Tag Archives: Madd at the Movies

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The Dream I Dreamed

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Les Miserables

by Hope Madden

“Remember this, my friends. There is no such thing as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators.”

Victor Hugo penned those words as he watched the suffering and oppression in the streets of Montfermeil.

Set in July 2018, when the World Cup victory made celebratory compatriots of everyone in France, at first blush, Ladj Ly’s film Les Miserables bears little resemblance to the saga of Jean Valjean and that tenacious Javert. But it doesn’t take long for the filmmaker to use the story of law enforcement and the population of modern day Montfermeil to show that little has changed since Hugo set quill to parchment 150 years ago.

Damien Bonnard (Staying Vertical) plays Stéphane. Ly taps Julien Poupard’s camera to follow Stephane on his first day in Paris as part of a three man unit tasked with keeping an eye on a mainly poor, primarily Muslim district.

Stéphane’s new partners, Chris (Alexis Manenti) and Gwada (Djibril Zonga), have been on the job long enough to have developed relationships and tensions in the neighborhood. Thanks to an almost absurd subplot involving a traveling circus—whose lion delivers an apt metaphor and a heartbreaking scene—Stephane’s first days on the force will be regrettable.

Ly was inspired to write the film by riots that broke out in his own apartment building and neighborhood in 2005. That authenticity lends the film both a visceral dread as well as a complicated compassion.

Like Hugo, Ly seems unwilling to abandon those in authority to the fate of villain any more than he’s willing to entirely forgive the actions of the oppressed. Rather, each side is implicated (one far more boldly than the other), but it’s the lack of tidy resolution that makes the fate of these characters compelling.

While every performance is impressive, young Issa Perica is the film’s beating heart, its undetermined destiny, and he’s more than up to the task. His lines are limited but his performance is heartbreaking, his character really the only one that matters.

A devastating social commentary masquerading quite convincingly as an intense cop drama, I’d say Les Miserables would do Hugo proud. The truth is, it would probably break his heart.

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Have Mercy

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Clemency

by Hope Madden

Alfre Woodard has primarily provided crucial supporting turns in film and television since 1978. With writer/director Chinonye Chukwu’s Clemency, Woodard delivers an astonishing lead turn as a prison warden dealing with inmates on death row.

Examining capital punishment from the eyes of a prison warden is certainly a novel approach. The warden has generally been relinquished on film to a cowboy hat wearing good ol’ boy with no qualms about flipping that switch. Chukwu and Woodard are disinterested in clichés. Instead they carve out something truly new in this genre.

The thing Chukwu gets most right in this film is an overwhelming sense of responsibility and grief, and it’s a tough line to toe. Warden Bernadine Williams understands that, while her own grief threatens to swallow her whole, it doesn’t compare with the pain she comes in contact with. For that reason, she never defends her position or betrays her sympathies when confronted by victims’ families, the families of the condemned or the condemned themselves.

Her own grief is so acutely individual that she refuses to seek sympathy and she outright rejects empathy, because who could put themselves in her place? She is in charge but has no control. She is responsible, yet she does not determine these men’s fates.

If Chukwu hits the right notes here, it’s Woodard who sings. This journeyman has played just about everything across her four decades in the business, and she brings a palpable sense of hard won wisdom to this role.

The film is essentially a character study, and one of a character determined not to discuss or betray her feelings. That’s a tough nut to crack because you have to let the audience know what’s going on without telling us anything at all. More than that, what Woodard has to convey is far beyond the scope of what anyone in the audience can really understand. And yet, she succeeds poignantly.

Aldis Hodge, playing death row inmate Anthony Woods, balances Woodard’s practiced stoicism with barely contained jolts of emotion. Clemency gives Hodge the opportunity to shine and he grabs it, conveying a tumult of raw feelings that will leave you heartbroken.

If Clemency is a miraculous package of performances, it doesn’t entirely work as a film. Bernadine’s story—her existential crisis—doesn’t have a beginning or an end, just an unhappy middle. But maybe that’s necessary for a film that breaks new ground while delivering the same message: we need criminal justice reform.

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You Can Dance If You Want To

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Cunningham

by Hope Madden

“The audience was puzzled.”

Such was modern dance legend Marce Cunningham’s wry, almost tickled description of one reaction to a performance. An enigmatic presence on and offstage, he makes for a fascinating if ultimately unknowable center to documentarian Alla Kovgan’s new documentary.

With Cunningham, the filmmaker seeks to reignite the peculiar audience response the dancer/choreographer’s performances once garnered, and perhaps drive wider appreciation for his work.

Kovgan chronicles the ways in which Cunningham challenged the traditional concept of dance, combining ballet and modern choreography and creating works without relation to music. His avant garde approach drew the attention and collaboration of other boundary-pushing artists of the time, including Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cunningham’s eventual life partner, John Cage.

Speaking of his interest in Cunningham’s work, Cage says, “I would like to have an art that was so bewildering, complex and illogical that we would return to everyday life with great pleasure.”

Kovgan goes about exploring not only that very work but the mind and imagination behind it through an appealing combination of archival footage, audio and onscreen text, as well as re-stagings of some of the artist’s most memorable pieces.

The result is provocatively piecemeal, a visually arresting if intentionally untidy image of Cunningham’s life and work. Most often, Kovgan’s style suits the content beautifully, but other times it’s a misfit.

Where Wim Wenders employed 3D to immerse the viewer in the dance of Pina, Kovgan is as concerned with the surrounding as the movement. She stages performances on rooftop, in meadows, among trees and within train tunnels. While the combination creates a vibrant visual impression, it steals emphasis from the movement itself, which feels out of step with Cunningham’s most basic philosophy.

Kovgan takes chances, capturing the dance from above, close up, far away, and at odd angles. This sometimes creates a vibrant, off kilter sensibility that complements the material. At other times, you wish you could see more of the dancers, feeling as if you’re missing something amazing in favor of needless close up footage of a face.

It’s a small knock, honestly, with dances this arresting and accompanying material this compelling. Kovgan’s respect for the work as well as the life of her subject is clear and she’s captured much of that spirit.

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Rite Here, Right Now

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Color Out of Space

by Hope Madden

HP Lovecraft has influenced horror cinema in ways too varied and numerous to really articulate. But true Lovecraft is tough to bring to the screen for a number of reasons, chief among them that his madness tends to involve something indescribable: a color no one’s ever seen before, a sound entirely new to the human ear, a shape that defies all laws of geography and logic.

Alex Garland pulled inspiration from Lovecraft’s 1927 short Colour Out of Space for his brilliant 2018 mindbender, Annihilation. But for direct adaptations, Richard Stanley’s newest may be the best.

Naturally, the film’s success is due in large part to Nicolas Cage’s performance, because who descends into madness quite as entertainingly?

Cage plays Nathan Gardner. Nathan and his wife (Joely Richardson), their three kids and their squatter (Tommy Chong – nice!) live a quiet life in the New England forest not far from Arkham. A meteorite changes all that.

Cage basically strums a favorite old tune, landing somewhere on his “nice guy gone insane” spectrum just this side of Brent (Mom and Dad) and Red Miller (Mandy). In fact, the voice that begins emerging once the meteorite hits is gleefully reminiscent of Peter Lowe from Vampire’s Kiss (a call back I can get behind).

Is that the only reason to see the movie? No. Tommy Chong is a hoot, Richardson gets one especially creepy carrot chopping scene, and things go a little Cronenberg just when you want them to.

There’s a lot wrong with the film, too. Scenes are sloppily slapped together, one rarely leading to the next. The film’s budget is betrayed by its FX and supporting performances are not especially strong.

But Stanley’s long-awaited comeback (this is his first narrative feature since being fired from The Island of Dr. Moreau in 1996) infuses Lovecraft with a much needed dark streak of comedy and entrenches his tale of madness within a loving family dynamic, offering an emotional center to the story that the author rarely delivered.

The film lacks the vibrant subversiveness of Mom and Dad and comes nowhere near the insane vision of Mandy, so Cage fans might be only mildly impressed. Lovecraft fans, though, have reason to be excited.

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Sleepless in Mexico City

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Midnight Family

by Hope Madden

For a population of 9 million, Mexico City keeps only 45 official ambulances. Private ambulances compete with each other to fill the need for additional resources. Midnight Family rides along with the Ochoas, one family making their living transporting the injured to government and private hospitals around the city.

Do they have training? The equipment they need to tend to a medical emergency?

Hell, they may not even have gas.

The nuance of the act of goodwill or commerce tightens the film’s emotional grip. As one member of the team worries over an infant while police question the father, clearly unable to pay for these services, it’s obvious that the Ochoa family takes its life saving mission seriously.

At the same time, every action is calculated: how to beat another ambulance to an accident, how to evaluate each situation to best secure payment, which hospital will be the most forthcoming with payment, which police are willing to alert them to accidents in return for a bribe.

It all sounds seedy until you realize what would happen to the injured without them.

And while you’re weighing the ghoulish balance between money and mercy, director Luke Lorentzen shows you just how a high speed chase should be filmed as 17-year-old Juan races and weaves his ambulance through traffic to beat another unit to the scene. (Honestly, you’d think a group of people this well-informed on the ills of Mexico City’s healthcare situation might be a little less daring!)

Juan is all business, a savvy worker with ambition and wisdom to share with his little brother Josue, who rides along at night instead of getting ready to go to school. In these moments, when family members cobble together enough cash for a dinner of tuna on saltines before going home to shower without hot water, the larger context and struggle takes shape.

An urgent portrait of a system in collapse, Midnight Family also uncovers one family’s raft of hope amid an ocean of desperation.

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Who’s Bad?

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Bad Boys for Life

by Hope Madden

It’s been 17 years since we last checked in on Detective Mike Lowery (Will Smith) and his goofy partner Marcus (Martin Lawrence). One of them has intimacy issues. One of them always wants to retire. They drive recklessly around Miami and wreak general havoc.

In those 17 years, Generation X has gotten old.

Marcus has a grandbaby now and wants to retire again. Then Mike is almost killed, so now Marcus really wants to retire. That means frustrated Mike, desperate to reestablish his manhood by finding the guy who tried to kill him, must team up with Miami PD’s new superteam, AMMO.

That’s right, AMMO, which stands for literally the most attractive group of police officers in the history of crime. They’re tech-tactical. They have a drone and shit, and no one would ever notice a drone flying into the abandoned warehouse while they do an arms deal.

But Mike don’t play that. He’s old school. And old. You know he’s old because he’s always wearing long sleeved shirts and jackets in Miami.

Is Bad Boys for Life ludicrous? Oh, hell yes. Luckily its casual sexism and jingoism are offset by its refreshing pro-violence stance.

Directors Adil El Arbi and Bilail Fallah—whose Shakespearean take on Brussels gang violence, Black, is well worth finding—offer no such lyrical balance of carnage and emotion here. It’s actually hard to imagine a film franchise so single-mindedly opposite of their insightful gangster drama.

It’s clear the marching orders were: get the bad boys back together, blow stuff up and trade quips! Fine, but who ordered all the forced ridiculousness and tonal whiplash?

Saddled with a breathtakingly by-the-numbers script by committee (Chris Bremner, Peter Craig and Joe Carnahan), the directing duo punctuates dramatic moments with comic relief while they distract from a weak story with nonsensical car chases and explosions, and when all else fails, fall back on daddy issues.

Don’t look at the credits and you’d swear Michael Bay directed this movie. (Bonus: Bay has a cameo.)

The film broaches interesting themes as one partner turns to God while another turns to bloodthirsty vengeance in the face of death. But Lawrence, ever the sloppy sidekick, makes clear that spirituality and peace are only fodder for jokes and neither partner will regain his manhood until there’s a massive weapon between his legs and he’s shooting Mexicans out of the sky.

Will Mike learn to love? Will he whip his tech-savvy and law abiding new team into shape (that is, help them to embrace lethal and mainly illegal justice)?

And finally, can we expect more of this?

Maybe. Whatcha gonna do?

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Fright Club: Time Loop Horror

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Ever feel like you’ve been here before? This week we celebrate that spooky feeling with some of the best horror movies to take advantage of time loop nuttiness.

5. Haunter (2013)

Nicolas Vincenzo (Cube) starts off with the standard Groundhog Day premise—surly teen Lisa (Abigail Breslin) wakes up to the walkie talkie sound of her brother playing hidden treasure with an imaginary friend. It’s not Sonny & Cher, but it’s not that far off.

But Vincenzo (working from Brian King’s screenplay) starts bending the time loop structure, blending it with a more recognizable horror trope and subverting expectations. Breslin delivers a solid performance, and Pontypool’s Stephan McHattie’s outstanding as the devilish Pale Man. Plus, excellent support work from Siouxsie Sioux’s big face on Lisa’s tee shirt!

The film does kind of collapse on itself by the third act as it gets all Frequency (or Lake House or Don’t Let Go) on us, but for a good chunk of time Haunter delivers.

4. Happy Death Day (2017)

Tree (Jessica Rothe) wakes up on her birthday in some rando’s dorm room with no memory of the night before, a raging hangover and an attitude. She’s murdered that night by a knife-wielding marauder in a plastic baby mask, only to wake up back in that same dorm room under that same They Live poster.

It doesn’t take too many déjà vu mornings before Tree decides there is a mystery to solve here and just like that, we’re off in Phil Connors territory: reliving the same day again and again gives you the chance to become a better person, right?

Director Christopher Landon (Scout’s Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse) wisely mines Scott Lobdell’s screenplay for laughs. Rothe boasts strong comic timing and a gift for physical comedy, a skill that transitions nicely to the demands of being repeatedly victimized by a slasher.

3. The Endless (2017)

There is something very clever about the way Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead’s movies sneak up on you. Always creepy, still they defy genre expectations even as they play with them.

Camp Arcadia offers the rustic backdrop for their latest, The Endless. A clever bit of SciFi misdirection, the film follows two brothers as they return to the cult they’d escaped a decade earlier.

It is this story and the pair’s storytelling skill that continues to impress. Their looping timelines provide fertile ground for clever turns that fans of the filmmakers will find delightful, but the uninitiated will appreciate as well.

2. Timecrimes (2007)

This one is nutty, and absolutely required viewing for anyone with an interest in space/time continuum conundrums.

Writer/director/co-star Nacho Vigalondo (Colossal) mocks our desire for control and our fear of the doppelganger with a very quick and dirty trip through time. So much can go wrong when you travel just one hour backward. The less you know going in, the better.

An always clever experiment in science fiction, horror and irony, Timecrimes is a spare, unique and wild ride.

1. Resolution (2012)

Not exactly a traditional time loop horror, Resolution plays with the concept of time in ways that are baffling and eerie.

Michael (Chris Cilella) is lured to a remote cabin, hoping to save his friend Chris (Vinny Curan) from himself. Chris will detox whether he wants to or not, then Michael will wash his hands of this situation and start again with his wife and unborn baby.

But Michael is in for more than he bargained, and not only because Chris has no interest in detoxing. Directors Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson (working from Benson’s screenplay) begin with a fascinating and bizarre group of characters and a solid story, layering on bizarre notions of time, horror and storytelling in ways that are simultaneously familiar and wildly unique. The result is funny, tense, and terrifying.

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Under the Sea

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Underwater

by Hope Madden

Kristin Stewart has been stretching.

Yes, she will probably forever be first known as that girl from Twilight, unfortunately. But, in the same way her ex-vampire lover Robert Pattinson has relentlessly carved a stronger impression via challenging independent film roles, Stewart has been honing her craft and developing a reputation as a solid talent via varying roles in small budget films.

The few dozen or so of us who saw her versatility over the last few years in Personal Shopper, JT LeRoy, Lizzie, Certain Women, Still Alice and Clouds of Sils Maria no longer think first of Twilight’s Bella Swan.

But Ellen Ripley?

William Eubank’s deep sea horror Underwater sees Stewart as Nora, a no-nonsense, quick thinking, fast acting survivor—the kind who just might keep the remaining crew alive as they try to make their way from an irreversibly damaged deep sea drill rig to a nearby vessel that might have pods to float them to safety.

But what caused the damage in the first place and what is making that noise?

Eubank has assembled a surprisingly solid cast for his “Alien Under the Sea” flick. Joining Stewart as the rig’s humbly heroic captain is the always excellent Vincent Cassel, while John Gallagher Jr. plays the latest in his long line of effortlessly likeable good guys, Smith. Chubby comic relief is delivered by T.J. Miller.

If that sounds like your basic set of recognizable stereotypes assembled to be picked off one by one, you’ve detected the first major problem with Eubank’s film: a breathtaking lack of originality.

The script, penned by Brian Duffield (The Babysitter) and Adam Cozad (The Legend of Tarzan), offers nothing in the way of novelty and much of the dialog is stilted, and Nora’s third act reveal of the emotional damage she must overcome is false and forced.

Luckily, Eubanks somehow convinced a bunch of genuinely talented actors to deliver these lines, so they mainly come off fine. And while the director frustratingly and consistently undercuts the claustrophobic tension he’s begun building, his monsters are pretty cool looking.

Stewart gets to try on the action hero role, and she’s not too bad. For a 95 minute sea monster movie, neither is Underwater. It’s not too good, either, but at least there are no sparkly vampires.