Jump inside The Screening Room podcast with us to talk through everything you can find in cinemas this weekend and everything newly available in home entertainment. We cover Only the Brave, The Snowman, Same Kind of Different as Me, Mark Felt: The Man Who Took Down the White House, Jungle and Human Flow. Listen HERE.
by Alex Edeburn
The “overview effect” is a phenomenon known only to astronauts who experience a shift in consciousness when looking back at the Earth while in orbit. Edgar Mitchell, a member of the Apollo 14 mission, once described the effect as “instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it.”
Director Ai Weiwei’s attempts to recreate this profound effect with his stunning and timely documentary, Human Flow.
The film is a sprawling examination of the millions of refugees around the world and allows us to bear witness to the lives of that increasing number of displaced people. It is a film that serves to humanize those who are suffering and who are too often maligned in this unfortunate age of travel bans and Brexits.
Weiwei’s artistic eye for calming cinematography paired with the brutal theme of the film forces us to assess all that we’re witnessing over the course of two and a half hours.
We’re lured in by the harrowing beauty of the Greek coastline in winter, only to then come to terms with the situation at hand once the camera exposes the countless life preservers that litter the rocky beach. There is much to consider with this film, including the continuous ticker of information providing alarming statistics regarding this global crisis.
Human Flow does not contain itself to one specific region or group of displaced people, but rather addresses all the ongoing plights such as the Rohingya fleeing ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, those escaping famine in East Africa, and the supposed “bad hombres” crossing America’s southern border.
Ai Weiwei’s documentary is not trying to prove any point or win any argument regarding this highly politicized and misunderstood crisis. Rather, he presents a film that works in earnest to be objective through the statistics it provides and the subjects it highlights.
Human Flow is a powerful film that puts faces to the 65 million people we are quick to dismiss as nothing more than refugees, rather than see them for what they actually are: humans.
by Hope Madden
Imagine what could go wrong if one group of power hungry thugs could subvert any investigative body, discredit the press and cover their corrupt, nation-degrading tracks.
Yes, in light of pussy grabbing, Nazi accepting, wall building, election tampering, hurricane victim abandoning and countless other inconceivable abominations, Watergate seems quaint.
But maybe that’s where Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House could find its power. It could not only underscore the nearly incomprehensible severity of our current climate but also remind us that change is possible.
Liam Neeson plays Felt, the Associate Director of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover who found himself so aggrieved by the corruption overtaking the bureau after Hoover’s passing that he leaked confidential information to the press, earning himself the affectionate nickname Deep Throat.
Writer/director Peter Landesman takes on nearly 45-year-old history perhaps to draw comparisons between then and now. For the former New York Times investigative journalist, the material may have been too tempting.
Since his leap to filmmaking, Landesman’s been concerned with true-life tales, but he’s been stronger as a writer (Kill the Messenger) than a writer/director (Concussion). Here, he stumbles with both.
The script wedges in too many clunky connectors to help the audience figure out who each participant is rather than creating a set of characters. Ensemble dramas have loads of characters. Watergate has loads of characters and drama. Let it breathe.
Worse still are the soliloquies Landesman saddles onto poor Diane Lane as Felt’s wife Audrey. Lane does what she can but her overwritten monologues beg the question: why is she telling him these things? Surely her husband already knows. The answer, of course, is that she’s telling us, which is just weak writing.
On paper, Felt’s a fascinating character, as any lifer in the bureau must be. And Liam Neeson’s a fine actor. So why is it the film never plumbs any deeper than a distant stare, a grimace, an errant curse word?
Mark Felt is onscreen for maybe 4 minutes in All The President’s Men and I understood him as a character more fully than in his full 2-hours here.
What may be the most interesting idea Landesman shares is that Felt was less interested in criminal activity at the highest level than he was in the idea that the FBI would become beholden to the White House. He was busy looking beyond a single presidency to the power and necessity of an independent investigative body when everybody else was too stunned by the felon in the White House to notice.
You know what, though? I bet Nixon knew he was president of the US Virgin Islands.
by Hope Madden
The Snowman, a Norway-set serial killer thriller, runs like a 3-hour flick that someone gutted for time without regard to sensibility, leaving a disemboweled and incoherent pile in the snow for audiences to puzzle over.
Not what I had expected.
I love director Tomas Alfredson. Well, I love his 2008 gem Let the Right One In and so, by extension, I love him. His writing team, adapting Jo Nesbø’s novel, includes the scribes behind such bits of brilliance as Drive (Hossein Amini) and Frank (Peter Straughan), and Michael Fassbender is the lead. Rock solid, that’s what that is.
And yet, The Snowman went horribly, embarrassingly, head-scratchingly wrong.
Fassbender plays Detective Harry Hole. (I swear to God, that’s his name.) He’s a blackout drunk in need of a case to straighten him out. He finds it in one misogynistic mess of a serial killer plot.
All he and his new partner Katrine (Rebecca Ferguson) know is that the killer leaves snowmen at the crime scene and has complicated issues with women. What follows is convoluted, needlessly complicated with erratic and unexplained behavior, ludicrous red herrings and a completely unexplained plot point about prescription pills.
The Snowman is not the first in Nesbø’s Harry Hole series, so a lot of “catch us up on this guy” exposition gets wedged in. From there, the writing team took a buzzsaw to Nesbø’s prose, leaving none of the connective tissue necessary to pull the many, varied and needlessly lurid details together into a sensible mystery plot.
It all leads ploddingly, frustratingly to an unearned climax heavy with needless flashbacks and convenient turns.
Everybody smokes, so it almost works as a cigarette ad, but as an actual story? No.
Fassbender, an inarguable talent, offers little to a clichéd character whose tics are predetermined—a shame because this is an actor who can dig deep when it comes to character tics. Ferguson and Charlotte Gainsbourg, as Hole’s ex, fare even worse. And an entire slew of heavy hitters gets wasted completely, including J.K. Simmons, Toby Jones and a weirdly dubbed Val Kilmer.
Alfredson films snowcapped carnage with a grotesque beauty few directors can touch, but that’s hardly reason enough to sit through this muddled mess.
by Hope Madden
It is hard to go wrong with a story as viscerally affecting as that of Yossi Ghinsberg, an Israeli who took a year off from his life to seek adventure. He found it in the Jungle.
Beautifully portrayed by Daniel Radcliffe, Yossi heads to Bolivia where he befriends Swiss schoolteacher Marcus (Joel Jackson) and American photographer Kevin (Alex Russell).
Director Greg McLean (Wolf Creek) invests a good chunk of Jungle in letting us get to know this amiable, romantic trio—searching souls that seek some kind of connection with nature, humanity and life.
They find something that may be too good to be true when Yossi meets the mysterious jungle guide Karl (a wonderful Thomas Kretschmann). Together the foursome head into uncharted territories in search of lost tribes, rivers full of gold and other wonders not found on the typical tourist to-do list.
You know what they say about things that sound too good to be true.
Frustrations run high, mercy runs low, faith in leadership wanes, and eventually, an accident separates Ghinsberg from the group. He is on his own to survive the jungle, starvation, delirium, and one nasty, squirmy head wound.
Adapting Ghinsberg’s autobiography, screenwriter Justin Monjo sticks to highlights, which gives the film an artificiality it never fully shakes. McLean’s camera embraces both the overpowering beauty of the extreme environment as well as its shadowy, jagged, sometimes toothy menace. He just needs to learn when to leave it alone.
Speaking of alone, Radcliffe spends about 1/3 of the film on his own. For anyone still wondering whether Harry Potter can act, this film should set aside all doubt. Radcliffe is a natural fit for deeply decent characters, and his expressive face helps him communicate an enormous amount of unspoken content.
He’s great, as is the story and the balance of the cast. It’s just the writer and director who let us down from time to time.
Jungle is at its worse when McLean shows how little faith he has in his material and his audience, leaning on emotional manipulation and an almost oppressively leading score to ensure we are getting his point.
There are other questionable decisions, like the dream sequences, which offer little to the film besides the opportunity to objectify the few—all lovely, all nameless—women who grace the screen.
Jungle is, if nothing else, a powerful testament to Daniel Radcliffe’s potency as an actor. It’s also an unbelievable story, and Radcliffe’s performance ensures your keen interest regardless of McLean’s antics.
The most fun of the year’s superhero movies is finally available to binge at home. Woot! There’s also a quirky indy dramedy and a naughty girls weekend available, but the smart money’s with Spidey.
by Hope Madden
Thurgood Marshall is among the most fascinating figures in contemporary American history. Too bad his biopic isn’t about him.
Marshall, director Reginald Hudlin’s glimpse at the first black Supreme Court justice’s earlier career as a tireless NAACP lawyer, offers an image of the man by way of one of his court cases.
It’s an interesting case, though probably not the best Marshall case to choose as a focus. It does, however, allow the unearthing of many complex and unfortunately still relevant issues of racism and injustice.
Like a hardboiled detective story turned historical courtroom drama, the film follows the 1941 case of Connecticut Versus Joseph Spell in which a white New England socialite (Kate Hudson) accused her African American chauffeur (Sterling K. Brown) of rape and attempted murder.
In the role of Thurgood Marshall is go-to biopic actor Chadwick Boseman. As you might expect given his string of impressive performances, Boseman has brooding, wise-beyond-his-years charisma to spare.
Josh Gad plays Marshall’s unlikely partner-in-justice Sam Friedman, a Connecticut tax attorney who wants nothing to do with this case. He and Boseman share a sometimes comical odd couple chemistry that often works in the film’s favor but just as often does not.
This speaks to one of Marshall’s two major weaknesses: Hudlin can’t find a tone. Too stylized to be a straight biopic, comical enough to feel tone deaf once the seriousness of the subject matter settles in, Marshall rarely finds its footing.
More problematic, though, is the court case itself.
Don’t get me wrong, this case is rife with cinematic elements and historical significance. The problem is that father and son writers Jacob and Michael Koskoff chose a case in which Thurgood Marshall was voiceless.
The presiding judge, capably played by the always welcome James Cromwell, forbade the out-of-state attorney to speak in court. An amazing piece of racially motivated injustice right there, making it another fascinating detail. It also means that we don’t get to see Thurgood Marshall command this court case.
It’s Gad’s Friedman who handles the courtroom drama—which he does quite well—but it leaves us with only some outside the courtroom mentoring and challenges from Marshall, and not enough else.
It may not totally sink a film built on solid performances and engaging material, but it’s enough to keep Marshall from making the kind of lasting impression it should have.
by Hope Madden
It’s funny how long it took people to rip off the Groundhog Day conceit—20 years, basically. No one really revisited the “day on repeat” idea (Source Code came close, but it wasn’t a full day) until Tom Cruise’s surprisingly high-quality 2014 flick Edge of Tomorrow.
It took twenty years to redo it once, and yet I’ve seen at least 9 of these this year. OK, I’ve seen two (Happy Death Day, Before I Fall) and am aware of two others (Naked, Premature). Still, that’s a lot. It’s like sitting through the same events over and over and over and over again with no idea why it’s happening or how to make it stop.
Happy Death Day does what it can to make up for its lacking originality with a tight pace and compelling lead performance.
Tree (Jessica Rothe) wakes up on her birthday in some rando’s dorm room with no memory of the night before, a raging hangover and an attitude. She’s murdered that night by a knife-wielding marauder in a plastic baby mask, only to wake up back in that same dorm room under that same They Live poster.
Repeat ad nauseam.
It doesn’t take too many déjà vu mornings before Tree decides there is a mystery to solve here and just like that, we’re off in Phil Connors territory: reliving the same day again and again gives you the chance to become a better person, right?
If, like Tree, you are unaware of Groundhog Day, Phil Connors is the Bill Murray character doomed to relive February 2 until he…well, if you haven’t seen it I don’t want to ruin it for you. But the fact that Happy Death Day addresses the groundhog in the room is part of its self-aware, played-for-comedy charm.
Rothe boasts strong comic timing and a gift for physical comedy, a skill that transitions nicely to the demands of being repeatedly victimized by a slasher.
Director Christopher Landon (Scout’s Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse) wisely mines Scott Lobdell’s screenplay for laughs. Given the repetitive, bloodless nature of the kills, trying to generate scares would have been a tough go.
The mystery absolutely does not hold up, red herrings are silly and fairly pointless, and whatever charm the filmmakers infuse into this recycled premise wears off just a tad before the credits roll. Still, there are funny bits and clever moments peppered throughout what is easily this year’s best Groundhog Day ripoff.
More of the best films of the summer roll onto the home screen. More of the crappy ones, too, so choose wisely. Let us help you out – click the title for a link to the full reviews.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwZznQaxmB4
Click HERE to join The Screening Room Podcast, where we hash out our thoughts on Blade Runner 2049, The Mountain Between Us, and what’s new in home entertainment – The Survivalist, A Ghost Story, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, and Goon 2.
