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New In Theaters

The 2014 Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts

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The Academy Award nominations can drive you crazy between the snubs and the needless accolades. Some years are so bad, you may think you’ll never forgive them. But every year, however misguided their big ticket nominations, the academy does at least one wonderful thing. They draw attention to short films that would otherwise go unnoticed. Do yourself a favor and head to the Gateway Film Center to catch all fifteen of these magnificent short subject works of art, starting with five brilliant and varied animated features.

The nominations this year net a variety of styles and tones. The clear frontrunner for the Oscar is Disney’s Get a Horse, the 3-D short that accompanied their popular (and prescient!) Frozen. Director Lauren MacMullen’s six minute ‘toon is a joyous ode to animation history, bridging Disney’s past with its future by mixing archival Mickey Mouse animation with modern cinematic storytelling.

At the other end of the spectrum is Ferel, a shadowy, impressionistic tale of a wild boy found by a hunter and introduced to society. Smokey images in shades of grey underscore the story’s haunting nature.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2vywZvg9uA

Equally haunted, though in a more literal and offbeat manner, is Shuhei Morita’s Possessions. A fix-it man travels, wares on his back, through a terrible storm. He takes shelter in an abandoned shack to witness the discarded items there come to life. It’s a lively, entertaining piece on a consume-and-discard culture.

Room on the Broom is a longer, stop-action style film aimed at a younger crowd. Simon Pegg voices the narration for the tale of a good hearted witch who never met a new friend she didn’t want to make, regardless of her cat’s preferences. It’s a sweet image of acceptance and family.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjhF37MpUYs

The best of the bunch, though likely not to be the winner, is the appealing Mr. Hublot. In a clattery, mechanical future world, idiosyncratic Mr. Hublot lives alone with his OCD. His days are full – straightening picture frames, turning the lights on and off, on and off, on and off. Back to straightening frames – though he can’t help but hear that abandoned, barking puppy out there in the weather. Writer Laurent Witz, along with his co-director Alexandre Espigares, creates an endearing image of familial love and acceptance with this charmer.

Every one’s a winner regardless of the final vote. Catch them while you can.

New In Theaters

The 2014 Oscar Nominated Live Action Shorts

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The Academy Award nominations can drive you crazy between the snubs and the needless accolades. Some years are so bad, you may think you’ll never forgive them. But every year, however misguided their big ticket nominations, the academy does at least one wonderful thing. They draw attention to short films that would otherwise go unnoticed. Do yourself a favor and head to the Gateway Film Center to catch all fifteen of these magnificent short subject works of art, including these 5 wildly different live action gems.

 

Helium

A hospital janitor befriends a dying boy, and begins entertaining him with tales about a magical land called “Helium.” As  the boy gets closer to death, it becomes clear the storytelling sessions are something the janitor needs just as much as his young friend.

 

The Voorman Problem

Martin Freeman (The Hobbit) stars in this brisk, clever tale of a psychologist questioning a new patient who believes himself to be a God.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aNyXNYeiwA

 

Do I Have to Take Care of Everything?

From Finland, this 7 minute entry is the shortest of the lot, bu it packs plenty of whimsy into the tale of a harried mom trying to get her husband and kids ready to leave for a wedding.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0XJRHxK4Y8

 

Just Before Losing Everything

In French with subtitles, this would be our pick to win. It is the subtle, yet stirring look at a woman in the midst of a desperate attempt to leave her abusive husband. Director Xavier Legrand’s spare style keeps details to a minimum, and that makes all the difference.

 

That Wasn’t Me

This Spanish import follows aid workers in Africa who become pawns in a violent civil war. Alejandra Lorente delivers a compelling lead performance in a film that searches for hope amid savagery.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TR9Fdn-a9-Q

 

 

New In Theaters, Slider

What Gives?

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by George Wolf

Walking out of the preview screening for Labor Day, a woman behind me remarked, “I don’t know..I need action, a hook in the back or something!”

So, while the film won’t please the “hook in back” demographic, it will also let down fans of writer/director Jason Reitman, who makes a curious left turn into overcooked melodrama.

Adapted from the source novel by Joyce Maynard, it is a story told in flashback narration by Henry (Tobey Maquire), recalling one memorable Labor Day weekend from his youth.

While shopping with his mother Adele (Kate Winslet), young Henry is approached by Frank (Josh Brolin), an escaped convict on the run.  Quietly forcing his will upon them, Frank takes refuge in their New Hampshire home, nursing the wounds from his jailbreak and slowly becoming a savior to both mother and son.

The breakdown of her marriage has left Adele constantly depressed, and left Henry without a strong male role model. How fortunate that Frank cooks, fixes most anything, knows baseball, swears he’s not the monster the papers say he is, and oh, yeah, simmers with sexuality.

As does most of the film, juxtaposing Adele’s clear ache for a man with young Henry’s exploding hormones. It’s all very earnest and obvious, miles away from the brilliant edge Reitman brought to every other feature he’s done (Thank You for Smoking, Juno, Up in the Air, Young Adult).

It makes you wonder just what inspired Reitman to film this story, one that is equal parts Douglas Sirk and Nicholas Sparks. Perhaps it was just the challenge of elevating it, to see if his talents, combined with those of strong actors, could give it resonance.

While Labor Day is indeed better for all of their efforts, the air of disappointment lingers.

 

Verdict-2-5-Stars

 

 

 

New In Theaters

Trading his Wings for Some Wheels

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12 O’clock Boys

by Hope Madden

A coming of age story set in poverty stricken, crime riddled West Baltimore sounds like an episode of the Wire gone sentimental. That’s not 12 O’clock Boys, though. 

We follow Pug, a savvy and funny preteen on the verge of adult decisions that will impact his life’s trajectory. And length.

What is absolutely fascinating about Lofty Nathan’s documentary, though, is that gangs and drugs and time spent on the corner are the furthest things from Pug’s consciousness. This is not to say that his goals are legal, exactly. And they certainly aren’t safe.

No, Pug wants desperately to join the dirt bikers who overrun West Baltimore streets each Sunday night, weaving in and out of traffic, through red lights, onto sidewalks – anywhere they like. Hundreds of zig-zagging, wheelie-popping maniacs have a blast while terrorizing and amazing onlookers, and Pug has no more passionate wish than to become one of them.

Filmed over three years, the doc chronicles Pug’s burgeoning adolescence as well as the societal, cultural and economic landmines between him and manhood. The fact that Pug is adorable – very small with a cherubic face and sly smile – only makes his struggle, his innocence that much more poignant.

But Nathan unveils more than just one boy’s journey. The footage of the Baltimore biking phenomenon is mind boggling, and the freedom and power the sport offers its riders does not skip by without mention. You might even applaud these young men of West Baltimore for avoiding, at least on Sunday evenings, much of the lawbreaking commonly found in their neighborhoods. But the 12 O’clock Boys – named for their ability to pull their bikes so far into a wheelie that they look like the hand of a clock striking 12 – can hardly be considered law-abiding.

And as thousands of traffic laws are beaten to submission each weekend, Baltimore police find themselves in a tough situation. The law forbids chasing the bikers because of the danger a chase poses to the riders and to bystanders, but they’re all in danger enough with or without a cop chase.

Wisely, Nathan’s position is not to judge the riders, the cops, the environment or Pug. Rather, he opens up an unseen world of skill, bravado and hellish traffic, and lets us watch it through the eyes of a budding young man still weighing his limited options.

 

Verdict-3-5-Stars

 

 

New In Theaters

Look Out, Little Red Riding Hood

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Big Bad Wolves

by Hope Madden

If you watched the film Prisoners and thought, wow, this could only be better if it were more graphic and a little funnier, then have I got the movie for you! (Also, get some psychiatric help.)

A mixture of disturbing fairy tale and ugly reality, Israel’s Big Bad Wolves takes you places you really don’t want to go, but damn if it doesn’t keep you mesmerized every minute.

The particularly vulgar slaughter of several little girls sets events in motion. One teacher is suspected. One cop is driven. One father suffers from grief-stricken mania. It’s going to get really ugly.

Filmmakers Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado implicate everyone, audience included. They create intentional parallels among the three men, pointing to the hypocrisy of the chase and making accusations all around of a taste for the intoxicating bloodlust that comes from dominating a weaker person.

Their taut and twisty script keeps surprises coming, but it’s the humor that’s most unexpected. Handled with dark, dry grace by Lior Ashkenazi (the cop) and Tzahi Grad (the father) – not to mention Doval’e Glickman (the grandfather) – this script elicits shamefaced but magnetic interest. You cannot look away, even when the blowtorch comes out. And God help you, it’s hard not to laugh now and again.

The violence is not shot to amuse. It is jarring and awful. But the subdued lunacy of the perpetrators allows a complicated kind of respite from the ugliness in the basement. Complicated because it pulls you back over to the side of men torturing another who – for all we, the audience, know – is as innocent as he claims to be.

Clearly the filmmakers are interested in the toxic ineffectiveness of torture as a method of interrogation, but the film never feels preachy. The characters are too well drawn, the performances too compelling, and the writing too full of misdirection.

The duo abandon the dark and dreamy camerawork that gave the early reels its menacingly hypnotic feel, and while the straightforward grit of later material suits the content, it’s hard not to miss the Goth poetry of Act I. But these two know how to develop dread, punctuate the darkness with almost absurdly beautiful images, and deliver a punishing blow. Big Bad Wolves will haunt your sleep.

New In Theaters, Slider

Tattoos & Scars

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by George Wolf

 

Love, loss, spirituality, tattoos and music – indeed some of the very bedrocks of life -take on a sublime urgency in The Broken Circle Breakdown, a 2014 Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film.

No matter how effectively a story may work onstage, a successful transition to the screen is far from guaranteed (i.e. August: Osage County). Though TBCB began as a stage play, the filmmakers recognize the different challenges a film adaptation creates, and they rise to the occasion with an achingly beautiful film.

The setting is Belgium, where Didier (Johan Heidenbergh, star and co-writer of the play) showcases his love for American bluegrass music by leading a popular local band. Though he’s pragmatic, technical, and verbose, he falls hard for the emotional, quietly intense Elise (Veerle Baetens), a tattoo artist who just happens to have a pretty sweet singing voice.

They begin a passionate relationship, she joins the band, and the couple soon welcomes daughter Maybelle.

When Maybelle is diagnosed with cancer, the differing world views held by Didier and Elise begin to clash. Didier’s atheism and Elise’s spirituality personify the ongoing debate over science and religion, and the couple soon question themselves and each other.

Director/co-writer Felix Van Groeningen presents the relationship as a graceful circle. The story cross-cuts between different stages in Didier and Elise’s life together, letting emotion trump chronology as a connective device, a strategy that pays off wonderfully.

That emotion often resonates through the music they both love. In the way its songs are deftly woven into the very fabric of the story arc, TBCB recalls both Once and Inside Llewyn Davis. The most obvious difference is that TBCB utilizes English lyrics even though the dialog is in Flemish, which is a tad jarring at first but soon serves to underscore the effect that America has on these characters, and indeed the rest of the world.

Both Heidenbergh (who will very much remind country music fans of singer Ronnie Dunn) and Baetens handle their own vocal duties, which seems only fitting, as there isn’t a false note in either performance.

Awash in authenticity, The Broken Circle Breakdown soars on joy and heartache, tenderness and defiance, ultimately leaving you tearful, but inspired.

Verdict-4-0-Stars

 

 

New In Theaters

When Push Comes to Puncture Wounds and Bullet Holes

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A Touch of Sin

by Hope Madden

A handful of befuddled but beautifully realized characters fall through the tears in the cultural fabric of a too-rapidly modernizing China in Zhangke Jia’s A Touch of Sin.

The film sets four tales spinning simultaneously, each uncovering the unpredictable challenges and opportunities facing four characters who are dealing with capitalistic expansion, an unprecedented and often unstructured change in more than just their economic reality. As each grapples with the task of making a living among the unscrupulous who’ve already learned to exploit the fledgling economy, bloodshed becomes ever more appealing.

Jia’s imagination and scope are epic, but his film remains intimate. Though his pacing is slower and his dialog certainly more restrained, Jia’s film draws on some of Tarantino’s staging preferences when push comes to puncture wounds and bullet holes. Like Tarantino, though, Jia never abandons his characters.

He remains invested in each one, whether it’s the disgruntled miner hoping to hold village officials responsible for community welfare, the young woman defending her honor to herself as well as her unwelcome suitors, the transient who enjoys his freedom and his handgun, or the adolescent thrashing desperately against a lifelong outlook of meager wages and soul-crushing employers.

The physical environment is as unforgiving as anything in this bleak, colorless winter where everyone looks cold and uncomfortable – not abjectly miserable, just utterly unhappy. It’s a perfect backdrop for these lost souls, although Jia seems to be suggesting that these outcasts may not be all that atypical. Not one is in an entirely unique situation, and only the gun-happy transient even seems like an odd duck. No, these are very regular people who finally, irrevocably react rather than submit.

This is the real brilliance in his film. With each passing storyline, the line between “he just snapped” and “would I have done the same” blurs. Jia wonders throughout how an intelligent, rational person is supposed to manage with no future.

 

Verdict-4-0-Stars

 

 

For Your Queue, New In Theaters

Rocket Makes Its Own Luck

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The Rocket

by Hope Madden

The Rocket, an Australian film set in Laos, is a deviously familiar movie. It deposits a well-worn storyline in an unusual context, not to prove the universality of the human condition, but to draw attention to our cultural differences.

According to his tribe’s beliefs, Ahlo (the vibrant talent Sitthiphon Disamoe) should have been killed at birth. He is a twin – the brother of a stillborn – and one twin is always cursed, though there’s no telling which is which. But Ahlo’s mother convinces his grandmother the baby should be spared and his secret kept.

Well, that secret gets spilled when Ahlo becomes the convenient scapegoat for tremendous family upheaval, tumult and tragedy. What is there for a plucky kid to do but prove he is not bad luck?

The casting director got lucky, that’s certain. Disamoe is more than adorable – although he certainly is that. His childlike logic, stubbornness and heartbreaking hope capture your imagination.

Troubling for other reasons entirely is the outcast Ahlo adopts as his “Uncle Purple,” a James Brown fanatic and village drunk played with swagger and heartache by Suthep Po-ngam. Cinema has offered many a pairing of unaccepted youngster and unappreciated oldster, but the bitter magic these two generate is something unique. Their damage is no run-of-the-mill angst and their collaboration is surprisingly moving.

There is certainly something familiar in the plotting: an uplifting story, a ragtag bunch of misfits, and a competition that could win them their future. But the context and setting are so wildly unpredictable that nothing about The Rocket ever feels stale.

Deftly maneuvering through a series of culturally saturated, often politically charged mishaps, Mordaunt uses the Laotian backdrop to give weight to what might otherwise have been a simple tale of the boundless optimism of youth. And yes, sentimentality flavors every scene, but what’s unexpected is that the presence of death is a constant shadow.

The Rocket is a film littered with motherless children, refugees of progress, and the ghosts of war. It’s a scruffy, haunted, vivid charmer about displaced souls, of all things. But it’s with this damaged but hearty population that Mordaunt spins a memorable and satisfying tale of resilience.

 

Verdict-3-5-Stars

 

 

New In Theaters

Building a Mystery

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By George Wolf

 

 

“Emotions are like works of art…they can be forged.”

That line from writer/director Giuseppe Tornatore‘s The Best Offer strikes at the heart of an often captivating mystery that becomes hampered by contrivance.

Geoffrey Rush plays Virgil Oldman, a leading figure in the Vienna art world.  A master auctioneer, Virgil is also frequently called upon to appraise various items set for auction, and to distinguish actual treasures from clever forgeries.

From the opening scenes, Rush draws us to his character, inviting curiosity about Virgil’s fussy, fastidious nature, and his strange inability to look any female in the eye for more than a fleeting moment (“Virgil Oldman” is but one letter removed from “virgin old man,” you see).

A mystery begins when Virgil takes a call from Claire (Sylvia Hoeks), an heiress who invites him to inventory the entire contents of her family estate. Slowly, Virgil becomes obsessed with the reclusive Claire, and he turns to his young friend Robert (Jim Sturgess) for help in relating to the fairer sex.

Saying anything more may be revealing too much, though there is a good chance you’ll guess what’s going on before the final reveal.

Tornatore displays nice pacing early on, and some sublime camerawork throughout, but the film begins to unravel as events require too much suspension of disbelief.

The filmmaker again shows his penchant for metaphor, with odes to deception and authenticity that will be impossible to miss, and a dark psychological tone miles away from his wistfully nostalgic  Oscar-winner Cinema Paradiso.

There’s nothing wistful about this film, in fact it could have used more of the winking, mischievous spirit Donald Sutherland brings to his few scenes as an art collector.

Still, Rush is (surprise) a joy to watch, and The Best Offer will keep you engaged just from waiting to see how far “out there” it’s willing to go before Tornatore regains his footing for a nicely understated postscript as the gavel finally drops.

 

Verdict-3-5-Stars

 

 

 

New In Theaters

Weren’t We Due a Little Something?

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Devil’s Due

by Hope Madden

For the last few years, the first weeks of January have been littered with horror films. Last year it was Texas Chainsaw and Mama; in 2012, Devil Inside; in 2011, Season of the Witch (remember that piece of shit?!) and The Rite. What the correlation is between the bleak and miserable post-holiday winter and bleak and miserable films is hard to say, but 2014 continues the tradition with Devil’s Due, the second mediocre-to-poor horror flick of 2014.

It’s one of those found footage style films that follows newlyweds Sam and Zach through their first, unexpected pregnancy.

There are only so many ways a horror film can go with an unexpected pregnancy, the most common of which, like Devil’s Due, travels down Rosemary’s Baby Lane. So, you know in advance what terror lies ahead. At that point it’s up to the filmmakers to find new and interesting ways to generate those scares.

Unfortunately writer Lindsay Devlin and co-directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett have zero surprises up their collective sleeve.

Ideas stolen from Rosemary, a smattering of Paranormal Activity films and scores of other, better movies are pasted blandly and unconvincingly together, with nary a jump, flinch or shudder to be found.

And do we seriously need two directors for this? Was there that much to do?

Devil’s Due is just another bad horror film, which means there’s little reason to explore cinematic integrity. And yet, here I go. The “found footage” approach in horror films is so, so tired that an actual artistic purpose for it rarely enters the picture anymore. In Blair Witch, someone discovered tins of film, and when those reels are watched, the mystery of three disappearances is revealed. In Quarantine, a newsman’s footage uncovers the terror of a hideous outbreak. In TrollHunter (if you haven’t seen it, you must), a TV news team receives and broadcasts footage shot of, well, trolls.

You see? If you have a found footage film, the footage has to be found at some point, explaining why we, the audience, are seeing it. Otherwise, the use of this technique is simply to avoid having to write a coherent story, provide character development or backstory, or learn the art of cinematography.

Far superior to the film itself, and much cheaper than a movie ticket, is the viral marketing video attached to it. Do yourself a favor and watch this (or watch it again) and skip the movie altogether.

 

Verdict-1-5-Stars