Tag Archives: Hope Madden

New In Theaters

Into the Sunset

Leave a comment

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

by Hope Madden and George Wolf

Should they have stopped after Last Crusade? Probably.

But is Dial of Destiny a more worthy sendoff for the iconic Indiana Jones than 2008’s Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? Most definitely.

Director James Mangold takes the whip from Spielberg and wastes no time reminding us why we have loved this character for decades. Impressively staged action and that familiar theme song combine for a thrilling 20-minute opening sequence set back amid Indy’s heyday, with the unusual combo of Harrison Ford’s de-aged face (pretty nifty) and 80 year-old voice (craggy) fighting to recover the blade that drew Christ’s blood.

Fast forward to the late 1960s, and Dr. Jones is ready for retirement when his past comes calling with a tempting opportunity. Indy’s goddaughter Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge, bringing some welcome zest), whose father was Indy’s old partner Basil Shaw (Toby Jones), shows up with a tale about finally recovering the artifact that neither Basil nor Indy could ever pin down.

It is the Antikythera, a hand-powered orrery designed by Greek astronomer Archimedes that was said to produce “fissures in time.” Archimedes hid the two halves of the dial from the Ancient Romans, and now Indy can help Helena find the dial before it falls into the menacing hands of the mysterious Dr. Schmidt (Mads Mikkelsen).

The script, co-written by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, David Koepp and Mangold, allows our character to feel his age – the wisdom of his accumulated experiences and the losses, the absences, they’ve brought him. It also allows a bit of silliness to creep in before we’re done, which becomes the one last hurdle that Indy must overcome.

As a director, Mangold comes to the franchise with a terrific resume that includes Logan, Ford v Ferarri, Walk the Line and 3:10 to Yuma. But while he’s able to fill many action-packed set pieces with craftmanship and flair, Spielberg’s unmistakable layer of childlike wonder is noticeably missing.

But so is Spielberg, so that’s gonna happen.

What Mangold and his writing team can do is find a comfortable groove that, like our hero, leans more toward respecting the past than plundering its remnants.

Ford is a big reason for that. He steps back into that fedora not like he’s never left it, which is the point. He meets his character where he actually is – old, alone, grieving. Mangold’s Logan also grappled with the melancholy of our waning years (and beautifully). Ford makes the most of this opportunity to see the character’s arc through, right into a warm and satisfying sunset.

Fright Club

Fright Club: Best Argento Movies

Leave a comment

How can it be that we’re more than 250 episodes in and we’ve never done a podcast on Dario Argento? Well, we’d like to thank the Wexner Center for the Arts for inspiring this episode. We will introduce one of the films in their upcoming Dario Argento series, as will our podcast guest Scott Woods. But first, we’ll get together and hash out our personal favorites.

5. Inferno (1980)

The second of Argento’s Mother Trilogy, Inferno orbits Mater Tenebrarum, the Mother of Darkness. She lives in a foul smelling but phantasmagorically constructed building in New York City, where Rose Elliott believes something diabolical is afoot.

A sequel to the filmmaker’s most lauded work, Suspiria, Inferno mirrors the stagey quality of the first in the trilogy. The architecture, the color scheme, the dizzying nature of the building itself give the film the surreal quality of a spell. This one takes on a neon soaked nighttime aesthetic that’s hypnotic. The opening underwater sequence is among Argento’s best set pieces.

Per usual, the Argento’s plot takes a backseat to the experience. A couple of these murders are especially grisly – appropriate, given that Mater Tenebrarum is the cruelest of the sisters.

4. Cat o’Nine Tails (1971)

Argento’s second feature delivers perhaps the most strictly giallo of his films, in that (before Argento reinvented the genre) a giallo is a mystery thriller. In this one, a blind former newspaperman (Carl Malden) teams up with a sighted but far less savvy newspaperman to figure out why so many murders are connected to the Terzi Institute.

Items that will become standards for the filmmaker: don’t trust what you see, science is a fun underpinning to a mystery no matter how ludicrous that science is, Hitchcock is cool – plus, the extreme close up eye balls and murderer POV that would become trademarks.

Surprises that he drops after this movie? Not only does one character deliver an insightful piece of feminism – “Whore equals liar equals murderer, perfect Italian logic!” – but the film actually murders more men than women.

Its color palette is a bit of a let down and it drags in parts, but it delivers a number of excellent set pieces and it’s really fun to see Carl Malden in an Italian horror movie.

3. The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970)

Argento’s first and arguably one of his best opens with a bang. Frustrated writer Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante) is killing time before he finally returns home to the States from Italy. But he witnesses an attack through the massive glass storefront of an art gallery.

It’s such a gorgeous frame for violence, and a perfect introduction to the maestro of sumptuous slaughter. There’s childhood trauma (the sort that turns a person toward mania), which will go on to become a go-to in the filmmaker’s arsenal. But what an introduction to his style!

2. Suspiria (1977)

American ballerina Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) moves to Germany to join a dance academy, but the other dancers are catty and the school staff are freaks. Plus, women keep disappearing and dying.

As Suzy undertakes an investigation of sorts, she discovers that the school is a front for a coven of witches. Suspiria is a twisted fairy tale of sorts, Argento saturating every image with detail and deep colors, oversized arches and doorways that dwarf the actors. Even the bizarre dubbing Argento favored in his earlier films works beautifully to feed the film’s effectively surreal quality.

It’s a gorgeous nightmare, bloody and grotesque but disturbingly appealing both visually and aurally (thanks to the second scoring effort by Goblin).

1. Deep Red (1975)

Maybe not the most traditional choice for Argento’s best, but it’s such a powerful step in his overall collection. He made three straight up gialli – The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Cat o’Nine Tails, and Four Flies on Grey Velvet – before taking a break from the genre with a dark historical comedy.

And then, Deep Red – a giallo, to be sure, but one that predicts the entirely surreal, aesthetic-over-plot supernatural thrillers he’d make next. Deep Red is gorgeous and bizarre, full of red herrings, childhood trauma, traumatizing children, tormented lizards as well as a number of themes he’s hit on since his first film.

David Hemmings (Marcus Daly) saw a murder, but he can’t be sure what exactly he saw. He’s sure if he can just remember it clearly, it’ll all make sense. This is a preoccupation of most of Argento’s films, but he’s never more curious than he is here. And the bloody, almost exquisite murders are more excessive and interesting here than in anything else he made.

Outtakes

Poetry of Nightmares

Leave a comment

Aisha

by Hope Madden

An instinct for sound design, a grasp of the difference between telling a story and reading a story – this is the power of Aisha. The piece of short fiction performance leaves you with the impression of your own heart racing, a sense of place and sound, of scent and feeling.

Co-creators Cory Choy and Feyiṣayo Aluko deliver a brief but complete story. We live Aisha’s nightmare with her, hear what she hears, feel what she feels – the breath on her neck, the shrinking claustrophobia of a tunnel, the stench of the bodies, the nightmare of the woman in the blue hijab. As evocative and true as any nightmare while it happens, the story brims with imagery and metaphor without succumbing to either.

In telling the story the way they do, the authors ask you to become Aisha, a powerful way to pull listeners into an unknown world and make them feel part of it. Frightening without being truly horror, the poetry in the storytelling echoes a primal terror of loss of self while imagery places that terror within the misery of war. And yet, tantalizingly, it’s Aisha’s waking moments at the tail end of the story that feel most genuinely frightening.

The Tribeca winner for Best Independent Audio Fiction promises a fascinating character to follow on a longer journey.

Listen to Aisha now at tribecafilm.com.

New In Theaters

Do You Want to Buy a Snowball?

Leave a comment

The Melt Goes On Forever: The Art & Times of David Hammons

by Hope Madden

In 1983, a woman buys a snowball from a street vendor. He has many snowballs laid out in a beautiful pattern on a blanket on a wintery New York street, surrounded by other vendors. She thinks she’s helping a homeless man but keeps the snowball in her parents’ freezer in Queens for months before letting her mom toss it.

Decades later she realizes the seller was David Hammons, an American artist who defied boundaries, mocked socially accepted practice, and became one of the most influential voices in art.

I bet she wishes she’d kept the snowball.

Documentarians Harold Crooks and Judd Tully share countless similar anecdotes as they unveil, layer upon layer, something of what Hammons meant to an art world desperately in need of him.

“The more he tells the art world to go fuck itself, the more they want him,” says poet Steve Cannon, whose poem “Rousing the Rubble” offers worthy narration to sections of the film. An ode to Hammons, the poem announces the artist’s many phases, as does the documentary:

            Booomboxes, into bebop, hip hop, scatter shots – lower poles Higher Goals –

            into human hair – into Bottle caps into people and their attributes ­–

Cannon’s interviews, as well as those with art historians, artists, curators and collectors, will have to mainly suffice. Although Hammons himself does appear and speak on a handful of rare occasions, his voice is mainly absent (he prefers not to be interviewed, the doc clarifies).

Those who do talk illuminate the spirit of an artist whose work defies categorization. That work, luckily, we do get to view throughout the film. Provocative, racial, absurd, prescient – the art itself is all of this, and the film points to Hammons’s rejection of the norms of the art world as among his most valuable qualities.

The Melt Goes On Forever celebrates the audacity of Hammons’s  curation, the subversive nature of his exhibition and the humor in his reactions and presentations, but is quick to point out that his lasting impact on art in the U.S. and globally is more a product of the intensity and relevance of the work itself.

The Melt Goes On Forever: The Art & Times of David Hammons screens this weekend only at the Wexner Center for the Arts.

New In Theaters

Take Me Down

Leave a comment

Asteroid City

by Hope Madden and George Wolf

Welcome to Asteroid City, a grief comedy that may be the most Wes Anderson-y movie Wes Anderson has ever made. Or, welcome to “Asteroid City” – the stage play from famous writer Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) upon which Asteroid City, the film (TV show?) is based. Actively. Brian Cranston will explain as he, the narrator of “Asteroid City”, deconstructs the meticulous framing device Anderson crafts to keep us just one layer further from chaos.

“We are all just characters in a play that we don’t understand.”

As is so often the case, writer/director Anderson painstakingly creates a world – colorful, peculiar, emotionally tight lipped – brimming with characters (equally colorful, peculiar and emotionally tight-lipped). Brimming. About 50 speaking characters stand or sit precisely on their mark, perfectly framed, each one doing their all to keep chaos at bay.

Like Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), a widowed war photographer stranded with his teenaged son (scene-stealer Jake Ryan from Eighth Grade) and three daughters in the clean desert nowhereville of Asteroid City, where a “stargazing event” will soon commence. Cinematographer Robert D.  Yeoman’s 360-degree swivel shows all you need to see: diner, roadway cabins, onramp to nowhere, and the garage where the town mechanic (Matt Dillon) has found that Augie’s wagon is now deceased.

Augie’s father-in-law Stanley Zak (Tom Hanks, in the usual Bill Murray role) fires ups his Cadillac and arrives for a rescue, only to find no one can leave Asteroid City on account of the alien.

Yep, an alien! He just came down sure as you please and made off with the city’s prized meteorite! Everybody saw it – including famous actress Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson) and all the visiting school kids in Miss June’s (Maya Hawke) class!

So the whole city’s on lockdown, while General Gibson (Jeffery Wright) and Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton) assess the situation and Augie realizes he just may have snapped the only photo of an honest to goodness alien.

All the unique and wonderful trademarks of Anderson’s craftsmanship are on display. Both the city itself, and the surrounding stage area where the play is performed, are given distinct aesthetics that benefit equally from Anderson’s commitment to symmetry, palette and depth-of-field.

The wordplay is succinct and witty per usual, dancing through themes of science, art, and Cold War paranoia. But while Anderson’s last film, The French Dispatch, left its procession of indelibly offbeat characters to fend for themselves, this time they’re connected with the sterile humanity that buoys the best of his work.

“You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep!”

You’ll hear that several times in Asteroid City, enough to know that Anderson hopes we’re paying attention. Leave yourself open – to what art, and science, is saying – and your world might seem a little more colorful.

New In Theaters

Swiss Cheese

Leave a comment

Mad Heidi

by Hope Madden

Hard core, low budget genre films tend to seem cheesy: women in prison, boobs, torture, splatter, training montages, katanas. Filmmakers Johannes Hartmann and Sandro Klopfstein embrace the budget constraints, embrace the genre, and absolutely celebrate the cheese with their opus, Mad Heidi.

Their genre sendup returns to Heidi, that cheery Swiss Alps legend, along with her grandfather and Peter the goat herder. But not all is well in Switzerland. The country’s Very Swiss Leader (played with relish by Casper Van Dien) is something out of a bad 1970s exploitation film. Swissploitation, if you will.

So, Heidi (Alice Lucy) must suffer, find her strength, and reclaim her country for the Swiss and the lactose intolerant.

One of the benefits of making a spoof is that no one can hold your ludicrous plot against you. Indeed, the more ludicrous, the spoofier. The plot – what there is of one – exists to move Heidi and her story from one recognizable genre beat to the next. The filmmakers clearly possess a sincere fondness for grindhouse action. Their film never feels mean-spirited, and more importantly, it never feels lazy. Instead, Mad Heidi delivers sometimes inspired set pieces, gags and jokes that land harder if you’re in on them.

It’s also sometimes shockingly beautifully shot.

While the filmmakers are obviously having fun with genre sensibilities, they also showcase genuine cinematic craftsmanship with a clearly low budget. The movie looks great. Gore effects strike the ideal over-the-top practical vibe. Hartman and Klopfstein make their chosen genre’s ludicrous nature, plot holes and unnatural pauses, cartoonish characters, and bloodlust work for them.

Van Dien – so good earlier this year in Daughter and mainly known for maybe the world’s greatest action spoof, Starship Troopers – delivers fun, exaggerated comic timing. In fact, the whole cast bad-acts quite well. Still, even at just 92 minutes, the film feels more than a little bloated around the midsection.

It can’t hurt to watch it, though, assuming you’re in the mood for an awful lot of goopy, sloppy, sticky – dare I say cheesy – action and you’re able to fully unplug your brain.

Shudder Premiere

Away with the Fairies

Leave a comment

Unwelcome

by Hope Madden

There’s never a bad time for an Irish horror movie. I guess it’s lucky that Grabbers director Jon Wright is back with the new tale of bloodthirsty little people, Unwelcome. Wright’s yarn follows Londoners Maya (Hannah John-Kamen, Ant-Man and the Wasp) and Jamie (Douglas Booth, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies). We meet as the two 1) confirm they are pregnant, and 2) barely survive a brutal break in.

Act 1 is grim, humorless and traumatizing, capitalizing on the very Brit-horror anxiety around roving young thugs and the pointless violence they will do. Act 2 ushers us into the lush, quaint Irish countryside where Jamie and Maya relocate, thanks to a timely inheritance. Jamie’s aunt passed on more than a cottage, though. There are rules.

But Maya doesn’t take the rules very seriously. And besides, she’s due any minute, there’s a hole in her roof, the clan of handymen they hired to fix it is somewhat terrifying, and she and Jamie are still suffering from the trauma of the break in back in London. So, yes, she forgot to leave the raw meat out on the back fence for the “red caps” roaming the forest beyond.

What could go wrong?

Let’s start with what goes right. Wright’s pivot to very Irish horror, with its humor, color and creatures of old creates a fascinating shift from the gritty British tone. The Whelan family (Colm Meaney, Kristian Nairn, Chris Walley and Jamie-Lee O’Donnell), hired to patch and repair the cottage, deliver uncomfortable tension from their introduction. Set design is gorgeous and the creatures are pretty cool.

Unfortunately, that’s not enough. Maya and Jamie make ridiculous decisions, many of them running counter to the characters’ own (sometimes verbalized) natures. The film doesn’t lean into humor nearly enough, and the conclusion leaves much to be desired.

Irish horror so often incorporates folktales of malevolent tricksters. You Are Not My Mother  (2021), The Hallow (2015), and The Hole in the Ground (2019) all tread similarly magical ground and all do a better job of it. Unwelcome can’t begin to stand up to comparisons to Wright’s creature feature Grabbers –the best Irish horror film you could hope for.

It’s not without its charm. Meaney and his crew turn in excellent performances and generate some honest laughs. But the film itself is a mess.

The Screening Room

Screening Room: The Flash, Elemental, The Blackening, Extraction 2, Maggie Moore(s) & More

Leave a comment
The Flash, Elemental, The Blackening, Maggie Moore(s), Extraction 2, Moon Garden, Peppergrass, Persian Lessons, Dry Ground Burning, Aged

New In Theaters

Some Pig

Leave a comment

Peppergrass

by Hope Madden

The pandemic was tough on everybody. Eula (Chantelle Han) lost her grandpa, made a bad decision with her bartender friend (Charles Boyland), and may lose her restaurant if things don’t turn around.

So, at the height of lockdown, these two restauranteurs takeoff into the night with a mysterious letter sent just after Grandpa died by a recluse he saved during the war. They decide to drive that letter 20 hours to the recluse’s acreage where they hope to find him and some truffles.

Really, really valuable truffles.

In the hands of co-directors Han and Steven Garbas, Peppergrass is, on the surface, a kind of backwoods culinary heist movie – which is more than intriguing enough. But the film, which Garbas co-wrote with Philip Irwin, delivers more than that.

The film is beautifully shot, from the somber color and framing of the urban opening act to the purposeful camera and sound work throughout the balance of the forest-heavy second and third acts.

Han’s Eula – in charge, no nonsense, desperate – anchors the film beautifully. The perfect counterbalance, Boyland plays at being the harmless dumbass. Thanks to a lived-in chemistry between the two actors and Boyland’s committed performance, you never root against his Morris no matter how much you want to smack him.

The script is clever, sometimes roughly funny, often surprising. Tonal shifts can be a problem, but generally Garbas and Han move smoothly, their framing and pace matching the swiftly shifting genre. Peppergrass swings from heist to horror to survival tale and back again, losing its footing only rarely.

Fear of contagion timestamps the film, but it also generates a kind of paranoia that heightens tension – the kind of tensions suited to backwoods survival tales. But Peppergrass’s greatest strength is how deftly it tells its real story – the one motivating the heist, which is never discussed outright, though it haunts the film.

Tense, surprising and delightfully unusual, Peppergrass is a gem of a thriller worth seeking out.