Tag Archives: Madd at the Movies

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Voice of Rage and Ruin

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Werewolf

by Hope Madden

Liberation isn’t always the good time it’s cracked up to be. In his strangely hopeful tale Werewolf, writer/director Adrian Panek offers a different image of social rebuilding.

His film follows a handful of orphans of the Nazi occupation. Eight children liberated from a concentration camp are dropped off at a makeshift orphanage—really a deserted mansion, long bereft of food, no running water, no electricity. The possibility of aid comes by way of rare visits from Russian guards who may or may not bring rations, may or may not bring their own danger.

Still, little by little the children begin to shake off the horrors of the camp. They explore the woods around them, find berries, even play. But Nazi danger is everywhere—maybe in the bunkers dug deep into the surrounding mountains. Definitely in the woods.

Lurking figures and echoing growls haunt the film from the children’s first steps outside the ruined mansion. Then there’s a body, then more bodies. When Panek reveals the source of the terror, Werewolf could easily turn to pulpy horror. It does not.

At times the film conjures the same magic and dread of Monos, but Panek may see more resilience than Lord of the Flies in children. The filmmaker shows restraint and a forgiving nature when it comes to the barbarity of childhood. He reveals strong instincts with his young cast, understating sentiment and avoiding either the maudlin or the saccharine.

Werewolf is beautifully shot, inside the crumbling castle, out in the woods, even in the early, jarring nonchalance of the concentration camp’s brutality. Panek hints at supernatural elements afoot, but the magic in his film is less metaphorical than that. 

The film is creepy and tense. It speaks of the unspeakable – the level of evil that can only really be understood through images of Nazi horror—but it sees a path back to something unspoiled.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXk6tB4lJQM

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City of Ruins

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Mosul

by Hope Madden

Matthew Michael Carnahan is a screenwriter unafraid to dive into the political. Though none of his films are classics, from the best (The Kingdom) to the worst (Lions for Lambs), all tell stories that combine governmental indecision with action in an attempt at cultural relevance.

As a rule, the success of his themes depends on the film’s director. So with Mosul, Carnahan has no one to blame but himself if it doesn’t work.

The film spends a single, tumultuous afternoon in the titular Iraqi city with the Nineveh province SWAT team, the only group to fight ISIS occupiers continuously from 2014 to 2017. Onscreen text clues us in to their successes, their legendary status, and their desperation to complete one last mission before ISIS finally flees the city.

En route to completing that mission, they hear gunfire and come to the aid of two standard issue uniformed police officers about to lose their lives in a standoff with ISIS. When all is said and done, one cop is on his way back to the other side of the city. The second, Kawa (Adam Bessa, Extraction), joins the rogue unit.

Carnahan shows surprising instincts when it comes to pacing. Rather than generating tension to be released with bursts of action, Mosul periodically punctuates the near-constant action with brief respites.

Carnahan knows how to make the most of these moments. We catch our breath for a glimpse of each of these men as men. The character building is brief and nearly everyone will die before we know their names, but thanks to touches that never feel scripted or heavy handed, the characters have the chance to be human.

The breathlessly paced slice of war torn life is grounded by two performances: Bessa and Suhail Dabbach, playing commanding officer Jasem. Kawa’s character evolves almost at the speed of light, turning in one afternoon from a wide-eyed, by the books police officer to an unrecognizable man with a mission.

Jasem is on the other side of that evolution and the veteran Iraqi actor makes you believe. A father figure who is simultaneously merciless and dangerously compassionate, he’s a bright and constant reminder of exactly why the unit fights.

Carnahan’s first time out behind the camera rushes at times. Kawa’s speedy transformation certainly strains credulity. But Mosul handles the political themes with a surprisingly light hand. It certainly keeps your attention and delivers eye-opening information without abandoning storytelling to do it.

He should keep directing his own movies.

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Teenaged Chasteland

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Porno

by Hope Madden

Have you seen Lamberto Bava’s 1985 horror Demons?

I can’t help but wonder if writers Matt Black and Laurence Vannicelli have. It’s a low rent affair that suckers a group of moviegoers into watching a violent horror flick that unleashes—you guessed it—demons.

More than three decades later, Vannicelli and Black pen a more good natured horror that traps five Christian teens in the small town cinema where they work circa 1992. After closing they chase a homeless intruder into an unknown basement, find additional theaters, movie posters for Orgy of the Dead and other unsavory features, and a canister.

Here’s where things get a little familiar. The teens decide to screen the film from the basement canister. But it’s not exactly a grisly horror film, like Bava’s. For these sexually repressed teens, it’s worse.

It’s porn.

Hell for sure.

Black and Vannicelli give director Keola Racela plenty to work with, whether touching the funny bone or the gag reflex. Porno is strangely upbeat and even sweet for a film whose villain (Katelyn Pearce) doesn’t deliver a single line or wear any clothes the entire running time (unless you count her merkin).

And it’s gross. You don’t even want to know what happens to Heavy Metal Jeff’s nut sack.

Four of the five teens are afraid they’re pervs in one way or another and are therefore headed to hell. (Not Jeff. Jeff’s keeping his edge.) Racela and cast have fun with this idea, thanks in large part to charming performances.

Porno nails the time period and the mood, delivering some carnage-laden laughs pointed at both the uptight and the nasty. But Racela gets a little lost in the storytelling. Porno would benefit from a serious edit. It runs a mere 90 minutes but feels much longer, likely because storylines spin out all over the building with little thought to pacing or tension.

Between the sloppy structure and some sophomoric comedy, even the brightest and wildest moments can be overlooked. (Well, not that thing with Jeff.) The weaknesses pile up and by the end, Porno feels like a near miss.

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Dear White People

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Hillbilly Elegy

by Hope Madden

I can’t say I’m a big Ron Howard fan. I find his films safe and sentimental. But I’d certainly say they were all competently made.

Until today.

What the hell is going on with Hillbilly Elegy?

Howard’s adaptation of J.D. Vance’s memoir does boast the one-two punch of perennial Oscar contenders Amy Adams and Glenn Close. Adams plays Vance’s unstable mother, Beverly. It’s less a character than a collection of outbursts, so I can’t even say whether she’s good.

Close, as Vance’s beloved Mamaw, gets more opportunity to carve out an actual character. But like everything else in the film, Mamaw exists in snippets to illustrate the Middletown, Ohio chains J.D. needs to break.

The main story is of law student J.D. (Gabriel Basso) trying to land summer employment at a firm so he can afford Yale next year. His mother overdoses on heroin just days before his interview. Can he get to Ohio, sort that out, and still make it back to Connecticut in time? Or will he be forever waylaid by all the hyperventilating, acid washed jeans, scrunchies and hysterics that populate his flashbacks?

Howard’s characters don’t show us much, but they do tell us a lot of things. J.D. tells us his mother is the smartest person he’s ever met. We never see even a glimpse of that, so we’ll have to take him at his word. He also tells us twice that he will do whatever it takes to make sure his mother gets the help she needs.

That’s supposed to be the heart of the story. Does there come a time when you have to put yourself first? Is it ever wrong to sacrifice yourself for your family?

Too bad Howard, working from a screenplay by Vanessa Taylor, can’t find that heartbeat.

Flashbacks do little to differentiate J.D. (played in youth by Owen Asztalos) from the others who can look forward to a life of “food stamps or jail.”

Never does the film see J.D. as possessing any privileges that may make success easier for him than for his grandmother, mother, or sister (Haley Bennett). Nope. J.D. just worked harder.

The reason Howard’s film seems like it refuses to say anything, which gives it the feel of a poorly pieced together puzzle, is that it says two things simultaneously. 1) Redneck is a term elitists use to make themselves feel superior to perfectly valuable people. 2) If rednecks worked hard enough, they could go to Yale and stop being rednecks.

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Bring the Noise

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Sound of Metal

by Hope Madden

Riz Ahmed is a guy who can do anything.

He can be funny (Four Lions), pathetic (Nightcrawler), tragic (Sisters Brothers), villainous (Venom). He’s soon to be Hamlet. But in Sound of Metal, playing a recovering addict heavy metal drummer who’s hearing suddenly deteriorates, he’s more than all of these put together.

Ahmed is Ruben, in a performance that brings this man to life with so many layers and such nuance and power it requires your attention.

Ruben’s traveling the country in an airstream with his girlfriend Lou (the always welcome Olivia Cooke). She sings/wails/screams and plays guitar, he bangs on the drums, and they keep each other safe, sane and sober. This is how they do it, one day at a time.

But Ruben’s sudden deafness is more than he can take and as he spirals out of control, Lou and his sponsor find him a place. It’s secluded, nestled on a big piece of land near a school for the deaf—a spot for recovering addicts who are deaf. No one else.

No Lou.

Even before you begin to appreciate Ahmed’s remarkable performance, you’ll likely notice writer/director Darius Marder’s choices when it comes to sound design.

Also, Sound of Metal is captioned, but not all the time. If Ruben can’t understand what’s being said, neither can you.

The sound design evokes the same sensation: of being in Ruben’s head. What he can’t really hear it, you can’t, either. Marder mimics the humming, echoing, and blurring together of sounds to create an immersive sensation that never feels like a gimmick.

It might, were it not for Ahmed, though. The rest of the cast, most of them non-actors, offer solid support. Cooke is characteristically strong, simultaneously resilient and dependent in a way that feels authentic to the character. The charming and endlessly tender third act arrival of Matthieu Amalric only adds to the emotional heft the film carries.

Sound of Metal is Marder’s first feature. It often benefits from a loose structure, but just as often, this becomes its downfall. There are scenes that amount to little, giving the film a bloated quality. But that’s not enough to defeat it, not nearly. Sound of Metal is a powerful experiment and a star turn for a talented actor.

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Paint By Numbers

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The Last Vermeer

by Hope Madden

Who doesn’t like a story about swindling Nazis?

There’s something festive in that notion, and Dan Friedkin’s The Last Vermeer does what it can to keep the mood light as one of Holland’s unsung artists is accused of consorting with Nazis to help Goering purchase a painting by Dutch master Vermeer.

The film is set shortly after the end of WWII. Claes Bang, who seems to only make films about art (Burnt Orange Heresy, The Cube), plays Captain Joseph Piller. A former member of the resistance with a strained family life, Piller is part of an operation that finds said Vermeer, Christ and the Adulteress.

The problem with this movie is that Friedkin treats it like a mystery. Mysteries are cool, and the reveal here is certainly interesting, but there very are few clues to follow. And following those few clues are characters far less interesting than Han Van Meegeren, played here with fanciful, libidinous panache by Guy Pearce and someone’s joke of a pair of eyebrows.

Van Meegeren’s crime, if he did collaborate with Nazis to move a masterpiece from Holland’s greatest artist, is a capital one. Not that you’d know that from Pearce’s flashes of eccentricity and decadence. He seems to be enjoying himself. His character—and, indeed, Van Meegeren himself—commands attention.

Too bad Friedkin and his slew of scriptwriters decided to bury the lede. In one of those Hollywood moves, this film chose to sideline its main character—the real life figure who could face a firing squad—in favor of a safe, blandly attractive hero we can all root for.

Yawn.

Worse still is the criminal underuse of The Phantom Thread’s Vicky Krieps as the attractive but honorable assistant.

The Last Vermeer is one of those hopelessly manipulated true histories. It looks good, although nothing about the direction seems inspired. Instead the film delivers a competently made, by-the-numbers historical recreation when it could have been art.

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The Holy and the Broken

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Dirty God

by Hope Madden

There is an unerring authenticity about the slice of life that is Dirty God. Co-writer/director Sacha Polak sugar coats nothing, wallows nowhere, and dares you to judge Jade (a breathtaking Vicky Knight), regardless of her behavior.

The film opens on Jade, barely out of her teens, as she stares toward the camera, her face partially covered by a clear plastic mask. What you can see is badly scarred. This is her last day in what appears to have been a very long stint in the hospital. The reasons are fairly obvious.

Back at the flat she shares with her own mother and toddler, Jade doesn’t adjust well. Business as usual bumps up against wounds—physical and emotional. No one, Jade included, seems to be dealing with the issue at hand.

What follows is a downward spiral, Jade making one self-destructive decision after another. You’d think that “rock bottom” had been hit when  her ex threw that acid in her face, but the ugly truth is that there was a lot farther Jade had to fall. It isn’t fun to watch, but thanks to Knight’s understated performance and Polak’s unflinching gaze, you never want to look away.

In other hands, this could feel maudlin or worse. But Polak doesn’t fetishize Jade’s suffering. She bears witness, but the overriding tone is of empathy, not sympathy.

The approach is provocative because Jade’s torment is almost inconceivable. Few of us could honestly imagine it. Polak doesn’t soft peddle, and she doesn’t let the viewer off the hook with a pitiable or noble character.

Knight, herself a burn victim, has never acted before. Her performance here, obviously informed by her own experience, is a minor miracle. There’s not a wasted gesture, not an overwrought emotion. The impact of that is jolting.

Dirty God—a film about self-image and the unfair reality of limitations—makes other “coming of age” style films feel like soft drink ads.

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Portrait of a Lady of Science

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Ammonite

by Hope Madden

Writer/director Francis Lee’s Ammonite is a beautiful, insightful, lonesome film about European women falling in love in a time when patriarchal society only allowed that to happen because they weren’t paying attention. It boasts beautiful cinematography and two utterly stellar performances.

And it suffers by comparison to Celine Sciamma’s similarly summarized 2019 masterpiece Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth seeing—it absolutely is. Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan—simply two of the most talented humans ever to grace a film screen—play, respectively, British paleontologist Mary Anning and the married woman she falls for, Charlotte Murchison.

Anning is, in fact, among the most influential scientists in British history. Being a woman in Victorian England, her work was accepted while she herself was not. There’s an interesting tale to tell right there, but Lee chose that repressive cultural landscape as more of a backdrop, like the forbidding English Channel coast town of Lyme where Anning did her fossil hunting.

There’s no historical evidence that Anning was gay. There’s also no historical evidence that she was not, and filmmakers have told Emily Dickinson’s story dozens of times, only once actually addressing her sexual preference. If it’s OK for them to fictionalize, why not Lee?

The telling gives Winslet opportunity—partly thanks to excellent support from Fiona Shaw, Gemma Jones and Alec Secareanu—to present a woman so ill-used by and out-of-step with the world around her that she sees a miscarriage of justice in every exchange. Winslet is sharp and brooding, superior and insecure. It’s another quietly outstanding performance.

Aglow and lilting, Ronan is all warmth, offering a swoon-worthy counterpoint to Winslet’s chill. But there is something rushed about her attraction, and the deep, risky longing never feels authentic.

The affection, however, feels painfully true, and that’s at the core of a story about limited possibilities. Lee’s no Tarantino, but keep an eye out for bare feet and (less Tarantino-esque) insects. There is something slightly melancholy in these images of freedom and vulnerability that suit the effort.

Lee doesn’t try to answer every question he raises or resolve every conflict he presents. Instead, he brings us into a story of outsiders trying to define their own realities, however limited they may have to be.