Tag Archives: MaddWolf

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It’s Out There

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Truth is the Only Client: The Official Investigation of the Murder of John F. Kennedy

by Rachel Willis

Quick question: do you think Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating John F. Kennedy? If you think Oswald was part of a larger network, whether tied to the mob, Cuba, or the Soviet Union, you’re not alone.

Directors Todd Kwait and Rob Stegman want to dispel the conspiracy theories once and for all. Along with Cuyahoga County Judge Brendan Sheehan, who narrates the film, Stegman and Kwait bring us a detailed look at the findings and conclusions of the Warren Commission, the committee of men charged with investigating the Kennedy assassination.

The bulk of the film features interviews with many who worked for the Commission, men who conducted witness interviews, reviewed the police and FBI reports from the crime scene, and sifted through the numerous avenues which Oswald might have been connected.

But there is also gruesome footage – the infamous Zapruder film, autopsy photos. These scenes are hard to watch. Since these things are easy to find online, their inclusion in the film could be deemed unnecessary, but they help underscore the point being made – that the conclusion Kennedy was shot from behind is accurate.

Two of the major avenues for a conspiracy are addressed in the film – the destruction of evidence by members of the FBI, and the CIA coverup of the plot to assassinate Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro. Both events became known after the Commission released its findings. These are profoundly disturbing occurrences, but do they speak to a larger conspiracy?

Not every conspiracy surrounding the assassination can be tackled in a 2 hour and 20 minute documentary, so the filmmakers try to restrict their focus to not only the most major theories, but also to a lengthy examination of Oswald himself. Some of the information presented is tedious and doesn’t do anything to convince us that Oswald acted alone. However, most of the information is pertinent to the investigation and the conclusions made.

The major question: Is any of the information presented new to those who believe Kennedy’s murder was part of a larger plot?

Maybe not, but as we approach the anniversary of the assassination, during a period of history that’s ripe with conspiracy theories, it’s worth re-examining once more. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qpSHFMne9o&t=28s

Shudder Premiere

Devil In the Details

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Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist

by George Wolf

Most of the time, limiting a documentary to only one point of view is not a winning strategy. You want balance, with a scope wide enough to deliver more than just an agenda-laden screed.

Leap of Faith doesn’t worry about all that. If your aim is to take a deep dive into the filming of The Exorcist, and director William Friedkin agrees to a lengthy interview, well, that’s that.

Sure, you could probably find someone to argue Friedkin didn’t craft one of the greatest horror films in history, but do we really need to give idiots any more screen time this year?

In just the last three years, director Alexandre O. Phillippe has deconstructed horror classics Alien (Memory: The Origins of Alien) and Psycho (78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene) to fascinating effect. Leap of Faith makes it a trifecta of terror, thanks to a film icon who also proves himself an endlessly engaging storyteller in front of the camera.

If it’s true every interview needs at least one good story to be worth the time, Phillippe’s visit with Friedkin is a pound for pound champ. The stories here – from Jason Miller taking the Father Karras role away from Stacy Keach to Friedkin’s battle with legendary composer Bernard Herrman over the score – keep you hanging on every word.

Strangely, though, the conversation never does get around to Linda Blair at all – not her casting, her performance, or the complexities of directing a teenage actress in such extreme subject matter. Even with all the compelling content here, it’s a noticeable omission.

But more than an indispensable guide through the making of a classic, Leap of Faith shines a wonderfully illuminating light on Friedkin’s creative process. Yes, Billy clearly likes him some Billy, but at 85 years old now, it’s hard to blame him.

Whether or not Phillippe knew what he was getting when first he sat down with Friedkin, the game plan no doubt materialized pretty quickly. Keep him talking, trim the fat, and then splice in the appropriate clips at the perfect time.

Leap of Faith might be a one man show, but when the show is The Exorcist and the man is William Friedkin, it feels like enough.

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Goodness and Lightsabers

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The LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special

by George Wolf

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the comedy stylings of…Emperor Palpatine!

If you’re not applauding now, you will be…you will be…as the wrinkly-faced baddie becomes the surprise standout of The LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special, a fast moving and often hilarious brick by brick homage to the entire franchise.

With narration from Master Yoda himself, the special is set around the festivities for “Life Day.” Rey and Finn have plans to attend the big celebration at Chewie’s place, but Rey is distracted.

She’s been trying to mentor Finn as a Jedi, but things aren’t going smoothly. Why can’t she train him?

Rey thinks the answers can be found with the Key to Galaxy’s Past, a tool that will let her travel across space and time and observe the training methods of previous Jedi masters. So with a promise to get back to Chewie’s as soon as possible, Rey and BB-8 take off to drop in on plenty of LEGO-fied moments from Star Wars history and gain a better understanding of the Force.

Once the time-hopping starts, director Ken Cunningham and writer David Shayne (both LEGO film veterans) unleash a barrage of wink-wink fun, highlighted by those priceless barbs from Palpatine.

This Emperor quickly becomes Darth Not-So-Serious, and no one – not Kylo Ren (“Put a shirt on!”) or anyone else (“Less talky-talky, more fighty-fighty!”) – is safe. The true power of the Dark Side? Mockery.

Featuring a smattering of voices from the original cast (Billy Dee Williams, Kelly Marie Tran, Anthony Daniels), the film threads our love of Star Wars through the spirit of some classic Christmas specials past for an irresistible family treat.

And with more lockdowns looming this Holiday season, it’s 44-minutes of smiles tailor made for repeated helpings.

The LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special debuts Nov. 17th on Disney+

Outtakes

Hellhound On My Trail

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Crossroads Book Review

by Hope Madden

Grief is such a provocative subject for horror. It’s a topic ill-suited to other genres because there—in an uplifting love story or very special drama—the tale is rarely really about the person who’s grieving. Those stories are usually more interested in the people around the grief-stricken whose goal is to alter the situation—end the perfectly reasonable process of suffering that accompanies a terrible loss. Rush a happy ending.

Essentially, they no longer want to deal with someone else’s pain. Horror is different in that way. It’s very comfortable with pain.

Laurel Hightower’s Crossroads introduces you to those other people, too—the father, who’s begun to move on; the grandmother, who can’t stand letting her daughter have the attention. But because of the point of view character in this spooky novella, you’re never more than a whisper away from the desperate pain of a mother willing to make rash choices to end her grief.

Chris stops by the site of her teenage son Trey’s fatal car accident every day after work. She’s been doing this for two years, almost to the date, when she cuts her hand on the wooden cross that marks the spot. Her blood soaks into the ground there at the crossroads, and things will never be the same for Chris again.

Hightower never wallows or dips into the maudlin as she shadows a woman whose life has ceased to exist outside the rituals that keep her son alive for her. The device introduces us to a character who’s simultaneously rational and a bit crazy, a necessary component for the supernatural tale the author conjures.

Congratulations are due to a writer who can create an atmosphere where you can believe not only the supernatural events, but the behavior of the central character, and Hightower has achieved both. We’re in it with Chris, we understand her thought processes and we ache for her loss.

Crossroads is a tale about grief and about parenthood, about what we do and do not learn from our own parents, and how entities outside ourselves read and manipulate us. It explores a personality type primed for sacrifice. Part of what make the novella so tough is that Chris feels incredibly familiar, so deeply human.

Hightower knows how to work your nerves and deliver a gut punch. She lulls you and then delivers a powerful emotional blow. You’ll be thinking about this one for a while.

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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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TGIF

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Freaky

by Hope Madden

Nobody has more fun with the slasher genre than writer/director Christopher Landon. (Well, maybe his writing partner Michael Kennedy.)

Three years ago, the duo created a time loop to allow one victim to return from the dead again and again and again and again until she stopped the marauder. Happy Death Day was so much more fun than it had any right to be, thanks, in part, to a giddy appreciation of the genre and some great casting.

Landon and Kennedy are at it again, and this time the premise and casting might be even better.

What if Freaky Friday met Friday the 13th?

That’s gold right there.

Freaky is as upbeat and lesson-filled as any Disney coming-of-age film, and its body count is as high and as messy as anything in the Voorhees universe. It’s a bloody riot, and Vince Vaughn hasn’t been this much fun since Old School.

Vaughn plays the Blissfield Butcher—at least for a while. But the boogeyman who haunts Blissfield teens right around Homecoming each year steals a cool looking dagger while dispatching nubile youth at an art collector’s house. When he uses the weapon on Millie (Kathryn Newton, Blockers), their souls magically reassign. The evil menace wakes up inside the body of a 5’5” high schooler while Millie wakes up looking like Vince Vaughn.

Oh, the hijinks.

Part of the subversive fun is watching Landon and Kennedy’s wish fulfilment, as the now-evil high schooler dispatches bully teachers, catty bitches and would-be gang rapist jocks. But most of the joy is in watching Vaughn.

He doesn’t overdo it, either. His gestures aren’t wildly feminine—he never feels like a caricature of a high school girl. It’s still funny, but the humor is far less built on a man playing a girl as it is on a petite female inhabiting the body of a really enormous man. That’s mainly the terrain Vaughn and Landon mine for physical comedy, and it is fertile ground.

And the fact that Vaughn so believably conjures the heart of a teenage girl makes any number of scenes—especially the romantic ones—delightfully sweet and tender.

And also, a lot of people die. This is not a PG-13 comedy. But it is a hoot.

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Wreathal Weapon

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Fatman

by George Wolf

Talk about a brand new bag.

As an entry into the Holiday season, Fatman gives us a Santa with serious issues and some high-powered heat to unpack. This is a movie that’s going to piss plenty of people off, starting right at the top of the cast list.

Starring as Chris Cringle himself, Mel Gibson is the antithesis of holly and jolly. Times are tough at the workshop, since Chris’s government contract pays by the present and kids seem to get more naughty every year.

One of those is Billy (Chance Hurstfield from Good Boys), an entitled rich boy who makes servants do his school projects and threatens torture to any classmate who might beat him out of a blue ribbon.

Santa knows who’s been bad or good, and Billy gets a big ‘ol lump of coal. Billy, for badness sake, decides that Santa must die.

Ruthless assassin Skinny Man (Walton Goggins) has his own grudge against the Fatman, so when the call from Billy comes in, he’s only too happy to make the long trek to the North Pole and stain the snow with Santa’s blood.

It only takes minutes to realize casting Gibson and his baggage was the perfect harbinger of what writers/directors Eshom and Ian Nelms (Small Town Crime) are bringing home for the holidays. This is no bad Santa, this is a dark and confrontational Santa, in an ambitiously unfocused and often bitingly funny takedown on everything from Trumpism to the military industrial complex to capitalism itself.

Gibson delivers with a gritty, committed performance that’s aided tremendously by the glorious Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Ruth Cringle. The two share a wonderful chemistry, as Ruth consistently brings the measured, cookie-baking wisdom to calm Chris’s gruff cynicism.

Workshop shortfalls force the Cringles into accepting a government contract to manufacture military hardware, which lets the Nelms brothers show just how far they’re willing to go in depicting Santa as a struggling businessman weary from the fight. Indeed, they go far enough to threaten the precision of their own barbs.

When the foreman elf comments, “It’s the giving that keeps him young,” the sudden deadpan underscores the clash of goals that muddies the road leading to the film’s final showdown. A little more lean in either direction – coal black humor or grim metaphor – might have upped the accessibility and impact.

But why would two filmmakers use uncomfortable realities, casual obscenities, wanton gunplay and blood-soaked violence to blaspheme the pristine legend of Santa Claus in the first place?

That’s a good question. The Nelms boys are glad you asked, and if you’re open to it, Fatman has a wholly unexpected, brazenly unapologetic and pretty satisfying answer.


Many thanks to Daniel Baldwin for “Wreathal Weapon”

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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.

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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.