Tag Archives: Hope Madden

New In Theaters

War Horse, Revisited

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To Catch a Killer

by Hope Madden

To Catch a Killer is a title that begs to be forgotten, bland and obvious and broad as it is. The film is about a disgruntled and underappreciated cop with the skills to get inside the mind of a killer, skills that are being nurtured by a grizzled detective who sees potential.

So far so yawn.

And yet, filmmaker Damián Szifron’s thriller is weirdly compelling.

His visuals are on point. Fireworks, cop cars, aerial shots, sudden impact – clarity in presentation tells us what is going on long before any actor speaks.

Those actors don’t hurt. Shailene Woodley delivers an un-showy but emotionally raw central performance as a beat cop quietly desperate for a meaningful challenge.

She’s aided by Ben Mendelsohn as the beleaguered senior investigator. While Det. Lammark doesn’t offer Mendelsohn the opportunities for pathos that allowed him to create iconic characters in Slow West, Mississippi Grind, Killing Them Softly, Animal Kingdom and more, the veteran finds enough humanity to make the detective memorable.

Politics, sycophancy, scapegoating and bad decisions cripple the investigation, giving Szifron and co-writer Jonathan Wakeham a chance to impress with their script as well. No broad strokes, the script indicts media, greed, cowardice, sexism, and capitalism in turn and finds reason to empathize with the least likable characters.

Still, it follows the beats you expect from a film called To Catch a Killer about an unsung but brilliant cop finding her legs as an investigator. The film can never fully escape that dull familiarity.

The film is solidly built on understated performances, and it makes viable points. But it can’t quite stick the landing.

New In Theaters

Ari, Are You OK? Are You OK, Ari?

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Beau Is Afraid

by Hope Madden

Is Ari Aster all right?

Asking as a fan who is starting to think Hereditary was autobiographical.

Aster’s new 3-hour self-indulgent opus Beau Is Afraid revisits the scene of his 7-minute 2011 short film Beau, in which a middle-aged man loses his keys and is delayed in his plan to visit his mother.

For his exponentially longer feature, Aster employs the inarguably brilliant Joaquin Phoenix.

Phoenix is Beau Isaac Wasserman from Wasserton and he is living a nightmare of undiluted Freudian scope. Things seem fine as we open on his session with his therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson, slyly hilarious), who prescribes some new meds. But Beau’s walk back to his apartment is a descent into Escape from New York territory. Escalating tension leads to a naked, corpse-leaping, maniac-fleeing car accident that lands Beau in the highly medicated home of Roger (Nathan Lane, an absolute treat) and Grace (Amy Ryan, always welcome).

But he needs to get to his mom’s house.

Aster generates much of the same kind of primal, ceaseless tension of the Safdies’ Uncut Gems or Aronofsky’s Mother. But he embraces the absurdity of it all in a way the others did not. At times, his film is astonishingly beautiful. There’s a surreal theatricality to the middle portion that’s stunning, but even the comparatively mundane scenes are shot gorgeously.

And as odd as they are, performances throughout are great. Patti LuPone, Kylie Rogers, Parker Posey, Zoe Lister-Jones, Armen Nahapetian, Hayley Squires, Richard Kind, Julian Richlings and a barely glimpsed but nonetheless memorable Bill Hader all add intrigue as they populate Beau’s increasingly desperate and blisteringly imaginative quest to get to his mom’s place.

But damn, it is long. And it asks a lot. Beau Is Afraid is essentially a 3-hour string of traumatic dream sequences, beautiful but shapeless, leading to something out of Pink Floyd’s The Wall. And if Hereditary triggered your mother issues, for the love of God, do not see Beau Is Afraid.

The similarities between Aster’s 2018 horror are legion: the house, the attic, the physically beaten son, a headless body – you’re almost waiting for Mona (LuPone) to deliver the line “I am your mother!”

All told, Beau Is Afraid is a fascinating, gorgeously realized vision and I don’t think you’re going to like it. I can’t say I liked it. I admire it, am stunned by it, and kind of want to see it again. Maybe I do like it, I can’t tell.

One thing I know for sure, Aster is still working some shit out.

Outtakes

An Exercise in Degradation

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Beleth Station

by Hope Madden

I imagine a lot of people have thought about getting out of a bad marriage and wondered, What’s the worst that could happen?

Those people should talk to Samantha Kolesnik and Bryan Smith. Or maybe they shouldn’t. The duo’s unusual A-side/B-side horror tale Beleth Station is like a premise wrapped in a dare that really digs into What’s the worst that could happen?

Both writers take the same set of characters, same basic idea of being trapped in a dying town off the Pennsylvania highway, and then each sees how bad it can get.

Kolesnik’s take, A Night to Remember, comes first, following Krista and Nick as they flee Krista’s stultifying marriage. They find themselves in need of roadside assistance in an isolated stretch – a common enough beat in horror, but one that Kolesnik takes in depraved and alarming directions. What follows is an experiment in degradation.

There is a deep hopelessness in this story, a kind of grim poetry that’s so beautifully written you commit to the long, bleak, terrifying haul. You will want to look away, but Kolesnik’s prose compels you.

Both stories explore the primal terror of helplessness, each wallowing in the evil that men do, each almost mocking the naivete of faith in the human condition. Still, they are vastly different tales. Smith’s The Gauntlet feels more cinematic, like Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Two Thousand Maniacs meets Stephen King’s The Running Man.

Conspiracy, brutality, revolution all fuel a tale that drops you in the middle of the action and never lets up. Two desperate pairs – young townies dying for escape, new lovers lured in from the outside – commit increasingly horrendous acts to garner freedom.

For Smith, the question isn’t how bad can it get as much as how far will you go, and what will you be when it’s over? He has a flair for both imagery and pace that makes The Gauntlet all but impossible to stop reading.

New In Theaters

In Need of Some Restraint

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The Pope’s Exorcist

by Hope Madden

Fair warning: I do tend to get in the weeds with these Catholic horror movies.

So, The Pope’s Exorcist.

Russell Crowe plays Fr. Gabriele Amorth, who was an honest to God exorcist based in the Vatican. He founded the International Association of Exorcists. For real, not in this movie. In this movie, he gets called to Spain to help an expat American family whose son is possessed.

The Pope’s Exorcist is the third possession film Michael Petroni has penned. Is that good news? He also wrote The Secret Lives of Alter Boys, the TV series Messiah, and The Chronicles of Naria: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. (How is that relevant, you say? Aslan is lion Jesus. FYI.) Is the point that he knows his stuff? Or that most of those scripts aren’t very good?

Co-writer Evan Spilotopoulos has also written lukewarm Catholic horror (The Unholy). What you can expect from their script (also co-written by R. Dean McCreary in his first holy horror) is very little that’s truly original.

This is where Crowe comes in.

Crowe is great. He’s funny, clever, looks amazing on his little Vespa. Alex Essoe as the possessed boy’s mother Julia is stiff, her acting even less believable when she sits across the table from Crowe, who’s enjoying every moment of his own performance. As will you.

Franco Nero plays the pope. This marks the second time Nero has played the pope, which is hilarious to me. Anyway, that’s fun. And Ralph Ineson (The VVitch) is the voice of the demon, which is the most authentic casting ever.

The Pope’s Exorcist directly mentions that the Catholic church has been the cause of two of the greatest and longest lasting sources of human misery in history: the Inquisition and the history of rampant, institutional sexual abuse. Credit for that. The film’s resolution can’t be discussed because of spoilers, but battling your demons has rarely felt less feminist.

The Pope’s Exorcist doesn’t hold a candle to the diabolical military fun of director Julius Avery’s Overlord. There are too few surprises, the FX are so-so at best, and the outcome is never really in question. Plus, it treads too heavily on the popularity of The Conjuring’s universe of “this must be true because some Catholic person wrote it down, so let’s create a Holy Water franchise.”

Is it better than Petroni’s 2011 dumpster fire, The Rite? It is. Is it another movie that says men throughout the history of Catholicism have done evil things to the powerless around them, but the only way to correct this is to believe other men in the Catholic church? It is.

But Crowe is having a blast, and it’s infectious.

New In Theaters

Bloody Good

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Renfield

by Hope Madden and George Wolf

So, two Robot Chicken writers and the guy who directed The Lego Batman Movie got together and said, I bet they’d let us make a movie if we could get Nic Cage to play Dracula.

I mean, maybe it didn’t go down like that, but it could have and if it did, it worked. They totally made a movie with a very saucy Nic Cage as Dracula. And a saucy Nic Cage is the best Nic Cage.

Through inspired cinematic homages, we’re whooshed through a little backstory. Robert Montague Renfield (Nicholas Hoult – who played Cage’s son in Gore Verbinski’s 2005 dramedy The Weather Man) is an ambitious real estate agent who sells his soul to Dracula. Fast forward 150 years or so and he’s grown weary of the co-dependent relationship.

The blood sucker’s insatiable appetite means that his reluctant manservant is forever finding a new place for them to lay low. Right now, it’s New Orleans, where an angry cop (Awkwafina) is fighting a losing battle with a corrupt city.

But enough about the story. Honestly, if you’re here for the story, you’ve come to the wrong place. Not that co-writers Ryan Ridley and Robert Kirkman do a poor job. They do a fine job of serving Cage opportunities to ham it up, while director Chris McKay wows with Story of Ricky levels of carnage, except here it’s intentionally funny.

And the blood-splatter here is much more accomplished then Ricky, as it’s woven through a spicy gumbo of action set pieces that mix Zombieland and Shaun of the Dead with a dash of Matrix. But as fun as this all often is, the film never fully commits to any of its multiple directions.

There’s at least one bloody toe in waters that send up rom-coms, satirize narcissistic relationships and homage a classic horror character while it’s also modernizing the themes that built him.

But experiencing Count Nicula alone is worth it. Plus, Hoult is perfect as the put-upon sad boy with access to anti-hero superpowers and Awkwafina can wring plenty of humor from simply telling a guy named Kyle to F-off.

Renfield might be bloodier than you expect, but it’s just as much fun as you’re hoping for. Call it bloody good fun.

New In Theaters

Both Refined and Uncouth

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Personality Crisis: One Night Only

by Hope Madden

David Johansen may not be the first name you associate with New York City, but why not? The Staten Island native has been a fixture of a teeming NYC Avant Garde since his teens, even before he launched perhaps the city’s first punk rock band, the New York Dolls.

Martin Scorsese, directing with longtime collaborator David Tedeschi, captures both New York and live music as only he can with the Johansen documentary, Personality Crisis: One Night Only.

Filmed in January, 2020 – Johansen’s 70th birthday – at Café Carlisle, the show sees the finely-coiffured troubadour fronting a jazzy combo, still the hippest guy in the room. Interviews, concert clips and other archival footage flank selections from a classic cabaret act.

As has been the case with all of Scorsese’s music docs, Personality Crisis is heavy on music. We’re treated to complete songs, Scorsese’s camera lingering on the Johansen’s snapping fingers, a great over the shoulder shot continually glimpsing an intimate club space filled with well-behaved, well-dressed patrons.

Because Johansen “was in no mood for learning new songs,” he performs old, mostly Dolls tunes in the style of Buster Poindexter. Of the many brilliant ideas to pour from this two-hour testament to punk spirit, the decision to perform Dolls songs as cabaret standards is perhaps the brightest and best.

Plenty of punk bands have taken on pop classics, giving them a dangerous spin. But very few punk songs stand up to more popular, lyric-focused stylings. But as Dolls superfan Morrissey points out early and often in this doc, Johansen wrote incredible pop songs.

As much as I hate to agree with Morrissey, he’s right. There’s no denying the introspection, pain and poetry in Johansen’s lyrics.

Plenty of Music, Funky but Chic, Temptation to Exist, Subway Train, Better than You (even though he forgot the lyrics), and, of course, Personality Crisis take on the rich, boozy texture of the cabaret style and tell you more than they did the first go-round.

Maimed Happiness transcends time entirely, feeling more at home in the mouth of a septuagenarian than it ever did a teenaged punk.

Tedeschi also edits this film, having worked with Scorsese on Shine a Light, and George Harrison: Living in the Material World . He mines for gold, not only onstage, but in the archives. From old interviews to intimate family footage shot by Johansen’s daughter, Leah Hennessey, to clips from his Sirius satellite radio show, we’re treated to a glimpse of a life richly, and sometimes dangerously lived.

Johansen’s an onstage charmer, but more than that, he’s a vibrant ghost of New York past.

New In Theaters

Head’s in Mississippi

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Far East Deep South

by Hope Madden

In 2015, Larissa Lam convinced her husband Baldwin Chiu that they should start filming. Chiu had begun to dig into his family’s history and Lam believed that what he was finding would make a great movie. The result was the award-winning short film Finding Cleveland.

The filmmaker believed that the surprising evidence of a substantial community of Chinese immigrants living in Cleveland, Mississippi dating back to the 1800s would compel viewer interest.

It did – so much interest, in fact, that Lam and Chiu dug deeper. The result is the feature length documentary Far East Deep South. Told in chapters, Lam’s doc begins intimately with the family and broadens to tap universal themes.

We travel with Baldwin and his family, uncovering an America few people knew existed. In watching the effect of this discovery on Baldwin’s father Charles, who last saw his own father when he was barely a toddler living in China, it’s tough not to be moved. Learning who his father was, why he lived so far away, and that he missed his children reshaped the way Charles saw himself.

Because of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Chinese women couldn’t immigrate to the US for decades. Because of anti-miscegenation laws, the Chinese men who’d come to the States couldn’t easily marry here. Many of these men therefore traveled back and forth to China to marry and have families, essentially creating generations of fatherless families in China.

Dr. Jane Hong and other experts punctuate Lam’s tale with some of those missing historical details we all should have learned in middle school. Like many products of the American educational system, the Chius were unfamiliar with the Chinese Exclusion Act. They had no idea there was a vibrant Chinese American population outside of the West Coast, or that their own history was so entrenched in America’s. This documentary points to the painful impact of massive omissions in the teaching of history.

Wisely, Lam limits the expert talking head footage, using it to illustrate the backdrop and letting the touching family drama drive the film. Far East Deep South is not only a statement about absence but a testament to the effect a person can on a community.

What’s maybe most touching is how this journey softened Charles Chiu’s memory of his grandmother, who’d lost both a son and a husband and still devoted herself to Charles. Seeing his love for her deepen before our eyes delivers as much emotional punch as his evolving feelings toward his father.

Come to Far East Deep South for the beautiful and surprising human drama. Stay for a chance to see America with sharper vision.

The Screening Room

Screening Room: Air, Super Mario Bros., Paint, The Five Devils & More

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Air, Super Mario Bros., Paint, The Five Devils, One Day as a Lion, The Portable Door, The Fist of the Condor, Balloon Animal, A Handful of Water