Screening Room: Mulan, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Tenet & More
Tag Archives: Hope Madden
All Sword, No Play
Mulan
by Hope Madden
The first tale of Mulan—a story that’s has been told and retold for centuries—dates to an epic poem written more than 1500 years ago in China. Back in 1998, Disney made its first attempt to capitalize on the girl power message of the daughter who hides her identity to take her father’s place in battle.
As part of the company’s live action re-imaginings of those old animated films, Mulan comes back today.
Yifei Liu plays the young warrior in a version that takes its material seriously. Don’t expect a wisecracking little dragon this go-round. With the PG-13 rating and the multiple and violent battle sequences, this one wasn’t made with the youngest fans in mind.
Director Niki Caro is not Asian, which makes her an unusual and potentially inappropriate choice to helm a story so entrenched in Chinese folklore. She hasn’t made as impressive a film as Mulan since her 2002 coming of age tale, Whale Rider, and it is no doubt on that film’s account that the New Zealander got the call from Disney.
She certainly does justice to the message of empowerment, as expected. What you might not expect given her previous films is her virtuosity in filming beautiful, elegant and eye-popping action.
The fight choreography is wonderous, as are the gorgeous vistas. Caro’s Mulan is a spectacle and it’s too bad it won’t be shared across big screens.
There’s a simplicity to the storyline that allows Caro and her cast to create wonder with the visuals, and Liu’s earnest portrayal suits that aim. The screenplay remains true to the folktale’s message in spots where ’98 animated version betrayed its more conventional view of female power.
There are no songs and dances here, but there is magic nonetheless.
Fright Club: Best Reboots
What were we looking for? Reboots/remakes that are superior to the original. There are more than you think. In the podcast, we run through eight horror reboots that are superior to the original, kick around another handful that are Even Stevens, and argue about several that could maybe go either way (depending on which one of us you’re talking to). So, you know, have a listen.
5. Dawn of the Dead
Zack Snyder would go on to success with vastly overrated movies, but his one truly fine piece of filmmaking updated Romero’s Dead sequel with the high octane horror. The result may be less cerebral and political than Romero’s original, but it is a thrill ride through hell and it is not to be missed.
The flick begins strong with one of the best “things seem fine but then they don’t” openings in film. And finally! A strong female lead (Sarah Polley). Polley’s beleaguered nurse Ana leads us through the aftermath of the dawn of the dead, fleeing her rabid husband and neighbors and winding up with a rag tag team of survivors hunkered down inside a mall.
In Romero’s version, themes of capitalism, greed, and mindless consumerism run through the narrative. Snyder, though affectionate to the source material, focuses more on survival, humanity, and thrills. (He also has a wickedly clever soundtrack.) It’s more visceral and more fun. His feature is gripping, breathlessly paced, well developed and genuinely terrifying.
4. Suspiria
Luca Guadagnino continues to be a master film craftsman. Much as he draped Call Me by Your Name in waves of dreamy romance, here he establishes a consistent mood of nightmarish goth. Macabre visions dart in and out like a video that will kill you in 7 days while sudden, extreme zooms, precise sound design and a vivid score from Thom Yorke help cement the homage to another era.
But even when this new Suspiria—a “cover version” of Dario Argento’s 1977 giallo classic—is tipping its hat, Guadagnino leaves no doubt he is making his own confident statement. The color scheme is intentionally muted, and you’ll find no men in this dance troupe, serving immediate notice that superficialities are not the endgame here.
3. The Ring/Ringu
Gore Verbinski’s film The Ring – thanks in large part to the creepy clever premise created by Koji Suzuki, who wrote the novel Ringu – is superior to its source material principally due to the imagination and edge of the fledgling director. Verbinski’s film is visually arresting, quietly atmospheric, and creepy as hell.
From cherubic image of plump cheeked innocence to a mess of ghastly flesh and disjointed bones climbing out of the well and into your life, the character of Samara is brilliantly created.
Hideo Nakata’s original was saddled with an unlikeable ex-husband and a screechy supernatural/psychic storyline that didn’t travel well. Screenwriter Ehren Kruger did a nice job of re-focusing the mystery.
Sure, it amounts to an immediately dated musing on technology. (VHS? They went out with the powdered wig!) But still, there’s that last moment when wee Aidan (a weirdly perfect David Dorfman) asks his mom, “What about the people we show it to? What happens to them?”
At this point we realize he means us, the audience.
We watched the tape! We’re screwed!
2. The Thing/The Thing From Another World
The 1951 original The Thing From Another World is a scifi classic, and every inch of it screams 1950s. The good guys are good, the monsters are monsters. Everything has its place. It’s reassuring.
John Carpenter’s remake upends all that with a thoroughly spectacular tale of icy isolation, contamination, and mutation.
A beard-tastic cast portrays a team of scientists on expedition in the Arctic who take in a dog. The dog is not a dog, though. Not really. And soon, in an isolated wasteland with barely enough interior room to hold all the facial hair, folks are getting jumpy because there’s no knowing who’s not really himself anymore.
This is an amped up body snatcher movie benefitting from some of Carpenter’s most cinema-fluent and crafty direction: wide shots when we need to see the vastness of the unruly wilds; tight shots to remind us of the close quarters with parasitic death inside.
The story remains taut beginning to end, and there’s rarely any telling just who is and who is not infected by the last reel. You’re as baffled and confined as the scientists.
1. The Fly
As endearing and fascinating as we find Kurt Neumann’s 1958 Vincent Price vehicle, it just doesn’t quite have the same impact once you’ve seen Jeff Goldblum peel off his fingernails.
Not because it’s gross—and it is gross AF—but because he’s fascinated by the process itself. It’s the scientist in him.
David Cronenberg knows how to properly make a mad scientist film, especially if that madness wreaks corporeal havoc. But it’s not just Cronenberg’s disturbed genius for images and ideas that makes The Fly fly; it’s the performance he draws from Goldblum.
Goldblum is an absolute gift to this film, so endearing in his pre-Brundlefly nerdiness. He’s the picture’s heartbeat, and it’s more than the fact that we like his character so much. The actor also performs heroically under all those prosthetics.
Time Out Of Mind
Tenet
by Hope Madden and George Wolf
A not-at-all funny thing happened to the movie calendar this year. And now, instead of kicking off the summer blockbuster season with a bang, the stakes for Tenet are a wee bit higher: rescue movie theaters.
As you may have heard, writer/director Christopher Nolan has been adamant that this film be experienced in theaters. He’s not wrong.
Tenet is a sensory battering experience, one not to be paused or downsized. The ideas are big, the visuals are full of wide-eyed wonders, and the persistent mind-bending immediately invites second helpings (maybe more).
An agent known only as The Protagonist (John David Washington) is introduced to technology that has the power to invert time. Time travel? Sorry, that’s Bill & Ted kid stuff. We’re talking the ability to move forward in a space where everything else is moving backward.
Nolan is returning to a familiar playground that manipulates time and reality. From Leonard looping through a constant present tense in Memento to Cobb forever bumping into his own past in his attempts to shift the future in Inception, back to The Prestige, forward to Interstellar and again to the braided timelines of Dunkirk, Nolan is a filmmaker who orchestrates universes by playing with time and consequence.
In Tenet, the future is talking to the past, and the fate of the world hangs in the balance. To put things right, our Protagonist and a mysterious partner named Neil (Robert Pattinson) must gain the trust of a high-end art dealer (Elizabeth Debicki) on the way to taking down her Russian arms dealer husband (Kenneth Branagh) who’s thinking bigger than Thanos.
A dialog heavy first half benefits primarily from the oily charm and sly humor of Pattinson’s character, whose arc is made more fun and more interesting by the way the film loops its realities. As elegant as always, Debicki exists to give the film a truly human character, which is to say, one whose behavior is too often (and too conveniently) impetuous.
The film’s biggest drawbacks are some cliched dialogue and its tendency to present itself as a SciFi James Bond movie with well-dressed characters popping up in gorgeous locales to impressively (and too conveniently) offer well-timed information. (Washington does impress as a potential Bond, though.)
The two and a half hour running time is not a concern, because once we hit the midpoint, Nolan (with a big assist from cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema and stunt coordinator George Cottle) decide we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Past and present collide in some of the most interesting, tense and downright fun action sequences Nolan’s ever put together—and fan or not, that’s a feat to acknowledge.
That’s merely a summary that doesn’t require a physics degree, but as Nolan’s own screenplay admits, “Don’t try to understand it.” We’re back to big screens, baby, let’s make it count!
Screening Room: New Mutants, Bill & Ted, David Copperfield and more
The Kids Are Not All Right
The New Mutants
by Hope Madden
Let’s be honest. Logan’s dead, JLaw’s past her contract obligations, Dark Phoenix bombed and the X-Men are in need of some new blood and maybe a new direction.
The franchise does make a big of a zig with its latest offshoot. The New Mutants is essentially a YA horror film. Co-writer/director Josh Boone’s premise may be comic book, but his execution is angst and PG-13 scares.
Dani Moonstar (Blu Hunt) wakes up to find herself in a locked-down, mainly vacant, definitely old and unmistakably spooky asylum of some sort. Here Dani will learn to control her power—whatever that might be—with the help of the sole custodian of Dani and four other special youngsters, Dr. Reyes (Alice Braga).
Focusing exclusively on adolescence allows the film to deliver, undiluted, the main concepts of the franchise: embrace your differences, forgive yourself, accept others for what they are, master your own potential and stick it to the man. Fine ideas, every one of them, and certainly common themes in YA.
As our plucky hero, Hunt struggles to find anything close to authenticity in her dreamy dialog, but the balance of the cast is strong.
The always remarkable Anya Taylor-Joy relishes the wicked girl role while Game of Thrones’s Maisie Williams (battling Taylor-Joy for largest eyes in a human face) is a deeply empathetic, awkward girl with a crush.
That the crush is not on one of the two boys in lockdown—played by Charlie Heaton and Henry Zaga—is a refreshing change of pace charmingly underscored by the teens’ apparent fixation with the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Boone, whose 2014 effort The Fault In Our Stars defines angst porn, knows YA. His combination of these two genres is a bit of a misfire, though, particularly when the final, big, giant scare is revealed. Yikes—and I don’t mean that in a good way.
New Mutants is a film trying too hard to cash in on proven youth market formulas, but the concoction fizzles. It doesn’t really work as an angsty romance, misses the mark as a horror movie and never for a minute feels like a superhero flick.
Speaking Softly
Lingua Franca
by Hope Madden
Lingua franca is literally a language used between two people who don’t share a native tongue. But what goes unsaid in Lingua Franca carries far more weight than anything we’re actually told.
Writer/director/producer/star Isabel Sandoval has mastered cinematic understatement. Her approach, as filmmaker and performer, is never showy. Her third and most confident feature is a slice of life drama that meditates quietly on need, agency, love and capital in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.
Olga (a perceptive Lynn Cohen) sometimes forgets where she is. She gets a little agitated and a little weary.
Olivia (Sandoval) calms her, keeps her safe, keeps her well, but has worries of her own.
Alex (Aemon Farren) just needs to catch a break, so he’s staying with his grandmother and helping out Olivia when he can. But we can’t all help each other, even when we mean to.
Sandoval’s film says so much with so few words, it’s remarkable. By way of Olga’s apartment we enter an entirely lived-in world, one that is likely to be utterly unfamiliar and yet feels as authentic as any you’ve seen. The ordinariness of extraordinary circumstances, unusual measures and extreme tensions emerges by way of Olivia’s resigned, world-wearied gaze.
There is a cultural currency to the story, one in which Olivia’s position as a transgender woman of color is actually less dangerous than her situation as an illegal immigrant in the age of ICE. That anxiety plays as a backdrop to a desperate romance between Olga’s two needy houseguests.
As Olivia’s sketchy love interest, Farren offers a nuanced and authentic turn. Alex is a man of squandered potential, dim prospects, and a fleeting if recurring notion that he can be something of value.
There’s a lonesome transience to the story, a feeling of impermanence that’s frightening, sad and just slightly freeing. Lingua Franca tells a lovely, sad story that’s very much worth hearing.
Bullets and Broomsticks
The Pale Door
by Hope Madden
The horror Western is an under-explored subgenre. There have been some great ones. In fact, just two years ago filmmaker Emma Tammi took a look at isolation and outlaws from a female perspective with her effective nightmare The Wind.
Co-writer/director Aaron B. Koontz (Scare Package) pits a bunch of women against some scurrilous train robbers in a Wild West ghost town for his latest, The Pale Door.
The title is a Poe reference, a line from his poem The Haunted Palace. Poe wasn’t much of a gun slinger, but that doesn’t matter because the title has nothing to do with anything. Just go with it. You’ll enjoy Koontz’s odd concoction more if you do.
Little brother Jake (Devin Druid) and big brother Duncan (Zachary Knighton) grew up on opposite sides of the law. Duncan runs the Dalton Gang, a bunch of quick shootin’ and hard drinkin’ outlaws. But that’s not the life Duncan ever wanted for his bro, who sweeps up at a saloon and saves his nickels to buy back the old farm.
Until the gang is one man down with a big payday coming on the next train. Jake steps in, the gang robs the train, but this score is not what they expected and next thing they know, wouldn’t ya figure it? Witches.
I am all in for a ghost town full of witches—it’s like a Scooby Doo episode gone wonderfully off track. Production values do not evoke a period and the props are hardly authentic, but the atmosphere is fun and the cast has a good time.
Pat Healey is the wrong-headed good choice he always is. Noah Segan (who directed one of the shorts in Koontz’s Scare Package) is basically playing Noah Segan, but luckily that character is always so entertaining.
Veteran character actor Stan Shaw is mainly saddled with exasperated entrances and hypermasculine melodrama (because this is, after all, a Western). Meanwhile, Bill Sage (We Are What We Are) charms as a kind of poor man’s Bruce Campbell. (That’s not an insult. We can’t all be Bruce Campbell.)
So the gang finds themselves in a sort of Wild West Titty Twister (let’s assume you’ve seen From Dusk Till Dawn), and young, wholesome Jake may be their only hope for survival.
Does the leap from Salem to Western ghost town make sense? It does not. How about the basic internal mythology, the blood ritual, the sex, the ending? Not really. And no one will accuse The Pale Door of taking a female perspective.
But for a witchtastic Western, is it fun?
Edgar Allen Poe couldn’t have made it any more fun.
Detroit Rock City
Creem: America’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll Magazine
by Hope Madden
Documentarian Scott Crawford has an interest in location-specific counter culture. His 2014 doc Salad Days recounted a decade of unsurpassed DIY punk rock transforming the underground of Washington, DC.
Now he turns his attention to Detroit.
Creem: America’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll MagazIne documents the inner dysfunction and outward impact of the Motor City’s “screw you” to the rock establishment. (Lookin’ at you, Rolling Stone.)
Launched in 1969 by Detroit head shop entrepreneur Barry Kramer, the magazine immediately defined itself among rock mags as the most personal, most irreverent, least sophisticated and most vital. Like the decaying, even dangerous city it represented, Creem Magazine existed outside the mainstream.
Boasting a litany of groundbreaking rock writers and more women on the editorial and writing staff than nearly any other magazine at the time, the magazine pushed boundaries. It didn’t just cover punk rock, it was punk rock. And like punk rock (or Detroit, for that matter), it was basically doomed.
Crawford’s gift is in establishing the period, time stamping the singular moment in rock history he wants to unveil. Archival footage and behind the scenes photos illustrate the hard core, nearly derelict quality of the working conditions. Kramer’s commitment was almost blind, and the untested staff—many of whom would reveal themselves to be rock writing geniuses—attacked their assignments with equal self-destructive passion.
We hear directly from many of them: Dave Marsh, Cameron Crowe, Jaan Uhelzski (who co-writes the film). We also hear from the rock stars that were covered (Alice Cooper, Gene Simmons, a very testy Joan Jett), as well as those modern day musicians whose young minds were warped by Creem’s pages (Michael Stipe, Kirk Hammett, Chad Smith).
The film’s production design does justice to its source material. Scott Gordon’s animated sequences are an inspired avenue into reenactments. Between the cartoons, stories, photos and excerpts of his writing, a provocative image of Lester Bangs emerges. And who could be more fitting to provide all the movie’s original music than MC5’s Wayne Kramer?
The film, produced by publisher Barry Kramer’s son JJ, is absolutely a mash note to rock’s most rebellious rag. For many it will be a lesson on the significance of Detroit, even after Motown, in the evolution of American music. More than anything, though, Crawford’s film is a testament to the legacy of America’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll Magazine.
