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.
by George Wolf
The Mountain Between Us is the type of film that wants to reach us by watching two wary characters slowly reach each other. Through talented actors, it wants to speak softly but cut deep.
Well, it nails the talented actors part.
Kate Winslet is Alex, who’s getting married tomorrow in Denver. Idris Elba is Ben, a neurosurgeon who’s also headed to Denver to perform delicate surgery on a ten-year-old. Problem is, they’re both in Idaho and all the flights are canceled due to weather.
They team up to charter a private plane from Walter (Beau Bridges), a local pilot with a lovable pooch, but when he suffers a stroke not long after takeoff, two strangers and a dog are left alone in the snow-covered mountains.
Screenwriters J. Miles Goodloe and Chris Weitz adapt Charles Martin’s novel with enough contrivance and melodrama to render Goodloe’s credit on a Nicholas Sparks film (The Best of Me) anything but surprising.
Director Hany Abu- Assad (Omar) serves up some majestic scenery and a nifty crash sequence, but settles for Sparks meets Castaway. Somehow, Winslet and Elba get us invested throughout the convenient, telegraphed plot turns. It is their seasoned talent and effortless likeability that ultimately saves the film from becoming a complete eye-rolling travesty.
Two of the best and most criminally underseen films of the summer are now available for your home viewing pleasure. Watch them! And also, there are a couple we think you might want to skip.
For the full review, click the film title below.
(DVD/BR)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xo3af_6_Jk
(DVD/BR)
Click HERE to join us in The Screening Room where we talk through Battle of the Sexes, American Made, Super Dark Times, Woodshock and all that’s new in home entertainment.
by George Wolf
A fight for equality playing out inside sports arenas. Sound familiar? Battle of the Sexes isn’t just an effortlessly engaging piece of entertainment, it’s a compelling reminder that the sporting world has long been intertwined with the social and political movements of the day.
In 1973, Billie Jean King was 29 years old and the leading name in women’s tennis. Bobby Riggs was a 55 year-old former champion who missed the spotlight. As the “women’s lib” movement grew, they met for three sets of tennis that was watched by ninety million people.
Directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine, Ruby Sparks) choose wisely in running the soul of the film through King. Bolstered by Emma Stone’s gracefully layered performance, the film’s emotional connection comes from King’s dueling inner conflicts: the responsibility of carrying the women’s game forward and her growing attraction to the tour hairdresser (an excellent Andrea Riseborough).
A taut script from the Oscar-winning Simon Beaufoy finds marks that often speak directly to today’s “stick to sports” crowd. In one particularly biting scene, a defiant King argues for equal prize money on the women’s circuit, telling the condescending director of the tour (Bill Pullman) that he’s a constant gentleman “until we want a bit of what you’ve got.”
As he was in the actual ’73 event, Riggs is the film’s camera-loving ringmaster, a born huckster who tells a recovery group they don’t need to stop gambling – they just need to get better at it. Steve Carell nails the role, and not just because he has the look and the attitude. In the quieter moments away from the cheering crowds, Carell gives us a faded star in search of purpose, finding the authenticity that Riggs leaned on to remain endearing.
The period details are just right and, thanks to some nifty work by two athletic body doubles, so is the tennis. Faulting only with some fleeting moments of flippancy, Battle of the Sexes wins by serving up both a crowd-pleasing spectacle and the human drama than ultimately made it so much more.
Remember the unbelievable bounty in home entertainment last week? Well, it can’t be Christmas every day, kids. Things are a little slower this week, but making its way to DVD/BluRay is a decent horror flick and swimming to your screen for the first time is a shark attack flick that’s not nearly as bad as you think it is. Also, a 17-hour long movie about kids toys dating back to medieval times or some such bullshit.
Click the film title for the full review.
So, there’s this one set of movies you may or may not be aware of about a guy with a William Shatner fixation just trying to get home in time for Halloween. You may have heard of it.
Here’s the thing, there are also other Halloween-themed movies you could watch this holiday if you’re so inclined. Loads of them. And while we feel like you probably know which Michael Meyers movies to skip (5 & 8), which to love (1, duh), and which to watch for the ironic enjoyment (6—we’re looking at you, Paul Rudd!), you might need some direction outside that series. So, here are our five favorite non-franchise Halloween horror movies.
It’s Halloween night in the late Eighties and a bunch of high school kids decides to go hang out at Angela’s party because, as the resident goth girl, “Halloween is like Christmas to Angela.”
Where’s the party? At the old, abandoned funeral parlor built over sacred land above some kind of demonic water source. Natch.
Do not be confused – Night of the Demons is not exactly recommended viewing. It’s terrible. Once you get past its dirt-cheap sets and TV-level staging, you’ll notice that the film boasts among the most stilted and cardboard dialogue of any film from the Aquanet decade.
But Angela (Amelia “Mimi” Kinkade) looks cool. Every goth chick— Fairuza Balk’s Nancy Downs from The Craft in particular—owes Angela a little respect. And professional dancer Kinkade does the demonic transformation justice. The acting is atrocious—all of it— but the film boasts a campy, nostalgic, oh-so-80s quality, and we never disagree with Bauhaus on a soundtrack.
Jeremy Saulnier is a filmmaker worth watching. Murder Party is not the near-masterpiece of Blue Ruin or Green Room, but it is a savvy, funny, fun change of pace.
Chris Sharp plays lonesome loser Christopher. Alone with his selfish cat on Halloween night, he decides to follow a whim and hit the party advertised on a flier. A “Murder Party.”
Fun!
What Saulnier pieces together could have dripped with condescending judgment, as a group of insecure art students plot to kill the poor guy as a piece of art that will impress Alexander (Sandy Barnett) enough to nab them the grant Alexander keeps lording over them.
The comedy is more self-referential and human than snide, simultaneously mocking and empathizing with the group of artists as well as their would-be victim.
Funny, tender, biting and often quite bloody and energetic, Murder Party does not suggest the style of film to come from Saulnier, but it predicts a filmmaker who knows what he’s doing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qI_DqgxNR7U
Ginger and Bridget, outcasts in the wasteland of Canadian suburbia, cling to each other and reject/loathe high school (a feeling that high school in general returns).
On the evening of Ginger’s first period, she’s bitten by a werewolf. Writer Karen Walton cares not for subtlety: the curse, get it? It turns out, lycanthropy makes for a pretty vivid metaphor for puberty.
This turn of events proves especially provocative and appropriate for a film that upends many mainstay female cliches. Walton’s wickedly humorous script stays in your face with the metaphors, successfully building an entire film on clever turns of phrase, puns, and analogies, stirring up the kind of hysteria that surrounds puberty, sex, reputations, body hair, and one’s own helplessness to these very elements.
A well-timed Halloween party allows Ginger to display her new look and skills in as insightful a high school horror film as you’ll find, peppered equally with dark humor and gore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zoa1A987A_k
Who wants a little romance? How about the tale of a wallflower, the blossom of new love, the efficient use of veterinary surgical equipment, and a good sized freezer?
Lucky McKee’s 2002 breakout is a showcase for his own talent as both writer and director, as well as his gift for casting. The entire ensemble surprises with individualized, fully realized, flawed but lovable characters, and McKee’s pacing allows each of his talented performers the room to breathe, grow, get to know each other, and develop a rapport.
More than anything, though, May is a gift from Angela Bettis to you.
May’s vulnerability is painful yet beautiful to watch, and it’s impossible not to hope that cool outsider Adam is telling the truth when he reassures her, “I like weird.”
McKee’s film pulls no punches, mining awkward moments until they’re almost unendurable and spilling plenty of blood when the time is right—on Halloween night, of course.
He deftly leads us from the sunny “anything could happen” first act through a darker, edgier coming of age middle, and finally to a carnage-laden climax that feels sad, satisfying, and somehow inevitable.
Columbus native Michael Dougherty outdid himself as writer/director of this anthology of interconnected Halloween shorts. Every brief tale compels attention with sinister storytelling, the occasional wicked bit of humor and great performances, but it’s the look of the film that sets it far above the others of its ilk.
Dougherty takes the “scary” comic approach to the film—the kind you find in Creepshow and other Tales from the Crypt types—but nothing looks as macabrely gorgeous as this movie. The lighting, the color, the costumes and the way live action bleeds into the perfectly placed and articulated moments of graphic artwork—all of it creates a giddy holiday mood that benefits the film immeasurably.
Dylan Baker (returning to the uptight and evil bastard he perfected for his fearless performance in Happiness) leads a whip-smart cast that includes impressive turns from Brian Cox, Anna Pacquin, Leslie Bibb and Brett Kelly (Thurman Merman, everybody!).
And it’s all connected with that adorable menace, Sam. Perfect.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
Damn! So many great movies coming home this week – blockbusters, indies, horror, drama, comedy. Everything you could want, and not a bad one in the batch. Hooray for us!!
Click the film title for the full review.
Click HERE to join us in The Screening Room, where we talk through mother!, American Assassin, Menashe, Red Christmas and what’s available this week in home entertainment.
by George Wolf
Done well, universal themes can resonate from even the most intimate of characterizations.
Menashe is the most intimate of characterizations, and it is done well.
Menashe (Menashe Lustig is an exceptional debut) is a struggling single father within a Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn. Since the death of his wife nearly a year ago, Menashe has been resisting all matchmaking efforts, even though that means his “broken home” is not fit for his teenaged son.
According to church teachings, broken homes equal broken societies, and the boy will continue living with his uncle’s family until Menashe agrees to take a new wife.
Director/co-writer Joshua Z Weinstein, a veteran of documentary shorts making his narrative feature debut, immerses Menashe in a measured authenticity that never ventures very far from a documentary feel. Though Weinstein doesn’t speak Yiddish, his film speaks it almost entirely, drawing us deeply into a strict society through a lens that is highly detailed but never judgmental.
What sits at the core of Menashe is a conflict that transcends denominations. With uncompromising intimacy, Weinstein tenderly probes faith, family, and the sacrifices necessary to hold on to what’s most important to you.
