Tag Archives: Hope Madden

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In the Name of the Son

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Till

by Hope Madden and George Wolf

Get to know Danielle Deadwyler.

Last year she stole scenes in the super-star-studded Western spectacle The Harder They Fall. In 2019, she seared through the screen in Lane and Ruckus Skye’s woefully underseen (See it! Do it!) Devil to Pay. And now she carries the weight of the world with grace as Mamie Till-Mobley in Chinonye Chukwu’s remarkable Till.

Deadwyler is hypnotic, a formidable presence as a woman who endures the unendurable and then alters history.

And Chukwu wastes no time making this history come alive.

For decades, we’ve mostly been shown the same faded, B&W snapshot of Emmett Till. Chukwu, as director and co-writer, bathes us in color and warmth from the opening minutes.

Mamie and her teenage son Emmett aka “Bo” (Jalyn Hall, charming and heartbreaking) share loving and tender moments as he prepares to leave Chicago and visit family in Mississippi. Deadwyler delivers Mamie’s apprehension with tense stoicism, and her eventual grief with gut-wrenching waves of pain.

Chukwu’s overall approach to the period piece offers hits and misses. The vibrant palette brings urgency to the past while fluid camerawork puts you in the parlors, courtrooms, streets and churches, making you part of the history you’re watching. It’s a beautiful film.

At the same time, much of the plotting, score and script fall back on tropes of the period drama. This comes as a particular disappointment given the filmmaker’s fresh and resonant approach to her 2019 drama, Clemency.

And yet, Chukwu mines these familiar beats for organic moments that create bridges to today. Victim blaming, character assassination, trial acquittals and the intimate helplessness of systemic oppression are all integral parts of this story, and ours. Those are ugly truths, but Till never loses its sense of beauty. There’s a remarkable grace to the film, even as it is reminding us that this American history is far from ancient.

There’s no denying Deadwyler, whose aching, breathtaking turn is certain to be remembered this awards season. In her hands, Mamie’s hesitant move to activism is genuine and inspiring, but it is always grounded in loss.

That loss is the soul of Till, a film that paints history with intelligence and anger as it honors one mother’s grief-stricken journey of commitment.

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Ain’t That a Shame

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Prey for the Devil

by Hope Madden

Shame preys on Catholic girls. It’s guilt that does us in. Just when you think there can be no new or relevant approach to exorcism horror, director Daniel Stamm picks that scab.

Jacqueline Byers is Sister Ann, and she wants to be an exorcist. She attends to patients/inmates/victims as a nurse in a prestigious, centuries-old facility for exorcism in Boston. She also sneaks into classes where no woman is welcome, until Father Quinn (Colin Salmon) notices her unusual connection to some of the afflicted.

Is the church ready for a little feminism?

Wait, the Catholic church?

Prey for the Devil scores points in understated ways. Virginia Madsen’s psychologist dismisses the rite and believes Ann suffers from unresolved trauma. This is treated as something to consider rather than as a narrative device representing good or evil. In the world created by writers Robert Zappia, Todd R. Jones and Earl Richey Jones, science and religion are equally helpful and problematic. It’s often fascinating the way the film respects and undermines simultaneously.

On the whole, exorcism films fall into two categories. One: religion is fake and Catholicism, in particular, is so steeped in misdeeds and debauchery that it may as well kneel to Satan. Two: faith is the only hope. Prey for the Devil suggests a more nuanced approach.

The film’s strengths are its moments of outright feminism because they feel informed rather than flippant. They’re also a bit muted by an acceptance of the “working from within the system” failure.

The other failure is the horror itself, and Stamm should know better. His 2008 gem The Last Exorcism is a standout in the sub-genre (and one of the welcome features where there’s nary a priest on the screen). The horror was inventive, primal and it packed an emotional punch.

A PG13 film, Prey for the Devil suffers from lack of imagination. If you’ve seen one crab walk you’ve seen them all, and Stamm doesn’t deliver a single unique moment of horror in 93 minutes.  

But he knows that nothing takes down a Catholic girl faster than a lifetime of guilt and shame. That metaphor fits a tale of an irredeemable soul better than any I’ve seen, and a little slap of feminism is probably the only thing that can help.

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Heart and Soul

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Ragged Heart

by Hope Madden

An aching poem to a culture that once was, Evan McNary’s indie Ragged Heart takes root in Athens, Georgia and blossoms with nostalgia, longing, grief and regret.

One-time musician Wyatt Galloway (Eddie Craddock) now rambles the county with Better Day Salvage, taking the old and disused and finding ways to turn them to art. It’s an apt metaphor – though not overwrought, thanks to McNary’s light touch.

Wyatt’s daughter Miranda (Willow Avalon) is the real talent. After a European tour, she’s back in Athens for her birthday and Wyatt’s hoping to reconnect. She leaves him a song, then leaves this earth.

Avalon’s voice and presence echo the melancholy nature of her character, helping the film straddle the space between natural and supernatural. Craddock offers a rugged, world-weary and deeply human presence, although he’s not always charismatic enough to carry the film.

A supporting cast populated by professionals and nonprofessionals, many of them musicians, contribute to the film’s authentic vibe. Joshua Mikel (The Walking Dead) is particularly strong, embodying the conflict between music and money – the battle for a soul.

Ragged Heart has the organic feel of an unscripted, evolving feature, and on the whole that works. It’s not without its rough patches, but the loose narrative structure suits a tale that values art over commerce, messy as that can be.

It loses momentum more than once, mainly because of its fragmented structure, but it also consistently surprises and never loses its way. McNary’s script, co-written with sister Debrah McNary, offers no easy answers for the grief and regret Wyatt faces. Neither do they pretend that remaining true to your art will bring your joy or peace.

But they definitely develop an atmosphere rich with symbolism, heady with art and music, and haunted with regret.

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Bittersweet Symphony

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Tár

by Hope Madden and George Wolf

During production of writer/director Todd Field’s terrific 2001 feature debut In the Bedroom, Harvey Weinstein reportedly made life so miserable, Field considered leaving the movie business altogether. He did return in 2006 with the equally impressive Little Children, but Field has been quiet since then.

All these years later, it’s not hard to imagine the Weinstein experience as an inspiration for Tár, a searing character study of art, arrogance, obsession and power that’s propelled by the towering presence of (surprised face) Cate Blanchett.

She is Lydia Tár, the first female music director of the Berlin orchestra. A nicely organic interview introduction runs down Lydia’s impressive resume, immediately cementing the character as one of the greatest living composer-conductors in the world.

And, as is her way, Blanchett (who prepped by learning several instruments and studying conducting) needs mere moments to define Lydia with sharp, unforgettable edges.

Tár is a control master who will converse and condescend with excess pleasantries, all the while keeping antenna up for anyone in her orbit who might contradict her careful plotting. And Field’s use of precise sound design and only diagetic music is a brilliant way to reinforce the maestro’s level of influence on everything around her.

Lydia is in rehearsals for a triumphant performance of Mahler’s 5th symphony, and also has a new book prepping for release. So while there’s much going on professionally, it’s the detailed, yet unassuming way Field narrows his focus to Lydia’s personal cruelty that brings the film to such a resonant point.

She humiliates a young student for daring to question a status quo power structure, takes advantage of her dutiful assistant’s (Noémie Merlant from the exquisite Portrait of a Lady on Fire) ambitions, works to remove an Assistant Conductor (Julian Glover) who dares to criticize, and is routinely dismissive of her wife (Nina Hoss).

The way Lydia handles a child bullying her young daughter is our first glimpse at true sociopathic tendencies, but Field – with moments of both sly humor and biting sarcasm – gradually unveils a familiar culture of predatory behavior.

To say the portrayal is perfection feels almost dismissive or perfunctory considering Blanchett’s mastery of her own art, but maybe that’s why this role stands apart. Maybe it’s her own experience, so unlike nearly anyone else’s, that shapes the organic and human performance. You want to feel for Lydia, or at least recognize how a genius with power begins to believe they are entitled to something. Or someone.

It’s in moments when Lydia dismisses ideas of gender inequality or coyly celebrates the history of patriarchy in her own profession that Field and Blanchett best expose the insidious nature of power. The storytelling is striking in its intimacy, gripping in its universal scope.

Tár is a showcase for two maestros working at the top of their game.

Bravo.

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Tonight We’re Gonna Party

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V/H/S/99

by Hope Madden

It’s been a full decade since the first short compilation V/H/S hit movie screens with its conceit of a single videotape full of horror snippets. Several of these original bits were great, and the directing talent showcased some serious cinematic promise: David Bruckner (Hellraiser), Ti West (Pearl), Adam Wingard (Godzilla vs. Kong), Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (Scream).

There have been a number of sequels, hitting and missing through the last ten years, but 2021’s V/H/S/94 – with its clear timestamp and shorts from Jennifer Reeder (Knives and Skin), Chloe Okuno (Watcher), Timo Tjahjanto, Simon Barrett and others – generated renewed interest in the series.

Wisely, the next installment also embraces exactly what homemade VHS tapes captured: a specific moment in history. For this installment, it’s 1999. Nickelodeon spewed goop at guests and cameras. The hip and entitled believed they and the music they listened to were punk. The internet made Jackass-style, testosterone-fueled idiocy acceptable. The incredibly popular film American Pie depicted the essentially criminal activity of young men as something to find charming. Those rascals!

1999 also saw the birth of found footage, so setting the new V/H/S film the same year as The Blair Witch Project makes good sense.

A new crop of filmmakers seems to channel their own childhoods for five short films capturing the era. Among the highlights are Maggie Levin’s Shredding, which follows narcissistic teens and the unearned cred they flaunt (to their peril) into the site of a punk concert tragedy.

Writers/directors Joseph and Vanessa Winter (Deadstream) employ the same sense of fun with their short To Hell and Back. The charmer of the bunch, it depicts a couple of best friends hired to record a conjuring on Y2K, to bumblingly catastrophic results.

Johannes (47 Meters Down) Roberts’s Suicide Bid offers fairly predictable sorority hazing horror, while Tyler MacIntyre (Tragedy Girls) turns the most repugnant part of American Pie into the horror it should have been. Neither short is wildly imaginative, but McIntyre does find a unique comeuppance.

The Flying Lotus piece Ozzy’s Dungeon is imaginative enough for everyone. It’s not scary or especially funny, but it’s weird, and sometimes that’s enough.

As with every V/H/S installment – and most short film anthologies, generally – the film hits and misses. None of the segments will stay with you the way Okuno’s Storm Drain from ’94 did. Hail Ratma! Still, it’s a quick, fun Halloween diversion.

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Game Night

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Dangerous Game: The Legacy Murders

by Hope Madden

Welcome to the murder castle!

That’s the bland first line in the exceptionally derivative Dangerous Game: The Legacy Murders, a mash of up Saw, Ready or Not and And Then There Were None with little of the associated mystery, thrills or gore and none of the humor. Plus the title sounds like a Lifetime flick.

Things begin predictably enough as a wealthy but dysfunctional family arrives on the patriarch’s (Jon Voight) secluded island to celebrate his 80th birthday. He and his manservant (Bradley Stryker) greet the guests in a Mr. Rourke/Tattoo kind of way before ushing them into his sprawling new mansion.

More frustrating than thrilling, the film still entertains in a B-movie way for a time. Rich people on an island who hate each other play a board game called Dangerous Game to pass the time. Why not?

Jonathan Rhys Meyers stars as the son who’s taken over the business from his bitter old man. Remember when Jonathan Rhys Meyers was a whole thing? Velvet Goldmine, Bend It Like Beckham, Match Point – he had a nice roll going there. He got a lot of attention for his TV gigs in Elvis and Tudors about a decade ago.

I’m worried about him. He’s made eight movies in the last two years, with another six in various stages of production. So far, not one of them is worth watching. Indeed, many are unwatchable.

Dangerous Game: Really Tedious Subtitle isn’t unwatchable. It’s just dumb and lazy, at least until this scene on an operating room. Things turn irreversibly stupid on the operating table.

Cardboard performances and silly writing veer toward the ludicrous and the film is never able to recover. Or capitalize.

Here’s the line, “I’m sorry baby, I can’t find it. Can you tell me where it is?”

At this moment, I began to hope that Sean McNamara’s film would surprise me, go full Malignant, or at least Orphan: First Kill. Alas, turns out this was just a ludicrous highlight in an otherwise unremarkable rehash of superior films.

So close, though!

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Unjustified

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Halloween Ends

by Hope Madden and George Wolf

In 2018, director David Gordon Green and writer Danny McBride did the almost unthinkable, something often tried but rarely accomplished. They made a good Halloween movie. Three years later they did what a lot of people have done. They made a bad sequel.

But the second film in a trilogy is tricky business. The origin story is out of the way and you can’t kill the villain – everyone already knows a third installment is coming. Some filmmakers thrive in that middle space, but most tread water until the big climax.

Well, that big climax is here. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Michael Myers (James Jude Courtney) face off in the final piece of Greene’s trilogy, Halloween Ends.

The bad second installment was better.

Rohan Campbell is Corey, a misunderstood outcast with tousled hair, bee stung lips and a motorcycle. The Strode women take a shine to him, Laure introducing him to granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak). But Haddonfield is pretty tough on Autumn romance, and this story is too rushed to resonate, too dull to be truly angsty.

Green has made some really good movies: George Washington, All the Real Girls, Undertow, Snow Angels, Pineapple Express, Joe, Halloween. One of the most impressive things about that list is the way it crosses genres like there is no border from one to the next. His first episode in the series was a mash note to the original. He wisely ignored all the other sequels and reboots and just brought us a clear vision for an Act 2.

Then, in lieu of a cohesive story, Green caves to some desire to pepper a sequel with odes and easter eggs in honor of all the franchise installments. He and co-writers McBride, Chris Bernier and Paul Brad Logan pick up an idea hinted at in two earlier episodes across the full constellation of films. An honest to god original thought would have been better.

It’s a sidetrack that some longtime fans might embrace, but the execution is littered with missteps. The new relationships do not feel authentic, much of the internal logic is questionable, and forget about scary, the film is too tired to even develop effective tension. There aren’t even any good kills.

We do get the final Laurie v Michael showdown that the title promises, which is a welcome return to giving the legendary Curtis some opportunity for badassery. But while Green & company manage a couple late-stage surprises, this is ultimately a disappointing end, with the highest of hopes limping to the finish for only lukewarm satisfaction.

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R+R4E

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Rosaline

by Hope Madden

Sometimes it’s fun to reconsider a Shakespearean story from the perspective of a side character. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern got their own play. Juliet’s nurse got her own book. So why not Romeo’s first love, Rosaline?

Director Karen Maine takes Rebecca Serle’s YA novel When You Were Mine back to Verona for a savvy, fun if slight reimagining of the Bard’s tragic love story. Kaitlyn Dever (who also produces) stars in a comedy that pokes holes in old-fashioned concepts of romance.

Devers is Rosaline, beloved of Romeo (Kyle Allen, your future He-Man, here sporting an eerily Heath Ledger look). He climbs her balcony at night, brings her roses, speaks such poetry – so when he finally tells her he loves her, why does she freeze?

It doesn’t matter. She’ll make it up to him at the masquerade ball, where Montagues and Capulets can dance together without anyone ever knowing. Brilliant! But she’s held up by one of her dad’s stupid suitors, Dario (Sean Teale, of the strong jawline and perfect teeth). By the time she gets to the ball, everyone’s gone. Romeo is long, long gone.

But soon enough she realizes it’s her young cousin Juliet (Isabela Merced) he’s fallen for. So, Rosaline takes Juliet under her wing in an attempt to undermine the new romance, to comedic ends.

The best bits come by way of Rosaline’s nurse, played with droll perfection by Minnie Driver, but the entire supporting cast is rock solid. Bradley Whitford is a charmingly befuddled father, Nico Hiraga gives good reason that Steve the Courier never seems to deliver packages properly, and Spencer Stevenson gets off a couple of chuckles as Paris. Anachronistic dialog fits the fun.

Maine’s film, written for the screen by Scott Neustradter and Michael H. Weber (who together penned The Spectacular Now, 500 Days of Summer, The Fault in Our Stars), is intentional in the way it dismantles damaging tropes of romance. Classic romantic stories pit women against women. And the best-known romance of all time ends with two youngsters making the dumbest decisions ever put to paper.

Rosaline recognizes this and makes light entertainment of it all. Dever is more than strong enough to carry the comedy. Her heroine offers stubbornly wrong-headed reasons for resilience and it’s hard to root against her. There’s nothing profound here, but it’s a breezy bit of fun.