Tag Archives: thriller

Review: “The Raven”

29 Sunday Apr 2012

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For the Birds?

Grade: B (RENT IT)

IT’S MIDNIGHT IN THE MIND of Edgar Allan Poe.  Make that a “midnight dreary” in the mind of America’s Master of the Macabre and Inventor of the Detective Story played with passionate intensity by John Cusack in the new thriller “The Raven.”  It’s refreshing to see Cusack step out of his hipster box but much less so to see his love interest in the “The Raven” (played here by Alice Eve) literally boxed up alive and buried under the floorboards.  Claustrophilic camerawork and costume design by Danny Ruhlmann and Carlo Poggioli, respectively, create a Victorian America sufficiently “grim, ungainly,” as Poe writes of his eponymous raven in the 1844 poem, “ghastly, gaunt, and ominous.”  It’s too bad that “The Raven” is closer to the flightless turkey than to a bird that truly gets off the ground.

From director James McTeigue (“V for Vendetta”), this pitch-black thriller is set in the fall of 1849, just weeks shy of Poe’s mysterious death in Baltimore.  At forty years old, the real-life Poe was found drunk, delirious and wearing another man’s clothes.  This is the bankrupt Poe who’d grown inconsolable in the wake of his young wife Virginia’s death from tuberculosis.  (Virginia was not only the author’s first-cousin but a surprising thirteen-years-old when she married the gloomy author in 1836.)  Likely inspired by the popular “Sherlock Holmes” series, “The Raven” turns its nineteenth-century literary man into something of a caped crusader.  Poe teams up with the dashing Inspector Emmett Fields (Luke “The Wire” Evans) in order to solve a string of murders that mirror those imagined by Poe on the page.  We’ve all heard of life imitating art and vice versa, but here we have, with the gory recreations of Poe’s tales of torture and immurement, a rare case of death imitating art.  They must protect Emily, Poe’s fiancée (Alice Eve) while avoiding the blows of Emily’s imperious father (Brendan Gleeson).  “Over my dead body!” Gleeson protests at one point to which Cusack smirks: “Is that an option?”

Screenwriters Ben Livingston and Hannah Shakespeare give us a fun and foul-mouthed Poe who insults his drinking mates as “slobs,” “philistines,” and “mental oysters.”  He spouts some great lines – “Is imagination now a felony?” – but the plot points otherwise will strike you as familiar.  The pace, like Cusack’s performance, is lively but the script pulls from so many other films that it leaves Cusack, like a mangled marionette, hanging between too many masters.  Is it comedy, romance, Jack-the-Ripper horror or psychological thriller?   Cusack laments twice in the film: “Melancholy has followed me like a black dog all my life.”  The other black dog dragging him down is a plot, while clever at times, that doesn’t quite rise to Poe’s level of sustained originality and madness.

The Best and Worst Films of 2011

02 Monday Jan 2012

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THE BEST FILMS OF 2011:

1.       “Midnight in Paris” (written and directed by Woody Allen) – Whoever thought you’d someday utter the words “Woody Allen” and “magical” in the same sentence?  After all, it’s been a long time since his “The Purple Rose of Cairo” (1985).  America’s greatest living filmmaker gives us not just his biggest box-office hit in forty years but the longest running movie of 2011.  A delightfully literary meditation on time travel and the Lost Generation.  No one can assemble a cast like Allen; Owen Wilson channels Allen without parodying his jokes and gestures in the City of Lights.

2.      “Drive” (directed by Nicolas Winding Refn) – This ultra-violent vehicle for Ryan Gosling, as the anonymous “Driver,” is a rough patch of LA noir, vicious and thrilling.  It also solidifies Gosling as the most versatile leading man to watch – politically mercurial in “The Ides of March” and a sartorial stallion in the comedy “Crazy Stupid Love” – in 2011.  “Drive” is on track to become a lasting cult favorite.

3.      “Take Shelter” (dir. by Jeff Nichols) – A harrowing meditation on paranoia and climate anxiety with the indomitable Michael Shannon (a sure-fire contender for the Best Actor Oscar) as an Ohio man coming apart.  Jessica Chastain (“The Help,” “The Debt”) was the ingénue of 2011, giving here, as a foil to her bubbly Southern belle in “The Help,” a restrained performance as the wife of a man either mentally ill or clairvoyant.  You decide.  Another powerful psychodrama, set in the heartland, from the writer-director of “Shotgun Stories.”

4.      “The Tree of Life” (written and directed by Terrence Malick) –  It appears only the “little things” in life matter to Malick (“Badlands,” “The Thin Red Line”).  His moving meditation on childhood, love, family, dinosaurs, Texas, the cosmos that had Americans demanding a refund must be worth the price of admission.  Believe it or not, in 2011, many movie-houses had to enforce their NO-REFUND policy for those left dazed and confused by 2011’s only poem-on-film (also the Palme d’Or winner at Cannes).  Costar Sean Penn even admitted that he had no real idea what Malick’s movie is about.  Actors!  Like any thoughtful work of art, it demands a lot from its viewer, but this tree’s roots stretch far and wide.

5.      “Bridesmaids” (dir. by Paul Feig) – Sure, it’s the female “Hangover” – replete with scatological slip-ups and crudely sexual candor – but “Bridesmaids” will get you to the church on time and, potentially, buzzed on the drive there.  Kristen Wiig dropped the over-the-top personae she brings to life on “Saturday Night Live” and surrounded herself with a hilarious ensemble cast that turned the chick-flick genre on its head.  That image alone of Wiig riding the automatic gate to Don Draper’s love pad is comic gold.

6.      “The Descendants” (directed by Alexander Payne) – After reading George Clooney boast to Rolling Stone that he’d be “surprised” if “The Descendants” didn’t go on to become a Best Picture nominee, I went into a showing of Alexander Payne’s new dramedy with my critical force-field up.  Yet its achingly honest tone and gallows humor eventually win you over.  Clooney’s light is less intense than newcomer Shailene Woodley as his truth-telling daughter.  The family bonds forged here feel real rather than Hollywood hokum.

7.      “Beginners” (dir. by Mike Mills) – It’s hard to believe that the man who, nearly fifty years ago, played Georg van Ludwig Von Tropp in “The Sound of Music” has the gumption, not to mention the joie de vivre, to play a newly widowed man who belatedly comes out of the closet.  Playing Plummer’s son, Ewan McGregor is on hand to scratch his head and find love (and roller-skate) for himself.  Mike (“Thumbsucker”) Mills based the comedy on his father’s own coming out and cancer.  A more cross-generational cancer comedy than the also entertaining “50/50.”

8.      “Young Adult” (dir. by Jason Reitman) – After stumbling with “Jennifer’s Body,” Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody (“Juno”) reestablishes herself by drawing up the virtually unlikable Mavis Gary, a “prom queen psychopath bitch” (lovingly described by a fellow native of Mercury, Minnesota unhappy to see her back in town and trying to break up a marriage).  Theron embodies another kind of “Monster” while Patton Oswalt delivers the laughs as a self-described “fat geek” who shares the most surprising love scene of ’11 with a wine-stained, cutlet-wearing Theron.

9.      “Hugo” (dir. by Martin Scorsese) – While contemporary Steven Spielberg stretched himself thin with “The Adventures of Tintin” and the mawkish “War Horse,” Martin Scorsese focused his attention – his 3-D attention, no less – on his first children’s film.  “Hugo” has a timeless feel, capturing the hurly-burly of an urchin inhabiting the walls of a Parisian train station and the advent of the motion picture in the age of Georges Méliès.  Is there anything Martin Scorsese can’t do? Oh, that’s right: comedy (see, or don’t see, his “After Hours” of 1985).

10.     “Moneyball” (dir. by Bennett Miller) – After last year’s “The Social Network,” screenwriter Aaron Sorkin hits another home-run with Brad Pitt  as Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane.  Even a sports-phobe like myself could connect with a script this dizzy with details and  dialogue for grown-ups.  It’s probably time Pitt picks up his first Best Actor Oscar and why not for a willful film that venerates all of you who think outside the box – or better yet, the diamond?

THE (VERY) WORST FILMS of 2011:

1.    “Abduction” – Sorry, Twi-hards, but Jacob Black of the Twilight Saga film series committed a serious error here in the lobotomizing tale of a kid raised, unbeknownst to him, by secret agents.  Lautner is far from ready for his close-up, Mr. DeMille.  He has the vacant, Neanderthalic gaze of Kim Kardashian’s short-lived husband, Kris Humphries.  If only “Abduction” had felt as short as that marriage.

2.    “In Time” – A perfectly acceptable script from Andrew Niccol (“Gattaca”) was marred by the calling-it-in acting style of Justin Timerblake who, like Taylor Lautner, is best kept in the chorus.  Costar Amanda Seyfried resembles a dyspeptic goldfish as she and Timberlake chase across rooftops, trying to beat the clock in “In Time.”  An acting malfunction.

3.    “Shame” – For some inexplicable reason, Michael Fassbender is being praised for playing a Manhattan professional addicted to sex in the impotent “Shame.”  Never has sexuality been so boring, characters so undeveloped, and a narrative so negligible as in Steve McQueen’s self-serious sophomore effort.  If the audience isn’t laughing derisively by the time Brandon descends into an inferno of gay bars and Sapphic three-ways, they’re not paying attention.  I returned to the lobby to dispense liquid butter directly into my eyeballs to blur this nightmare of a “drama.”  Shameful, indeed.

4.  “I Don’t Know How She Does It” – The one-note Sarah Jessica Parker fails to mix it up a bit (again) in this wannabe feminist twaddle.  Parker plays Kate Reddy, a finance executive juggling professionalism and pampers.  If only Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha had helped with babysitting duties, we might not have had to once again sympathize with the saccharine sentimentality of white woman bourgeois guilt.  Far from a breadwinner, this is a bread-loser that confirms the old adage that indeed you can’t have it all.

5.  “Trespass” – What was Nicole Kidman thinking to team up with the execrable Nicolas Cage and hit-or-miss director Joel Shumacher (“Dying Young,” “Phone Booth”)?  Cage plays a businessman and diamond-dealer victimized, alongside wife Kidman, during a sadistic house invasion.  If it’s pointless violence you’re after, “Trespass” has more than enough gore to go around.  If you play this loudly in your house, your neighbors will likely call the police due to its vociferous gunfire and relentless female shrieking.

In a year belonging to Woody Allen, it’s worth remembering a line from “Annie Hall” (1977).  (It’s a classic older than I am with insights immemorial.)  In the following, replace “television shows” with “movies,” especially the soulless “Trespass”:

Annie, in California: “It’s so clean out here.”

Alvy (Allen): “They don’t throw their garbage away. They turn it into television shows.”

Review: “In Time”

07 Monday Nov 2011

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“Clock-Blocked”

Review: “In Time”

Grade: D+ (SKIP IT)

TIME IS OF the essence in another dystopic installment from thinking-man’s director Andrew Niccol whose “Gattaca” (1997) remains one of the best of its sci-fi kind and no stranger to high school biology classes in which eugenics and questions of the “perfect” DNA perennially spur spirited debate.

That’s part of the disappointment behind Niccol’s latest, “In Time,” a fascinating premise blighted by thin dialogue and a too-cool-for-school performance by Justin Timberlake.  His sidekick is named Sylvia Weis – she’s played by Amanda Seyfried who, appropriately, resembles a Felix the Cat wall-clock – who helps to lead the resistance against a culture that takes ageism to a lethal level.  As the palindromic Will Salas, Timberlake is a working-class resident of a segregated Time Zone known as Dayton; he’s also 28 and living on borrowed time since everyone dies – or, as it’s euphemistically known, “times out” – at age 25.  That’s the point at which everyone stops aging and starts dying after the glow-in-the-dark time code on their forearm begins its countdown from 365 to 364 and so on.  Will’s opening narration sets the scene: “I don’t have time […] Time is now the currency we earn and spend.”  Toll roads charge two months, as do hotels, and prostitutes beckon with “I’ll give you 10 minutes for an hour.”  The culture has brought sexy back and, nightmarishly, forever.

Like the character Vincent Freeman (played by Ethan Hawke) in “Gattaca,” Will is an outsider who subverts his perfection-obsessed environs from within.  Unlike Vincent, Will doesn’t so much outsmart the bad-guys but flirt, play cards, and run across rooftops with villains Cillian Murphy (always in the role of the blue-eyed devil, i.e. “Red Eye” and “Batman Begins”) and the sublimely smug Vincent Kartheiser of “Mad Men” hot on his trail.  As Raymond, Murphy is a “timekeeper” sent to take back the time given to Will by Henry Hamilton (Matt Bomer of TV’s “White Collar”), a 105-year-old who gives Will his years and plunges him into a world of trouble.

Shot in ambers and grays, and in digital, cinematographer Roger Deakins imbues Niccol’s vision with the look of permanent midnight.  “In Time” has an amusing opener in which Niccol startles us into his world’s weirder realities: Will’s mother (Olivia Wilde) is 50 years old and literally running out of time, but she looks not a day over 24.  He could have done more with this off-putting oedipality.  There’s additional shock value in Kartheiser proudly displaying his wife, mother-in-law, and daughter when all three look like triplets rather than a family tee.  But as time goes on, the puns and plays on temporality fatigue and bore the viewer.  Beyond the “99 second store,” Niccol’s script references “timeshares,” “quality time,” “minute men,” et cetera.

Worse yet, there’s Timberlake who is charming as supporting cast in “The Social Network” and “Alpha Dog,” but has neither the voice nor the physical presence of a leading man.  Andy Warhol famously predicted that in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.  Reality television and the Kardashians made that prediction a present-day reality, and while Timberlake’s talent is timeless as a song-and-dance man…JT, the movie star?  Could Timberlake pass what I like to call the Hamlet test?  Can you actually imagine him as the gloomy Dane on stage, asking “For who would bear the whips and scorns of time?”

Not in a million years.

Review: “Dream House”

09 Sunday Oct 2011

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“Burning Down the House”

Grade: F (SKIP IT)

For sale: three bedrooms, three full baths, garage, fully furnished, crown molding, stainless steel appliances, washer/dryer, storage.  House also includes poltergeists in the form of a murdered mother and her two dead daughters.  Any takers?

Only two: city-slickers Libby (played by Rachel Weisz) and Will, a publisher with pectorals played by Daniel Craig (a.k.a. 007 du jour), who move from town to country with bloody results.  The primary problem with “Dream House,” which is set in a New England town called New Ashford with Craig as an aspiring novelist, is that there’s not a shred of newness or novelty in this film (directed by the otherwise bright Irish film director, Jim Sheridan, of “In the Name of the Father” and “My Left Foot”).  As an anguished Libby tells Will, “There is something wrong with this house.”

Wrong, indeed. The less than dreamy house at the center of this turkey is already something of a suburban legend by the time Libby and Will start unpacking boxes.  Horror-queen Naomi Watts plays Anne, Will’s mysterious neighbor who keeps her distance, and won’t say what happened inside the Ward home five years ago.  After Will catches a gaggle of Goths holding a creepy séance in his cellar, and the ever-menacing Elias Koteas (of “Shutter Island,” a superior film built on the same concept of parallel plots) peering through his windows, he complains that he has an “infestation of teenagers in the basement.”  That’s the least of his problems.  Much to his disbelief, he comes to suspect that he is the house’s former occupant, a wife-killer named Peter Ward, and that Libby and his daughters are mere visions.  After paying a visit to Greenhaven Psychiatric Institute, Will comes to wonder: am I Ward?  Am I a widower or a wack-job?

Chances are you won’t stick around to find out and for good reason.  Screenwriter David Louck stuffs his script with laughable lines like “I’m not writing a book, I’m living in a fantasy!” and “Get me the chloroform now!” And when Will and Libby realize that the iniquity inside their walls cannot be suppressed, we get this: “You can’t paint over evil!”

Any smart spectator of this claptrap would be hard-pressed to find something intelligent to say about it, but if forced to lay a cerebral layer of paint over “Dream House,” Freud’s conceptualization of the “The Uncanny” (1919) comes to mind.  To prove that the uncanny relates to what he calls “themes of the double in all its grades and developments,” Freud describes being lost in an Italian piazza: “I suddenly found myself in the same street again [where] my swift departure resulted only in my ending up in the very same place, through a different detour, for the third time.  But then I was overcome by a feeling I can only describe as uncanny […] the unintended return of the same.”   The uncanny isn’t so much déjà vu but the compulsion to repeat and return over and over again.

“Dream House” not only repeats the central conceit of the King/Kubric classic, “The Shining,” in which murdered girls leave an infectious trace behind – come play with us, Danny! – but it goes in circles like the toilet bowl in which it belongs.  When a great conflagration eventually erupts in the final reel, you won’t feel the heat since, by that point, “Dream House” has already collapsed like a house of cards.

Review: “Abduction”

23 Friday Sep 2011

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“Adventures in Baby-Snatching”

Film: “Abduction” (2011)

Grade: F (SKIP IT)


 

“TWILIGHT” STAR TAYLOR Lautner included, this flaccid timewaster of a “thriller” is full of shiny surfaces and zero substance.  BMWs, Apple Macbooks, even the pearly magic of Lautner’s dentistry are set before our eyes like glossy windup-toys headed right off the side of a cliff.   Putting the abs in “Abduction,” a toned but tonedeaf Lautner plays Nathan Price, a high school senior duped into thinking his parents (Maria Bello and Jason Isaacs) are his biological progenitors when instead, they’re undercover agents determined to arm and protect him from impending badguys.

Something’s fishy when your psychologist dissuades you from thinking too deeply about your dreams, especially that flashback of what could be your mother dead on a hotel floor in Paris.  Slumming it as Nathan’s psychiatrist, Sigourney Weaver plays Dr. Bennett, another adult actively involved in the cover-up of Nathan’s real origins.  (Are the “Avatar” and “Alien 1, 2, 3, 4” residuals really that paltry that Weaver needs “Abduction” for the moola because it can’t possibly be the script that called her great name?  The same goes for the equally distinguished Alfred Molina, of “Frida” and “Spiderman 2,” as a crooked CIA agent.)

Something’s even fishier when your dad picks you up from a ragin’ pool party – of course, a shirtless and hungover Nathan is strewn, alongside the obligatory red Dixie cups, on the lawn – only to bring you home and viciously defeat you in a kickboxing match.  “Drink like a man; fight like a man!” growls Isaacs as Nate’s dad.  It’s boot camp masquerading as tough love, and when danger finally comes a knockin’ – cue the Russian goon squad and the dead-eyed villain named Viktor Kazlow (Michael Nyqvist) who wants the encrypted information on Nathan’s cell phone – Nathan is ready to defend himself.  “Abduction” knows its demographic all too well for any real harm to come to its hero, and his haircut, and the film ends, improbably, with he and girlfriend (Lily Collins – Phil’s daughter) snuggling in an empty baseball stadium.  Hot dogs, get your hot dogs here!

If  director John Singleton (of “Boyz n the Hood” and “2 Fast 2 Furious”) musters little shock when Nathan eventually stumbles over his childhood photo on a missing persons’ database – I know my name is Steven! – it’s because Lautner too closely resembled the guy who misses quite a bit throughout his day: irony, algebra, carbohydrates.  Lautner isn’t so much an actor but the multiplex’s version of a chocolate Easter bunny: he may satiate your sweet tooth, but he’s all hollow inside.

Whatever “Abduction” names as its ransom, don’t pay it.

Review: “Contagion”

13 Tuesday Sep 2011

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“Cover Your Cough”

Film Review: “Contagion” (2011)

Grade: B (RENT IT)

“BLOGGING ISN’T WRITING. It’s graffiti with punctuation.”  This from Dr. Ian Sussman (played by Elliott Gould), an epidemiologist scrambling to find a vaccine for the pernicious pandemic known as MEV-1 in the new thriller, “Contagion.”

The blogosphere will certainly admire the fact that the object of Sussman’s invective – a San Francisco blogger named Alan (Jude Law) – is one of the lucky few completely immune to the plague.  Then again, Alan is a sleaze who capitalizes on the crisis by exploiting his readers’ panic  (Too bad I’d need a global epidemic to gain that kind of readership!)  In a Dickensian stroke, Alan’s last name is Krumwiede (pronounced “Crumb-Weedy”) and he’s as slimy as the infection himself.

Before Krumwiede comes on the scene, however, society as we know it quickly unravels after business exec Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) returns from Hong Kong to her home in Minneapolis.  Husband Mitch (Matt Damon) is devastated when she and son Clark (Griffin Kane) quickly succumb to an illness as inexplicable as it is fatal.  It’s a cool and crestfallen performance from Damon, shot in the oceanic blues favored by director Steven Soderbergh (“Erin Brockovich,” “Oceans 11”).  Watch as his reaction hardens from disbelief to fury as an emergency room doc tells him both his wife and six-year-old son are dead.  The pathogen in “Contagion” doesn’t just infect; it ravages.  With its rapid incubation phase, and 2.5 million dead in just 26 days, MEV-1 makes SARS look like the sniffles.

To the rescue is a team of experts including Kate Winslet (as Dr. Erin Mears of the CDC), Laurence Fishburne (as Ellis Cheever), and the marvelous Marion Cotillard (as Leonora Orantes of the World Health Organization).  One of the numerous subplots involves Leonora’s abduction at the hands of an Asian family man who holds her hostage until his villagers are given the cure.  After a no-nonsense Winslet is shown an empty stadium for treating the sick, she replies: “Good.  Now give me three more just like it.”

Where “Contagion” succeeds in terms of pacing – composer Cliff Martinez provides an electronic score of blips and bleeps, which sounds like call-waiting on Mars – the film never transcends a purely base and biologic level.  The greatest explorations of contagion on page aren’t as modern as you might think.  Mary Shelley’s The Last Man may have been set in the future, but it was published back in 1826 while La Peste (or The Plague) of Albert Camus followed the Second World War in 1947.  What those two novels share is the alertness to contagion as something more than simple transmission.  Yes, a germy handshake can be a weapon, but it’s also a tie that binds.

However slick and satisfying, “Contagion” is more interested in building (then swiftly dissembling) the puzzle-like structure of a medical mystery than it is in the plague as some kind of meaningful metaphor for interconnectivity and a world flattened by travel and globalization.  “Contagion” will make you afraid, but it won’t make you think, and stripped of the idea that illness is always a metaphor, it metastasizes into some soulless installment of “Final Destination” where you end up waiting on the next character to die.