Based on his own Danish-language film Silent Heart, writer Christian Torpe partners with director Roger Michell for the Anglo-American remake, Blackbird. You likely know the story already: an ailing matriarch invites her fractured family around to stay for one last weekend of joy and festivities before she plans to end her life through euthanasia. But, as is so often the case in films like this, everyone’s a long way from even pretending to play happy family.
Susan Sarandon stars as Lily, the head of the family unit. Sam Neill puts in a career-high as Paul, Lily’s husband, who proceeds with a stoic, removed air about his wife’s illness and impending self-death.
Kate Winslet’s Jennifer is the first to arrive, early, along with husband Michael (Rainn Wilson) and son Johnathan (Anson Boon). Straight-laced and proud, Jennifer is the polar opposite of her younger sister, Anna (Mia Wasikowska); a flighty young woman who traipses in late, “looking like shit,” with girlfriend Chris (Bex Taylor-Klaus) in tow.
Completing the family unit is Liz (Lindsay Duncan), Lily’s oldest and dearest friend.
As you can probably tell, the film’s main attraction is its star-studded cast. A sea of riveting performances is what awaits us and Torpe’s well-written, character-establishing (and building) dialogue make these people come alive and feel genuine—even if some of their actions don’t. Indeed, Michell relies heavily on the strength of his actors to deliver the emotional clout the movie promises. There’s no denying the cast is up to the task, although other aspects of the film feeling like an afterthought.
The plot mechanics are hackneyed and unoriginal, while Peter Gregson’s score feels generic and uninspired. Mike Ely’s crystalline visuals, though, are an absolute delight, and effortlessly reflect the beauty and tragedy of both life and death.
It’s unoriginal, and it’s certainly not perfect, but this is a beautiful piece of filmmaking about the celebration of life, love and family, rather than the sadness of death and loss. And it brought tears to my eyes on more than one occasion.
We haven’t been able to leave home in months, which means that home has kind of turned into its own horror show. For us, that’s Ohio, so we figured, why not celebrate?! In honor of our own home grown horror show, we dug into the best horror movies set right here in OH-IO!
5. Scream 2 (1997): Windsor College, OH
Updating his celebratory meta-analysis of genre clichés, Craven checked back in on Sydney Prescott (Neve Campell) and crew a couple years later, as the surviving members of the Woodsboro murders settled into a new semester in the little Ohio liberal arts school of Windsor College. The movie Stab, based on the horrors Sydney and posse survived (well, some didn’t survive) just two years ago is already out and screening on campus, but has it inspired copycat killers?
Craven, working again from a screenplay by Kevin Williamson, goes even more meta, using the film-within-a-film technique while simultaneously poking fun at horror sequel clichés in his own horror sequel.
And in the same way Scream subverted horror tropes while employing them to joyous results, the sequel – funny, tense, scary, smart, and fun – manages to find freshness by digging through what should be stale.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG0oUO4mK4A&t=29s
4. Tragedy Girls (2017): Rosedale, OH
Heathers meets Scream in the savvy horror comedy that mines social media culture to truly entertaining effect.
Sadie (Brianna Hildebrand) and McKayla (Alexandra Shipp) are looking for more followers to improve their brand, and they have been doing a lot of research to make their content more compelling. The Tragedy Girls plumb their small Ohio town’s surprising death toll with more insight than the local police seem to have. Where do they get their knowledge?
Provocative.
Hildebrand and Shipp (both X-Men; Hildebrand was the moody Negasonic in Deadpool while Shipp plays young Storm in the franchise proper) nail their characters’ natural narcissism. Is it just the expectedly shallow, self-centeredness of the teenage years, or are they sociopaths? Who can tell these days?
3. The Faculty (1998): Herrington, OH
The film exaggerates (one hopes) the social order of a typical
Ohio high school to propose that it wouldn’t be so terrible if all the teachers
and most of the students died violently, or at least underwent such a horrific
trauma that a revision of the social order became appealing.
Indeed, in this film, conformity equals a communicable disease.
Adults aren’t to be trusted; high school is a sadistic machine grinding us into
sausage; outcasts are the only true individuals and, therefore, the only people
worth saving. Director Robert Rodriguez pulls the thing off with panache, all
the while exploring the terrifying truth that we subject our children to a very
real and reinforced helplessness every school day.
Interestingly, the infected teachers and students don’t turn into
superficial, Stepford-style versions of themselves. For the most part, they
indeed become better, stronger, more self-actualized (ironically enough)
versions, which is interestingly creepy. It’s as if humanity – at least the
version of it we find in a typical American high school – really isn’t worth
saving.
2. Trick ‘r Treat (2007): Warren Valley, OH
Columbus, Ohio native Michael Dougherty outdid himself as writer/director of this anthology of interconnected Halloween shorts. Every brief tale set in sleepy Warren Valley, Ohio compels attention with sinister storytelling, the occasional wicked bit of humor and great performances, but it’s the look of the film that sets it far above the others of its ilk.
Dougherty takes the “scary” comic approach to the film—the kind you find in Creepshow and other Tales from the Crypt types—but nothing looks as macabrely gorgeous as this movie. The lighting, the color, the costumes and the way live action bleeds into the perfectly placed and articulated moments of graphic artwork—all of it creates a giddy holiday mood that benefits the film immeasurably.
Dylan Baker (returning to the uptight and evil bastard he perfected for his fearless performance in Happiness) leads a whip-smart cast that includes impressive turns from Brian Cox, Anna Pacquin, Leslie Bibb and Brett Kelly (Thurman Merman, everybody!).
And it’s all connected with that adorable menace, Sam. Perfect.
1. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984): Springwood, OH
Teens in suburban Ohio share nightmares, and one by one, these teens are not waking up. Not that their disbelieving parents care. When Tina woke one night, her nightgown shredded by Freddie’s razor fingers, her super-classy mother admonished, “Tina, hon, you gotta cut your fingernails or you gotta stop that kind of dreamin’. One or the other.”
Depositing a boogieman in your dreams to create nightmares that will truly kill you was a genius concept by writer/director/Clevelander Craven because you can only stay awake for so long. It took everyone’s fear of nightmares to a more concrete level.
The film was sequeled to death, it suffers slightly from a low budget and even more from weak FX that date it, but it’s still an effective shocker. That face that stretches through the wall is cool, the stretched out arms behind Tina are still scary. The nightmare images are apt, and the hopscotch chant and the vision of Freddie himself were not only refreshingly original but wildly creepy.
“Lord knows where a person who ain’t saved might end up.”
Indeed. The constant fight to overcome the worst in ourselves lies at the heart of The Devil All the Time, director Antonio Campos’s darkly riveting realization of Donald Ray Pollock’s best-selling novel.
Bookended by the close of World War II and the escalation in Vietnam, the film connects the fates of various characters living in the small rural towns of Southern Ohio and West Virginia.
Arvin (Tom Holland), the son of a disturbed WWII vet (Bill Skarsgård), fights to protect his sister (Eliza Scanlen) while he ponders his future. Husband and wife serial killers (Jason Clarke and Riley Keough) look for hitchhikers to degrade, photograph and murder. A new small town preacher (Robert Pattinson) displays a special interest in the young girls of his congregation.
It’s a star studded affair—Mia Wasikowska, Haley Bennett and Sebastian Stan joining as well—but every actor blends into the woodsy atmosphere with a sense of unease that permeates the air. No stars here, all character actors in service of the film’s unsettling calling.
Pollock’s prose created a dizzyingly bleak landscape where Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy might meet to quietly ponder man’s inhumanity to man. Campos unlocks that world courtesy of Pollock himself, who narrates the film’s depravity with a backwoods folksiness that makes it all the more chilling.
As rays of light are constantly snuffed out by darkness, Campos (who also co-wrote the screenplay) uses Pollock’s voice and contrasting soundtrack song choices to create a perverse air of comfort.
Redemption is a slippery aim in and around Knockemstiff, Ohio, and grace is even harder to come by. With a heavier hand, this film would have been a savage beating or a backwoods horror of the most grotesque kind. Campos and his formidable ensemble deliver Pollock’s tale with enough understatement and integrity to cut deeply, unnerving your soul and leaving a well-earned scar.
It might be more fair for someone who wasn’t an Ohio State graduate and/or rabid Buckeye fan to review TBDBITL 141.
But no one fitting that description lives in my house, so…
For the sadly unwashed, “TBDBITL” stands for The Best Damn Band in the Land. 2018 brought the Ohio State Marching Band’s 141st edition, and director Joe Camoriano takes us inside that memorable season with unprecedented access. (Camoriano’s role as the University Communication Director of National Broadcast Media might have helped.)
From summer practice to tryouts, headline-grabbing halftime shows to the Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade, Rose Bowl and Disneyland, we get a captivating look at how hard Band Director Dr. Christopher Hoch, his staff and band members work to achieve a status that is – in the words of former football coach Urban Meyer – “elite.”
Camoriano is wise to humanize the experience via three engaging band members. There’s Konner, who is realizing a lifelong dream as Drum Major; Sydney, a charming trombone player with boundless enthusiasm; and Thomas, the lucky sousaphonist who gets the honor of dotting the “I” in the incomparable Script Ohio.
These three are likable personalities and easy to root for, which naturally increases our investment in the entire process, and is especially helpful for anyone coming to this film wondering what the hype is all about.
Despite an over-reliance on video fades and some rough patches in the background sound mix, Camoriano’s footage is always informative and engaging, even occasionally thrilling.
And for those of us always ready to answer a cry of “O-H!” there might be a goosebump or three.
Documentaries can be frustrating, especially political
documentaries. They warn you about coming disasters you hadn’t predicted, show
you the brutality and ugliness in parts of the world you hadn’t seen, reinforce
that ulcerous dread in your gut about humanity on the whole. You can basically
only hope they also show you a way out.
Mercifully, All In: The Fight for Democracy does
that. But first it upbraids your apathy about voting by detailing the harrowing
history of Americans who had to take a beating, even die, just to exercise that
right. Then it details the meticulously detailed strategy in place and being
executed right now to keep you from exercising your right, now that you understand
its value.
Filmmakers Lisa Cortes and Liz Garbus wisely anchor their
facts to Georgia’s gubernatorial race of 2018. The core storyline, narrated by the
Democratic candidate in that race, Stacey Abrams, is of that election’s rampant
and open-to-pubic-view suppression of Georgia votes. Abrams’s opponent, Brian
Kemp, had been an architect of voter suppression as Georgia’s Secretary of State:
closing polling places, purging voting rolls and instituting legislation that
made voting more difficult.
It was incredibly successful for him. Expect to see more of
it.
If that sounds cynical, it is. It’s also a major point of the film. But Cortes and Garbus (and Abrams) have a more idealistic goal, which is to point out something important to every American citizen regardless of party: Democracies only work when citizens decide what politicians do, not vice versa. When citizens vote, we can make the decisions. We can determine who is in office and what they need to fight for and against. And if they don’t do it? We can vote them out.
But we can only do that if we can actually vote, which is
why politicians who don’t want to do their jobs enacting the will of the people
work tirelessly to make it harder and harder for Americans to cast their
ballots.
The history is well told between effective speakers and
illustrative animations, but it’s the insidious nature of voter suppression and
its modern execution that is equal parts enlightening, terrifying and
frustrating.
So make a plan. Verify your polling location. Double check
that you are still on the rolls. (Ohio is especially guilty of stifling the
vote.) Vote early.
Hey, it’s been a pretty easy going year. Feel like a movie?
Well, first time feature filmmaker Rodd Rathjen has one for
you and you’re not going to like it, but you should watch it anyway. Buoyancy
shadows a 14-year-old Cambodian boy sold into slave labor on a Thai fishing
trawler.
I know, but stay with me.
In his feature debut behind the camera, Rathjen wisely
relies on naturalistic performances from mainly non-professional actors to
recreate the circumstances rather than dramatize them.
Sarm Heng is Chakra, a put upon adolescent bristling at the
limitations of his life. There’s the universal element of adolescent rebellion,
here tied to far more than angst. Chakra does manual labor rather than going to
school, and as kids in uniform whiz by him on bicycles, and cars on the nearby
highway come and go, his stagnancy and the back breaking monotony awaiting him
in adulthood press down on him.
He follows an opportunity to sneak away from home and get a
ride out of the country, where he’ll make real money working in a factory. It’s
OK if he doesn’t have the $500 fare to leave the country, he can work that off
in his first month.
That’s not how it actually works, and we spend the rest of
the film watching as Chaka’s realization comes to him in bits and pieces that
he will probably never leave this rickety fishing boat.
Rathjen’s film ends with sobering facts concerning the
modern slave trade in Southeast Asia, with as many as 200,000 boys and men
currently missing and believed to be held in bondage on fishing boats. The
filmmaker’s verité style helps us understand how this happens. There’s no boisterous
villain detailing the scheme, no, “Ha! You belong to me now!” No one tells you
you’re never being paid, never going home. You simply adjust to your
circumstances or you die.
There’s little dialog once Chakra leaves the boys in the
village behind, but Heng doesn’t need it. The evolution of this character hangs
on his face. It’s a remarkable performance, especially from a kid who’s never
acted before.
Heng gets an assist from two actors with some experience. An
utterly heartbreaking Mony Ros is the middle aged man who falls prey to the
scheme in the hopes of providing for his family. The camaraderie between these
two characters is powerful, and it’s a theme Rathjen mirrors in Chakra’s
relationship with the ship’s captain, played with menacing relish by Thenawut
Ketsaro.
What they create together is harrowing, but it’s also a brilliant piece of filmmaking that needs to be seen.
I have no problem at all with scary movies, I love them. But I gotta be honest, I can’t think of many things more frightening than the prospect of dating in today’s social climate.
So kudos to writer/director Natalie Krinsky for squeezing so much feel-goodiness out of the dating tribulations of twenty-something New Yorkers in The Broken Hearts Gallery.
Lucy (Geraldine Viswanathan), a gallery assistant, is smarting from a painful breakup. Her roommate besties Amanda (Molly Gordon from Booksmart, Good Boys, Life of the Party) and Nadine (Hamilton‘s Phillipa Soo) are helping her cope.
First lesson in letting go: get rid of all that junk you’ve saved as souvenirs from past relationships!
But a chance meeting with Nick (Dacre Montgomery from Stranger Things), a budding hotel owner, spawns an idea. If Lucy will help get the hotel ready for opening day, Nick will give her space to open a gallery showcasing trinkets donated by lovers left behind.
Krinsky, a TV vet helming her first feature, leans on plenty of familiar rom-com tropes, but gives them all just the right amount of unabashed enthusiasm to feel more comfortable than cheesy.
The dance montages are numerous, the dialog less like real conversations and more like people waiting for their next turn to quip, and the ladies’ Big Apple cynicism as biting as a sugar-coated fantasy.
But Viswanathan (Blockers, Bad Education) is bursting with bubbly charm, Montgomery brings a welcome, dialed-down authenticity, and Krinsky is able to mine some contemporary laughs from recycled ideas (the actual Museum of Broken Relationships, When Harry Met Sally-styled interviews with the trinket owners).
The Broken Hearts Gallery is often as awkward and messy as it is breezy and spirited. You know where it’s going and it goes there, pushed buttons blazing.
And for 108 minutes, dating in this world seems like it isn’t that scary at all, and could maybe even be fun. Maybe.
The most effective documentaries often serve as windows to a new world. The world framed by Red, White & Wasted may be covered in Florida mud, but its view – in both foreground and background – is remarkably clear.
Up front, we’re immersed in the culture of “mudders,” who live for monster trucks and mud holes, beer and babes. The undercurrent, though, carries the type of bare bones political insight authors and filmmakers have been trying to articulate for years.
Directors Sam Jones and Andrei Bowden Schwartz introduce us to Matthew Burns, a mudding disciple who years back gained some local Orlando fame as “Video Pat,” ringleader of the “Swamp Ghost” mud hole. The monster truckers would come to barrel through the mud, and Pat would eventually fill “1,000 +” videotapes with all the filthy glory.
But Orlando, as you may have heard, is famous for some other attractions, and eventually the mudders’ favorite piece of land is sold, forcing them all to give up the Ghost.
The introduction of Video Pat’s family and friends expands the fascination the film finds in uncovering this backwoods life. While Jones and Schwartz – in their feature debut – never condescend to the mudders opening up to them, they’re also smart enough to follow where the simple country folks are only too happy too lead.
These proud “rednecks” are openly racist but don’t think it’s really a problem, keep tuned to conservative media, have “a lot of respect for Vladimir Putin” and protest that the Confederate flag really represents “home grown cookin’.”
And they are bigly fans of Donald Trump.
For anyone still wondering why so many of these rural Americans continue to vote against their own interests, this film and these people make it clear as mud. Their way of life is disappearing, and blaming the immigrants, city slickers, job-stealing foreign countries and libtards makes them feel better.
And whichever way you react to that, Pat’s reflections on his years of mudding, his failures as a father, and his status as a brand new grandfather arrive with a conflicted poignancy.
As he smiles and gently cradles his new grandson, Pat wonders about all the boy might soon be taught.
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.
