Day 199: Trance

"To be yourself you have to constantly remember yourself... it's a full-time job."

For years Danny Boyle toiled away as an underrated director of some pretty great genre pictures like Shallow Grave, Trainspotting & 28 Days Later. Then a funny thing happened in 2008. A little film that he made called Slumdog Millionaire, that had been intended to go direct to dvd, became a worldwide sensation. For fans of his earlier work, it seemed to validate the faith we had in him as a director, yet also left us feeling a bit hollow since he was getting tons of recognition for what is arguably his weakest film. After another awards grab with 2010's 127 Hours, Boyle has returned to his gritty roots with his latest film Trance.




James McAvoy plays Simon, a worker at a big time auction house in London. As the film opens, he's explaining what his training has prepared him for in the event of an attempted robbery at the auction house. At the same time, a carefully orchestrated heist, headed by Franck (Vincent Cassel) is being carried out. While attempting to protect an extremely valuable painting by Goya, Simon is kncoked unconscious by Franck, who soon discovers that the painting is missing from the package he took from Simon.

When Simon comes to in a hospital room, the blow suffered by Franck has left him with amnesia, and he cannot remember where he stashed the real painting. Franck turns to a hypnotist by the name of Elizabeth (Rosario Dawson) to unlock Simon's memories and discover the location of the painting. But when Elizabeth gets wise to what's really going on, she wants in on whatever take the stolen painting will net them when Simon remembers where he hid it.



The thing that works best about Trance is its simplicity. Although the film is a maze and information is doled out bit by bit over the film's short 100 minute running time, it's a remarkably simple heist film, and that, more than anything else, makes it work so well. There's the usual camera trickery and funky camera angles we've come to expect from Boyle as a director, but he keeps things small and never strays from the main plot of recovering the stolen painting.

Boyle is the kind of director that can rely too heavily on fancy footwork to distract from his lack of substantial content, but he doesn't do that much here. Don't get me wrong, there's still plenty of odd & interesting work being done, but it's all in the service of the story. The editing on the film, done by Jon Harris, is brilliant as well, often cutting for maximum comedic or suspenseful value. When the plot finally comes together in the film's climax, it's edited brilliantly, making the multitude of reveals (some of which were a tad ridiculous) come together in a wholly satisfactory way.



James McAvoy is as dynamic an actor as there is working today. He reminds me so much of a young Ewan McGregor, and has all of the same vitality and versatility that McGregor possessed early in his career. His character here is fascinating and he rises to the challenge of playing him as such. Vincent Cassel is also perfectly cast in the film. He has a sleazy charm as an actor and Boyle puts that to great use here. Rosario Dawson is perfectly fine in the role, but doesn't really grow into the character until her last few scenes.

Ultimately, I think the reason the film works as well as it does is because it has a great screenplay. Joe Ahearne wrote the script, based on his story, with frequent Boyle collaborator John Hodge. Hodge wrote almost all of Boyle's early screenplays, through The Beach, and will be returning to collaborate on the Trainspotting sequel Porno. This is a tightly written script, full of great dialogue and sly reveals, and it's a huge part of the reason the film succeeds.



One of the highest compliments I can pay the film is that I can't wait to see it again. By the time you get to the climax and the reveals start piling up, it will make you want to go back and see the film knowing how everything shakes out, and see what you missed. That's the mark of a great thriller, and I feel confident in saying that's what this is. Granted, it's a bit preposterous, and requires your faith in hypnotism as a genuine science in order for it to work, but for me it worked great. You may not love the film, but I can guarantee you'll at least be entertained by it, and when all is said and done, that's what a movie is supposed to do.

GO Rating: 4/5



[Photos via BoxOfficeMojo]

Day 198: To The Wonder

"Life's a dream. In a dream you can't make mistakes."

Terrence Malick is one of the only truly enigmatic directors left in cinema. In 1978, after releasing only his second feature film Days of Heaven, he took a twenty years hiatus before returning with 1998's The Thin Red Line. The myth that built up around him in those twenty years made him seem less like a real person and more of a legend. In the fifteen years since The Thin Red Line, he's released three more films, including my favorite film of 2011, The Tree of Life. Now just two years later, he's released To The Wonder, a film that's been billed as "his most accessible film yet." So how accessible is it? Read on to find out...




Malick is a master of utilizing voiceover, and with his latest film, he relies almost solely on voiceover to tell the story. The film follows Marina (Olga Kurylenko) a woman living with her ten year old daughter, Tatiana, in France. Here she meets a tourist named Neil (Ben Affleck) and the two begin a love affair that culminates in Neil asking Marina & Tatiana to move back with him to Oklahoma. While in the US, Neil works as an environmental inspector, and Marina and her daughter grow restless. Eventually they return to France, where Tatiana decides to go live with her father, leaving Marina despondent & alone.

In their absence, Neil begins another relationship with Jane (Rachel McAdams). Their affair isn't as carefree as his previous one with Marina, because Jane is haunted by the death of her daughter. Neil learns about Marina's struggles and offers to marry her so she can become a US citizen. Returning to the US is no easier this time, and Marina finds herself striking up a friendship with an equally distraught outsider, the priest at a local church, Father Quintana (Javier Bardem).

Father Quintana has issues with his local parish, and with the fact that he feels cut off from God. Marina & Neil begin grow apart in their marriage and seek comfort elsewhere, and Father Quintana also looks for any sort of connection to others that he can get by proselytizing to prisoners or spending time with the sexton. Everyone is looking for connection, but no one seems to be able to find it.



My summary of the plot is much more straightforward than the film presents it. Granted the film does follow a much more linear storyline than Tree of Life, but with almost no dialogue, the details have to be gleaned & put together by the viewer since almost all of the voiceover is expressionistic. It's also an interesting choice that Marina & Quintana do all of the voiceover work, meaning that it's all in either subtitled French or Spanish, even though the bulk of the film is set in the US. I'm likely making this sound much more confusing than it actually is, it works perfectly fine, but it's a blank enough canvas for you to project your own thoughts onto.

And this, I suppose, is my biggest issue with the film after my first viewing. The film doesn't have the emotional immediacy of The Tree of Life. Where that film covered so much of the life cycle that it was easy to cling to whatever details or characters appealed most to you, the circle of characters here seem distant. As REM taught us, everybody hurts, so I suppose there is a lot for viewers to latch onto here, but this film feels so emotionally distant from his previous work that it was hard for me to make my way into the story. I didn't explicitly dislike any of the characters, but we see so little of them and so few sides of them that they feel sadly one-dimensional. It was hard for me to connect with any of them.



It's virtually impossible to critique the film's performances since they seem almost secondary to the film's intent. I'm sold on Ben Affleck the director, but as an actor, it's taking me some time to warm back up to him. I like Affleck a lot, but he's not terribly expressive as an actor, and for a role like this, that's pretty deadly. Kurylenko is very good in her role, as is Bardem, but virtually all of their character work is done in voiceover. They have a few moments, such as Bardem's tour of the church with the sexton or Kurylenko's late film "walk of shame" from a motel, that shine, but most of what I liked about their characters was done in voiceover.

As anyone who's a fan of Malick will tell you, his films demand repeat viewings, and often play best on the big screen. Since To The Wonder was released simultaneously in theaters and on iTunes, I got to see it for the first time at home, and the distractions of home can be deadly to a Malick film. I'm positive that once I get a chance to see it on the big screen or watch it again on my television instead of my computer, I'll work through a lot of the vagueness of it and be able to see things more clearly.



If I had written a review of The Tree of Life immediately after seeing it for the first time, it wouldn't have been as glowing as after the third time I saw it. Even still, there was a ton of lingering imagery and dialogue and character choices that made that film resonate with me even though I didn't immediately love it. With this film, I'm having a really difficult time remembering anything outside of the imagery. I do want to see this film again, but I don't feel the need to see it again right away, which is probably the saddest thing I can say about it right now.

GO Rating: 2.5/5



[Photos via BoxOfficeMojo]

Day 197: The Place Beyond the Pines

"If you ride like lightning you're gonna crash like thunder."

Ryan Gosling has made a career out of zigging when everyone else zags. After his star making turn in The Notebook, everyone more or less thought he would go the safe route & build a career as a leading man in the traditional sense, but he has carefully built his career doing anything but what's traditional. One of his best performances came in 2010's Blue Valentine for director Derek Cianfrance, so hopes & expectations are high for their latest collaboration The Place Beyond the Pines.



Gosling plays Luke, a motorcycle riding drifter who comes to the small town of Schenectady, NY with a traveling carnival. He meets & sleeps with a local girl named Romina (Eva Mendes), and when he returns the following year, he discovers that she has a young son that he fathered on their night together. Luke quits his job and decides to stay in town to find a way to be in his son's life and provide for him. He takes a mechanic job working with a local guy named Robin (Ben Mendelsohn), who recognizes Luke's skills with a motorcycle, and convinces him to use his talents to rob banks.

Since Romina is living with another man, Luke thinks that perhaps if he makes enough money robbing banks to provide for his son & her, that she'll want to live with him instead. His bank robberies, however, put his life on a course to intersect with a rookie cop named Avery (Bradley Cooper). Their fateful encounter sets off a series of events that ricochet over the next fifteen years.



If you've seen the trailer to the film, you've already seen too much. For me to say anymore than I've already said would be to give even more away. Needless to say, the trailer not only contains too many significant plot points, it also misleads you into thinking the film is going to be intercut & woven together in a large tapestry of their intersecting lives, and that's not how the film plays out at all. The narrative is a pretty straight line from A-Z, which is not at all what the trailers led me to believe. If you've somehow managed to avoid the trailers, I would recommend you not watch them, stop reading, and go see the film.

One of the things that really struck me about this film was the immediacy of the way it was shot. Blue Valentine had an almost claustrophobic style that made you feel like you were suffocating along with those characters, but this film is much more expansive. It runs 140 minutes, but it's never boring, and the handheld camerawork smartly keeps you focused on what's important in a given scene. The bank robbery scenes are wisely chaotic & frantic, but the dialogue & character driven scenes are much more classically shot with a handheld edge to them. In short, if you didn't like Blue Valentine, don't be afraid that this will be more of the same, and if you did like it, you'll find yourself pleasantly surprised by how versatile a director Cianfrance has turned out to be.



Gosling's performance in this film is nowhere near as good as it was in Blue Valentine. Too often in this film, he tries to do more by doing nothing at all, and it just sort of falls flat most of the time. I like Gosling a lot as an actor, but he's almost too minimalistic here for this character. He keeps him at arm's length from the audience and the rest of the characters, and I think that was a mistake. Cooper is very good here too, though not as good as he was in Silver Linings Playbook. He dials his character down significantly, and it works for most of the film except his next to last scene which I thought he overplayed.

However, it was Ben Mendelsohn who stole the whole film for me. He's only in a handful of scenes, but he's such a dynamic character that while the other two (no offense) pretty boy actors are busy showing you how they can do more with less, Mendelsohn goes for broke and ends up upstaging everyone. After his small roles in Killing Them Softly & The Dark Knight Rises, he is quickly turning into one of my favorite character actors working today. The film also features great performances from Ray Liotta, Bruce Greenwood & Harris Yulin in very small but memorable roles.

The biggest issue with the film is that it goes on about five minutes longer than it should have, which is odd to say about a film that's this long. It wasn't necessarily the running time I had an issue with, it was the final scene which I felt almost single-handedly derailed the entire movie. It was trite and obvious where the entire rest of the film hadn't been. I don't want to say anymore about it, but I'm curious to see what others think. I think it would have been a better movie without the final scene.



The Place Beyond the Pines is a very good film, with very good actors & very good writing & direction. However it fell just shy of greatness for me. I enjoyed the theme of the film with its meditation on fathers & sons and people being doomed to repeat the past if they don't learn from it. But it feels elusive to me, even now just an hour after seeing it. It holds you at an emotional distance, similar to how Zero Dark Thirty did late last year. It's an excellently made film, I just didn't connect with it in the way that I hoped I would, and, I imagine, in the way the filmmakers wanted me to.

GO Rating: 3.5/5



[Photos via BoxOfficeMojo]

Top 5: Uses of a Popular Song in a Movie

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First & foremost, I have to thank my friend Rob Nargi for suggesting this to me, and for his favorite, which made #4 on my list. Thank you sir!

The use of popular songs in films is not a new art. Directors have been cutting scenes in their films to popular songs for as long as films have been made. Often there are great pairings that happen, such as Mike Nichols' decision to set most of The Graduate to the songs of Simon & Garfunkle, or Paul Thomas Anderson's collaboration with Aimee Mann on Magnolia.

In thinking about my top five examples though, I wanted to look at one-off uses of a pop song in a film used to heighten the emotion of the scene. These are my five favorite pairings of song & scene. I'm sure I've forgotten a bunch, and many just missed the cut ("Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" from Butch Cassidy or "Head Over Heels" from Donnie Darko) but these five rose to the top.



5. Ferris Bueller's Day Off: "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want" covered by Dream Academy.

The thought of doing a list like this without including a scene from a John Hughes movie is absurd, since he was the voice of youth, music & movies in the 80s. My favorite example has got to be the scene in Ferris Bueller's Day Off when the star trio slow things down with a visit to The Art Institute of Chicago. The use of an instrumental version of one of The Smiths' most famous songs is brilliant, and this scene, more than any other, still sticks with me even though I probably haven't watched this movie in five years.


4. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind: "If I Had a Hammer" by Peter, Paul & Mary

George Clooney's directorial debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, is one of my all-time favorite movies. Charlie Kaufman's screenplay, based on Chuck Barris' "autobiography," is filled with tons of incredible dialogue & anchored by an amazing lead performance by Sam Rockwell. However, it was Clooney's use of the seemingly innocuous Peter, Paul & Mary song, played as Barris is losing his mind, that showed he had talent to spare behind the camera.



3. Fight Club: "Where is My Mind" by The Pixies

David Fincher is an artist of the highest caliber, and since he got his start in music videos, it should be no surprise that he makes insanely good use of music in his films. This slot could have easily gone to the "Hurdy Gurdy Man" scene from Zodiac or the rowing competition from The Social Network set to "In the Hall of the Mountain King." However, when I think of music in a Fincher film, there's no better example than his use of "Where is My Mind" by The Pixies to end Fight Club since it artfully manages to combine music, imagery and the overall theme of the film into one scene lasting less than a minute. Gorgeous.



2. Goodfellas: "Layla" by Derek & The Dominos 

Martin Scorsese is another director with whom I could fill an entire list of best uses of music. He started the trend right in the opening credits of Mean Streets with The Ronettes' "Be My Baby," and he's used "Gimme Shelter" by The Rolling Stones to great in effect in three of his films, and none of this is even mentioning his concert films like The Last Waltz. However, his crowning achievement has got to be this scene from Goodfellas in which Jimmy (Robert DeNiro)'s paranoia about the Lufthansa heist finally gets the best of him and he goes about getting rid of everyone that was in on the heist. The song is recycled again in the end credits, but it's the slow-motion images of death, coupled with the song & the narration by Henry (Ray Liotta) that linger with you after the film is over.




1. Rushmore: "A Quick One While He's Away" by The Who

For many years, Rushmore was my favorite movie, and I've likely seen it more than I've seen any other movie ever made. In the years that followed, Wes Anderson got a bit twee with his use of music, but there are so many solid examples early in his career ("Life on Mars" from The Life Aquatic, "Me & Julio..." from The Royal Tenenbaums) that made him a master of montaging scenes to songs of The British Invasion. The best example by far, and my favorite use of a song in a movie ever, has got to be the scene in Rushmore when Max (Jason Schwartzman) & Mr. Blume (a never better Bill Murray) go to war over their mutual love of Ms. Cross (Olivia Williams). This is what perfect editing looks like.

Day 196: Spring Breakers

"This is poetry in motion, big booties and money fallin' y'all!"

Harmony Korine, as both writer & director, has never made a film that even remotely interested me or that I found any sort of redeeming qualities in. He is a provocateur, and his debut screenplay, Kids, made for the perfect storm of provocation when it was directed by one of the most despicable directors alive, Larry Clark. That film is absolute, exploitative garbage, claiming to be aimed at teenagers, but clearly intended for gross, disgusting adults who get their rocks off on watching teens participate in risky behaviors. 

While his newest film as writer & director, Spring Breakers, is nowhere near as openly aimed at people with pedophiliac tendencies, it's somehow worse in the fact that it thinks it actually has something meaningful to say about the typical American college girl experience. Part of me hopes that it does anyway, because if it's actually trying to subvert those and becomes sort of the inverse, a film that exploits exploitation so to speak, than it's even more hideous.

The film opens with the boring & disparate tales of four college friends. There's the inseparable Brit (Ashley Benson) & Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), who spends most of her time onscreen making guns with her thumb and forefinger and firing them at her head, in her mouth or at others. There's Cotty (Rachel Korine) who defies description other than to say she's basically just like the other two, and then there's Faith (Selena Gomez) to whom we're introduced at some sort of wacky college evangelical Christian gathering. Look, nobody despises evangelical Christians as much as I do, but even I was offended by the way Korine portrayed this group of college students & their "hip" pastor. 

Faith is obviously the one who's not like the other three, but spends her time with them because they've been friends since Kindergarten. The girls are planning a trip to Florida for Spring Break, but don't have enough money to make the trip, so Brit, Candy & Cotty decide to don ski masks and rob a greasy spoon chicken shack with a hammer & a painted water gun. Their plan goes swimmingly and the girls now have enough money to head to St. Pete. When they arrive, it's the typical parent's nightmare bacchanalia. Liquor, drugs, tits, douchebag guys with faux-hawks, cocaine, white rappers, slow motion, keg stands, borderline rape, actual rape, those sorts of things. This portion of the film plays out like an extended highlight reel for dirty old men to feather their sacks to. 

There's no redeeming qualities to any of the girls as they ride around on scooters, sing "Hit Me Baby One More Time" in a liquor store parking lot, or re-enact the robbery that got them there for Faith's benefit. In short, it was enough to make me want to leave the theater. But something kept me there. It was the entire reason that I had shown up to the movie in the first place, and that was the promise of seeing a full-on bat shit crazy performance from James Franco. Franco makes a brief appearance earlier in the film rapping on the beach at a concert, and I was beginning to think he may not come back. 

Then the girls get arrested at a hotel party where they're caught snorting coke with two wiggers. The wiggers happen to be in the posse of Franco's character Alien, and when Alien sees them in court, threatened with more jail time if they're unable to pay their bail, he steps in and bails them out. He's a drug dealing, gun-loving, white guy who thinks he's black, and he felt compelled to help these girls out and show them a good time in his part of St. Pete. When they arrive at a party, Faith begins to get bad feelings and wants to go back home. Alien tells her she can go, but that her friends are staying, and with that, the only remotely likable character in the film leaves, and the film takes a steep plunge into shitsville. 

Now, I'm not saying I liked the character of Faith or that I enjoyed the movie more when she was in it, but the prospect of losing any sort of voice of reason character made the film's remaining forty minutes an endurance test. Alien has a bit of a turf war going with his childhood friend Big Arch (Gucci Mane), and the remaining three girls want in on Alien's posse and want to become part of his war. When Cotty is shot in the arm by one of Arch's bitches, she leaves for home as well, removing the only other obstacle between Alien, Brit & Candy's dream love affair. 

There is an absolutely interminable sequence in Alien's pool where the three of them have sex, and the girls are constantly calling him a scaredy cat because they know he wants to kill Arch, but won't go through with it. They seriously repeat the same four lines of dialogue, ad nauseam, for five or six minutes. And of course the film ends in a bloodbath with two teenage girls from the middle of nowhere gunning down multiple thugs guarding Big Arch's house. Nonsense.

None of this is to mention the extended "look at my shit" monologue by Franco, where he implores Brit & Candy to look at his guns, money, bed, sneakers, socks, television, money & other assorted shit. This monologue ends with the girls forcing him to fellate the business end of two silenced rifles. Oh, and he's wearing zubaz. I'm serious when I say that I can't tell if they're being serious or not, and I'm not sure which is more disconcerting to me. I would also be remiss if I didn't mention the sing-along around Alien's poolside piano of Britney Spears' "Everytime," that then becomes a montage of Alien & the girls robbing & pillaging. I hate to get political here, but I wish every NRA member and every person in Congress fighting to protect our current gun laws would watch this movie. These are the "responsible gun owners" that they're trying to protect. Dumb. 

This movie is so god damned dumb it makes me angry. I wish that I could say there were some redeeming qualities. I wish I could tell you it's worth seeing for James Franco, but he's somehow worse in this than he was in Oz. It seems like the kind of performance that's right in his wheelhouse, with his grill & cornrows & Kevin Federline vibe, but he's almost too self-conscious as an actor to truly go for it. His accent keeps changing, and he just honestly doesn't appear to be taking it seriously, which again leads me to wonder if this entire movie is serious or not. 

Spring Breakers is one of the absolute worst movies I have ever laid eyes on. It's pure garbage with no soul, designed to titillate the viler impulses in the worst people in our society. Steer clear of anyone that thinks this is a good movie or an interesting movie or thinks that it's deep. It isn't. It's shallow and it's the worst kind of shallow because it thinks it's making a statement about shallowness in our society. I hated this film with every fiber of my being.

[Photos via BoxOfficeMojo]

Day 195: Room 237

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In a forty year career as a filmmaker, Stanley Kubrick only made thirteen feature films and four short films, and despite his reputation, he was far from reclusive. However, he was very reticent to let people in on his process and left behind an aura of mystery that lends itself to the sort of myth-making that film scholars delight in.

The new "documentary," Room 237, is a film unlike any other you'll ever see in that it doesn't delve into any sort of factual behind-the-scenes insights into Kubrick's 1980 film The Shining. Rather it takes five people and gives them a forum in which to explain what they think the true, hidden meanings in this film are, and they are so wildly divergent, there's no way they could all be true. However, digging into the mysteries within this enigmatic film is almost as pleasurable as just watching the film itself.




Director Rodney Ascher has made a one-of-a-kind film with Room 237. Unlike a traditional documentary, he forgoes any sort of traditional style, such as talking head interviews, and instead uses footage directly from The Shining with the interviews overlaid as voice over. Therefore, we get to see the same shots, multiple times, with multiple interpretations of them.

The five interviewees and their various theories on the true meanings of The Shining are as follows: Bill Blakemore postulates that the film is about the systematic slaughter of Native Americans by the white European settlers. Geoffrey Cocks theorizes that the film is rife with metaphorical connections to 1942 & The Wannsee Conference in which the Nazis decided to rid Europe of the Jewish people. Jay Weidner's theory is that NASA utilized Kubrick's services to help stage footage of the 1969 moon landing, and The Shining is his confession to his part in this national conspiracy.



Lastly there is Juli Kearns & John Fell Ryan, both of whom focus on the film's tongue-in-cheek implausibilities and inside jokes that Kubrick littered the film with. Kearns focuses on impossible windows in the hotel layout & some pretty odd metaphors involving a minotaur hidden in a skiing poster. Ryan shows interesting overlays and edits that the film makes, and culminates his arguments with a demonstration of how the film syncs to itself when projected forwards and backwards simultaneously on the same screen (if that sounds confusing, it actually works quite well when shown in the film).

Needless to say, it's categorically impossible for Kubrick to have intended the film to have all of these meanings simultaneously, so the audience will likely have to decide for themselves which theories work and which don't. In all honesty, there are holes in all of these various theories, though some are arguably larger than others. Weidner's NASA conspiracies reek of the sort of paranoid ramblings of a man who's spent too much time writing manifestos in a secure bunker. Similarly every point that Kearns makes which seems to make sense or be interesting is almost immediately followed by one which requires gigantic logical leaps of faith to believe.



Since there is no on-screen naming of the individuals speaking, it's hard for me to know whether it was Blakemore or Cocks that posits some early theories about the hidden sexual subliminal images in the film, but they are laughably absurd. It also feels at times like all five speakers are reaching towards things that are obvious continuity errors to place hidden meanings to them, such as a disappearing sticker of the dwarf Dopey on young Danny Torrance's bedroom door.

Nevertheless, Kubrick was a notorious stickler for detail, often spending entire days decorating a set or rearranging props within a given scene to achieve his desired vision. This fact, in and of itself, hangs an air of suspicion over every little detail in the film that is seemingly out of place. There are strong possibilities that these things were done intentionally, but to say with certainty what Kubrick's intentions were is the slipperiest of slopes.



Room 237 is a unique viewing experience that is absolutely essential for fans of cinematic dissection and most assuredly for fans of either Stanley Kubrick or The Shining. It is the kind of film that will make you want to watch The Shining again immediately to see what theories stick with you and perhaps even what theories of your own you could concoct.

The film is showing in limited engagements across the country right now and is also available to stream on iTunes & The Playstation Network, so it's never been more accessible than it is at the moment. I cannot recommend it any higher for fans of Kubrick or movies in general. It will make you laugh, shake you head, and most importantly, think.

GO Rating: 4/5


[Photos 2-5 via Lucy Who]

Day 194: Evil Dead (2013)

"I can smell your filthy soul."

Let me get this out of the way, right off the bat: There are some sacred cows for me in the world of cinema. Films that I consider to be holy and above being remade. Sam Raimi's Evil Dead is not one of those films. I have no great attachment to the original film, and I was not up in arms over the proposed remake when it was announced. I feel the need to qualify this fact because I am about to tear this remake to shreds, and I don't want anyone reading this to think that I have some sort of personal animus towards the film based on some affinity for the original.



For the record, I do enjoy the original Evil Dead trilogy to an extent. I think that the films got better each time out of the gate, with Army of Darkness being my favorite. The main thing that sets those films apart from most of the horror movies being made in this day and age is that they have a true sense of levity to them. They're a wonderful mixture of comedy & horror, and while not all horror films need to combine laughter into the mix, when you're being asked to buy into a ridiculous premise like demonic possession via an ancient book of the dead & witchcraft rituals, it certainly helps.

The new film follows the same basic premise as the original, five friends travel to a remote cabin in the woods, find a "book of the dead," and find themselves possessed by a demon. In an attempt to answer the age old adage of "why don't they just leave," the writers added a subplot wherein one of the girls is there to quit her heroin habit, so the others are not convinced by her repeated attempts to try and escape.

The addict in question is Mia (Jane Levy), and her companions are her estranged brother & Ash stand-in David (Shiloh Fernandez), his girlfriend (Elizabeth Blackmore), their registered nurse friend Olivia (Jessica Lucas) & English teacher turned resident book of the dead expert Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci). I have to admit that the way they dealt with the exposition and lengthy backstory had me hooked for the first ten minutes or so. I was honestly impressed by how well they conveyed a lot of information with very little dialogue. Kudos to the screenwriters for managing to hash together a great first act.



Things unfortunately go in the toilet pretty soon after that, and the film's dead serious tone helped to sink the movie almost immediately. One of the most infamous scenes in the original is the "rape tree," which is handled here in the most dire of ways. It was an immediate indicator that the film was not looking to have any fun with its premise, but instead was focused on attempting to legitimately scare its audience with obviously comedic premises.

Director Fede Alvarez has a vivid imagination and certainly comes up with some of the more interesting ways to pile on the blood and guts I've seen in a long time, but he's not terribly clever. The height of his cleverness is on display when Eric, who looks like the prototypical version of Jesus, is attacked with a nail gun and shot through the palms. This is as clever as the director and/or writers were willing to get, and that's ultimately disappointing.



It's hard to criticize the performances in a film like this since all of the actors were being called upon to essentially portray screaming ninnies with ridiculous lapses in common sense. They did that well enough, I would have just liked to see some character development beyond the first ten minutes of the film. They were all perfectly serviceable, but lacked any sort of depth to make you care about them when they're systematically slaughtered.

Another big issue I had was the way the film pushed the bounds of plausibility. I know how categorically absurd it is for me to say that about a film like this, but if I'm playing along with the filmmakers and taking all of this seriously, their characters withstand tremendous amounts of bodily damage and blood loss without dying. And anyone who's seen 127 Hours knows that it's no easy feat to separate your arm from your body, yet no less than two characters in this film do it as if they're cutting the tag off a new shirt.



My issues with Evil Dead can be summed up like this: It's fine to do a humorless remake of a film that had a sense of humor, but don't insist on paying homage to the original every chance you get. This is a dour film with no sense of irony, fun or originality. If the people who made it had their wits about them, they might have tried to lighten the mood a bit. I would have loved this film had it had a sense of humor about what it was, but as it stands now, it's just a violent mish-mash of nonsensical premises presented in the most serious manner imaginable, and if that concept frightens you, you're already more scared than this dreck is going to make you in its entire ninety minute running time.

GO Rating: 0.5/5


[Photos via Box Office Mojo]

In Memoriam: Roger Ebert

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Today brings news that legendary film critic Roger Ebert has died at the age of 70. It’s hard to argue that there has been a more influential film critic in my lifetime, and certainly none that elevated film criticism to an art form like he did. While many critics before him, such as Pauline Kael, helped people to take film seriously as an art form, Ebert was the first popular critic to truly champion a well-made film no matter the genre or subject matter.

He was the kind of critic that readily acknowledged that a film didn’t have to be a serious-minded, Oscar-worthy film to be a great film. He made it okay to give a thumbs up vote to schlock, provided it was well-made schlock, and I cannot emphasize how truly important that is to the institution of film criticism. While I may not have always seen eye to eye with his criticism, I valued it in a way that I valued few other critics.

He truly understood the language of cinema, and helped to make difficult films more accessible, and show the value in a good film where others may have dismissed it outright. And none of this is to say that he loved everything. His book Your Film Sucks, gathers some of his most scathing reviews and shows how sharp his knives could be when they were drawn. But he understood when and how to make that distinction, which I feel is his single greatest contribution to world of film criticism. He judged a film on how well it worked in comparison to what it set out to do, which is something that not a lot of critics before him took the time to do. Many would just casually dismiss a film such as Matchstick Men, where he would take the time to understand the filmmakers intent and score the film accordingly.

I cannot overstate the importance his criticism had on my young film going life. Every Friday I would tear into the entertainment section of the local paper (The Bergen Record in northern NJ) to read his syndicated reviews (one of the earliest I remember reading was his review for Tim Burton’s Batman in 1989). Honestly, how many ten year olds cared what a film critic thought about a film, but to me, his opinion mattered. I valued it, even at a young age, and he helped to make me more than just a casual filmgoer.

Roger Ebert loved movies, and this, more than anything else, informed his criticism of film. He didn’t divorce this love of film from his job, and he could write eloquently about films that others would likely just reject. His love of film helped him to champion the underdog and it also led him to eloquently tear down abject failures. He could take it personally when a filmmaker fundamentally failed, and a negative review from him could be enough to make a filmmaker take stock of their work before trying again.

It’s become to easy to dismiss the art of criticism in a culture where anyone with an internet connection can voice their opinion on art, so the loss of a titan like Ebert is immeasurable. In addition to his work in print, he was also one of the first critics to embrace the blogosphere and use the internet as a way to publish articles and other thoughtful pieces that a newspaper might otherwise not make room for. It’s hard to know what impact his loss will have on the critic community, I just hope that whomever is selected as his successor is thoughtful and considerate enough to love film as deeply as Mr. Ebert did.

The fact that he continued his work even after cancer had ravaged most of his face & body is a testament to how deeply felt his love of what he did truly was. He wasn’t one to turn and run in the face of adversity, and it grows his myth even larger in the wake of his passing. Roger Ebert will not be replaced. It’s as simple as that. Much as he struggled to find a replacement in the passing of his long time critic partner Gene Siskel in 1999, the world will try (and fail) to replace Ebert atop the film critic pedestal. Someone else may come along and take over his job as critic at the Sun-Times or take over his blog, but no one will ever replace the man himself.

I would personally like to extend my deepest condolences to his wife Chaz, who was by his side for so many years and became a symbol of strength in the face of adversity. It is a truly sad day for anyone in my line of work, but it is an especially sad day for anyone who loves film, because we’ve lost one of our own. Rest in peace, good sir. You will be missed.

Day 193: Admission

"Virginia Woolf was a twat, extremely overrated, no Getrude Stein. I'll have a breast."

Tina Fey is a force to be reckoned with on the small screen. As head writer for Saturday Night Live, she oversaw one of the show's renaissance periods in the early 00s, and as creator & star of 30 Rock, she forged a path for the smart, single camera comedy that has become a staple of prime time television. On the big screen, however, her work has been sadly met with indifference from the movie going public. Apart from her gig as the writer of Mean Girls, most of her starring vehicles have floundered, and its unfortunate that her most recent film, Admission, has gone the same way, as it's arguably her best film yet.



Based on a novel by Jean Hanff Korelitz, Admission tells the story of Princeton admissions officer Portian Nathan (Fey), a career driven woman working in a high pressure job at the top University in the country. When Princeton loses its number one ranking from US News & World Report, she is charged by the Dean of Admissions (Wallace Shawn) to find spectacular new freshman to elevate the school's standing once again.

One such student falls into her lap courtesy of old college acquaintance John (Paul Rudd) who runs an alternative high school in New Hampshire called Quest. His prized student, Jeremiah (Nat Wolff), is about to begin his college search, and John is desperate for Portia to take a look at him. He doesn't seem like Princeton material, though, and John's true motives come to light when he tells Portia that he thinks Jeremiah is the son she gave up for adoption when they were in undergrad together.

Portia is dealt a further blow when her longtime boyfriend (Michael Sheen) leaves her for a woman he's been having an affair with. So between her relationship crisis, the information about her possible son & increasing pressure at work, Portia's life seems as if it's going to unravel.



The thing that I love most about this film is how well it manages this balancing act with equal parts humor and realistic pathos. It's no surprise that it comes from Paul Weitz, the director of another similarly underrated film, About a Boy. Unlike that film where Hugh Grant's character in that film was dragged kicking and screaming into adulthood, here is a woman who on the surface has her life together, but secretly harbors the fear that she really doesn't, and Fey is perfect in the role.

The major thought that I had throughout almost the entire film was that it shouldn't work as well as it does. It seems so cliched pairing this driven career woman with Paul Rudd's flighty, worldly eco-warrior, and all of the film's themes come to a head when she helps John & Jeremiah birth a cow, a scene that should have sent me running for the aisles for all of its obvious heavy-handedness, but somehow it worked. I think that what made scenes like that work is that they never linger. The film is packed with scenes that seem like they will collapse the film with the obviousness of their meaning, but they move so quickly that nothing feels forced because they don't dwell on the themes the way other movies would.

The film also has a nice third-act turn that helped to alleviate some of the obviousness that was in the air. I won't risk spoiling anything, but I was a big fan of the way that the last half hour of the film artfully wove its way through all of the themes that they had been dealing with. I was actively expecting two things to happen which didn't, and I was pleasantly surprised that it managed to avoid falling into a hole that it seemed to have dug for itself.



The performances are great, particularly Fey & Rudd. They're both world-class comic actors, right at home in this sort of film, and watching them interact with one another was great. Sheen was also a lot of fun in his role as a spineless intellectual who did everything in his power to avoid conflict. Lily Tomlin is fantastic as Portia's mom, the epitome of everything that Portia is rebelling against in her own life, and frankly it's just nice to see her on screen again.

The film's script by Karen Croner is efficient & witty without ever feeling forced, and Weitz's direction compliments it nicely at every turn. The way that the film uses montage is great, particularly early on when Portia is reading applications & touring around various high schools. It all works together incredibly well. The film's score was done by Stephen Trask, who co-wrote the music for Hedwig & The Angry Inch, and the best compliment I can pay it is that you would never know that if you weren't already aware.



As with most of the film's that I've really liked this year, this one has had trouble finding an audience as well, which is sad. I feel as though people are more than willing to pay money to see schlock, but whenever something small and genuine comes along, it's met with indifference. This is a perfect date movie because it can be enjoyed by both sexes equally, and that's something you would never find in a Nicholas Sparks film. If it's still playing, do yourself a favor and go see Admission. It's a lovely little film.

GO Rating: 3.5/5

[Photos via BoxOfficeMojo]