Monthly Archives: January 2021

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Nights Are Warm and the Days Are Young

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Some Kind of Heaven

by Hope Madden

There is something absurd and mesmerizing about Lance Oppenheim’s documentary Some Kind of Heaven. The greens of the golf courses are insanely green, the aquas of the pools are blindingly blue/green, the synchrony of limbs or golf carts in the choreographed dances is hypnotic.

They have synchronized golf cart dances.

The Villages is nuts!

Sort of the Disneyland of retirement communities, Florida’s The Villages is a 100,000 strong city, gated and catering exclusively to elderly residents. Their town square is painted and constructed to look like a real town square – it even has a fake history that city tour guides will spin with a smile and a deep, savage tan.

This is a community of affluence ripe for satire in an era of catastrophic generational income inequality. Instead, Oppenheim finds a more melancholy and poignant inspiration. Rather than lampoon the wretched excess, the filmmaker develops character studies, unveiling something more bitter than sweet in this dessert topping of a town.

Anne and Reggie, married 47 years, began falling apart before they moved to The Villages, but his recreational drug use and attempts at spiritual awakening are taking a toll. A poignant look at loneliness inside the happiest place in old age, the recently widowed Barbara works all day and finds herself an outsider in a world full of vacant, smiling eyes.

But the true outsider is the seediest and most fascinating character of the bunch. Eighty-one-year-old Dennis cannot afford The Villages, but he’s not ashamed to scam his way in. Living in his van and preying on lonely women with money, he reminded me of the sublime Senior Love Triangle from 2020.

That comparison, though, only draws attention to the fairly superficial treatment Oppenheim gives the subjects. Dennis seemed to be an opportunity to comment on an unseemly reality seeping into this community, itself a perversion of reality.

Oppenheim’s framing and David Bolen’s cinematography create an unforgettable visual experience, preparing you for a Wes Anderson meets John Waters documentary about rich old people synchronized swimming.

Well, that’s just too high a bar. Who could live up to that? Instead, Oppenheim settles for a little razzle dazzle, a little character intrigue, and enough footage to make you wonder what the hell goes on in The Villages.

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Diamond Life

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Locked Down

by George Wolf

If you’re gonna be quarantined, you could do worse than being stuck with Anne Hathaway or Chiwetel Ejiofor. They’re both extremely talented and – inexplicable internet hate notwithstanding – easy to like.

But in Locked Down, their characters don’t like each other much anymore. In fact, Linda and Paxton were just about to split up when the stay-at-home orders came down. So now he’s been furloughed, she’s been firing people via Skype, and they keep to opposite ends of their (pretty sweet) London townhouse.

But fate is a funny thing, and though Paxton thinks it’s long been against him, suddenly he and Linda have the opportunity to steal a priceless diamond from Herrod’s without anyone noticing.

In writer Steven Knight’s resume of big ups (Locke) and major downs (Serenity – I mean wtf?) Locked Down is a creamy middle with a pleasant enough aftertaste.

Though the dialogue is filled with too-perfect banter and characters who casually drop references to Norse mythology while getting tripped up over “implode” and “explode”, everyone involved seems like their having fun. Expect a couple laugh out loud moments as well, so there’s that.

Hathaway and Ejiofor exude effortless charisma, and a parade of cameos (Ben Stiller, Ben Kingsley, Mindy Kaling, Stephen Merchant, Claes Bang) adds to the comfort food feeling.

And since this is a true socially distant production, most of those famous faces are seen only on computer screens, with director Doug Liman making sure there are plenty of Zoom glitches and other overdone reminders of our interesting times.

But though Liman is best known for action flicks (Edge of Tomorrow, Mr. and Mrs. Smith) this is no Ocean’s Two. The heist is small scale and forgettable fun, but it’s when we’re gently reminded about the things the pandemic hasn’t changed – only revealed – that Locked Down finds a relevant voice.

Locked Down is available now on HBOMax

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School of Hard Rocks

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Rock Camp: The Movie

by George Wolf

“Thanks for coming out tonight, we’re Motley Jüe..oy!”

Yes, Motley Jüe was a real band, at least for a few days. Picking the perfect band name is just a small part of the fun for the wannabe rockers at Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp. Rock Camp: The Movie takes us inside the experience that bridges the gap between stage and the Gold Circle section.

Because, let’s face it, those in the cheap seats can’t afford this, either. But for the fans that can swing it, RCTM shows us an indulgence that’s a lot less worthy of the kinds of jokes it inspired in year one.

Promoter David Fishof launched the first camp in 1997, to minimal interest. He got the idea from a practical joke played on him backstage by members of Ringo’s All-Starr Band (that home video footage is priceless), though low attendance the first year seemed to signal failure.

But after the camp was featured in various TV and commercial segments, it gained a foothold in popular culture. That brought some big rock stars into the fold, and Fishof (an interesting guy who could merit a documentary himself) suddenly had a hit.

The film is the debut feature for co-writers/directors Renee Barron and Douglas Blush, which often shows. Their focus can wander, and much of the production isn’t far removed from a marketing video. Plus, there’s no escaping that fact that much of the footage – judging by the look of some very famous faces – is clearly less than recent. The overall context of regular folk taking a chance to follow their passion, though, does help these rough edges seem appropriate.

Profiles of fewer campers might have allowed time to foster a more intimate feel, but the dreamers Barron and Blush introduce are worth knowing. We see lives uplifted, families strengthened, and true talent given the chance to grow.

Perhaps most surprisingly, we see rich and incredibly successful musicians truly moved by their students, and reconnecting with the simple joy of music that set them on their path. And some of them – Roger Daltrey, Paul Stanley and Sammy Hagar especially – seem like really nice people.

Yeah, Gene Simmons is still obnoxious. Even fantasies have their limits.

Shudder Premiere

Tale from the Hood

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Hunted

by Hope Madden

It’s hard to tell a new story. People have been telling stories since the beginning of people, and eventually – probably millennia ago – we realized we were just recycling the same dozen or so tales.

This week’s Shudder premiere, director Vincent Paronnaud’s Hunted, feels especially familiar. He knows that, presumably, or the woman being chased through a massive forest wouldn’t be wearing a red hooded coat.

It’s clear in every aspect of the telling of this story that the filmmaker (and a team of writers including Paronnaud, Lea Pernollet and David H. Pickering) want you to understand how familiar this is.

Indeed, Paronnaud’s tale of a man chasing a woman is so ordinary that no matter how outlandish the circumstances, onlookers barely register it as more than a moment’s blip in their day.

Hunted opens with a fairy tale, spun by fireside in a deep, dark woods, of a group of men who turn on a woman. In this ancient lore, things don’t turn out so well for the men, not because a savior steps in but because of something more primal.

And so, eons later, the aptly named Eve (Lucie Debay) is dealing with a boss who underestimates her and a husband who can’t stop calling. She goes out for a drink. That might have been the last we ever heard from Eve.

Instead, after a series of events that escalate beyond the point of realism to something bordering on the absurd, the whole damn forest hears her.

Debay’s transformation is also marked very obviously and very visually, underscoring the cartoonish nature of this particular enactment. She does a wonderful job of evolving from something in Act 1 that feels garden variety for horror into something surprising and fierce.

Arieh Worthalter equals her as the psychopath, often lensed to give him the look of an animated wolf charming villagers.

Paronnaud’s background is in animation—he co-directed Marjane Satrapi’s sublime black and white wonder Persepolis. His move to horror benefits from his visual flair. While the red coat stands out as an obvious nod (not to mention terrible camouflage), a later splash of blue feels simultaneously insane and warrior-like.  

Or a fresh coat of paint.

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The Room Where It Happened

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One Night in Miami

by George Wolf

The room where it really happened was in Miami’s Hampton House. After a young Cassius Clay won the Heavyweight title from Sonny Liston on Feb. 25, 1964, he joined his long time mentor Malcolm X, NFL legend Jim Brown and soul sensation Sam Cooke at the South Florida hotel.

Writer Kemp Powers first imagined how that meeting of legendary minds might have played out, and now Regina King – who already has an acting Oscar – jumps into the race for Best Director with a wise and wonderful adaptation of Powers’s stage play. Propelled by a bold, vital script from Powers himself, King invites us into a frank discussion about the steps in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and about each man’s role in the struggle.

Though existing mainly inside that single hotel room, One Night in Miami is in a constant state of motion, as four talented actors serve and volley through a ballet of insight and intellect.

Portraying a bigger-than life-personality such as Clay without a hint of caricature is no easy feat, but Eli Goree handles it with smooth charisma.

Clay’s braggadocio is as playful and charming as you remember, but Goree also finds authentic shades of apprehension about the societal role Clay (who would publicly join the Nation of Islam and announce his name change to Muhammed Ali just weeks after the meeting) was about to accept.

Kingsley Ben-Adir’s Malcom X is a measured voice of wisdom, but the film finds its gravitational pull in the forces of Aldis Hodge and Leslie Odom, Jr.

As Brown, Hodge is beautifully restrained power, a man of incredible strength still able to be staggered by sudden blows of racism. Brown’s path as a leader of the civil rights movement contrasts sharply with Cooke’s, and Odom, Jr. gives the singer surprising and resonant layers that include anger at the thought that he’s not all in for the cause.

The characters continually challenge each other, as King and Powers challenge us with a profundity that comes from their refusal to settle for easy answers. Each question the film raises connects past to present with committed grace, and One Night in Miami finds a beautiful dignity that shines in the face of bigotry. 

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Hair of the Dog

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Bright Hill Road

by Hope Madden

No one looks forward to the consequences of their actions. If you believe in God, they’re coming for you one way or the other.

Robert Cuffley’s latest economically made horror Bright Hill Road shadows no-longer-functioning alcoholic Marcy (Siobhan Williams) through a pretty bad stretch. It would be hard to imagine things getting any worse, really. So, Marcy decides to drive across country to spend some time with her sister Mia in California.

She doesn’t drive straight through, though. She wakes up in her car in front of a pretty dodgy looking hotel in some forgotten little town and finds herself checking in. The place is super weird, though, and Marcy’s never sure if she’s hallucinating, drying out, or seeing and hearing ghosts.

Most of the time Bright Hill Road works—playing on your guesswork without giving away all its secrets. Sometimes it does not work. But the film lives and dies with Siobhan Williams’s performance.

Slight but scrappy, she takes on the image of Angela Bettis or Elliot Page. You worry for her, believe in both her vulnerability and the chip on her shoulder that might get her through it. She’s weary but spirited and more than anything, she’s in denial.

Cuffley’s direction takes on a hallucinatory quality that suits Susie Maloney’s trippy script. Both Act 1 and Act 3 feel rushed—the opening bit of violence shocks you out of complaining, but the final moments border on being unearned. Still, the meat of the film meanders at a creepy pace, one that conjures the feeling of a bad dream.

Bright Hill Road has an intentional, low rent Overlook quality to it—something both supernatural and seedy. It carries its own internal logic, and while the toughest eruptions of violence hit us in the film’s opening moments, it has some grim images to share as the hotel takes on additional guests.

Cuffley doesn’t break a lot of new ground, but his is an appealing riff on a familiar tune. Most of our demons are within. Trauma takes on an even more sinister form when it’s mixed up with shame. Addiction is its own monster. No one likes a shared bathroom.

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Is Anyone There?

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Go/Don’t Go

by Brandon Thomas

The opening minutes of Go/Don’t Go hint at a burgeoning relationship drama. Shy boy meets an outgoing girl. Girl draws the boy out of his shell. Hints of electricity crackle as they find themselves engrossed in conversation. The parts are all there, but as the scene comes to a close, Go/Don’t Go crosses into something a little more…sinister. 

Set in a not-so-distant future, Adam (writer/director Alex Knapp) spends his days completing routine tasks. He cleans, prepares meals and works on repairing a car. When not doing his day-to-day, Adam wanders the countryside, checks homes and marks areas on a map as “Go/Don’t Go.” Adam appears to be the only person left.

Isolation and loneliness exist in the periphery of every post-apocalyptic type movie. In Go/Don’t Go, the isolation is front and center. Adam doesn’t spend the entire running time evading cannibalistic marauders or dispatching shuffling zombies. No, Adam’s conflict exists in the haunted memories of a past love, K (Olivia Luccardi, It Follows). 

Looked at as a typical horror/thriller, Go/Don’t Go could be a frustrating watch for many. There’s a purposeful aloofness to the narrative that builds a lot of mystery, but also never shows much interest in resolving said mysteries. Adam’s flashbacks fill in interesting character gaps instead of explaining how Adam found himself in his current situation. 

The film’s most interesting angle is how it plays with metaphor. Is the landscape in which Adam lives even real? Every house he enters has running water and electricity. The market he goes to is always stocked full of fresh products. Maybe Adam’s shyness, hinted at in those opening minutes, has consumed him after the ending of a relationship. Of course, nothing is definitive and most of this is left to the viewer to decide. 

Knapp’s handling of familiar territory is a breath of fresh air. Despite the lack of momentum in the narrative, Knapp taps into a sense of urgency through clever editing. This allows layers of character to be peeled back piece by piece. It’s enough to keep us interested and invested in a story that moves at more of a sporadic pace. 

By focusing on character and theme, Go/Don’t Go manages to stand out in a sea of post-apocalyptic tales. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38k4Mmat_6I

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Not a British Comedy

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Bloody Hell

by Hope Madden

The title made me think I was in for droll English humor. Not the case.

Bloody Hell, the latest from filmmaker Alister Grierson, is a kind of American/Finnish hybrid about tourism and how it’s often a terrible decision.

Rex (Ben O’Toole, Detroit) made one mistake. Well, it was sort of a series of mistakes all at one time, but they’re only mistakes if you think of them that way, and he doesn’t. Not really. Yes, one person died as a result, but Rex’s debt is paid now and he’s ready to rebuild his life.

Just not in the US, where the video of his “mistake” made him wildly, oppressively famous. Nope, somewhere else. Somewhere far away. Somewhere calm.

Finland! It’s the happiest country in the world! (It’s true. Look it up.) What could go wrong? There’s even reindeer.

There’s also this one sadistic and insane family, and Rex is about to get to know them and learn that unwanted fame is not, in the grander scheme, that bad when the grander scheme includes Finnish cannibals.

Bloody Hell is funny. It’s mean funny, sometimes tone-deaf mean and not so funny, but the often joyously dark humor almost makes up for that. The film’s success is mainly thanks to O’Toole, who manages to be sympathetic and sort of awful.

A string of lunatic supporting turns moves the story forward. Caroline Craig and Matthew Sunderland, in particular, are creepy fun as the heads of the household.

Credit screenwriter Robert Benjamin for much of the film’s frenetic pace. He has a knack for understanding what details we really do not need to possess to be able to follow along. Benjamin has basically strung together a series of carnage-strewn set pieces, and Grierson relies on O’Toole’s charisma to elevate these for messy, bloody laughs.

With self-deprecating charm to burn, O’Toole creates a wrong-headed but hilarious and almost sweet tone that helps Grierson hold together a plot that throws a lot at you. But at its heart, Bloody Hell is the tale of a lonely guy—endearingly but borderline psychotically lonely—and what it takes for him to find someone to love.   

It takes a trip to Finland. No wonder they’re so happy over there!

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Peace From the World

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The Reason I Jump

by George Wolf

Ten years ago, a Japanese teenager wrote a book that quickly became regarded as “an envoy from another world.”

With The Reason I Jump, 13 year-old Naoki Higashida expressed in poetic detail how a nonverbal autistic child sees the world.

In short, it’s “details first…then the whole thing.”

For the film adaptation, veteran documentarian Jerry Rothwell gently weaves narrated passages from the book around visits with a handful of other mostly nonverbal autistic teens from around the globe.

The wonderful cinematography from Ruben Woodin Deschamps is a perfect vessel to unveil the beautifully undiscovered country the film explores. These teens are talented, intelligent and expressive, longing for friendships that only require “peace from the world.”

And more than anything, they want to change the perception of autism by joining the conversations they’ve long been the subject of. The Reason I Jump is a touching introduction into how much we can learn by listening to them.

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Better Together

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If Not Now, When?

by Hope Madden

Meagan Good and Tamara Bass have essentially grown up before our eyes. Mainly taking supporting roles in films and TV, the veterans have been fairly consistent presences since the Nineties.

For their latest, they create their own roles and their own stories. If Not Now, When?—written by Bass and co-directed by the duo—chronicles the lives of four high school besties facing their thirties and wondering what went wrong.

Good and Bass co-star as, respectively, a professional facing her addiction problem and a nurse unwilling to hope for a family of her own. They’re joined by Mekia Cox as a football star’s unhappily pregnant wife, and, most impressively, Meagan Holder as a mother torn between family and ambition.

The four have a fairly solid chemistry, with Holder bringing a mellow, peacemaker vibe that diffuses much of the melodrama the film flirts with. A solid supporting cast—Edwin Hodge is especially strong as a love interest—help give each character’s personal story some needed depth and interest.

Bass’s script is too often superficial, creating moments for each star to shine, but those moments invariably feel unearned. Without weightier or more believable interior lives and conflicts, flashes of heartbreak or breakthrough come off as little more than fodder for an acting reel. They rarely feel like honest moments in a character’s life.

If Not Now, When? does a lot right, too. The pacing of each character’s arc is different, so the excitement and poignant moments are staggered—more like real life. We don’t all hit our own personal highs and lows simultaneously (thank God), and neither should these characters. The cadence not only lends some needed authenticity, but it gives the film a slight irregularity in its structure, which keeps it from feeling formulaic or predictable.

In keeping with that thread of authenticity, Bass wisely avoids closing each individual story with tidy precision. Will she or won’t she? And how will that turn out for her? The questions are rarely answered with any real finality, and that emphasizes the film’s point, which is not how each one is doing individually. Bass and Good are more interested in exploring how they do together.