Tag Archives: Cat McAlpine

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Woof

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The Dog Lover

by Cat McAlpine

A young city girl wants to make a difference. She has no idea what she’s doing, and stirs up a lot of dust in a small rural community. Also there are dogs.

Sara Gold works for the United Animal Protection Agency (UAPA). The offices are pristine and corporate, mysterious for an agency which can’t afford to even pay the people manning its desks, but Sara is up for a “promotion” anyway and is ready to make a name for herself.

Sara is assigned to go undercover, posing as a second-year vet student and eager summer intern, at the Holloway family owned and operated dog breeder. There have been allegations of inhumane circumstances, and armed with a handful of wireless cameras, Sara is determined to get justice for the dogs she loves so much.

The strangest thing about The Dog Lover is that there really aren’t many dogs, not in the way you’d hope. While the opening credits are composed of various internet clips of people interacting with their beloved family pets, no one in the film seems to actually love dogs. Sara doesn’t seem to even know any herself. The Holloway family has a house dog, but no one is shown connecting with it.

Director Alex Ranarivelo spends a lot of time peering at big brown eyes through chain link. These shots are sure to tug at heart strings, but fail to create a real connection between any of the actors and their companions.

This puzzle has a lot of pieces that just don’t seem to fit. The struggling family dog breeding business also has horses, a very expensive animal to house. The only time a horse appears useful is when strapping young Will Holloway rides up, shot-gun in hand, to save Sara from threatening red-neck “backyard breeders.” Yes, he actually rides in on horseback.

A lot of work is spent undermining Sara at the outset. When she arrives at the small airport, Will suggests she might want to reconsider. “Reconsider what?” It’s her shirt that’s apparently offensive. Will explains that his father is very conservative. Sara is wearing a v-neck t-shirt.

When she joins the Holloway family for dinner on her first night, she declines an offer of chicken, explaining that she’s a vegetarian. The family reactions vary from disbelief to dismissal. The mother laughs that she was a vegetarian when she was in vet school too, but that she eventually “couldn’t resist.” When Sara hesitates to hold hands at prayer, the father asks gruffly “You aren’t an atheist, too?”

The Dog Lover promises to have heart, but never delivers. It settles somewhere close to Hallmark channel original. The plot isn’t much, the actors are middling to good, and there are some standard Americana shots, including a running herd of horses for good measure.

The film concludes with a warning message fading on a black screen. “Investigate before you donate.” Turns out, the animal protection agency were the bad guys all along, small town America reigns supreme, and the backyard breeders who were actually doing animals harm never get their comeuppance. Woof.

Verdict-2-5-Stars

 

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Crouching Tiger

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Dheepan

by Cat McAlpine

When you recommend this film, do not lead with “French, subtitled.” Though an accurate description on both counts, the association of moody cigarette smoking would do little to represent the raw heart of Dheepan.

Dheepan is a Tamil freedom fighter (called Tigers) who flees as the war begins its bloody close. Having lost his own wife and daughters, he must travel with Yalini (26) and Illayaal (9), posing as family to secure asylum in France.

These three strangers become dependent on one another for the facade that protects them. Unfortunately, fleeing Sri Lanka makes only minor improvements in their livelihoods, and the makeshift family discovers that war comes in sizes great and small.

Writer/director Jacques Audiard (A Prophet) is hyper-aware of light, using both color and shape to carve out living, breathing moments. Dheepan battles his monsters in a red-lit basement room. An elephant sways slowly in the dappled light of the forest. Yalini leaves the door open while she showers, and the blue light from the bathroom flickers teasingly.

This is the vision that truly guides the narrative, finding those quiet moments in-between the gruesome truths of war, gangs, poverty, immigrants, and trying to love someone you do not know.

The camera work, too, defines these moments. The close-up seems to be a favorite of Audiard, but it is not misused in context. The camera betrays when Dheepan’s world feels small and when it feels large. The watcher often feels like they are peering into rooms where they were not invited.

Jesuthasan Antonythasan’s Dheepan is stoic, contemplative, and yearning. You can feel his need for anything simple and real. His violence is believable and earned. Kalieaswari Srinivasan as Yalini builds a curious fear of the world and people around her. She is rarely likable, but always enthralling. That’s the humanity in Audiard’s characters, they are more real because they are less likeable, but this can make Dheepan harder to watch.

The film could lose 20 or 30 minutes, or at least appropriate it to the more aggressive scenes. Beautiful and real though it is, there are long periods where not much happens. Its pinnacle violence is gruesome and triumphant, leaving you wanting more. But a lust for violence is precisely what Dheepan and his family have been running from.

Verdict-4-0-Stars

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Baby Mama Drama

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The Ones Below

by Cat McAlpine

Having a child is an amazing and joyous event. It is also terrifying. Alien knew it. That whole Season 8 arc of the XFiles knew it. We’ve even dedicated a Fright Club to Pregnancy Horror. But The Ones Below favors less bursting out of chests and more psychological slow burn.

Enter a small house containing two flats, one upstairs, and one downstairs. Upstairs is home to longtime residents Justin (Stephen Campbell Moore) and Kate (Clémence Poésy), who is pregnant with her first child after years of denying motherhood. New neighbors have moved in downstairs, and Kate finally catches a glimpse of equally pregnant Theresa (Laura Birn).

Theresa and husband Jon (David Morrissey) come upstairs for dinner one evening, and express how desperate they’ve been for a child over some very stilted small talk. Thus tears the rift between the two couples, which only grows after a tragic accident leaves everyone scurrying to dodge guilt and blame.

First time feature director David Farr chases a touch of timelessness in his arrangement and almost pulls it off. There’s a neither here nor there quality to the set and costuming. Milk is delivered daily in glass bottles on the doorstep, smart phones fill hands but pictures are taken with digital cameras, young couples work in open floor plan offices. The upstairs couple dresses as modern young professionals, comfortably. The downstairs pair is more pressed, more clean, and further off trend. A perfectly manicured garden gives off an eerie, Stepford feel.

The editing and design seem to struggle with Farr’s intention a bit. Cool tones downplay some of the raw emotional quality of the scenes, making more intimate moments feel a bit detached. This could be intentional, or I could be trying to cover up for the lack of chemistry between couples.

The most intriguing performance by far is Birn’s Theresa, who is fascinating to watch with equal measures of conniving and innocent. Poésy and Moore are both down-to-earth and relatable, but Poésy ultimately just doesn’t have much to work with. Moore, as the straight man character to everyone else’s crazy, gives a solid performance and becomes the beating heart of the film.

The dialogue mostly consists of bickering, which lends both realism and additional tension, but doesn’t seem to otherwise motivate the characters. There are vague references to strained relationships, which, while underdeveloped, provide breadcrumbs leading to both false and unbelievable-but-true conclusions.

The film ends, deliciously, with a few sharp twists. The thriller connoisseur will see these tricks coming, but the payoff to Farr’s mounting tensions is welcome either way. The Ones Below is a middling to good directorial debut for David Farr that promises, with a few more turns around the block, he will be serving up a style undeniably his.

Verdict-3-5-Stars

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It’s The Thought That Counts

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Love Thy Nature

by Cat McAlpine

The best way to convince people that caring for the planet is badass is to have a badass tell them so. This is what I was hoping to get from Liam Neeson’s narration of Love Thy Nature. This is not what I got.

Neeson’s involvement is featured heavily in the documentary’s promotions, but his real role is much smaller than that of “narrator.” Neeson voices “sapiens, homo sapiens” – essentially speaking for the human race. The choice to involve the human race as a whole and to engage it, quite literally, in a dialogue is interesting but ultimately not effective. Neeson’s script is heavy handed, ending musing thoughts with sudden reversals like “Or is it?” or “Could I be wrong?”

The film itself proceeds like any shown in a high school science classroom. Picturesque landscape shots cover the basics; rocks, beach, underwater, trees, the savannah. These shots are accompanied by a litany of new age talking heads, cartoonish and often unnecessary animations, and an excessive amount of footage featuring people gazing into the distance.

What’s most perplexing is that the talking heads never seem to say much of merit. The film has good heart, urging that we reconnect with the planet, but when it comes to facts or statistics, an entire cast of scientific professionals has little to offer. One talking head claims that “slathering ourselves with sunblock or covering up actually increases the risk of skin cancer.” There’s no follow up.

Love Thy Nature is segmented by profound quotes about man and nature, displayed on the screen in white lettering on the same hazy forest backdrop each time. The quotes seem to have little purpose other than to be inspirational.

While the film eventually suggests that we can use technology to further our relationship with nature, a bizarre cut early on seems to suggest that children playing video games leads to forest fires.

Eventually, director Sylvie Rokab settles on the idea of biomimicry, an engineering field that focuses on using designs that are naturally occurring. It seems like this is what Love Thy Nature has been building toward, the ultimate reconnection of man and nature. The segment lasts about a minute or two, with few hard facts, and then is over.

Rokab is obviously dedicated to this cause, also co-writing the script and story and leading the Kickstarter that funded the project. It is a noble cause. Sapiens, Homo Sapiens, will find it hard to deny a cry to take better care of both our planet and ourselves. But this Earth Day is better served by skipping the film and going outside.

Verdict-2-0-Stars

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVNFkOBswEI

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Love in the Time of Rotary Phones

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Colonia

by Cat McAlpine

On the surface, Colonia is a pretty film. The leads are attractive, the period setting lends both nostalgia and an otherworldly quality, and there are some beautiful shots. Despite being based on true and rather horrifying events, however, the film lacks depth.

Florian Gallenberger both directed and co-wrote Colonia, and he seems to shy away from getting too involved with the political details. The story follows two international lovers who find themselves imprisoned at creepy cult camp Colonia Dignidad during the Chilean military coup of 1973. The true events simply serve as a back drop, unfortunately.

Lena (Emma Watson) asks about the crowd holding up her taxi, “Why are they protesting?” Her driver replies vaguely, “Inflation? Food shortages? It is getting very bad now.”

At its open, there is a raw brutality which serves as a painful reminder of what social injustice looked like before the smart phone. Daniel (Daniel Brühl ) is spotted by military police attempting to document their indiscretions with a bulky film camera. This is where both relevancy and homage seem to fade, however. Once Daniel is taken to the colony, the film mostly devolves into a standard thriller featuring an attractive young couple.

Brühl plays Daniel with a sweet subtlety which is not lost in moments of passion or desperation, but rather heightens the reality of his character.

Watson, on the other hand, is wasted as Lena, who lacks both intensity and lines despite immense screen time. There is little to no chemistry between Lena and Daniel, and once they are reunited, they navigate an endless series of near misses with relative ease. There is little doubt that they will survive.

Paul Scäfer (a marvelous Michael Nyqvist) is so mesmerizing and terrifying at the same time, I found myself hoping he’d be in the next scene. He oozes delusion and power. His second in command, Gisela (Richenda Carey) balances positions of power and weakness, and her character becomes more complex as the narrative moves on, a rarity in this film.

Unfortunately, the film does not delve into how Scäfer came to be a god amongst his followers. It also failes to explain exactly how the camp is connected to the military. Lena serves as our eyes for the majority, and we discover along with her. When the film stops being about the camp, it becomes boring and predictable, despite its pacing.

Colonia has beautiful, eerie, and beautifully eerie moments. The cast gives a worthy effort and Emma Watson’s eyebrows look amazing, but none of this star power is enough the raise this film beyond a “meh.” You’re left wondering why a film lacking resolution is two hours long in the first place.

Verdict-2-5-Stars