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Welcome to the Neighborhood

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The Overnight

by Hope Madden

When handled properly, even the slightest premise or most ridiculous behavior can turn into an insightful and moving observation. Such is the case with the frank and uncomfortable sex comedy The Overnight.

Emily and Alex (Taylor Schilling and Adam Scott, respectively) recently relocated from Seattle to LA, and while their youngster RJ has a birthday party to attend that will help him make friends, they are still feeling a little isolated and friendless. That is, until uber-hipster Kurt (Jason Schwartzman) approaches them at the park after his son befriends theirs.

The kids hit it off, the parents hit it off, and Kurt invites the whole gang back to his place for an impromptu pizza party. What could be better? Go spend 24 hours with your neighbors and see how weird it gets.

Schwartzman is spot on perfection, as is often the case, with the smarmy but likeable but maybe creepy but kind of awesome Kurt. Few if any can hit these notes of self-parody caricature and earnest vulnerability quite this well.

Scott, as the tightly wound, trying-too-hard straight man to Schwartzman’s nut is equally impressive. Luckily, it’s not just odd couple schtick the two are after, though. They, as well as Schilling and Judith Godreche, as Kurt’s wife Charlotte, toggle nicely between broad comedy and precise, insightful characterization.

Like a less precious, more contemporary Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, The Overnight flirts with the idea of partner swapping as a way to explore more: personal insecurities, relationships, love, commitment, boredom, and breast pump fetishists.

Although you always have the sense of where things are going, there’s a surprise in nearly every scene. Not every one pays off, but most of them land with a laugh and maybe an awkward shudder. Though writer/director Patrick Brice mines the embarrassing situation on a near-Noah Baumbach level, his film is compassionate. He gives his four performers room to breathe, sometimes hold their breath, but they’re able to be mortified and vulnerable simultaneously.

The Overnight is a perceptive if bawdy comedy directed with nuance for laughs and resonance. Brice can’t nail the tone consistently enough, the overarching tale leans too heavily on giddy expectation, and the female characters are not given enough chance to evolve, but that hardly sinks this ship. Schwartzman and Scott are an inspired pairing and the film is a nice, adult minded comedy to offset the summer’s blockbuster glut.

Verdict-3-5-Stars

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Some Bonds are Stronger than Others

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Bound to Vengeance

by Hope Madden

Revenge fantasies have been theatrical staples since writers first put quill to parchment. Even the rape-revenge fantasy has been a mainstay of genre filmmaking for generations. Somehow director Jose Manuel Cravioto mixes the classic theatricality with both common exploitation and an unsettling contemporary relevance in his first English language effort, Bound to Vengeance.

Combining present tense narrative with flashback footage, the film unveils the predicament that has befallen Eve (a believably intense Tina Ivlev). Chained in filth in the basement of an isolated old house, Eve finally makes her escape but chooses to risk herself further by keeping her captor alive long enough to fulfill an obligation.

The filmmaker thankfully skirts unseemly titillation. Though his film uses sex trafficking as its basis for horror, Cravioto does not rely on the shock value lechery that has driven other films of the sort. Because the film is told from Eve’s perspective, we’re given the opportunity to find humanity and compassion.

But don’t write the film off to political correctness. Craviotio makes some provocative decisions that won’t thrill every viewer, although they do seem to serve the unsettling reality of the film itself.

Ivlev tinges her character’s tenacity with just enough PTSD flourishes to make the character both realistic and unpredictable, while Richard Tyson is creepy perfection as her foil. Is he the sympathetic simpleton he makes himself out to be, or the conniving psychopathic predator you’d imagine could be capable of this inhuman behavior?

Give writers Rock Shaink Jr. and Keith Kjornes credit – every time a character makes a careless or stupid decision, it isn’t simply convenient writing. There’s a reason for most everything that happens here.

This is a small film, visually grimy and difficult to watch, but it’s Cravioto’s restraint that makes it worth the effort. Very little here feels exploitative, and he never gives over to sentimentality. He invests in characters and reminds us why the revenge fantasy has remained as compelling as it has for as long as people have told stories.

Verdict-3-0-Stars

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A Different Kind of Avenger

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Felt

by Hope Madden

Few among us have even heard of the film Felt, and those who have are misled. Packaged as a feminist superhero movie about rape culture, this film has less in common with rape/revenge fantasies like I Spit on Your Grave and American Mary and more in common with mumblecore.

This is a peculiar, intimate, meandering meditation on a single person’s struggle with trauma. The fact that Amy (co-writer Amy Everson) works through her problems by creating hyper-masculine costumes that she wears in the woods, accompanied only by her anger and her wooden sword, is really what sets Felt apart from other art films.

Director/co-writer Jason Banker’s camera is intimate and awkward, an ideal combination that mirrors Amy’s state of mind. There’s something uneasy in the quick edits, extreme close ups, and wandering visuals that suggests Amy’s perspective.

Recovering from an unspecified but clearly sexual trauma, Amy slowly deserts the socially accepted course of healing – those steps her friends keep urging her to take – instead filling her room with art that’s equally childish and grotesque, most of it phallic.

But it’s the costumes that seem to help Amy regain some measure of personal power, and the film’s strongest scenes are those in which she explores this empowerment. Whether she and her penis suit are scaling trees, or she wears her exaggerated vagina and breast outfit to upend a sexy photo session, the behavior is unpredictable, fascinating, and sometimes weirdly funny.

The scene with the photographer and new friend Roxanne (Roxanne Lauren Knouse) is a scream, and something truly unlike anything else in film. Roxanne immediately embraces what it is Amy is trying to do, which is why she’s disappointed when Amy does what her other friends see as healthy – gets a new boyfriend.

Kenny (Kentucker Audley) represents a gentle, patient soul willing to wait for Amy, but with trust comes vulnerability. There’s a circuitous nature to the sparse narrative. Traditional relationships find an echo later in the film, the second time with Amy in a position of power, but she is ill prepared to handle the shift.

The film boasts very little dialog, and as a curious onscreen presence, Everson is a master. At times, though, the lines delivered feel too obvious for the film itself, and in the end Everson and Banker fall back on behavior too predictable for the fractured fairy tale they’ve crafted. They do leave you unsettled, though. There’s no big hurrah, no sense of accomplishment, just more of the same maddening nightmare.

Verdict-3-5-Stars

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Still a Magic Man

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Magic Mike XXL

by Hope Madden

Rarely is a sequel superior to the original film – Bride of Frankenstein, The Empire Strikes Back, maybe The Godfather, Part 2. That’s heady company for Magic Mike XXL – in fact, the movie should never really be mentioned in the same sentence as those particular films – but let’s give it its due. It is a better movie than the original.

It’s been three years since Mike (Channing Tatum) left male entertainment behind him for the settled life. But he’s bored, basically, and he misses it, so he joins the old Tampa Kings for one last trip to the national stripper convention in Myrtle Beach.

There is a huge, gaping hole in this film shaped like Matthew McConaughey, who was the only reason to watch the original. McConaughey was Dallas, the leader and emcee for the Tampa Kings, and the performance was positively unhinged. This was just at the beginning of what anthropologists will call the McConaissance – that period of unbelievable performances that led to his first Oscar. He does not return for the sequel, and his inspired lunacy is dearly missed.

On the other hand, both Alex Pettyfer and Cody Horn are blessedly missing. I’m sure they’re nice people, but Lord they cannot act.

Another positive change, weirdly enough, is a switch in director. Steven Soderbergh directed the original to be a gritty expose on the dangerous world of Florida stripper life, while the film owes its irrational success to one thing: beefcake.

Director Gregory Jacobs embraces this. Welcome aboard a road trip of muscle and thong, spray tans and gyration as Tatum and his buds hope to pull off one last, big dance. They want to go out in a tsunami of dollar bills and they hope you brought your singles.

Tatum is effortlessly charming, as always, but his posse gets more of an opportunity to show off personality as well as pecs this time around. Joe Manganiello, in particular, gets more screen time in a film that’s far more bromance than romantic comedy.

There are also cameos aplenty, some glitter, some baby oil, and at least as much screaming inside the theater as on the screen. Ladies, calm down.

Magic Mike XXL is not a great movie by any stretch, but it knows what it is and it runs with it. Well, dances with it. And that’s fine.

Verdict-3-0-Stars

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The Jackasses of Activism

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The Yes Men Are Revolting

By Christie Robb

As you take shelter from yet another downpour and check in on the interwebs, have you seen that thing Pope Francis said about humanity ruining the planet? Or Jeb Bush’s command for him to shut his pointy-hat wearing trap? Or the latest on California drying up like a raisin?

Well, there’s a documentary out on that theme, The Yes Men Are Revolting.

The Yes Men, activists Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno (not their real names) have been together since the 90s egging each other on to ever escalating heights of ridiculousness in an attempt to prank corporations and climate change deniers.

In order to draw public attention to issues, they stage phony press events and impersonate lobbyists, employees of corporations, and/or governmental agencies and announce dramatic shifts in policy, like Canada agreeing to pay 1% of its GDP to help poor countries adapt to climate change. (Imagine the guys from Jackass, but with a political agenda.)

Often, the stunts get picked up as legitimate stories by mainstream media, before the folks they’ve been impersonating scramble to set the record straight and do damage control.

This, the Yes Men’s third film, covers their attempts to draw the public’s attention to climate change while simultaneously dealing with transformation in the duo’s own lives. They’ve been doing this gig for a while. Now, Bonanno’s married with two kids and one on the way. Bichlbaum finally finds a man he wants to settle down with. Both men have other jobs that put demands on them. They’re asking questions: How much time can they devote to their stunts and each other anymore? Is activism even worth it? What difference are they actually making? Isn’t the world in worse shape now than when they started?

Despite these questions and the gloom generated by any discussion of climate change, The Yes Men Are Revolting will not result in you wanting to slit your wrists.

Bichlbaum and Bonanno’s enjoyment of each other and their vocation, the silliness of their fake names and awful disguises, the quality of the ideas at the heart of their pranks, and a final act that involves getting defense contractors to awkwardly dance, make this film fun and even potentially inspirational.

Verdict-3-0-Stars

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Everybody’s Got One

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Hungry Hearts

by Hope Madden

New parents can easily panic at the counterintuitive, conflicting, hyperbolic, self-righteous nonsense that purports to be parenting advice. At no time in your life do you feel more of a need to be strong and reliable, and at no time do you see yourself as more of an underprepared moron. It can be terrifying.

Hungry Hearts mines that terror in provocative and insightful ways as it invites us into the crumbling relationship between Mina (Alba Rohrwacher) and Jude (Adam Driver).

Jude and Mina’s tale is told in terms of proximity rather than intimacy. From their remarkable meeting throughout their courtship and marriage, their story is articulated by its confinement, the fragile power struggle almost always shown in corporeal terms: Inside this small space, whose body is controlling whose?

From this perspective, the casting is impeccable, with Driver’s unintimidating lankiness at odds with, and often physically overwhelming, the petite Rohrwacher.

Driver is a master at walking the line between vulnerability and believable insincerity, a skill he puts to impressive use here. Jude seems so harmless, sees himself as harmless, and he certainly doesn’t intend to do anything other than love and respect his family. That’s why he’s so confounded when it all goes south.

It’s a provocative story where Jude’s seemingly small acts of power lead to the need for more concrete acts, although it is Mina’s helplessness in the face of all those small but profound betrayals that created her paranoia in the first place.

Director Severio Costanzo traps you in this insulated world. What looks and feels like an indie drama gives way to the distorted camerawork and intentional score of horror. The tonal shift doesn’t always work, and the third act feels too tidy and conventional for the film itself, but you never lose interest.

What Costanzo has created, and what his small but game cast has almost perfectly animated, is a nuanced, delicate nightmare of helplessness, control and madness with the fate of a 7-month-old in the balance.

Verdict-3-5-Stars

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It’s Not the Sandman

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The Nightmare

by Hope Madden

An effective scary movie is one that haunts your dreams long after the credits roll. It’s that kind of impact most horror buffs are seeking, but even the most ardent genre fan will hope out loud that Rodney Ascher’s new documentary The Nightmare doesn’t follow them to sleep.

His film explores sleep paralysis. It’s a sleep disorder – or a label hung on the world’s most unfortunate night terrors – that’s haunted humanity for eons. Most sufferers never realize that others share their misery.

Sleep paralysis is the phenomenon that inspired Wes Craven to write A Nightmare on Elm Street. It’s a clear creative root for Insidious, Borgman and scores of other horror movies. But it isn’t fiction. It’s a sometimes nightly horror show real people have to live with. And dig this – it sounds like it might be contagious.

Ascher’s a fascinating, idiosyncratic filmmaker. His documentaries approach some dark, often morbid topics with a sense of wonder. His films never seem to be pushing an agenda, he doesn’t seem to have made up his mind on his subject matter. Rather, he is open which, in turn, invites the audience to be open.

It’s not all earnest sleuthing, though, because Ascher is a real showman. What’s intriguing is the way he draws your attention to his craftsmanship – like framing a shot so you see the speaker not head on, but in a large mirror’s reflection, then leaving the reflection of the cameraman’s arm in the same shot. Touches like this never feel amateurish, but they don’t really feel like a cinematic wink, either. Instead they seem intentional, as if he may just be playing.

Coyness suited his Shining documentary Room 237 pretty brilliantly. Here it feels almost like a way to release the tension, remind you that you are, indeed, watching a movie… a heartbreaking, terrifying movie.

I spend a great deal of time watching horror movies, and I cannot remember an instance in my life that I considered turning off a film for fear that I would dream about it later. Until now.

Verdict-4-0-Stars

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A Bountiful Harvest

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Tangerines
by Hope Madden

It’s 1992 in what had recently been the Soviet Union. The Abkhazians of western Georgia have declared independence and Civil War has broken out. The battle is almost at Ivo’s door, but even as natives kill for the land under his feet, the Estonian immigrant tends the Tangerines. He and a neighbor – also Estonian by birth – hope to harvest the crop before it is lost to the war.

It’s a lovely central image: two elderly men with no dog in the fight working against the clock tending to the region’s natural bounty. Unfortunately, the fight comes knocking. Gunplay between three Georgians and two Chechen mercenaries leaves two wounded men – one from either side of the battle – in Ivo’s care.

Writer/director Zaza Urushadze’s elegant film garnered nominations for best foreign language film from the Academy, Golden Globes and others, and rightly so. His succinct screenplay relies on understatement and the power in silence and in action to convey its pacifist message. The timeless ideas embedded in this intimate setting become potent. While the theme is never in doubt, Urushadze’s unadorned film never feels preachy.

A great deal of that success lies in Lambit Ulfsak’s powerful performance as Ivo. He has an amazing presence, inhabiting this character with weary wisdom. Resolute and morally level-headed, Ivo is impossible not to respect. He’s the film’s conscience and through him we quietly witness a powerful humanity – one that the film would like to see infect us all.

There are three other principals – Giorgi Nakashidze as the Chechen, and Misha Meskhi as the Georgian, and Elmo Nuganen as neighbor Margus. Each brings something muscular but tender to their role. Their work benefits from the dry humor and melancholy tone of Urushadze’s screenplay. The quiet evolution beneath their boisterous clashing feels more inevitable than predictable, which allows Urushadze’s point more poignancy.

We don’t get to see a lot of Estonian filmmaking over here, and that appears to be a shame. Ulfsak was recently named the country’s male performer of the century. It’s not hard to see why.

Verdict-4-0-Stars

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Eye in the Sky

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Good Kill

by Hope Madden

In 2013, Jeremy Scahill opened our eyes to the darker side of drone wars with his documentary Dirty Wars. Writer/director Andrew Niccol uses a more understated and intimate road to the same destination with his latest effort, Good Kill.

The film follows Tom Egan (Ethan Hawke), a man who flew 6 tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan and is now on his third tour in a Vegas cubical piloting drones. From 7000 miles away he watches, then eliminates Taliban threats. Then he goes home to barbeque.

As a writer, Niccol has a long history of mining similar ideas – the alienating power of surveillance as well as the business of war (The Truman Show, Lord of War). He’s on his game here, depositing points and counterpoints in the mouths of the right characters and watching each character evolve as their duties begin to look more like war crimes.

Niccol made some fine decisions as the director as well, keeping the tone understated and the tensions on low boil. He also slyly parallels the aerial images of the Middle East – dry, brown and dusty with neat rows of damaged houses – with aerials of Vegas. Once you get past the glitz and bombast of the strip, the landscape is eerily similar. Not only does this humanize the targets, but it exposes our own vulnerability.

Hawke, hot off a career-best performance in Boyhood, does a stellar job animating a mostly internal character. His struggle feels honest, and on the rare occasion that Tom articulates an issue, his thoughts are enlightening. “We got no skin in the game. I feel like a coward every day.”

Bruce Greenwood, reliable as always, carries a great deal of the weight in the film without ever taking the spotlight. Meanwhile, the great character actor Peter Coyote lends a smarmy, soulless voice as “Langley,” the CIA contact given control over Egan’s unit.

This is a meticulously written script, one that weighs issues without truly taking sides, and Niccol develops a hushed tension that builds to something powerful.

It’s a finely crafted and engrossing film that looks at the effects of a risk-free war from the eyes of one of the warriors being saved from combat. Without beating you about the head with its message, it’s about a lot more than that, too.

Verdict-3-5-Stars

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Mad World

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Mad Max: Fury Road

by Hope Madden

Holy shit.

To say that George Miller has stepped up his game since he left us at Thunderdome would be far too mild a statement to open with. Mad Max: Fury Road is not just superior to everything in this franchise, as well as everything else Miller has ever directed. It’s among the most exhausting, thrilling, visceral action films ever made.

Powerful, villainous white guys have ruined the planet by way of their greed for oil and their warmongering, and now they are sustaining their power by taking control of women’s reproductive systems. So, you know, pretty far-fetched.

But Max doesn’t belong to any of these festering wounds called societies. He’s feral. Again. No telling how long it’s been since Max saved the kids from Aunty Entity, but he’s lost himself again, wandering the desert hunted by man and haunted by those he couldn’t save.

Again Miller puts Max in a position to redeem himself by helping the vulnerable and pure survive this apocalyptic future. Mercifully, there are no children and no mullets this go-round.

Unsurprisingly, the great Tom Hardy delivers a perfect, guttural performance as the road warrior. As his reluctant partner in survival, Charlize Theron is the perfect mix of compassion and badassedness. Hardy’s a fascinating, mysterious presence, but Theron owns this film.

Like the first two films in this series, Fury Road wastes little time on dialogue or plotting. Rather, it is basically one long, magnificent car chase. Miller adorns every scene with the most astonishing, peculiar imagery and the vehicular action is like nothing you’ve ever seen.

Dudes on poles!

Miller’s magnificent action sequences keep the film from ever hitting the dragging monotony of his first two efforts in the series. While the characters remain as paper thin as they have been in every episode, the vast superiority of this cast from top to bottom guarantees that the marauding band’s excess and abandon are handled with genuine skill.

Fury Road amounts to a film about survival, redemption and the power of the universal blood donor. Clever, spare scripting makes room for indulgent set pieces that astonish and amaze. There’s real craftsmanship involved here – in the practical effects, the pacing, the disturbing imagery, and the performances that hold it all together – that marks not just a creative force at the top of his game, but a high water mark for summer blockbusters.