Amy Adams is as reliable an actor as they come. Thoughtful and expressive, she shares a tremendous range of emotions without uttering a sound.
With his latest, Arrival, director Denis Villeneuve puts her skills to use to quietly display everything from wonder to terror to hope to gratitude as her character, Dr. Louise Banks, struggles to communicate with visitors.
Twelve vessels have touched down in random spots across the globe: Sierra Leone, Russia, China, United States. Each nation has taken its own tack toward determining the purpose of the aliens. An expert in communication and linguistics, Banks has been brought to Montana to decipher that purpose.
Villeneuve, working from Eric Heisserer’s adaptation of Ted Chiang’s short “Story of Your Life,” whispers reminders of a dozen other alien invasion films without ever bending to predictability. His is a sense of cautious wonder.
Those familiar with the director’s work – particularly his more mainstream films Prisoners and Sicario – may be preparing for the unendurably tense. No need.
Yes, there are armed skirmishes, doomsday predictions and bad decisions, but Villeneuve’s focus and ours is always with Banks, whose struggle to make sense of the situation mirrors our own.
Adams owns a performance that does not immediately dazzle. Banks is a solitary, somewhat morose figure. Her predicament reflects humanity’s – she isn’t using her power to communicate for its true use, connecting.
Villeneuve and Adams toy with your expectations – Adams, because of your preconceived notions concerning her solitude, and Villeneuve through a sly playfulness with time and structure.
This sleight of hand allows the filmmaker to ask questions that are simultaneously grand and intimate. Arrival is a quiet film – not mind-blowing or terrifying or one to elicit a self-satisfied, “Fuck yeah!”
People looking for explosions and jingoism on a global scale need not attend. In its place is a quiet contemplation on speaking, listening and working together. While that may not sound like much excitement, it’s about as relevant a message today as anything I can think of.
You know who’s great? Gladys Knight. Man, what a voice. “Midnight Train to Georgia” has to be one of the greatest songs ever recorded.
What’s that got to do with Almost Christmas? Well, Gladys has two scenes it in and she might as well be Santa, bringing a genuine smile each time. So there’s that.
Filling up the film’s other 110 minutes are the favored devices of writer/director David E. Talbert (Baggage Claim, First Sunday): contrived situations, painful dialog and exaggerated storytelling.
At least his heart’s in the right place: home for the holidays.
Family patriarch Walter Meyers (Danny Glover) is facing his first Christmas season since the loss of his beloved wife, so the whole extended clan comes home to Birmingham 5 days out, and the countdown is on. The cliche countdown.
There will be a backyard football game. There will be a dance routine in the kitchen, and there will be plenty of sudden mood swings with tender music ready to cue the sighs and wistful staring that means we’re remembering Mama.
And yes, Glover will say his line about being too mature for this excrement or something.
There’s veteran talent in this cast (Oscar-winner Mo’Nique, Gabrielle Union, Omar Epps, John Michael Higgins, Nicole Ari Parker) but Talbert’s filmmaking is so broadly-drawn and obvious his movie earns more groans than chuckles. Everyone sees, hears or walks in on something at exactly the right moment while calling each other by helpful names such as “brother-in-law” (just like at your house) so anyone who came in late can follow who’s who. There are sassy putdowns and sitcom-ready innuendo, plus plenty of notice when it’s time to get serious, like multiple closeups on a bottle of prescription pills…just to make sure we didn’t miss the message that someone is abusing prescription pills.
Almost Christmas plagues a likable cast with storytelling so lazy it gets points for not having a character win the lottery.
How long has it been since a film touched your very soul?
Chances are, it’s been a few superheroes ago.
Saving the world is great, so is finding love, or cracking the case, funnying the bone or haunting the house. But a movie that slowly awakens you to the human experience seems a little harder to find at the local multiplex.
You can find one in Moonlight, a minor miracle of filmmaking from writer/director Barry Jenkins. With just his second feature (after 2008’s Medicine for Melancholy), Jenkins presents a journey of self-discovery in three acts, each one leading us with graceful insight toward a finale as subtle as it is powerful.
Young Chiron (Alex R. Hibbert) is known as “Little” around his Miami neighborhood, and he’s picked on for being different. Juan, a local drug dealer (Mahershala Ali), finds Little hiding from bullies in an abandoned building, and begins spending more time with the boy, mentoring him while the boy’s own mother (Naomie Harris) is at work or on drugs. Juan and his girlfriend Teresa (Janelle Monae) eventually get the introverted Little to open up, and he asks what the word “faggot” means.
By the time he is a skinny teenager, Chiron (Ashton Sanders) has taken Teresa as a surrogate mother, and is struggling to keep one friend (Andre Holland) and navigate the expectations of masculinity.
As a grown man in Atlanta now known as “Black” (Trevante Rhodes), Chiron embodies them. He lives as a mix of chiseled muscle and silent, fearsome demeanor when two faces from the past stir up ghosts he cannot shake.
Jenkins adapts Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue” with astonishing sensitivity and artful nuance. Simple shots such as closing doors or hands on a sandy beach scream with meaning, and the entire film is grounded in an ache and a longing you will feel in your bones. Jenkins places you in Chiron’s world and lets the important moments breathe, finding universal truth and beauty in the most intimate of questions.
The performances are impeccable, the craftsmanship precise, the insight blinding. You will be a better human for seeing Moonlight. It is a poignant reminder that movies still have that power.
All the single ladies, all the single ladies – unfortunately, life does not always turn out as well for us as it does for Beyonce. Today we celebrate and fear the horror that can befall the single parent. Your kids may be monsters. Monsters may be after your kids. You may be the monster. Maybe it’s all three at once. Whatever the case, horror filmmakers have found a way to hit some very effective buttons when exploring the horror potential in a single parent home.
5. The Ring (2002)
Let’s be honest, Rachel (Naomi Watts) is not much of a mother. Were it not for her sloppy parenting, her precocious son Aidan (adorable and creepy David Dorfman) might not even be in this mess. But she left her VHS tape laying around, paid no attention to what he was up to, and now Samara is coming for him.
Gore Verbinski one-upped Hideo Nakata’s 1998 Japanese original Ringu with this deeply creepy, well-executed nightmare, much of it centering on questionable parenting. Both Watts and Dorfman are excellent, each creating a character that is somehow rigid and distant, but you long for tenderness between them. Dorfman’s wise-beyond-his-years performance feels both chilly and vulnerable, and the relationship here creates an off-kilter foundation for the horrific mystery unfolding.
Everything about this film is done well – the images on the video tape, the looks on the faces of the victims, that horse bit on the boat, Brian Cox in the bathtub, Samara climbing out of the well! Verbinski strings together one nightmare image after another, but the tension of whether or not Rachel has the wherewithal to save the son she hasn’t paid enough attention to in the first place is what holds these together.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PkgRhzq_BQ
4. Goodnight Mommy (2014)
There is something eerily beautiful about Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s rural Austrian horror Goodnight Mommy (Ich seh, Ich seh).
During one languid summer, twin brothers Lukas and Elias await their mother’s return from the hospital. But when their mom comes home, bandaged from the cosmetic surgery she underwent, the brothers fear more has changed than just her face.
Inside this elegantly filmed environment, where sun dappled fields lead to leafy forests, the filmmakers mine a kind of primal childhood fear. There’s a subtle lack of compassion that works the nerves beautifully, because it’s hard to feel too badly for the boys or for their mother. You don’t wish harm on any of them, but at the same time, their flaws make all three a bit terrifying.
Performances by young brothers Lukas and Elias Schwarz compel interest, while Susanne Wuest’s cagey turn as the boys’ mother propels the mystery. It’s a hypnotic, bucolic adventure as visually arresting as it is utterly creepy.
3. Under the Shadow (2016)
The tale is set in Tehran circa 1988, at the height of the Iran/Iraq war and just a few years into the “Cultural Revolution” that enforced fundamentalist ideologies.
Shideh (a fearless Narges Rashidi) has been banned from returning to medical school because of her pre-war political leanings. Her husband, a practicing physician, is serving his yearly medical duty with the troops. This leaves Shideh and their young daughter Dorsa (Avin Manshadi) alone in their apartment as missiles rain on Tehran.
When a dud missile plants itself in the roof of the building (shades of del Toro’s Devil’s Backbone), Dora starts talking to a secret friend. Maybe the friend would be a better mommy.
Frazzled, impatient, judged and constrained from all sides, Shideh’s nerve is hit with this threat. And as external and internal anxieties build, she’s no longer sure what she’s seeing, what she’s thinking, or what the hell to do about it.
The fact that this menacing presence – a djinn, or wind spirit – takes the shape of a flapping, floating burka is no random choice. Shideh’s failure in this moment will determine her daughter’s entire future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fhejr94P14
2. Psycho (1960)
Was Norman Bates psychotic from the start? Or was he smothered into madness by his mother?
Hard to say – Mrs. Bates can’t speak for herself, can she? Although Norman’s mother is not a character in Hitchcock’s classic, her presence is everywhere. But to be fair, we don’t get to see her as she was, we only get to see her as Norman sees her.
Whatever the case, Norman has an unhealthy attachment to his late mother, a single parent whose relationship with her son may have driven him to some very bad deeds. Part of Hitchcock’s skill in this film is to play with our expectations of the characters.
The heroine has done some questionable things. The villain is the most sympathetic character onscreen. The most relevant character in the story isn’t even in the film. Was Mrs. Bates really a bad mom, or does she just seem like that to us because we see her through Norman’s eyes, and he’s a psycho?
1. Babadook (2014)
You’re exhausted – just bone-deep tired – and for the umpteenth night in a row your son refuses to sleep. You let him choose a book to read, and he hands you a pop-up you don’t recognize: The Babadook. Pretty soon, your son isn’t the only one afraid of what’s in the shadows.
Filmmaker Jennifer Kent’s film is expertly written and beautifully acted, boasting unnerving performances from not only a stellar lead in Essie Davis, but also the alarmingly spot-on young Noah Wiseman. Davis’s lovely, loving Amelia is so recognizably wearied by her only child’s erratic, sometimes violent behavior that you cannot help but pity her, and sometimes fear for her, and other times fear her.
Likewise, Wiseman delivers as a tender, confused, dear little boy you sometimes just want to throttle. Their naturalistic performances genuinely showcase the baggage that can exist between a parent and a child.
Much of what catapults The Babadook beyond similar “presence in my house” flicks is the allegorical nature of the story. There’s an almost subversive relevance to the familial tensions because of their naked honesty, and the fight with the shadowy monster as well as the film’s unusual resolution heighten tensions.
The film’s subtext sits so close to the surface that it threatens to burst through. Though that does at times weaken the fantasy, it gives the film a terrifying urgency. In the subtext there is a primal horror, a taboo rarely visited in film and certainly never examined with such sympathy. Indeed, the compassion in the film may be the element that makes it so very unsettling.
What if I told you…the Chosen One didn’t take the blue pill or the red pill, he took the brown acid, and things got mighty trippy?
Alternate realities, a school for sorcery, supernatural powers hiding seductive dark sides. We’ve seen these themes before, but Doctor Strange presents them with such eye-popping, mind-bending style, the Marvel Comics Universe has a brand new A-lister.
This is one that absolutely rewards the investment in a 3D/IMAX viewing, but beyond all the technical wizardry, the film’s superpower is refreshingly human – a cast with the talent to make elevating some cheesy dialog seem effortless.
Equal parts Jobs and Hawking, Dr. Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a brilliant neurosurgeon stuck in a broken body from a nasty car crash. When medical science can’t restore the dexterity of his hands to operating room standards, he abandons a potential love (Rachel McAdams) to seek out mystical healing in Nepal, finding himself under the tutelage of The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) and Master Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor).
Cumberbatch? Chiwetel? McAdams? Tilda? Talk about your superfriends.
The doctor studies hard and acquires sweet new astral skills – including levitation, Holmes – when a dormant cloak grants him the power of flight and Strange’s place as a new Master is assured. Just in time, too, as the evil Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelson, earning more gold stars for the casting director) and his followers are closing in on a plan to unleash the Dark Dimension and achieve immortality.
Director/co-writer Scott Derrickson (Sinister, Deliver Us from Evil) makes spellbinding use of the spectacular visual effects and, despite early moments in Strange’s transformation that seem a tad rushed, settles into a steady pace that renders this origin story one of the MCU’s most satisfying. Similarly, the script is able to balance a flirtation with excess and unsure transitions with some commendably meatier issues, such as grappling with the question of “when moral bills come due.”
But seriously, those visuals.
Go with the glasses and the biggest screen you can conjure up.
Bathing an audience in violence – but violence in service of a noble cause – has become filmmaker Mel Gibson’s stock and trade.
Braveheart was a great movie – thrilling, self-righteous and violent as hell. But Gibson really hit paydirt as a director when he underpinned his gorefests with images of the victimhood of the Christian. (Or, of Christ himself.)
Gibson returns to what works with his latest, Hacksaw Ridge.
There is no question that the story of WWII veteran Desmond Doss not only deserves but requires our attention. A conscientious objector and devout Seventh Day Adventist, Doss refused to bear arms and yet he single-handedly carried 75 injured soldiers to safety during a particularly bloody battle in Okinawa.
Screenwriters Andrew Knight and Robert Schenkkan burden the film with every cliché in the WWII movie arsenal, from the wholesome hometown love to the flatly stereotyped platoon mates to nearly every line in the film.
Yet, between Gibson’s skill behind the camera and Andrew Garfield’s commitment to his character, Hacksaw Ridge always manages to be better than the material. And there is really no denying Gibson’s knack for action, carnage and viscera – all in the service of non-violence, of course.
It was Doss’s faith that kept him strong in his non-violent beliefs, just as it was his faith that kept him courageous in battle. Whether you believe in God or you do not, you will admire Desmond Doss, and Garfield does him justice.
He’s goofy and layered and at no point does Doss’s own explanation of his faith feel like a sermon. Thank God.
Garfield also boasts lovely chemistry with just about every actor onscreen – this is particularly touching in some early scenes with Teresa Palmer, playing Doss’s hometown sweetheart Dorothy.
So, come for the wholesome message, stay for the flaming soldiers who’ll flail in unimaginable agony before your very eyes.
It isn’t tough to shock with violence when you’re re-telling the greatest story ever told, but to one-up the carnage in a war movie? Have you seen Platoon? Saving Private Ryan?
Well, Gibson has, and he won’t be intimidated. But give the man credit, these sequences are breathtakingly choreographed, as full of energy and clarity as they are human entrails. If you’re looking for an opportunity to satisfy your bloodlust while also celebrating pacifism, well, Gibson’s got you covered.
So, there’s a reason for that gravity-defying shock of hair on the top of a troll’s head. It comes in mighty handy for camouflage, swinging from place to place, or even as a weapon against the attack of a hungry spider.
But these Dreamworks Trolls hate to resort to that last item. Fighting is unhappy business, and Trolls are the happiest creatures alive, filling their days with singing, dancing and hourly hug time.
Except for Branch.
Branch (Justin Timberlake, with a speaking voice that suddenly sounds more polished) lives in his doomsday bunker and warns Princess Poppy (the always likable Anna Kendrick) that loud frivolity will one day attract the attention of the dreaded Bergens, the giant miserable ogres that get their only happiness in life from…eating happy little Trolls.
Of course Branch is right, and when the evil Bergen Chef (Christine Baranski, hamming it up to fine effect) makes off with a fanny pack full of Trolls, Poppy must convince Branch to help her rescue their friends, teach the Bergens the meaning of true happiness, and get with the singing and hugging program already!
Crafted by aa team of co-directors and co-writers sporting multiple animation credits including the Shrek films, Trolls ends up feeling closer to a Smurfs episode after a big-budget 3D upgrade. It’s full of constant song snippets and color splashes, with a repetitive message of plucky positivity aimed squarely at the 8 and under crowd.
For the parents in tow, a few attempts at tongue-in-cheek humor do find their mark, like the friendly cloud who just wants a high five and the hippie-trippy rendition of “The Sounds of Silence.” Recognizable hits and familiar story lines keep coming, each reinforcing the vibe that Trolls is only interested in serving reheated leftovers.
There’s no crime is being a perfectly passable way to spend an afternoon with some young ones. Trolls certainly fits that bill, but its formulaic tale delivers little more.
Quick, who said this: “I went to Detroit with a tab of mescaline and a shovel.”
Who but Iggy Pop?
Effortlessly odd and forever fascinating, Pop and his band, the seminal punks The Stooges, are the subject of Jim Jarmusch’s new documentary, Gimme Danger.
Rock docs forever champion their subjects, frequently making a case for someone’s misunderstood and underappreciated genius. The fact that this kind of treatment could possibly be needed for arguably the first ever punk band, a group who influenced The Ramones, The Sex Pistols, David Bowie and dozens of others – well, it’s just disheartening, isn’t it?
While the story – from Ann Arbor trailer park to punk stardom to Ann Arbor trailer park – fits with the traditional “Behind the Music” approach, it’s never wise to expect the expected with Jarmusch.
Sure, the filmmaker pieces together vintage Stooges performances with interviews, but Gimme Danger is awash in the kind of wry cinematic mastery that has become Jarmusch’s trademark. Interviews with Pop take place in his home, the singer sometimes perched on a golden throne bedecked by skulls, sometimes barefoot in the laundry room in front of a washer/dryer set.
Likewise, on-again, off-again Stooge guitarist James Williamson sits through his interviews, guitar in hand, in a public men’s room.
Why? Why not?
Jarmusch has always brought an unusual perspective to his films, and The Stooges are an unusual subject. The pairing works, and for all Jarmusch’s droll use of animation, Three Stooges bits and vintage advertising as backdrop to Stooge insanity, his own affection and respect for the band is always evident.
Indeed, very early in the film, he proclaims The Stooges, “The greatest rock and roll band of all time.”
Jim Jarmusch is a native Ohioan who loves The Stooges.
Oh my God – we have so much in common!
His relationship with Pop goes back decades, since the singer co-starred in Jarmusch’s Dead Man and an early Coffee and Cigarettes short. In both, Pop (billed here as Jim Osterberg as Iggy Pop) haunts and bewilders with his sinewy frame and enormous eyes.
Oddly enough, Gimme Danger neglects some of the more jarring and lurid details of the Pop life. Jarmusch remains reverent throughout the film, focusing exclusively on The Stooges’ musical history. Almost quizzically missing is detail of Pop and crew’s self-destructive behavior, Pop’s infamous stage antics, or any mention of his solo musical or dramatic career.
Nope, Jarmusch wants you to realize that the world’s first punk band – as infamous record scout Danny Fields notes – reinvented music as we know it.
