Tag Archives: Hope Madden

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Have Mercy

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Clemency

by Hope Madden

Alfre Woodard has primarily provided crucial supporting turns in film and television since 1978. With writer/director Chinonye Chukwu’s Clemency, Woodard delivers an astonishing lead turn as a prison warden dealing with inmates on death row.

Examining capital punishment from the eyes of a prison warden is certainly a novel approach. The warden has generally been relinquished on film to a cowboy hat wearing good ol’ boy with no qualms about flipping that switch. Chukwu and Woodard are disinterested in clichés. Instead they carve out something truly new in this genre.

The thing Chukwu gets most right in this film is an overwhelming sense of responsibility and grief, and it’s a tough line to toe. Warden Bernadine Williams understands that, while her own grief threatens to swallow her whole, it doesn’t compare with the pain she comes in contact with. For that reason, she never defends her position or betrays her sympathies when confronted by victims’ families, the families of the condemned or the condemned themselves.

Her own grief is so acutely individual that she refuses to seek sympathy and she outright rejects empathy, because who could put themselves in her place? She is in charge but has no control. She is responsible, yet she does not determine these men’s fates.

If Chukwu hits the right notes here, it’s Woodard who sings. This journeyman has played just about everything across her four decades in the business, and she brings a palpable sense of hard won wisdom to this role.

The film is essentially a character study, and one of a character determined not to discuss or betray her feelings. That’s a tough nut to crack because you have to let the audience know what’s going on without telling us anything at all. More than that, what Woodard has to convey is far beyond the scope of what anyone in the audience can really understand. And yet, she succeeds poignantly.

Aldis Hodge, playing death row inmate Anthony Woods, balances Woodard’s practiced stoicism with barely contained jolts of emotion. Clemency gives Hodge the opportunity to shine and he grabs it, conveying a tumult of raw feelings that will leave you heartbroken.

If Clemency is a miraculous package of performances, it doesn’t entirely work as a film. Bernadine’s story—her existential crisis—doesn’t have a beginning or an end, just an unhappy middle. But maybe that’s necessary for a film that breaks new ground while delivering the same message: we need criminal justice reform.

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You Can Dance If You Want To

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Cunningham

by Hope Madden

“The audience was puzzled.”

Such was modern dance legend Marce Cunningham’s wry, almost tickled description of one reaction to a performance. An enigmatic presence on and offstage, he makes for a fascinating if ultimately unknowable center to documentarian Alla Kovgan’s new documentary.

With Cunningham, the filmmaker seeks to reignite the peculiar audience response the dancer/choreographer’s performances once garnered, and perhaps drive wider appreciation for his work.

Kovgan chronicles the ways in which Cunningham challenged the traditional concept of dance, combining ballet and modern choreography and creating works without relation to music. His avant garde approach drew the attention and collaboration of other boundary-pushing artists of the time, including Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cunningham’s eventual life partner, John Cage.

Speaking of his interest in Cunningham’s work, Cage says, “I would like to have an art that was so bewildering, complex and illogical that we would return to everyday life with great pleasure.”

Kovgan goes about exploring not only that very work but the mind and imagination behind it through an appealing combination of archival footage, audio and onscreen text, as well as re-stagings of some of the artist’s most memorable pieces.

The result is provocatively piecemeal, a visually arresting if intentionally untidy image of Cunningham’s life and work. Most often, Kovgan’s style suits the content beautifully, but other times it’s a misfit.

Where Wim Wenders employed 3D to immerse the viewer in the dance of Pina, Kovgan is as concerned with the surrounding as the movement. She stages performances on rooftop, in meadows, among trees and within train tunnels. While the combination creates a vibrant visual impression, it steals emphasis from the movement itself, which feels out of step with Cunningham’s most basic philosophy.

Kovgan takes chances, capturing the dance from above, close up, far away, and at odd angles. This sometimes creates a vibrant, off kilter sensibility that complements the material. At other times, you wish you could see more of the dancers, feeling as if you’re missing something amazing in favor of needless close up footage of a face.

It’s a small knock, honestly, with dances this arresting and accompanying material this compelling. Kovgan’s respect for the work as well as the life of her subject is clear and she’s captured much of that spirit.

New In Theaters, Slider

Rite Here, Right Now

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Color Out of Space

by Hope Madden

HP Lovecraft has influenced horror cinema in ways too varied and numerous to really articulate. But true Lovecraft is tough to bring to the screen for a number of reasons, chief among them that his madness tends to involve something indescribable: a color no one’s ever seen before, a sound entirely new to the human ear, a shape that defies all laws of geography and logic.

Alex Garland pulled inspiration from Lovecraft’s 1927 short Colour Out of Space for his brilliant 2018 mindbender, Annihilation. But for direct adaptations, Richard Stanley’s newest may be the best.

Naturally, the film’s success is due in large part to Nicolas Cage’s performance, because who descends into madness quite as entertainingly?

Cage plays Nathan Gardner. Nathan and his wife (Joely Richardson), their three kids and their squatter (Tommy Chong – nice!) live a quiet life in the New England forest not far from Arkham. A meteorite changes all that.

Cage basically strums a favorite old tune, landing somewhere on his “nice guy gone insane” spectrum just this side of Brent (Mom and Dad) and Red Miller (Mandy). In fact, the voice that begins emerging once the meteorite hits is gleefully reminiscent of Peter Lowe from Vampire’s Kiss (a call back I can get behind).

Is that the only reason to see the movie? No. Tommy Chong is a hoot, Richardson gets one especially creepy carrot chopping scene, and things go a little Cronenberg just when you want them to.

There’s a lot wrong with the film, too. Scenes are sloppily slapped together, one rarely leading to the next. The film’s budget is betrayed by its FX and supporting performances are not especially strong.

But Stanley’s long-awaited comeback (this is his first narrative feature since being fired from The Island of Dr. Moreau in 1996) infuses Lovecraft with a much needed dark streak of comedy and entrenches his tale of madness within a loving family dynamic, offering an emotional center to the story that the author rarely delivered.

The film lacks the vibrant subversiveness of Mom and Dad and comes nowhere near the insane vision of Mandy, so Cage fans might be only mildly impressed. Lovecraft fans, though, have reason to be excited.

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Sleepless in Mexico City

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Midnight Family

by Hope Madden

For a population of 9 million, Mexico City keeps only 45 official ambulances. Private ambulances compete with each other to fill the need for additional resources. Midnight Family rides along with the Ochoas, one family making their living transporting the injured to government and private hospitals around the city.

Do they have training? The equipment they need to tend to a medical emergency?

Hell, they may not even have gas.

The nuance of the act of goodwill or commerce tightens the film’s emotional grip. As one member of the team worries over an infant while police question the father, clearly unable to pay for these services, it’s obvious that the Ochoa family takes its life saving mission seriously.

At the same time, every action is calculated: how to beat another ambulance to an accident, how to evaluate each situation to best secure payment, which hospital will be the most forthcoming with payment, which police are willing to alert them to accidents in return for a bribe.

It all sounds seedy until you realize what would happen to the injured without them.

And while you’re weighing the ghoulish balance between money and mercy, director Luke Lorentzen shows you just how a high speed chase should be filmed as 17-year-old Juan races and weaves his ambulance through traffic to beat another unit to the scene. (Honestly, you’d think a group of people this well-informed on the ills of Mexico City’s healthcare situation might be a little less daring!)

Juan is all business, a savvy worker with ambition and wisdom to share with his little brother Josue, who rides along at night instead of getting ready to go to school. In these moments, when family members cobble together enough cash for a dinner of tuna on saltines before going home to shower without hot water, the larger context and struggle takes shape.

An urgent portrait of a system in collapse, Midnight Family also uncovers one family’s raft of hope amid an ocean of desperation.

New In Theaters, Slider

Who’s Bad?

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Bad Boys for Life

by Hope Madden

It’s been 17 years since we last checked in on Detective Mike Lowery (Will Smith) and his goofy partner Marcus (Martin Lawrence). One of them has intimacy issues. One of them always wants to retire. They drive recklessly around Miami and wreak general havoc.

In those 17 years, Generation X has gotten old.

Marcus has a grandbaby now and wants to retire again. Then Mike is almost killed, so now Marcus really wants to retire. That means frustrated Mike, desperate to reestablish his manhood by finding the guy who tried to kill him, must team up with Miami PD’s new superteam, AMMO.

That’s right, AMMO, which stands for literally the most attractive group of police officers in the history of crime. They’re tech-tactical. They have a drone and shit, and no one would ever notice a drone flying into the abandoned warehouse while they do an arms deal.

But Mike don’t play that. He’s old school. And old. You know he’s old because he’s always wearing long sleeved shirts and jackets in Miami.

Is Bad Boys for Life ludicrous? Oh, hell yes. Luckily its casual sexism and jingoism are offset by its refreshing pro-violence stance.

Directors Adil El Arbi and Bilail Fallah—whose Shakespearean take on Brussels gang violence, Black, is well worth finding—offer no such lyrical balance of carnage and emotion here. It’s actually hard to imagine a film franchise so single-mindedly opposite of their insightful gangster drama.

It’s clear the marching orders were: get the bad boys back together, blow stuff up and trade quips! Fine, but who ordered all the forced ridiculousness and tonal whiplash?

Saddled with a breathtakingly by-the-numbers script by committee (Chris Bremner, Peter Craig and Joe Carnahan), the directing duo punctuates dramatic moments with comic relief while they distract from a weak story with nonsensical car chases and explosions, and when all else fails, fall back on daddy issues.

Don’t look at the credits and you’d swear Michael Bay directed this movie. (Bonus: Bay has a cameo.)

The film broaches interesting themes as one partner turns to God while another turns to bloodthirsty vengeance in the face of death. But Lawrence, ever the sloppy sidekick, makes clear that spirituality and peace are only fodder for jokes and neither partner will regain his manhood until there’s a massive weapon between his legs and he’s shooting Mexicans out of the sky.

Will Mike learn to love? Will he whip his tech-savvy and law abiding new team into shape (that is, help them to embrace lethal and mainly illegal justice)?

And finally, can we expect more of this?

Maybe. Whatcha gonna do?

Outtakes, Slider

Nom Nom Nom 2020

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Any year as strong a 2019 is going to see its share of snubs in the Oscar race because there are just too damn many worthy films and performances. It’s a blessing, really. But we will complain anyway.

First, though, we’ll celebrate Scarlet Johansson for finally getting a nomination, and then getting a second. She nabbed a nom in both lead and supporting categories this year. Antonio  Banderas and Cynthia Erivo nab their first Oscar nominations—Banderas waited just a tad longer for the recognition, but both are well deserved. Also thrilled to see Parasite clean up, JoJo Rabbit and 1917 collecting so much love.

But where was Uncut Gems? Not a peep for Adam Sandler’s career-turning performance or for the Safdie Brothers writing, direction or film. Same for Awkwafina and writer/director Lulu Wang’s The Farewell, both films that deserved a spot.

The most obvious snubs belong to Jennifer Lopez, whose brilliant turn in Hustlers was forgotten, Frozen 2, which didn’t garner an animation nomination (although we’re OK with that), and Apollo 11, which went unnoticed in the documentary category.

Here’s what we did get.

Best Film

Ford v Ferrari

The Irishman

Jojo Rabbit

Joker

Little Women

Marriage Story

1917

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Parasite

Surprises

Knives Out struck us as a clear contender for Best Picture. It would be great to fill the list out to its full capacity of 10, include Knives Out and either The Farewell or Uncut Gems.

Best Director

Martin Scorsese for The Irishman

Todd Philips for Joker

Sam Mendes for 1917

Quentin Tarantino for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Bong Joon Ho for Parasite

Surprises

Greta Gerwig needed to be here for Little Women, not just because this is once again the All Male Olympics, but because she deserves to be here. We’d give her Phillips’s spot.

Best Performance by a Lead Actress

Cynthia Erivo for Harriet

Scarlett Johansson for Marriage Story

Saoirse Ronan for Little Women

Charlize Theron for Bombshell

Renee Zellweger for Judy

Surprises

Awkwafina, who won the Golden Globe and showed remarkable skill, vulnerability and range in The Farewell deserved a slot as did Lupita Nyong’o for Us. We’d have put them in over Theron and Erivo. It would not have made us unhappy to see Tessa Thompson or Elisabeth Moss make the list for Little Woods and Her Smell, respectively, but that would have been asking a lot.

Best Performance by a Lead Actor

Antonio Banderas for Pain and Glory

Leonardo DiCaprio for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Adam Driver for Marriage Story

Joaquin Phoenix for Joker

Jonathan Pryce for The Two Popes

Surprises

Hooray for Antonio Banderas. It’s about damn time.

I don’t know that we’re surprised the Academy voters didn’t go with Adam Sandler, but we’re definitely disappointed. He should have had Pryce’s spot. It’s a tough, stacked year for lead actor, which is why glorious work by Robert Pattinson (The Lighthouse), Eddie Murphy (Dolemite Is My Name) and Kelvin Harrison, Jr. (Luce) went unnoticed. More surprising are snubs for DeNiro (The Irishman), Taron Edgerton (Rocketman) and Christian Bale (Ford v. Ferrari), but again, this category is loaded.

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role

Tom Hanks for A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

Anthony Hopkins for The Two Popes

Al Pacino for The Irishman

Joe Pesci for The Irishman

Brad Pitt for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Surprises

Who are those guys? Never heard of them.

If we had our way, Song Kang Ho’s incandescent turn as patriarch in Parasite would have edged out Hopkins, but the biggest let down is Willem Dafoe, whose insane wickie in The Lighthouse deserved a spot.

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role

Kathy Bates in Richard Jewell

Laura Dern in Marriage Story

Scarlett Johansson in Jojo Rabbit

Florence Pugh in Little Women

Margot Robbie in Bombshell

Surprises

If you’d asked us ten years ago whether we would ever utter the line, “Jennifer Lopez deserves the Oscar nomination that went to Kathy Bates,” we would have assumed you were high. But there you have it. Or maybe Robbie took J Lo’s place, we don’t know. They were all good, but Lopez was better.

Best Screenplay, Adapted

The Irishman

Jojo Rabbit

Joker

Little Women

The Two Popes

Surprises

That’s an exciting category.

Best Screenplay, Original

Knives Out

Marriage Story

1917

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Parasite

Surprises

Another great category, and one that’s hard to argue. The Farewell deserved a spot as did  Uncut Gems, but we don’t know where we would have put them.

Best Documentary

American Factory

The Cave

The Edge of Democracy

For Sama

Honeyland

Surprises

No Apollo 11? We’d have given the damn Oscar to that breathtaking piece of history, and here it isn’t even nominated. It was a great year for docs, though, and here’s proof. 

Best Animated Film

How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World

I Lost My Body

Klaus

Missing Link

Toy Story 4

Surprises

Lots. I Lost My Body might come as a surprise to a lot of people, but we thought it might crack the list. Hell, Missing Link might surprise some folks, even with the Golden Globe win. But Klaus is certainly a film that few expected to see named on this list. What did we expect? Frozen 2, although if we’re honest, we’re pleased as punch to see this list. (As long as TS4 wins.)

Best International Feature Film

Corpus Cristi

Honeyland

Les Miserables

Pain and Glory

Parasite

Surprises

Great to see the  brilliant Honeyland draw noms in both International Picture and Documentary, but where the hell is Portrait of a Lady on Fire?

Best Cinematography

The Irishman

Joker

The Lighthouse

1917

Once Upon a time in Hollywood

Surprises

All deserving. We are just grateful they recognized the glorious cinematography in The Lighthouse.

Best Score

Joker

Little Women

Marriage story

1917

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

Surprises

No Us? We’d put Michael Abels score in Skywalker’s place, but the rest sound fine to us.

Best Original Song

“I Can’t Let You Throw Yourself Away” (Toy Story 4) — Randy Newman    “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again” (Rocketman) — Elton John & Bernie Taupin “I’m Standing With You” (Breakthrough) — Diane Warren                   “Into the Unknown” (Frozen 2) — Robert Lopez & Kristen Anderson-Lopez “Stand Up” (Harriet) — Joshuah Brian Campbell & Cynthia Erivo

Surprises                                                                                                                                               “Glasgow” from Wild Rose would have been a nice inclusion, but everyone here is battling for second place after Rocketman.

The 92 annual Academy Awards will be held February 9th, and aired live on ABC.

Fright Club, Slider

Fright Club: Time Loop Horror

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Ever feel like you’ve been here before? This week we celebrate that spooky feeling with some of the best horror movies to take advantage of time loop nuttiness.

5. Haunter (2013)

Nicolas Vincenzo (Cube) starts off with the standard Groundhog Day premise—surly teen Lisa (Abigail Breslin) wakes up to the walkie talkie sound of her brother playing hidden treasure with an imaginary friend. It’s not Sonny & Cher, but it’s not that far off.

But Vincenzo (working from Brian King’s screenplay) starts bending the time loop structure, blending it with a more recognizable horror trope and subverting expectations. Breslin delivers a solid performance, and Pontypool’s Stephan McHattie’s outstanding as the devilish Pale Man. Plus, excellent support work from Siouxsie Sioux’s big face on Lisa’s tee shirt!

The film does kind of collapse on itself by the third act as it gets all Frequency (or Lake House or Don’t Let Go) on us, but for a good chunk of time Haunter delivers.

4. Happy Death Day (2017)

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.

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?

Director Christopher Landon (Scout’s Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse) wisely mines Scott Lobdell’s screenplay for laughs. 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.

3. The Endless (2017)

There is something very clever about the way Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead’s movies sneak up on you. Always creepy, still they defy genre expectations even as they play with them.

Camp Arcadia offers the rustic backdrop for their latest, The Endless. A clever bit of SciFi misdirection, the film follows two brothers as they return to the cult they’d escaped a decade earlier.

It is this story and the pair’s storytelling skill that continues to impress. Their looping timelines provide fertile ground for clever turns that fans of the filmmakers will find delightful, but the uninitiated will appreciate as well.

2. Timecrimes (2007)

This one is nutty, and absolutely required viewing for anyone with an interest in space/time continuum conundrums.

Writer/director/co-star Nacho Vigalondo (Colossal) mocks our desire for control and our fear of the doppelganger with a very quick and dirty trip through time. So much can go wrong when you travel just one hour backward. The less you know going in, the better.

An always clever experiment in science fiction, horror and irony, Timecrimes is a spare, unique and wild ride.

1. Resolution (2012)

Not exactly a traditional time loop horror, Resolution plays with the concept of time in ways that are baffling and eerie.

Michael (Chris Cilella) is lured to a remote cabin, hoping to save his friend Chris (Vinny Curan) from himself. Chris will detox whether he wants to or not, then Michael will wash his hands of this situation and start again with his wife and unborn baby.

But Michael is in for more than he bargained, and not only because Chris has no interest in detoxing. Directors Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson (working from Benson’s screenplay) begin with a fascinating and bizarre group of characters and a solid story, layering on bizarre notions of time, horror and storytelling in ways that are simultaneously familiar and wildly unique. The result is funny, tense, and terrifying.