Tag Archives: Madd at the Movies

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Passing Through Nature to Eternity

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Hamnet

by Hope Madden

It’s been five years since Chloé Zhao took home two Oscars, one for directing and one for adapting the screenplay for Nomadland. She returns to form in both respects with Hamnet, the cinematic adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel that imagines the way grief may have shaped Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy.

Zhao’s film opens stunningly on Jessie Buckley, nestled womblike among the roots of a massive tree, her face and hands dirty, her hair tangled with leaves. Buckley is Agnes, believed by those in town to be the daughter of a forest witch. Agnes comes from what is.

Will (Paul Mescal) imagines what can be. The hyper real poetry of Zhao’s camera perfectly articulates their yin/yang balance.

It’s with Will that we first see Agnes’s nurturing side applied to humanity rather than the wild. It’s a trait that will become the backbone of their story. Her love is powerful, messy, and unforgiving, and Buckley’s more than up to the task. Her performance, as is so often the case, feels dangerous and uncensored. And gazing adoringly at her, inspired and nurtured, is Will. If there is a better face in cinema than Mescal’s for earnest yet doomed longing, I don’t know whose it could be.

The young cast more than keeps pace. Jacobi Jupe is particularly amazing and utterly heartbreaking as Will and Agnes’s boy, Hamnet. (His older brother Noah Jupe also impresses later in the film as the actor portraying the great Dane in the first ever stage production.)

By the time the most famous lines in theatre are uttered, it takes restraint and rawness. The slightest hint of artifice and the previous ninety minutes are ruined, the film a gimmick. But Zhao never skirts artifice, not even when she makes a Marvel movie, and Mescal delivers lines we know by heart as if they were freshly pulled from an open wound.

Zhao has crafted, aided by magnificent performances and hauntingly stunning cinematography from Lukasz Zal (The Zone of Interest, Cold War), a film that is shattering in its articulation that it is the depth of love that deepens and amplifies the pain of grief.

People make movies about grief all the time. We can expect one every Oscar season. But what Chloé Zhao does with Hamnet is ask us to experience that grief, not just witness it, and in experiencing it we understand the power and vital importance of art.

Fright Club

Fright Club: Attics in Horror

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We’ve gone exploring to find all our Christmas decorations! It led us to the basement (which we discuss with Jamie Ray over on his amazing Fave Five from Fans podcast), and into the attic! That’s where we stay for a countdown of the best attics in horror movies!

5. 30 Days of Night (2007)

A pod of survivors hides in an attic, careful not to make any noise or draw any attention to themselves. One old man has dementia, which generates a lot of tension in the group, since he’s hard to contain and keep quiet.

There’s no knowing whether the town has any other survivors, and some of these guys are getting itchy. Then they hear a small voice outside.

Walking and sobbing down the main drag is a little girl, crying for help. It’s as pathetic a scene as any in such a film, and it may be the first moment in the picture where you identify with the trapped, who must do the unthinkable. Because, what would you do?

As the would-be heroes in the attic begin to understand this ploy, the camera on the street pulls back to show Danny Huston and crew perched atop the nearby buildings. The sobbing tot amounts to the worm on their reel.

Creepy business!

4. Hereditary (2018)

With just a handful of mannerisms, one melodic clucking noise, and a few seemingly throwaway lines, Ari Aster and his magnificent cast quickly establish what will become nuanced, layered human characters, all of them scarred and battered by family.

Art and life imitate each other to macabre degrees while family members strain to behave in the manner that feels human, seems connected, or might be normal. What is said and what stays hidden, what’s festering in the attic and in the unspoken tensions within the family, it’s all part of a horrific atmosphere meticulously crafted to unnerve you.

Aster takes advantage of a remarkably committed cast to explore family dysfunction of the most insidious type. Whether his supernatural twisting and turning amount to metaphor or fact hardly matters with performances this unnerving and visual storytelling this hypnotic.

3. The Birds (1963)

As The Birds opens, wealthy socialite Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) has followed hottie bachelor lawyer Mitch (Rod Taylor) to little Bodega Bay, his hometown, to play a flirtatious practical joke of cat and mouse. But you know what will eat both cats and mice? Birds.

Hitchcock introduces a number of provocative characters, including Hedren’s not-that-likeable heroine. Suzanne Pleshette’s lovelorn schoolteacher’s a favorite. But whatever the character, the dread is building, so they need to work together to outwit these goddamn birds.

The film is basically an intelligent zombie film, although it predates our traditional zombie by a good many years, so maybe, like every other dark film genre, the zombie film owes its history to Hitchcock. The reason the birds behave so badly is never explained, they grow in number, and they wait en masse for you to come outside. No one’s off limits – a fact Hitch announces at the children’s party. Nice!

Though the FX were astonishing for 1963, the whole episode feels a bit campy today. But if you’re in the mood for a nostalgic, clean cut and yet somehow subversive foray into fairly bloodless horror, or if, like one of us, you’re just afraid of birds, this one’s a classic.

2. The Changeling (1980)

George C. Scott is a grieving father isolating himself in an old mansion. But something in that mansion in Peter Medak’s atmospheric ghost story is drawn to him.

The Changeling is a beautiful, haunting mystery full of melancholy and grief. Scott’s big, gruff performance breaks with vulnerability just often enough to jerk a tear or two in a film that’s spooky, lovely, and satisfying.

1. Black Christmas (1974)

Director Bob Clark made two Christmas-themed films in his erratic career. His 1940s era A Christmas Story has become a holiday tradition for many families and most cable channels, but we celebrate a darker yule tide tale: Black Christmas.

Sure, it’s another case of mysterious phone calls leading to grisly murders; sure it’s another one-by-one pick off of sorority girls; sure, there’s a damaged child backstory; naturally John Saxon co-stars. Wait, what was different? Oh yeah, it did it first.

Released in 1974, the film predates most slashers by at least a half dozen years. It created the architecture. More importantly, the phone calls are actually quite unsettling, there is something fantastically horrifying staring out the window in the attic, and the end of the film is a powerful, memorable nightmare.

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Happy Holidays, Ya Filthy Animals

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Zootopia 2

by Hope Madden

It’s been a decade since Disney rewrote their longstanding history of rocking no boats when the delightfully fearless Zootopia asked its audience to confront our own biases and recognize the way we are programmed to fear the weak to benefit the powerful.

Animators Jared Bush and Byron Howard maybe looked around and noticed certain themes trending again. Zootopia 2, which both direct and Bush writes solo this time, benefits from the same fantastic casting, same visual splendor, same wit as their 2016 Oscar winner. But Bush’s writing burns a little more brightly with anger this time, however charmingly packaged.

Bunny cop Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) and her fox partner, Nick Wilde (Jason Batemen), will not content themselves to sitting on the sidelines as rookies when there are real crimes to investigate. Judy believes the weird material she found at the scene of a smuggling crime is actually the shed skin of a snake—and reptiles are banned from Zootopia! They’re weird and dangerous! Just ask the powerful land baron heirs of generational wealth, the Lynxleys!

Do you know how to immediately convince children and adults alike that Gary the heat-sensitive pit viper is, indeed, no threat all? Besides naming him Gary? Cast Ke Huy Quan, whose performance, even when it’s only vocal, sings of harmlessness.

Is Gary being framed? Can conspiracy-seeking podcasting beaver Nibbles Maplestick (Fortune Feimster, hilarious) help in the investigation? Can Judy and Nick’s friendship survive another big case? Is any of this worth dying for?

Boy, that last one’s a big question for a kid’s movie, but Zootopia 2 is committed to asking big questions. It’s equally committed to hilarious sight gags (Hungry Hungry Hippo and Ratatoullie were battling for my favorite, but then they brought out the hedge maze). So it’s a good balance.

Bush’s plot is a little complicated for the youngest viewers, and the film takes a while to really find its groove. But it’s also shockingly relevant and sometimes powerfully emotional. Plus, Patrick Warburton as a vainglorious blond show horse movie star turned mayor is a hoot.

It’s great to see a family film that reminds kids (and adults) that bullies are often the people with the most money, and that the bully is always the problem. Zootopia 2 may not be the utter revelation of the original, but it is an excellent sequel and a tale worth telling.

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A Murder of Crows

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The Thing with Feathers

by Hope Madden

Novelist Max Porter puts readers into headspaces we might just as well not want to visit, but he creates a territory that’s slyly hopeful. In Shy, beautifully adapted as Steve for Netflix by Tim Mielants with Cillian Murphy, Porter explores form to help us think as a troubled boy.

Porter’s first novel, 2015’s Grief Is a Thing with Feathers, likewise experiments to mimic the overwhelming despair of grief as it visits a man (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his two young sons (Richard and Henry Boxall) in the form of a huge, unsympathetic crow (voice by David Thewlis with Eric Lampaert inside the suit).

That’s right, there is a suit. It’s designed with menacing beauty by Nicola Hicks, and the physical presence, along with the echoing caw and inky shadows in the art design, heighten the chaotic despair haunting writer/director Dylan Southern’s film.

Dad is unable to get past his wife’s sudden death. In fact, he doesn’t want to “come to terms” with anything, can’t even imagine what the terms in this situation could be. He wants her back, and in the face of that impossibility, he just wants to feel the absence as keenly and entirely as possible. Which is wildly irresponsible and selfish for a dad.

So, Crow—terrifying, comforting, confrontational, riotous—settles in with the family to make things worse. Or better. Depends who you ask.

The always reliable Cumberbatch digs deep for this one, offering an unadorned performance that aches with authenticity. A film so darkly fanciful needed this level of unvarnished vulnerability at its core, and what Cumberbatch delivers is fearless and beautiful.

Both boys are likewise beautiful, and Southerland’s dreamy direction waltzes easily in perspective from child to man to crow without losing the melancholy music the film develops.

The plot lacks structure, though, and Cumberbatch’s performance is not anchor enough. In place of beats and form, Southerland inserts poetic analogy, some of which border on cliché.

It’s a funny balance, not dark enough to be folk horror, not story-driven enough to be a satisfying drama. But The Thing with Feathers boasts a darkly beautiful imagination and enough transfixing performances to make it worth a look.

The Screening Room

Screening Room: Wicked: For Good, Sisu: Road to Revenge, Rental Family, Jay Kelly & More

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Hope & George review this week’s new releases: Wicked: For Good, Sisu: Road to Revenge, Jay Kelly, Rental Family, Sentimental Value, Peter Hujar’s Day, Reawakening, Altered, and Time Travel Is Dangerous. Plus, movie news & notes from The Schlocketeer Daniel Baldwin!

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Historical Portrait

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Peter Hujar’s Day

by Hope Madden

Linda Rosenkranz blurred lines between fiction and nonfiction, turning conversation into a microcosm of Chelsea Hotel-orbiting 1970s society. Peter Hujar—one artist in that orbit—provided photographic evidence of the same.

Writer/director Ira Sachs attempts to trap that same lightning on screen with Peter Hujar’s Day. Sachs adapts a transcript, part of a planned book by Rosenkrantz in which her artist friends simply dictated, in detail, every event of the previous day. We catch Peter Hujar on December 18, 1974.

Ben Whishaw is Hujar, dutifully detailing his previous day to a prodding, intimate Rosenkranz (Rebecca Hall). Theirs are the only faces you see, the only voices you hear, for the film’s brisk 75-minute run time.

The two fall into a delightfully familiar chemistry, Linda a little protective, Peter a tad vulnerable, but certainly committed. Every detail—from sleeping through his alarm and being awakened by a phone call, through all the phone calls, naps, liverwurst sandwiches, right up until being awakened in the middle of the night by the prostitutes talking business under his window—is recounted.

Faithful to the tone of Rosenkranz’s body of work, Sachs spotlights the fiction structuring the nonfiction, blurring lines while drawing attention to them. The banality of the exercise—forcing himself to remember every forgettable detail of a day—strips the conversation of ego or pretention, unveiling introspection and struggle.

Whishaw is exceptional, the rote and self-consciousness at the beginning of the conversation evolving into self-effacing humor and, eventually, raw bursts of personal reflection touched by lilting melancholy.

Hall is a gift in this role, the personification of the absolute joy in simply giving your attention, listening and being with a person.

Set design and cinematography befit not just the time period but the portraiture Hujar is known for. Sachs captures kindship and camaraderie among artists.

Peter Hujar’s Day is a peek inside a lost and treasured time, an era of punk rock artistic and literary revolution. It’s also a bittersweet dance with an artist underappreciated in his time, whose work and words pack a punch 50 years on.

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Which Witch

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Wicked: For Good

by Hope Madden and George Wolf

The lights are flickering, intermission is over, and Wicked: For Good brings us all back to that good problem Glinda and Elphaba have always had.

How do you match the high from part one?

Well, director Jon M. Chu and his magical cast return to do much of what they just did, for a grand, satisfying conclusion that comes about as close to last year’s Wicked as the material allows.

Did I say grand? Make that Grande.

As Glinda, Ariana takes more of the lead this time, in another pitch perfect turn that leans on the wonderful harmony with Cynthia Erivo’s amazing Elphaba.

After embracing the black hat and broom, Elphie is now on the run. The Wizard (Jeff Goldbum) and Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) have opened the yellow brick road and ratcheted up their propaganda campaign, convincing the Ozzians of Elphie’s wickedness and the need to crack down on both animals and munchkins.

Glinda has become an official goodwill ambassador, putting on fake displays of magic and prepping the kingdom for her lavish upcoming wedding to Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Baily).

But Glinda and Fiyero know Elphie is not evil. If they help broker a truce and bring her home, can The Wizard be trusted?

The layers of state-sponsored disinformation, discrimination and cruelty are – surprise! – even more relevant this time, but become less of a focus. A promised romance finally emerges, along with the need to connect the narrative with legendary story beats from The Wizard of Oz.

Baily doesn’t squander his limited screen time. And while the romance has always been secondary to the friendship in jeopardy, it’s still fun to see Elphie decide there’s something to enjoy in being wicked.

Nathan Crowleys’s production design, Paul Tazewell’s costuming and the cinematography from Alice Brooks continue to dazzle, each environment and ensemble styled to emphasize the individuals Elphie and Glinda are becoming. Erivo embraces Elphaba’s maturity and resolve, and she’s never sounded better.

But Grande is the belle of this ball. Glinda trades in her rose colored glasses for clarity, and Grande wields the character’s vulnerability in ways that make the transformation heartbreakingly lovely.

Chu’s commitment to the source material—both the stage musical and Gregory Maguire’s novel—again delivers a compelling, resonant spectacle. But, as was true with the stage production, “Defying Gravity” is the high point of this show. Despite two original tunes, this second half contains fewer truly memorable songs, and ties to the events of The Wizard of Oz feel a bit forced.

And though Chu and returning writers Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox make some course corrections along this yellow brick road, the subtext and emotional depth of storytelling fall just a clock tick below the sublime fantasy of part one.

That’s really been the case since the original show’s opening night. The first half is just stronger, and there is no shame at all in this second place. Far from it. Wicked: For Good is thrilling, impeccably crafted and wonderfully performed. And after all these years and impossibly high expectations, for the complete adaptation of Wicked to be this satisfying may be the most impressive gravity-defying feat of them all.

Fright Club

Fright Club: Kidnapping Horror

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The idea of being kidnapped is one of those primal fears, one of the first worries we have as children. No doubt those fears have inspired many of these horror movies, and our own connection to those same anxieties the reason why so many of them hit home. From Hounds of Love to Split, Don’t Breathe to Misery, Last House on the Left to Prisoners and so many more, movies centered on kidnapping can leave you breathless and scarred. That must be why we had such a tough time landing on our five favorites. But here they are, live from the Gateway Film Center on Ohio State University campus.

5. The Woman (2011)

There’s something not quite right about Chris Cleese (an unsettlingly cherubic Sean Bridgers), and his family’s uber-wholesomeness is clearly suspect. This becomes evident once Chris hunts down a feral woman (an awesome Pollyanna McIntosh), chains her, and invites the family to help him “civilize” her.

The film rethinks family – well, patriarchy, anyway. You know from the opening, sunshiny segment that nothing is as lovely as it seems, but what lurks underneath this wholesome facade begins with some obvious ugliness—abuse, incest—but where it leads is diabolical.

Nothing happens in this film by accident – not even the innocent seeming baking of cookies – nor does it ever happen solely to titillate. It’s a dark and disturbing adventure that finds something unsavory in our primal nature and even worse in our quest to civilize. Don’t even ask about what it finds in the dog pen.

4. The Loved Ones (2009)

Writer/director/Tasmanian Sean Byrne upends high school clichés and deftly maneuvers between gritty drama and glittery carnage in a story that borrows from other horror flicks but absolutely tells its own story.

Brent (Xavier Samuel) is dealing with guilt and tragedy in his own way, and his girlfriend Holly tries to be patient with him. Oblivious to all this, Lola (a gloriously wrong-minded Robin McLeavy) asks Brent to the end of school dance. He politely declines, which proves to be probably a poor decision.

Inside Lola’s house, we’re privy to the weirdest, darkest image of a spoiled princess and her daddy. The daddy/daughter bonding over power tool related tasks is – well – I’m not sure touching is the right word for it.

The Loved Ones is a cleverly written, unique piece of filmmaking that benefits from McLeavy’s inspired performance as much as it does its filmmaker’s sly handling of subject matter.

3. I’m Not Scared (2003)

Director Gabriele Salvatores (Mediterraneo) crafts a perfect, gripping, breathless thriller with his Italian period piece. In a tiny Southern Italian town, kids run through lushly photographed fields on the hottest day of the year. They’re playing, and also establishing a hierarchy, and with their game Salvatores introduces a tension that will not let up until the last gasping breaths of his film.

Michele (Giuseppe Cristiano) sees a boy down a deep hole on a neighboring farm. The boy, Filippo (Mattia Di Pierro), believes he is dead and Michele is an angel. But the truth is far more sinister. I’m Not Scared is a masterpiece of a thriller.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUI09lqnelQ

2. Oldboy (2003)

A guy passes out after a hard night of drinking. It’s his daughter’s birthday, and that helps us see that this guy is a dick. He wakes up a prisoner in a weird, apartment-like cell. Here he stays for years and years.

The guy is Dae-su Oh (Min-sik Choi). The film is Oldboy, director Chan-wook Park’s masterpiece of subversive brutality and serious wrongdoing.

Choi is unforgettable as the film’s anti-hero, and his disheveled explosion of emotion is perfectly balanced by the elegantly evil Ji-tae Yu.

Choi takes you with him through a brutal, original, startling and difficult to watch mystery. You will want to look away, but don’t do it! What you witness will no doubt shake and disturb you, but missing it would be the bigger mistake.

1. The Vanishing (Spoorloos) (1988)

Back in ’88, filmmaker George Sluizer and novelist Tim Krabbe adapted his novel about curiosity killing a cat. The result is a spare, grim mystery that works the nerves.

An unnervingly convincing Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu takes us through the steps, the embarrassing trial and error, of executing his plan. His Raymond is a simple person, really, and one fully aware of who he is: a psychopath and a claustrophobe.

Three years ago, Raymond abducted Saskia (Johanna ter Steege), and her boyfriend Rex (Gene Bervoets) has gone a bit mad with the mystery of what happened to her. So mad, in fact, that when Raymond offers to clue him in as long as he’s willing to suffer the same fate, Rex bites. Do not make the mistake of watching Sluizer’s neutered 1993 American remake.