Join us in the Screening Room this week to talk through the pros and cons of Pacific Rim: Uprising, Unsane, Death of Stalin, Loveless and all that’s new in home entertainment.
Listen to the podcast HERE.
Tag Archives: Hope Madden
Unsafe House
Unsane
by Hope Madden
Sawyer Valentini (Claire Foy) is living your worst nightmare.
Having recently moved 400 miles from Boston to suburban Pennsylvania to escape her stalker, she begins seeing him everywhere. Shaken and without a support network, she visits an insurance-approved therapist in a nearby clinic.
She’s grateful for the ear, but upon completing her paperwork Sawyer finds that, due to the therapist’s diagnosis that Sawyer is a danger to herself or others, she is held involuntarily for 24 hours.
After punching an orderly she mistakes for her stalker, that 24 hours turns into one week. And now she’s convinced that the new orderly George is, in fact, her stalker David (Joshua Leonard—you know, doomed Josh from The Blair Witch Project!).
There a number of factors hard at work in Unsane‘s brisk 98-minute ride. Director Steven Soderbergh, by way of Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer’s script, lays bare some terrifying facts about our privatized mental health industry.
Seriously and deeply alarming.
He structures this critique with a somewhat traditional is-she-or-isn’t-she-crazy storyline. Anyone who watches much horror will recognize that uneasy line: you may be here against your will, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be here.
And the seasoned director of misdirection knows how to toy with that notion, how to employ Sawyer’s very real damage, touch on her raw nerve of struggling to remain in control of her own life only to have another’s will forced upon her.
Part of the film’s success is Soderbergh’s ability to put you in Sawyer’s headspace, which he does primarily through the use of iPhone 7. He claims to have filmed entirely on these phones, and whether or not that’s true, the shallow, oversaturated aesthetic creates the sense of delusion.
Foy’s performance is refreshingly unpleasant. Sawyer is tough to like, but she’s damaged and savvy in a way that feels authentic.
Leonard’s cloying neediness and bursts of violence match Foy’s formidable if brittle performance and a strong supporting cast including Juno Temple, SNL’s Jay Pharoah, Amy Irving and a spot-on Polly McKie.
Soderbergh relies on familiar tropes to say something relevant and in doing so creates a tidy, satisfying thriller.
All You Need
Loveless
by Hope Madden
There is a deep and deeply Russian melancholy to the films of Andrey Zvyagintsev.
Loveless opens on a sweet-faced boy meandering playfully through the woods between school and home. Once home, Alexey (Matvey Novikov) stares blankly out his bedroom window while his hostile mother (Maryana Spivak) shows the apartment to two prospective buyers.
Alexey’s parents are divorcing. Each has gone on to another relationship, each indulges images of future comfort and bliss, each bristles at the company of the other, and neither has any interest in bringing Alexey into their perfect futures.
So complete is their self-absorption that it takes more than a day before either realizes 12-year-old Alexey hasn’t been home.
Zvyagintsev’s films depict absence as much as presence. His dilapidated buildings become emblematic characters, as do his busily detailed living quarters. They appear to represent a fractured image of Russia, whose past haunts its present as clearly as these abandoned buildings mar the urban landscape where Alexey and his parents live.
TV and radio newsbreaks setting the film’s present day in 2012 concern political upheaval and war in Ukraine. They sometimes tip the film toward obviousness, Zvyagintsev’s allegory to the moral blindness of his countrymen becoming a little stifling.
Alexey’s parents Zhenya and Boris—thankless roles played exquisitely by Spivak and Aleksey Rozin—border on parody in their remarkable self-obsession. But this is a tension Zvyagintsev builds intentionally, and it is thanks to the stunning performances as well as the director’s slow, open visual style that his film never abandons its human drama in favor of its larger themes.
Like the filmmaker’s 2015 Oscar nominee Leviathan, another poetic dip into Russian misery, Loveless does offer small reasons for optimism. The volunteers—led by a dedicated Ivan (Aleksey Fateev), who has no time for bickering parents—brighten an otherwise exhaustingly grim look at familial disintegration.
Loveless doesn’t balance intimacy and allegory as well as Leviathan did, and its opinion of the Russian people feels more like finger wagging this time around, but Zvyagintsev remains a storyteller like few other. His latest is a visually stunning gut punch.
I Don’t Want to Go Out—Week of March 19
You know the best cure for a St. Patrick’s Day hangover? The Rock. That’s what he told me, anyway, and who am I to argue? His better-than-expected Jumanji comes out this week, as does the better-than-you-heard Downsizing and the worse-the-third-time Pitch Perfect 3. Let us help you choose.
Click the film title for a full review.
Downsizing
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
Pitch Perfect 3
The Screening Room: Raiders New and Old
This week in the Screening Room we hash out the good and the bac: Tomb Raider, Love, Simon, 7 Days in Entebbe plus everything out this week in home entertainment.
Listen to the full podcast HERE.
Like to Do Drawings
19th Annual Animation Show of Shows
by Hope Madden
Whimsy, melancholy, existential dread—the absurdity of human existence. What can tackle it all?
Cartoons can.
The 19th Annual Animation Show of Shows returns, jam-packed with tales both celebratory and cautionary. Human interconnectedness becomes a theme that runs throughout the program, one that feels simultaneously contemporary and retro.
From the brief, flippant Unsatisfying—a quick montage of irritating moments—to the lengthy morality tale Hangman, the film finds a wonderful balance in tone and mood, shifts mirrored in the ever-changing and always wonderful artistic styles of the shorts.
Traditional hand-animation, chalk and pencil, computer-generated art and even animation drawn directly on film stock, the choices made by the animators create unique atmospheres where each story can breathe and show off.
Kobe Bryant’s Oscar-winning Dear Basketball figures into the film, but its real highlights include Niki Lindroth von Bahr’s odd and amazing My Burden, Max Mortl and Robert Lobel’s bright Island, Tom Eshed’s charming Our Wonderful Nature: The Common Chameleon and David O’Reilly’s philosophical mind-bender, Everything.
There’s not a weak moment, truth be told, as headier fare is punctuated with musical flourishes or a quick laugh. The variety within the program and the sequencing of the shorts strengthens not only the overall experience but the human-ness that underlies the program’s unifying themes.
It’s lovely—sometimes funny, often sad, genuinely nutty and forever charming. If you’ve seen these celebrations of the art and glory of animation in previous years, you know the treat being offered. If you have not, this is your year.
I Don’t Want to Go Out—Week of March 12
It’s Oscar week, people. Not the week of the Oscars, but the week the Oscar winners and nominees come home to us. All told, five Oscar nominees (including the best picture winner) are available for home entertainment. And, if you prefer bad movies, Justice League is also out. Choice!
Click the film title for a full review.
The Shape of Water
Call Me By Your Name
I, Tonya
The Disaster Artist
Ferdinand
Justice League
Donovan Riley happened…
by Hope Madden
I was not a pleasant pregnant person. There was no legitimate reason for my nastiness—I didn’t have a particularly problematic pregnancy. I wasn’t bed-ridden or diabetic, didn’t have kidney stones or anything. Two of my sisters and a niece-in-law all passed kidney stones while they were pregnant. Fuck! So I had no real reason to complain, but complain I did.
During the time that I was pregnant, I worked at a restaurant in the now-defunct City Center Mall called The Boulevard. There were several servers hired at one point or another during my pregnancy, and once Riley was born and I’d returned to work, one of them—Dawn—said to my friend Tori, “Wow! Motherhood’s had a big impact on Hope. She’s so nice now. She’s a completely different person now that she’s a mom.”
Tori responded: “No, she was a completely different person when she was pregnant. We just got her back.”
My dickishness was fairly legendary at the restaurant. At one point, while I was taking an order from one table, the man at the next table started pestering me.
“Excuse me. Miss! Excuse me! Excuse me!”
I asked my customers to give me just a second, turned my head toward the offending patron and barked.
I’m not saying that metaphorically I barked at a customer. I’m saying that I made a barking noise, loudly and as viciously as I could, toward this man. Who shut right up, by the way.
Why so grumpy? Well, first of all, people touch you when you’re pregnant. The minute they realize you’re pregnant, it’s as if that misanthropic asshole they’ve known all their lives has disappeared and in its place is a polite woman who invites you to put your grubby hands on her belly.
As if!
Also, when you do express your frustrations, they make excuses for you. “It’s just the hormones…”
Hey, buddy, fuck you. Acknowledge and accept my seething anger or risk being pushed down those stairs like that last idiot who underestimated my bloodlust.
Mainly, though, I felt claustrophobic in my own body, like I was trapped inside my ribcage or something. Plus, the smell of anything made me vomit—not just for the first few weeks, but for the entire pregnancy. All 9 ½ months of it.
That’s correct. He was two weeks late. Imagine how pleased I was. I would walk up and down the stairs, jump up and down, curse out neighbors—any of those tried and true methods of encouraging the baby to just come out already.
None of it worked, until March 12. We were facing a very late blizzard and the boy decided it was time.
Not, like, immediately. I was to face hours and hours of lies as George—eating from a basket of candy that, I still feel confident, was meant for me—would join in the doctor’s chorus of, “Just one more push!”
Liars!
Oh, the string of expletives that would follow such deceit. So bad that I won’t repeat them here, and I’ve already said fuck at least twice. That’s how bad.
I will share one anecdote that you don’t want to hear. The head of my bed faced one side of the room and the foot of my bed faced the door.
That, friends, is just bad geography. As the door opened and closed, opened and closed while nurses and technicians came and went, I got—impatient is not the word, but it’s in the area code.
“Do you think we could keep the door closed?” I asked politely in between screams of pain. “It may be just a birth canal to you, but I’d rather not share it with passersby.”
I’d have smacked somebody if I could have, but that’s the other real drawback of pregnancy—immobility.
Anyway, sometime after 11, after George had eaten all the good candies from my basket and Married with Children reruns were on the wall-hanging TV, Donovan Riley joined us.
All giant head and tiny body and furrowed brow, he looked very worried. And he should have been because we were all about to be tossed out in a blizzard since we had no insurance or earthly way of paying for a night’s stay at a hospital.
Or maybe he was worried about the cluelessness that wafted like a fog off his parents.
Oh my God, we were parents.
And maybe we didn’t suck at it because here it is, 25 years later, and he is the very best, bravest, loveliest person we have ever known.
Happy Birthday, baby bunny!
Good Breeding
Thoroughbreds
by Hope Madden
Directing his first feature, Cory Finley adapts his play about teenage girls planning a murder. It’s a buddy picture, a coming-of-age tale, Superbad, if you will. No, not really.
Finley draws us into the palatial estate where Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy) reluctantly tutors Amanda (Olivia Cooke). The two were friends in middle school, but that was a lifetime ago. Now seniors, Amanda is an outcast, having personally euthanized her family’s suffering thoroughbred horse.
Lily has her own problems.
Wicked, surprising, unapologetic, cynical and buoyed by flawless performances, Thoroughbreds is a mean little treat.
Amanda doesn’t feel. She’s not a sociopath, exactly. She just doesn’t feel anything—joy, sorrow, regret, fear. Empathy.
Lily, who tears up quickly and is forever retracting statements or pausing to perform the correct social cue at the acceptable time, isn’t sure whether she relates to or envies Amanda’s plight.
Not that Amanda sees it as a plight, exactly. She doesn’t care, does she?
Cooke mystifies, her observant but emotionally disinterested performance a magical thing to witness. Amanda has nearly perfected the art of pretending to be normal, pretending to care.
The fact that Lily can see the advantage of this is what sets this coming-of-age tale apart from others. Because, yes, from her perch inside the mansion, Lily is coming of age. Just not like the rest of us.
If Cooke is great, Taylor-Joy is better. An actor who wears her vulnerability in her every expression, she gives great depth to this character on the precipice of adulthood, learning, as she must, that to prosper in her world you need to rid yourself of human emotions and replace them with acceptably false facsimiles.
In the way that Oliver Stone, by way of Gordon Gecko, proselytized that greed is good, Finley uses Lily and Amanda to suggest that empathy is bad.
Their ultimate foil, the societal underling as disposable to their class as an animal—a horse, even—is Anton Yelchin, in his final role. Digging deep into an underwritten character and turning up more authenticity and personality than Finley can fit onscreen, Yelchin’s pathetic loser offers all the humanity lacking from this pristine world.
It’s a fascinating look at how the other class comes of age, blackly comedic and biting.
The Screening Room: Follow the Light
So many movies to talk about this week! Let us help you decide where to devote your energy: A Wrinkle in Time, The Hurricane Heist, Thoroughbreds or The Strangers: Prey at Night. We also run through the scads of new releases in home entertainment.
Listen HERE.
