Tag Archives: Madd at the Movies

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That Seventies Show

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The Man in the White Van

by Hope Madden

A teen prone to exaggeration is disbelieved when she tells of a white van following her around her small Florida town. Working from a script he wrote with Sharon Y. Cobb, director Warren Skeels recreates a time when doors were left unlocked, and rebels were listening to Credence instead of the Partridge Family for his true crime thriller The Man in the White Van.

It’s 1975, but as Annie (Madison Wolfe, The Conjuring 2) tries to protect herself, Skeels takes us back to 1974, 1973, 1972, 1971, 1970 with the menacing van and the other girls nobody believed.  

The story is ostensibly based on Billy Mansfield Jr.’s Seventies era crime binge, although no name is given to the driver stalking Florida streets. Skeels’s framing device—present-day Seventies storytelling punctuated with vignettes from across the murder spree—is reminiscent of Anna Kendrick’s Woman of the Hour. But where Kendrick used cutaways to serial killer Rodney Alcala’s previous victims to deepen our understanding of the psychopath and humanize his victims, Skeels uses it to tweak tension as we wait for what is to come for young Annie.

Skeels also develops anxiety with Seventies style hijinks—the frustration of a busy signal and rotary phone dialing when in a real hurry.  

Ali Larter and Sean Astin, who also serve as executive producers, help to generate a believable family dynamic as Annie’s loving but skeptical parents. Though the balance of performances are not bad, the writing is superficial enough that the ensemble can’t carve out much in the way of personality. Worse, scenes last a beat too long, the camera often lingering on each line long enough that the unnaturalness, the performance itself, becomes evident.

Interestingly, there’s something about this particular falseness and the sloppiness in the script that actually reflects Seventies horror, which is kind of fun—sort of the The Town that Dreaded Sundown era, before tropes dug in and determined every story beat.

Where Kendrick attempted to push the conversation about serial murder and horror in a fresh direction, Skeels reaches back toward an older version of the story. It doesn’t make for as compelling a film, but The Man in the White Van has its charm.

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Bark at the Moon

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Nightbitch

by Hope Madden

There’s something wrong with Mother.

That’s the only name we have for Amy Adams’s character in Marielle Heller’s darkly surreal comedy Nightbitch, because it’s all we really need to know about her. Whatever she was before Baby (Arleigh and Emmet Snowden, adorable)—a successful artist, as it turns out—hardly matters now. Some time before the opening credits rolled, she gave that up to be a stay-at-home mother. And like most humans on the planet, she had no real idea what parenthood would mean.

Adams is wonderful at articulating with a gesture or a glance the loneliness and isolation, the weariness and guilt and self-loathing that can seep into days spent truly loving the tiny, filthy, needy little monster eating up every waking second of your life.

But in case you miss it, Heller’s script, penned with Rachel Yoder, allows her a number of alternative ways to beat you about the head and neck with it. These include voiceover narration as well as fantasy sequences where she screams at and slaps those who insult or underestimate her. Plus, of course, there’s the larger metaphor at work in which Mother embraces her inner bitch goddess and indeed turns into a feral dog at night.

Parenting is exhausting, especially if it’s not a truly shared responsibility. Society is set up to judge women whether they work or stay home, and no matter how their kids behave. Adams delivers a delightfully subversive take on motherhood and navigates tough material to carve out a sympathetic and funny character. But the metaphor itself—Heller’s touch with magical realism—weaken rather than strengthen the effort.

The real problems with Nightbitch, though, are all first world. These parents can afford to live in a big, spacious suburban neighborhood on one income. Mother’s artist friends can afford nannies, and her “Book Baby” mommies also all seem to flourish financially without a second income.

Which is to say that Mother’s choice to give up her career and stay home with her son, while fraught with self-sacrifice, feels more like privilege than burden since most parents have no such choice in front of them.

And if the problems are only for the wealthy, the solutions are equally out of reach for most audiences. Which makes it hard to root for Mother, no matter how truly (and characteristically) excellent Adams is.

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And Hustle

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Flow

by Hope Madden

Have you felt recently like the world as you know it has changed irreparably, everything around you is dangerous chaos, and those who were once family are no longer reliable so you have to kind of cobble together a new tribe or go it alone?

Cat knows your pain.

Gints Zilbalodis’s stunning animated film Flow follows the solitary feline through a lush world where it does what it can to remain aloof and alone—fleeing other creatures, particularly those rambunctious dogs, to find its quiet spot in the top floor of an empty home. The time period is unspecific but ancient, the attention to detail magnificent, and the animation breathtaking.

A flood is coming, and this little black cat will have to work in tandem with a handful of other strays—one capybara, a lemur, a secretarybird, and a dog—in an abandoned boat to survive the rising tide.

There’s no dialog and precious little anthropomorphism to be found. That may sound like it could keep an audience at arm’s length, but quite the opposite results. The surprisingly natural, primal behavior of the animals, particularly in peril, gives Flow an anguished kind of thrill that is gripping.

The animals have personalities in keeping with their species (the capybara can’t be bullied or bothered; the lemur collects and covets shiny things; the dog is big, dumb and friendly) and Zilbalodis gives over to magical realism sparingly.

The animals’ surroundings, even in moments of catastrophe, are rendered with such care and beauty they almost conjure Miyazaki. Almost. That Zilbalodis crafted such gorgeously animated scenes entirely with an open-source platform to keep budget in check is indie genius that would be only a gimmick were his storytelling instincts less stellar.

The dog doesn’t look great. I have no idea why that is, but it can pull you out of certain scenes.

Otherwise, there’s not much opportunity to slight this animated Latvian treasure sure to scoop up awards nominations this season. Catch it on the big screen while you can.

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Leader of the Pack

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Werewolves

by Hope Madden

A supermoon is a full moon that occurs as the moon is at its closest to the earth in its orbit. And this one time, the supermoon turned everyone touched by its moonlight into werewolves.

Wow. I bet that would be a fascinating movie. But that’s not the movie writer Matthew Kennedy and director Steven C. Miller are making. Their Werewolves, starring Frank Grillo, takes place one year after the supermoon that turned everyone in its light into bloodthirsty monsters. Tonight’s the night of the next supermoon, and folks are expecting the evening is about to get pretty hairy.

Who can save us?

Oh, wait. Did I say Grillo? Well, there you go.

The film feels quite a bit like The Purge with werewolves: it’s over in one night, no emergency facilities until daybreak, don’t get caught outside, pray nothing outside wants to get in.

Grillo plays a physicist with a military background whose team has been working on a vaccine. Will it work?

It has to work, damn it! We can’t survive last year’s bloodbath all over again!

It is a funny notion – beginning with what is essentially the sequel. Anyone could change if the moonlight hits them, which makes you wonder why people don’t make the universal decision to walk in the moonlight. Would werewolves kill each other with nobody else left to eat? Another possibly fun movie, but that’s not this movie.

Apparently, most folks do not want to take the chance. But Grillo has to risk it—he’s been separated from his family and must make it through the city, the wolves and the moonlight to get back to them.

There’s a vaccine spray (it only lasts one hour!), goggled children in rain slickers, post-apocalyptic zealots, gun-happy militia types, and his own limited ammo.

But let’s talk about what really matters: the monsters. How do they look?

Mainly, OK, kind of The Howling meets Rawhead Rex. Practical elements account for the old school look, which is more than welcome and fuels the grindhouse vibe. But the truth is that this is a siege action film more than a horror flick.

There’s lots of gunplay, along with some car explosions and werewolf fist fights—paw fights? It’s ridiculous fun. And if you got full moon fever as soon as you heard “Grillo’s in a werewolf action flick,” Werewolves won’t disappoint.

For Your Queue

Santa Actually

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That Christmas

by Hope Madden

More than two decades ago, writer/director Richard Curtis made a very British Christmas film. It hasn’t aged particularly well, though many folks watch it year in, year out. Including, apparently, the inhabitants of Wellington-on-Sea.

Now, that may be because That Christmas—the new animated film set in the little port village—was co-written by Curtis. The Love Actually joke is a good bit in director Simon Otto’s holiday tale that’s a bit disjointed but never lacking in charm.

The film opens with Santa (Brian Cox—wait, really?) narrating the climax of one particularly problematic Christmas Eve night in the tiny community. The worries are larger than just this massive blizzard. But to do it all justice, Santa has to take us back a few days, to the school Christmas play.

One set of twins is split on the naughty and nice lists. One tween girl, left to care for her baby sister and three other children, breaks tradition but may also be negligent enough to allow tragedy to occur. And lonesome Danny (Jack Wisniewski) fears he will spend Christmas utterly alone.

Curtis, writing with Peter Souter, creates another crisscrossing of bittersweet, intimate, interconnected Christmas stories. And once again, Bill Nighy (this time voicing the character Lighthouse Bill) is underused.

The animation is delightful, the humor decidedly British, and the hijinks wholesome but relatable and often bittersweet. One bit about an under-appreciated single mum is not only beautifully tender but also quite welcome.

But none of it is particularly funny, or terribly fresh.

Five years ago, Netflix produced Klaus, a Christmas story that was stunning to look at and full of surprises. This year’s holiday offering is a charmer, and its understated humor and wry observations help to keep it engaging regardless of your age. But that’s not enough for That Christmas to transcend the glut of Christmas fare this year (and every year) to become an annual tradition.

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Jolly Holiday

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Get Away

by Hope Madden

It’s not a terribly unique set up. A carful of travelers stops off just before their destination and the surly local, upon hearing of their destination, warns them. They mustn’t go! It is doom!

Well, that’s not exactly the message. What the surly diner owner tells Richard (Nick Frost, who also writes), Susan (Aisling Bea) and their kids Jessie (Maisie Ayers) and Sam (Sebastian Croft) is that Svälta is not a tourist destination and that the Swedish islanders will be especially unwelcoming during this, their sacred celebration.

Pish posh, they’ve rented an Airbnb. They’ll take the last ferry, face the incredibly unwelcoming islanders, and find their way to the cozy little cottage where their host Mats (Eero Milonof, Border) lost his mother by beheading about 10 years ago.

Says Jessie, “My phone’s got no signal.”

Responds her brother, “Of course it hasn’t. We’ve come on holiday to a Swedish horror film.”

Even though Get Away quickly veers into Wicker Man territory by way of Midsommar, director Steffan Haars has already established the darkly humorous vibe that will permeate the film. But this is not a horror spoof as much as it is a retooling of genre tropes meant to keep you on your toes.

Frost and Bea make for a fun duo, a dorky pair just trying to have a nice holiday and keep their kids from getting too bored. Milonof delivers an unsettling villainous vibe, as is his way, but the comic elements here allow him to flex a new muscle.

Ayres and Croft steal scenes as a pair of teens ironically commenting on everything around them, their lofty adolescent mockery of anything and everything often serving for some well-placed comedy. Ayers even gets a couple of moments of emotional honesty, which she nails.

The film’s never frightening, but it does get bloody. The island population and all they’re planning feels a bit undercooked and the red herring is forgettable, but the core cast is having enough fun to keep the film upbeat and entertaining. With some well-placed Iron Maiden and an odd cover of the old Toto Coelo tune “I Eat Cannibals,” the soundtrack keeps you intrigued as well.

New In Theaters, Nightmares Film Festival

Life in a Northern Town

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The Soul Eater

by Hope Madden

There’s a handful of filmmakers who raise anticipation with each new film. For horror fans, Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury have perched gruesomely within that prized group since their 2007 feature debut, Inside.

2021’s Kandisha was another highlight in a slew of genre films, all boundary pushers, all gorgeously shot, all benefitting from flawed characters in the grimmest of circumstances making tough, often unusual decisions.

Like Elisabeth (Virginie Ledoyen) and Franck (Paul Hamy), both working the same case—unwillingly paired as it seems a murder/suicide connects two separate cases—in a remote mountain village in France.

A married couple potentially implicated in the disappearance of a dozen children has brutally killed each other, each cannibalizing the other and reaching sexual climax before finally expiring. It’s a weird case, grisly, and for each investigator it triggers a painful past.

What the filmmakers conjure—working from a script by first time screenwriters Annelyse Batrel, Ludovic Lefebvre and Alexis Laipsker—is a pervasive paranoia that allows superstitious nonsense to look like logic. It’s a bit of a magic trick, and they pull it off by developing a sense of place that never condescends but uses outsiders’ eyes to see the creepy that’s accepted as natural by locals.

This atmosphere feeds a childlike logic that colors the film, appropriate because so many of the primary characters are children. These bruised souls give the thriller a melancholy darkness that’s hard to shake.

And The Soul Eater is more twisty thriller than the outright horror of the pair’s previous films. Though there’s carnage, blood, and a dark and thrilling finale, the true horror of the story echoes around every sad face and suspicious glance. The imagery is haunting, allowing the film to transcend its police procedural structure to become something more mysterious and troubling.

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Greek Tragedy

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Maria

by George Wolf and Hope Madden

After 2016’s Jackie and 2021’s Spencer, director Pablo Larraín wraps his Grand Dame trilogy by shining a slightly less engrossing spotlight on legendary opera diva Maria Callas.

Angelina Jolie is outstanding as the American-born Greek soprano “La Callas,” allowing Maria’s indulgence of her own iconic status to land as more realism than caricature. Jolie meets the demands of Larraín’s fondness for lip-synching close ups, and moves through the lushly detailed production design like a queen walking to her throne.

Cinematographer Edward Lachman, who earned one of his three Oscar nominations for last year’s Larraín collaboration, El Conde, elegantly captures the image of a solitary figure traveling an exquisite if lonesome city.

There is much to admire in the film, but this time screenwriter Steven Knight (who also penned Spencer) keeps the biography a bit too much at arm’s length. Anchoring the timeline in the last week of Callas’s life and then flashing back via Maria’s interview with a reporter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), Knight never lets us glimpse the full-of-life Maria that calls to us from archival footage over the closing credits.

Both Pierfrancesco Favino and Alba Rohrwacher bring needed warmth to their scenes as Callas’s devoted staff, but the balance of the film feels too tidy and glossy to be telling a life’s story.

As with both Jackie and Spencer, Larraín is able to illustrate the loneliness and isolation of an iconic woman. We see it again in Maria, we just don’t feel the tragic arc quite as deeply.

For Your Queue

Green Christmas

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Nutcrackers

by Hope Madden

If you know David Gordon Green from the recent Halloween trilogy or The Exorcist: Believer, you don’t really know David Gordon Green. Who could blame you? He’s a hard guy to know.

He followed up the four magnificent character driven indies that began his career with a trio of raucous comedies before mixing TV directing with low budget dramas. Then he did a couple of high-profile Hollywood dramas before venturing into franchise horror. The guy’s tastes are less eclectic than whiplash.

Well, with Nutcrackers, he’s back in the independent realm, but his dabblings in every format, budget and genre inform the piece.

Ben Stiller plays Michael, a Chicago real estate developer in the final throes of a project he’s been working for six years. He’s called to BFE Ohio (actually, Blanchester, Ohio) to care for his four recently orphaned nephews while the social worker (Linda Cardellini, classing up the joint) looks for a foster family.

He can only stay for the weekend, though.

Sure, sure.

It’s a classic set up—ambitious city slicker loses everything and finds out who he really is in the chaos of family and smalltown life. And at Christmas, no less! Michael is also the type of character Stiller’s played many times. But Green’s approach is strictly indie—no swelling score, no spit takes, no mugging, no reaction shots.

Green also recognizes his real stars: Homer, Arlo, Atlas and Ulysses Janson. The four newcomers deliver sweetly feral performances with an authenticity you don’t find in films like these.

Leland Douglas’s script hits familiar beats that could easily have become cookie-cutter family film fare, but Green’s execution is untidy enough—snot-faced, uncombed and realistic—to breathe new life into a familiar idea.

Stiller’s delightfully understated performance cements the genuine feel of the film. He has an easy chemistry with Cardellini as well as the Janson kids, and he mines the script’s humor for something that seems like real people being funny, rather than movie comedy.

There’s a feeling of improvisation within scenes that allows Nutcrackers plenty of surprises. On the other hand, Green’s indie approach is often a mismatch with the broad comedy hijinks in the story. Certain scripted moments—those that smack of “zany comedy adventure”—are wildly out of place, and the film never fully shakes the obviousness of its premise.

Nutcrackers mainly feels like an experiment. David Gordon Green takes a familiar Christmas family film script and sees if he can make something real out of it. He doesn’t always succeed, but he does deliver a charming mixed bag of nuts.