Heavy hitters this week: Oscar contenders and people who just hit hard. We talk through The Post, The Commuter, Jane and what’s new in home entertainment.
Listen to the podcast HERE.
All posts by maddwolf
A Very Rare Sort of Bear
Paddington 2
by Cat McAlpine
Paddington 2 paints a beautiful, pop-up love letter to London. It breaks down something like this:
Wes Anderson aesthetic + Lemony Snicket whimsy + marmalade = Paddington Bear’s latest adventure.
Sure, this is a kid’s movie. The main character is a talking bear. His greatest aspiration is to buy a rare pop-up book of London for his Aunt’s birthday. In most ways, the film is predictable. Almost rote. But there’s some sparkle there, too.
Firstly, the movie is incredibly well lit. Lighting this good has no business in a children’s film’s sequel. And yet there it is. Warm yellow homes, moody shafts of light through window panes, snowy alleyways. That light isn’t wasted either. It illuminates bright, punchy sets and colorful costumes hung on a parade of quirky characters.
The Wes Anderson inspiration shows up in bright green rooms and pastel pink prison uniforms. Director Paul King finds sweetness in even life’s most ordinary moments. Where he cannot find sweetness, in a grimy pipe or a shattered telephone box, he finds curiosity instead, playing with light and camera angles.
Following a pop-up book of London, King makes sure to hit all of London’s beloved landmarks. London is a part of Paddington’s mythology. It’s a magical kingdom full of fun and mystery. King paints the city beautifully.
Secondly, what a cast. Sally Hawkins, fresh off her incredible performance in The Shape of Water, oozes gumption. English favorites parade across the screen: Peter Capaldi, Richard Ayoade, Brendan Gleeson.
None quite as fun, though, as Hugh Grant in his role as an unhinged stage actor. As the baddie, Grant never slips into evil. Nefarious, yes, but never evil. King keeps his film silly, always, but never allows it to be hollow.
For every predictable gag there’s a genuinely funny moment, too. Good children’s films cater to their whole audience, kids and parents. Its important to screen films like these in theatres. I was reminded of this when a character passed out, face down, into a cake. The children in the audience shrieked with delight.
That’s Paddington 2’s final merit. It’s good natured. It has jokes, visual gags, and constant reminders to be kind. Paddington believes in himself, his family, and his friends. Sure, a children’s film about a talking bear isn’t destined to be profound. But it manages to be sweet all the way through, just like marmalade.
Crazy Train
The Commuter
by Hope Madden
In 2014, Jaume Collet-Serra directed Non-Stop, a Liam Neeson thriller that saw the down-on-his-luck Irishman with a particular set of skills trapped on a speeding vehicle with a killer, a mystery, and an outside force looking to pin some wrongdoing on him.
In 2018, Jaume Collet-Serra directed The Commuter. Same movie. Train this time.
This go-round, happily married devoted father Michael MacCauley (Neeson) gets chatted up by the lovely and mysterious Joanna (Vera Farmiga) as he heads home on his nightly commute. She poses a question: would you do one little thing—something you are uniquely qualified to do—if it landed you 100k and you had no idea of the consequences?
Well, it’s not a game and next thing you know he’s dragging his lanky frame up and down the train cars trying to find a mysterious person with a mysterious bag before his family is nabbed or someone else gets killed.
How many times do we have to see this movie? We get it, Neeson is not a man to be messed with. He’s savvy, noble and he can take a punch.
Farmiga’s always a welcome sight, plus Sam Neill and Patrick Wilson contribute as they can. But mainly it’s just you, Neeson and a host of stereotypes trying to test your mystery-solving skills but not your patience.
At its best, The Commuter is a B-movie popcorn-munching ode to the forgotten middle class good guy. At its worst, a boldly predictable waste of talent littered with plot holes and weak CGI.
It’s a Liam Neeson movie. What do you want?
Must Never Be Silent
The Post
by Hope Madden
It is Oscar season, people, and we have a big story to tell. Assemble the heavy hitters!
Spielberg – check.
Tom Hanks – check.
Where do you go from there when you’re making the Big Important Film? The one with potential blockbuster legs?
Correct: Meryl Streep.
It is official: The Post has it all, beginning with the almost-too-relevant story of a newspaper casting off its personal associations to hold the government accountable by sharing actual news with citizens of the United States and the world.
“If we live in a world where the government tells us what we can and cannot print,” says Ben Bradlee by way of Tom Hanks, “the Washington Post has already ceased to exist.”
The year is 1971. The New York Times has just published parts of the Pentagon Papers, a decades-long study that proves the government lied for years about what was happening in Vietnam. The Washington Post wants desperately to be seen as one of the big news outlets, so they’re working to publish similar content of their own when Nixon decides it’s in his purview to suppress the freedom of the press.
A timely reminder of the struggle to maintain an informed public, Spielberg’s latest is also a testament to Post publisher Kay Graham (Streep). The film offers an insightful image of her difficult road and her courageous actions.
Like Spotlight, also co-written by Post co-scribe Josh Singer (writing here with Liz Hannah), this story encapsulates a watershed moment in journalism. No, not the struggle for a free press. The introduction of profit into the mix. Part of the film’s tension comes from the fact that the Pentagon Papers became available at the same time that the Post was being made public, which introduces yet another powerful contributor toward determining what is and is not deemed appropriate news: money.
It’s a lot to tackle, but naturally, Spielberg has it all well in hand and he doesn’t limit his spectacular casting to Streep and Hanks. Look for great ensemble performances from Tracy Letts, Bob Odenkirk, Bradley Whitford, Sarah Paulson, Bruce Greenwood and about 30 others.
Spielberg’s passion and polish come together here as an expertly crafted rallying cry. He’s preaching to the choir, but he preaches so well.
Into the Wild
Jane
by George Wolf
Of all the feels stirred by Brett Morgen’s new documentary Jane, perhaps the most lasting is the wonderful rediscovery of an iconic personality we thought we knew.
And if you didn’t know Jane Goodall at all, this is an unforgettable introduction.
Goodall was a young secretary to famed archeologist Dr. Louis Leakey in 1962 when the Dr. dispatched her to Tanzania for a groundbreaking study of free-living chimpanzees. Her qualifications? Only a love of animals and a passion to live among them.
To Leakey, this only made Jane more valuable, as she would enter the wild with no predetermined biases that might cloud her findings. As the project gained notoriety, National Geographic assigned acclaimed photographer Hugo van Lawick to join Goodall, eventually becoming her first husband.
Morgen (The Kid Stays in the Picture, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck) was blessed with over 100 hours of van Lawick’s 16mm footage, and he lets it breathe in a manner that is remarkably organic. These archives, swimming in a loving score from Philip Glass, put us right next to Goodall as she blazes her scientific trail.
The sense of discovery quickly becomes twofold. Goodall was experiencing things unknown to science (as an untrained “comely young miss,” no less), and we become the quiet student of her environment, as she was to the chimps of the Gombe Reserve.
Morgen also includes current memories from Goodall, now in her eighties, and her insightful commentary, interspersed as it is with striking film of her younger self embarking on a historic journey, adds a touching, heartfelt layer.
Jane’s is a remarkable story of curiosity, commitment and the passion to learn. And Jane, easily one of the best docs of 2017, is a beautiful piece of storytelling.
I Don’t Want to Go Out – Week of January 8
Nasty weather getting you down? Nothing cheers a body up like a clown! That’s right, It comes home this week, along with some other bits of middling entertainment from 2017. Wouldn’t it all go so well with popcorn? Pop pop pop pop pop…
Click the film title to read the full review.
It
Marshall
The Foreigner
Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House
Friend Request
Fright Club: Oscar Nominee Skeletons in the Closet
You know what? This year’s batch of Oscar hopefuls have made some genuinely excellent horror movies. Richard Jenkins starred in not only the amazing Bone Tomahawk, but also the underseen Fright Club favorite Let Me In. Willem Dafoe took a beating in the amazing Antichrist and grabbed an Oscar nomination for his glorious turn in Shadow of the Vampire. Laurie Metcalf made us laugh and squirm in Scream 2 and Woody Harrelson led one of our all time favorite zombie shoot-em-ups, Zombieland.
But what’s the fun in talking about that when so many of the nominees have made so many bad movies? Here we focus on the worst of the worst, but if you check out the podcast we mention even more.
5. Halloween II (2009)
Octavia Spencer’s 20+ year career, struggling early with low-budget supporting work, guarantees her a place in this list. Indeed, she could have taken several slots (2006’s Pulse is especially rank), but we find ourselves drawn to Rob Zombie’s sequel to his 2007 revisionist history.
Zombie ups the violence, adds dream sequences and suggests that Laurie Strode (played here, poorly, by Scout Taylor-Compton) shares some hereditary psychosis with her brother Michael.
Spencer plays the Night Nurse, which naturally means that she dies. Pretty spectacularly, actually, but that hardly salvages the mirthless cameo-tastic retread.
4. Gary Oldman: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)
Francis Ford Coppola took his shot at Dracula in ’92. How’d he do?
Cons: Keanu Reeves cannot act. Winona Ryder can act—we’ve seen her act—but she shows no aptitude for it here, and lord she should not do accents. Anthony Hopkins has always enjoyed the taste of scenery, but his performance here is just ham-fisted camp.
Pros: Gary Oldman, who can chomp scenery with the best chewers in the biz, munches here with great panache. He delivers a perversely fascinating performance. His queer old man Dracula, in particular – asynchronous shadow and all – offers a lot of creepy fun. Plus, Tom Waits as Renfield – nice!
Still, there’s no looking past Ryder, whose performance is high school drama bad.
3. Clownhouse (1989)
There are several fascinating pieces of information concerning the derivative yet uniquely weird Clownhouse. These range from odd to awful.
1) The Sundance Film Festival somehow found this film—this one, Clownhouse, the movie about 3 escaped mental patients who dress as clowns, break into a house where three brothers are home alone on Halloween night, and commence to terrify and slaughter them— worthy of a nomination for Best Drama. If you haven’t seen this film, you might not quite recognize how profoundly insane that is.
2) The great and underappreciated Sam Rockwell made his feature debut as the dickhead oldest brother in this movie. The clowns themselves—Cheezo, Bippo, and Dippo—are genuinely scary and garishly fascinating, but outside of them, only Rockwell can act. At all.
3) Writer/director Victor Salva would go on to create the Jeepers Creepers franchise. But first he would serve 15 months of a 3-year state prison sentence for molesting the 12-year-old lead actor in this film, Nathan Forrest Winters.
So, basically, this film should never have been made. But at least Rockwell got his start here.
2. Margot Robbie: ICU (2009)
Margot Robbie is a confirmed talent. Underappreciated in her wickedly perfect turn in Wolf of Wall Street, she has gone on to prove that she is far more than a stunning beauty (though she certainly is that).
Not that you’d realize that by way of her early work in this low-budget Aussie dumpster fire.
The then-19-year-old leads a cast of unhappy teens vacationing for the weekend with their estranged dad, who’s called into work yet again. To entertain themselves, they peep on their neighbors through the facing skyscraper windows.
Robbie showers, swims and changes clothes at least 3 needless times within the film’s opening 10 minutes, which makes a film that wags a finger at modern voyeurism feel a little hypocritical. But to even make that statement is to take writer/director Aash Aaron’s film too seriously. Heinously acted, abysmally written and tediously directed, it amounts to 50 minutes of whining followed by utterly ludicrous plot twists, unless Australia boasts the largest per-capita number of serial killers on earth.
But the point is this: Robbie would go on to deliver stellar performances, so this is just something we all need to shake off.
1. Frances McDormand: Crimewave (1985)
Is a horror film really a horror film just because imdb.com says so?
Well, anything as bad as Crimewave is a horror, that’s for sure. The fact that it’s a slapstick crime comedy at its heart hardly matters.
Co-written by Joel and Ethan Coen, directed by Sam Raimi and co-starring Bruce Campbell, this film has a pedigree. And we love them all so much we can almost forgive them for this insufferable disaster. But we suffered through it for two scenes—one at the beginning, one at the end—involving a nun who’s taken a vow of silence.
Frances McDormand, what the hell are you doing in this movie?
No, no. We get it. If we were duped into optimism by Coen brother involvement, what hope did you have? You couldn’t have known that the result would be a tiresome, embarrassing, un-funny, painful waste of 83 minutes.
The Pileup
by Hope Madden
Damn, it is cold out. Cold enough for me to be oh so happy I no longer make that commute every day from Grandview to Crosswoods—easily the nastiest drive in Columbus.
In fact, I don’t have to drive anywhere, which means I don’t have to warm up my car, don’t have to scrape off the windshield. Truth be told, I don’t have to shower.
I mean, I do. Often enough.
But I did drive to Crosswoods last week to return a laptop and meet my friends for lunch and it was stupid-cold and it reminded me of that time I totaled my car.
Among the many casualties of the winter of 2011 was my Toyota Matrix. I’m not nearly over the loss.
This was the first new car George and I had ever purchased. It replaced our beloved, if ridiculous, 1993 Ford Festiva.
We got our new driving machine for a song. Columbus had recently fallen victim to another ludicrous weather patch—the great hailstorm of April 20, 2003—and Tansky Toyota had some damaged vehicles to move.
A bit romantic about our first new car purchase, we thought about going with an undimpled-by-hail version, until we remembered that we don’t have a garage. We could very well have paid an extra two grand for a car that would, by morning, have hail damage, depending on the zany Ohio weather. So we embraced the tiny divots.
That’s the voice of reason at work right there.
Dimples or no, the Matrix was a good car. It required almost no maintenance in the seven years we owned it. It got great gas mileage. It was paid off.
And yet, Mother Nature called it home.
Perhaps your morning commute was delayed one day that January because of three accidents on Rt. 315 north near the hospital curve. Mine was similarly delayed, as I was in one of the accidents.
Yes, if you waded through the metal carnage that morning, I was in the gold Matrix on the left berm—the only one of the six cars involved not to make it home on its own four wheels. Awesome.
Lest you mistake the morning’s escapade for a six-car pileup (how exciting!), it actually was three separate accidents within eyeshot of one another. Maybe less exciting, but certainly odd.
My own misadventure was caused by a slowdown of all lanes of traffic, causing me to veer from the center lane into the far left one. That maneuver allowed me the most stopping distance. It seemed like a smart move since the roads didn’t look bad in the slightest.
Yet, when I applied the brakes, my car continued moving forward at the same speed.
I turned the wheel, deciding it made more sense to hit the median than that black pickup ahead of me. But my vehicle still moved in the same direction.
The culprit? Black ice. Aaarrrgh!
I don’t know why, but the phrase “black ice” makes me want to talk like a pirate.
So I did hit that poor guy in the black pickup, which, unfortunately for me, came out victorious in that battle.
Jeff, the awfully nice man whose vehicle I hit, pulled his truck into the berm and then helped me push mine over. Then we wondered what exactly one does at this point. Call AAA? Contact the police? Notify our insurance agents? Surely all, but in which order?
We decided he’d call the police while I phoned AAA. As it turns out, either of us knew how to call the police except by dialing 911, which seemed like an exaggeration of our predicament, but that’s what he did.
Meanwhile, I forgot what my responsibility was so I got ahold of George.
Jeff never got through to the police via their emergency line, but a cruiser showed up nonetheless. The officer asked whether we’d called AAA, which reminded me to call AAA.
Somewhat obviously, it turned out I had a concussion. My poor car, though, suffered unfixable injuries. No amount of anti-inflammatories or ball bearings or whatever fixes cars would help.
Concussed as I was, car shopping took a backseat to trying to understand the words coming out of George’s mouth for a couple of weeks. And then the nasty winter weather goaded us into putting off the task for a few more weeks; we limped along sharing and bumming rides from friends.
And once springlike weather arrived, we claimed an altogether revolutionary idea—one that proves I learned shockingly little from the horrific weather we’d survived.
We bought a motorcycle.
Maybe I’ll blame the concussion. Anyone living in Central Ohio who buys a motorcycle can’t possibly be in their right mind.
The Screening Room: Ice, Ice Baby
Some Oscar contenders out this week. The Screening Room helps you sort them out: I, Tonya, Molly’s Game, Insidious: The Last Key plus what’s new in home entertainment.
Listen to the podcast HERE.
Don’t Open the Door
Insidious: The Last Key
by Hope Madden
The Insidious franchise—like most horror series—began missing a step about two films in. The fourth installment, Insidious: The Last Key, starts off with promise, though.
Thanks in large part to a heartbreaking performance from Ava Kolker, the newest Insidious opens with a gut punch of an origin story.
By Episode 3, we’d abandoned the core family of the first two films to follow ghost hunters Elise (Lin Shaye), Tucker (Angus Sampson) and Specs (Leigh Whannell, who also writes the series). As this film opens, we glimpse the beginnings of Elise’s gift, the troubles it brings, and the demon she unwittingly released into the world.
Though the minor characters are full-blown clichés, director Adam Robitel (The Taking of Deborah Logan) and his young actors create a compelling opening.
Can Insidious: The Last Key deliver on that promise?
No.
Is it the tedious jump-scare-athon with none of the exquisite delivery we’ve come to expect from James Wan (director of the original Insidious, and producer here)? Is it the mid-film move from spectral thriller to police procedural and back? Is it the creepy attention Elise’s goofball sidekicks pay to her young and pretty nieces?
Or is the problem that the whole cool sequence from the trailer—you know, with Melanie Gaydos and all the ghosts coming out of the jail cells?—is missing from the movie.
Yes—it’s all that and more. The film is a jumbled mess of backstory and personal demons, clichés and uninspired monsters. All of this is shouldered by the veteran Shaye, who is, unfortunately, no lead.
Shaye has proven herself to be a talented character actor in her 40+ years in film, often stealing scenes out from under high-paid leads. (Please see her in Kingpin and There’s Something About Mary, she’s genius.) But she doesn’t have the magnetism to carry a film, and The Last Key feels that much more untethered and pointless for the lack.
Everything runs out of steam at some point. Here’s hoping this franchise has run out of doors to open.
