Another documentary on Scientology? Is that religion really so endlessly fascinating?
Um, yes.
There is just something about this cross-breed of spirituality, celebrity, science and greed that makes Scientology immediately intriguing.
And the backstory: a religion that reads like science fiction, developed (revealed?) by a science fiction writer, believed by many as the true and only possible answer to our deepest questions.
Plus celebrities, secrets and very, very suspicious behavior – it’s just hard to look away, and if a filmmaker can find a novel way of exposing the subject, then why not indulge?
Documentarian Louis Theroux brings his wry curiosity to the project, and the result is an uneven but surprisingly compassionate glimpse.
Theroux has a 20-year career with BBC defined by enmeshing himself with fringe populations from neo-Nazis to the Westboro Baptist Church and others. It is his uncanny charm and low-key curiosity that help him endear himself to his subjects and his audience.
The obstacle to any documentary on Scientology is access. You can’t get in. And there is a limit to the number of speculative outsider-looking-in docs that can be considered worthwhile.
What makes Theroux’s avenue into the story interesting is that he uses his lack of access to gain access, because one of Scientology’s curious customs is to combat any perceived threat of investigation. Paranoia is baked into their business model.
They send people out to follow, film and generally harass folks like Louis.
A good portion of Theroux and director Rob Alter’s doc captures the sound stage recreation of incidents – primarily those alleged abuses that have dogged Scientology leader David Miscavige. Theroux also interviews former church members, including one-time high-ranker Marty Rathburn.
So far, so ordinary.
But Theroux’s aim is to flush out the active Scientologists and document their behavior.
A lot can be gleaned from that behavior, and from Theroux’s more balanced investigation into the former church members who participate in his documentary.
We’re still left with so many aggravating holes that you have to rely more on being entertained than informed. Theroux’s affable persistence and comedic intelligence combine with his empathetic insights to offer enough difference that his look is worth the time.
Film lost one of the great character actors earlier this year. Bill Paxton – forever reliable, always memorable, often quotable – died in February at the age of 61.
Gone far, far too soon, he’s the horror icon-of-sorts we pay tribute to today. The man made a lot of films, many of them horror: The Colony, Impulse, Future Shock, Club Dread, Deadly Lessons, Mortuary. Sure, these are bad movies, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t enjoyable.
We want to spend most of our time with the horror films that are really worth seeing. Three of them are even quite good!
5. Night Warning (1982)
Here’s a weird one. And convoluted, too. Orphaned Billy (Jimmy McNichol) lives with his horny Aunt (Susan Tyrrell), plays basketball, and necks with his girlfriend Julia (Julia Duffy). Aunt Cheryl kills the TV repairman, claiming he was trying to rape her. When police realize the TV repairman was actually the longtime lover of Billy’s basketball coach, an evenhanded treatment of homophobia arises – surprising, given the time period. Not that it’s the point of the film, but it is the biggest surprise.
No one is really trying to unravel the murder mysteries piling up here. Aunt Cheryl is too busy trying to keep Billy to herself while small town cop Joe Carlson (go-to bigoted cop figure throughout the 70s and 80s, Bo Svenson) just wants to know whether or not Billy’s gay.
You know who else does? Billy’s on-the-court nemesis Eddie (Paxton).
This is very definitely a low budget, early Eighties horror flick. Don’t get your hopes up. But it is such a peculiar movie. Susan Tyrrell is fascinatingly unhinged and so, so creepy that you cannot look away, and if you’re up for one hot mess of a movie, this is an especially absorbing time waster.
4. Brain Dead (1990)
What?! Bill Paxton AND Bill Pullman – is this some kind of lottery jackpot?
No, the two Bills co-starred as a good guy doctor and a sleazy corporate monster. Guess who plays which.
Paxton – working the gap-toothed smirk – needs his old pal Rex (Pullman) to use his skills as a brain surgeon to extract some info from an old colleague, played by Bud Cort. (Bud Cort?! This cast is like a precious gift.)
The film becomes one of those “descent into madness” horrors where the character isn’t sure whether he’s the doctor or the madman. The writing is weak and the direction laughable, but there truly is something going on her. Who knows why Pullman, Paxton or Cort all agreed to this gig. By 1990, all three of them could have done better. But they did this, God bless ‘em, and it is weirdly worth a viewing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtmqGe7740g
3. Near Dark (1987)
Back in ’87, future Oscar winner Kathryn Bigelow brought a new take on a familiar theme to the screen. A mixture of vampire and western tropes, Near Dark succeeds mostly on the charisma of the cast.
The always welcome Lance Henricksen is campy fun as the badass leader of a vampire family, while the beguiling Mae (Jenny Wright) – nomadic white trash vampire beauty – draws you in with a performance that’s vulnerable and slightly menacing.
The most fun, though, is Bill Paxton as the truest psychopath among the group looking to initiate a new member. All the film’s minor flaws are forgotten when you can watch an unhinged Paxton terrorize a barful of rednecks. Woo hoo!
2. Frailty (2001)
Director Paxton stars as a widowed country dad awakened one night with an epiphany. He understands now that he and his sons have been called by God to kill demons.
Frailty manages to subvert every horror film expectation by playing right into them.
Brent Hanley’s sly screenplay evokes such nostalgic familiarity – down to a Dukes of Hazzard reference – and Paxton’s direction makes you feel entirely comfortable in these common surroundings. Then the two of them upend everything – repeatedly – until it’s as if they’ve challenged your expectations, biases, and your own childhood to boot.
Paxton crafts a morbidly compelling tale free from irony, sarcasm, or judgment and full of darkly sympathetic characters. It’s a surprisingly strong feature directorial debut from a guy who once played a giant talking turd.
1. Aliens (1986)
Stop your grinnin’ and drop your linen.
Of all Paxton’s unforgettable roles, his Private Hudson has to be the favorite. Better than Weird Science’s Chet, that talking pile of shit, better than the skeevy Simon from True Lies, better even than the punk who’s stripped naked by Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator.
Paxton takes a character that could have been a formulaic Marine ready for the monster’s picking and turned him into an interesting, memorable character. He’s the guy you quote, he’s the guy who made you laugh, he’s the guy who kept your attention.
Back in 2005, Aussie director Greg McLean made a name for himself with the brutal but brilliant Wolf Creek. A year later, writer James Gunn would make his feature debut behind the camera with the underseen and wonderful creature feature Slither. (You may know him better for a little something called Guardians of the Galaxy.)
Regardless of whether you do or do not know these two, the fact that they worked together on the new horror The Belko Experiment meant one thing to me: hoo-effing-ray!
There’s the ripe premise: office workers hear over a loud speaker that they have a few minutes to kill two people or the unseen speaker (a royal we) will kill 4. Things escalate. People go a little nuts. It’s Darwinism at its most microcosmic.
Plus McLean and Gunn have assembled a fine cast full of excellent character actors: Tony Goldwyn, John C. McKinley, James Gallagher, Michael Rooker and Gregg Henry, among others.
So what went so blandly, forgettably wrong?
The biggest surprise in The Belko Experiment is the utter absence of surprises. Each actor plays exactly who you’d expect him or her to play. Their Stanford Prison Experiment meets Lord of the Flies exercise turns people into exactly what you’d expect them to turn into.
There’s not even a single inventive death scene to distract you from the fact that you had really high expectations because you totally love these filmmakers and now you’re just wasting yet another lovely evening a darkened movie theater.
Alain Guiraudie’s meditation on manhood Staying Vertical hits upon similar themes as his 2013 murder mystery Stranger by the Lake. In other ways, one film is the other’s opposite.
Stranger by the Lake – a serial killer film set on the banks of a French lake used for gay cruising – examined its topic from the inside out. We were surrounded by the suspects, the victims and the scene of the crime. We knew what the leads knew when they knew it, so we participated in each curious choice.
And though Guiraudie once again considers sexuality – sexual expression, repression and identity – he keeps the audience at arm’s length from the exploration.
We wander the French countryside with Léo (Damien Bonnard). Our wide-eyed protagonist is a screenwriter in search of a story. He meanders from one situation to the next, his open curiosity his guide as well as his frequent undoing.
Staying Vertical’s story is as loose and open as Stranger’s was tightly wound. The film is borderline plot free. Leo hikes into the path of shepherd Marie (India Hair), plays with her kids, dodges looks from her father (Raphaël Thiéry – a find!), wanders away and, periodically, back.
His rambling leads him to town, where he tries to connect with a homeless man under a bridge. Then we’re on to a ramshackle house and into the lives of a young man and his ambiguously-defined father figure, into a bizarre plant therapy situation, back to Marie and out again.
Between the loose structure and Bonnard’s guileless performance, Guiraudie creates a fascinatingly male world of disconnection, longing and hope. Léo is – as are we, by extension – an interloper, regardless of his attempts to situate himself.
The filmmaker knows how to arrest your attention despite the meandering nature of the plot. The frank and often jarring sexual imagery (seriously, there’s a scene set to a Pink Floyd riff that will floor you) manages to question preconceived notions in truly fresh ways.
He also shoots scenes through with wry humor, and he captures landscapes (in look and sound) as few if any current filmmaker can.
Guiraudie’s metaphors are frequent and interesting, but never stronger than in the closing scene. Though the crossing storylines don’t always work, the characters that populate this harsh but lovely environment pique your interest as Léo’s journey captures your imagination.
In Vermont recently I was trying to find my way to the spa on Church St. where my sister Joy works. Her husband had nabbed me from the airport and dropped me off in the town’s small bohemian coffee house and art district with directions to my sister.
As I wandered onward, a handful of teenage girls walked behind me and I could not help but overhear their conversation because, as a rule, teens are loud.
Said one: My mom and I are both giving up chocolate for Lent.
Responded a second: You’re not even religious.
A third chimed in: That doesn’t matter. I’m doing Lent and I’m Jewish.
Another said: I think people just do Lent so they can say they do Lent to other people to make them feel bad.
By this point my mind had blown and was no longer capable of processing sound stimuli, so I can’t report what other fascinating ridiculousness flowed from their mouth holes.
I was cranky, this being a Friday in Lent and me without any decent meal options at the airports. I wanted badly to grimace at them in utter disdain. I may have wanted to punch them in their dumb ass faces. At the very least, I wanted to shout that you don’t “do Lent.” Lent is not a cartwheel, ladies.
Lucky for them I’d given up mocking and abusing vacuous teens for Lent.
Oh, wait…
Damn, I guess I’ve already broken that penance, haven’t I? And so soon into the season. Lent’s always so much harder than you think it’s going to be.
With an almost offensively naïve – or more likely, revisionist – sense of history surrounding an entirely anachronistic amount of gumption, The Ottoman Lieutenant is the third historical romance to hit theaters in as many weeks.
And the weakest.
The lovely A United Kingdom struggled to find an authentic voice for the true story of Seretse and Ruth Khama’s love. Bitter Harvest, on the other hand, lacked the focus to use its love story to articulate the horrors of war.
Both films made a valiant effort to shine a light on a historical period. The Ottoman Lieutenant separates itself from the pack primarily with its open attempt to rewrite history, to make it more noble, palatable and romantic.
Lillie Rowe (Hera Hilmar) is a young woman of privilege. She’s also an American with a thick Icelandic accent, but no matter. Lillie spurns her stuffy 1914 Philadelphian upbringing in in favor of mission work in Anatolia, thanks to a cardboard-stiff speech given by mission doctor Jude Gresham (Josh Hartnett).
Once there, as Dr. Gresham falls in love with Lillie, she’s busy falling for Lieutenant Ismael Veli (Michiel Huisman) who, luckily, speaks English – as do all Turks in the film, even when they’re talking amongst themselves. How convenient!
Armenians – a population all but wiped from existence one year later – figure minutely in this soft focus clash between Muslims and Christians. But why tell their story just because your film is set in their backyard on the eve of their genocide? The important thing to understand is that, in war, everyone is wrong and only love is right.
That’s the gallingly simple outlook of the nurse with the tousled hair whose cloying voiceover tells us everything and nothing, simultaneously.
Though Joseph Ruben’s direction can never transcend Jeff Stockwell’s historically vacuous screenplay, the film often looks quite lovely. As does Hilmar, which is great as she is never called upon to act. She poses really well, though, and never laughs no matter how precious the dialog. Plus, Lillie has so many great hats!
It’s almost a shame Ben Kingsley shows up when he does because, even saddled as he is with this one-dimensional stereotype of a character, Ben Kingsley can act. His talent only exposes the balance of the cast for the posers (and poseurs) they are.
The Ottoman Lieutenant offers a lot of easily won wisdom and quick solutions – and hats. None of these strike me as items abounding during a time of war, but stark reality is not the goal of the film.
Who loves horror? We do, you do, and that’s probably why homage horror is so satisfying. Filmmakers take a self-referential approach to draw attention to the tropes of the genre they – and we – love. It’s not a spoof, not a satire, it’s a loving ode to the genre. It’s like a big, bloody bear hug, and we are in!
5. Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006)
This loving slasher offers not just clever, self-referential writing, but surprisingly likeable performances, given the topic. Leslie (Nathan Baesel – magnificent) intends to become the next great serial killer. Not your garden-variety killer, but the stuff of legend: Jason, Freddy, Michael Myers, Leslie Vernon.
A documentary news crew (of sorts) led by intern Taylor (Angela Goethals) documents Leslie’s preparations.
Director/co-writer Scott Glosserman nails a tone that’s comical, affectionate to the genre, and eventually scary. Part Man Bites Dog, part Scream, the film could easily feel stale. It does not.
This is partly due to the wit and intelligence in the screenplay, but an awful lot of the film’s success rides on Baesel’s shoulders. As the budding legend, Baesel is so charming as to be impossible to root against. He’s borderline adorable, even as he slashes his way through teen after teen unwise enough to party at the old, abandoned Vernon farm.
4. Stitches (2012)
There are a lot of scary clowns in films, but not that many can carry an entire film. Stitches can.
This Irish import sees a half-assed clown accidentally offed at a 10-year-old’s birthday party, only to return to finish his act when the lad turns 16.
Yes, it is a familiar slasher set up: something happened ten years ago – an accident! It was nobody’s fault! They were only children!! And then, ten years later, a return from the grave timed perfectly with a big bash that lets the grisly menace pick teens off one by one. But co-writer/director Connor McMahon does not simply tread that well-worn path. He makes glorious use of the main difference: his menace is a sketchy, ill-tempered clown.
Dark yet bawdy humor and game performances elevate this one way above teen slasher. Gory, gross, funny and well-acted – it brings to mind some of Peter Jackson’s early work. It’s worth a look.
3. Tucker and Dale Versus Evil (2010)
Horror cinema’s most common and terrifying villain may not be the vampire or even the zombie, but the hillbilly. The generous, giddy Tucker and Dale vs. Evil lampoons that dread with good natured humor and a couple of rubes you can root for.
In the tradition of Shaun of the Dead, T&DVE lovingly sends up a familiar subgenre with insightful, self-referential humor, upending expectations by taking the point of view of the presumably villainous hicks. And it happens to be hilarious.
Two backwoods buddies (an endearing Tyler Labine and Alan Tudyk) head to their mountain cabin for a weekend of fishing. En route they meet some college kids on their own camping adventure. A comedy of errors, misunderstandings and subsequent, escalating violence follows as the kids misinterpret every move Tucker and Dale make.
T&DVE offers enough spirit and charm to overcome any weakness. Inspired performances and sharp writing make it certainly the most fun participant in the You Got a Purty Mouth class of film.
2. Cabin in the Woods (2012)
You know the drill: 5 college kids head into the woods for a wild weekend of doobage, cocktails and hookups but find, instead, dismemberment, terror and pain. You can probably already picture the kids, too: a couple of hottie Alphas, the nice girl, the guy she may or may not be into, and the comic relief tag along. In fact, if you tried, you could almost predict who gets picked off when.
But that’s just the point, of course. Making his directorial debut, Drew Goddard, along with his co-scribe Joss Whedon, uses that preexisting knowledge to entertain holy hell out of you.
Goddard and Whedon’s nimble screenplay offers a spot-on deconstruction of horror tropes as well as a joyous celebration of the genre. Aided by exquisite casting – particularly the gloriously deadpan Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford – the filmmakers create something truly special.
Cabin is not a spoof. It’s not a satire. It’s sort of a celebratory homage, but not entirely. What you get with this film is a very different kind of horror comedy.
1. Scream (1996)
In his career, Wes Craven has reinvented horror any number of times. When Scream hit screens in 1996, we were still three years from the onslaught of the shakey cam, six years from the deluge of Asian remakes, and nearly ten years from the first foul waft of horror porn. In its time, Scream resurrected a basically dying genre, using clever meta-analysis and black humor.
What you have is a traditional high school slasher – someone dons a likeness of Edvard Munch’s most famous painting and plants a butcher knife in a local teen, leading to red herrings, mystery, bloodletting and whatnot. But Craven’s on the inside looking out and he wants you to know it.
What makes Scream stand apart is the way it critiques horror clichés as it employs them, subverting expectation just when we most rely on it. As the film opens, Casey (Drew Barrymore) could have survived entirely (we presume) had she only remembered that it was not, in fact, Jason Voorhees who killed all those campers in Friday the 13th; it was his mother. A twisted reverence for the intricacies of slashers is introduced in the film’s opening sequence, then glibly revisited in one form or another in nearly every scene after.
We spent the next five years or more watching talented TV teens and sitcom stars make the big screen leap to slashers, mostly with weak results, but Scream stands the test of time. It could be the wryly clever writing or the solid performances, but we think it’s the joyous fondness for a genre and its fans that keeps this one fresh.
George participates in life. Me, I like to sleep late, eat a burrito, take in a movie. It’s all part of my “Sleepin’ Late and Feelin’ Great” philosophy, as opposed to the “Gettin’ Up Early and Feelin’ Surly” approach to life.
George can sleep late/feel great only so many days in a row before he has to go wrestle a bear or something. God help me, he always drags my ass with him.
Last weekend, he pumped and ran with Arnold. You know this one? You bench press your body weight, and then run a 5k. After lifting your body weight.
Which would involve a public weighing, so I’m out.
Not George, because he just looks for stuff to do.
It was for this reason that we got up bright and early one Sunday and drove to Logan, OH – about halfway between Lancaster and Athens. Rolling hills, strawberry patches, barns and assorted other rural whatnot. It’s like a little slice of West Virginia right here in Ohio!
Why head into the hotbed of nothing much? Warrior Dash – George’s second annual bout with mud, ropes and turkey legs.
He’d go on to tougher mudders than this, but it was really this Episode #2 that made me wonder what in the hell is the matter with people.
Warrior Dash is a 5(ish)K. You start running straight up a steep and muddy hill, then crawl through more mud, this time under barbed wire. You cross rope bridges, mount several climbing walls with nothing but your slimy, muddy hands and a rope to get you over. Then you wade chest-deep across a pond and pull yourself up to a platform, haul yourself over another wall, try not to slide ass first down a mud hill using a tow line to lower yourself, jump over a pit of fire (I swear to God), then drop into another mud pit and crawl on your belly to the finish line.
For your efforts you’re awarded a turkey leg, a beer and a Viking helmet.
Batman was there. He left his utility belt behind apparently, running in his mask, shoes and not much else. He did not perform as well as you might expect from a superhero.
Lots of people run in costumes, actually, which makes you wonder why people choose to invest so much time and effort in an outfit they will have to burn later.
When George Dashed the previous year, I had the excellent excuse of a walking boot to keep me from participating. Year two, it was just good old common sense that kept me sidelined.
George enjoyed the challenge, though, and performed well, as always. You cannot imagine how filthy he was as he finished. Words cannot describe it. Nasty – I guess that’s a fairly adequate word.
I snapped some shots as the mud caked and hardened. Post-race, we followed signs for Warrior Wash to tidy him up. The previous year they had a fire hose kind of set up that power washed the mud into submission. This year, warriors were offered more of a bath.
Signs led to a filthy brown pond. Warriors swam through it and, voila, clean! Because nothing cleans like pond water.
Gross!
Then the shuttle/school bus back to the car. There’s nothing quite like the aroma of a bus full of warriors: humans who’ve just completed a 3.5 mile obstacle course ending in a mandatory army crawl through a mud pit.
Smells like victory!
Sounds awesome, right? George enjoyed it.
You might, too! All you need to compete in Warrior Dash – aside from masochism and a few bucks – is a pair of running shoes you never hope to wear again, shorts you can tie (because wet, muddy shorts want to come off you as you run), and that nutty desire to participate in life.
At the close of X-Men: Days of Future Past, Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) gazes with befuddled joy at his beloved colleagues (one more beloved than others), his own ugly history and the dire fate of his breed now expunged. Remember?
Expect nothing so precious from James Mangold or Logan.
Set just a handful of years into the future, the film sees the most haunted of the X-Men – a guy around 200 years old by now – really beginning to show some wear and tear. Limping, scarred, drunk and mean, Logan no longer heals quite the way he used to. His beard is grey, his hero days long gone.
The last mutant was born more than 25 years ago. Nowadays, Logan drives a limo and uses the cash to grab dementia meds he brings across the border to his old father figure, Charles Xavier.
Bloody and bleak, tossing F-bombs and the franchise’s first flash of nudity, Logan is not like the other X-Men.
Or is he? A little girl claws her way into his life, and suddenly it’s evil scientists, armed goons and genetically enhanced villains all over again.
The villains won’t leave an impression, but the film will.
Logan relies on themes of redemption – a superhero’s favorite. Mangold pulls ideas from Children of Men and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, but his film reminds me more of The Girl with All the Gifts. (If you haven’t seen it, you should.)
The point? The children are our future and Logan’s real battle has always been with himself. Almost literally, in this case.
He fights others, too, don’t fret. Indeed, you will see those claws tear into more flesh in this film than in all previous efforts combined. The violence in Logan is more unhinged, bloody and satisfying, too.
Even more startling is the behavior of Logan’s tiny feral beast, Laura (Dafne Keen). Oh, this movie has a body count – at least two of them headless.
It has an emotional center as well – which is not to say Logan works on all fronts. It’s lacking as the family drama it flirts with becoming, and can’t hold its own as a road movie, either. The narrative can’t find momentum.
But as an opportunity for Hugh Jackman to put his most iconic character to bed, it’s sometimes amazing.
Last year, Jeff Nichols’s Loving quietly observed the bond between Mildred and Richard Loving, a married couple whose union eventually brought down miscegenation laws in the US.
A United Kingdom, Amma Asante’s follow up to her 2013 historical drama Belle, treads similar waters. Like Loving, this is the true story of an interracial marriage with profound social and political impact.
In 1945, London clerk Ruth Williams (Rosamund Pike) married Seretse Khama (David Oyelowo), heir to the throne of Bechuanaland (now Botswana).
Rejected by her family and his, the couple then faced opposition first from Khama’s people, then, more sharply, from the British government working in collusion with apartheid-riddled South Africa.
A United Kingdom teems with beautiful actors, postcard-ready shots, swelling strings and feel good moments.
What Asante’s film lacks is Nichols’s observational style, one that trusts the story and the actors to draw an audience in. Asante too often tells the audience how to feel with a leading score and disruptive camerawork.
The filmmaker and her cast have a lot of ground to cover, and though Asante’s glimpses the budding romance quickly enough to induce whiplash, her instincts are strong when it comes to handling the drier political wheeling and dealing that sought to keep the newlyweds separate.
David Oyelowo’s performance cannot help but conjure memories of his outstanding turn in Ava DuVernay’s 2014’s masterpiece, Selma. As he did in his portrayal of Martin Luther King, Oyelowo gives Khama tremendous presence. He is thoughtful, wise, compelling, charismatic yet human – exactly the kind of person who could lead a nation to democracy.
As Williams, Pike presents a believable mix of self-assuredness and self-doubt. In her hands, Ruth is elegant, humble and in love.
Luckily for Asante and the film, Oyelowo and Pike share so bright an onscreen union they overshadow most of A United Kingdom’s faults. They do seem very comfortably in love. So much so that it is impossible to accept that anyone – let alone three entire governments – felt the need to force the two apart.
While far from perfect, A United Kingdom gives you reason to applaud, to feel good, and to hope. That may be enough.
