Before heading to the screening of Rob Zombie’s new flick 31, I hopped on imdb to find out how long a film it was. I needed to know whether Chipotle would still be open when the movie got out. While on the site, I happened to notice that 31 possessed a metacritic score of 11.
For those of you new to metacritic, it’s a website that calculates a film’s ratings from major film critics across the globe and offers an aggregate score from 1 to 100. Now, I didn’t read those reviews – I like to go in clean – but still…
Eleven.
It’s Halloween night, 1976. A van full of what appear to be do-it-yourself carnies pulls into a dusty, woebegone Southern gas station and meets a couple of creepy characters.
You’ve seen at least one horror movie in your life. You know things cannot end well for everyone involved. But if you’re familiar with Zombie’s work, you’ll know that 31 is neither a spoof nor a ripoff. Every film in Zombie’s repertoire is a mishmash homage to everything from slashers to Blaxploitation flicks to grindhouse movies to the “savage cinema” of the Seventies. 31 is no different, except that the mishing and mashing don’t work especially well.
The homages continue with the cast. As is the director’s way, Zombie’s populated his overly familiar yet strangely mismatched world with similarly remembered yet out-of-place faces. Favorites Sheri Moon Zombie (natch), Jeff Daniel Phillips and Malcolm McDowell join Laurence Hilton-Jacobs (that’s right! Boom Boom Washington, people!), Meg Foster and Richard Brake in a game of death on Halloween night. (31 – get it?)
The writing is dreadful and the acting worse. While Zombie’s attempts at humor may make you recoil, the carnage itself is generally uninspired. He contrasts the grimy fight on the ground with a weirdly opulent games-masters celebration (powdered wigs and all). What I’ve learned is that you can bedeck Malcolm McDowell with all the frilly collars and broaches you like, he can’t deliver with a shitty script. And if he can’t manage, what’s a hack like Sheri Moon Zombie supposed to do with it?
“You want to know what’s in this head of mine? I’ll tell you what’s in this head of mine. What’s in this head of mine is…”
Do you know what that is?
That’s bad writing.
Is 31 an 11? No. It’s probably a 31 – not bad enough to be memorable, not good enough to pay to see.
The great news, though, is that Chipotle was still open.
What’s in The Disappointments Room? Is it a monkey?
Nope. The room is as good as its name.
Kate Beckinsale is the damaged woman who may or may not be imagining ghosts in her new home – a rambling, crumbling old estate that has at least 70 rooms too many for her family of 3. But they moved from Brooklyn to this isolated, overgrown, creepy mansion for a fresh start.
And do you know why? Because that is the most clichéd way you could possibly begin a ghost story.
Beckinsale’s Dana begins to believe there’s something amiss in her new digs when she uncovers a secret room in the attic and the door slams behind her! Plus, a cat! And a dog!! Or are all these domesticated animals and secret rooms the fault of those prescription pills she keeps eyeballing in her medicine cabinet – but not taking! Those are prescription drugs. I bet she needs those.
Luckily there’s a woman in town working in some sort of historical society who happens to have a file handy on the old Blacker home because, you know, lazy writing.
Beckinsale struck gold earlier this year with Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship. Blessed with maybe the best role of her career, she outshone an already impressive cast and displayed her wicked sense of humor we haven’t seen since Cold Comfort Farm.
You’ll see precious little of that here. On the whole she handles the film well, although the emotional climax is beyond her. It’s even farther beyond Mel Raido, who plays Dana’s well-meaning dumbass of a husband, David.
The film was co-written by Wenworth Miller, the Prison Break actor who also penned one of the most interesting inverted serial killer films in recent memory, Chan Wook-Park’s Stoker. Where is all that nuance, subversion, originality? It’s somewhere else. It is not here.
There’s nothing seriously wrong with The Disappointments Room, but there is not a single new idea or interesting twist on an old trope. No, this is exactly the same movie you’ve seen at least a dozen times, handled this time around with nothing to distinguish itself, no flair, no pizazz, and not nearly enough scares to keep your attention.
If you’ve ever met someone whose grandiose stories didn’t always add up, you may think you know Alice (Rachel Weisz), a plus-one at an adult birthday celebration who charms the other party guests…until she doesn’t.
Alice is just the latest identity for a woman who is addicted to being a “blank slate,” abruptly leaving everything and everyone around her, traveling to a new locale, and becoming someone else. She might be a magician’s assistant in China, she might be researching frogs in Australia, or she might be making all of it up.
She’s finagled this party invite because she has quite a history with Tom, the birthday boy (Michael Shannon). “Alice” ghosted him some 15 years earlier, but now thinks she’d like to catch up, which isn’t quite the birthday surprise that Tom, or his wife, was expecting.
Director/co-writer Joshua Marston (Maria Full of Grace) sets a very intriguing premise with precision and occasional sleight of hand, then can’t quite capitalize on the expectations he so skillfully crafted.
Weisz and Shannon are both…take a wild guess…fantastic, as they slowly reveal parts of their characters’ histories that only make you more interested in digging deeper. She is cryptic but hypnotizing, while he is wounded but dangerously curious about the strange habits of his old friend.
Complete Unknown feels much like the latest stage play Roman Polanski might have brought to the screen, minus the biting insight. Once Tom confronts Alice about leaving him, the film meanders as much as they do. We get plenty of conversation, obvious metaphors such as mirror gazing and metamorphic amphibians, but truly salient points about identity and limitation seem just out of reach.
Well-crafted and impeccably performed, Complete Unknown is never less than watchable, even if it peaks much too early.
Carrying a true American icon both in front of the camera and behind it, Sully lands with a smooth craftsmanship as fitting as it is inevitable.
In January of 2009, Captain Chesley Sullenberger pulled off the Miracle on the Hudson, landing a commercial jet on the Hudson River after dual engine failure, saving the lives of all 155 souls on board. Based on Sullenberger’s own memoir, this tale of American heroism in the face of extreme circumstance probably had Clint Eastwood’s name on the director’s chair before the Captain even finished his book.
And really, who else is more suited for the helm of a vessel in peril than Tom Hanks?
Eastwood and screenwriter Todd Komarnicki rightly anchor the film with the miraculous landing, while highlighting the human drama of a conflicted hero and the lives that hung in the balance during 208 fateful seconds. We get a subtle overview of Sully’s four decades of flight experience, nicely balanced with glimpses into the lives of his passengers and the seemingly random events that brought them all together.
It’s a strange thing for an actor to reach the level Hanks has, where he is universally regarded as such a treasure that his startling performance three years ago in Captain Philips became some sort of jarring reminder that, oh yeah, he’s good. This title role bears obvious similarities, but Hanks is able to illustrate the differences with easy grace. From Sully’s nagging self-doubt, to a determined defense of his choice to bypass nearby runways, to the stifling effects of sudden fame, Hanks carves out layers that are unique and deeply felt.
Eastwood builds the tension quietly, maintaining a consistent tone of understatement that makes the spectacle of the water landing all the more breathtaking (and worth the extra dough for IMAX). Kudos, too, for the almost Rashoman-style approach to framing the tragedy, and the respectful acknowledgment to the painful memories rekindled by the image of a crippled plane in NYC.
Not every scene embraces subtlety and not every line finds its mark, but Sully does, because it approaches the story precisely the way Sully himself seemed to approach his job. It’s a film that is modest, prepared and professional, with important moments that rise to the occasion.
To find a serial killer, you have to get inside his head. This is not a new concept in horror movies, thrillers, police procedurals. No, this is a tired conceit.
But Irish filmmaker Billy O’Brien (Isolation) finds a new vision for it with his wry, understated indie I Am Not a Serial Killer.
John (Max Records) is an outsider in a small Minnesota town. He works in his mom’s morgue, writes all his school papers on serial killers, and generally creeps out the whole of his high school. His preoccupations have landed him a therapist, the bird enthusiast Dr. Neblin (Karl Geary).
Turns out, John is a budding sociopath – that’s his official diagnosis. A good kid who lacks empathy, may not feel love, and obsesses over death and murder, he follows self-imposed rules and rituals to try to make himself normal and ensure the safety of those around him.
But when townsfolk start turning up in gory pieces, John turns his keen insights on the case.
Though O’Brien’s film may be too quiet an effort to command attention, his coming-of-age approach and indie sensibilities help him turn this outlandish and contrived effort into something touching, humorous and rewarding.
Records, who melted me as young Max in Spike Jonze’s 2009 masterpiece Where the Wild Things Are, serves up an extraordinarily confident, restrained performance. One scene, in particular – when he turns the tables on a bully at the school dance – is outstanding.
His onscreen chemistry with the nice old man across the street – Back to the Future’s Christopher Lloyd – generates thrills enough to offset the movie’s slow pace.
For his part, Lloyd is in turns tender, heartbreaking and terrifying.
The story cleverly inverts the age-old “catch a killer” cliché and toys with your expectations as it does. Robbie Ryan’s grainy cinematography gives the film a throwback looks that fits the image of a depressed Midwest town lost in time.
Bursts of driest humor keep the film engaging, while Records’s performance engenders the kind of empathy from the audience that the character himself could never muster.
It’s an effective twist on the serial killer formula, certainly, not to mention a coming-of-age tale that accepts its unpopular protagonist for who he is rather than how he could be made over to be happier in a way that makes us comfortable.
The weekend of wasted talent rolls on with Morgan, a derivative AI adventure that boasts an impressive cast and a lot of borrowed material.
Luke Scott’s feature directorial debut finds trouble with the L7 – an unnamed corporation’s newest attempt at artificial intelligence. There’s been an injury, and we don’t want a repeat of Helsinki, (it’s always Helsinki!) so Corporate sends the risk analyst (Kate Mara) to assess the situation.
The cast offers loads of reason for optimism. Joining Mara are Brian Cox, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Toby Jones and the great Paul Giamatti. That is a stacked ensemble. And even if every single one of them is underused, each brings something genuine and human – you know, the kind of thing that comes from deep and true talent – to the proceedings.
Highest hopes, though, are hung on the potentially dangerous cyborg herself, played by Anya Taylor-Joy. Hot off a brilliant lead in The Witch, Taylor-Joy again takes on a role in which her innocence is in question.
Like Witch helmsman Robert Eggers, Scott employs full screen close ups of Taylor-Joy’s face – her enormous, wide-set eyes and round, innocent features – to exacerbate a struggle to determine whether the character is good or evil.
And Scott clearly knows a good idea when he sees it because he borrows, grabs and plunders with glee.
His film is a mish-mash of Ex Machina, The Silence of the Lambs, Blade Runner and Terminator buoyed with decent performances and one vaguely fresh notion.
Every major character – every hero, villain, person of authority and character pivotal to the plot – is female. Every good decision, poor decision, and bit of badassery is made by a woman. And – get this – even when two of those women are soaking wet, their shirts are neither clingy nor sheer.
Right?!
I’m not going to lie to you – any horror/action hybrid with a predominantly female cast that chooses not to stoop to titillation and exploitation gets an extra star.
There are subtle moments that toy with sexuality, and Scott wisely lets Taylor-Joy express these themes primarily through a nuanced physicality. That, decent pacing and performances better than the material demands elevate the film above the predictable off-season action vehicle that it is.
The evil stepmother has been a source of fear and dread for eons. The Grimm brothers knew it – they disliked stepmothers as much as they disliked wolves. Horror has picked that same scab again and again over the years, but it’s not just that mom-substitute that you need to worry over. As we discover this week, stepdads – especially the heavily bearded, axe-wielding variety – are just as problematic.
5. The Stepfather (1987)
Years before Terry O’Quinn gained a following on Lost (or West Wing or Alias or Millennium), he crafted a memorable villain out of a weakly written toss-off of a horror flick, creating, in turn, a movie worth a second look.
With an idyllic suburb-turned-nightmare hellscape, the film opens like John Carpenter’s Halloween, the camera wading through the falling leaves and quiet street before stopping on the window of one particularly unpretentious little home. Inside, O’Quinn quickly and effectively establishes character. This is an actual character, not a cookie cutter psycho, and on the strength of his performance, this bloody confection of 80s family values works.
O’Quinn’s Jerry Blake marries into fatherless homes, ever seeking the perfect family. As soon as he sees the reality of familial bliss, he decides his family is a disappointment and slaughter ensues. As the film unspools, Jerry’s new brood, including Charlie’s Angel’s Shelley Hack, as well as Jill Schoelen, as her 16-year-old daughter, show signs of fatigue already.
Stepfather explores ideas of the exclusivity of the American dream and the inexplicable popularity of shaker knit sweaters. Mostly, though, it mines that same tension that worked so well for the Brothers Grimm: the fear inherent in taking on a step parent, in that they not only represent the finality of the loss of a beloved, but the possibility that the new household head to which you must submit will actually bring you danger.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZGHTP2dH10
4. Amityville Horror (1979)
Back in the Seventies, Long Island residents Kathy and George Lutz caused quite a stir with their tale of a diabolical house that nearly killed their whole family. The cultural hysteria they stirred led to a bestselling book, at least ten feature films and a documentary. The most famous of the cinematic efforts was the 1979 flick, a picture that followed the Lutzes as they took one step inside 112 Ocean Avenue and screamed, “Oh my God, this wallpaper is hideous!”
But, the house was really cheap, what with the former tenants having all been slain by their oldest son/brother Ronald DeFeo, so the Lutzes turned a blind eye to the hideous décor and moved right in.
James Brolin and his hair star as George Lutz, newly married to Kathy (Margot Kidder), new father to her three kids, serious wood cutter. George goes a little nuts, and who can blame him? There is obviously not a single decent barber in all of Long Island, and he’s sunk his life savings into a lovely home that sits atop the gateway to hell. (Honestly, though I always thought Tiffin, Ohio was the gateway to hell, the actual gateway lies beneath Columbus, OH. It’s true. Look it up.)
The film seems like low-level exploitation for director Stuart Rosenberg (Cool Hand Luke), whose approach is more melodramatic than horrific. He rode the cultural hysteria to big box office, but his effort feels a little silly now. Maybe it’s the red-eyed pig out the window?
3. The Snowtown Murders (2011)
John Bunting tortured and killed eleven people during his spree in South Australia in the Nineties. We only watch it happen once on film, but that’s more than enough.
Director Justin Kurzel seems less interested in the lurid details of Bunting’s brutal violence than he is in the complicated and alarming nature of complicity. Ironically, this less-is-more approach may be why the movie leaves you so shaken.
An unflinching examination of a predator swimming among prey, Snowtown succeeds where many true crime films fail because of its understatement, its casual observational style, and its unsettling authenticity. More than anything, though, the film excels due to one astounding performance.
Daniel Henshall cuts an unimpressive figure on screen – a round-faced, smiling schlub. But he brings Bunting an amiability and confrontational fearlessness that provides insight into what draws people to a sadistic madman. There’s not a false note in his chilling turn, nor in the atmosphere Kurzel creates of a population aching for a man – any adult male to care for them, protect them and tell them what to do.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcoCTA2IZ7c
2. Tale of Two Sisters (2003)
A lurid Korean fairy tale of sorts – replete with dreamy cottage and evil stepmother – Jee-woon Kim’s Tale of Two Sisters is saturated with bold colors and family troubles.
A tight lipped father returns home with his daughter after her prolonged hospital stay. Her sister has missed her; her stepmother has not. Or so it all would seem, although jealousy, dream sequences, ghosts, a nonlinear timeframe, and confused identity keep you from ever fully articulating what is going on. The film takes on an unreliable point of view, subverting expectations and keeping the audience off balance. But that’s just one of the reasons it works.
The director’s use of space, the composition of his frame, the set decoration, and the disturbing and constant anxiety he creates about what’s just beyond the edge of the frame wrings tensions and heightens chills. The composite effect disturbs more then it horrifies, but it stays with you either way.
Tale masters the slow reveal, and the dinner party scene is a pivotal one for that reason. One of the great things about this picture is not the surprise about to be revealed – one you may have guessed by this point, but is nonetheless handled beautifully – but the fact that Tale has something else up its sleeve. And under its table.
1. Night of the Hunter (1955)
Robert F. Mitchum. This may be the coolest guy there ever was, with an air of nonchalance about him that made him magnetic onscreen. His world-wizened baritone and moseying way gave him the appearance of a man who knew everything, could do anything, but couldn’t care less. And perhaps his greatest role in definitely his best film is as serial killer/preacher Harry Powell in the classic Night of the Hunter.
The iconic film noir sees Mitchum as a con man who cashed in on lonely widows’ fortunes before knocking them off. He’s set his sights on Willa Harper (Shelley Winters), whose bank robber husband had been a cell mate before his execution.
What unravels is a gorgeously filmed, tremendously tense story of Depression-era terror as Powell seduces the widow and her entire town, but not her stubborn son. Many of the performances have that stilted, pre-Method tinge to them, but both Winters and Mitchum bring something more authentic and unseemly to their roles. The conflict in styles actually enhances an off-kilter feel director Charles Laughton emphasizes with over-the-top shadows and staging. It gives the whole film a nightmarish quality that, along with Mitchum’s unforgettable performance, makes Night of the Hunter among the best films of its era.
In 2002, filmmaker Gus Van Sant released one of his more polarizing and thoughtful films. In Gerry, two guys named Gerry (Casey Affleck and Matt Damon) hike ill-prepared into the desert to find themselves fighting for survival.
A quick glance at The Sea of Trees suggests that perhaps Van Sant returned to these themes. Matthew McConaughey loses himself in a Japanese forest, befriends another wayward traveler (Ken Watanbe), their treacherous journey offering life lessons aplenty.
Because horror writer Chris Sparling penned The Sea of Trees, I was kind of hoping the film would be a cross between Gerry and The Blair Witch Project.
It is not.
No, it’s an overtly sentimental, culturally patronizing waste of one Oscar winner and two Oscar nominees.
We wander Aokigahara, Japan’s “suicide forest,” with McConaughey’s Arthur Brennan. Brennan’s a scientist, and you know that that means. That’s right – atheist.
Van Sant falls back on the crutch of the flashback to help us understand what this handsome scientist is doing in the suicide forest. It’s in these segments that we meet Naomi Watts’s Joan Brennan and begin to unravel the mystery behind Arthur’s trip into the woods.
Watts suffers most from Sparling’s hackneyed dialog. Her few scenes need to be pivotal and weighty – we know this because of her utterly unrealistic speeches as well as Mason Bates’s condescending score.
Van Sant is no stranger to schmaltz. As great a filmmaker as he has been, sentimentality tripped him up in Promised Land, Finding Forrester and others. His career is peppered with other writers’ projects, many of them with a point to make, and those statement films tend to be Van Sant’s weakest.
Perhaps it’s because, rather than finding his own language for the story via camerawork or score, he relies on an existing style. The Sea of Trees certainly suffers from a heavy handed score. Van Sant also misses opportunities to create a sense of foreboding, claustrophobia, isolation or even redemption with the forest itself, Kasper Tuxen’s photography instead offering irrelevant yet lovely images of windblown treetops.
Can stellar performances, skilled direction, pristine cinematography and an evocative score elevate a story built on weepy schmaltz?
Well….yes.
The Light Between Oceans is definitely a melodramatic weeper, but one saved from outright embarrassment by the sheer force of the talent assembled to bring it to the screen. Writer/director Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond the Pines) adapts M.L. Stedman’s best-selling novel with a determined earnestness and a rock solid cast.
Michael Fassbender is Tom, a WWI veteran haunted by memories of combat who takes a job as lighthouse keeper off the coast of Australia in 1918. Before heading back out to his post, a picnic with Isabel (Alicia Vikander) leads to multiple letters full of romantic longing between the two, and then to marriage. Years at the island lighthouse go by without an addition to the family, when suddenly an old rowboat washes ashore…with a crying baby inside.
The child obviously needs them, and no one will ever be the wiser, right?
Waves of guilt begin crashing at the baby’s christening, when Tom learns about Hannah (Rachel Weisz), a wealthy town resident who still grieves for the husband and child who were lost at sea.
The plot turns that follow seem born from a unholy union of Sparks and Dickens, as contrived circumstance begets impossible choice, painful sacrifice, and a search for absolution through that far, far better thing to do.
Cianfrance wraps it all in the majestic, windswept landscapes necessary to recall classic period romances, with sharp instincts for knowing when to let Alexandre Desplat’s music swell with power, and when to let silence fuel the sense of isolation.
Fassbender and Weisz are customarily nuanced and splendid, while Vikander is simply wonderful, making Isabel’s arc from youthful naivete to world-weary grief feel as authentic as material this emotionally manipulative possibly could.
The Light Between Oceans amounts to a two-hour struggle between talent and substance. One side brought the varsity squad.
