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Wetlands (Feuchtgebiete)

by George Wolf

 

Every once in awhile, a movie comes along about a young girl with anal fissures and a fascination with bodily fluids.

Not familiar with that genre? Get to know Wetlands.

Based on the “scandalous” semi-autobiographical novel by Charlotte Roche, it’s an often shocking, uncomfortable film, sporting a remarkable lead performance and a tender, funny soul aching to be discovered, even as it’s daring you to keep watching.

That soul is personified by 18 year-old Helen (Carla Juri), an eccentric German girl with eyebrow-raising attitudes about sex and hygiene, which she’s only too happy to share. During a hospital stay to treat her fissure, Helen narrates flashbacks in her life story, and we learn about her unusual philosophies, including the reason she wants her estranged parents to reunite.

Juri’s performance is an absolute marvel. Beyond the fearlessness, Juri finds amazing depth, never letting us forget that Helen is more than a simple wild child. She is pushing limits on all fronts, testing the validity of social taboos passed down by her mother, and finding comfort in the age-old teenage goal of surviving your parents. Remarkably assured for her years, Juri paints Helen as a completely authentic mix of rebellion, perversion and hurt.

Director David Wnendt gives the film a wonderful punk-rock vibe throughout, and keeps it grounded in coming of age honesty while also showing gross-out comedies how to be grosser. Despite one or two moments that feel a bit obvious, Wnendt’s vision for bringing the book to life is clear and true.

Anyone who’s seen Lars von Trier’s recent Nymphomanaic films will appreciate Wetlands even more. While LvT hijacked a woman’s extremely blunt sexuality for a narcissistic personal statement, Wnendt knows better than to stray from the path of Helen’s extremely personal journey.

If you haven’t guessed, Wetlands is definitely not a movie for everybody.

But, you know what? With this much humanity, hilarity and all-out balls, maybe it should be.

 

Verdict-4-0-Stars

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Not Worth Telling

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Dracula Untold

by Hope Madden

Who’s eager for another Dracula movie? Because that is not the single most worn out, overused, tired storyline in cinematic history. But wait – what if there was something you didn’t yet know about Dracula? Something untold?

If you’re thinking not even then, well Dracula Untold goes to show just how wise you are.

What amounts to the love child of Bram Stoker and George R. R. Martin, Dracula Untold takes a decidedly Game of Thrones angle to share the old bloodsucker’s origins story. Full of epic battles, impaling, damsels in distress, and even two Thrones actors (Art Parkinson and a woefully underused Charles Dance), it’s a medieval bloodbath and unfortunate snoozefest.

An oh-so-earnest Luke Evans (The Hobbit) trades in Middle Earth for the Middle Ages as Vlad, once The Impaler, now the peace-seeking prince of Transylvania. He had a crisis of conscience after all that impaling with the Turkish army and now just wants to live peaceably with his lovely wife and son. But the Turks are having none of it, and without a real army of his own, he turns to an evil force to help him protect his kingdom and his family.

Evans makes for a fine dreamy, noble, tragic vampire if you’re into that kind of thing, and if that’s your bag you might enjoy the first 60 minutes or so of this film. But then – by the time the rest of us are fidgeting in our seats, having abandoned all hope for a film with real bite – first time director Gary Shore throws some creepy, gory bits at you.

It’s not enough to make the film tolerable for horror fans, but probably too much for the romance lovers.

For anyone interested in a lucid film, first time screenwriters Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless leave you with more questions than answers as they bend, introduce and retool vampire lore to suit them. Look past the moony love story and there’s a whole lot of silliness underneath.

Worse still are the dialog profundities. At one point, the Turks employ some Jedi shit, blindfolding the entire army because, “You can’t fear what you can’t see.”

What kind of counter intuitive nonsense is that? Plus, imagine how idiotic it looks to march an entirely blindfolded army up the side of a mountain. Ridiculous.

I know Game of Thrones Season 5 is a long way off, but Dracula Untold won’t satisfy your jones.

 

Verdict-2-0-Stars

 

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Real, Real Gone

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Gone Girl

by Hope Madden

David Fincher makes a lot of good films, but in his best films, he seems to be having wicked fun. Such is the case with Gone Girl.

Don’t let the trailers fool you. This is not a dour whodunit tragedy. It’s a brightly crafted melodrama that embraces its pulpy center as lovingly as its razor sharp edges. Infused with acerbic wit and delivered with stellar performances, Gone Girl is an absorbing twist-and-turn-athon and a ton of fun.

Ben Affleck stars as Nick Dunne, suspect #1 in the disappearance of his beautiful wife Amy (Rosamund Pike), and he’s never been better. That’s not such a strong statement, because in general his performances are blandly likeable, but here he’s able to channel his inner douchiness and it works wonders. He’s the exact mix of endearing everyman and disappointing schmuck the film needs to work.

But Pike is the reason to watch this movie. It’s easy to see why every heavy hitter in Hollywood – including the film’s producer Reese Witherspoon – banged on Fincher’s door in search of this role. Amy Dunne is a hell of a character and Rosamund Pike gives a hell of a performance – fluid enough to meet the high, constantly changing demands.

Fincher’s casting throughout is slyly wonderful, with unexpected faces in exactly the right roles. Tyler Perry is a hoot as Nick’s high-powered ambulance chaser and Neil Patrick Harris is just as unconventionally cast and just as enjoyably spot-on.

Fincher takes aim at current American culture – tragedy groupies, local law enforcement, the media and Nancy Grace-style “news” programs, in particular – and scores bull’s eyes every time. It gives the film an air of self-satisfaction, sure, but the barbs are so very precise and relevant that any smugness can be forgiven.

Fincher’s craft is on full display here, dreamily weaving multiple points of view and saturating the mystery with wit and tension. What feels stilted and flat in early scenes evolves into a series of “aha!” moments for viewers.

Gone Girl is not a heavy, thoughtful awards season drama. At its heart, it’s paperback trash, and in Fincher’s exceedingly capable hands, that’s all it needs to be to amount to a memorable, satisfying, constantly surprising movie.

Verdict-4-0-Stars

 

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Diary of a Creepy-Ass Doll

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Annabelle

by Hope Madden

Who doesn’t love a creepy-ass doll? Someone must, right? Doesn’t everybody’s old auntie keep a display case of them right in the guest bedroom where you have to sleep when you visit? And you really want to close the windows because the curtains are blowing in that menacing way, but you’d have to walk right past the display case. Well, that old auntie needs to see Annabelle. It’s for her own good. Because you have been right about those nefarious dolls all this time.

Yes, the horrid looking doll that introduced us to The Conjuring – hands-down the best horror film of 2013 – is back with a film all her own. It’s the dawning of the Seventies and a young pregnant housewife gets a gift from her devoted husband – a hideous vintage doll. Oh, how they cherish her…until she tries to eat their souls.

Old fashioned dolls are absolutely terrifying, but only in small doses. Luckily, director John Leonetti (upgraded from cinematographer on The Conjuring) understands this and presents three different faces for the scares. None is overplayed, each is genuinely frightening in its own right, and the anxiety over which might show up where keeps the tension tight.

Annabelle Wallis (seriously, the lead’s real name is the same as the doll’s!) turns in a solid enough performance as the vulnerable mom looking for the strength to protect her newborn from evil. Alfre Woodard manages to find some dignity in an obvious and underwritten character.

Ward Horton has less luck showcasing a pulse as supportive husband John. If you don’t pay close attention you might mistake him for a walking slice of Wonder Bread.

But they don’t really matter, do they? What matters is this: how scary is the doll and how cute is that baby she’s trying to harm?

Very and very.

The screenplay by Gary Dauberman throws in enough fun, unexpected scares to keep you jumpy while Leonetti tosses in some knowing nods toward iconic genre flicks. And while he cannot touch the timestamp authenticity of The Conjuring, the film has some fun with early Seventies images and ideas.

Annabelle never comes close to the near-classic status The Conjuring reached, but it’s a fun seasonal flick. Take your aunt. You may just save her soul.

Verdict-3-0-Stars

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Calling Dr. Phil

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A Good Marriage

by George Wolf

 

The last time Stephen King wrote a screenplay the results were, to be polite, disappointing. The film was Sleepwalkers and to be impolite, it sucked out loud.

But hey, that was 22 years ago, so let’s forget about the past and focus on how much better his latest screenwriting project turned out. With A Good Marriage, King expands his own short story into an intimate, no frills feature built on love, secrets, sex and murder.

Anthony LaPaglia and Joan Allen are Bob and Darcy, a longtime couple who are still plenty hot for each other, and who have the type of marriage others point to as being ideal.

The situation around their New Hampshire home is a bit more troubling. There is a serial killer in the area, and though news reports of the latest victim dominate the evening news, Bob and Darcy have family matters to attend to.

Their daughter’s wedding is at hand, and after the happy day, Bob leaves on a business trip. Alone in their big house, Darcy is tackling some household errands when she happens upon a secret stash of evidence that undoubtedly links her loving husband to a very dangerous double life.

From there, King and director Peter Askin have some fun with the thriller genre, leaving you unsure just how much of Darcy’s life with her now-suspicious husband is really happening. As you might expect, the two veteran leads take full advantage, with Allen especially delivering a rich performance that effortlessly swings between domestic bliss and survivalist cunning.

Scene-stealing honors go to Stephen Lang (Avatar) as an old-time detective tracking the killer. King gives him some juicy dialogue, and his scenes with Allen display a delicious back and forth tinged with a darkly comical mutual admiration.

In fact, it’s a shame A Good Marriage doesn’t explore its wickedly humorous edges more completely. It could have beefed up a story that’s stretched thin at times, and ridden three fine performances to even higher ground.

 

Verdict-3-0-Stars

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP9-6F3HMfI

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Halloween Countdown, Day 1

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The Descent (2005)

A caving expedition turns ugly for a group of friends, who will quickly realize that being trapped inside the earth is not the worst thing that could happen. The Descent is the most profoundly claustrophobic film since The Vanishing (the original, not that wussy Keifer Sutherland remake).

This spelunking adventure comes with a familiar cast of characters: arrogant authority figure, maverick, emotionally scarred question mark, bickering siblings, and a sad-sack tag along.  And yet, somehow, the interaction among them feels surprisingly authentic, and not just because each is cast as a woman.

These ladies are not Green Berets who, unlike the audience, are trained for extreme circumstances. These particular thrill seekers are just working stiffs on vacation. It hits a lot closer to home.

More importantly, the cast is rock solid, each bringing a naturalness to her character that makes her absolutely horrifying, merciless, stunningly brutal final moments on this earth that much more meaningful.

Writer/director Neil Marshall must be commended for sidestepping the obvious trap of exploiting the characters for their sexuality – I’m not saying he avoids this entirely, but for a horror director he is fantastically restrained. He also manages to use the characters’ vulnerability without patronizing or stereotyping.

He makes even better use of the story’s structure. Between that and the way film and sound editing are employed, Marshall squeezes every available ounce of anxiety from the audience.

The film begins with an emotionally jolting shock, quickly follows with some awfully unsettling cave crawling and squeezing and generally hyperventilating, then turns dizzyingly panicky before it snaps a bone right in two.

And then we find out there are monsters.

Long before the first drop of blood is drawn by the monsters – which are surprisingly well conceived and tremendously creepy – the audience has already been wrung out emotionally.

The grislier the film gets, the more primal the tone becomes, eventually taking on a tenor as much like a war movie as a horror film. This is not surprising from the director that unleashed Dog Soldiers – a gory fun werewolf adventure. But Marshall’s second attempt is far scarier.

For full-on horror, this is one hell of a monster movie.

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Stylish Vengeance

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The Equalizer

by George Wolf

The title The Equalizer probably should have been used in a late 80s Schwarzenegger flick, with a catch phrase like “You plus me equals..dead!”  Instead, it was a late 80s guilty pleasure TV series, with Brit Edward Woodward starring as an ex-covert op specialist helping those with nowhere else to turn.

Actually, the big screen version may remind you more of Taken, with Denzel Washington as the new hero with a particular set of skills. No offense to Liam Neeson’s ass-kicking resume, but if Liam is bad then Denzel is superbad, and he and director Antoine Fuqua make The Equalizer a ton of fun.

Be aware, though, it’s plenty violent, as gentle hardware store employee Robert McCall (Denzel) awakens his mysterious past after befriending a young hooker (Chloe Grace Moretz, redeeming herself well after the If I Stay disaster). When she’s badly beaten, Robert takes very bloody revenge, and that doesn’t sit well with the Russian mob controlling the prostitution ring.

Washington and Fuqua again prove a formidable team. But while their Training Day was infused with a gritty mean streak that story deserved, The Equalizer‘s violence is all about style, with Fuqua using slow motion techniques and flashy panning shots to offset the brutality.

Denzel is equally effective bringing some humanity to his role as vigilante. McCall is picky and meticulous in his personal life, with a caring interest in his coworkers. Yes, there’s some cheesy humor and a few clunky metaphors (a chess game, reading The Old Man and the Sea) but Denzel absolutely sells it. Did we really think he wouldn’t?

Though the film is a tad long at 131 minutes, Fuqua’s pacing is on the money. He knows how to build palpable tension before an oncoming beat down, and he knows when it’s more effective to skip the fight altogether, letting a single “after” shot (bloody eyeglasses) do the talking.

It can’t go unmentioned that intended or not, cliched moments in The Equalizer gain more heft from memories of recent news headlines. What might have otherwise fallen a bit flat ends up reinforcing the entire theme of justice for the common folk.

The ending certainly leaves the door open for sequels, and as long as the Denzel/Fuqua team is intact, I’m in.

 

Verdict-3-5-Stars

 

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What’s In the Box?

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The Boxtrolls

by Christie Robb

If you’re looking for a quick Halloween costume for your kid and don’t have any skills, fling ‘em in the car and go see the Boxtrolls immediately. Even if you’ve achieved the Martha Stewart merit badge for craftiness, buckle them in the booster seat. This movie is adorable.

The town of Cheesebridge comes to life after curfew. The Boxtrolls, a group of cavorting wee beasties who wear boxes like turtle shells, roam the streets in search of mechanical doodads to drag back to their underground lair. These guys upsycle trash into musical instruments and fantastical inventions.

But they have a bad rep—accused of binging on babies, they are rounded up by a red-hatted crew whose leader, Archibald Snatcher (voiced by Ben Kingsley), hopes to be promoted to a white hat once he captures the last of the trolls.

The trolls are harboring a small boy they’ve dressed in an egg carton (Isaac Hempstead Wright). Raised to think he’s a troll, Eggs realizes he’s a boy when confronted by the daughter of the city’s big cheese and head white hat Lord Portley-Rind (Jared Harris). Together Eggs and Winnifred (Elle Fanning) quest to discover Eggs’s true identity and prove to the townsfolk who the real bad guys are.

The stop-motion animation from the creators of Coraline and ParaNorman is glorious and filled with bug-eating gross out humor and pratfalls that will delight the younger members of the audience. But there are enough cheese-based puns and ruminations on the nature of good and evil to please the adults.

Certain scenes might be a bit too scary for the very small.

Verdict-4-0-Stars

 

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Save it for When You’re Sick

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This Is Where I Leave You

by Christie Robb

You’ve probably seen it before: a broken man forced by circumstance to return to his family home and reconnect with the life he had before, somehow, it all went awry. But you probably haven’t seen it with such enormous fake tits.

This Is Where I Leave You is as familiar and unchallenging as a bowl of chicken soup. Shawn Levy’s adaptation of the book by Jonathan Tropper places the spotlight on Jason Bateman’s Judd, a sad-sack who actually sits down for a breath and watches while his boss bones his wife on their marital bed. While couch surfing and growing out his obligatory beard of depression, he receives a phone call from his sister (Tina Fey) informing him that his father has died. His last request: that the kids sit shiva together for a week.

The family gathers with attendant significant others and kidlets and are encouraged by their oversharing, breast-enhanced mom (Jane Fonda), to let it all hang out and really get into the grief.

Like the bowl of chicken soup, you know exactly what you are going to get when you start. Family brawls. Run-ins with old loves. Finding dad’s secret stash of weed… You can ease into a nap worry-free. You’ll be able to figure out what happened before you dig the sleep crusties out of your eye creases.

The ensemble cast works to provide a little spice to an otherwise bland dramedy. Adam Driver (Girls) is great as the black sheep baby of the family and steals every scene that he’s in with a manic, fresh delivery and moments of puppy dog eyed sincerity. His interactions with the rabbi (Ben Schwartz from Parks and Recreation) who cannot shake his childhood nickname, Boner, are particularly delightful.  But the talent mostly drowns in the soppy sentimentality and same-ness of it all.

I’m not saying the flick isn’t worth seeing. Just watch it at home nestled in a blanket, coughing out a lung  with a bottle of NyQuil at your side.

Verdict-2-5-Stars

 

 

 

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Second Helping

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The Trip to Italy

by George Wolf

 

Yes, they do the Michael Caine bit again.

If this news brings a knowing smile to your face, you’ll have a fine time taking The Trip to Italy.

For the uninitiated, the “bit” involves Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon trying to one-up each other in a hilarious battle of Michael Caine impressions. It was a highlight of the 2011 film The Trip, which chronicled their travels to some of the finer restaurants of Northern England. Playing fictionalized versions of themselves, they engaged in joyously witty banter during a stint as food critics for the UK paper The Observer.

As you might guess from its title, the sequel takes the pair on a similar assignment in Italy, where they try to keep tabs on their respective acting careers while enjoying the picturesque locales and tempting cuisine of the region. And, of course, bickering about everything from Alanis Morrisette’s music to Jude Law’s hair.

Director Michael Winterbottom is back at the helm, with good instincts for what this film needs to equal, and often better, the first go round. The simple novelty of the premise may be gone, but there is a subtle deepening of character development, and an all-around breezy warmth that is contagious.

But, those are just tasty side dishes supporting the main course:  two likable chaps given plenty of room to match razor-sharp wits. They display a wonderful chemistry, and complete command over the process of turning droll, deadpan humor into some uproarious moments.

Sporting plenty of laughter, wonderful scenery and delectable looking dishes, don’t be shocked if you leave The Trip to Italy with an urge to call your travel agent.

 

Verdict-4-0-Stars