REVIEW: Unforgettable

26 04 2017

For the better part of a decade, Katherine Heigl has struggled to shake off a reputation of being disagreeable. Much of this stems from a 2007 interview about “Knocked Up” where she chided the film’s supposed sexist treatment of female characters. (Inner publicist note: had she just waited and made the comment in retrospect, it’s likely no one would have found it controversial.) But ever since, many in the culture have projected their worst ideas about outspoken women onto her. She often wears the dreaded label of “unlikable.”

After countless attempts to correct the narrative by starring in sunny rom-coms, network television procedurals and a few indies, Heigl finally leans into the bad rap as the villain of “Unforgettable.” In Denise Di Novi’s domestic thriller, she plays Tessa Connover, the eerie ex-wife who torments her former flame’s new dame, Rosario Dawson’s Julia Banks. The film’s twist on the catfight genre is that Julia herself is not purely a victim or object of terror. She’s a survivor of domestic abuse dealing with lingering distress of her own.

Tessa plays manipulative mind games behind a placid exterior, though in Heigl’s hands, it often comes across as wooden. For these films to successfully scare, there needs to be some element of mystery behind the machinations of menace. Tessa is essentially an open book; in Heigl’s defense, the obvious broadcasting of her character’s motivations and actions is also a fault at the script level. But just as she could have spoken up and changed things with “Knocked Up,” Heigl could have added some mystery to her performance to strengthen the film. Tessa is her way of winking at the audience and admitting she knows what they think of her. Little in “Unforgettable” makes a compelling case for why people should change their minds. C+ / 


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REVIEW: Buster’s Mal Heart

25 04 2017

Fantastic Fest

I don’t know why it took me over six months to connect Sarah Adina Smith’s headscratcher “Buster’s Mal Heart” to Richard Kelly’s cult classic “Donnie Darko,” but alas, the two have linked in my head. Both are films that it’s possible to show to a group of people, all of whom agree on the content shown yet diverge widely over whether it’s genius or madness. In such debates, I usually tend to fall somewhere in the middle – neither pole has a monopoly on good idea – and this instance is no different.

Smith puts star Rami Malek to chilling use as Buster, a soft-spoken family man who ends up working a “The Shining”-esque gig as the night desk man at a small hotel. The film does not just play on reserves of feeling carried over from his similarly reserved work in “Mr. Robot,” either. It’s a sensitive performance that reflects a quiet, shy man whose desire to please crosses paths with a grifting loon with an intent to deceive. Said shady figure, DJ Qualls’ Brown, spews apocalyptic rhetoric about a coming day of reckoning known as “The Inversion.” Whether out of boredom, politeness or curisoity, Buster never shuts down Brown’s babbling.

But eventually, tolerating Brown’s presence has consequences. While we witness his inability to rid himself of the negative influence, Smith intercuts glimpses of two other storylines involving Buster – or is it just Malek? One is a drifter making himself at home in the winter vacation houses of the rich during off-season. The other is a sunburned Jesus-looking fellow floating the open sea in a small boat. They’re connected, of course, but Smith never convincingly sells their tenuous linkage.

Standard linear, narrative cohesion is not the endgame, though even a more complex thematic relationship seems like a stretch. “Buster’s Mal Heart” stretches for cosmic, spiritual connections that I just couldn’t sense on the wavelength where I felt like the film operated. That does not mean they do not exist, nor does it discount the intriguing main section with Buster and Brown. B / 


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F.I.L.M. of the Week (April 20, 2017)

20 04 2017

We’ve all seen our fair share of time travel movies ranging from the fantastic (“X-Men: Days of Future Past,” the “Terminator” series) to the comedic (“Hot Tub Time Machine“) and even the romantic (“About Time“). But there’s a special class of scrappier films, like Shane Carruth’s “Primer” and Rian Johnson’s “Looper,” who rely less on stars and visual effects for this particular blend of sci-fi. Instead, they involve us in story by putting a creative spin on the mechanics of their time manipulation.

Nacho Vigalondo’s 2008 debut feature, “Timecrimes,” is another welcome entry into this esteemed group. Admittedly, I avoided the film for quite some time because I judged the book by its cover. (The gauze-wrapped head on the poster made me feel some kind of way.) But after the rapturous acclaim Vigalondo’s latest film, “Colossal,” received, I thought it only right to go back to the beginning with the director. What I found was a sharp, succinct time travel tale that is deeply concerned with human agency and free will in a world where delineations between past, present and future cease to exist. It’s an obvious choice for the “F.I.L.M. of the Week,” and it’s certainly one I’ll be mulling over for weeks to come.

Going too deep into plot details would only inhibit full intellectual access to “Timecrimes,” so I’ll describe the experience as something close to “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” or “Edge of Tomorrow.” The outcome is certain in all these films, despite the ability to make directional shifts along a chronological timeline. For the characters making these journeys to the past, they slowly come to realize that their actions are not their own. Instead, they must play a predetermined role in maintaining reality.

For Héctor in “Timecrimes,” this involves piecing together the seemingly non-sensical relationship between a naked girl in the woods, a gauze-wrapped man wielding scissors and an invasion of his home. In order to make sense of it all, he must make several trips back to the past with the aid of a mysterious neighbor’s contraption. Though we might lose our footing in time, we never unlock ourselves from Héctor’s desire to return to normalcy and restore some order in life. It’s this connection that makes the film so memorable and distinctive among its peers.


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REVIEW: King Cobra

19 04 2017

There’s plenty of “period” footage in Justin Kelly’s “King Cobra” to date the film back to the mid-2000s. Videos have that digital grain from the middling quality video camera available at the time. A character turns the lens of a digital camera to face him for a selfie, pre-front facing touchscreen.

Yet of all the things that locate the film in the time, there was one indelible image. Shockingly, in a movie set in the world of gay pornography, it was not something involving explicit sex. (And for those looking for that kind of thing, this isn’t some low-budget Skinemax flick.) It’s the news showing footage of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation, summoning a cascade of memories of what it was like to be alive in 2005. The odd mix of malaise, shame and embarrassment provides a fitting backdrop for “King Cobra,” where gay characters of various comfort levels in their sexuality grapple with the era’s repression.

It’s too bad that the film doesn’t just borrow the mood of the Bush era. It also takes the stereotypes. Though based on a true story, every gay character in “King Cobra” fits into some kind of tired, lazy archetype: the young and nubile stud, the predatory porn producer, the aging diva, the jealous lover. The actors play them as clingy, feminine and sexually voracious. We’re talking pre-“Brokeback Mountain” style caricatures here.

If Kelly gave his characters the same texture he granted their milieu, the film might amount to something. Instead, it plays like a traditional show business tale of a young talent (Garrett Clayton’s Brent Corrigan) who allows himself to get sweet-talked by a lecherous Internet porn mogul (Christian Slater’s closeted creep Stephen). The film takes an interesting turn when a rival producer/star duo (James Franco and Keegan Allen’s Joe and Harlow) intervene, but by that point, it’s tough to get invested in anything that’s happening. C+ / 


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REVIEW: The Handmaiden

18 04 2017

Fantastic Fest

Park Chan-Wook’s “The Handmaiden” boasts absolutely stunning costumes, set design and cinematography – not to mention some truly devoted actors to make magic happen in the frame. This is all very necessary for a film that makes its audience watch the same story play out three separate times over the course of nearly two and a half hours. Every section adds perspective to the other, but getting to that enlightened place is equal parts exhausting and rewarding.

This Korean-set caper details the exploits of Sook-hee, a handmaiden who enters the home of the occupying Japanese heiress Lady Hideiko, as she attempts to guide her employer to marry a conman who will then commit her to an asylum and steal her family’s fortune. What ensues is something akin to a more erotic “Gone Girl” with stunning reversals. But wait, there’s more – “The Handmaiden” features some screwball comedy flourishes that make the proceedings even wilder! There’s also erotic fiction reading, kinky sex and some savagely violent beatdowns.

Park maintains a sharp feminist eye throughout, paying close attention to the female solidarity that emerges between Sook-hee and Hideiko as they realize how men attempt to play them off each other for selfish ends. Each section of the triptych adds more dimensionality and intrigue to their relationship. While “The Handmaiden” may occasionally drag in redundancy, it never gets boring to observe their unconventional power dynamic shift around.  B+ / 


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REVIEW: Free Fire

17 04 2017

SXSW Film Festival

Ben Wheatley is not the kind of director to slowly ease you into the milieu of the world he creates. He simply plunges you into the deep end with piranhas, primarily through the use of stylized and highly specific situational dialogue. “Free Fire” does not wait for you to catch up. The loquacious characters simply start spitting out Wheatley and co-writer Amy Jump’s words at a mile-a-minute pace, as they naturally would. You either start running or get left in its dust.

The only time Wheatley slows down is not for our sake. It’s to commemorate the first bullet fired of what must be thousands over the course of the film. In suspended animation, we watch it travel and have a moment to consider its impact. Then the full playground game breaks out between two rival Boston gangs in an arms deal, and it becomes absolute pandemonium.

Wheatley uses the film’s singular warehouse location to its absolute fullest, utilizing it like an adult jungle gym occupied by men (and Brie Larson’s Justine) who showed up in what looks like costumes for a trashy ’70s party. Every move to advance around the space requires at least four bullets, and the gunfire eventually immobilizes every participant one limb at a time. Towards the end, Justine relies on a firearm to serve as a combined cane and replacement appendage. Yes, “Free Fire” is that kind of movie.

It’s also a film that leaves behind little but empty bullet cases. Enjoyable though it may be to watch these bumbling gangsters unleash load after load on each other to period tunes (executive producer Martin Scorsese must have lent his personal jukebox), those pleasures prove fleeting. “Free Fire” unyokes the hysteria of Wheatley’s last film, “High-Rise,” from any form of social commentary. This is a very different movie with no pretensions of intellectual depth, yet even adjusting for the difference, it still fires a few blanks. B /


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REVIEW: Silence

16 04 2017

Like I do with many great films, I approached reviewing Martin Scorsese’s “Silence” with a reverence tinged with trepidation. No matter how many seemingly objective angles I took to evaluating it, I could not find a path that did not somehow cross with my own experiences and beliefs as a person of faith. Though this underscores just about every review I write, rarely does it bubble up to the surface. But since today is Easter, I thought it made sense to craft a hybrid akin to Scorsese’s work: a personal statement and a prayer.

I’ve been grappling with the film for the past three months; as Matt Zoller Seitz astutely observed, “This is not the sort of film you ‘like’ or ‘don’t like.’ It’s a film that you experience and then live with.” Scorsese himself has wrestled with Shusaku Endo’s novel for longer than I have been alive. Christian thinkers themselves have wrestled with these issues since the religion began two millennia ago. To project any kind of intellectual authority or issue some kind of vast, sweeping statement about the ideology and thematics of “Silence” is naive and preposterous. In its searing specificity, the film gets beyond the simplistic discussions of religion that predominate our polite culture and delves headfirst into the questions that demarcate contemporary Christianity.

It goes without saying that Scorsese’s involvement in the film ensures “Silence” does not issue the kind of self-congratulatory pat on the back and reaffirmation of most religious films. He zooms past the “what” of faith and immediately wades into the murkier waters of the “how,” specifically as it pertains to evangelism and discipleship. 17th century Portuguese fathers Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Garrpe (Adam Driver) set sail for Japan, where their mentor Ferreira (Liam Neeson) disappears and allegedly disavows the Catholic religion.

Their rescue mission brings them into contact with persecuted Japanese Christians practicing their faith in private, an experience that tugs the fathers’ beliefs at opposite directions with equal force. On the one hand, their torture at the hands of Japanese inquisitors makes the abstract concept of martyrdom painfully real, humbling them tremendously. Yet these supplicants also view the priests as direct conduits to God to the point that they take on a God-like status, inflating the latent self-righteousness undergirding many of their actions.

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REVIEW: Patriots Day

15 04 2017

The narrative elements of “Patriots Day” show Peter Berg at the top of his game. As a film that recreates the terror of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and the frenzied search to catch the perpetrators, it’s every bit as taught and harrowing as “Lone Survivor.” Critique ideology all you want – and I had my fair share of issues with the comforting yet alarming deployment of the surveillance state – but objectively speaking, Berg and his technicians know how to edit for maximum tension around an event whose outcome we already know.

Now, you might have noticed that I specified “narrative elements.” That was intentional. “Patriots Day” ends on a lengthy postscript of talking-head style documentary footage with survivors of the bombing. It’s stirring, sure, but it left me wondering – why not just make a non-fiction film? The appetite for documentaries exists now thanks to platforms like Netflix and HBO.

In “Patriots Day,” fictionalization began to feel like trivialization. If the words of real people are powerful enough to end a film, they ought to be powerful enough to sustain a film. Why does Berg think we need Mark Wahlberg sermonizing from the back of a truck bed over sappy, inspiring music to care about the heroism of Boston’s finest? Why does he feel the need to compress the valiant actions of several police officers into one composite, Teddy Saunders, for Mark Wahlberg to play?

Berg tries to have it both ways in the film, leaning on both the authenticity of the survivors’ pain while also shoehorning reality into a convenient narrative device about one police officer who cracks open the case with a hobbled leg. (At times, his lickety-split reactions don’t even make logical sense!) If recent yanked from the headlines stories are going to continue to serve as fodder for cinema, we need to have a larger debate about how filmmakers can and cannot rely on actual participants. B+ / 


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REVIEW: Their Finest

14 04 2017

“Authenticity informed by optimism” – that was the motto of Britain’s wartime Ministry of Information when it comes to creating films, according to Lone Scherfig’s “Their Finest.” Around the time that “keep calm and carry on” came into common parlance through Tube posters, the government was also hard at work shaping the national consciousness through the medium of cinema. In 1940, filmmakers came together to convey the seriousness of the war effort while also inspiring confidence and patriotism.

“Their Finest” specifically follows the course of one picture shoot about the sacrifices made at Dunkirk (luckily Scherfig got this out before Christopher Nolan’s epic). Welsh screenwriter Catrin Cole (Gemma Arterton) approaches the evacuation with a creative, novel approach to a story whose validity and heroism do not immediately signal the traditional Hollywood ending. Her job gets even harder when the government hijacks the film to subtly goad the United States into helping the war effort – primarily through the addition of American actor Carl Lundbeck, a  blonde bombshell of machismo played with spunk by Jake Lacy. Before WikiLeaks, this was how covert influence worked. (I like this way a lot more.)

Gabby Chiape’s screenplay balances more than just a straightforward tale of film production in wartime. “Their Finest” also includes a significant feminist slant concerning women’s contribution to the war effort and their mounting preemptive fears about men relegating them back to the home as soon as combat ceases. That tension plays out in the dimly lit government buildings where Catrin toils over a typewriter with the charming curmudgeon Tom Buckley (Sam Claflin) as well as at home with her husband Ellis (Jack Huston), a disabled veteran whose “brutal and dispiriting” paintings don’t exactly jive with the national mood. This central tenet of the film bobs back and forth between serving as subject and subtext, and after nearly two hours, Chiape and Scherfig never quite figure out where it belongs. Between that and an enjoyable B-plot featuring Billy Nighy’s washed-up character actor Ambrose Hilliard, “Their Finest” simply fights on one too many fronts to come out on top. B- / 


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F.I.L.M. of the Week (April 13, 2017)

13 04 2017

At some point while working on a profile of Robert Pattinson, I realized I couldn’t write honestly or insightfully about the actor if I only considered his post-“Twilight” work, which I generally considered to. I’m not sure at what point I decided I needed to watch everything in his filmography, but one film I did not particularly anticipate sitting through was “Bel Ami.” Costume dramas, especially ones set in 19th-century Europe, tend to function as something akin to the bane of my existence.

But to my very pleasant surprise, “Bel Ami” stands out as a delicious experience in a primarily dreary and stuffy genre. To be fair, I’m not sure how much I would have enjoyed the film had I watched it upon release in 2012. Pattinson was still, reluctantly, in the thrall of “Twilight” mania. The specious read of the film is to see his character, Georges Duroy, as an emotionless man who somehow manages to function as an effortless womanizer. (There is admittedly some jealousy in play, I’ll be up front.)

Indeed, there are some similarities to Edward Cullen at the surface level of “Bel Ami.” Yet with some distance, the film looks more like a reaction against his famous role. Georges makes plenty of sexual conquests in the film, but he achieves them not out of confidence or swagger. He’s deeply insecure about his station in the Parisian social strata, nervously approaching formality. In his first high society appearance, Georges musses with his appearance several times in the mirror before entering the room.

He’s at a distinct advantage in the elite ecosystem since he does not come from money and only gets a seat at the table when a former comrade from war lifts him up. To hold this tenuous position, Georges needs an ace in the hole, and he finds it through gaming undersexed and undervalued wives. Wooing them works to his benefit for a while, but eventually he learns that appealing to them goes only so far in a male-dominated world. This narrative acts as something of a meta commentary on Pattinson’s participation in the “Twilight” franchise, and his desperation and frustration is the secret sauce that raises “Bel Ami” out of standard period piece drudgery and into the “F.I.L.M. of the Week” territory.


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REVIEW: Gifted

10 04 2017

Movie dads are a dime a dozen, but we rarely get movies about the specific pressures of paternity. It’s tough to tell, then, whether the pleasures of Marc Webb’s “Gifted” are organic or simply a refreshingly different story in a crowded environment.

There’s plenty to enjoy and identify with in Chris Evans’ Frank Adler, an uncle-cum-surrogate dad who mills about working-class Florida in his dirt-stained undershirt and seemingly permanent bedhead. He’s raising his niece, the film’s titular savant Mary Adler (McKenna Grace), based on his hardscrabble and wisecracking instincts. Segregating the exceptional from the average, he jokes, only produces congressmen. His everyman parenting style gets a shock from the arrival of his ivory tower-minded mother, Lindsay Duncan’s Evelyn.

From there on out, “Gifted” plays out like the Florida Man edition of “Kramer vs. Kramer” with a little dash of “Good Will Hunting” to liven up the familiar settings of family court and therapy sessions. How much that affects each viewer probably depends on their individual tolerance for the well-executed cliché and the obvious emotional moment. When Frank and Mary spend some quality time watching new dads come out of delivery to the hospital waiting room, it’s possible to read the scene as hopelessly cloying or truly touching.

I found “Gifted” somewhere in between, affecting in fits and spurts while never truly melting my heart like a stick of butter in the sun. Evans clearly has a big heart that he pumps into the film, yet Tom Flynn’s script gives him remarkably little agency. Frank is defined primarily in relation to other characters, many of whom float in and out of the plot with whiplash-inducing speed. (And let’s not even brooch the serious ethical debate that Flynn completely sidesteps in the film’s big finale.) But don’t worry everyone, there’s a truly great movie about an uncle struggling to provide adequate guardianship for the orphaned child of his departed sibling – and it’s readily available to watch. B- / 


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REVIEW: Personal Shopper

9 04 2017

Olivier Assayas’ “Personal Shopper” bills itself as a ghost story, and that moniker applies to just about every facet of the film. Yes, there’s the obvious – Kristen Stewart’s Maureen considers herself a medium, and she looks to commune with the spirit of her recently departed twin brother Lewis. The first to leave the land of the living was to leave the other a sign, so she relocates to Paris in order to make contact. But mostly she’s just “waiting,” as Maureen describes it.

The apparitional element extends beyond the supernatural and the spiritualistic, though. Maureen pays her way in the City of Light as a personal shopper, a go-between for the producing and the consuming class. Her employer, the socialite Kyra, sends out Maureen as a phantom presence to select, purchase but never try on clothes for future engagements. The two scarcely ever have physical interactions, leading Maureen to approach her vocation with a deepening sense of estrangement and alienation. Not unlike with Lewis, it’s like she must communicate with and channel the spirit of a ghost.

Practically every aspect of “Personal Shopper” sees Maureen in contact with some kind of reality removed from her own, be it her boyfriend over Skype or a mysteriously probing and knowledgeable unknown number via text in the film’s centerpiece. As Maureen travels round-trip from Paris to London for the sole purpose of picking up a dress for Kyra, she feels an other-worldly gravitational pull to return to this persistent phantasm. As much as her thumbs may quiver in response, she keeps the conversation going for the cross-country train journey, revealing truths about herself to a person whose identity she cannot even verify.

There’s so much to unpack here, so much so that it feels wrong to even take a stab at the deeper meanings of “Personal Shopper” after just one viewing. Further watches will likely further illuminate just how carefully Stewart dances along the line of channeling someone and desiring to become that person altogether. Her ethereal performance does not so much power the film as she haunts it. Like a ghost, she’s diffuse, elusive and difficult to pin down and describe. B+ / 


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REVIEW: We Are the Flesh

8 04 2017

Fantastic Fest

Due to some kind of inexplicable error with the DCP file, I had to watch Emiliano Rocha Minter’s “We Are the Flesh” off some kind of pixelated backup copy. Maybe it was for the best that I couldn’t see every inch of the film in all its graphic detail. I saw plenty – or dare I say, too much – from what was there.

Credit Minter for crafting a visually innovative hellscape that invokes the surreal “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” only here as the devil’s cavern. He also assembles a cacophonous symphony of tactile sounds that accentuate the unnatural space. Yet beyond the creation of a unique world, the “last monument of a miserable society,” I can offer few compliments.

“We Are the Flesh” makes “Wetlands” seem like a Disney movie in its innocence. Minter drops two siblings in this unforgiving landscape and introduces them to a deranged stranger who awakens their incestuous desires. It was around the point of the Reygadas-esque sex scene, complete with freeze frames during orgastic spasms, where I just gave up any hope of finding meaning or commentary in the film. Minter is shocking for the sake of being shocking. He’s free to make the movie he wants, but I certainly don’t have to enjoy being subjected to an orgy of flesh eating as the ends of the film, not its means. C+ / 


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REVIEW: Raw

7 04 2017

Fantastic Fest

Getting adjusted to college life can bring out the monster in all of us. Julia Ducornau’s “Raw” just makes that a little more vivid and terrifying by adding in an element of cannibalism as a metaphor for the suppressed true self. (Yes, you read that right.)

The film begins with Justine (Garance Marillier) arriving quietly at veterinary school with the kind of milquetoast blandness that indicates a lack of self-confidence. She’s the type to wander the party alone – no judgment; I can definitely relate. Her sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf), an upperclassman, does her best to gently nudge Justine to break out of her shell. When that fails, she takes more drastic steps towards humiliation and mortification.

Alexia means her actions with the kind of tough familial love we all come to expect from siblings, but they begin to have immediate physical consequences for Justine. Like a nagging rash, vomiting hair and more. The family condition involves a taste for their fellow humans awakened by flesh contact, a sadistically difficult thing to avoid when surrounded by the blood and meat of animals … not to mention the normal carnal desires of young people packed into tight living quarters.

Ducornau does a fine job balancing the two faces of “Raw,” both the specifics of its body horror and the generalities of its collegiate angst. She’s not afraid to indulge in a moment of pure discomfort or a little levity. (For more on the latter aspect – shameless plug – check out my piece from Fantastic Fest comparing it to critical cause célèbre “Toni Erdmann.”) And, as always, the scariest element is no one moment but simply the dawning realization of the aberrant desires pent up inside ourselves. B+ / 


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F.I.L.M. of the Week (April 6, 2017)

6 04 2017

Seduction gets the on-screen treatment quite a bit, though I can say I’ve rarely seen it so expertly dissembled as it was in Catherine Breillat’s “Fat Girl,” my pick for the “F.I.L.M. of the Week.” This twisted tale of adolescent experimentation, which delightedly revels in its own bawdiness, spends a solid 20 minutes of its tight 83 minute runtime devoted to a single scene in which college-aged beach rat Fernando (Libero De Rienzo) attempts to get in the pants of teenaged Elena (Roxane Mesquida). He’s using just about every trick in the book to end up at intercourse, but Elena clutches the prize of her virginity with a firm grip. It’s not something Fernando would need to pry from her cold, dead hands, so, slowly, he chips away at her resistance.

All the while, Elena’s younger sister Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux) bears witness to the scene playing out from the vantage point of her bed a few feet away. She’s an odd mixture of appalled and fascinated, repelled and curious. At the time documented in the movie, Anaïs (the titular obese woman) has begun to realize and visualize herself in sexual terms. She betrays little, concealing both her jealousy and vicarious pleasure.

“Fat Girl” provides only a short window into the lives of Elena and Anaïs, denying us the chance to go on any of the traditional “journey” narratives associated with teenage sexuality. Instead, Breillat forces us to stare at sex for what it is. That’s not always pretty. Sometimes, it amounts to little more than the fulfillment of animalistic desires – even over the valid objections of another person.


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