Tag Archives: Hope Madden
Return of the King
Gladiator II
by Hope Madden
Ridley Scott knows how to stage an epic. At 87, he’s lost none of his flair with massive battles on land or sea, nor with the brutal intimacy of hand-to-hand combat. And he still knows how to cast a movie.
His narrative skills have taken a step back, but his eye has rarely been sharper.
It’s been 24 years since Scott’s Oscar-bedecked Gladiator cemented its position as the best sword-and-sandal film, but in the age of Caesars, only 14 years have passed. Scott opens Gladiator II with a lovely animated sequence honoring the fallen Maximus, as well as many of the filmmaker’s most iconic images.
And then we land on the film’s present-day African coast, a battle with a Roman navy led by Acacius (Pedro Pascal), a nation subdued, and a grieving widower (Paul Mescal) claimed as prisoner of war.
But we know he’s no ordinary prisoner.
For the next 2+ hours, Scott toys with “echoes through eternity” as he undermines much of the rebellious political nature of his original in favor of a returning king parable. That, a few wobbly accents, a couple of narrative dead spots, and a really poor decision involving sharks weaken the sequel.
But a good gladiator can’t be stopped, and Mescal is a really good gladiator. Russell Crow layered righteous rage with tenderness. Mescal replaces that tenderness with a vulnerability that only makes the rage more unruly. A touch of mischievous good humor humanizes the character and compels attention.
As does Denzel Washington. I dare you to take your eyes off him. Vain but wise, calculating and saucy, Washington’s Macrinus proves a much more complicated foe than the original’s wholly dishonorable, incestuous crybaby Commodus. But the simplicity of good v evil clarified Gladiator’s appeal. Macrinus is harder to hate.
Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger supply the syphilitic excess this go-round as twin Emperors Geta and Caracalla. Connie Nielsen returns, regal as ever, though no more skilled at staging coups. The balance of the cast is uniformly solid if not entirely memorable.
Gladiator II delivers an often exhilarating, mainly gorgeous spectacle populated by enigmatic characters performed admirably. It does not live up to Gladiator. But what could?
Broken Wing
Rita
by Hope Madden
In 2019, filmmaker Jayro Bustamante traced a history of state-sanctioned horrors exacted on Guatemalan women with his superb supernatural tale, La Llorona. With his follow up, he mines far more current history to uncover troublingly similar horrors.
Rita is a fairy tale told from the perspective of the titular 13-year-old (Giuliana Santa Cruz). As Rita tells us in the beginning, her story—like any fairy tale—is true, but it didn’t happen exactly this way. Remanded to a state-run institution for girls, Rita describes the palace she believed would be her sanctuary, but it was run by ogres and witches.
The girls in the shelter are divided into cliques, each with its own costume. The fairies are very young; the dogs are wild and muzzled; bunnies are pregnant. There are also princesses and star lights. Rita is an angel.
It’s one way in which Bustamante—like the world at large—defiles images of innocence linked with girlhood. But the filmmaker never veers from his protagonist’s perspective, and to her, the inmates are mystical creatures, each type with its own power, each transcendent no matter the evil.
The young cast, exclusively newcomers, impresses with every character’s unseasoned choice, every child’s brutish and childlike reaction. Their wisdom feels unforced, never the product of a screenwriter needing to provide exposition. Santa Cruz is stoic, her character interior, while Alejandra Vásquez’s Bebé is charmingly blunt, Ángela Quevedo’s Sulmy is tenderly optimistic and Isabel Aidana’s La Terca is protective and gruff.
No one’s fully dimensional, but fairy tale characters never are. Bustamante’s dialog blends childlike inexperience with tragic notes of experience in ways that feel right at home in this polluted playground.
Because Bustamante’s film never leaves the grimy physical reality of Rita’s world, Rita leans closer to Issa Lopéz’s Tigers Are Not Afraid than del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, but all three recognize the toll of systemic oppression on the most vulnerable and powerless.
Rita, though it barely qualifies as true horror, is a tough watch, especially because it is based on true events. It’s moving and debilitating at the same time, but it’s a beautiful and powerful work.
Garbage Day
Street Trash
by Hope Madden
In 1987, J. Michael Muro unleashed a colorful, sloppy bit of nastiness in bottles labeled Tenafly Viper. Street Trash was unlike anything you’d seen, sort of fearlessly nasty and endlessly goopy, in a way that rejected the notion of a remake.
Wisely, Ryan Kruger (Fried Barry) doesn’t remake it. His new film Street Trash is a sequel of sorts, set in present-day Cape Town. He retains the underdog spirit of the original, injecting it with equal parts irreverence and social commentary.
A repugnant, hateful, spray-tanned dictator in the pocket of billionaires has caused a boom in the population of homeless due to his one-sided economic policies. To clean up the streets so rich people don’t have to see the unhoused left behind by their greed, the politician gleefully greenlights the use of a new agent derived from the old Viper.
If you’ve seen Muro’s original, you know what happens to the poor sods sprayed by the politician’s drones. If you have not, it’s tough to describe, but it is brightly colored and highly viscous.
We tag along with a little band of buddies living on the street and trying to survive. Many alums of Kruger’s lunatic 2020 gem Fried Barry join this party, including ringleader Ronald (Sean Cameron Michael), 2-Bit (Fried Barry himself, Gary Green), Society (Jonathan Pienaar), Chef (Joe Vaz), and Kruger himself as the voice of the possibly imaginary and very horny blue gremlin, Reggie.
Muro sprinkles nods to the original throughout, although I do miss that toilet scene. The acting is sometimes fun, sometimes bad. The writing is also not great. But nobody looking for Shakespeare ever tuned into a movie where street people turn the tables on the 1% and melt them down into vibrant puddles of goo.
The film splashes vibrantly colored innards across the scene with abandon and delivers a message we can all get behind. This gooey mess may just be the healing balm we need right now.
Screening Room: Red One, A Real Pain, Bird, Underdog, Return of the King
Of a Feather
Bird
by Hope Madden
There is nothing quite like an Andrea Arnold film. The writer/director sees through the eyes of cast aside adolescent girls like few other filmmakers, and her own eye for color and detail behind the camera creates transcendent cinematic experiences.
Her latest effort, Bird, represents something closer to magical realism than anything she’s done previously (American Honey, Fish Tank), but her generous nature with characters and her impeccable casting are present, as always.
Bailey (newcomer and treasure Nykiya Adams) is a 12-year-old bored and frustrated with life. She lives with her father, Bug (Barry Keoghan, magnificent as ever), who intends to start making real money with the “drug toad” he’s just brought home. (An actual toad. It “slimes” a hallucinogenic when it hears earnest music.) Across town, her mother’s abusive boyfriend is a threat to Bailey’s three younger half siblings.
Somewhere between the two, Bailey meets Bird (Franz Rogowski). Bird is unusual. At first, she quietly follows him out of curiosity, then a kind of protectiveness, and finally friendship.
Rogowski’s enigmatic performance never patronizes, never bends to the noble outsider cliché.
Keoghan—easily among the most fascinating actors working—exudes a childlike charm that makes Bug irresistible.
Bailey’s life with her father—though hardly a safe or comfortable environment—takes on qualities of a fairy tale, or at least the absence of an adult world. In many ways, Bird tells of his coming-of-age even as it follows his daughter’s.
What makes the third act such a standout—whether you can get behind its surreal quality or you cannot—is the unerring authenticity of the first two acts. And what makes that authenticity so magical in itself is the way Arnold and her cast mine it for beauty.
Arnold is forgiving, though never naïve. There’s plenty of ugliness as well, but spray painted eyes and matching purple jumpsuits have rarely seemed so beautiful.
Cousins Are Forever
A Real Pain
by Hope Madden
“My pain is unexceptional, and I don’t feel the need to burden everybody with it.”
It’s a revelation articulated by David Kaplan (Jesse Eisenberg), and just one of countless memorable insights in the screenplay Eisenberg penned for his second feature behind the camera, A Real Pain.
David and cousin Benji (Kieran Culkin) are traveling together to Poland to honor their recently deceased Grandmother Dora, who’d survived the Holocaust by “a thousand little miracles” and left her grandsons funds to make the trip.
David’s been busy with work and family. Benji has not. The odd couple—one reserved and polite, the other charming and wild—join a tour group and embark on their adventure.
Culkin is excellent, delivering a masterful performance that oscillates between charming emotional manipulator and hard-core emotional basket case. The relationship between the cousins is lived-in and fraught. Benji plays Dave, plies him with intimate attention, prods him with tenderness then punishes him the next second. But thanks to Culkin’s raw performance, it’s hard to hold anything against Benji.
Eisenberg’s performance meshes with Culkin’s, reflecting the authentic yin to his yang. In Eisenberg’s hands, Dave’s manipulation is quiet but pointed, his sympathy condescending. The two actors—much thanks to an observant script and delicate direction—carve out the recognizable patterns of family.
Screenwriter Eisenberg complicates characters. The enjoyable verbal sparring between two bright, witty buddies keeps the film entertaining, but the tremendous depth of both performances unearths something surprisingly moving.
Eisenberg’s work as a filmmaker here is very sharp, never taking the cheap shot. Both characters are held to account, but there’s a generosity of spirit in the film that’s equally forgiving. The result is a poignant treasure.
As an actor, Eisenberg has never been better, truly, and one of his many strengths (as an actor and a filmmaker) is to just let Culkin steal this movie. Benji is recognizable and unforgettable in a film that wants badly to embrace the uncomfortable complications of family, if only it could.
Fright Club: Teenage Monsters in Horror Movies
I Was a Teenage Werewolf. Teen Wolf. The Craft. Even Carrie. Horror moviemakers have long equated coming-of-age with otherness, monstrosity. Sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it’s tragic, but whatever the result —the witches of The Craft or the mermaid of Blue My Mind, the zombie of Maggie or the werewolf (it’s so often a werewwolf!) of When Animals Dream, it’s a ripe metaphor. Here, recorded live at Gateway Film Center at the heart of The Ohio State University Campus, is our list of the five best teenage monsters in horror movies.
5. Jennifer’s Body (2009)
If Ginger Snaps owes a lot to Carrie (and it does), then Jennifer’s Body finds itself even more indebted to Ginger Snaps.
The central premise: Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them. Better still, lure them to an isolated area and eat them, leaving their carcasses for the crows. This is the surprisingly catchy idea behind this coal-black horror comedy.
In for another surprise? Megan Fox’s performance is spot-on as the high school hottie turned demon. Director Karyn Kusama’s film showcases the actress’s most famous assets, but also mines for comic timing and talent other directors apparently overlooked.
Amanda Seyfried’s performance as the best friend, replete with homely girl glasses and Jan Brady hairstyle, balances Fox’s smolder, and both performers animate Diablo Cody’s screenplay with authority. They take the Snaps conceit and expand it – adolescence sucks for all girls, not just the outcasts.
4. Fright Night (1985)
Fright Night takes that Eighties, Goonies-style adventure (kids on an adult-free quest of life and death) and uses the conceit to create something tense and scary, and a bit giddy as well. The feature debut as both writer and director for Tom Holland, the film has some sly fun with the vampire legend.
Roddy McDowall got much deserved love at the time for his turn as a washed-up actor from horror’s nostalgic past, and Chris Sarandon put his rich baritone to campy, sinister use.
Still, everyone’s favorite character was Evil Ed, the manic, pitiful loser turned bloodsucking minion. Credit Stephen Geoffreys for an electric and, at least in one scene, heartbreaking performance.
3. The Faculty (1998)
The film exaggerates (one hopes) the social order of a typical Ohio high school to propose that it wouldn’t be so terrible if all the teachers and most of the students died violently, or at least underwent such a horrific trauma that a revision of the social order became appealing.
Indeed, in this film, conformity equals a communicable disease. Adults aren’t to be trusted; high school is a sadistic machine grinding us into sausage; outcasts are the only true individuals and, therefore, the only people worth saving. Director Robert Rodriguez pulls the thing off with panache, all the while exploring the terrifying truth that we subject our children to a very real and reinforced helplessness every school day.
Interestingly, the infected teachers and students don’t turn into superficial, Stepford-style versions of themselves. For the most part, they indeed become better, stronger, more self-actualized (ironically enough) versions, which is interestingly creepy. It’s as if humanity – at least the version of it we find in a typical American high school – really isn’t worth saving.
2. Ginger Snaps (2000)
Sisters 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. It’s as insightful a high school horror film as you’ll find, peppered equally with dark humor and gore.
1. The Transfiguration (2016)
Milo likes vampire movies.
So, it would seem, does writer/director Michael O’Shea, whose confident feature debut shows us the relationship between the folklore and the life of a forlorn high school outcast.
Eric Ruffin plays Milo, a friendless teen who believes he is a vampire. What he is really is a lonely child who finds solace in the romantic idea of this cursed, lone predator. But he’s committed to his misguided belief.
O’Shea’s film borrows ideas from George Romero’s Martin, Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In, and openly gushes over Murnau’s Nosferatu. Inside and out, the film draws on the best in vampire cinema to help Milo deal with a world in which he is a freak no matter what he decides to do.
Screening Room: Heretic, The Piano Lesson, Blitz, Small Things Like These, Memoir of a Snail and More
Have You Seen This Mollusk?
Memoir of a Snail
by Hope Madden
Adam Elliot is an artist of singular vision. His stop-motion plasticine adventures discard whimsy in favor of almost Dickensian storylines told with eccentricity, dark humor, heartbreak and grit.
Memoir of a Snail trails Grace Pudel (voiced by Succession’s Sarah Snook). Grace is a twin, an orphan, an introvert, and a lover of snails. And as she ages, each one of these labels takes up a deeper, more complicated, more pathological space in her life. The one reliable bright spot is her best friend Pinky (Jacki Weaver), the town oddball (and that’s saying something).
The film begins near its end, as Grace shares her life story with Sylvia, her favorite snail. It’s not a particularly happy tale—in fact, it’s marked by genuine tragedy and haunted with loneliness—but there are moments of joy, and Snook delivers every clever, bittersweet line perfectly.
The voice cast shines, top to bottom. Kodi Smit-McPhee, Nick Cave and Eric Bana deliver the perfect vocal personalities to do justice to the endearingly odd inhabitants of Elliot’s charmingly homely little world.
Elliot’s writing is as impressive as his stop-action artistry. Memoir of a Snail delivers poignant insights and clever gags, astonishing depth of character and well-observed idiosyncrasies.
There’s a real sweetness to the film, and the grimmest possible story turns are delivered with a unique blend of tenderness and bleak humor that’s tough to describe. It’s a tone Elliot’s mastered as evidenced by his Oscar winning 2004 short Harvie Krumpet and brilliant 2009 feature Mary and Max.
Elliot treasures time spent with characters ignored and disregarded in their own worlds. His narratives don’t condescend or judge, and the characters are so wonderfully warts-and-all compelling that you hate to see your time with them come to an end.
Adam Elliot’s world is a darker, drearier spot than the neighborhoods populated by Aardman’s characters. (Sidenote: There’s a new Wallace & Gromit movie this year! Woo hoo!!!) His films are not as silly, their homes not as brightly lit, their cheese selections more limited. But the world Elliot creates—this ranch home on a small street in Canberra, Australia, crammed to bursting with ceramic snails, randy novels, Guinea pigs, and longing—is the flip side of the same plasticine coin. It’s ingenious, moving, hilarious and required viewing.
