Tag Archives: Hope Madden

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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Holding Out for a Hero

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The Super Mario Bros. Movie

by Hope Madden

Allegedly, Anya Taylor-Joy, who’d never played a Mario game of any kind, played incessantly to prepare for her role as Princess Peach in The Super Mario Bros. Movie. I have also never played, but I am far less committed.

Directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic (both of Teen Titans fame) hit their tone in an absurd, adorable opening sequence that introduces the evil of Bowser (Jack Black, perfect). Then we skip to Brooklyn to meet a pair of lovable plumbing losers, Luigi (Charlie Day) and Mario (Chris Pratt).

Soon the indefatigable Mario and his hapless brother are sucked into another realm where the filmmakers show their fondness for these games. To keep from inadvertently spoiling any surprises, I’ll limit my description because I have no idea what is and is not an Easter egg here.

But video games equal quests and quests are excellent underpinnings for films as long as you strike the right tone. The recent Dungeons & Dragons movie knew that, which is why it was the first success in three attempts to turn that game into a good movie.

Writer Matthew Fogel (Minions: The Rise of Gru) balances light hearted humor with video game architecture that benefits from Illumination’s trademark vibrant color. Bowser gets an excellent music video moment custom made for Black, and Seth Rogan gives Donkey Kong a bratty quality I never realized he needed.

Plus, did you know there were these skeleton turtle zombies? AND little masked dystopian devil soldier guys who are simultaneously goth and cute as can be? But this side of the coin gets little attention, the filmmakers instead making a solidly family friendly flick with no grim undercurrents.

It’s simple enough for kids to enjoy it, it throws a little macabre humor at you via Lumalee (Juliet Jelenic), and it looks good. Not glorious, but definitely good. The game-like levels definitely go on for too long and you feel each of those scant 92 minutes, but it’s a pretty good time.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie feels to me like a fitting celebration of a series of beloved video games. But what do I know? As a movie, it’s perfectly entertaining.

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Bedeviled

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The Five Devils

by Hope Madden

The magical realism of Léa Mysius’s sophomore feature takes a minute to suss out. Things feel straightforward enough, at least for a time. Although, how can a person miss the magic in Sally Dramé’s little face?

Dramé plays Vicky, and she plays her magnificently. Vicky’s an odd duck, disliked intensely at school but happy as can be accompanying her mother, Joanne (Adèle Exarchopoulos) to the pool where Joanne is an instructor and lifeguard.

But all is not right at home between Vicky’s parents, and when her dad’s sister Julia (Swala Emati) comes to stay, things really come undone.

Mysius expertly balances family drama with fantastical elements to achieve an emotional honesty about a complex topic. The drama itself borders on melodrama, with backstabbing, coupling and uncoupling, and sexual relations of an almost Greek tragedy sort. Understated performances from the entire cast keep it from devolving into soap opera, but Mysius has something better than that in store.

The time travel magic of the film, limited as it is to the impish Vicky, allows for a childlike innocence, even when the implications of that magic become very dark. Essentially, by straddling soap opera antics and fantasy elements, Mysius can ask more questions about family entanglements than she answers. But the questions she asks are so rarely tackled that leaving them hanging does not feel unsatisfying.

Again, so much of the success of the film sits with the emotionally honest performances. Exarchopoulos once again delivers raw vulnerability that never feels staged. In fact, despite its sometimes lurid narrative meanderings, there is nothing showy about The Five Devils.

This is an unusual film, generous with its characters even as it looks at the selfishness of love, the neediness within family, and the strange battles we fight.