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Girl Fight

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Raze

by Hope Madden

Quentin Tarantino’s deceptively complex Django Unchained boasts almost countless fascinating images of depravity and violence, among them, the Mandingo fights that Django and Dr. King use to con their way onto Candyland Plantation.

Filmmakers Josh Waller and Robert Beaucage found inspiration in this particular idea, writing and directing the film Raze about a set of prisoners forced to fight each other to the death. Rather than pitting enslaved men against each other for the amusement of plantation owners, Raze forces kidnapped, attractive women to beat each other to death.

Back to Tarantino and his far better ideas. Waller pairs the involuntary death match concept with Tarantino’s favorite death proof stunt double Zoe Bell for their spare and brutal film. We know Bell can hang onto the hood of a speeding Dodge Challenger, but can she hold her own against 49 women desperate to survive and protect their loved ones?

Bell plays Sabrina, a young woman who woke up one day in a cell in the dungeon-like basement belonging to some wacko order of zealots. Losing a fight does not only mean a prisoner’s own death, but also ensures the death of one loved one.

It’s a streamlined plot, certainly, with precious little time wasted on character backstory or the specifics of this weird, bloodthirsty order. Just round after round of two women bare-knuckling it until only one’s left breathing.

It would appear that this exploitation film hopes to make some points about exploitation, and it’s true that these battle sequences could hardly be considered titillating. (Should you find these battles arousing in any way, do society a favor and seek help.) But any gesture toward feminism or humanity is hollow. This is not a “women in prison” film in the traditional sense, but gratuitous violence is its primary purpose.

Bell is impressive. It’s always nice to find yourself believing a performance, and I believe she can kick some ass. I wouldn’t cross her.

Her Death Proof co-star Tracie Thoms turns in a solid performance, and Doug Jones offers an effectively quirky turn as the leader of the cult. But the relentlessness of the plot becomes tedious with half the film still to watch, and the anonymity of victims more than undermines any high-mindedness the film purports to offer.

Raze devolves quickly to little more than percussive violence perpetrated without imagination or artistic purpose. Apparently there is more the filmmakers have to learn from Tarantino.

Verdict-2-0-Stars

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id29tVGhbFA

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Could Have Used a Wookie

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Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit

by Hope Madden

JJ Abrams can reboot a franchise – or at least, given the success of his Star Trek re-direct, that’s what Star Wars fans are hoping. But with Abrams tied up in galaxies far, far away, I guess when it came time to breathe new life into an old spy with Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, filmmakers went with the next best thing: Captain Kirk.

Yes, Chris Pine takes on the role filled by Alec Baldwin (The Hunt for Red October), Ben Affleck (The Sum of All Fears), and most lucratively, Harrison Ford (Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger). The results are barely worth noting.

American Jack Ryan is working on his PhD in London when 9/11 changes his trajectory. He ditches school in favor of the Marine Corps, but heroism (“Ryan dragged then both to safety. With a broken back!!”) sends him to a hospital to rehab and be eyeballed by Kevin Costner.

It’s a clumsy, shorthand back story meant, I suppose, to illustrate Ryan’s brains, patriotism, heroism and resilience in one reel. Plus it introduces the love of his life (Keira Knightly). Oh, that Ryan is such a good man!

Costner’s a CIA operative with designs on Ryan. Next thing you know, Russia’s trying to collapse our economy and we need Ryan to discern the algorithm.

Good God, who greenlit that yawnfest of a storyline? If the big threat is a Russian algorithm, director Kenneth Branagh will need his A-game to keep this action thriller thrilling and action packed. Will he bring it?

He will not.

Intrigue is an afterthought, tensions are kept to a minimum, and action sequences are few and far between.

Branagh pulls a bland double duty as director and baddie, playing the vodka pounding, assistant kicking, Knightly admiring Russian Viktor Cheverin. (It’s his algorithm.) Branagh can overact with the best of them, but his performance here is as colorless as Stoli on the rocks.

Pine, on the other hand, is charismatic. Costner proves to be a charming curmudgeon on occasion. Kiera Knightly is characteristically solid, but honestly, what is she doing in this film? Suddenly she has to take the role of the one-dimensional love interest to a second-rate action hero? When and why did that happen?

She deserves better than a toothless reboot. Maybe she should call Abrams. He might be looking for a new Leia.

 

 

Verdict-2-5-Stars

 

 

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Thanks Anyway, I’ll Walk

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by George Wolf

 

In 1982, a young Eddie Murphy made his film debut in 48 Hours, a funny,  action-filled cop caper that instantly launched him toward household name status.

Ride Along feels like an attempt to rewrite that film, and that history, to the benefit of Kevin Hart.

Okay, so Hart is hardly a newbie, and he’s proven himself to be a very funny guy through numerous supporting roles and one documentary/ concert film (Laugh at My Pain, 2011). But here, though he gets most of the screen time as part of a wannabe action/comedy, he’s on his own more than Murphy’s Reggie Hammond was in that redneck bar

Hart plays Ben, a security guard in Atlanta who has ambitions of being a police officer. When he finally gets accepted to the academy, Ben thinks it’s time to pop the question to longtime love Angela (Tika Sumpter, in a role that’s little more than eye candy.) Trouble is, Angela’s brother James (Ice Cube) is already a street-smart cop, and he thinks Ben isn’t worthy of his sister or a badge.

The answer is a “ride along,” and Ben jumps at the offer to join his future brother-in-law on his duties for a day, in hopes of convincing James to give the marriage his blessing. Ladies, maybe one day you’ll be able to get hitched without a man’s approval, but today is not that day!

The script comes from a committee of writers, with various credits including Employee of the Month, The Tuxedo, and last year’s R.I.P.D.

Wait, didn’t they all suck?

Yes, they did, and Ride Along would be equally bad, except for the efforts of Hart.  Director Tim Story‘s main strategy comes straight outta Cleveland in the LeBron days:  just go trough the motions and wait for the star to bail everybody out. Hart tries his best, and single-handedly delivers a few good moments of physical comedy, but it’s not nearly enough.

Kevin Hart may still get his trip to household stardom, but Ride Along is too lazy take him there.

 

 

Verdict-2-0-Stars

 

 

For Your Queue

For Your Queue: First Time Filmmakers Demanding to be Seen

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Available today is new filmmaker Ryan Coogler’s impressive debut Fruitvale Station, telling the tragic story of Oscar Grant with the help of an award-worthy lead turn from Michael B. Jordan. Coogler’s evenhanded telling and his cast’s spontaneity and authenticity give the tale a fitting naturalism, but the film will be remembered as a look at two phenomenal young talents.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crMTGCCui5c

Likewise, Dee Rees’s 2011 drama Pariah introduced an incisive and compelling new filmmaker with the story of an urban youth just trying to find a way to thrive. Also like Fruitvale, the film owes its power to a revelatory central performance. Adepero Oduye rings not a single false note as a 17-year-old coming out and finding her stride.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vlc0SZYnoMc

Outtakes

This Week’s Countdown: Time Traveling Out of January

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Her came out this week, and it’s awesome. August: Osage County, also new in theaters, is worth a peek. But that’s probably it for a while. January is the beginning of the long winter movie wasteland, littered with films that were not deemed good competition for holiday movies, not likely award winners – just not that great. The kind of thing you hang on to until it’s bleak and dreary and people have lost the will to live so, why not watch Ride Along?

I, Frankenstein? I vomit.

Seriously, you know it’s bad when you’re holding out for the Hercules movie starring The Rock.

It’s too bad we don’t have a time machine to just jump past the dismal winter movie months. But we don’t. What we do have – which is almost as good – are time machine movies. Here are our 8 favorites. Why eight? January’s a long month and five might not be enough. Use them to fill the void of good flicks at the theater.

8. Twelve Monkeys

Madman Terry Gilliam creates a fascinating shell-world of the future, in which penal colony worker Bruce Willis agrees to travel back to the Nineties to sleuth out the cause of the apocalypse. The SciFi business is intricate and delicate and works surprisingly well, but it’s Gilliam’s particular genius for ruminating on the nature of insanity that keeps this one fascinating. That, along with fun performances from Willis and Oscar nominated (thought, let’s be honest, maybe he didn’t deserve that one) Brad Pitt.

7. Time Bandits

What? More Terry Gilliam? Yes, this guy has a real jones for time travel and, in this case, dwarfs. In 1981 Gilliam was still working with his Monty Python cohorts, ensuring that this bit of lunacy (for wherever Gilliam creates, lunacy follows) takes on a far more comical air than 12 Monkeys. Imaginative and hilarious, it’s no Brazil, but that film couldn’t have existed without this one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd4DBq8a2y0

 

6. The Terminator

Computers become self aware. They build super sized, thickly accented, human-ish cyborgs (the role Schwarzenegger was born to play) to infiltrate the few remaining warriors and end the human race. But one scrappy lad sends his dad back to knock up his mom, ensuring the future of the species. Which begs the question: is the survival of the human race reason enough to entertain the idea of your parents doing it?

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHz95RYUbik

 

5. Planet of the Apes

The film’s 45 years old at this point. We hope we’re not giving up any spoilers by including it on the time travel countdown. But it’s a fascinating thought – maybe it’s not the machines that will enslave us. Maybe it’ll be those damn, dirty apes! Oh Charlton Heston, with your granite jaw and loin cloth, how you suffer when you find out!

4. Timecrimes

This one is nutty, and absolutely required viewing for anyone who enjoys time space continuum conundrums. So much can go wrong when you travel just one hour back in time. An always clever experiment in science fiction and irony, Timecrimes is a spare, unique and wild ride.

3. Back to the Future

The most beloved of all time travel films, Back to the Future has charm to spare. Inventive and endearing, and yet Marty McFly almost makes out with his own mom. Ewww. (We love you, George McFly!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVuQWf9M700

2. Primer

Made for $7000, this film is, in itself, an act of science fiction. Writer/director Shane Carruth (who would go on to make the best sic fi film of 2013, Upstream Color,) finds all new ways to consider what havoc a time machine could wreak. It would be the most streamlined, absorbing and ingenious film of its kind if there were other films of its kind.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CC60HJvZRE

1. Looper

An ingenious look at personal destiny wrapped inside a mind bending time travel thriller, the film watches Joe (Joseph Gordon Levitt) try to kill the older version of himself (Bruce Willis) whose been sent back to him from the future for a mob hit. Breathlessly entertaining, wildly clever and incredibly well crafted, it’s among the very best SciFi  film of a generation.

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Pass the Salt…Bitch!

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by George Wolf

 

So, how was your family get-together over the Holidays?

If secrets and dinner plates weren’t tossed about like a salad dressed with obscenities, you’ve got nothing on the Westons, the dysfunctional brood at the heart of August:  Osage County.

Screenwriter Tracy Letts adapts his own Pulitzer Prize-winning play, and the sublime wordplay in his dark, rich comedy is brought to life via an exceptional ensemble cast. Only tentative direction from John Wells holds the film back from its full potential.

Meryl Streep rules the roost as family matriarch Violet Weston, who..ahem…”welcomes” her children, siblings and assorted other team members back home after a family crisis.

There isn’t much time spent on niceties before the barbs start flying. Old wounds are exposed, and new secrets are uncovered as the family struggles to deal with the effect their past has on their present.

At the heart of the conflict is Barbara, the oldest Weston daughter, fully realized by Julia Roberts in, hands down, the performance of her career.

Barbara’s contempt for her mother is on hilariously full display, while bubbling underneath is the fear of becoming her mother, a fear she tries to hide through angry outbursts. Stealing a movie from Meryl Streep is no easy feat, but damned if Roberts doesn’t do it.

In fact, the film is wall to wall with fine performers, including Chris Cooper, Sam Shepard, Juliette Lewis, Ewan McGregor, and Margo Martindale (who shows a fantastic chemistry with Streep, giving their scenes together an added air of mischief).

The problem is, director John Wells seems a bit intimidated by who, and what, he’s working with. The characters are too often on their own island, as when a soap opera cuts from a close up of one deep sigh to a completely different storyline.

These characters are under one roof for much of the movie, yet we don’t feel the cohesiveness of any shared connections, just a series of histrionics often left swinging in the venomous breeze.

It’s not the material. Letts also wrote Bug and Killer Joe, both adapted into brilliant movies by the skills of legendary director William Friedkin. Wells, a veteran TV director, doesn’t provide the nuance needed to make a successful cinematic leap.

August:  Osage County boasts all the ingredients, and is certainly entertaining, but ultimately feels like a missed opportunity for something special.

 

Verdict-3-0-Stars

 

 

 

 

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Is the Viewer who is Watching Confused?

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Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?

by Hope Madden

There are some who would take an interview with Noam Chomsky – philosopher, cognitive scientist, linguist, all around smartypants – and try to simplify it, make it easier for the audience to understand.

Not Michel Gondry. The French filmmaker best known for the wonderful Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind pairs Chomsky interviews with his own wildly abstract, hand-drawn animation with a purpose that is certainly not clarity.

In his documentary Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, Gondry invites the audience to puzzle through the words of the genius who believes the world is a mystery and that we are all the better for it. The director, therefore, goes out of his way to ensure that we are befuddled, because, according to Chomsky, that’s the only way to go through life. If we believe we understand, then we don’t probe, question, challenge.

So, Gondry creates a challenge. Indeed, the obstacles to comprehensibility are either alarming or hilarious. Abstract animation can be tough to understand. So can Gondry’s thick French accent. So can Chomsky. Gondry piles on with intentionally distracting camera noise and, on occasion, the obscuring volume of background music.

If all this seems frustrating, strangely enough, that’s not the effect Gondry achieves. Eventually, the filmmaker’s wonder and the subject’s challenges to puzzle out what’s happening wash over you, and you let go of your own instinct to predict what comes next in order to comprehend what is happening. You achieve your own sense of wonder at the befuddlement of it all.

The secret is Gondry himself, who is trying and failing to keep up. It’s endearing, but it’s also a relief. You’re not the only one.

People looking for an informative document of Chomsky’s life will be wildly disappointed. This film is not about what you want to see. It’s about what Gondry always wanted to ask Noam Chomsky if he ever got the chance. Plus cartoons!

 

Verdict-3-5-Stars

 

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Imagination + Love = Her

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Her

by Hope Madden

Is Spike Jonze the most imaginative American filmmaker working today?

Yes. Need proof?

This is the guy who turned the beloved, 10-sentence children’s book Where the Wild Things Are into the most heartbreaking and wondrous film of 2009. The guy who could make the act of adapting existing work into the most original film of 2002 (Adaptation).

Hell, it’s the man who made his directorial debut telling the tale of a filing clerk who sells tickets into John Malkovich’s head. And the quality of his output has only improved, taking on a depth and beauty since he began writing his projects as well.

With Her, the first film Jonze has written entirely on his own, he’s crafted the year’s most poignant love story.

It sounds like the lead-in to a joke: A man falls in love with his computer operating system. Who, besides Jonze, could take a premise like and turn it into a masterful image of our times?

Joaquin Phoenix plays the lonely and emotionally bruised Theodore, in the not-too-distant-future Los Angeles. Still reeling from a break up, Theodore shies away from traditional intimacy, but finds himself attracted to the newest update in operating systems: the OS that evolves to meet every need.

Credit Jonze for sidestepping every imaginable cliché – and there are plenty – and instead exploring society’s current trajectory with surprising tenderness, perhaps even optimism. Yes, he notes the superficiality of relationships in the technological age, and the tendency toward isolation. But it’s not like he believes the machines are going to rise up and enslave us.

Not that he exactly rules that out.

What he does instead is almost magical. He introduces us to the very picture of humanity in Samantha, the operating system. Scarlett Johansson voices the character, and enough cannot be said of her performance. It’s easy to undervalue voice talent, but Johansson shows what can be done with nothing else to rely on – no facial expressions, no setting, no gestures. Her performance is an absolute wonder.

Likewise, Phoenix is magnificent, falling in love on screen with no physical being to perform against. His work is vulnerable and touching enough to take your breath.

A sparkling supporting group, including Amy Adams, Olivia Wilde, a very funny Chris Pratt, fills out the cast, each making the utmost of the environment Jonze has created.

The film looks and feels amazing, with every detail of set design and script enhancing and deepening the impact of the love story. It’s a beautiful, imaginative, relevant image of love in the modern world.

Verdict-4-5-Stars

 

 

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Just Keeping It Real

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by George Wolf

 

From the opening moments of Lone Survivor, it’s clear writer/director Peter Berg kept one goal above all others: honor the Navy SEALS at the heart of this harrowing true life tale.

By most accounts he’s done that, and his adaptation of the 2007 memoir by SEAL Marcus Luttrell emerges as a single-minded war movie of both power and intensity.

In 2005, “Operation Red Wings” sent a four man SEAL team into Afghanistan to eliminate a  senior Taliban leader. The mission was compromised, a firefight ensued and an attempt to rescue the team turned tragic. Only Luttrell was left alive.

It’s a riveting tale, and Berg (Friday Night Lights/The Kingdom) anchors it with the brotherhood among the men involved, and the unflinching devotion to their duty. We don’t get intimate profiles of any of the characters, but we get enough to feel we know them, and more importantly, we see how deeply they identify with each other, with their team, and with their respective places in it.

Though Mark Wahlberg stars as Luttrell, Berg wisely does not tilt the screen time in his favor, and we fear for each member of his team equally, even though we already know what the eventual outcome will be. Credit Wahlberg, and co-stars Taylor Kitsch, Ben Foster, and Emile Hirsch with solid performances that are able to resonate collectively, yet still illustrate the anguish of a fallen comrade.

Berg’s touch with the battle scenes is equally focused, filming with an intentional frenzy full of gut-wrenching stunt work.  Keeping these sequences nearly absent of background music or superfluous pageantry, the unmistakable aim is to present this hellish scenario as the men themselves knew it.

Of course, as a war film, Lone Survivor carries instant baggage, seemingly destined to be labeled either jingoistic, un-American or misinformed. Clearly looking to avoid the “that’s not how it’s done” barbs slung at Zero Dark Thirty, Berg spent a month embedded with a SEAL team in Iraq, and his film offers no apologies for its abundant machismo or respectful salute.

The catch-22 is, this approach works at the expense of a layered dramatic narrative that makes movies such as Zero Dark Thirty so compelling.

To be fair, though, Lone Survivor never aims that high. It is a film that mainly wants us to understand what it takes to do a job that most of us can’t even fathom.

Consider that mission accomplished.

 

 

Verdict-3-0-Stars

 

 

 

For Your Queue

For Your Queue: Best Documentary of 2013

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Available today on DVD and Blu-ray is the most breathtaking, mind boggling documentary of this or perhaps any year, The Act of Killing. Director Joshua Oppenheimer, along with dozens of filmmakers who remain anonymous for their own safety, work with the people who slaughtered more than a million Indonesians in 1965 to reenact their own crimes – or heroics, as they see it. The result is absolutely unlike anything you have ever seen. A jaw dropping act of discovery, the film is a masterpiece, a brave and confrontational effort, and essential viewing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQhIRBxbchU

We usually pair new releases with backlist titles that match up well, but honestly, there is nothing on earth quite like The Act of Killing. The best we can do is to recommend Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991). The documentary looks at the making of Coppola’s extraordinary film, detailing the unsavory chaos on set and the madness of the shoot – another peek inside insanity.

Hope Madden and George Wolf … get it?