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Aussie Cujos

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The Pack

by Hope Madden

There are not a lot of Australian horror movies I would pass up. Whether it’s the relentless, grisly terror of Wolf Creek, the shattering metaphorical horror of The Babadook, or one of the trademark muscular, bloody comedies like Wyrmwood or 100 Bloody Acres, somehow Aussie genre output satisfies more often than not.

Nick Robertson’s The Pack offers a slight premise, but mines it for all it’s worth as an isolated farmhouse family must survive the night once a pack of flesh-hungry dogs surrounds their property.

There’s precious little story outside the nightlong attack. Carla (Anna Lise Phillips) is a vet who tends to the pets and farm animals in the surrounding countryside, a job that’s meager wage pays most of the bills now that something’s been killing so much of her family’s livestock. Her husband Adam (Jack Campbell) refuses to sell the property to the creepy banker; their son (Hamish Phillips) wants to stay while their teenaged daughter (Katie Moore) would rather live in town.

And then dogs come.

The wild isolation of the outback has provided the backbone for most of the country’s horror output – as it does again here. Rather than filming the vast, surrounding woods and wilderness as a menace, cinematographer Benjamin Shirley’s camera captures the elegance and beauty of it. You don’t wonder what makes this family want to stay. It’s an interesting cinematic choice, because you aren’t given the sense that their separation from the larger society is necessarily dangerous, rather that this abundance of beauty somehow betrays them.

Same with the dogs. These are not your sinewy, feral beasts slinking through the woods. They’re gorgeous – fluffy, even. And yet, when enough of them spread out through the trees just beyond the edge of the property, their heads lowered, their eyes catching the fading light, it’s all you can do not to yell to Adam to run.

The problem with The Pack is that the whisper thin plot doesn’t allow for much of a climax or denouement. The final scene in this film leaves more questions than answers, and not in an exciting, ambiguous way.

It’s a quick and finely acted rush, but like the sugar from this box of Thin Mints next to me, it’s not a rush that sticks around.

Verdict-2-5-Stars

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Keep Digging

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The Treasure

by Hope Madden

Corneliu Porumboiu’s new film The Treasure is just that, if you have the patience to wait for it.

The Romanian director is a master of the deadpan comedy of manners, setting his films firmly in the conflicting values and strapped economy of post-Communist Romania. Dry, that’s what I’m saying, but no less than wonderful.

In The Treasure, he is once again braiding historical ideas with workaday sensibilities to create the driest kind of treasure hunt.

The ripe ground for this comical examination is a chance to escape the paycheck-driven world. The stage is set when Costi (Toma Cuzin), an office worker with a bland if contented life, is offered a sketchy opportunity to find riches buried in a neighbor’s crumbling family property.

Like Porumboiu’s excellent 2009 film Police, Adjective, The Treasure uses its low key approach to turn the minutia of daily existence – administrative red tape, day to day boredom, bill paying – into understated yet absurd comedy.

Cuzin’s performance – much of it simply the expression on his face – offers so much with so little. As boringly adult as his life has become, there is a childlike quality to the character that gives his every choice a sweetness. Is he naïve, even ignorant, to buy into this clearly desperate scheme?

His quietly likeable good guy is perfectly counterbalanced by his griping neighbor, Adrian (Adrian Purcarescu). Adrian’s sense of entitlement and bitterness come out most strongly and most humorously when a third treasure hunter – just an interested party with a metal detector (Corneliu Cozmei – a non-actor and actual metal detector technician) enters the picture.

The banter as the three men tediously sweep the property, gain and lose hope, bicker over the situation, exposes the social commentary about Romania’s political landscape in a way that is familiar, believable, and uncomfortably funny.

Porumboiu’s consistent use of stationary, wide shots exacerbates the film’s sense of inertia, which is used to generate the tension that fuels the comedy.

It can feel like a long set up for a surprisingly lovely climax, followed by the most inspired use of music. When the final, surprising but fitting image rolls against the death metal band Laibach’s cover of the 80s pop hit Live is Life, the absurd clash of reality and fairy tale is complete.

Verdict-3-5-Stars

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Desperate Men Go Into the Desert

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Mojave

by Hope Madden

“I’m into motiveless malignacy. I’m a Shakespeare man.”

So begins the battle of wits and wills at the center of Mojave, writer/director William Monahan’s meditation on the alpha male.

Thomas (Garrett Hedlund) is having an existential crisis. He’s been famous his entire adult life, and now that he has everything, there’s nothing left for him to want. His downward spiral leads him into the desert, where he happens upon a drifter (Oscar Isaac).

The duo’s hyper-literate fireside exchange is tinged with predatory tones, each man intrigued by the shifting ground of dominant/submissive beneath the wordplay.

The stilted, noir-esque characters – including bizarre cameos from Walton Goggins and Mark Walberg – are too hard boiled to be authentic. Instead Monahan and his cast create entertainingly dead-eyed facsimiles of humans, each floating (often meaninglessly) in and out of the battling pair’s dilemma.

What is that dilemma? Well, something happened out in that desert, and as drifter Jack says, “The game is on, brother.”

The wealthy, handsome Thomas misjudges his lowlife adversary, but Jack is equally guilty of underestimating the superficial pretty boy he’s set as his mark. Don’t look for a good guy in this battle, though, because the world would be better off without either party, and they both know it.

Isaac ranks among the most talented actors working today. If you only know him from Star Wars, you need to look deeper into this chameleonic performer’s work. He struggles here and there with Mojave, though, because Monahan’s writing makes it hard to find a real person beneath all the machismo.

Hedlund is no Isaac, but it’s fun to see the chemistry between the two (who shared a similarly uncomfortable chemistry during their fateful car ride in Inside Llewyn Davis).

Ultimately the cat-and-mouse thriller drowns in its own testosterone – the pair of utterly suicidal antiheroes buckling beneath their burdensome masculinity. Still, as literary references abound and the more-alike-than-different outsiders bristle at societal constraint, this over-written mess remains curiously fascinating.

Verdict-3-0-Stars

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pwwVQ8YCl4

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Truth or Bare

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Bare

by Rachel Willis

Bare has the elements to be a great film. It’s a story of a woman, Sarah. Feeling restless and lost in small town Nevada, she is taken under the wing of a drifter, Pepper, who opens her up to new experiences and new feelings. Sarah is a relatable, empathetic character. While the story isn’t entirely original, interpretations of old tales can be great if the right pieces are in place. Unfortunately, the elements simply don’t come together in a satisfying way in Bare.

The crux of the film is the relationship between Sarah (Dianna Argon), our restless protagonist, and Pepper (Paz de la Huerta), the wanderer who stumbles into Sarah’s hum drum life. The major problem is that Pepper is not an appealing character. It’s hard to understand what Sarah finds interesting about her when she first meets Pepper crashed out on a couch in her father’s antique store. When Sarah tells Pepper she can continue to stay, the audience is left wondering why Sarah would want to be around this woman who can barely string together a coherent sentence. While writer/director Natalie Leite might be trying to create a realistic character with Pepper, she fails to find the appeal the character would have for Sarah.

Dianna Argon brings her best game to Bare, but she is restricted by a script that doesn’t develop a realistic relationship between Pepper and Sarah. The characters do drugs together, visit Reno together, and Pepper introduces Sarah to the strip club where she works, but they never share a truly meaningful conversation on screen. There are mentions of conversations the characters have shared, but without seeing them, the relationship never develops beyond two acquaintances who do drugs together.

Paz de la Huerta’s interpretation of Pepper is interesting, but not in a good or compelling way. At times, it seems Pepper is mentally handicapped, perhaps a side effect of all the drugs she’s taken. Anyone sober would not want to spend that much time with Pepper, no matter how dissatisfied one is with their life.

There is some beauty in the film. The cinematography is at times lovely, even within the confines of a strip club, with all the gritty seediness still intact. The desert shots convey the vast emptiness of the landscape and plays nicely on the emptiness within Sarah.

It is unfortunate that the film doesn’t have much to offer between a few great shots and one great actor.

Verdict-2-0-Stars

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Beautiful, but Boring

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Wildlike

By Christie Robb

The movie Wildlike has the pace and emotional warmth of a glacier grinding down the slopes of Denali.

The first full-length feature from writer/director Frank Hall Green, the film follows Mackenzie (Ella Purnell, Maleficent), a 14-year-old girl sent to live with her uncle in Juneau while her widowed mother makes a stint at recovery.

The relationship, at first tender, soon becomes creepy and emotionally manipulative and Mackenzie flees. She spends the remainder of the movie stoically trying to get herself back to her mom in the lower 48. Ultimately, she ends up more or less stalking this poor widower (Bruce Greenwood, Star Trek) who’s on a solo hiking trip to mourn his ex wife. Mackenzie spots his return ferry ticket to Seattle, and after that adheres herself to him like a tick, and they wander about the – admittedly beautifully shot – Alaskan wilderness.

Although at first determined to get rid of her, the dude ultimately becomes a kind of surrogate dad. At least he rejects her awkward attempt to sleep with him, anyway.

The two bond for some reason—he tells her about his regrets and she…looks at him with watery, mascara-rimmed eyes.

The film has been praised for its minimalism and Purnell’s nuanced performance, but without seemingly necessary dialogue to flesh out Mackenzie, Purnell’s emotional restraint suppresses the character development necessary to understand why her travelling companion doesn’t simply turn her over to child protective services at the first available opportunity.

Verdict-1-0-Star

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Some Bonds are Stronger than Others

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Bound to Vengeance

by Hope Madden

Revenge fantasies have been theatrical staples since writers first put quill to parchment. Even the rape-revenge fantasy has been a mainstay of genre filmmaking for generations. Somehow director Jose Manuel Cravioto mixes the classic theatricality with both common exploitation and an unsettling contemporary relevance in his first English language effort, Bound to Vengeance.

Combining present tense narrative with flashback footage, the film unveils the predicament that has befallen Eve (a believably intense Tina Ivlev). Chained in filth in the basement of an isolated old house, Eve finally makes her escape but chooses to risk herself further by keeping her captor alive long enough to fulfill an obligation.

The filmmaker thankfully skirts unseemly titillation. Though his film uses sex trafficking as its basis for horror, Cravioto does not rely on the shock value lechery that has driven other films of the sort. Because the film is told from Eve’s perspective, we’re given the opportunity to find humanity and compassion.

But don’t write the film off to political correctness. Craviotio makes some provocative decisions that won’t thrill every viewer, although they do seem to serve the unsettling reality of the film itself.

Ivlev tinges her character’s tenacity with just enough PTSD flourishes to make the character both realistic and unpredictable, while Richard Tyson is creepy perfection as her foil. Is he the sympathetic simpleton he makes himself out to be, or the conniving psychopathic predator you’d imagine could be capable of this inhuman behavior?

Give writers Rock Shaink Jr. and Keith Kjornes credit – every time a character makes a careless or stupid decision, it isn’t simply convenient writing. There’s a reason for most everything that happens here.

This is a small film, visually grimy and difficult to watch, but it’s Cravioto’s restraint that makes it worth the effort. Very little here feels exploitative, and he never gives over to sentimentality. He invests in characters and reminds us why the revenge fantasy has remained as compelling as it has for as long as people have told stories.

Verdict-3-0-Stars

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A Bountiful Harvest

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Tangerines
by Hope Madden

It’s 1992 in what had recently been the Soviet Union. The Abkhazians of western Georgia have declared independence and Civil War has broken out. The battle is almost at Ivo’s door, but even as natives kill for the land under his feet, the Estonian immigrant tends the Tangerines. He and a neighbor – also Estonian by birth – hope to harvest the crop before it is lost to the war.

It’s a lovely central image: two elderly men with no dog in the fight working against the clock tending to the region’s natural bounty. Unfortunately, the fight comes knocking. Gunplay between three Georgians and two Chechen mercenaries leaves two wounded men – one from either side of the battle – in Ivo’s care.

Writer/director Zaza Urushadze’s elegant film garnered nominations for best foreign language film from the Academy, Golden Globes and others, and rightly so. His succinct screenplay relies on understatement and the power in silence and in action to convey its pacifist message. The timeless ideas embedded in this intimate setting become potent. While the theme is never in doubt, Urushadze’s unadorned film never feels preachy.

A great deal of that success lies in Lambit Ulfsak’s powerful performance as Ivo. He has an amazing presence, inhabiting this character with weary wisdom. Resolute and morally level-headed, Ivo is impossible not to respect. He’s the film’s conscience and through him we quietly witness a powerful humanity – one that the film would like to see infect us all.

There are three other principals – Giorgi Nakashidze as the Chechen, and Misha Meskhi as the Georgian, and Elmo Nuganen as neighbor Margus. Each brings something muscular but tender to their role. Their work benefits from the dry humor and melancholy tone of Urushadze’s screenplay. The quiet evolution beneath their boisterous clashing feels more inevitable than predictable, which allows Urushadze’s point more poignancy.

We don’t get to see a lot of Estonian filmmaking over here, and that appears to be a shame. Ulfsak was recently named the country’s male performer of the century. It’s not hard to see why.

Verdict-4-0-Stars

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Beyond Aging Gracefully

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Beyond the Reach

by Hope Madden

Michael Douglas continues to find intriguing ways to evolve as an actor. Now into his 7th decade on the planet, the actor has taken more and more interesting roles, generally succeeding. His Liberace in 2013’s Beyond the Candelabra marked a high point in his long career, and for his latest, the thriller Beyond the Reach, he reimagines a role originated by Andy Griffith, of all people.

Douglas plays a multi-millionaire named Madec, a man who collects trophies, buying his way out of red tape and problems, no matter how dire. He finds himself in hot water when an expensive but unlicensed hunt for “big horns” goes wrong. When he suspects that his young guide may not be as easily bought as he’d hoped, he devises a particularly nasty Plan B.

Jeremy Irvine (War Horse) is Ben, Madec’s wholesome but potentially corruptible young guide. What emerges is more than a sadistic cat and mouse game, mostly because Douglas patiently unveils layers to the character that feel at once horrifying and utterly natural.

It’s a straight forward thriller wisely adapted by Stephen Susco from a novel by Robb White. White was the source writer for many an exploitation flick back in the day (House on Haunted Hill, The Tingler, 13 Ghosts), and while Susco maintains the same type of urgency and thrill, his taut script is as interested in character as terror.

There is something so genuine about Douglas’s performance – he’s a shark, a man who’s amassed enormous wealth through charm, savvy, and cut-throat maneuvering. His sense of entitlement is based on decades of success, success that has encouraged him to see the world exactly as he sees it here. As ugly as his behavior is, it isn’t necessarily personal. It’s survival. It’s business.

Irvine handles his task capably, but it’s Douglas who makes the film worth watching. What begins as simply the clearest (if most heartless) strategy toward achieving a goal becomes, as time wears on, an old buck’s attempt to dominate the young challenger to his alpha status.

Beyond the Reach is a simple premise and a simple film that could very easily have become another throwaway thriller, and though it’s certainly no masterpiece, it transcends its exploitation trappings thanks to a veteran actor who knows what it means to be a survivor.

Verdict-3-0-Stars

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Inspiring or Exploitative?

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Farewell to Hollywood

by Christie Robb

In Farewell to Hollywood, documentary filmmaker Henry Corra presents us with the last two years in the life of co-director Regina Nicholson, a young woman struggling against osteosarcoma for the second time.

The movie is troubling. And not just because of the cancer.

Originally diagnosed just after her sixteenth birthday, Regina “Reggie”was an aspiring filmmaker that met the much older Henry at a film festival. Her life’s goal was to make a full-length feature. She sets out to do this with Henry, but early into the project her cancer returns.

The resulting film is an arty home movie of the end of Reggie’s life.

In the film, Reggie’s family initially seems to welcome Henry, excited that he’s taking an interest in their daughter’s dreams. But, as the cancer becomes more aggressive, relations between the grown-ups becomes strained. Reggie’s parents tell Henry to back off. Attached to the point of obsession, Henry presses on Reggie to give him more of her time. Her parents threaten to cut off Reggie’s medical insurance and Henry finds her a home in South Pasadena, taking over as her medical caretaker.

To what extent does Henry exacerbate the family drama? To what extent does he provide essential support?

Because the narrative is given to us through Henry’s editing, it’s difficult to say whether Henry has crossed the line into Perv Town. (There are moments that provoke a major sense of unease.) Or whether Reggie’s parents are smothering and emotionally manipulative to the point of denying her the chance to live in the limited time she has left. Or both.

There’s little input Reggie seems to have on the film. At no point does she clearly turn the camera on Henry. Her chops as a filmmaker are glossed over. We see her bedroom, her stacks of DVDs, her walls plastered with movie posters. We see scenes from her favorite movies, but despite her co-authorship credit, she comes across as more subject than author.

But as a subject, what we do see is a driven, resilient young woman following her dream, joking her way through medical procedures while dealing with excruciating pain and needy adults—interspersed with lots of clips from Pulp Fiction.

In the end, Reggie shares her death beautifully and it was a privilege to know that for 19 brief years she was a part of this world.

Verdict-2-5-Stars

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Living Dangerously

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A Most Violent Year

by Hope Madden

J. C. Chandor knows what he wants to say. He knows the content, the concepts, and the situations, and while you may not, do not expect to be spoon fed. His 2011 debut Margin Call wasted no time getting audiences up to speed on Wall Street’s inner workings, nor did Chandor preface last year’s All Is Lost with a tutorial on yachting. Chandor believes you are wise enough to keep up, which is a daunting but wonderful change of pace.

Like the filmmaker’s previous work, A Most Violent Year drops you in the center of an episode in progress, and while you may know little of the crime in New York City in 1981, and less still about the fuel business, Chandor hopes you’ll push all that aside to take in the kind of period drama we haven’t seen since Sidney Lumet.

Oscar Isaac plays handsome, proud, honorable man Abel Morales, who bought his father-in-law’s heating oil business and is brokering a deal that will allow him to break free from that shadow and control his own fate – if he can complete the payment in 30 days.

Meanwhile, a gunman’s been prowling his property, hijackers are taking his trucks, his terrified drivers want to arm themselves illegally, and the DA promises coming indictments.

A Most Violent Year is a film about the merits versus moral compromise of the American Dream, and Chandor’s slow boil of a film keeps you on edge for a full 125 minutes because there is absolutely no guessing what is coming next.

Isaac and Jessica Chastain, playing his wife Anna, are measured perfection – an impeccable, in-control Abel balanced by a volatile Anna. They become a force, survivors who check and balance each other. Their chemistry is amazing. Co-stars David Oyelowo and Albert Brooks are also excellent.

The film is satisfyingly untidy – a fact that makes it unpredictable and genuinely life-like. No flashbacks remind you of one legacy or explain another character’s behavior because that doesn’t happen in life, either. People are as they are, situations complicate and unravel, marriages take shape and morph in to something else.

It’s also a piece of atmospheric perfection, a provocatively gritty and realistic image of NYC in 1981. As much authenticity as you’ll find in Chandor’s screenplay, his wide shots, subway graffiti, lighting and wardrobe complete the picture. It’s just another reason you feel as if you’re watching an old Sidney Lumet film, and wishing there were more filmmakers willing to make a location and point in time as grand a character as anyone in the ensemble.

Verdict-4-5-Stars