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Outtakes, Slider

Fall Preview Countdown

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Football, honey crisp apples, leaves to rake – you know what that means? It means the cinema will turn from alien invasion bombast to thought provoking, character driven awards bait. Hooray!  Here are the ten fall movies we are most excited to spend time with between now and the holidays.

 10. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1

Sure, it’s another blockbuster and hardly the kind of adult, autumnal fare you’ll find on the balance of the list, but we don’t care. We’re as geeked for Katniss’s next step as any 13-year-old girl. Director Francis Lawrence took the franchise into ingenious new territory with Catching Fire and we are eager to see where JLaw and team can take the political maneuvering next.

9. Fury (October 17)

Brad Pitt returns to Nazi Germany, but don’t expect the dark comedy of Inglourious Basterds. Writer/director David Ayer (End of Watch) is at the helm of what is being described as a brutal but honest look at WWII.

8. Whiplash (October 23)

The always spectacular J. K. Simmons and talented, young Miles Teller join forces in a cymbal-crashing boot camp for musicians. Buzz for this one is great, and we love Simmons, so we’re ready to rock and roll.

7. Men, Women & Children (October 17)

Jason Reitman made his first major misstep this year with the syrupy mess Labor Day, but we are optimistic he will recover with this ensemble drama about how technology is changing our personal landscapes. Co-writer Erin Cressida Wilson (Secretary) should help.

6. Rosewater (November 7)

Jon Stewart writes and directs this true story of a journalist imprisoned and tortured for simply reporting on Iran’s 2009 election. Clearly a topic close to Stewart’s heart, we are eager to see if he can do at the helm of a film what he’s managed to do with his comedy show: articulate the people’s need for unencumbered journalism.

5. Birdman (October 17)

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu takes a break from heady, heartbreaking drama (Biutiful, 21 Grams, Amores Perros) for something lighter and a bit more meta. Onetime Batman, current struggling actor Michael Keaton plays a struggling actor once known for his role as a superhero. We are in.

4. Foxcatcher (November 14)

Steve Carell has gotten notice for an unforgettable and surprising turn in a true crime drama co-starring Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo. Director Bennett Miller (Capote, Moneyball) has done no wrong so far in his career, and we are intrigued to see where he takes us next.

3. Interstellar (November 9)

Because Christopher Nolan. If he’s directing, we’re in line for tickets, so this space exploration/wormhole business starring Matthew McConaughey (hey, he’s been a good bet lately, eh?) sounds like time well spent.

2. Gone Girl (October 3)

Who else would we line up to see no matter what? David Fincher, who helms this gritty crime drama about a missing wife and a husband who looks guilty. Ben Affleck stars, which is not always his strongest suit, but we’re betting on Fincher.

1. St. Vincent

Bill Murray plays the aging, boozy whoremonger next door who lends a hand to the neighborhood’s new single mom (Melissa McCarthy) in need of a babysitter. What could go wrong? We will be on hand to find out.

Fright Club

Fright Club: The Reflecting Skin

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The Reflecting Skin (1990)

It isn’t often when documenting horror cinema that you have the need to mention an art director, but for The Reflecting Skin, the work of Rick Roberts deserves a note. His gorgeous, bucolic Idaho is perfectly crafted, with golden wheat and decrepit wooden outbuildings representing both the wholesomeness and decay that will meld in this tale.

Writer/director Philip Ridley has a fascinating imagination, and his film captures your attention from its opening moments. A cherubic tot walks gleefully through wheat fields toward his two adorable little buddies, carrying a frog nearly as big as he is. “Look at this wonderful frog!” he calls out to them.

What happens next is grotesque and amazing – the casual but exuberant cruelty of children. It’s the perfect introduction to this world of macabre happenings as seen through the eyes of a little boy.

Seth Dove lives with his emotionally abusive mother and his soft but distant father, who run a gas station in rural Idaho sometime after WWII. Seth’s older brother Cameron (Viggo Mortensen) is off serving in Japan. Seth has decided that the neighborhood widow Dolphin Blue (a wonderfully freaky Lindsay Duncan) is a vampire.

Positively horrible things begin to happen, each of them clouded by the dangerous innocence of our point of view character.

The film plays a bit like a David Lynch effort, but with more honesty. Rather than the hallucinatory dreaminess Lynch injects into films like Blue Velvet (the most similar), this film is ruled by the ferociously logical illogic of childhood. With this point of view, the realities of a war blend effortlessly with the possibility of vampires. Through little Seth Dove’s eyes, everything that happens is predictably mysterious, as the world is to an 8-year-old. His mind immediately accepts every new happening as a mystery to unravel, and the jibberish adults speak only confirm that assumption.

This film is a beautiful, horrifying, fascinating adventure unlike most anything else available. A kind of thematic cross between Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Terry Gilliam’s Tideland (nice company!), The Reflecting Skin manages to feel more honest, and therefore more deeply frightening, than either.

New In Theaters, Slider

Big, Messy Ideas

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The Congress

by George Wolf

 

Tired of the same old girl meets boy stories? How about girl meets a digital version of herself, loses many years in a cryogenic state, and then travels between realities in an effort to reconnect with her son?

Welcome to The Congress, a flawed but often fascinating work inspired by the 1971 novel The Futurological Congress, Stanislaw Lem’s darkly comic allegory of life under communist rule.

Writer/director Ari Folman (the Oscar-nominated Waltz with Bashir) sets his sights on the Hollywood regime, where veteran actress Robin Wright, playing a fictionalized version of herself, has reached a critical point in her career.

She’s years removed from being America’s sweetheart, she’s been branded as “difficult,” and she’s on the wrong side of forty. But now, there’s a curious career opportunity…

After much soul-searching and a big paycheck, she agrees to let the film studio create a digital copy of herself. Once completed, the new Robin will have a busy career doing, in the words of the studio boss (Danny Huston), “all the things your Robin Wright won’t do” while the old Robin never acts again.

The ironic part is that the real Robin’s acting has never been better, and her touching performance anchors the film even when it threatens to skid completely off the rails.

Folman has big, ambitious, eccentric ideas, but things get a bit messy once the film makes the shift to animation. Unlike Bashir, where clashing styles of animation only accentuated the different memories of war, the animated portion of The Congress sometimes struggles to find a tone worthy of the strong live action opening.

It becomes a mix of Heavy Metal, Pink Floyd The Wall and Cool World, leaving some interesting issues hanging as dots that are never fully connected. Folman -who has said he got his first inspiration for the project in film school-seems so invested in the overall concept that he can’t resist the urge to explore every idea, no matter how tenuous.

Good thing, then, that Folman’s explorations are more interesting than most, leaving The Congress as a visionary, frustrating, extraordinary head trip.

 

Verdict-3-0-Stars

 

 

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It’s All In His Head

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Frank

by Hope Madden

An interesting cinematic trend is emerging: cast the best, most talented, best looking performers in roles where we can’t see them. As counterintuitive as it appears, it has been wildly successful. Scarlett Johansson was never better than in her disembodied role in Her, while Bradley Cooper was a laugh riot as a pissed off raccoon in Guardians of the Galaxy. And now, the great Michael Fassbender dons a huge, smiley, fake head for nearly the entire duration of his new film, Frank.

It definitely works.

Of course it does, he’s Michael Fassbender, exactly the actor who’d be drawn to such a role. Fassbender is wonderful, naturally, this time with a delicate charm. His gesturing, physical presence, and endearing vocal delivery outline a beautiful performance that drives the film and, eventually, breaks your heart.

Though this film is hardly a tragedy. It’s wryly funny, at times satirical but routinely quite intimate. Co-written by Jon Ronson, the film is inspired by the enigmatic musician/comic/giant-head-wearer Chris Sievey, to whom the film is dedicated and with whom Ronson briefly played.

Writing with Peter Straughan – his collaborator on The Men Who Stare at Goats – Ronson recreates himself as the everyman character Jon (Domhnall Gleeson), an aspiring musician who stumbles into eccentric frontman Frank’s band when the previous keyboardist tries to drown himself. Then Jon’s off to the woods for 18 months to record with a group who mostly loathe him.

As Clara, the Lady Macbeth for this band on the fringes, the always magnificent Maggie Gyllenhaal controls every situation with a withering glare. Gyllenhaal’s weary expression carries with it the untold baggage and band history that Jon just isn’t interested in understanding.

Lenny Abrahamson’s utterly masterful direction first draws you in with Jon’s artistic voyage, but a slyly evolving storyline populated with playful but authentic performances leads you somewhere surprising yet inevitable.

Frank, though joyous, odd and thoroughly enjoyable, slowly exposes the limits of talent, the weight of enduring relationships, and the corruptively seductive power of fame.

It’s also an insightful ode to the transcendent, mad magic of music.

 

Verdict-4-0-Stars

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dcLw6CPzIs

Fright Club

Fright Club Friday: Dog Soldiers

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Dog Soldiers (2002)

Let’s get the long weekend rolling with a fun, bloody, exciting trip to the Scottish highlands. Wry humor, impenetrable accents, a true sense of isolation and blood by the gallon help separate Neil Marshall’s (The Descent) Dog Soldiers from legions of other wolfmen tales.

Marshall creates a familiarly tense feeling, brilliantly straddling monster movie and war movie. A platoon is dropped into an enormous forest for a military exercise. There’s a surprise attack. The remaining soldiers hunker down in an isolated cabin to mend, figure out WTF, and strategize for survival.

This is like any good genre pic where a battalion is trapped behind enemy lines – just as vivid, bloody and intense. Who’s gone soft? Who will risk what to save a buddy? How to outsmart the enemy?

But the enemies this time are giant, hairy, hungry monsters. Woo hoo!

The fantastically realized idea of traitors takes on a little extra something-something, I’ll tell you that right now.

Though the rubber suits – shown fairly minimally and with some flair – do lessen the film’s horrific impact, solid writing, dark humor and a good deal of ripping and tearing energize this blast of a lycanthropic Alamo.

 

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A Tight Squeeze

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As Above, So Below

by Hope Madden

A friend of mine went to Paris for her honeymoon, convincing her husband to tour the catacombs beneath the city while there. It’s a creepy, claustrophobic destination for most anyone. He’s uninterested in the macabre, and he’s 6’4”. It was a tight fit.

I thought of him frequently during As Above, So Below because, if there’s one thing the film does effectively, it is tap your claustrophobic dread.

Scarlett, an Indiana Jones type, believes a stone that A) turns any metal into gold, and B) grants eternal life, is hidden beneath Paris. She lures a documentarian, an old boyfriend, and a team of Parisian catacomb explorers to help her finish the quest that killed her father. All told, it’s a weirdly young, attractive, hyper-intelligent group of explorers.

Obviously, co-writer/director John Erick Dowdle (Quarantine) owes the Jones franchise a pretty big debt. He’s equally indebted to Neil Marshall’s 2005 horror classic The Descent, and he robs here and there from his own Quarantine, the Julia Roberts/Keiffer Sutherland debacle Flatliners, and the Nicolas Cage ridiculousness National Treasure. A weird mix, that, but there are moments when it works.

The one thing Dowdle does well is develop a rising terror of confinement – a knack he proved with Quarantine. He loses his footing when it comes to intermittent scares, and the film just doesn’t build to enough of a climax.

The set up takes too long and there’s not enough terror to distract you from the fairly ludicrous quest underway. The spooky images are few and far between, with Dowdle relying too heavily on the whiz and whir of handheld cameras and distorted sounds to carry the load his imagination couldn’t.

It doesn’t make the film entirely unsatisfying. The claustrophobic among us, in particular, will be put through the ringer. But Dowdle and crew can’t quite piece together enough quality moments to deliver a memorable chiller.

Verdict-2-5-Stars

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-KIzzF3S0o

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The Price of Prestige

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Ivory Tower

by George Wolf

 

Enough about your school’s football team.

Do you have a climbing wall? Swimming pool for the luxury dorm?

If not, then your school is just not keeping up with the competitive college atmosphere illustrated in Ivory Tower, an effective documentary on the skyrocketing cost of higher education.

Utilizing interviews, archival footage and statistical graphics, writer/director Andrew Rossi does a masterful job illustrating how alarming the situation has become, and why.

He hits you early with some sobering numbers. Since 1978, college tuition has increased more than any other good or service in the United States, leading to a total amount of student loan debt that has now topped one trillion dollars. Yes, with a “t”.

Rossi then makes a strong and seemingly fair-minded case that the entire system is nearing a point of collapse, driven by the schools’ relentless “pursuit of prestige” and the Reagan-era reclassification of students as consumers.

To illustrate both points, we get a close look at New York City’s Cooper Union, founded in the 1850s on the promise that education should always be free. When a new President proposes reneging on that promise and the students revolt, there is an unexpected rise in the dramatic heft of the film.

As he did so effectively in Page One:  Inside the New York Times, Rossi lets us feel part of a movement, and the result is an engrossing documentary-within-a-documentary.

Final sequences on the student loan industry and online education are informative, but seem a bit anti-climactic, merely adding to the list of problems without any proposed solutions.

The underlying premise of Ivory Tower is the debate over whether or not a college education is still worth the cost. Though the film cops out a bit on the final answer, it serves as a vital prerequisite to fully understanding the question.

 

Verdict-3-5-Stars

 

 

 

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Late August Man

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The November Man

by Hope Madden

Somehow, it’s easy to lower your expectations in August, and a film that would seem stale and dated in, say, May or even November, can feel almost like a relief. The November Man is one of those movies.

Its lack of digital wizardry – relying, as it does, on old fashioned practical effects – feels like a welcome respite from the summer’s FX bombast. And though this agent-thinks-he’s-out-but-gets-pulled-back-in tale brings very little new to the table, at least it isn’t If I Stay. Or Sin City 2. Or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Oh, August.

At first blush, the film appears to be a James Bond rip off, right down to the lead and his lady (Pierce Brosnan and Quantum of Solace Bond Girl Olga Kurylenko). But this film casts off any interest in smooth, sly espionage, gadgetry, one-liners and one night stands in favor of something a little more brutish.

Brosnan’s ex CIA op retires not long after an incident with a trainee he deems unfit for service. But when a colleague needs a favor and pulls him back in for one last gig…well, when does that ever go as planned? Next thing you know, he’s trying to figure out what went wrong with his op while he plays cat and mouse with that old trainee, now a trained CIA sniper with bigger ambitions.

Brosnan’s grizzled charm buoys the effort, even when he’s pursing his lips like a school marm at his former trainee (a mostly serviceable Luke Bracey). The film falters most in its dual purposes: mentor/mentee cat and mouse versus international conspiracy leading to a puppet Russian president with a pension for under aged war refugees.

The truth is, neither side is especially compelling on its own, and when the two blur together, things feel just silly.

Still, The November Man isn’t bad. It’s no Skyfall – the new high water mark for spy movies – but it’s no Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, either. Remember that one? From January of this year? Yeah, January is another one of those bad movie months. At least in August the bad movies don’t come with snow.

 

Verdict-2-5-Stars

 

For Your Queue

A Fresh Take on History For Your Queue

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Who’s in the mood for a couple of fascinating historical dramas, the kind that make you rethink your history lessons? Because Belle, releases to DVD today, and it’s the fact-based tale of a bi-racial girl raised by her aristocratic grandparents in 18th Century England. Well told and perfectly cast, with the always flawless Tom Wilkinson playing the family patriarch and a wondrous break out turn by Gugu Mbath-Raw in the lead, the film draws parallels you never knew existed between past and present.

If you’re looking for a little wilder, true ish (or at least rumored to be true) story that may cause you to rethink everything you know about British history and literature, have a gander at Anonymous. The usually unwatchably bombastic Roland Emmerich dials it back a bit – but not too much – to sketch a treacherous, traitorous, sordid story of the real William Shakespeare. Excellent performances and a savvy screenplay by John Orloff keep this one fresh and entertaining.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jbILbHJrAI

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Revisiting One Rotten Town

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Sin City 2: A Dame to Kill For

by Hope Madden

Remember The Matrix? So cool! Full of heady ideas with a visual execution like nothing we’d ever seen before, it kind of took audiences’ breath away. But just two years later when the sequel came out, the visuals were already stale, which made the weaknesses in the script, performances and direction more evident, which led to a pretty big letdown.

So at least you’re prepared for Sin City 2: A Dame to Kill For.

Though Robert Rodriguez has not lost his flair for comic book imagery – SC2 is to noir cartoon glory what LeBron James is to homecomings – it’s no longer enough to overlook the flaws in the story. It’s been nine years since the experience was new, and it’s been redone by many since then. What else does this Dame have to offer?

More of the same: damaged, mostly naked women, some of them in bondage wear; tough guys with a soft spot for dames and a weakness for their own inner demons; lost souls of good people who make bad choices; evildoers, and one back alley surgeon who gives the film a much needed moment of levity.

The timelines among this film’s vignettes and those of its predecessor are never clear, which works in this surreal environment. Sure, Marv (Mickey Rourke) died last time, but maybe this is a prequel. I mean, the twins are still alive. Except Marv’s wearing that black trench coat and the Nancy storyline is up to date, so…who cares? Just go with it. The film has enough problems without you taking a magnifying glass to its narrative structure.

No one would claim the original Sin City was a feminist manifesto, but its sequel’s shift in primary villain from a quartet of power- and flesh-hungry men to one very naked woman (the never shy Eva Green) tips the misogyny scale away from guilty pleasure to vicarious contempt.

Which is not to say that Green does a bad job. Hers is easily the strongest performance onscreen, an admirable accomplishment since her role can be summed up in three tasks: get naked, seduce, repeat.

There are two or three storylines that go nowhere, while the Nancy (Jessica Alba)/Hartigan (Bruce Willis) side plot begs for a little clarity. Very little happening onscreen is as compelling as it was last time around, and the co-directors frequently lose their pacing, giving their tales a bloated, tedious feel.

It turns out, Frank Miller’s grim, salacious world wasn’t really worth the return trip.

 

Verdict-2-5-Stars