Tag Archives: Screen Wolf

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Gaslight Anthem

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A Simple Favor

by George Wolf

Stephanie is a suburban single mom who keeps an “oopsie” jar for swearing and volunteers for everything at her son’s elementary school.

Emily is passionately married, drops frequent f-bombs and has a painting of her vajayjay hanging in the living room.

But a play date for their sons leads to an unlikely friendship in A Simple Favor, a crazy fun mystery with plenty of surprises up its sassy sleeveless number.

The first may be seeing the director is Paul Feig, who made his name with blockbuster comedies such as Bridesmaids and Spy.

So, he’s doing dark thrillers, now? Nope, he’s doing a satirical comedy with strong women, nice diversity and a pretty sharp bite.

Perky Stephanie (Anna Kendrick – perfect) and glamorous Emily (Blake Lively – ditto) share martinis and secrets until Emily turns up missing. Steph provides case updates on her Mommy vlog (“cookies and origami” help to ease the strain!) while spending more and more time watching Emily’s son and “comforting” her husband (Henry Golding from Crazy Rich Asians).

You’ll guess some of what comes next, but there’s plenty you won’t, unless you read Darcey Bell’s source novel. Screenwriter Jessica Sharzer (Nerve) shapes it for the big screen as a Gone Girl for the gaslight age, where ridiculousness is a default setting, all information is equally true/false and irony is a security blanket never far out of reach.

There are plenty of black comedic laughs to be found here, as well as clever plot twists and knowing nods to the expectations that come with roles of “wife,” “mother,” “career woman” and “friend.”

The running time starts to feel bloated by the third act, and the film flirts with joining the mundane fray it had been so giddily rising above. But it rallies for the win with a satisfying finale of comeuppance and LOL updates on how some characters have moved on.

A Simple Favor is not what the trailer makes you think it is – which turns out to be the perfect setup for a film with plenty of head fakes that lead to a mischievous good time.

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I Don’t Want to Go Out—Week of September 10

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Not the strongest week in home entertainment. Not the weakest one, either. Three entertaining if flawed flicks that you, if box office is a good estimate, probably didn’t see in theaters. Here’s the lowdown.

Ocean’s 8

Hearts Beat Loud

Superfly

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I Said, What’s In Your GD Wallet!

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Peppermint

by George Wolf

Jennifer Garner has been a screen sweetheart for enough years now that it might be easy to forget she rose to fame as the action star of TV’s Alias.

Peppermint is her bloody reminder, a corpse-strewn revenge caper with few surprises but plenty of ambitions for a new franchise.

Garner is Riley North, an LA mom whose husband and daughter are gunned down on orders from ruthless drug dealer Diego Garcia (Juan Pablo Raba). Riley is injured badly but survives the shooting, eventually giving the cops positive IDs on the three gunman….which bases the entire film on a contradiction.

The flimsy reason for the hit, along with the stories of Garcia’s mythic levels of evildoing, don’t jibe with his offer to buy Riley’s silence instead of buying her the farm. If only that were the film’s biggest problem.

The script from Chad St. John (London Has Fallen – woof) serves up heaps of one-note obviousness amid layers of cop cliche circle-jerkery.

“The FBI wants to talk..”

“The Feds?”

Yes, experienced detective, that’s a big ten-four!

Treasure troves of info result from 15-second phone calls, kids living on skid row sport gleaming white teeth, and the search for any authenticity in this film is DOA.

So, dead then?

Sigh…yes! And then there’s the matter of Riley’s particularly deadly set of skills. Suffice to say there are issues there as well, but thankfully not because we’re given yet another Taken knockoff.

With Taken‘s director Pierre Morel at the helm, it’s not a big leap to expect just that. Instead, Riley’s frequent baddie beatdowns set her up as a West Coast Equalizer, but Morel can’t cash that check, either.

The reasons to get invested in any of this are hastily assembled and unconvincing, and Morel’s action sequences seldom escape a bland auto pilot, but Garner makes a comfortable return to the action saddle. She casts Riley as a likable, if less-than-believable, anti-hero, and Morel manages to keep the focus respectably gritty, never sexualizing Garner beyond some seriously long-lasting lipstick.

High on body count but low on substance, Peppermint tastes like a strange blend of committed and lazy.

For Your Queue

I Don’t Want to Go Out—Week of September 3

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A bunch of new stuff in home entertainment this week, not one of them a dud. We have two of the year’s absolute best, followed by a slew of really solid flicks you may have missed during their brief stints in theaters. Now is the day to rectify! We’ll help you sequence your week’s viewing.

Click the film title for the full review.

Hereditary

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

Beast

Ghost Stories

*new on DVD

Adrift

The Screening Room

The Screening Room: Hiding in Plain Sight

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A lot of little gems out in theaters this week. On the podcast, we talk through Searching, Operation Finale, The Little Stranger, Kin and what’s new in home entertainment.

Listen to the full podcast HERE.

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Death and the Malkin

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Operation Finale

by George Wolf

“Whom did you lose?”

“We lost six mill-”

“I’m asking about YOU!”

Operation Finale may be an often gripping take on the hunt and capture of elusive Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann, but it finds emotional power in the intimate characterizations of two truly gifted actors.

Sir Ben Kingsley is Eichmann, the SS “Head of Jewish Affairs” who lived under a false identity in Argentina until an Israeli Mossad unit tracked him down. Oscar Isaac is Peter Malkin, the Mossad agent who entered into a psychological duel with Eichmann while negotiating his extradition for trial in Israel.

Director Chris Weitz handles well the shifting timelines and changing locales, propping the historical dramatics up with tense staging reminiscent of Argo. And, as he’s not had any recent head injuries, Weitz knows when to stay out of the way and let his two leads do the masterful things they do.

The trouble spots in Operation Finale come mainly from Matthew Orton’s script, which is ironic because many isolated moments are quite effective.

Much of the dialogue is breezy and even funny, which humanizes the supporting characters (with fine work from an ensemble including Melanie Laurent, Haley Lu Richardson and Nick Kroll) but can feel a bit flippant inside such weighty history.

And in weighing that history, Orton’s first feature screenplay aims for meaningful statements on the casualness of evil and the moral ambiguities of war, but settles instead for well meaning generalities that don’t amount to any unique vision.

Kingsley and Isaac (who also earns a producer credit) provide their own. Their scenes together become a richly-drawn cat and mouse game, a face off between personifications of genocide and exterminator. Somehow, they make subject matter this unpleasant a joy to watch unfold, elevating Operation Finale with a moving contrast of soul.

 

 

 

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Clear History?

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Searching

by George Wolf

Much like early 80s music video directors adjusting to the possibilities afforded by the power of MTV, it’s taken current filmmakers some time to craft nuanced statements on the rise of social media.

But then, we’ve yet to see evidence that ZZ Top’s “Legs” swung an election, so clearly, we’re all still adjusting.

Searching is the latest reminder that for social media-themed movies, at least, things are looking up.

In his debut feature, director/co-writer Aneesh Chaganty crafts a smart, fast-moving internet mystery that plays out on the screens of various platforms. Dropping sly clues among its plot twist head fakes, the film becomes a surprisingly satisfying B-movie potboiler, a terrifically tense race against time that reminds us how tech-entrenched we are without resorting to any heavy-handed judgments.

Busy father David Kim (a perfect John Cho) is annoyed when his 15-year-old daughter Margot (Michelle La) won’t answer his texts or face time requests. Annoyance turns to desperation when it becomes clear Margot is a missing person.

Detective Vick (Debra Messing, effectively understated and against type) is on the case, and as David follows her advice to scour Margot’s online history for clues, we learn along with Dad that Margot had secrets.

Right from a nifty opening montage that serves to bond us with the Kim family while it wistfully reminds us how our own connections to technology have grown, Chaganty establishes a commitment to narrative momentum that rarely lets up. Very little time feels wasted because, natch, there’s no time to waste.

The integrity of the “real-time computer screen” device is richly detailed, organically sound and beautifully constructed, drawing a strange contrast in authenticity with the TV news segments covering Margot’s disappearance.

Did Changanty not bother sweating those details, or is it his nod to “old media” being out of step? I’m guessing the latter.

At least one plot twist seems a bit of a reach, and the final reveal stops just south of Scooby Doo inspired explanation, but Searching has brains and heart enough to rise above.

Though Chaganty assembles the film with the latest in frame wizardry, he surrounds it with familiar thriller elements that bring a subtle throwback feel to the astute look at how we live now.

Ultimately, Searching is a mystery with as much to say about parenting as posting, and a remarkably in-the-moment statement.

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The Screening Room: Puppets, Pimps and Jailbreaks

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Hey, friends of puppetry! What did we think about the Melissa McCarthy puppetmania that is The Happytime Murders? How about Charlie Hunnam’s Pappilon remake? And did you hear the dish on all those Hollywood celebrities? If not, you clearly haven’t seen Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood, but we did and we’ll tell you what we thought about those three flicks plus all that’s fit to watch in new home entertainment.

 

Check out the Screening Room podcast HERE.

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The Greatest Escape

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Papillon

by George Wolf

Don’t expect wholesale changes to the classic survival tale from 1973. Instead, Danish director Michael Noer makes a subtle shift in tone, moving the focus away from the physical, and more toward the mental, philosophical and spiritual toll levied by years in a brutal penal colony.

Like the Steve McQueen/Dustin Hoffman original, this new Papillon is based on Henri Charriere’s book detailing his ordeal in a French Guyana prison camp, a sentence that began in the 1930s. Though the questionable authenticity of many of the book’s details earned it a “biographical novel” classification, Henri’s tale of primal struggle still commands attention.

As Henri (nicknamed “Papillon” after his butterfly tattoo), Charlie Hunnam finds McQueen’s big shoes a surprisingly comfortable fit. Showing more commitment than he has to date, Hunnam turns in a fierce performance that caters to Noer’s vision of an outside/in character arc.

Rami Malek is even better as the soft-spoken Louis, a wealthy counterfeiter who leans on the bruising Henri to provide safe haven from the savagery of other inmates. Keeping the basics of Hoffman’s characterization, Malek adds his own shading for a compelling take on a man drawn to his friend for the defiant commitment lacking within himself.

Noer sets a compelling contrast between two worlds, both visually impressive. The prison interiors are draped in blood, sweat and dark despair, while the colorful, expansive vistas just outside taunt the inmates with constant reminders of a freedom they are not likely to taste again.

The parts are all here and competently assembled, but the punch of the bigger themes Noer and screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski (Prisoners, Contraband) are aiming for never land flush. The ordeal is tense, brutal and sometimes pulse-pounding, but this new Papillon can’t fully expose the nerve it was digging for.

Beyond physical toughness, what was it that drove Henri to merely bend where other men were breaking?

We get some fine glimpses, but none with depth enough to truly transcend the journey.