Screening Room: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, The Boogeyman, Shooting Stars, Esme My Love & More
Tag Archives: Madd at the Movies
Spider-Animania
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
by Hope Madden
Do you remember how cool Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was? It was the coolest! A film that celebrated everything a comic book film could be, everything a hero could be, and everything a cartoon could be.
Expect all that again as Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) returns, this time sharing screentime and character arc almost 50/50 with Spider-Woman Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld), who starts us off with her own troubled tale of balancing great responsibility with great power. Things get so bad she has to abandon this universe, and her one real friend.
That friend has his own troubles. Mr. and Mrs. Morales (do not call them by their first names) know Miles is keeping something from them, a problem that’s only exacerbated by some goofy villain-of-the-week (Jason Schwartzman, priceless).
Or is Miles taking The Spot less seriously than he should?
He is! No matter, he gets to help Gwen and bunches of other (often hilarious) Spider-Men (and -Women and -Cats and -Dinosaurs). But it all goes to hell in a riotous celebration of animated style and spot-on writing that simultaneously tease and embrace comic book lore.
Schwartzman is not the only killer new talent crawling the web. Daniel Kaluuya lends his voice to the outstanding punk rock Spider-Man, Hobie; Issa Rae is the badass on wheels Jessica Drew; Karan Soni voices the huggable Pavitr, or Spider-Man India. Rachel Dratch plays essentially an animated version of herself as Miles’s high school principal, and the great Oscar Isaac delivers all the serious lines as Spider-Man Miguel O’Hara. Add in the returning Brian Tyree-Henry, Luna Lauren Velez and Mahershala Ali, and that is a star-studded lineup. Studs aplenty!
That wattage is almost outshone by the animation. Every conceivable style, melding one scene to the next, bringing conflict, love and heroism to startling, vivid, utterly gorgeous life.
Writers Phil Lords and Christopher Miller (The Lego Movie, The Mitchells vs. the Machines) return, bringing Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings writer Dave Callaham along for the sequel. Their story is wild but never illogical, delivering a heady balance of quantum physics, Jungian psychology and pop culture homages while rarely feeling like a self-congratulatory explosion of capitalism. Heart strings are tugged, and it helps if you’ve seen the previous installment. (If you haven’t, that’s on you, man. Rectify that situation immediately.)
If there is a drawback (and judging the reaction of some of the youngsters in my screening, there may be), it’s that Across the Spider-Verse is a cliffhanger. If you’re cool with an amazing second act in a three-story arc (The Empire Strikes Back, The Two Towers), you’ll probably be OK with it. Maybe warn your kids, but don’t let it dissuade you from taking in this animated glory on the biggest screen you can find.
Diary of a Mad Woman
The Attachment Diaries
by Hope Madden
Tell me you’re having a bad day without telling me you’re having a bad day.
Argentinian filmmaker Valentin Javier Diment knows how to articulate desperation with nothing more onscreen than a sidewalk, heavy rain, and a broken heel. From there, The Attachment Diaries sets up an eerie power dynamic between forlorn Carla (Jimena Anganuzzi) – pregnant, alone, very wet and in need of help – and Irina (Lola Berthet).
It’s 1970-something. Irina is a doctor willing to perform abortions, but Carla, is too far along. If she’s willing, Carla can stay with Irina, give birth and make some money with an arranged adoption.
Diment invests time in both characters, neither of whom is quite what she seems. The more we learn about each the less we really know, but trouble’s brewing, that’s for sure. And the greater the intrigue, the stranger the film.
The filmmaker wades hip deep into triggers: abortion, self-harm, sexual assault. And his approach unsentimental. No, it is blunt. Nothing is sacred, or to be honest, even interesting enough for Irina’s thoughtful consideration. Trauma and mental health are not treated delicately, either. No kid gloves, but loads of intentionality – Carla is often as shocked by Irina’s blasé attitude as we are, and Carla’s no delicate flower.
Berthet and Anganuzzi deliver everything a moviegoer needs from the heroes and villains of this twisted tale. Berthet is the hard candy shell to Anganuzzi’s messy middle, and neither character is easy to root for. But together, their almost hostile yet somehow tender chemistry fuels the human madness developing in the film.
Flashes of Hitchcock and Almodovar (that’s a fun pairing!) flavor the film’s aesthetic and movement, Diment blending inspiration with his own impeccable sense of detail to create a film full of intensity, eccentricity and style.
The filmmaker sets up gorgeous shots, both to keep you off balance and for the sheer odd beauty of them. His use of color is also fascinating. At first it feels a little too on-the-nose, but the truth is that, once again, he’s underscoring a change in the power dynamic.
The escalating lunacy nearly tips to melodrama or even parody, but the duo at the center of it all manages to hold it all together somehow. The Attachment Diaries is a dark, bizarre mystery thriller that flirts with B-movie status in a way that somehow makes the experience richer than it had any real right to be.
Growing Pains
Falcon Lake
by Hope Madden
Co-writer/director Charlotte Le Bon crafts a melancholy poem to that fleeting moment of the last real summer of your childhood with her moody coming-of-age tale Falcon Lake.
Thirteen (almost 14) year-old Bastien (Joseh Engel) and his family go to visit friends on a lake for a couple of weeks over the summer. Bastien and his little brother will room with Chloe (Sara Montpetit), two years older, gorgeous, a little weird, a little bored. As Bastien tags along, Chloe is the one we see playing tug of war with adulthood.
The summer orbits these two kids, navigating the vanishing moments of childhood, blinking into the blinding future. Le Bon captures these moments perfectly, aided immeasurably by two truly wonderful performances.
Montpetit unveils something vulnerable beneath Chloe’s capricious behavior. But it’s Engel who mesmerizes. His smile, genuine as it can be, is uplifting and heartbreaking in equal measure. He punctuates a hauntingly quiet performance with bursts of joy, silliness and tenderness that make Bastien achingly lovable. But more than that, he’s authentic. As lovely and lyrical as Falcon Lake can be, rather than crafting a romantic nostalgia about innocence lost, Le Bon delivers a slice of life.
Cinematographer Kristof Brandl’s camera evokes the mood, lonesome silhouettes, isolating crowds, awkward intimacy. Le Bon exhibits a delicate if controlled touch to her tale of young love. Few topics are more oft tread in cinema, on stage, in print or in song. But Falcon Lake, though its honesty gives it the feel of familiarity, never seems tired or worn.
Can’t Go Home Again
Esme, My Love
by Hope Madden
We don’t know much about Esme (Audrey Grace Marshall) or Hannah (Stacey Weckstein), really.
Director/co-writer Cory Choy’s feature debut Esme, My Love keeps us in the dark about a lot of things. Choy leaves us to piece together what we can of the duo’s mysterious trip into the woods, just as Hannah leaves Esme to do.
More brooding mystery thriller than outright horror, Choy’s film plays on your imagination with gorgeous sound design and cinematography. An eerie mismatch of voiceover and image in the early going suggests that not everything with Hannah is A-OK.
Ostensibly, she’s taking her daughter to visit the old, abandoned family stomping grounds so the two can spend some time together. Esme, Hannah suggests, is sick. She doesn’t seem sick. She seems fine. Hannah, on the other hand…
The atmosphere Choy develops creates a hypnotic world perfectly suited to Hannah’s psychological unbending. Thanks to two malleable performances, that meticulously crafted atmosphere pays off.
Choy and co-writer Laura Allen refuse to spoon-feed you information. Their structure is loose, their explanations all but nonexistent. You’re left to parse through the images and sensations, determine what’s real and what isn’t, and decide things for yourself.
The ambiguity often works in the film’s favor. Esme, My Love possesses a brooding, nightmarish quality that, along with the two performances, keeps you guessing and interested. But to be honest, a touch more structure would have strengthened the film, which begins to feel lovely but unmoored before it’s over.
At a full 1:45, the film’s fluid storytelling and disjointed imagery flirt with self-indulgence.
Esme, My Love never offers any solid catharsis, any true clarity. Yes, you can guess the meaning of the climax, but with so much guesswork throughout, it feels less like ambiguity and more like a cheat. Or worse still, indecisiveness.
While frustrating, it’s not enough to sink a film that submerges you in a dark family tragedy and leaves you stranded.
Fright Club: Brothers in Horror Movies
Big thanks to filmmaker Jeremiah Kipp, whose exceptional horror Slapface inspired our topic. We look into the best brothers (or sometimes worst brothers!) in horror. Be sure to listen in because Jeremiah has some thoughts and recs you won’t want to miss.
5) The Lost Boys (1987)
Joel Schumacher spins a yarn of Santa Carla, a town with a perpetual coastal carnival and the nation’s highest murder rate. A roving band of cycle-riding vampires haunts the carnival and accounts for the carnage, until Diane Weist moves her family to town. While hottie Michael (Jason Patric) is being seduced into the demon brethren, younger brother Sam (Corey Haim) teams up with local goofballs the Frog brothers (Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander) to stake all bloodsuckers.
There are two obvious sets of brothers, one that’s falling apart and one that acts exclusively as a team, the band of vampires also represents a brother hood. This becomes clearest when Max (Edward Herrmann) makes it clear that his intention is to have Weist’s character play mother to all the boys.
4) Basket Case (1982)
This film is fed by a particularly twin-linked anxiety. Can anyone really be the love of one twin’s life, and if so, where does that leave the other twin? More than that, though, the idea of separating conjoined twins is just irresistible to dark fantasy. Rock bottom production values and ridiculous FX combine with the absurdist concept and poor acting to result in an entertaining splatter comedy a bit like Peter Jackson’s early work.
When super-wholesome teenage Duane moves into a cheap and dangerous New York flophouse, it’s easy to become anxious for him. But that’s not laundry in his basket, Belial is in the basket -Duane’s deformed, angry, bloodthirsty, jealous twin brother – but not just a twin, a formerly conjoined twin. What he really is, of course, is Duane’s id – his Hyde, his Hulk, his Danny DeVito. And together the brothers tear a bloody, vengeful rip in the fabric of family life.
3) Goodnight Mommy (2014)
There is something eerily beautiful about Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s rural Austrian horror Goodnight Mommy (Ich seh, Ich seh).
During one languid summer, twin brothers Lukas and Elias await their mother’s return from the hospital. But when their mom comes home, bandaged from the cosmetic surgery she underwent, the brothers fear more has changed than just her face.
Inside this elegantly filmed environment, where sun dappled fields lead to leafy forests, the filmmakers mine a kind of primal childhood fear. There’s a subtle lack of compassion that works the nerves beautifully, because it’s hard to feel too badly for the boys or for their mother. You don’t wish harm on any of them, but at the same time, their flaws make all three a bit terrifying.
Performances by young brothers Lukas and Elias Schwarz compel interest, while Susanne Wuest’s cagey turn as the boys’ mother propels the mystery. It’s a hypnotic, bucolic adventure as visually arresting as it is utterly creepy.
2) Frailty (2001)
“He can make me dig this stupid hole, but he can’t make me pray.”
Aah, adolescence. We all bristle against our dads’ sense of morality and discipline, right? Well, some have a tougher time of it than others. Paxton stars as a widowed, bucolic country dad awakened one night by an angel – or a bright light shining off the angel on top of a trophy on his ramshackle bedroom bookcase. Whichever – he understands now that he and his sons have been called by God to kill demons.
Paxton, who directs, leans on excellent performances from young Jeremy Sumpter as the obedient younger son and Matt O’Leary as our point of view character, the brother whose adolescent rebellion will pit him against the father he loves and the brother he’d like to protect.
1) Dead Ringers (1988)
The film is about separation anxiety, with the effortlessly melancholy Jeremy Irons playing a set of gynecologist twins on a downward spiral. Cronenberg doesn’t consider this a horror film at all. Truth is, because the twin brothers facing emotional and mental collapse are gynecologists, Cronenberg is wrong.
Irons is brilliant as Elliot and Beverly Mantle, bringing such flair and, eventually, childlike charm to the performance you feel almost grateful. Like some of the greats, he manages to create two very distinct yet appropriately linked personalities, and Cronenberg’s interest is the deeply painful power shift as they try and fail to find independence from the other. The film’s pace is slow and its horror subtle, but the uncomfortable moments are peculiarly, artfully Cronenberg.
Screening Room: The Little Mermaid, You Hurt My Feelings, Kandahar, About My Father, Influencer, Wrath of Becky, Cracked
You Know, Billy, We Blew It
Anchorage
by Hope Madden
Anchorage invites you on road trip through a depleted America, ghost town upon ghost town, as two drug-riddled brothers follow their destiny from Miami to Anchorage, Alaska. What’s left of Miami amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of opioids in the trunk of Jacob’s (Scott Monahan, who also directs) car. What awaits Jacob and John (Dakota Loesch, writer)? Fortune and glory, kid.
Anchorage has been likened to Easy Rider, and the comparison is valid. A wild cross-country ride through the American Dream inevitably exposes it as a nightmare.
Monahan’s structure is deceptively sound, though his film plays like an improvisational string of sights and blights to see. But themes introduced early only strengthen as the duo spiral toward destiny. Hyper aware of their own mortality yet playing at being immortal, the brothers’ drug-fueled mania that fuels the journey turns more and more desperate with each rest stop.
The actors wade into that bleary real estate between playfulness and danger. Each mile they make toward northern glory wears on them, changing their dynamic and tainting the spirit of their journey. The 4954-mile drive from Miami to Anchorage analogizes addiction in much the way Burt Lancaster’s back yard swims did in Frank Perry and Sydney Pollack’s 1968 classic The Swimmer. It’s all a party at the start, but reality can’t be kept at bay long enough to make it home.
Aside from a handful of extras and one additional speaking role (Christopher Corey Smith), the entire film belongs to Monahan and Loesch. The slow, inevitable arc the characters take is authentically delivered, tense and heartbreaking. Monahan dwells in Jacob’s waning innocence, while Loesch’s performance is a celebration of innocence lost.
The two make a fascinating cinematic pairing and their film slips easily into your memory to stay.
Truth Hurts
You Hurt My Feelings
by Hope Madden
One of filmmaker Nicole Holofcener’s great talents is to acknowledge within a film that there is no reason to feel for her characters, and then making you feel for the characters. She’s a master of the relatable if tedious angst of the privileged. In her hands, these primarily insignificant tensions are humanized and often hilarious.
Such is the case with her latest, You Hurt My Feelings, a story about a well-off couple, truly compatible and in love, who fall on hard times when one overhears the other’s honest opinion.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who was so magnificently flawed and empathetic in Holofcener’s 2013 film Enough Said, stars as Beth, a novelist. Well, she wants to be a novelist, but her memoir only did OK and now her agent doesn’t seem that thrilled with her first ever novel. Maybe it sucks?
No, supportive-to-a-fault husband and psychologist Don (Tobias Menzies) assures her. But secretly, honestly, maybe that’s not how he feels.
And that’s Holofcener’s next great talent – casting. Louis-Dreyfus is characteristically flawless. Her humanity, comic timing, and self-deprecating yet narcissistic humor make her every character endlessly watchable. Menzies–in many ways the emotional anchor for the film–equals her. Both face the wearying revelation that truth really does hurt, right as their midlife insecurities are at their highest.
Arian Moayed and the always amazing Michaela Watkins play a mirror couple, Beth’s sister – a discontented interior designer for the very wealthy – and her insecure if lovable actor husband. They are both tremendously endearing and funny. Capping the ensemble is Owen Teague (To Leslie), Beth and Don’s 23-year-old only son who’s coming to terms with the fact that he was raised to believe he was more special than he really is. Also, he’s a writer.
Hilarious cameos from Amber Tamblyn and David Cross as an angry couple in therapy help to clarify Holofcener’s themes and push the comedy value higher. But it’s with the core couples that the filmmaker delivers her finest moments, creating a lived-in world, a true microcosm that pokes fun at our insecurities and the little white lies that keep us happy.
Smells Like Teen Sequel
The Wrath of Becky
by Hope Madden
Back in 2012, Lulu Wilson carved out a frighteningly believable pissed-off adolescent in Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion’s Becky. As had been the case with the filmmakers’ 2014 horror Cooties, the duo indulges a subversive fantasy that makes you laugh and turn away in equal measure – often at the same moment.
Wilson returns with new directors Matt Angel and Suzanne Coote in The Wrath of Becky, playing the slightly older, no less angry youngster.
Becky and her trusty hound Diego have been on the lam for several years. They’ve found a kind of peace living off the grid with elderly misanthrope Elena (Denise Burse) and making a living at a nearby diner. That peace is shattered when some Proud Boys – I’m sorry, some Noble Men – come to town.
Last time around, Becky did serious damage to a handful of neo-Nazis. Seeing her gut and dismember Proud Boy stand-ins promised to be very fun. Cathartic, even. And it sometimes is, but too often the sequel gets lazy.
Seann William Scott (Goon, American Pie) leads up the contemptible group of baddies with a quietly sinister performance that carries a lot of weight. Jill Larson (The Taking of Deborah Logan), though underused, brings a sassy surprise to the villainy and Aaron Dalla Villa is spot on as the slacker smartass of the group.
Last time around, writers Ruckus and Lane Skye and Nick Morris offered their game cast a bit of intrigue and plot. The sequel’s script, penned by Angel, Coote and Becky’s Morris, misses any of the depth beneath the murder spree.
Gone, too, is the tentative logic behind Becky’s bloodbath logistics. Millot and Murnion showed you how a 12-year-old managed not only to outwit the bad guys, but to physically annihilate them. Angel and Coote do not. They cut away, then cut back and miraculously Becky has accomplished something that defies not only reason but the laws of the known universe as well as the actual story itself.
In fact, every character makes a series of choices that defy the very storyline the film itself is trying to establish. Once or twice is forgivable, but eventually this lapse in internal logic becomes a real burden.
Wilson’s schtick lacks some of the vibrance of the original film, partly because watching a pre-teen on a murder spree is simply more novel, shocking and funny than witnessing another angry teen on a rampage. It would have helped if the filmmakers tried a little harder to convince us Becky could do it.
