New In Theaters

Gifted & Talented

Leave a comment

The Girl with All the Gifts

by Hope Madden

It is the top of the food chain that has the most reason to fear evolution.

Isn’t that the abiding tension in monster and superhero movie alike? The Girl with All the Gifts explores it thoughtfully and elegantly – for a zombie movie.

In 2010, director Colm McCarthy took an unusually restrained and intimate look at lycanthropy in his underseen Outcast – kind of a werewolf Romeo and Juliet among Irish travelers. This time he mines Mike Carey’s screen adaptation of his own novel with the same quietly insightful bent.

Melanie (startlingly strong newcomer Sennia Nanua) lives out her young life in a cell, then restrained head, hands and feet in a wheelchair as part of ongoing research conducted by Dr. Caldwell (Glenn Close).

Let’s pause. When 6-time Oscar nominee and all around acting badass Glenn Close deems a zombie film worthy of her talent, we should all pay attention.

So, what’s the deal? A horde of “hungries,” each infected with a plant-based virus, has long since overrun the human population. Dr. Caldwell, her researchers and the military are holed up while trying to derive a cure from the next generation, like Melanie – the offspring of those infected during pregnancy.

It is an unsettling premise handled with restraint and realism, bolstered by uniformly admirable performances.

Melanie aside, the characters could be standard fare zombipocalypse cogs: gung ho military guys, driven researcher, tender-hearted woman here to remind us all of the civilization we’re fighting to save.

But expect something surprising and wonderful out of every actor involved – from Paddy Considine as the Sarge with something to learn to Gemma Arterton as Melanie’s beloved teacher to Close, steely and cagey in a underwritten role.

But much of the weight sits on Nanua’s narrow shoulders, and she owns this film. The role requires a level of emotional nimbleness, naiveté edged with survival instinct, and command. She has that and more.

McCarthy showcases his bounty of talent in a film that knows its roots but embraces the natural evolution of the genre. It’s not easy to make a zombie film that says something different.

Girl brims with ideas and nods to films of the past – in many ways, it is the natural extension of the ideas Romero first brought to the screen when he invented the genre in ’68. It definitely picks up where his Day of the Dead left off in ’85, working in nods to 28 Days Later as well as other seminal flicks in the genre.

But what Girl has to say is both surprising and inevitable.

And she says it really, really well.

Verdict-4-0-Stars

New In Theaters, Slider

Shell Shocked

Leave a comment

The Red Turtle (La Tortue Rouge)

by Hope Madden

Life, death, the natural world and the redemptive love of a redhead – all excellent topics, all simply but beautifully explored in the Oscar-nominated animated film The Red Turtle.

When Dutch filmmaker Michael Dudok de Wit got word from Studio Ghibli that they wanted him to be the first foreign filmmaker to work with them, he agreed, even though it would mean leaving the world of short subjects behind in favor of something feature length.

The filmmaker, who’d been contentedly animating shorts since 1981 and directing his own work since ’92, took the next nine years to complete The Red Turtle.

Like his Oscar-winning short Father and Daughter, The Red Turtle boasts minimalistic visuals to convey solitude, longing and the harsh realities of nature. But the melancholy of the previous effort is missing, something more hopeful in its place.

We join a nameless man – survivor of a shipwreck now stranded on a deserted island – as he fights to save himself from his fate. With no company but the skittering beach crabs, he explores enough of the island to determine the best ways off.

But each raft he builds is destroyed from below by an unseen force.

Without the help of dialog, musical numbers or flashy visuals – indeed, the entire effort borders on the monochromatic – The Red Turtle becomes a hypnotic experience. De Wit asks you to wonder whether the extraordinary events are happening or are the hallucinations of a desperate man – perhaps even the visions of a man in the throes of death.

He doesn’t answer your questions, instead weaving a fable as easily taken for symbol as it is taken literally. Perhaps the man didn’t survive the shipwreck. Perhaps he did, and the inexplicable power and magic of the natural world convinced him to stop fighting and live the life he has.

Either way, this spare and often somber film, punctuated as it is with both joyous outbursts and peril, is a welcome piece of poetry in Oscar’s roster.

Verdict-4-0-Stars

New In Theaters

Cure for Insomnia

Leave a comment

A Cure for Wellness

by Hope Madden

Not too far into The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter suggests that Buffalo Bill’s behavior seems “desperately random.”

Director Gore Verbinski’s latest, A Cure for Wellness, feels desperately creepy – and far too random.

His film is a little bit Kubrick, a little more Cronenberg, a touch Scorsese and an awful lot Burton. Maybe that’s why it’s so long – it takes Verbinski a while to squeeze all those other people’s vision into his movie.

What’s it about? How avaricious humanity’s lost its way, how an ambitious corporate cog travels to a spa in the Swiss alps to retrieve his boss, and eels.

All of it amounts to a bunch of nothing, but man, the package is great.

Dane DeHaan plays Lockhart, relentless executive headed for the top. When the firm sends him to a “wellness center” in hopes of retrieving a missing CEO, Lockhart sees his chance for the big time. But, like Scorsese’s Shutter Island, things are not as they seem.

Verbinski hasn’t been as visually unleashed in years, and his picture is very pretty, very creepy and endlessly stylized.

Beneath that distracting layer of polish is a hodgepodge – a mainly incoherent assortment of unrelated ideas. A Cure for Wellness slides images at you, each of them meant to conjure a particular feeling, but it never lays out any cohesive narrative to bring them together.

And, my God it’s so long.

On the surface is a familiar story of a man who is not a patient at a sanitarium becoming a patient against his will. And then, of course, is the mystery he must solve concerning his CEO – unless he’s going mad in the process? Mwa ha ha ha ha….

Plus some confluence of vaguely Nazi imagery (this is the whitest film you will ever see), a bit of a creature feature, odds and ends that feel like folklore horror, flashbacks and/or dream sequences, and a dance scene that could be straight out of Harry Potter. (The fact that Lucius Malfoy – Jason Isaacs – plays the villain doesn’t hinder that notion.)

Random creepy images grow tiresome after 80 or so minutes. Unmercifully, A Cure for Wellness has another sixty minutes to go, without a coherent thread or satisfying payoff. Or any payoff, really.

Verdict-2-5-Stars

New In Theaters

Don’t Knock At All

Leave a comment

Don’t Knock Twice

by Hope Madden

Two Thomas the Tank Engine writers team up with fledgling director Caradog James to talk of witches, urban legends, estranged children and doors.

They just don’t do it very well.

Do you ever watch a horror film where a storyline leads to a jump scare, and then characters move on with their lives as if no spindly legged giant demon woman just crawled out of their closet toward them? They just go to the next scene?

Frustrating, right?

Welcome to Don’t Knock Twice.

The film follows a recovered addict turned successful sculptor (Katee Sackhoff) as she tries to regain custody of the teen daughter she gave up years ago. Chloe (Lucy Boynton – who was so good in last year’s Sing Street) wants nothing to do with her mum until buddy Danny goes missing and Chloe suspects the long dead neighborhood witch is to blame.

A mishmash of horror tropes follows as Chloe and her mother believe idiocy and do ridiculous things.

There’s a Baba Yaga – nice! Now there’s a fresh idea.

There’s also a beautiful foreigner spinning hocusy pocusy nonsense, which is straight out of every “her husband left town and something supernatural is happening” piece of garbage ever to be set to film.

Lucy Boynton has talent. Katee Sackhoff, as far as Don’t Knock Twice exposes, does not. Her flat delivery never suggests the maternal devotion meant to drive her character’s actions and her chemistry with the rest of the cast is nonexistent.

The main trouble, however, is James. He cannot create a cohesive mythology, which is especially important in supernatural horror. Very little holds together and even less holds your attention.

It’s a mystery, you see – one that routinely mentions doors without ever really doing anything with that; one that returns repeatedly to clues just to pretend they mean something different this time; one that asks you to accept that a conscious human could find a box of evidence in her own art studio and not ask, “Hey, how did this get here?!”

It’s bad, is what I’m saying.

And worse yet, it’s dull.

Verdict-2-0-Stars

New In Theaters, Slider

Readin’, Writin’, Teacher Fightin’

Leave a comment

Fist Fight

by George Wolf

At Roosevelt High, it’s the last day before summer break, and the school’s online newspaper gets a breaking story:

WHY MR. CAMPBELL WILL DIE

Seems the meek Mr. Campbell (Charlie Day) snitched on the scary Mr. Strickland (Ice Cube), and you know what they say about snitches. They get their asses beat on the playground while the whole school watches…and they will most likely require stitches at some point.

Fist Fight is often contrived and ridiculous, and has those funny bloopers ready to roll as soon as possible, but ya know, it fills the class with enough likable clowns to get a pass.

The two leads aren’t asked to venture beyond their respective comfort zones, but do display some nice comic timing that bolsters their easy chemistry. Cube pushes his menacing persona and steely glare for all they are worth while Day does the same with the naturally funny pairing of his diminutive stature and high-pitched wheeze. The conflict of their characters is grounded just by these two actors sharing the same frame, giving the film a comic foundation from the start.

Then you have the always weird and welcome Jillian Bell as a guidance counselor who’s really fond of drugs and “that tenis” (teenage penis), Kumail Nanjiani’s by-the-book school security officer and Tracy Morgan dispensing wisdom as Coach Crawford (“You can’t run away! Who is you, Seabiscuit?”) for a steady stream of nuttiness.

Director Richie Keen makes his feature debut after years of TV episodes (including Day’s It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia), keeping the pace lively and the mood raunchy. He even shows a little theatrical flair once the students’ start spreading rumors of Mr.Strickland’s murderous past, and the fantasies play out with hilarious excess.

Fist Fight offers violence, plenty of sex-fueled gags and the obligatory foul-mouthed grade-schooler. It’s an adult education, for sure, and just funny enough not to skip.

Verdict-3-0-Stars

 

 

New In Theaters, Slider

Just Another Brick

Leave a comment

The Great Wall

by Hope Madden

You’ve seen the trailers for The Great Wall, right?

It looks terrible, doesn’t it?

It’s not.

It’s not good – let’s not get crazy. But I was expecting Warcraft bad – maybe worse – and The Great Wall is a borderline-passable piece of monster-laden eye candy.

Matt Damon plays William, a bow-for-hire who travels with a band of ne’er-do-wells into China seeking the legendary black powder.

Dreams of selling this weapon in the West keeps the Irish…Scottish…what kind of accent is Damon attempting?And why does it only show up in about 25% of the film?

Anyway, William and his mercenary friend Tovar (Pedro Pascal) must eventually surrender to the color-coordinated forces within The Great Wall – who actually have better things to do.

After that, director Yimou Zhang (House of Flying Daggers, Raise the Red Lantern) does what he can to visually wow an audience and draw attention away from the leaden screenplay.

Zhang is a nearly unparalleled visual showman, and though Great Wall never approaches the style of his best efforts, the aesthetic will keep your attention and create wonder. Vivid color and rhythm drive a joyous spectacle of monster carnage once the CGI swarms come calling.

And then we’re back inside, with one-dimensional characters stumbling through obviousness about greed, trust and teamwork.

Zhang takes advantage of 3D as few filmmakers have. The approach rarely serves a larger purpose than to transport and amaze, but those who come to The Great Wall seeking a larger purpose should prepare for crushing disappointment.

The generally strong Damon struggles with more than the accent. Though glib humor enlivens several scenes with Pascal, the deadly serious tone the film takes and the broadly drawn characterizations of the Chinese warriors make chemistry or human drama impossible.

But damn, look at those hills and swirling bodies, the acrobatics of monster mayhem.

It may be that the only thing The Great Wall did right was to swap out director Edward Zwick (associated early in development with the film) for Zhang, because if you weren’t so distracted by how glorious this film looks, it might really be as bad as the trailers made it out to be.

Verdict-2-5-Stars

New In Theaters, Slider

Truth to Power

Leave a comment

I Am Not Your Negro

by George Wolf

It may be driven by content decades old, but I Am Not Your Negro wastes no time in driving home its urgency.

As author James Baldwin tells Dick Cavett why he doesn’t view 1968 as a year of “progress for Negroes,” disturbing images of recent conflicts roll in succession, connecting the two eras with gut-wrenching irony.

Director Raoul Peck weaves notes from Baldwin’s unfinished 1979 novel Remember This House, along with interview and archival footage, to give new life to Baldwin’s assertion that the history of Negroes in American tells the story of America itself.

“It is not pretty.”

At its very core, the film is a  reminder of Baldwin’s intellect and clarity of thought. From page to interview to personal letter to public debate, Baldwin had an innate ability to communicate his ideas with laser focus and biting precision. And Peck (Sometimes in April) finds an effective balance between letting the historical Baldwin (who died in 1987) speak for himself, and entrusting a famous voice to speak for him.

Samuel L Jackson recites Baldwin’s prose, wisely trading the voice that is so recognizable for a hushed delivery that lends gravity to each carefully chosen word. There is a furious anger here, but Jackson’s trademark boom would have been both out of character and a needless distraction. In its place is a perfect tone of reverence and wisdom that commands attention as effectively as any of Jackson’s fiery movie monologues.

As Baldwin speaks of his own time, there’s no doubt he is also speaking directly to ours. It is no coincidence that the last twelve months have given us three of the most compelling documentaries on racial strife we have seen in years. 13th, OJ: Made in America and I Am Not Your Negro (all Oscar-nominated this year) are all worthy of any course in American history, each dissecting our deeply troubled times from unique perspectives.

If there is any point that shows the age of Baldwin’s original essays – and make no mistake, the depth of their relevance is often stunning – it is the lack of any substantial female perspective beyond that of suffering wives. Though the male-centric view is more understandable when considering Baldwin’s original book idea was based on the lives of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., it remains noticeable.

But through Peck and Jackson, an unforgettable voice from the past becomes an indispensable storyteller for today. I Am Not Your Negro tells that story.

No, it is not pretty, but it demands to be seen.

Verdict-5-0-Stars

 

 

 

 

 

Outtakes

Cbus Filmmaker Screens Dance Doc Saturday

1 Comment

by George Wolf

“I see the light of dance. The freedom. The undeniable release of expression within our human forms transformed outwardly for all to see through the movements of our bodies. I want the world to experience this from Columbus.”

Candace Wright is a Sr. Business Analyst at JPMorgan Chase by day, but has plenty of experience away from her desk and behind a camera. After years of video production projects she’s made the jump to filmmaker with her first documentary feature, Love, Dance, screening this weekend at Gateway Film Center.

“I haven’t made any other films at all,” Wright says. “The film work I do is mostly weddings and some promotional videos, so I was really excited to start with a documentary as I venture into real, feature-length filmmaking.”

Wright is a dancer herself, and her debut film not only displays a love for her subject, but solid instincts as a director. Love, Dance showcases eleven Columbus-area dancers of different ages and backgrounds, exploring how each “dance journey” changed a life.

To find her stars, Wright went looking for passion.

“I put out a casting call online and put up flyers at some dance studios. Most of the dancers selected were recommended to me from several other dancers in Columbus. I spoke to each of them beforehand about my idea and their story about their love of dance and how it has changed them or is changing them. From that, I wanted to pick who had true passion for dancing, talent and a great story of why they love dance.”

Aside from an occasionally rough sound mix that is common with young filmmakers, Wright’s entry into the Columbus film scene is impressive. The stories evolve naturally and are paced well, as Wright mixes first person interviews, performance clips, and old home video with a fine eye for style and editing. Very little of the film feels like filler, with Wright finding moments of true poignancy in her diverse group of performers.

Though many of the dancers in the film express some disappointment with the dance scene in Columbus, Wright is hoping to find the Columbus film community more supportive.

“I want to inspire people through film. Everyone has a story…it can inspire you. I want to make documentaries that make that happen.”

Gateway Film Center will present Love, Dance Feb. 18th at 4:30 pm. More info on the film at CandiRainProductions.

 

https://vimeo.com/191251329

New In Theaters

No Escape

Leave a comment

Toni Erdmann

by Christie Robb

It has already been a rough year. If you are looking for a movie to help you escape the bleakness of the year, Toni Erdmann isn’t exactly going to be it. No space battles, no superheroes, no fantastic beasts. It’s a spare and complicated film about a sad, silly man trying to reconnect with his distant, ambitious daughter.

The daughter, Ines (Sandra Hüller), works for an international consulting firm based in Bucharest. Her job is to compellingly propose outsourcing to oil company management. She shoulders the responsibility of job losses so that executives can sidestep the guilt. Ines doesn’t see much of her family and her father, Winfried (Peter Simonischek), jokes about hiring a substitute daughter to take Ines’s place (at Ines’s expense).

After the death of his beloved elderly dog, Winfried visits Ines, appearing unannounced in the lobby of her office building. Unfortunately, she’s in the midst of a project that may help her make partner. Her dad’s presence and corny jokes (delivered in front of clients) get under Ines’s skin and threaten her advancement.

Failing to reconnect, Winfred agrees to go home. Ines hits a bar to vent to some networking contacts about her horrible weekend. The man next to her at the bar introduces himself. It’s Winfried in a bad wig, with bizarre false teeth, claiming to be “Toni Erdmann”—consultant and life coach. Unwilling to out him (and by extension herself) to her contacts, Ines plays along while Toni inserts himself into her professional life, showing up at her office and at after-hours parties.

Hüller and Simonischek are outstanding, giving utterly believable, finely wrought performances—Hüller in particular. Ines’s carefully crafted professional polish requires that very little of her interior life is visible, and Hüller manages to get a lot across with the twitch of a lip or a downward tilt of the head.

But this is not the heartwarming, wacky father-daughter reconnection movie you might expect. There’s little of the tidy warmth that characterized Thicke’s Growing Pains. But there is a lot more realism. Writer/director Maren Ade’s film is almost three hours long, giving time to contextualize the characters in a way more typical of the new Golden Age of Television. We understand why Ines might be tempted to throw herself out of her apartment window, and we get why Winfried/Toni might not exactly have the answers for why she shouldn’t. But we see how hard he tries.

This is definitely not the movie that delivers on the uncomplicated warm fuzzies. It’s sad and weird, sometimes funny, and thoroughly awkward. But it might inspire you to embrace a loved one, and after this year, a good long bear hug is probably something we could all use.

Verdict-3-5-Stars

New In Theaters, Slider

Sloppy Seconds

Leave a comment

Fifty Shades Darker

by Matt Weiner

The latest installment in the Fifty Shades trilogy, to its credit, could very well be an ingenious meta-joke on the audience regarding punishment and masochism.

And that’s the kindest thing to be said about Fifty Shades Darker, the follow-up to 2015’s Fifty Shades of Grey (based on the wildly popular book series by E. L. James—insert joke about how it was wise to use a pen name, except with those book sales the joke is on all of us).

The sequel has a new director (James Foley) and new hastily sketched roadblocks—er, characters—on the path to bound-up bliss, but in nearly every other way the film doubles down on everything torturous about the first one.

Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan are back as Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey. They brought some new toys this time around (pro tip: don’t Google “spreader” at work), but there is no amount of light bondage that can distract from the obvious lack of chemistry between the two leads.

Johnson makes the best of a bad situation, and at times her portrayal of Ana flirts with acknowledging how absurd the entire enterprise is. Dornan, however, is impenetrable. Although in his defense, Grey only has three modes to choose from: having sex, being tortured by a mysterious past or impersonating a brick.

A boring relationship between the two leads of an erotic romance series should be a glaring red flag, but just in case the movie also outdoes the original when it comes to mind-blowingly bizarre plotting and pacing.

The film kicks off as a creepy thriller, and tries to wind things up the same way, save the 90 minutes in between that have nothing to do with the main story. Instead the film props up supporting characters as a teaser for the final movie. (Kim Basinger could be a great femme fatale as Elena, Grey’s mentor and original seductress. But if the pattern holds, it’ll be hard for anyone to rise above the source material.)

The script was written by Niall Leonard, who is E. L. James’s husband. This helps the film only insofar as it means Christian and Ana no longer deserve to be the most loathed couple involved in the production.

The LEGO Batman Movie also opens this weekend. It’s a movie full of computer-generated plastic people. Go see that instead: you won’t feel guilty laughing at the dialogue, and the characters do a better job at impersonating humans.

Verdict-0-5-Star

 

 

Hope Madden and George Wolf … get it?