6
Souls (Mans Marlind &
Bjorn Stein, USA, 2010, 112 min.)
Viewed
on DVD First Viewing
This direct-to-DVD horror film features
mysterious supernatural illnesses, devil worship, and a major character with
multiple personality disorder, but still winds up feeling completely dull and
run of the mill. Most of the
above-average cast, including Julianne Moore and Frances Conroy, are wasted on
stock roles, while Jonathan Rhys Meyers goes embarrassingly over-the-top as the
character with identity issues. D-
Brief
Encounter (David Lean, UK,
1945, 86 min.)
Viewed
on DVD First Viewing
Considering that he’s best known for helming
bloated epics like Lawrence of Arabia
(1962), it’s almost hard to believe that David Lean is the director of this
beautifully streamlined two-hander concerning the affair between a bored
middle-class housewife (Celia Johnson) and a doctor (Trevor Howard) who is also
unhappily married. Noel Coward adapted
his play Still Life for this film,
but Lean assures that the action never feels stagey as he smartly places the
lovers in the frame in ways that subtly correspond to the state of their
relationship, giving the viewer a palpable sense of their fleeting bliss as
well as their sadness and frustration.
It truly feels like a violation of the couple’s privacy any time another
character occupies their screen space, though Coward and Lean wisely never
vilify any of these people for effect.
The tacked-on happy ending feels like a compromise, but the previous 85
minutes offer one of the most vivid and tragic depictions of an affair on
screen, right up there with In the Mood
for Love (2000). A-
Faster,
Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (Russ Meyer, USA, 1965, 83 min.)
Viewed
on YouTube Second Viewing
Russ Meyer’s outrageous cult classic never
fully lives up to the promise of its insane opening moments (a hysterical
narration about violence followed by a frantic montage of go-go dancing), but
there’s still nothing else quite like it.
The thin plot about a trio of sensationally proportioned dancers (Tura
Satana, Lori Williams, and Haji) attempting to rob a legendary stash of money
only exists to provide a context for Meyer’s real interests: lurid violence, ludicrously hard-boiled
dialogue (when one character asks Satana what her point is, she growls “the
point is of no return, and you just crossed it!”), and, of course, enormous
breasts. B
Gone
Girl (David Fincher, USA,
2014,149 min.)
Viewed
Theatrically First Viewing
David Fincher’s adaptation of 2012’s
best-selling mystery novel is a marvel of craftsmanship that succeeds almost in
spite of its trashy material.
Screenwriter Gillian Flynn reportedly changed very little in adapting
her book for the screen, but Fincher and his production team give the film a
chilly modern noir mood that make it easy to look past (or even enjoy) the
shallowness of the story. Giving away
too much of the narrative would spoil a lot of the fun – particularly given how
much a ludicrous mid-story plot twist changes the game – but suffice to say
that the film revolves around the aftermath of the disappearance and apparent
murder of a wealthy socialite (Rosamund Pike), and the suspicious behavior of
her husband (Ben Affleck). Fincher and
Flynn keep the plot momentum high (the two and a half hours fly by), but the
general atmosphere of creeping menace is a lot more convincing than the
characters’ actions are. Pike, in
particular, has issues navigating a character written with little recognizable
human motivation. B-
The
Hound of the Baskervilles
(Sidney Lanfield, USA, 1939, 77 min.)
Viewed
on YouTube First Viewing
This is the first of the fourteen Sherlock
Holmes films to co-star Basil Rathbone as the iconic detective and Nigel Bruce
as his faithful sidekick John Watson.
Though often considered to be the best silver screen version of Arthur
Conan Doyle’s most famous novel, this is ultimately a fairly generic
procedural. The oddball chemistry
between the erudite Rathbone and the bumbling Bruce is entertaining, but their
scenes together are limited, as Holmes spends a surprising amount of time
either on the sidelines or in disguise. C+
Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, USA, 2014, 169 min.)
Viewed
in IMAX First Viewing
The high-tech showmanship on display
throughout Interstellar is so
mesmerizing that it’s frankly frustrating that Christopher Nolan (and his
brother/screenwriting partner Jonathan) felt that they needed to also give the
film a blandly sentimental story about the relationship between a father
(Matthew McConaughey) and his daughter (played at different ages by Mackenzie
Foy, Jessica Chastain, and Ellen Burstyn).
Nolan’s hard sci-fi premise, too complicated to detail here, has some
intriguing notions about time and space travel, most of which are impressively
visualized by he and his crack production team.
If anything the space sequences here may be even more convincing than
those in last year’s Gravity, despite
the fact that Nolan’s plot gets into the realm of theoretical physics while the
earlier film dealt with a relatively realistic scenario. But Nolan keeps trying for big, broad,
Spielbergian emotions that are simply out of his range, despite the best efforts of
his fine cast. The only time the film’s
“human element” is really convincing is during the suspenseful build-up to the
revelation of one astronaut’s space madness.
More often the film aims shamelessly for tear-jerking moments and winds
up just feeling corny, particularly during a brutally prolonged climax reaffirming
the connection between father and daughter.
Nolan’s skill is cramming big, ambitious ideas into a blockbuster
format. He should leave the simple stuff
up to somebody else. B-
Martin (George Romero, USA, 1977, 95 min.)
Viewed
on YouTube Second Viewing
This capsule review also appears as part of
the Joyless Creatures feature Scary Creatures
George Romero will always be best known for
defining the modern zombie film with Night
of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of
the Dead (1978), but in between those established horror classics he
delivered his best work with this highly peculiar take on the vampire
subgenre. In fact, it isn’t clear
whether the titular character (John Amplas) is a vampire at all, even though
his Old World cousin (Lincoln Maazel) insists on referring to him as
“Nosferatu.” Martin is a killer, but
instead of hypnotizing women and biting their necks he has to knock them out
with a syringe and stab them with razors.
He’s not a supernatural seducer, but an extremely awkward teenager with
severe emotional issues. It’s hard to
think of a film that more accurately captures the feeling of being young and
alienated, with all of the boredom, sexual frustration and social anxiety that
that entails. In a sense Martin functions as an empathetic, if
unflattering, portrait of Romero’s midnight movie audience, in much the same
way his later Knightriders (1981) was
an obtuse autobiography. Where many
later Romero films have been marred by overly blunt social commentary, Martin’s messages are oblique and
frequently arrive in surprising ways, including a very offbeat mid-film parody
of The Exorcist (1973). All of this may make the film sound like some
sort of postmodern meta commentary on horror, but while Romero isn’t afraid to
poke fun at the genre that made him famous, he also delivers on real, visceral
terror. Though not especially gory, the
murder scenes are unnervingly drawn out and intense, with one incredibly taut
home invasion sequence standing out as a mini masterpiece of heart-pounding
suspense. A-
Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy, USA, 2014, 117 min.)
Viewed
Theatrically First Viewing
This bitter yet surprisingly funny modern noir
suggests that veteran screenwriter Dan Gilroy has an impressive future in front
of him as a director. When we first meet
Louis Bloom (a frighteningly committed Jake Gyllenhaal), he’s little more than
a petty thief, but a chance encounter with a crime scene gives him the ambition
to capture luridly violent footage and sell it to the highest bidding local
news stations. Eventually, when the
crime scenes aren’t vivid enough to get Gyllenhaal the types of shots he needs,
he decides to take matters into his own hands.
The film has already earned plenty of understandable comparisons to
Billy Wilder’s masterpiece Ace in the
Hole (1951), but King of Comedy
(1983) is perhaps an even closer match in tone and story. Like Robert De Niro’s aspiring talk show host
in Scorsese’s classic, Louis Bloom speaks almost entirely in absurd platitudes,
and his collision (and quasi-sexual relationship) with a cynical news producer
(Rene Russo) has some similarities to the confrontation between the De Niro and
Jerry Lewis characters in the earlier film.
Overall Nightcrawler is more
flawed than Scorsese or Wilder’s films – it’s messages can be overly blunt at
times, and a police investigation into Gyllenhaal’s activities is introduced too
late to really go anywhere. But it’s
still one of the most purely entertaining films of the year, with beautiful
cinematography from Robert Elswit, a riveting climactic car chase that ranks as
one of the finest action scenes of recent memory, and the performance of the
year from Gyllenhaal, who is equally hilarious and terrifying. B+
Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor (Tyler Perry, USA, 2013, 111 min.)
Viewed
on Netflix First Viewing
Tyler Perry’s hysterical melodrama may be the
best “so bad it’s good” movie since The
Room (2003). Though far more competently made than Tommy Wiseau’s
wonderfully awkward psychodrama, Temptation
displays an equally shaky grasp of normal human behavior, and has an even more
toxic view of women. The story follows a
therapist (Jurnee Smollett-Bell) as she grows bored with her childhood
sweetheart husband (Lance Gross) and falls into the arms of a suave jet-setter
(Robbie Jones) who is described with memorably pointless specificity as “the
third-largest social media mogul behind Mark Zuckerberg.” While the broad outlines of the story are
strictly generic, the details are almost uniformly bonkers. Some of Perry’s curious creative decisions –
such as filling one “erotic” hot tub scene with so much literal steam that the
characters are almost completely invisible – can probably be blamed on the
writer-director’s devout Christianity.
But how could anyone explain the scene where the husband attempts to
cheer up his wife by donning a cowboy hat and a guitar to lip synch to “Try a
Little Tenderness,” a song that neither features a prominent guitar line or
justifies wearing a cowboy hat? Or Kim
Kardashian’s supporting role as a secretary whose constant put-downs of the
therapist’s fashion sense are apparently (maybe) meant as comic relief? Or Vanessa Williams, as the therapist’s boss,
affecting a jarringly phony French accent?
Or the many scenes where it is suggested that the social media celebrity
is literally Satan? Nothing will prepare
viewers for the batshit insanity of the epilogue, in which the therapist (now
at least twenty years older) goes to a pharmacy owned by her now-ex-husband to
pick up her HIV medication, limping away as her ex is surrounded by a loving,
presumably devoutly Christian family.
Let that be a lesson to you, ladies:
stick with your boring husband (and the church) no matter what. You don’t want to end up with that AIDS
limp. B
Young
& Beautiful (Francois Ozon,
France, 2013, 95 min.)
Viewed
on Netflix First Viewing
A 17-year-old girl (Marine Vacth) loses her virginity during
summer vacation, and by the next time we see her its autumn and she’s working
as a high-end call girl. No explanation
is given for this career move, and little is revealed about how Vacth feels
about her job or her sexuality, as if writer-director Francois Ozon started
with the question of why a young person would become a prostitute and then, not
finding an obvious answer, decided to simply respect the mystery. At times Ozon’s decision to keep his film’s
meaning so close to the chest is frustrating, but the ambiguity also makes the
film intriguingly tough to nail down.
It’s less the tawdry exploitation film that its premise would seem to
suggest than a tone poem about the complexities of budding sexuality, and any
given scene is just as likely to be creepy or sad as it is erotic. A memorably puzzling climax featuring a cameo
by Charlotte Rampling suggests that the young call girl is just as confused as
we are. B
