Back in 1990 there weren’t even online dating sites, let alone handy apps for lonely singles, and David (Brian Landis Folkins) is lonely. He cares for his mother by day and spends evenings in his basement, viewing new VHS tapes from a dating service—a service he’s belonged to for six months without a single match.
When he goes back in to record a new video of his own, David stumbles across a different kind of tape: Rent-A-Pal.
This video doesn’t tempt David with first person accounts of
women who won’t be interested in him. No, Andy (Wil Wheaton) is a real friend,
even if he is just a recording.
It’s like Blue’s Clues, except it’s aimed at desperately lonely men, which is maybe the creepiest premise I can remember.
From the top loading VCR to the woody wagon, writer/director
Jon Stevenson has David clearly defined. Even for 1990, he is behind the times.
He’s a loser. But Stevenson doesn’t dismiss David, and he definitely doesn’t
mock him. Which is not to say Rent-A-Pal is entirely sympathetic.
Stevenson and Folkins work together to make David a believable,
heartbreaking, damaged human being. Were he a caricature of that loser who
lives in his mom’s basement, Rent-A-Pal would not pack nearly the wallop
it does. Folkins’s layered, vulnerable performance and his character’s
evolution are powerful, awful, and awfully relevant.
It’s a pre-internet story of a lonely white guy, easily convinced
of his entitlement to everything he wants by another, similar white guy. Thanks
to this other voice, so very similar to his own and so very supportive, David’s
self-pity turns bitter.
Rent-A-Pal is a cautionary, pre-incel tale of the insidious dangers of blame and entitlement. Driven by a smart script, excellent supporting work (both Amy Rutledge and Kathleen Brady are wonderful), and an unerring lead turn, Rent-A-Pal delivers an alarming kind of origin story.
Aah, the woods. It is almost overwhelming in its defiance of
civilization, its sheer magnitude of just plain nature. Shakespeare set his
magic there, but a lot of horror filmmakers lean closer to Lars Von Trier’s
proclamation: Nature is Satan’s church.
Making his feature debut as both director and co-writer,
Minos Nikolakakis conjures a spooky fairy tale that makes much ado about nature.
Panos (Prometheus Aleifer), a city doctor looking for a
simpler, more isolated existence, moves to a remote Greek village to become the
town’s only (and apparently first) doctor. Winding through wooded, mountainous
roads on his way to his new home he nearly runs down a lovely young woman, who
promptly disappears back into the woods.
Once in the village, Panos discovers tight-lipped locals, superstition and boredom—all of which leads him on a quest to figure out who that girl in the woods might be.
It’s to Nikolakakis’s credit as a visual storyteller that so
many familiar elements still work to cast a spell. The film explains very
little. It sprinkles clues about, but relies on your familiarity with the way
folk tales work to lead you into an unusual take on the genre. There’s nothing
overstated or campy about Nikolakakis’s fairy tale trappings.
Aleifer’s understated charisma—his penetrating stare, his abiding
sadness—creates a strong center for the story. A melancholy mixture of logic
and longing, his bearing articulates the dizzying, frustrating mixture of
emotions and circumstances that trap Panos.
Anastasia Rafaella Konidi’s earthy version of the succubus
intrigues consistently. She vacillates between demanding and imploring, but
never feels genuinely sinister. And we’re never entirely sure whether the
doctor sees his plight in the woods as a dream or a nightmare, and that
shifting reality generates dizzying dread.
The film’s weakest element is the presence of co-writer John De Holland in the role of Panos’s protective half-brother, George. The performance is shaky enough that the first act suffers badly—the first impression is of a movie not worth your time.
Luckily De Holland has considerably less screen time through
the remainder of the film. Still, when George does appear intermittently he
punctures the spell Nikolakakis and the remainder of the cast has conjured and
it takes a while to recreate the mood.
The way the story resolves itself is a puzzle, and not an especially satisfying one. With Entwined, Nikolakakis boasts some impressive storytelling instincts, but there’s still room for growth.
The first tale of Mulan—a story that’s has been told
and retold for centuries—dates to an epic poem written more than 1500 years ago
in China. Back in 1998, Disney made its first attempt to capitalize on the girl
power message of the daughter who hides her identity to take her father’s place
in battle.
As part of the company’s live action re-imaginings of those
old animated films, Mulan comes back today.
Yifei Liu plays the young warrior in a version that takes
its material seriously. Don’t expect a wisecracking little dragon this
go-round. With the PG-13 rating and the multiple and violent battle sequences,
this one wasn’t made with the youngest fans in mind.
Director Niki Caro is not Asian, which makes her an unusual
and potentially inappropriate choice to helm a story so entrenched in Chinese
folklore. She hasn’t made as impressive a film as Mulan since her 2002
coming of age tale, Whale Rider, and it is no doubt on that film’s
account that the New Zealander got the call from Disney.
She certainly does justice to the message of empowerment, as
expected. What you might not expect given her previous films is her virtuosity
in filming beautiful, elegant and eye-popping action.
The fight choreography is wonderous, as are the gorgeous
vistas. Caro’s Mulan is a spectacle and it’s too bad it won’t be shared
across big screens.
There’s a simplicity to the storyline that allows Caro and
her cast to create wonder with the visuals, and Liu’s earnest portrayal suits
that aim. The screenplay remains true to the folktale’s message in spots where ’98
animated version betrayed its more conventional view of female power.
There are no songs and dances here, but there is magic nonetheless.
“People want to know about the road, if it was hard getting
here. That’s not the question.”
A Step Without Feet, the first documentary from Jeremy Glaholt and Lydia Schamschula, spends 90 minutes in snowy Berlin with a handful of refugees from the Syrian war. The filmmakers’ first question: What do you think of the word “refugee”?
They don’t see the word the same way you do.
It’s actually a fascinating way to get into a story that
looks sideways at a topic so often portrayed in documentaries. The bloody,
lengthy, horrific war in Syria has launched more documentaries than I can
count, many of them brilliant, most of them brutal.
Glaholt and Schamschula pull us out of all that brutality,
mercifully, and drop us into the newly created lives of those who’ve escaped it:
a dancer and a dentist, a musician and a cook, a writer and a student. Their
resilience, nostalgia, trauma and optimism are on screen in a film that
recognizes salvation—however profound—as just another transition in life.
Though life in Germany has been seemingly peaceful for the
group and each has many happy moments to discuss, the anxieties of the past and
the longing for what is lost give their peaceful existence a bittersweet flavor.
Many bridge the past and the present, their old home and
new, with art. One writes, one dances, one sings, each of them tapping into
something that gives creative outlet to their fear and yearning.
The film’s biggest drawback is its lack of context. We’re 15 minutes or more into the film before anyone utters the word Syria. The reasons each one left is never clearly articulated. While those familiar with the conflict would certainly have a sense, the reasons that these individuals needed to flee while their parents or siblings were OK to stay is never addressed.
With the clear and mostly fulfilled goal of casting these human beings in the present tense, the filmmakers likely made the conscious decision not to dig too deeply in this painful terrain. Still, the magnitude of the subjects’ sorrow, longing and trauma is tied to that specific conflict. To do their present justice we need more of their past.
The film—almost exclusively talking head footage of interviews with the seven refugees—remains strangely captivating throughout. Because of the music, the dance, the poetry and the candor, a deeply human and powerfully universal story emerges.
In this modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s play by the
same name, Measure for Measure follows a large cast of characters all
tied to the same horrific event. A man high on meth goes on a racially charged
shooting spree in a housing
commission tower. Angelo sold him the drugs. Farouk might have sold him the
gun. Claudio and Jaiwara were simply lucky enough to survive. What really
connects the tenants of the dreary flats is not a single act violence, but the
fact that their lives are rife with it.
Director Paul Ireland uses
trauma as connective tissue, highlighting the theme with repeated showings of August
Friedrich Schenck’s “Anguish.” The painting shows a ewe crying out over the
body of her dead lamb, encircled by waiting crows. It is trauma, and
vulnerability, like this that pushes characters together and rips them apart,
with carrion birds waiting to swoop in.
The script, penned by Ireland and Damian Hill (to whom the film is dedicated), is strongest when it strays from Shakespeare. The addition of an immigrant family to the story adds dimension to the types of trauma we face and how it shapes the next generation. The love story of Ireland and Hill’s Measure for Measure is much more straightforward than Shakespeare’s. If anything, the film would’ve improved from even further deviation.
What truly carries the production are its strong performances. Hugo Weaving is great as Duke, endlessly watchable. His manic foil Angelo (Mark Leonard Winter) is also fantastic, even when the script doesn’t support him. Farouk (Fayssal Bazzi) starts as a stereotypical baddie, but Bazzi finds complicated depth in him later on. Harrison Gilbertson and Megan Smart build great chemistry together as Claudio and Jaiwara, despite a bit of a montaged love story at the start.
Measure for Measure is a worthy effort to take the endlessly classic nature of Shakespeare and frame it in a modern retelling with new resonance. Its focus on loss, vengeance, and love are undeniably relatable, while still telling a fresh story in an old frame.
Countless movies over the years have pondered what it might feel
like to be immortal. Writer Jon Dabach, in four separate tales with one thread
in common, wonders what it would be like not to be able to die.
His film Immortal strings together these stories,
each one directed by a different person (Tom Colley, Danny Isaacs, Rob
Margolies and Dabach himself), each one depicting one person’s relationship
with deathlessness.
The composite contains a horror short, two thrillers and one
anguished romance.
Chelsea, starring the great Dylan Baker, offers a
somewhat overwritten first act. Baker is beloved old high school English
teacher Mr. Shagis, Chelsea (Lindsay Mushet) is the school’s star athlete, and
today’s lesson is symbolism.
Baker’s as nuanced and fascinating as always in a short that
starts things off with a solid smack.
Of the balance, Mary and Ted is most effective. Assisted
suicide advocates film a video of the longtime married couple played lovingly
by Robin Bartlett and Tony Todd. We, along with the crew, get to know them—their
love, their suffering—and then the crew leaves them to their task.
I feel like I want to send Dabach a thank you note for this
one, just to see Tony Todd this tender. The sub-baritone voiced horror icon (Candyman,
Night of the Living Dead) delicately wields emotion and heartbreak here
in a way we’ve certainly never seen from this actor. Bartlett offers an
outstanding counterpoint, the believable resignation in her delivery weighing down
every line.
A hit and run victim exacts precise revenge in Warren, which takes a particularly solitary view: So you just found out you can’t die. What do you do now? The absolute ordinariness, the down-to-earthiness of this one’s delivery—as well as the charmingly odd investigator—give it real appeal.
Even the one that feels most predictable takes a wildly
unpredictable turn—one the filmmakers do not shy away from capturing on film.
In each, there’s an element of discovery that punctuates the story. Dabach and
his team of directors capture a wide range of emotions and attitudes, but leave
the audience wondering just enough.
Immortal is essentially an anthology of short films, and in fact, the pieces do not intersect, nor do they clarify much. Instead, they offer four slices of life—well, slices of not death—and an intriguing look at what death means to us.
Well, it’s got enough of its Irish up that hearing “Whiskey in the Jar” play on a barroom jukebox feels like being part of an inside joke. And that’s about the only funny business in a film that fuses multiple inspirations into one searingly intimate rumination on a life defined by violence.
Douglas “Arm” Armstrong (Cosmo Jarvis) was once a promising Irish boxing champion, but left the gloves behind for the reliable income and familiar treatment offered by the Devers crime family. As their chief enforcer, Arm is feared, which often hampers his relationship with his ex Ursula (Naimh Algar) and their autistic son Jack.
The delicate co-existence of Arm’s two worlds is a constant struggle, but when family patriarch Paudi Devers (Ned Dennehy) finally orders Arm to kill, it becomes clear there is room for only one set of loyalties.
Director Nick Rowland and screenwriter Joseph Murtagh adapt Colin Barrett’s short story “Calm With Horses” with a tightly-wound sense of tension and brutality that propels a fascinating curiosity about the lasting effects of violence on the ones dishing it out.
While recalling films from the classic (On the Watefront) to the underseen (The Drop), Rowland’s feature debut carves out its own rural identity thanks to an instinct for detail (watching two Irish gangsters debate the wisdom of fleeing to Mexico is perfection) and a marvelous cast.
Jarvis makes Arm an endlessly sympathetic brute, providing a needed depth to Arm’s slow awakening about who is and isn’t worth his trust. Much of that trust is given to Paudi’s heir apparent Dympna, an unrepentant manipulator brought to menacing life by Barry Keoghan (The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Dunkirk), who again shows why you don’t want to miss any film with him in it.
But it’s Arm’s time with Ursula and Jack (Kiljan Moroney) that reminds him of the kind of man he wants to be, one that knows the difference “between loyalty and servitude.”
These moral complexities of a man questioning his sense of the world are what gives The Shadow of Violence its voice, one that speaks most eloquently in the spaces between the bloodshed.
Even as we’re still reeling from the shocking death of Chadwick Boseman this past weekend, Robin’s Wish takes us back to August of 2014, when Robin Williams’s suicide sent similar shockwaves.
In the years since, Robin’s death has often appeared as a testament to the danger of chronic depression. But with this film, director/co-writer Tylor Norwood’s main goal is allowing Robin’s widow to correct the record.
Depression may have touched Robin’s life, but that’s not what ended it.
Susan Schneider Williams explains that an autopsy revealed that Robin suffered from diffuse Lewy body dementia, a buildup of proteins in the brain. Always fatal, the degenerative disease can cause anxiety, self-doubt, delusions, an intense lack of sleep, and drastic paranoia.
As sad as the ending is, Norwood and Schneider Williams make sure we see the genius of Robin’s talent and the “bigness of love” in his soul. The joy he took in bringing smiles to others is touching, as is the Robin and Susan love story that began when one of them (guess) wore camouflage pants to the Apple store.
The film’s overview of Williams’s career is satisfactory but, for the most part, a rehashing of information. The really glaring hole here is the absence of any Williams family member beyond Susan. The reason for this is unclear, but outside voices would certainly have broadened the context.
But Robin’s Wish is indeed worthwhile for a more complete understanding of a legend. The final days of Williams’s life are re-defined with tenderness, clarity and purpose, framing a once-in-a-lifetime talent in an entirely new and tragic light.
What were we looking for? Reboots/remakes that are superior to the original. There are more than you think. In the podcast, we run through eight horror reboots that are superior to the original, kick around another handful that are Even Stevens, and argue about several that could maybe go either way (depending on which one of us you’re talking to). So, you know, have a listen.
5. Dawn of the Dead
Zack Snyder would go on to success with vastly overrated movies, but his one truly fine piece of filmmaking updated Romero’s Dead sequel with the high octane horror. The result may be less cerebral and political than Romero’s original, but it is a thrill ride through hell and it is not to be missed.
The flick begins strong with one of the best “things seem fine but then they don’t” openings in film. And finally! A strong female lead (Sarah Polley). Polley’s beleaguered nurse Ana leads us through the aftermath of the dawn of the dead, fleeing her rabid husband and neighbors and winding up with a rag tag team of survivors hunkered down inside a mall.
In Romero’s version, themes of capitalism, greed, and mindless consumerism run through the narrative. Snyder, though affectionate to the source material, focuses more on survival, humanity, and thrills. (He also has a wickedly clever soundtrack.) It’s more visceral and more fun. His feature is gripping, breathlessly paced, well developed and genuinely terrifying.
4. Suspiria
Luca Guadagnino continues to be a master film craftsman. Much as he draped Call Me by Your Name in waves of dreamy romance, here he establishes a consistent mood of nightmarish goth. Macabre visions dart in and out like a video that will kill you in 7 days while sudden, extreme zooms, precise sound design and a vivid score from Thom Yorke help cement the homage to another era.
But even when this new Suspiria—a “cover version” of Dario Argento’s 1977 giallo classic—is tipping its hat, Guadagnino leaves no doubt he is making his own confident statement. The color scheme is intentionally muted, and you’ll find no men in this dance troupe, serving immediate notice that superficialities are not the endgame here.
3. The Ring/Ringu
Gore Verbinski’s film The Ring – thanks in large part to the creepy clever premise created by Koji Suzuki, who wrote the novel Ringu – is superior to its source material principally due to the imagination and edge of the fledgling director. Verbinski’s film is visually arresting, quietly atmospheric, and creepy as hell.
From cherubic image of plump cheeked innocence to a mess of ghastly flesh and disjointed bones climbing out of the well and into your life, the character of Samara is brilliantly created.
Hideo Nakata’s original was saddled with an unlikeable ex-husband and a screechy supernatural/psychic storyline that didn’t travel well. Screenwriter Ehren Kruger did a nice job of re-focusing the mystery.
Sure, it amounts to an immediately dated musing on technology. (VHS? They went out with the powdered wig!) But still, there’s that last moment when wee Aidan (a weirdly perfect David Dorfman) asks his mom, “What about the people we show it to? What happens to them?”
At this point we realize he means us, the audience.
We watched the tape! We’re screwed!
2. The Thing/The Thing From Another World
The 1951 original The Thing From Another World is a scifi classic, and every inch of it screams 1950s. The good guys are good, the monsters are monsters. Everything has its place. It’s reassuring.
John Carpenter’s remake upends all that with a thoroughly spectacular tale of icy isolation, contamination, and mutation.
A beard-tastic cast portrays a team of scientists on expedition in the Arctic who take in a dog. The dog is not a dog, though. Not really. And soon, in an isolated wasteland with barely enough interior room to hold all the facial hair, folks are getting jumpy because there’s no knowing who’s not really himself anymore.
This is an amped up body snatcher movie benefitting from some of Carpenter’s most cinema-fluent and crafty direction: wide shots when we need to see the vastness of the unruly wilds; tight shots to remind us of the close quarters with parasitic death inside.
The story remains taut beginning to end, and there’s rarely any telling just who is and who is not infected by the last reel. You’re as baffled and confined as the scientists.
1. The Fly
As endearing and fascinating as we find Kurt Neumann’s 1958 Vincent Price vehicle, it just doesn’t quite have the same impact once you’ve seen Jeff Goldblum peel off his fingernails.
Not because it’s gross—and it is gross AF—but because he’s fascinated by the process itself. It’s the scientist in him.
David Cronenberg knows how to properly make a mad scientist film, especially if that madness wreaks corporeal havoc. But it’s not just Cronenberg’s disturbed genius for images and ideas that makes The Fly fly; it’s the performance he draws from Goldblum.
Goldblum is an absolute gift to this film, so endearing in his pre-Brundlefly nerdiness. He’s the picture’s heartbeat, and it’s more than the fact that we like his character so much. The actor also performs heroically under all those prosthetics.
