Tag Archives: Madd at the Movies

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Smells Like Teen Spirit

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Dating Amber

by Hope Madden

Awkward teens pretend to date each other to sidestep the school bullies, only to find a deep and genuine bond. That sounds pat enough, but writer/director David Freyne (The Cured) and a stunning cast have something far messier and human in mind.

Welcome to County Kildare in the mid Nineties. Divorce is still illegal, homosexuality a curse, the Irish army or the hair salon are the likeliest post-graduation vocations. As Amber (Lola Petticrew) says frequently, “This place will kill you.”

Amber should know. She found her father hanging in the forest near the trailer court where she rents out spots to horny teens, which she does to accrue enough dough to head to London the minute she graduates.

But to survive between now and then, she proposes the “let’s pretend we’re dating” con to Eddie (a remarkable Fionn O’Shea). Because Amber is gay. Gay gay gay. And so is Eddie.

No. No, he definitely is not gay. Not at all. But still…it isn’t a terrible idea.

So begins Freyne’s semi-satirical look at the perils of high school generally and sexual conformity specifically. There are delightful, early, broad-stroke comic moments that simply feel like a cheeky Irish upending of John Hughes tropes.

But that’s not Dating Amber. Not at all. The brightly familiar comedy trappings serve to lull you into a comfortable space so the film can unveil something beautifully untidy and really heartbreaking, something simultaneously devastating and resilient.

Freyne mixes darkness and forgiveness in equal measure. Everyone has their own shit to deal with, and an depressed small town full of frightened people lacking in any real opportunity or choice is bound to take its toll—on the gay kids, on the parents who probably don’t want to be married anymore, on the younger brother who just wants to feel like his family is normal, and on everyone facing graduation and whatever likely dismal future lies ahead.

But mainly, Freyne is interested in how Amber and Eddie contend with things. Luckily, Petticrew and O’Shea share a truly lovely chemistry, creating the kind of bond you long to see for every desperate and lonely teenager.

Their honesty gives every scene an extra punch—of laughter or heartbreak. Coming of age still looks like it seriously sucks, but Dating Amber is a keeper.

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Gotta Be the Shoes

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Meeting Michael

by Hope Madden and George Wolf

Normally, you’d expect the MVP of any doc about Michael Jordan – especially one featuring some priceless footage of MJ in his prime – to be the man himself. But in Meeting Michael, he’s upstaged by two kids curious about their Dad’s obsession.

Dad is writer/director Adam Kontras. An Ohio native, Kontras was just a youngster himself when he first idolized Jordan and the mid-80s Chicago Bulls. Now, his L.A. attic is bursting with impressive MJ memorabilia, including two special videotapes with some amazing behind-the-scenes footage.

At just 19 years old, Kontras was pulling the overnight shift at a news/talk radio station in Columbus. Through that gig, he scored a press pass for the Bulls game in Cleveland on Nov. 9th, 1995, and brought a camcorder. With both courtside and locker room access, Kontras captured a truly compelling moment in time.

He released some of the footage five years ago as a short film, drawing superlatives in outlets ranging from online blogs to the Washington Post. For the feature length version, Kontras smartly reframes the entire story as one he’s telling his young son and daughter on the day they’re finally allowed to explore his fan cave.

Though Kontras’s storytelling can flirt with self-congratulations, it’s more often laced with a sheepish wonder at what he pulled off, and some endearing self-deprecating humor aimed at his younger self.

As a director, Kontras (Fastest Delorean in the World, Fastest Delorean Part II) exhibits fine instincts for answering the questions raised by his on-court encounter. For example, footage of Jordan finally answering a merciless heckler sparks a natural curiosity about the garishly dressed front row loudmouth, and Kontras delivers. Bypassing this sidebar wouldn’t have wrecked the film, but giving some time to Eddie “the Heckler” Nahra leads to a richer experience.

It’s these details – some personal, some observational – that keep the film from feeling like a short surrounded by filler.

For Jordan and/or NBA fans, Meeting Michael is a must. But by anchoring the story through the sharing of passions – and by using a touching story about shoes to cement a life lesson – it’s a film with more of a purpose than just liking Mike.

Meeting Michael releases 11/9/20 on Amazon. $4.99 to rent, $7.99 to buy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Jk72BJPUw

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Screening Room: Let Him Go, Jungleland, Mortal, The Dark and the Wicked, Kindred & More

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Let Him Go, Jungleland, Mortal, Proxima, The Dark and the Wicked, Kindred, His House, Blood Vessel, Acute Misfortune, Koko-Di Koko Da, Attack of the Demons

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Mummy Dearest

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Kindred

by Hope Madden

It’s incredibly hard to make a film that feels fresh. Hell, it’s hard to get a film greenlit unless you can describe it to potential financers as a cross between something they’ve seen and something else they’ve seen. Most hope of originality is squashed early.

Writer/director Joe Marcantonio doesn’t exactly concern himself with originality in his feature debut, Kindred. He hopes a stellar cast and a thick, uneasy atmosphere can make up for some of his film’s predictability. For the most part, that does work.

Charlotte (Tamara Lawrance) and her white boyfriend Ben (Edward Holcroft) intend to leave their isolated English village for Australia. Now it’s just telling Mum (Fiona Shaw, as formidable a presence as ever).

The first Sunday lunch with Mum and step-brother Thomas (Jack Lowden) effectively conveys all we need to know about the family dynamics, and Marcantonio tidily establishes a sense of dread that will only deepen as the moments pass until the final credits.

Charlotte, you see, is pregnant, and when Ben dies suddenly, Mum and Thomas offer hospitality that will quickly turn into an inescapable prison.

There are hints early in the film that perhaps Ben is more like his Mum—a bit controlling and manipulative, even if he doesn’t honestly realize it. This sets an intriguing conflict that will obviously balloon once Mum’s in charge.

It’s Rosemary’s Baby meets Get Out. See? Two outstanding movies that you may not want to see watered down into a terribly obvious story, but again, a great atmosphere and several fierce performances will pull you through it.

Shaw’s turn is a magnificent slice of will and bitterness, but it’s Dunkirk’s Lowden who steals the film. In his hands, Thomas is so eerily sincere that you never know quite what to expect. He’s simultaneously sympathetic, pathetic, and sweetly terrifying.

Lawrance works valiantly against a script that frustrates you with its lazy plotting of constant near-escape and recapture. Worse still is the way Marcantonio ignores his underlying themes of racism—something that could have given the old Gothic style fable of bit of new life.

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Norwegian Would

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Mortal

by Hope Madden

André Øvredal is a hard filmmaker to pin down. After his 2010 breakout Trollhunter, a giddy found footage flick concerning the impact giant trolls have on his native Norway, the writer/director got far more serious with his 2016 sophomore effort, the excellent horror show The Autopsy of Jane Doe.

Then it was all visuals and atmosphere in the more family friendly genre fare Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. And now he abandons any hint of horror, returning to the mythology of his homeland for a superhero tale of sorts, Mortal.

Nat Wolff is Eric, a disheveled American in Norway. He keeps to the forests, isolates, but eventually runs afoul of a car full of teenage d-bags—much to the dismay of the marauding teens.

Under arrest and awaiting an American convoy, he’s befriended by Christine (Iben Akerlie) the Norwegian therapist asked to speak with him. She’s the first to recognize his burgeoning but uncontrolled powers, although the Americans who are coming for him seem to have some inkling.

What Øvredal has done here is to reimagine the superhero origin story. True to its title, Mortal examines a very human character, weighing the guilt, pressure, confusion and fear that come with this territory.

Some comic franchises—the X-Men, in particular—ask whether humankind is ready or even worthy of superior beings. Mortal does the same. In fact, it does a lot of the same things you’ve seen in other origin stories and superhero franchises. Its uniqueness may be in the afterthought about how the world would construe the existence of a superhero in terms of religious implications.

This is one of the truly interesting thoughts the film injects into the overcrowded genre. It’s not well developed, unfortunately. But there is something akin to swagger in watching this mid-budget action thriller wrangle Norway’s own mythology away from a far showier, exponentially more famous universe.

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Sheep Go to Heaven, Goats Go to Hell

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The Dark and the Wicked

by Hope Madden

I’ve been a Bryan Bertino fan since The Strangers because of course I have. How could I not be? That loyalty paid off in 2016 with the moving allegorical horror The Monster, and it rewards viewers again this weekend with the supernatural terror of The Dark and the Wicked.

A twisty old Southern Gothic that relies on practical effects and imagination, the film arrives somewhere in deeply rural America with Louise (a terrific Marin Ireland). She’s about a day behind her brother Michael (Michael Abbott Jr., The Death of Dick Long), back at home because of Dad’s deteriorating health.

Mom (Lynn Andrews) does not want them here.

Bertino is not a filmmaker to let his audience off the hook—if you’ve seen The Strangers, you know that. Like that effort, TD&TW is a slow burn with nerves fraying inside the isolated farmhouse as noises, shadows, and menacing figures lurk outside.

Bertino and cinematographer Tom Schraeder work the darkness in and around the goat farm to create a lingering, roaming dread. There are clumsier moments that feel like pre-ordained audience scares, and they really stand out in a film that otherwise just seeps into your subconscious. But where Bertino, who also writes, scores extra points is in crafting believable characters.

Too often in horror you find wildly dramatic behavior in the face of the supernatural. One character adamantly denies and defies what is clearly happening while another desperately tries to communicate with “it.” No one would do either, but this is the best way to serve the needed action to come in lesser films.

Here, Bertino, Ireland and Abbott give us real characters honestly grappling with something extraordinary.

The don’t want to be here. They don’t want to leave. So, they just do what they can, like the rugged folks they are.

“Well, if I’m here, I’m gonna work.”

Like Natalie James’s Relic from earlier this year, TD&TW has the long, slow, debilitating experience of parental illness on its mind. Like that film, this movie has a deeply aching center that makes the horror in the house as tragic as it is scary, and more horrifyingly, somehow inevitable.

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Because You’re Mine

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Spell

by Hope Madden

Spell is here to let you know that fear of backwoods folk is not for white people only.

Omari Hardwick is Marquis, an enormously successful corporate lawyer who is not above defending clients against class action lawsuits that would primarily benefit people of color like himself. Why does he do it? Because that’s his job, he’s good at his job, he makes a lot of money, and he worked very hard to get where he is.

How do we know that last bit? Well, nightmares about abuse wake him in the morning, plus he knows how to pick a lock when his wife somehow locks herself in her own bedroom. Marquis came from somewhere he’s not proud of, and now he has to pilot his own airplane with his wife and two teens back to Appalachia to go to his father’s funeral.

Spell is a by-the-numbers backwoods thriller. Our hero has forgotten where he comes from. This film plans to scare him into remembering.

Marquis wakes up all James Caan style in the bedroom of some helpful but controlling woman who wants him just to rest. He does not not want to rest, though. Quite reasonably, he wants to know where his family is, what happened to him, and why Miss Eloise (Loretta Devine) keeps the door to his room locked.

Deep in Appalachia, it seems, you will always find a creepy granny type who conjures a bit, an amiable grampa type who’s not as nice as he seems, and an extra-large, extra quiet Jethro kind of guy in bib overalls.

Screenwriter Kurt Wimmer doesn’t drum up too many surprises there. His screenplay borrows heavily from about a dozen films from Misery to The Skeleton Key to Green Inferno, not to mention every flick where a group stops off at a creepy gas station only to realize they’ve gone too far off the map for their own safety.

Wimmer is white, though, which makes this particular story an unusual one for him. Director Mark Tonderai does not get a screenwriting credit, so I guess we assume that this vernacular sprung from the head of Wimmer. I really hope not. It would be problematic enough coming from a Black writer.

Marquis’s foot, though. For gore hounds and the squeamish looking for a nasty thrill, that foot alone is almost worth it.

Until the third act. I am not one to suggest that ambiguity equals plot holes. I like movies that leave questions unanswered. Unless those questions are: Where did the entire cast of villains go off to, leaving the hero all the time in the world to travel wherever he needs to go in these woods? And why isn’t he even limping?

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The Beast in Me

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May the Devil Take You Too

by Hope Madden

Alfie (Chelsea Islan) is a badass survivor. You can tell because she’s really mean to everyone and she and others repeatedly mention the ordeal she’s already survived.

One problem: if you haven’t seen writer/director Timo Tjahjanto’s 2018 film May the Devil Take You—and you probably haven’t—you’ll need to take this film at its word. May the Devil Take You Too (also called May the Devil Take You: Chapter Two) revisits the hero of that little known Indonesian film two years after the incidents you likely don’t know about.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you totally know all about Alfie, young Nara (Hadijah Shahab) and some kind of demonic parenting issues. If you haven’t seen the original—and I haven’t, by the way—you should probably still be able to make heads or tails of this sequel’s story. More or less. Kind of.

So here’s the skinny. Meanie-pants Alfie, badass survivor, and young Nara find themselves the involuntary guests of seven foster siblings. Like Alfie, the group has some diabolical paternal concerns. It’s never at all clear why they think Alfie could help them, why Nara had to come, or why the whole thing is staged as a kidnapping.

The point is, best not to look closely at the details.

The filmmaker has his own take on religious ritual, possession and afterlife horror, although he is unafraid to wear his American influences on his sleeve. Evil Dead references are a lot less fun when delivered so humorlessly, though. (You may also detect several Nightmare on Elm Street references, and just a touch of Constantine.)

Chapter Two does a lot with a limited budget, relying mainly on old fashioned practical effects and makeup for scares—with frequently decent outcomes. There is some grisly fun to be had in Tjahjanto’s nightmare funhouse.

The filmmaker’s strength is certainly more in staging and effects than it is in writing, however. Contrived and often counter intuitive, the plot is little more than an opportunity to string together kills and the dialog is weak. Not one character makes natural decisions— mainly they stand around in a group looking shocked and screaming each other’s names while something happens.

But once it gets going, Chapter Two is pretty relentless with the bloody action. That’s probably not reason enough to see it, unless you’re a huge fan of the original. Maybe that one was good.