Tag Archives: Hope Madden

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Sexy Boots

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Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

by Hope Madden

Live like there’s no tomorrow. For some, that idea may be freeing. Not for Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas).

Down to the last of his nine lives thanks to his devil-may-care, adventuring lifestyle, the legendary tabby knows fear for the first time. Indeed, it seems to him that death itself stalks his every move.

But just as he’s resigned himself to the life of a housecat, he learns of a wishing star and decides that this one wish is his key to becoming his fearless, legendary self again. Too bad his ex, Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek), is also after it. So is narcissistic psychopath and piemaker Jack Horner (John Mulaney), as well as Goldilocks (Florence Pugh) and the three bears (Olivia Colman, Ray Winstone and Samson Kayo).

That’s a killer cast right there. That’s five Academy Award nominations and one Oscar. Sure, most of that is Colman, but still, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is loaded with talent.

That’s no real surprise from the Shrek franchise or the gang at Dreamworks. What is a surprise is the material these pros have to tear into. Directors Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado capitalize on the talent with a heartfelt, surprisingly mature script from Tommy Swerdlow, Tom Wheeler and Paul Fisher as well as animation that looks better than anything the studio’s put out to date.

Banderas has a blast, as he has since his first appearance as the booted feline in 2004. Not every actor is cut out for voice work, but Banderas excels.

Pugh’s scrappy Goldilocks is a stitch, as is Winstone’s Papa Bear. Colman characteristically delivers a performance that’s equal parts tender, hilarious and heartbreaking. And with just her voice!

The entire cast, including Harvey Guillén as the most resilient chihuahua ever animated, populates this imaginary world with decidedly memorable characters – characters with dimension, 2D be damned.

Puss’s existential crisis drives this imaginative, often hilarious adventure, but it does more than that. It anchors all the derring-do with earnest emotion and recognizable struggle. The film never feels as if it’s winking at its adult audience while dishing out frivolity to youngsters. Instead, somehow the filmmakers bridge that, engaging all ages with an emotionally complex but digestible tale, gorgeously rendered, beautifully acted and shockingly fun.

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Rad Chad’s Metaverse

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Scare Package II: Rad Chad’s Revenge

by Hope Madden

Three years ago, Aaron B. Koontz delighted die-hard horror fans with the squishy, oozy, gory mash note to the video store, Scare Package. It was an anthology of horror shorts, and those only tend to work if they have a compelling frame. In this case, each short represented a film on the shelf at Rad Chad’s Horror Emporium.

For the sequel, Scare Package II: Rad Chad’s Revenge, survivors from Part I regroup for Rad Chad’s funeral. But they find themselves trapped by a sinister mastermind with deadly games they must play if they hope to make it out alive.

Why do they watch the short films? That’s less clear this go-round, but the shorts they do watch are all pretty solid.

Both Alexandra Barreto’s Welcome to the Nineties and Anthony Cousins’s The Night He Came Back Again! Part VI: The Night She Came Back – like Koontz’s framing story – rely on your knowledge of horror tropes to generate laughs. Barreto’s film has some of the sharpest insights via dialog as it celebrates the changing of the “final girl” guard once the grunge-and-garage era took hold.

Rachele Wiggins’s We’re So Dead is a fun Aussie adventure, part Stand by Me part Re-Animator, with a wry delivery. Like all the other shorts in the program, We’re So Dead offers metacommentary without surrendering its standalone charm.

For Special Edition, director Jed Shepherd sets a handful of friends in a lighthouse for the night with a one-of-a-kind video. But what is the film, exactly? As one woman obsessively rewinds, fast forwards and pauses, her friends are the ones making the big discoveries.

Nods to Aliens, Black Christmas, Halloween, Friday the 13th Part 5, A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3, Hellraiser, Saw and more flavor the product and mark its makers as bona fide fans. You may have to be a fan of Scare Package to appreciate Koontz’s framing story because it picks up not long after the first left off, without explanation. Being in on the joke, as always, makes the gag more satisfying. But that’s the basic premise of every story told in this collection.

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Mommy Issues

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They Wait in the Dark

by Hope Madden

Writer/director Patrick Rea’s latest opens on a little girl standing and staring at the foot of a bed, her expression blank. In the bed, a woman – the child’s mother, we’ll later learn ­– bleeds out.

It’s an effective way to open a horror film, but the following image is even more provocative. A woman, lean and hollow-eyed, wakes in a little-used corner of a convenience store, a nook where she and a young boy catch some sleep, hopefully unnoticed.

What exactly is happening in They Wait in the Dark?

Rea leaves you guessing for a long while, and even once you think you’ve pieced the plot together, you haven’t. His film is a supernatural psychological drama about the circular trauma of abuse. But the filmmaker toys with your preconceived notions of supernatural horror and domestic thriller tropes, and the sleight of hand is often compelling.

Sarah McGuire is Amy, the mother on the run, making her way with her son to the ramshackle house her father left her. McGuire gives Amy the believable, faraway look of someone haunted. She’s asked to shoulder a lot of internal and emotional shifts. Amy’s motivations are never a given, and McGuire must drive the film while keeping her character mainly a mystery. She succeeds, often because she allows the physical performance to carry the emotional weight of the character.

Though not ever performance in the film is as strong, Rea’s instinct for how and when to introduce creepier elements helps the film overcome most of its weaknesses. The filmmaker never rushes, so when we do see a hand where no hand should be, the impact is felt.

There are some lapses in logic – like why squatting teens would leave empty beer cans and a pentagram behind but would not help themselves to a shotgun. And scenes sometimes linger longer than necessary, the actors looking like they’re spinning their wheels while the film’s slight runtime begins to feel padded.

But thanks to sly maneuvering of genre expectations and a handful of uncomfortable scenes, They Wait in the Dark leaves an impression.

The Screening Room

Screening Room: Avatar: The Way of Water, If These Walls Could Sing, Utama, Onoda, High Heat

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Avatar: The Way of Water, If These Walls Could Sing, Utama, High Heat, Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle

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Come and Sea

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Avatar: The Way of Water

by George Wolf

Week after week, really good films telling solid, compelling stories have been debuting in movie theaters and sinking like streaming-bound stones. What’s it gonna take for movies not named Top Gun to move people off the couch and back into the cinema?

James Cameron thinks the answer is to provide a sensory experience you just cannot get anywhere else. And on that front, Avatar: The Way of Water is a resounding success. See it on the IMAX screen, with the 3D glasses on your face, the thumping Dolby in your earholes and the high frame rate injected in your eyeballs and you’ll be transported to a theme park-like world of technical wonder.

The storytelling, on the other hand, is all wet.

Since we last left Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) over ten years ago, he and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) have formed a happy family among the forest people of Pandora.

Their peace is shattered by a new invasion from the sky people, with a Na’vi clone of Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) out to settle an old score. To keep the Na’vi from the fight, Jake and family flee to a village of the water people (including Kate Winslet and CCH Pounder) that’s led by Tonowari (Cliff Curtis).

But just as the forest family is bonding with their new water world, Quaritch and his troops come calling for a showdown.

You know who realized they shouldn’t run, that war would follow them and put others at risk? Neytiri did, the latest in a long line of smart women in James Cameron movies who no one listens to. That’s not the only throwback to Cameron films you may notice. Aliens, The Abyss, and Titanic are all over this film, and why not? Everybody else steals from them, why not Cameron?

The problem is not that he borrows from himself, but that he repeats himself. Scenes replay the same beats again and again. There’s so much wasted narrative space in this three-plus-hour film, and yet voiceover narration explains what that space could have been used to show.

And that’s the ironic weakness that consistently keeps Avatar 2 from resonating beyond surface-level amazement. Cameron (who also co-wrote the script) shows us so many wonderful delights, but precious few of them advance any investment in character, theme or narrative. It’s not that the ideals hitching a ride with the wizardry aren’t worthy, it’s just that they’re slapped together with so much obviousness and redundancy.

As the long-promised follow-up to the all-time box office champ, and carrying a budget in the hundreds of millions with several more sequels in the pipeline, there was already plenty riding on Cameron’s new vision. But a big return for TWOW could fast track a bittersweet bargain. The days of a rising tide at the multiplex lifting all boats seem to be fading fast, and one more huge wave might not leave room for anything on the big screen that’s less than pure spectacle.

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Truth and Consequences

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Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths

by Hope Madden and George Wolf

The latest from Oscar-winning director Alejandro G. Iñárritu may be uneven and frustrating at times, but do not be tardy. The first three minutes of the film, while showcasing only light, shadow and landscape, unveil the most mesmerizing opening we’ve seen in a damn long time.

And good news, it’s just an appetizer for the two and a half hours of visual delights that follow.

Crafting self-indulgence into sometimes breathtaking art, Iñárritu turns his characteristic cinematic style inward for the sorta-semi-autobiographical Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths.

“If you don’t know how to fool around, you don’t deserve to be taken seriously.” So says the Iñárritu stand-in, Silverio Game (Daniel Giménez-Cacho, terrific), a journalist-turned-documentarian who yearns to show emotion rather than fact.  

Silverio’s about to be presented with a big award in L.A., which only triggers a series of introspections that attempt to reconcile an imposter complex with a need for recognition, global fame with his Mexican identity, and a general distaste for the state of his profession.

Visually, Iñárritu pulls no punches, reminding us of the fluid wonder that characterized his films from Babel to Biutiful to Birdman and The Revenant. Here those tactics conjure a dreamlike reality, simultaneously playful and bitter, ideal to reflect the reminiscences and wallowing preoccupations of an artist brooding on his accomplishments and shortcomings.

The narrative is bloated and rambling, which Silverio freely acknowledges as Iñárritu (who also co-wrote the script with frequent collaborator Nicolás Giacobone) continues indulging his self-indulgence. Giménez-Cacho finds sympathy in Silverio’s identity crisis, and it’s fascinating to feel both the push and pull of Iñárritu‘s approach. We embrace it for the shot-making but resist it while the artist tries to tell us where his artistry takes root.

The metaphors, symbolism and contradictions pile on, along with enough jaw-dropping framing to make you realize this could be in an unknown language with zero subtitles and it would still be worth seeing.

“Life is a brief series of senseless events,” Silverio tells us. Maybe. And though Bardo may not be brief and its sense can be confounding, there’s no denying its beauty.

Indulge yourself. See it on the big screen.

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Song of the Condor

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Utama

by Hope Madden

Per Quechua tradition, when a condor decides its life has lost its purpose, it flies to the top of the mountain, then closes its wings to die on the rocks below. It’s a heavy metaphor, and one that suits not only Utama’s hero Virginio (José Calcina) but perhaps the entire Quechua way of life.

Virginio and his wife Sisi (Luisa Guispe) live in the Bolivian highlands where they keep a small herd of llamas. But it’s been months since it rained. The well in the town several miles away is dry, and now Sisi has to make an even longer walk to a faraway river. Even the snow at the top of the mountain is gone.

To make matters worse, Virginio’s cough has gotten deeper and more insistent. Their grandson Clever’s (Santos Choque) unexpected visit further throws the pair’s generally calm and simple life into chaos.

In a stunning feature debut, writer/director Alejandro Loayza Grisi develops this simple premise into both an intimate tale of survival and a global allegory of time, change and destruction.

Gorgeous Bolivian panoramas tell half the tale on their own, and the filmmaker’s framing is exceptional. Unlikely heroes disappear Eastwood-like into sunsets, jauntily festooned llamas crane their necks curiously about. Each splash of color feels like an act of bravery. Cinematographer Barbara Alvarez merges joy and sorrow in every image, her execution of Grisi’s vision simultaneously serene and forbidding, but always gorgeous.

Sweetly heartbreaking performances from Guispe and Calcina deliver lived-in, enduring love that ensures the tale never tips too far toward symbol. You care deeply about what happens to these two. The authenticity of their work gives the film an almost documentary feel that only deepens its effect.

Beautiful beyond measure but never showy, deliberate, and set among elderly people of a tiny community high in the hills of Bolivia, a film like Utama feels impossible.

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Left Behind

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Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle

by Hope Madden

In 1974, Hiroo Onoda found out World War II was over and that he could return to Japan from the Philippine jungle where he’d been hiding since 1944. This is true. This happened. And it feels like such a tragic squandering of a lifetime that you almost have to cling to the absurdity of it, make it a joke.

Instead, French filmmaker Arthur Harari mines Onoda’s story to examine the more universal if romantic theme of finding meaning in your own life.

Across nearly three hours we travel with Onoda, from the drunken dishonor of his recruitment – he’d been rejected as a pilot because he was afraid to die – through the training that would make him believe in his singular mission, on to that mission and the decades of reimagining reality to create something in keeping with that mission.

Harari’s film glides easily from war story to survival tale to odd couple bromance, each shift marking a passage of time and a new reality for Onoda.

Almost immediately upon landing in the Philippines, Lubang Island fell to the Allies. Onoda, a novice intelligence officer, convinced six men to remain with him rather than surrendering, assuring the troops that their mission was to regain control of the island no matter the circumstances.

Hiroo Onoda – as portrayed in youth by Yûya Endô but in particular in mournful old age by Kanji Tsuda ­– is a mixture of sorrowful elegance rarely depicted with such humanity in a war film. The vulnerability both actors bring to the role creates a soldier worthy of empathy rather than mockery.

Onoda’s second in command, Kozuka – whether played in youth by Yûya Matsuura or in maturity by Tetsuya Chiba – becomes the bold and tender heart of the film. Passionate and foolhardy, he’s a wonderful counterpoint to Onoda’s quiet discipline. Both pairings of actors create compelling rapport, but Tsuda and Chiba are especially heartbreaking.

Eventually, of course, Onoda is found. A tourist of luxurious means (Taiga Nakano) put finding Onoda on his list of must-dos, right up there with finding a Yeti. Once found, the tourist’s flippant privilege in the face of Onoda’s unimaginable loss and confusion perfectly encapsulates the shift in cultural ideals and the sheer self-congratulatory idiocy of the 1970s. But with limited screen time, Nakano acquits his generation nicely.

Harari’s film is lovely, heartbreaking and respectful. Onoda becomes not just an anomaly, an oddity, but an image of a generation lost and a promise forgotten.

Fright Club

Fright Club: Best John Carpenter Horror Movies

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Our Christmas gift to ourselves this year is a walk through the career of horror master John Carpenter. Yes, we did want to include Assault on Precinct 13 and Escape from New York. But we stayed strong, because we still had to sift through so many genre classics to determine which five would rise to the top.

5. The Fog (1980)

Stevie Wayne (director John Carpenter favorite, at least while they were married, Adrienne Barbeau) does an air shift from a studio in that old lighthouse out on Antonio Bay. But the fog rolling in off the bay is just too thick tonight. It’s as if she’s entirely alone in the world. Can anyone hear her? Will someone go check on her young son?

While a lot does not work in Carpenter’s pirate leper ghost story (leper pirates?!), his first theatrical release after Halloween does hit some of the right marks. The vulnerability of a radio DJ – totally isolated while simultaneously exposed – has never been more palpable than in this film.

Jamie Lee Curtis (another Carpenter favorite) joins her mom Janet Leigh and B-horror legend Tom Atkins to fill out the pool of leper pirate bait. While the film is hardly one of Carpenter’s best, his knack for framing, his voyeuristic camera, and his ability to generate scares with a meager budget are on full display.

4. They Live (1988)

More SciFi and action than horror, still John Carpenter’s vision of an elite class using tech to mollify and control the population of the US was eerily prescient. And horrifying.

At the time, though, it was just plain entertaining in a way that married Carpenter’s own iconic Escape from New York vibe with the SciFi horror miniseries of the day, V.

But mainly, it’s Rowdy Roddy Piper chewing bubble gum, and the 6 1/2 minute fight scene between Piper and undeniable badass Keith David that make this film as fun to watch today as it was when it was released.

3. In the Mouth of Madness (1994)

Sutter Cane may be awfully close to Stephen King, but John Carpenter’s cosmic horror is even more preoccupied by Lovecraft. The great Sam Neill leads a fun cast in a tale of madness as created by the written world.

What if those horror novels you read became reality? What if that sketchy writer with the maybe-too-vivid imagination was not just got to his own page, but god for real? This movie tackles that ripe premise while ladling love for both of the horror novelists who made New England the creepiest section of America.

2. Halloween (1978)

No film is more responsible for the explosion of teen slashers than John Carpenter’s babysitter butchering classic.

From the creepy opening piano notes to the disappearing body ending, this low budget surprise changed everything. Carpenter develops anxiety like nobody else, and plants it right in a wholesome Midwestern neighborhood. You don’t have to go camping or take a road trip or do anything at all – the boogeyman is right there at home.

Michael Myers – that hulking, unstoppable, blank menace – is scary. Pair that with the down-to-earth charm of lead Jamie Lee Curtis, who brought a little class and talent to the genre, and add the bellowing melodrama of horror veteran Donald Pleasance, and you’ve hit all the important notes. Just add John Carpenter’s spare score to ratchet up the anxiety. Perfect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKvxAvkJkac

1.  The Thing (1982)

John Carpenter’s remake of the 1951 SciFi flick The Thing from Another World concocts a thoroughly spectacular tale of icy isolation, contamination, and mutation.

A beard-tastic cast portrays a team of scientists on expedition in the Arctic who take in a dog. The dog is not a dog, though. Not really. And soon, in an isolated wasteland with barely enough interior room to hold all the facial hair, folks are getting jumpy because there’s no knowing who’s not really himself anymore.

This is an amped up body snatcher movie benefitting from some of Carpenter’s most cinema-fluent and crafty direction: wide shots when we need to see the vastness of the unruly wilds; tight shots to remind us of the close quarters with parasitic death inside.

The story remains taut, beginning to end, and there’s rarely any telling just who is and who is not infected by the last reel. You’re as baffled and confined as the scientists.

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On With the Show

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Empire of Light

by Hope Madden and George Wolf

There are certain actors – you know the ones – who seem to put out a film every year right at awards season. The people who somehow never have a straight-to-VOD indie or a summer romp, just yearly Oscar vehicles.

For at least one of these people it is a welcome return visit, year after year.

Hello, Olivia Colman.

Seriously, is there anyone who does not love her? Any filmmaker, any actor, any moviegoer? Her performances are shamelessly, giddily human, authentic to a chilling degree. Her force of nature in Sam Mendes’s ode to the cinema, Empire of Light, is no different.

Mendes’s 2019 epic 1917 showed him a master of pacing, understated emotion and visceral thrill. Back in 2012, he made an almost Shakespearean Bond film, easily the strongest in the entire franchise with Skyfall. For Empire of Light, the filmmaker ­– who also wrote the script ­ – returns to the more sentimental content of his earlier career.

Colman is Hilary, the troubled, often melancholy manager of a coastal England cinema in the very early 1980s. A wonderful supporting cast – from the kindly Toby Jones to the prickly Colin Firth, the tender Michael Ward to surprising Tom Brooke ­– surrounds Colman with sparring partners up to the challenge.

Mendes’s tale, at its heart, revels not just in the magic of the movies, but of the movie house itself. Most of the patrons seem to come to the screenings alone, looking to escape the loneliness, the mundane, or the rising tide of extremism right outside those glass doors.

And though the crowds aren’t as large as they once were, the theater still has something to offer – as does Hilary. Her dutiful existence is shaken by the younger Stephen (Ward, outstanding) joining the crew, and together they start exploring some forgotten areas of the once majestic cinema.

The metaphor isn’t subtle, and the film’s tone is overtly nostalgic, but because Colman’s character is anything but typical, Mendes punctures his own sentimentality before it can become overbearing. Gorgeous framing from the great Roger Deakins doesn’t hurt, bathing it all in a grand beauty that reinforces what power can come from that certain beam of light.

The pandemic has drawn out no shortage of filmmakers who’ve been understandably inspired to assess their life’s work. With Empire of Light, Mendes is wearing his heart on his cupholder, imploring us to value what the theater has to offer.

This film can offer the exquisite Colman and a stellar ensemble, and that’s just enough. Through them, Mendes finds impact in his sweetness, rising above the moments that seem engineered for an ad that runs right before the one telling you not to talk or text.