 Plymouth. Christine, it should be noted, similarly featured suggestive scenes of bromance.)
The strength and investment of Russell’s performance, admittedly too briefly discussed here, must be seen, especially in the film’s numerous musical numbers and reenactments. There might be too many musical interludes for viewers with no appreciation for the subject’s hits, but the overall effect is a life lived fully in performance and thus prematurely exhausted. The film ends where it starts, in 1969, before Elvis’s “fat and troubled years” really took a toll. (He died in ‘77.)
Elvis contains one of the best performances of Russell’s career, and as with Johnny Depp and Hunter Thompson or Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Terminator later, he was fine with not completely shaking off and being associated with the character’s mannerisms for years afterward. The film ends on an image of The King staring out into an applauding but unremarkable audience, an image open to interpretation, which Carpenter makes sure stays with the viewer. It may have taken a few decades to experience, but it will surely last for decades more.
/Film Rating: 8.0 out of 10
Hunter Stephenson can be reached on Twitter.
There will be critics who call The Ghost Writer “a refreshing throwback to the taut political-conspiracy thrillers of the ’70s” and “an enjoyable treat that offers smart flashes of Roman Polanski in his prime,” and this praise, genuinely expressed or not, is unfortunate. Watching the film, I was convinced that had a “blind” screening been arranged—wherein a cinema-savvy audience was not aware of the director’s identity—hardly anyone would claim this a work by a masterful filmmaker. My personal guess would have been, “Ron Howard evoking Alfred Hitchcock—but has Howard lost his wet-fingered knack for the polished blockbuster? Either way, is this receiving a wide theatrical release?”
One could argue that Polanski, at age 76, had an uphill creative battle with the film’s post-production in face of returning international legal problems, in addition to the general agreement that his The Ninth Gate in 1999 and 2005’s Oliver Twist were similarly below par. One could also argue that after his lead performance in The Ghost Writer, Ewan McGregor should promptly go roll around in the waves for the rest of his acting career. The guy seems to care so little about his work here that he fails to believably: type on a keyboard (re: his character is a professional writer), urgently ride a bicycle in a downpour (again, he does this with inexplicable la-di-da slowness), and talk at a GPS with any semblance of a person who is frustrated. (The geek-minded will likely flashback to dull R2-D2 exchanges.) Without spoiling the film, the life of McGregor’s nameless character is put in jeopardy as he falls down a post-9/11 rabbit hole in which world powers, shady Ivy Leaguers, and secret agencies may (or may not) be in longterm, shady cahoots.
Not only is the life of McGregor’s ghost flirting with fatality (clever title), but he’s possibly on the tail of a story and conspiracy of a (our?) lifetime. It makes no difference that the guy is not a journalist but a hired hack who writes at the urge of dollar signs, any realistic excitement from being caught up in mass-corruption and history is free from his smooth brow just the same. With a would-be complex string of murder and cover-ups, it’s a shame that the film’s biggest shock is that McGregor appears to have decided to dig deep and really jump a fence in one scene to distinguish himself from a J. Crew mannequin rather than use a stunt double.
The film is based on the novel, The Ghost, a thinly veiled, accusatory condemnation of British Prime Minister Tony Blair by author Robert Harris, who co-wrote the screenplay with RP. Having not read the book, I was surprised by how scathing and open the film’s (and Polanski’s) politics and worldview are. Pierce Brosnan co-stars as the pompous, undeniable composite of Blair named Adam Lang. His quietly-catty staff (including a prim Kim Cattrall, cast as yet another adulterer) hires and instructs McGregor to be the latest ghost writer of Lang’s memoirs after the first “ghost” committed suicide.
In line with an initially light tone, the film does not bother presenting the previous ghost’s suspicious exit convincingly—to viewers or to McGregor’s open-mark. On the contrary, the obviousness of foul play borders on amusing. And if there was any remaining doubt of a conspiracy at start, Polanski’s over-emphasis on black, crashing waves in the Atlantic and grey skies as we see McGregor’s ghost depart (first by Virgin airplane) to meet Lang put a pin in it.
As prime minister, Lang’s popularity and reputation are on the outs due to his role in okaying the Iraq Occupation and Afghanistan War—referred to by a character here as “illegal wars”; Lang is met by McGregor in a state of denial inside a sleek, dimly lit beach getaway house in Martha’s Vineyard. This modern, heavily secured residence is filmed to have the airtight charm of a mausoleum built to store bloated entitlement and bad art; some Polanski fans might sense in this setting a forthcoming claustrophobic trip down paranoia lane—albeit a less horrifying one—that pays homage to those in the director’s Rosemary’s Baby and The Tenant. Not this time. However, the attentive use of color and crisp presentation in these indoor scenes adequately conveys that Lang’s fortune and isolated doom are one in the same way, just as the often visible ocean is serene yet secretive.
No matter how aptly presented, these foreboding atmospherics and metaphors have remained by-the-numbers for the adult thriller for decades; and like the stale, recycled charades of today’s politics, they grow tiresome quickly, not overlooking certain autobiographical parallels.
During The Ghost Writer’s first half, Lang’s controversy-spurred isolation away from home and his sense of noble loneliness deliberately mirror Polanski’s life. Judgmental protesters wave “Liar!” signs, including one who’s a devastated father mourning a soldier-son lost to the Iraq Occupation, as they linger outside his beach-front property. Aging and on the outside-looking-in at a digitized world, there’s a forgettable luddite joke involving Lang about USB storage to boot. Nevertheless, Polanski aspires to recognize here how politics have been forever changed and rocked by technology—a Google search scene reveals privy information that a young Robert Redford would have spent an hour in the ’70s compiling—but the execution is off.
When, on several occasions, McGregor stares at possibly incriminating photos of Lang from his moppish days at university, the Photoshop work on display is supposed to be cheeky, but instead the phoniness is awful. So, by the second half of the film—much more serious, politically incensed and reminiscent of the tonal shift in Warren Beatty’s Bulworth without the bite—the film has already made self-referential and out-of-touch strikes against the real irreverence it’s striving for.
I felt as though I was being treated like a toddler when McGregor’s character requests a TV be switched from a news broadcast of leaked military footage showing the illegal water torture of alleged terrorists to another channel—that just happened to be sports. Sports as society’s opiate. Enlightening; but if we’re being so deep, why not, say, flip to an airing of National Treasure or any piece of brain-fry, reality show escapism released during the Bush years? Later, when the former U.S. administration’s war path is linked to a complicit company called Hatherton in place of Halliburton, I felt like I was being pandered to like I grew up on a liberal farm and I was retarded. The blatant substitution is indescribably pretentious on screen—and I want Cheney’s head on a stick like everyone else—and reminded me of a writer choosing to use “Fuck” in an online headline and then inserting a censor asterisk. Who are these changes for exactly? In the movie’s case, why not suck it up and say “Halliburton” and really make the point and let the lawyers claim it’s protected under satire?
This may seem like a trivial, illogical quibble, but the film merely feigns the punchy vitality attributed to great rabble-rouser allegories as it hides in a limp, intellectual defeatism that says, “It’s okay for the movie to be discovered later on history’s shelf by a general audience…but of course, by then it will be too late.” Either that, or Polanski has underestimated what are already widely-accepted war crimes and horrors by his audience.
When the film ended, I also could not shake how the film applies blame to a female character for a good portion of the global harm and personal tragedy at hand. Viewing the film in a modern context and considering the male culprits that inspired the films’s plot, it doesn’t sit well. And of course, a few viewers will consider the specifics of Polanski’s criminal charges and find a bitter hypocrisy in this creative decision. Attempting with its conclusion to make a grand statement on the hopeless depravity of American and British politicians in the aughts, the aha! reveal that leads up to it is straight out of a gimmicky ’80s mystery or Dan Brown’s collection of jotted napkins. To claim The Ghost Writer’s mediocrity is all in the name of lighthearted fun is an excuse I hope to never hear about a film made by Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson in their later years.
Rodent Watch: If you have seen the film, please answer: Where was the squirrel to save that character’s ass the second and final time? Wait a second. What’s this? I just found a message in an envelope taped under the third drawer of my desk. It reads:
“Sorry, it was too cold that day and I was busy watching Polanski’s Chinatown for the 20th time on cable. Signed, The Film’s Reluctant Squirrel of Fate. P.S. Just kidding, I’m actually the reincarnation of Alfred Hitchcock and only showed up for the first scene to tell Roman to cast Nicholas Cage in Ewan’s role as he originally planned. P.S.2 Sike, I actually work for Hatherton.”
/Film Rating: 4.5/10
Hunter Stephenson can be reached on Twitter. If you would like to send him a screener or NYC screening invitation, h.attila/gmail.
It’s a crazy, mixed up world and we are thankful for movies, excluding Valentine’s Day starring every safe, boring white actor ever, that offer proof. /Film’s Weekend Weirdness examines such flicks, whether in the form of a new trailer for a provocative indie, a mini review or an interview.
The first half-hour of Police, Adjective features several long takes following an expressionless young detective as he walks and walks Romanian streets in silence, occasionally bending to pick up and examine a roach of hashish recently discarded by high schoolers. Watching the scenes, I began to think about the resilience of the never-ending yet naive affair between indie films and patience, or boredom, that plays out in front of modern audiences. Weeks before seeing this much-praised import, I had estimated, however cynically, that the mere inclusion of Adjective in its title had daisy-cut its potential audience stateside; add in all of this walking and creeping—and we’re talking more than in Ti West’s The House of the Devil—and my imagined demographic for the film outside of the indie faithful became commercially bleak.
But I also sensed in these long takes that writer/director Corneliu Porumboiu was consciously going against-the-grain, staging mundanity in real-time with jestful purpose. I decided to trust the instincts and stay with it. It turned out to be one of the best and more profound films I’ve seen in 2010 thus far.
After the film’s conclusion—which features a similarly long take of three cops in a nondescript office verbally sparring over definitions read aloud from a dictionary—Adjective flirted with the air of a mini-cinematic revolution. The press release attributes the film’s heady importance to its inclusion under the Romanian New Wave umbrella, but for viewers unfamiliar with that cinematic movement, resonance will be found in its philosophically deep and troubling themes, and because its suspenseful dictionary scene would feel inexplicably alien and taboo in any remake, retread, cop thriller, or sequel in Hollywood’s pipeline during any given month. When, say, Mark Wahlberg or Denzel Washington star as cops in a film, their characters tend to operate in a world where dictionaries might as well not exist—and where paperwork is as a part of the booking process as dry cleaning. That’s not a strange diss, but Porumboiu’s dark comedy, and how it revels in drawn out routine, feels like a refreshing splash of cold water on American cop movie cliches, just as much as the film sheds artistic light on authority and generational and historical divide in Porumboiu’s native Romania.
(Above is a screenshot I took of the film’s young detective, played by Dragos Bucur, in an aforementioned bout of walking. At first, I found the crude Chicago Bulls and John Cena graffiti to be awesomely random, but after the film was over I considered how the universality of these symbols and brands contrasts with the exhaustive complexity of drug laws across countries and continents.)
Bucur’s detective is named Cristi, and his current assignment is surface- simple: Gather a fair but not aggressive amount of physical and observational evidence from casual stake-outs to confirm that a high school teen is “supplying” weed by way of joints to two other high school students, and apprehend him. But in Cristi’s district—the director’s native city of Vaslui—this common misdemeanor for hashish/marijuana could land the kid in question behind bars for seven plus years. As we watch Cristi file antiquated, handwritten reports, eat meals alone, and banter in sport with elder colleagues, reservedly but clearly dwelling on the punishment, the penalty and the case’s minutiae hang over him. It’s a subtle display of youth-burning frustration and confusion at reality’s Kafka-esque absurdity.
But Porumboiu doesn’t desire to have us side with a handsome, rebellious idealist, a heroic cavalier, or a trendy anti-hero. Cristi’s dissonance with the case and with the law is belied by a seemingly unremarkable education and disinterest in cultural discourse and local news. Recently married to a cute and intelligent wife, much of his attitude seems informed by their recent vacation to the more liberated Prague, mirroring the questionable arrogance of so many American 20somethings after returning from overseas for the first time. As Cristi, Bucur has droopy but amused eyes that seem immersed in dark triangles of self-absorption, and his face is not dissimilar in this way to James Franco’s. One of the best scenes is not directly related to the case. Cristi returns home tipsy to a lonely kitchen dinner, his wife blasting a drippy ballad on YouTube from another room that equates love’s permanency with the sea. Framed in the kitchen’s door way with sympathetic privacy, Cristi doesn’t say a word as the sappiness seems to push him gently to the brink. Any guy can forced to listen to terrible, empty pop music can relate.
I expected Cristi to break down or act out, but instead he joins his wife and drunkly objects to her because the singer’s meaning is not direct or precise—amusing foreshadowing—leaving her to admit she never examined the lyrics. The lyrics mean well and comfort her, and that’s enough. Mildly romantic and surprisingly funny, the scene darkly hints at the years when self-centered ambiguity and ignorant bliss either steps away from, or steps directly on, the toes of precision- and time-obsessed adulthood. When the latter happens, it’s rarely pretty, and Cristi’s exchanges at police headquarters are no different…
Cristi: That’s why I brought up the Czech Republic. They smoke weed in the street and it’s no big deal. I’m sure that soon the law will change here too. Nowhere in Europe are you arrested for smoking a joint…
Superior: Christi, listen to this old guy: Maybe attitudes will change a bit but the law won’t. [The alleged pot supplier and smoker] is out in three-and-a-half, or less. His father’s an accountant, he’s well off…
After continuing to delay the arrest, Cristi is forced to explain to his supervisor why his “conscience” is allowed to supersede “the law”—and then he’s urged to explain why his definitions for “law” and “conscience” fail to align with the definition and well-defined duties of a police officer. As the no-nonsense head of the department, actor Vlad Ivanov (best known for his performance in the Romanian abortion drama 4 Months, 3 weeks, and 2 Days) corners Cristi left-and-right with “dialetic” prowess like a disgruntled boxer. With just a few minutes of screentime, Ivanov’s character symbolizes the stubborn, familiar refusal of an elder generations to entertain a better system, no matter the precedent elsewhere. For one man, two joints do not justify ruining a young man’s life, for another, they do not undermine the letters of law. Cristi, not realizing the book is being figuratively thrown at him before its too late, must decide to get in single file and roll with the punches or file for unemployment and roll a joint. Porumboiu succeeds with memorable gusto at putting the viewer right on the spot alongside him, one city’s law representing much of society’s madness.
/Film Rating: 8.5/10
For info on Police, Adjective, here. For previous installments of Weekend Weirdness, here.
Hunter Stephenson can be reached on Twitter. If you’d like to send him a screener, or an NYC screening invitation, email him at h.attila/gmail.
It’s a crazy, mixed up world and we are thankful for movies, excluding The Tooth Fairy starring The Rock, that offer proof. /Film’s Weekend Weirdness examines such flicks, whether in the form of a new trailer for a provocative indie, a mini review or…”what do you mean Merlin wasn’t real?!“ Attention hosers: it’s the return of FUBAR! And much more after the jump in this double-deep installment…
FUBAR 2 sees the most famous hosers of the aughts aim high!
Several days ago in NYC a tatted beer delivery man alerted me that a long-rumored sequel to the 2002 cult faux-doc on hosers, FUBAR, had completed production and was due for release end of ‘10. If you are not familiar with this slang—”hosers”—it’s a beloved term for Canadians who shotgun beers daily, making their goofy accents downright hilarious. (Further enlightenment on the term can be found at UD and by renting the definitive if overrated SCTV hoser comedy Strange Brew.) The original FUBAR followed two remarkably unremarkable, diehard members of this accidental plebe subculture named Terry (mullet, crop top, leather cap) and Dean (mullet, cancer immune ’stache) as they philosophized on sports, rock music, wizards, and sluts. Here’s a highlight clip…
This week, publicists at Alliance Films contacted me and confirmed that the sequel has completed production after a December start, and the full title is FUBAR II: Terry and Dean Head North—a new subtitle in place of the previous one, The Wrath of Tron. The official synopsis as follows…
Headbanger relics Dean (Paul Spence) and Terry (Dave Lawrence) are back in the ’86 Cutlass Supreme, flat of beer in the trunk, heading to Fort McMurray, Alberta in search of sweet cash from working on the pipelines. The story starts in Calgary where the boys are tired of trying to give’r while barely scraping by, when their old buddy and party leader, Tron (Andrew Sparacino) hooks them up with jobs in Fort McMurray. Before long they are rolling in dough and good times. Flush with money and confidence, Terry starts dating Trish (Terra Hazelton), a local waitress, and things get serious in a hurry. Meanwhile, Dean is playing up the part of the cancer survivor, and upon hearing about the glories of workers’ compensation, purposely bungs up his leg in an attempt to qualify. When Terry moves in with Trish, Dean does his best to save his buddy from swapping the banger life for domestic captivity.
Returning Canadian director Michael Dowse (2004’s It’s All Gone Pete Tong) told the Canuck press last year that it’s “a Christmas film.” In addition, the sequel now has a production blog up and “the Deaner” has barfed and stumbled his way onto Twitter. The publicists also sent along three pics…
Like the zeitgeist trajectory of ironic mullet humor, the first film experienced a huge spike in stateside popularity, followed by inevitable backlash that it wasn’t as funny as many claimed or fit to lick Christopher Guest’s bottom. But the timing again seems right, and I doubt Dowse—who is directing Jay Baruchel in the Slap Shot-aspiring hockey comedy Goon—and crew would arrange another improv-heavy session simply for a payday.
The second season of Party Down: Fun yet months away
The second season of Party Down, which gets my vote for best 2009 comedy series after Eastbound & Down, doesn’t air until April on Starz. So, try to imagine my surprise when it arrived at my door outfitted in a crisp white dress shirt and a please-strangle-me pink bow-tie—just like those worn by the down-and-out caterer characters brought to depressing life by Adam Scott and Martin Starr. I’m not allowed to say anything about the season just yet, but Scott did in his recent /Film interview. Alright, I’ll say this: the fifth episode is the best one ever and deserves an award for a guest star from a certain Academy.
Daddy Longlegs: Irresponsible dads everywhere may have a new leader (Trailer and Mini-Review)
My interest in Daddy Longlegs was initially sparked when I first read about the NYC-based divorced dad character study in The Fader and went into indie-gem-anticipation mode when several trusted peers attending last month’s Sundance gave it an endorsement, including Michael Tully at Hammer to Nail.
Written and directed by Ben and Joshua Safdie, the film is said to be based on the brothers’ autobiographical experiences spending limited visits with their father while growing up in NYC; knowing this aspect before I saw the film bolstered an early personal appreciation for their many acute, moppy-haired memories of childhood on screen. A few scenes set in middle school in particular, involving fart spray on the playground and low-fives in the hallway, blew the dust off my own days around that age. The Safdies’ honest, low budget sneakers-on-the-street style and spare but stark use of adult nudity could be indebted to ’90s-era Larry Clark and ’70s-era James Toback; the pace and tone of the film could also be seen as an urban compliment to Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy from last year. Nice company, all.
But it’s the performance of actor Ronald Bronstein, an upcoming indie director in his own right, as the divorced dad that has stayed with viewers most so far. An underground comics enthusiast who thinks outside the figurative box while scoring with the female variety, Bronstein’s character charmingly and sympathetically struggles to find stable work as a movie projectionist. But when this leads to his depressing and telling struggles to supervise his sons during a brief annual visit to his city apartment, I not only lost respect for the character—intentional, no doubt—I lost a chunk of interest in the film. If you like challenging indies, peep the trailer above and then give it a shot. More importantly, keep an eye out for the Safdie bros. and Bronstein in the future.
Weekend Weirdness: Links on the Brink
- I’ve known up-and-coming filmmaker Shawn Wines since university at Miami, and was both elated and frightened to see that his hatred of Jimmy Fallon has not cooled since—as exemplified by the above video he directed and starred in on Funny or Die.
- The conspiracy theory that Stanley Kubrick helped fake the Apollo moon landing and moon walk is well known in geek circles; the conspiracy theory that includes The Shining in this historic web and posits that the horror masterpiece is filled with metaphorical evidence and saddened overshares is…schizo slash awesome?
- More than a week ago, I decided that the latest winner of the Weed-Induced-Tumblr-Award goes to Selleck Waterfall Sandwich, a gallery of JPEGs and GIFs that combines my Instant Netflix obsession with Magnum P.I., the munchies and misty screensaver flora. A sample below.
Hunter Stephenson can be reached on Twitter. If you’d like to send him a screener, or an NYC screening invitation, email him at h.attila/gmail. For previous installments of Weekend Weirdness, here.
It’s a crazy, mixed up world and we are thankful for movies, excluding The Spy Next Door and The Tooth Fairy, that offer proof. /Film’s Weekend Weirdness examines such flicks, whether in the form of a new trailer for a provocative indie, a mini review, or an interview. In this installment, new trailers and a review of the Red Riding Trilogy, a noirish triptych of serial killer dramas imported from British television and being released stateside in February by IFC Films.
During a screening of the entire Red Riding Trilogy, with one intermission allotted for lunch, I found myself pondering the irony in three directors, one screenwriter, one author, tens of actors and three separate crews realizing a project that depicts humanity and bureaucracy at its most foul and irreversibly corrupt. A recent poster for the trilogy forebodingly reads, “Evil Lives Here,” a tagline that would serve most of the work that exits Stephen King’s skull; instead the “here” in Red Riding is Northern England in the ’70s and early ’80s, when a serial killer known as the Yorkshire Ripper carved a trail of female victims and set a mood and mythos ripe for social reflection.
If that sounds reminiscent of David Fincher’s Zodiac, it is. Both that serial killer epic and Se7en are influential here by way of nightmarish imagery and the former’s tediously realistic period detail and pre-computerized investigation routines. But it’s much harder to seek comparison for the way the trilogy’s storylines and characters—spread across three films, 1974, 1980, and 1983—communally bleed into each other, yet vary in quality, tone, and execution. The first film is a sexy, hardboiled mystery; the second a pitch-black procedural; the middling third a tale of redemption that borders on Hollywood melodrama. These differences make the trilogy appealing and slightly frustrating. Taken as a whole, it’s a collaborative achievement that fans of crime cinema can feast upon.
In the Year of Our Lord 1974: Enough Cigarettes, Sex, and Murder to Make Andrew Garfield a Star
Rather surprisingly, the first installment of Red Riding has no less than four sex scenes, all of which feature 20something Brit actor Andrew Garfield. When he’s not preoccupied in a bout of shagging, Garfield’s mutton-chopped character, an ambitious newspaper journalist named Eddie Dunford, tends to have a cig and drink in hand. At first, it’s difficult to gauge where the film is coming from, but Dunford’s lifestyle choices are a youthful juggling act that blurs his well-meaning but naive obsession with a missing girl. He hopes to link the possible murder to two similar cases gathering dust and catch his big break.
In the proceeding two films, Dunford is a minor, peripheral character, but 1974 offers a star-making performance for Garfield, who will appear later this year in The Social Network. He portrays a young journalist drunk on romanticized, idealistic notions of the profession and still taps plenty of Raymond Chandler-like cool doing so. When the latest girl’s body randomly surfaces, swan wings inexplicably sewn to her back, director Julian Jarrold (Brideshead Revisited) makes Dunford’s hazy confusion our own, quickly plummeting us into a conspiratorial web of group-think involving the police, a powerful developer, elite society, and the media. Recurring themes of paternal betrayal and vacancy are planted beforehand, with Sean Bean as a delightfully sleazy yet dapper father figure-from-hell to Dunford.
Several readers have wondered if the Red Riding films work as stand-alone features—especially since they were originally made, and aired last year, for British television. Jarrold’s 1974 works best in this regard. His use of 16mm in rendering a patina-heavy Yorkshire as a murderous landscape of pubs and misleading, at times ashen, hillside lends his film to memorable images. Dunford’s tale is also the most singular and isolated—his noirish nighttime drives pay homage to David Lynch’s Lost Highway—and the six-year gap between ‘74 and In the Year of Our Lord 1980 allows Jarrold to introduce several, complicit characters that are central later without worry for prior comparison. /Film Rating: 8/10
In the Year of Our Lord 1980: The Trilogy’s Darkest Entry and the Critical Favorite
Set amidst a fictionalized investigation of the Yorkshire Ripper murders, 1980 is directed by James Marsh, who directed 2008’s well-received doc Man on Wire. Compared to 1974, the protagonist in ‘80 is older and smarter, an experienced officer named Peter Hunter recruited to crack the stockpiling Ripper case (and who previously led an unsolved investigation of the bloody aftermath capping ‘74).
Whereas the look and tone of ‘74 mirrored the heady overindulgence turned paranoia of Garfield’s Dumford, the style and pace of ‘80s plays on the sober career anxieties of Officer Hunter (played by In America’s Patty Considine). Peter Hunter’s rabbit hole is directly in front of him; he’s the good man out amongst this new unit, but can’t admit just how far. Of the three directors, Marsh has the most difficult task in bridging the films. He uses 35mm, lots of wide shots, and is font of framing Hunter in scenes to illustrate the Kafka-like labyrinth of bullshit—mundane and later sociopathic—he’s up against.
Personally, I found Considine’s officer to share a certain optimistic weariness reminiscent of Tony Blair walking into Bush’s authoritative den of wolves; I’ll also admit that certain scenes packed such hopelessness that I questioned the film’s value of realism—and yet considered in mild horror whether the film’s palpable anger was directed at actual records of police misconduct.
In watching Hunter re-examine the murder of a young girl wrongly (purposely?) attributed to the Ripper, I began to feel that 1980 too briefly touched on the serial killer’s past crimes and terror. These films are not directly about the Ripper, but more exposition about him, and scenes with him, here would have been nice. Later I learned that the trilogy’s source material was a quartet of books by British author David Peace (The Damned United); the second book, 1977, did indeed focus on the Ripper’s spree. (It was left unfilmed due to budgetary restraints.) Knowing this, 1980 compensates for several gaps by featuring the trilogy’s best ensemble performance and the bleakest if not wholly unpredictable twists and turns. /Film Rating: 7.5/10
In the Year of Our Lord 1983: Does the Director of Leap Year Stick the Landing?
I’ve chosen to highlight the stylistic differences and a few of the recurring themes for the prior two films since diving into countless supporting characters and their litany of motives would lead to spoiler-addled overlap. Thus far in critical circles, 1983 is being correctly cited as the trilogy’s runt. What I found most puzzling was its rushed conclusion, which conjured so many soaring, slow-motion climaxes featured in the murder-thrillers that satiate Ashley Judd’s Wal-Mart fanbase. If and when the Red Riding Trilogy—which I should add is subtitle free—is pointlessly remade by Columbia Pictures as planned, I doubt its ending will be this cliche.
Unlike 1974 and 1980, 1983 utilizes a lot of flashbacks (ones made for this installment), and also differs by spliting its focus between three men: a compromised police officer named Maurice Jobson (actor David Morrissey, who appears in all three and whose character changes the most between films—another point of debate amongst critics); a portly, unremarkable solicitor/attorney named John Piggott (Mark Addy); and a transvestite drifter named BJ (Robert Sheehan). All of these characters eventually cross paths after another young girl is abducted in Yorkshire. In a coiciding wave of panic, several police, including Jobson, consult a talented psychic. Quite a stretch. Suddenly the evil yet human foundation of the first films seems on the verge of being thrown out altogether.
Director Anand Tucker (the recently panned Leap Year) takes the most creative license, and for all of his entry’s flaws and heavy-handed symbolism, his is still an interesting film. The material was certainly there for another director to stay within bounds and hit a deserved homerun, but the spirit of Red Riding encourages freedom for interpretation. And perhaps some of the blame for ‘83’s ill-fit should be shared with screenwriter Tony Grisoni, who adapted all of them. Part of what makes Red Riding so captivating is the creative risk in loose and ambitious collaboration, and it’s the resulting three uniquely haunting versions of a Yorkshire-in-decline that loom over arguments for more traditional consistency. /Film Rating: 5.5
/Film Rating: Entire Trilogy: 7
Hunter Stephenson can be reached on Twitter. If you’d like to send him a screener, or a screening invitation, email him at h.attila/gmail. For previous installments of Weekend Weirdness, here.
In December, we made a post about a guy named Mike from Milwaukee, WI, who created a 70-minute video review of Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace. The 7-part dissection tore apart George Lucas’ first installment of the prequel trilogy, and was linked by almost every website known to man. In fact, the video now has over 1.25 million views on YouTube alone. Even geek celebs like Damon Lindelof commented on the review. If you are one of the few who hasn’t seen it - click here now!
Well, Mike is back, this time with a less elaborate 18-minute video review of James Cameron’s Avatar. Watch the two-part video review now, after the jump.
Part 1 focuses on the story, the forced cultural message, comparisons to Cameron’s Titanic, the problem with the two-dimension villains, the unexplored problems of savage races without technology, how Cameron tricked audiences into falling in love with an alien race.
Part 2 focuses on the secret meanings behind the words of the world of Avatar, the Titanic/Aliens mach-up, the argument of the film being more about the experience than about the plot, how Fox/Cameron took advantage of a strategic release date, and Mike’s conclusion about the film.
Thanks to MikeyK for the tip.
David Michôd has had a pretty big year at Sundance. Hesher, which he wrote along with director Spencer Susser, was one of the most anticipated films of the festival (read Peter’s review here). He also directed Animal Kingdom, an Australian crime drama starring Guy Pearce, Ben Mendelsohn, and newcomer James Frecheville. I have no compunction about saying that Animal Kingdom was one of my most favorite films of Sundance. Hit the jump for some of my thoughts, as well as a video review I recorded with members of our blogger condo.
The first scene of the film introduces us to our teenage protagonist, Josh (Frecheville), as he’s sitting in front of the television, slack-jawed, watching Dear or No Deal, with an unconscious woman sitting next to him. Moments later, paramedics arrive and we discover that the woman next to him is actually his mother, and that she’s died from a heroin overdose. Josh is forced to go live with his uncles in Melbourne, including Baz (Joel Edgerton) and Darren (Luke Ford), as well as his wizened, loving, and slightly creepy grandmother (Jacki Weaver). The brothers have successfully robbed banks for some time, but Baz is trying to convince brother Pope (Mendelsohn) to get out of this high-risk, low-reward business. When one of the brothers is senselessly killed by police, it propels the entire family into an inextricable cycle of violence that threatens to unravel the entire family.
Animal Kingdom is what I’d call a slow, but worthwhile, burn. In tone, it’s similar to David Chase’s The Sopranos, with its brooding atmosphere, naturalistic dialogue, and brilliant use of soundtrack and score (You will never listen to “Air Supply” the same way again after this film, I promise you). Unlike other crime films, though, the film isn’t heavy on the violence or action. In fact, so few are the number of gunshots/kills in this movie that whenever one occurred, I was quite startled and literally jumped in my seat. The violence in the Melbourne-based world that Michôd has created is always sudden, always unexpected, and always brutal.
Most of the movie rests on the shoulders of Frecheville, through whose eyes we witness the horrifying events that unfold throughout the film. I’ll admit that at first I wasn’t too taken with his performance; Frecheville spends much of the film looking completely catatonic and shell-shocked, and I questioned how much acting skill he was truly possessed of. However, I appreciated the fact that a lot of this was probably a result of Michôd’s direction. Josh, called “J” by his family and friends, has undoubtedly lived a bizarre life constantly surrounded by violence. The detached way he behaves through most of the film is probably a result of this, a physical and emotional manifestation of the ravages of crime. Thus, he ends up successfully holding the film together.
Weaver and Mendelsohn also put in standout performances. Mendelsohn’s character of Pope is absolutely terrifying, a seemingly innocuous brother who reveals more of his sociopathic tendencies as the film progresses. And Weaver is chilling as the loving grandmother. It’s a character we’ve seen before in films like this, the unassuming maternal figure who also happens to pull all the strings, or at least, know where all the strings are. But Weaver wonderfully brings out the grandmother’s character traits with subtlety (for example, she constantly kisses her sons on the lips, a strange yet telling sign of her near-pathological attachment to them), and towards the end of the film, she’s given an opportunity to demonstrate her acting chops to great effect.
Thematically, Animal Kingdom recalls the work of Greek playwright Aeschylus, who wrote compellingly on the nature of revenge and its attendant tragedy. With its deliberate pacing and excellent direction, Animal Kingdom is riveting, thrilling, and in the end, heartbreaking.
On my last night at Sundance, I fired up the camera to discuss the movie with some other bloggers at our condo. You can watch that discussion below:
Earlier today I saw a screening of Joel Schumacher’s Twelve, which stars Chace Crawford, Emma Roberts, 50 Cent, Ellen Barkin and Rory Culkin. Twelve takes place in a similar world as Gossip Girl, focusing mostly on super rich upper east side New Yorkers.
“A new drama chronicling of the highs and lows of privileged kids on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, in a tale that involves sex, drugs and murder. Written by Jordan Melamed (the director of 2001’s Maniac), the story follows a young drug dealer who watches as his high-rolling life is dismantled in the wake of his cousin’s murder, which sees his best friend arrested for the crime.”
While most people like to give Schumacher shit for his Batman films, many forget his better films, like The Lost Boys, Flatliners, A Time To Kill, and Phone Booth. Is Twelve a return to form? Or just a disaster? Watch the video blog review I recorded with Frosty from Collider, embedded after the jump.
