Damn! So many great movies coming home this week – blockbusters, indies, horror, drama, comedy. Everything you could want, and not a bad one in the batch. Hooray for us!!
Click the film title for the full review.
Click HERE to join us in The Screening Room, where we talk through mother!, American Assassin, Menashe, Red Christmas and what’s available this week in home entertainment.
by Rachel Willis
History is written by the victors.
So begins Gurinder Chadha’s Viceroy’s House, a film that focuses on the transition of power from England to India and the partition of India into two countries. It’s an interesting sentiment as the film seeks to show that in the transition of power, there are no victors.
With a history such as India’s, Chadha makes the wise decision to focus the bulk of the story within the confines of the viceroy’s house and grounds. The film opens with the arrival of India’s last viceroy from England, Lord Mountbatten, with his family. Because of the intimacy of the setting, the audience is privy to the negotiations between the British and the leaders of India. Many will recognize Mahatma Gandhi, but may not be familiar with the other leaders, including the head of the All-Indian Muslim League Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who led the charge to partition India with the creation of Pakistan.
In addition to the wider story focused on this transition of power, a more personal tale is woven behind the scenes through the love affair of Aalia and Jeet. Aalia is a Muslim woman in love with Jeet, a Hindu. As tensions between Hindu, Sikh, and Muslims rise, the two are pulled in different directions as family and religion come between them. Their story provides the audience with a more personal connection to the conflicts that arise as Lord Mountbatten tries to negotiate a peaceful transition of power.
As Lord Mountbatten, Hugh Bonneville plays a familiar role, as those who have seen him in Downton Abbey will recognize the similarities between characters. Gillian Anderson is his wife Edwina Mountbatten. Flawless as always, Anderson is almost underutilized in her role. However, the scenes in which she does appear are riveting. The two are sympathetic as they try to avoid a violent passage of power.
However, the film truly belongs to Huma Qureshi and Manish Dayal. As Aalia and Jeet, they bring life and hope to a movie racked with conflict. As tensions rise, their love is a light in the dark. Though the history of India may be written by the victors, it’s the stories of the people who live through it that connect us to the past.
As a love story, as a history, Viceroy’s House is a moving examination of a tumultuous moment in India’s history.
by Hope Madden
Darren Aronofsky is grappling with some things.
For those of you who know the writer/director primarily for his streamlined, intimate films like The Wrestler, mother! may come as a bit of a surprise.
For the rest of us, mother! may come as a bit of a surprise.
How do you feel about metaphor?
Jennifer Lawrence stars as the very young wife of a middle-aged poet with writer’s block (Javier Bardem). While he stares at a blank piece of paper, she quietly busies herself restoring every room and detail in his remote, fire-damaged home—now their home.
Their peace is disturbed by a man (Ed Harris) knocking at the door, soon followed by a woman (Michelle Pfieffer—look for her name come Oscar time). The poet is only too happy to offer the strangers a place to stay, and this is bad news for the poet’s wife.
Between Aronofsky’s disorienting camera and his cast’s impeccable performances, he ratchets up tension in a way that is beyond uncomfortable. This is all clearly leading somewhere very wrong and the film develops the atmosphere of a nightmare quickly, descending further and further with each scene.
Many a horror film has been built around writer’s block, but Aronofsky has more on his mind than that. The larger concept of creation and all its complications: male versus female, celebrity, consumption, art and commerce. Also maybe the self-destructive nature of humanity as well as its tendency toward regeneration and rot. And being God.
Aronofsky picks up many of the themes that have run through his work, from Requiem for a Dream to The Fountain through Black Swan and Noah.
God as creator, god as creation. Gender politics and the nature of man.
Or is it all just one man’s frustration at not being able to give birth?
Hard to say, really. It’s a big stew, and it’s equal parts self-indulgent and self-pitying. Aronofsky is a daring filmmaker and an artist that feels no compulsion to hide his preoccupations.
Like most of the filmmaker’s work, mother! will not be for everyone. But if you’re up for an allegorical descent into hell, meticulously crafted and deftly told, and if you like your metaphors heavy and your climaxes absurd, this mother! is for you.
by Hope Madden
A holiday celebration of bad taste, Aussie writer/director Craig Anderson’s Red Christmas is a yuletide grab bag of solid performances, provocative subject matter, lazy scripting and gore.
Horror icon and E.T. mom Dee Wallace (who also produces) stars as Diane, the matriarch of a big Australian family gathering for the last holiday at their family home. With all the kids grown, Diane is selling off her large country estate and taking some time for herself.
But first—the best Christmas ever!
She’s joined by a set of squabbling adult children and their spouses, a pot-head uncle, and a stranger bedecked in dirty bandages, black robes and the reek of urine.
That last guest will be trouble.
Anderson has a lot on his mind about family, birth, death, murder, choice and basically every other noun you can associate with abortion. He is neither subtle nor judgmental, honestly, with carnage and questions piling up on both sides of the issue.
His film weaves between the splatter comedy stylings of a young Peter Jackson and the nonsensical decision making of any 80s slasher.
“You stay here while I go do something stupid, leaving you entirely defenseless for no logical reason,” says everyone at one point or another.
I’m paraphrasing.
A great deal about Red Christmas is grotesque yet intriguing. At least as much of it is tedious and hair-brained.
Wallace delivers, regardless of Diane’s routinely questionable decisions in the face of ax-wielding danger. She masters that maternal support-and-shepherd-and-chastise behavior that allows Diane to feel recognizable and human, no matter the increasingly horrific circumstances.
Each member of the cast finds dimension in thinly drawn characters, and the relationships among them feel well-worn.
Whether clever or distasteful, Anderson manages to dispatch characters in manners grossly suited to the subject matter. So, bravo there, I guess.
Not that you see a great deal of the dismemberment—Anderson’s reliance on red and green filters ensures you see very little of anything. His framing and use of sound focus more on reaction and spillage, really, but his is not a film for the squeamish.
I’m not sure who it is for. Red Christmas offers a peculiar, sloppy bit of macabre that manages to be more memorable than it is enjoyable.
by George Wolf
Done well, universal themes can resonate from even the most intimate of characterizations.
Menashe is the most intimate of characterizations, and it is done well.
Menashe (Menashe Lustig is an exceptional debut) is a struggling single father within a Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn. Since the death of his wife nearly a year ago, Menashe has been resisting all matchmaking efforts, even though that means his “broken home” is not fit for his teenaged son.
According to church teachings, broken homes equal broken societies, and the boy will continue living with his uncle’s family until Menashe agrees to take a new wife.
Director/co-writer Joshua Z Weinstein, a veteran of documentary shorts making his narrative feature debut, immerses Menashe in a measured authenticity that never ventures very far from a documentary feel. Though Weinstein doesn’t speak Yiddish, his film speaks it almost entirely, drawing us deeply into a strict society through a lens that is highly detailed but never judgmental.
What sits at the core of Menashe is a conflict that transcends denominations. With uncompromising intimacy, Weinstein tenderly probes faith, family, and the sacrifices necessary to hold on to what’s most important to you.
There is a lot about eating in horror movies. Sometimes it’s a single meal (Ray Liotta’s brain, for example), other times it’s a pervasive theme to the entire movie, as in Troll 2 or The Stuff.
We’re focused on the bigger theme here, which is a bit of a shame because spending some time talking about that spaghetti scene in Se7en, or the finger in the french fries in The Hitcher, or that tasty Texas barbeque in Texas Chainsaw Massacre would have been fun. Don’t even get us started on Oldboy and the octopus!
It takes all kinds of critters to make Farmer Vincent’s fritters!
Farmer Vincent (Fifties heartthrob Rory Calhoun) makes the county’s tastiest sausage and runs the Motel Hello as well. Now if swingers keep disappearing from the motel, and mysterious, bubbly moans echo around the farm, that does not necessarily mean anything is amiss.
Farmer Vincent, along with his sister Ida (a super creepy Nancy Parsons) rids the world of human filth while serving the righteous some tasty vittles. Just don’t look under those wiggling, gurgling sacks out behind the butcherin’ barn!
Motel Hell is a deeply disturbed, inspired little low budget jewel. A dark comedy, the film nonetheless offers some unsettling images, not to mention sounds. Sure, less admiring eyes may see only that super-cheese director Kevin Connor teamed up with Parsons and Calhoun – as well as Elaine Joyce and John Ratzenberger – for a quick buck. But in reality, they teamed up to create one of the best bad horror films ever made.
So gloriously bad!
Here’s a bizarre idea for a musical: The barber upstairs kills his clients and the baker downstairs uses the bodies in her meat pies. Odd for a Broadway musical, yes, but for a Tim Burton film? That sounds a little more natural.
Burton’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is a full-on musical – Burton’s first – and every inch a stage play reproduction. For many films, this would be a criticism, but Burton’s knack for dark artificiality serves the project beautifully, and he achieves the perfect Dickensian Goth tone. His production is very stagy and theatrical but never veers from his distinct, ghoulish visual flair.
As in most of Burton’s best efforts, Sweeney Todd stars Johnny Depp in the title role. Depp is unmistakably fantastic – consumed, morose, twisted with vengeance – and he’s in fine voice, to boot.
With Burton’s help, Depp found another dark, bizarre anti-hero to showcase his considerable talent. With Depp’s help, Burton gorgeously, grotesquely realized another macabre fantasy.
Ana Lily Amirpour follows themes that fascinated her with her feature debut A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, this time setting those preoccupations in a wasteland of conformity, survival and food.
The Bridge People are hyper-bulked up, ultra-tanned cannibals represented by Miami Man (Jason Momoa). They may not have access to steroids, but they’re certainly getting a lot of protein. The second community of Comfort offers a colorful, almost habitable environment led by charismatic leader The Dream (Keanu Reeves).
One version of America sees the vain, self-centered “winners” literally feeding on the weak. The second may seem more accepting, but it pushes religion, drugs and other “comforts” to encourage passivity.
Amirpour has such a facility with creating mood and environment, and though the approach here is different than with her debut, she once again loads the soundtrack and screen with inspired images, sounds and idiosyncrasies.
Like the by-product of a high cholesterol diet, The Greasy Strangler will lodge itself into your brain and do a lot of damage.
A touching father/son story about romance, car washes and disco, this movie is like little else ever set to film, showcasing unholy familial unions, men in their underwear, and merkins. (Look it up.)
Brayden (Sky Elobar) and his dad Big Ronnie (Michael St. Michaels – that is a name!) share the family business: LA walking tours of disco landmarks. They live together, work together, eat together.
Father and son possess a seriously unusual family dynamic that seems to work for them until they meet Janet (Elizabeth De Razzo – brave and funny). Both men fall for this “rootie tootie disco cutie,” and if that wasn’t enough, there’s a marauder on the loose – an inhuman beast covered head to toe in cooking grease.
The result is ingenious. Or repellant. Or maybe hilarious – it just depends on your tolerance for WTF horror and sick, sick shit. Whatever else it may be, though, The Greasy Strangler is – I promise you – hard to forget.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPl1vcb4hao
Fruit Chan’s Dumplings satirizes the global obsession with youth and beauty in taboo-shattering ways.
Gorgeous if off-putting Aunt Mei (Bai Ling) balances her time between performing black market medical functions and selling youth-rejuvenating dumplings. She’s found a customer for the dumplings in Mrs. Li (Miriam Yeung ChinWah), the discarded wife of a wealthy man.
With darkest humor and sharp insight, Chan situates the horror in a specifically Chinese history but skewers a youth-obsessed culture that circles the globe.
The secret ingredient is Bai Ling, whose performance is a sly work of genius. There are layers to this character that are only slowly revealed, but Ling clearly knows them inside and out, hinting at them all the while and flatly surprised at everything Mrs. Li (and you and everyone else) hasn’t guessed.
Gross and intimate, uncomfortable and wise, mean, well-acted and really nicely photographed, Dumplings will likely not be for everyone. But it’s certainly a change of pace from your day-to-day horror diet.
by George Wolf
Why would two different sets of white college boys head into the deep South in the summer of 1964 and go searching for long lost bluesmen?
“We were either brave, stupid, or uninformed.”
Two Trains Runnin’, director Samuel D. Pollard’s engrossing documentary on the convergence of separate journeys, shows them to be all three.
In June of ’64, the boys were privileged enough to be unaware of the Mississippi Summer Project, which aimed to bring voter registration to as many African-American Mississippians as possible. Like historical embodiments of Steve Buscemi’s music nerd in Ghost World, they were all obsessed with Delta blues, and most specifically, with two legends of the genre who had all but disappeared.
A group from California set out in search of Skip James (though no known photographs of James even existed), while “three Jews in a VW Bug with New York plates” went south to follow clues that might lead them to Eddie “Son” House (someone maybe saw him leave a theater). Maps are laid out like dueling ascents on Everest, and Pollard utilizes first-person interviews, stylized graphics, animated re-creations and, of course, stirring blues music to unite the paths of the “two trains” headed to Mississippi.
The boys were drawn to these performers through powerful expressions of both the “source and cure” of a torment light years away from their postwar suburbia. Outside the comforts of home, they found the raging racial torment of beatings, bombings, and murder, with a view that they themselves were just more outsiders coming to “give the vote to the blacks.” It is on this point that Pollard makes his subtle pivot, and the film strengthens the current of shared humanity running through it.
Featuring graceful narration from Common and contemporary Delta blues performances by Valerie June, Gary Clark, Jr., Lucinda Williams and others, Pollard has crafted a rousing bookend to Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman’s 2009 documentary Soundtrack for a Revolution. The music is the message and the message is the music, and Two Trains Runnin’ becomes both a sober reminder that the fight continues, and an uplifting ode to fight on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvjHLxliFAg
The biggest turd of the summer is finally stinking up homes this week, but there are two truly outstanding indies releasing this week that you should watch instead. Because The Mummy‘s not even “this is so bad I’ll just watch it at home and enjoy it ironically” bad. It’s the bad kind of bad.
Click the film title for the full review.
Click HERE to join us in the screening room where we chat about scary clowns! Yes, It is finally here, as well as Home Again, The Oath, Crown Heights. We talk through those as well as everything new in home entertainment.
