Category Archives: Outtakes

Movie-related whatnot

Outtakes

Time to Be Funny

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Time Travel Is Dangerous

by Brandon Thomas

Mockumentaries may not have enjoyed the same rise in popularity as found footage did – at least in the feature film world – but this subgenre still holds a special place in the hearts of many filmgoers. Comedy is where the mockumentary especially took hold. Films like Borat, This is Spinal Tap, What We Do in the Shadows, and the groundbreaking oeuvre of Christopher Guest not only rank as some of the best mockumentaries ever made, they are also seen as some of the best comedies ever made. While Time Travel is Dangerous doesn’t meet the level of these particular films, it is a quirky and fun addition to the genre. 

Best friends Ruth and Megan run a relatively successful vintage shop in the London suburb of Muswell Hill. After finding a time machine near a dumpster, the two begin using it to travel into the past to find items to sell in their shop. Unaware of the “rules” of time travel, their journeys to the past begin to unravel space and time. 

Time Travel is Dangerous isn’t the ornery variety of comedy, like Borat or What We Do in the Shadows. There’s a sweet silliness to the film that wraps you in a warm blanket but also doesn’t treat the audience like a group of blockheads. The science behind Time Travel is Dangerous isn’t the most important aspect of the film, but director Chris Reading isn’t interested in pushing it aside to make the film more digestible either. Unlike many time-travel-related films, viewers won’t need a diagram to follow along. I’m looking at you Primer.

Instead of falling headfirst into a complicated plot, Time Travel is Dangerous puts the characters front and center. Actors Ruth Syratt and Megan Stevenson bring the identically named characters to life with a world-weary familiarity. Their decision to use the time machine to travel into the past to collect merchandise for their store is exactly the dumb thing most people would do with such power. Ain’t no one going back to stop the assassination of JFK or see Dinosaurs. 

Reading wisely doesn’t let the film get too “big” for its budget or the winky tone. The mix of practical effects and CGI keeps with the overall silliness of the film without just looking cheap. If you can’t do a great-looking flying DeLorean, then a modestly looking flying van will have to do.

Time Travel is Dangerous isn’t full of belly laughs or tear-inducing howls. What it does do, though, is keep a smile on your face for a full 99 minutes.

Outtakes

Undercooked Allegory

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Altered

by Daniel Baldwin

Socio-political allegory and science fiction storytelling go together like peanut butter and chocolate. One can enjoy their tastes separately, but when combined in the right portions, they taste even better together. The trick, of course, is in getting that mixture right. Making sure that the visuals, themes, world-building, and characters are all executed at a high level. When that’s done, we are handed gems like RoboCop, Children of Men, They Live, Nemesis, Gattaca, or any number of Twilight Zone episodes.

Writer/director Timo Vuorensola (Iron Sky) gets a lot right with Altered. This film posits a post-apocalyptic society that outwardly seems like a utopia but is anything but for anyone who is not deemed genetically perfect by its leaders and culture. Those “unblemished” by genetic “deficiencies” are referred to as the Genetics. They are the “pure” ruling class.

Anyone deemed imperfect – those who are disabled in any way – are called the “Specials”. They are allowed to contribute to society, but generally only through manual labor and menial jobs. Platitudes of equality and unity are dished out in public speeches by the Genetics, but inequality is the true atmosphere of this world. Something that the Specials would like to change.

The world-building is effective, and the themes are relevant. The execution? Not so much. One can see what the film’s core message is meant to be – that we are all important and have worth to society – but these themes are frequently muddled by character and storytelling choices that undercut them throughout. Brief bursts of sci-fi action involving a (pretty silly) plant-powered super suit help to paper this over in bits, but it’s never enough to offset the often undercooked writing.

New lower-budget sci-fi movies roll out by the dozens each and every year. Given that Altered is on the higher end of those in terms of production value and cast (Tom Felton, Elizaveta Bugulova, Richard Brake, etc.), hardcore sci-fi fans may still find a bit to enjoy here. Casual viewers will find far less within to hold their attention. It’s a film that does have at least something going on under the hood, but there’s not enough gas in the tank to get it across the finish line.

Outtakes

A Sort of Homecoming

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Reawakening

by Rachel Willis

It’s generally a good bet that if Jared Harris is in your film, it will be worth watching.

This is certainly the case for writer/director Virginia Gilbert’s Reawakening, and the cast surrounding Harris help elevate the entire film.

On the tenth anniversary of their daughter Clare’s disappearance, John (Harris) and Mary (Juliet Stevenson) make a renewed plea to the public to help them in their search for their daughter. It’s made known through subtle pieces of conversation that Clare wasn’t kidnapped but ran away from home at the age of 14.

Brief flashbacks show pieces from the past that help to explain the events leading up to Clare’s departure, but these moments never overshadow the present narrative. We frequently see how her disappearance continues to affect her parents. Mary’s grief is overwhelming. John looks for his daughter in the faces of every young woman he passes. Both have continued with their lives, but it’s clear they will never move on from their loss.

This is a subtle thriller, as the twists and turns play second fiddle to a poignant character study. Harris takes center stage as first a grieving father, then a skeptical one as a woman claiming to be Clare (Erin Doherty) enters their lives. It’s not hard to understand why Mary and John have such divergent reactions to the return of their daughter. Their reactions underscore both blind hope and stunning disbelief.

The film’s subtlety sometimes works against it. There are small moments that are easy to miss even though they play an important role in the overall narrative.

But what works for this film is the veracity of this small family as they seek answers and struggle to reconnect. Harris, especially, sells his role as a father who just wants to know what really happened to his beloved daughter.

It’s a moving analysis of family trauma that resonates long after the credits roll.

Outtakes

Exit Light, Enter Night

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In Your Dreams

by Hope Madden

The delightfully juvenile humor that propels much of the new Dreamworks animated film In Your Dreams entertains. It also amplifies the tension between tween big sister Stevie (Jolie Hoant-Rappaport) and little brother, Elliot (Elias Janssen).

If the perfectionist eldest sibling is going to somehow get her parents to stay together, the last thing she needs is Elliot and his foul-smelling stuffed animal Baloney Tony (Craig Robinson) getting in the way.

But naturally, when Stevie makes a wish to find Sandman and make her dream of a happy family come true, somehow Elliot gets himself involved. Now Stevie can’t make her way through dreamland to find the Sandman without her pesky little brother.

In that way, In Your Dreams is sort of the Predator: Badlands of the grade school set.

Though the computer-generated animation is sometimes disappointing, the movie’s chaotic energy and humor while our heroes work toward finding the Sandman—plus a fun, splashy bit of hand drawn animation— are a blast. It’s during these dream montages that co-writers/directors Erik Benson and Alexander Woo (who write with Stanely Moore) are most inspired. It’s also where we get to spend the most time with Baloney Tony, easily the film’s funniest character.

As dreams of life among happily animated breakfast foods turn rancid under the influence of Nightmara (Gia Carides), In Your Dreams runs through a fun, funny, and often insightful set of dream sequences set to appropriate and fun needle drops.

The film’s themes are compelling and often insightfully rendered, and the storyline itself bears originality sometimes lost in family films. But once we finally reach the Sandman, the look, feel, humor and imagination seem to disappear. We build and build to Sandman, but he and his castle are bland and forgettable.

In Your Dreams never fully recovers, most of Act 3 feeling like a quick and easy escape route from the otherwise clever conceits in the plot. There are definitely laughs and fun sequences, but you may forget this one as quickly as last night’s dream.

Outtakes

Mommy Fearest

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The Hand That Rocks the Cradle

by George Wolf

Even at its most fun, 1992’s The Hand That Rocks the Cradle was a bit of a guilty pleasure. Hulu’s new update strips away the overdone pulp for a more focused, and more primally scary tale.

Caitlin (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is an L.A. lawyer who diligently screens her children’s food for sugars and aims to get a new stop sign for her neighborhood. Working at a tenants rights group, Caitlin helps Polly (Maika Monroe) with a landlord problem, and when the two cross paths again at a local market, fate seems to have dealt a good hand.

Polly has experience as a nanny, and she comes with a glowing recommendation from her last employer. She looks like the perfect choice to help Caitlin and her husband Miguel (Raúl Castillo) with young Emma (Mileiah Vega) and baby Josie (Nora and Lola Contreras).

Caitlin chooses poorly.

Screenwriter Micah Bloomberg (Sanctuary) updates the original story with some important twists, and director Michelle Garza Cervera sets a pace that lets the gaslighting, secrets and lies simmer nicely before boiling over.

Cervera crafted an impressive maternal nightmare three years ago with her feature debut, Husera: The Bone Woman. Here, she trades the religious imagery for symbols of upwardly mobile success, while still toying with anyone eager to check boxes of good mother/bad mother.

Winstead and Monroe are both terrific, bringing their characters into a dance of identity with menacing dread. There is more to Caitlin than her liberal guilt, and as Polly twists the knife with increasing sociopathy, Cervera’s instincts for a modern horror thriller are again solid.

Is any remake truly “necessary?” Debatable. But even back in ’92, the original film seemed like one that wouldn’t age particularly well. The questionable decisions remain, and one or two story beats are foreshadowed too heavily, but by the time all secrets are revealed, this Cradle rocks with some newly relevant bloodletting.

Outtakes

Downbound Train

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Barcelona Underground

by Hope Madden

Subways can be very scary places. An American Werewolf in London knew it. Del Toro’s Mimic. Midnight Meat Train. Jacob’s Ladder. A Quiet Place: Day One. These films amplified the claustrophobic subterranean atmosphere for all its hellscape potential.

Luis Prieto’s Barcelona Underground (also variously called Last Stop: Rocafort St. and Rocafort Station) tries to tap into that mass transit terror. Laura (Natalia Azahara) has a new job manning the Rocafort stop on Barcelona’s subway system, which is legendary for its suicides. Three of every four subway suicides in the city take place at the Rocafort Street stop.

It all started back when Román (Javier Gutiérrez) was still a cop. He followed serial killer Elías Soro through the labyrinthine tunnels but wasn’t quick enough to save the family of four Soro had taken hostage.

Were they suicides? They were not. How is this connected to the suicides? And why is Laura haunted by hallucinations ever since she witnessed one? Who knows, honestly? I sat through the whole movie and feel confident in saying that Prieto never truly connects the folklore, exorcism, and police procedural threads to even begin to make sense of this plot.

Worse, he doesn’t capitalize on the horrific possibilities available in a subway tunnel.

Barcelona Underground is a hodgepodge of obvious cliches and worn-out tropes slapped together with nonsensical panache. Each piece is incredibly familiar, but not one fits snugly in place beside the next piece. It’s as if Prieto, writing with Ivan Ledesma and Ángel Agudo, lifted the most cliched scene from a dozen films and taped them together, hoping to create a single tale.

None of it works because none of it makes sense. Both Azahara and Gutiérrez do what they can with poorly written roles, but the senseless mishmash of a story arc keeps either from crafting a recognizable character.

Plus, it’s not scary.  

An American Werewolf in London is scary, though. Do with that information what you will.

Outtakes

Slim, Sick and Sorry Looking

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Coyotes

by Hope Madden

Colin Minihan’s a fun filmmaker. Not everything hits, but nothing ever entirely misses. His latest, the horror comedy with heart Coyotes, is one of his more pleasant, less memorable efforts.

Justin Long is a comic book writing dad living in the Hollywood Hills. His wife (real life wife Kate Bosworth), daughter (Mila Harris), and schnauzer Charlie life comfortably enough but they think they hear rats in their walls.

Rats won’t be their biggest problem once a pack of bloodthirsty coyotes stands between Long’s family and escape from the raging wildfire the neighbor inadvertently set after coyotes gnawed through his carcass.

Trip (Norbert Leo Butz), the neighbor, and his girlfriend-for-hire (Brittany Allen, frequent Minihan collaborator) balance the neighbor family’s earnestness with bawdy, slapstick humor. Allen’s comic sensibility is especially strong, her presence creating a consistent sense of random humor that elevates everything.

Allen’s wrongheadedness bounces beautifully off Long’s likeable dufus, leaving Bosworth the somewhat thankless straight man role. But she carries it with the right balance of dignity and impatience to give the character flavor.

The chemistry among the actors goes a long way to strengthen a slight script. The character motivations we’re told about don’t match the footage we see, and coyotes come and go with little rational explanation.

As for horror, nearly every death, even nearly every attack, is off screen. Reaction shots fill in for carnage, each intended more for a laugh than a scare. But there just aren’t that many outright laughs.

Still, it’s hard not to root for Justin Long to survive a horror movie. Here, he’s at his most likeable and goofy, plus he’s rightfully preoccupied with keeping Charlie from coyote clutches. Because screw the neighbors, protect that dog!

Coyotes is not one of Minihan’s strongest, and it certainly doesn’t measure up to Long’s better genre titles. The writing can’t measure up in logic, fun, humor or horror to what the cast deserves. But it’s a pleasant enough waste of time for horror fans.

Outtakes

The Long Goodbye

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Another End

by Adam Barney

“Grief is the price we pay for love” – Queen Elizabeth II.

It’s probably the cynic in me, but it’s not hard for me to believe that companies will find a way to monetize our grief processing in the near future. It feels like it is practically upon us that an AI program will gobble up e-mails and text messages and then communicate with us as a construct of our deceased loved one. The grieving will get the chance to hang on a little longer to that person or say something that they didn’t get a chance to say during their life. But is this doing any good for the bereaved?

This is the primary issue that writer/director Piero Messina explores in Another End. With a wave-of-the-hand science explanation, a deceased’s memories can be loaded into a volunteer “host”, and they will spend a few sessions with the bereaved. The host transitions back and forth between themselves and the deceased when they go to sleep. This process can’t last forever, so you must be prepared to say goodbye again.

Gael Garcia Bernal (The Motorcycle Diaries, The Science of Sleep) plays Sal, a widowed husband who blames himself for the car crash that killed his wife. His sister Ebe (Berenice Bejo, The Artist) is worried that Sal won’t fully recover from his grief and she just so happens to work for the company that provides the host experience described above. After convincing Sal to try the program, his wife’s memories are downloaded into Ava (Renate Reinsve, The Worst Person in the World, A Different Man), who begins to visit Sal as his deceased wife Zoe. Sal is curious about the host, so he starts to follow Ava in her real life so that he can get to know her too.

Another End is melancholic. From the score to the performances, there is a sterile iciness that permeates every inch of this film. We don’t get to experience any of the happier times; we just dwell with the characters in the pit of their loss.

Bernal wears haunted well and Reinsve does an excellent job in the dual roles of Ava and Zoe. Black Mirror, for better or worse, has conditioned us to have certain expectations with a story like this. All the expected twists and turns play out as you will have likely guessed from the beginning and nothing profound is offered before the credits roll. An advantage to the Black Mirror stories is that they are handled in about an hour, which makes Another End feel quite bloated with its two-hour runtime.

Outtakes

Scrolling in the Deep

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Swiped

by George Wolf

2012, what a time to be young and upwardly mobile. Barack Obama was re-elected, “Gangnam Style” seemed to burst from every speaker, and Facebook’s IPO made social media technology the new capitalist battleground.

But when we first meet a young Whitney Wolfe – the future founder of Bumble – she’s a whip-smart, idealistic young woman looking for a tech startup that would easily connect volunteers to orphanages in need. Hulu’s Swiped presents her shift into dating apps as a dizzying, formulaic ride through ambition, greed, traumatic harassment and well-earned triumph.

Lily James is perfect in the lead. Wolfe’s seduction by the rush of the tech boom, and by her quick rise up the ladder at the firm launching Twitter, seems authentic. Whitney is well aware of how male-dominated the tech industry is, and when she initially puts aside some micro aggressions for a continued belief in CEO Sean Rad (Ben Schnetzer), James gives Whitney enough layers to craft a sympathetic internal conflict.

Director and co-writer Rachel Lee Goldenberg (Unpregnant, 2020’s Valley Girl) strikes a tone and pace that can feel rushed among the recognizable time stamp. These online rules “were written by men,” and Twitter’s explosion at the Winter Olympics ushers in the era of toxic behavior and dick pics. Wolfe’s subsequent push for some app safeguards at the same time her relationship with a fellow Tinder founder (Jackson White) is crumbling makes her a target.

The abuse gets intense, and sexual harassment charges follow.

An NDA eventually signed by Wolfe (now Wolfe-Herd) meant she couldn’t directly consult on the film – and Goldenberg makes it clear she did indeed take creative license – but Swiped paints an effective big picture. Could it have dug deeper? Most definitely, but you never get the feeling that it wants to explore any of the larger “social commodity” issues confronted by Celine Song’s Materialists from earlier this year, or the intricate empire building of 2010’s seminal The Social Network.

The aim here is an entertaining streamer, one that will engage with energy and polish while it introduces you to a hero from the tech wars that you may not know. And though you really won’t know her after watching Swiped, you’ll get a version of her story that’s always watchable, just never a match for memorable social commentary.

Outtakes

In and Out

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Just Breathe

by Brooklyn Ewing

Given the chance to see actor Kyle Gallner in a movie, I will always flock to it. Gallner’s ability to make someone fall in and out of love with a character is something special. In Just Breathe, he brings his A game.

Directed by newcomer Paul Pompa III, Just Breathe offers up a game of cat and mouse that keeps you guessing, and yelling at the screen. 

After serving a year in jail for assault, Nick Bianco (Gallner) sets out to reunite with the love of his life, Mel (Amyri Crutchfield). He discovers that she has a new admirer named Chester (Shawn Ashmore), who also happens to be Nick’s parole officer, setting off his anger issues all over again.

Just Breathe sees William Forsythe’s return to the screen as Tony, Nick’s deadbeat dad. Forsythe brings so much life to this rough and tumble character. I loved to hate him. 

Gallner and Crutchfield are great together, and watching them makeup and breakup keeps you praying their relationship can survive Chester’s romantic, and offbeat, advances. 

Fans of traditional Lifetime movies will love this one, and it has the polish to hit the big screen. The acting is the star of this thriller, and I’m excited for folks to see it so we can all talk about how much we hate Chester together. 

Just Breathe is another Kyle Gallner classic to add to the collection. Make sure to give it a watch.