Column, Midwest Film Journal

No Sleep October: The Lost Boys

Originally posted on Midwest Film Journal

Sweaty shirtless saxophone shredding. Of all the images from Joel Schumacher’s 1987 campy vamp romp The Lost Boys, the shots of muscular oiled-up Tim Cappello, humping the air while blowing the riff for “I Still Believe”, have transcended their origin and exist now in the upper echelon of GIFdom. The beach concert cameo from the ponytailed performer, who had appearances in the music videos for both of Tina Turner’s cuts from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome two years prior, obviously doesn’t contribute to the movie’s plot but it comes close to summing up its setting and spirit. Steeped in the carefree decadence of 1980s coastal California, the film’s primary backdrop of the Santa Cruz Boardwalk perfectly encapsulates the up-all-night defiance and eternally youthful energy emanating from the bell of its horn.

Standing in for Santa Cruz throughout The Lost Boys is the fictitious town of Santa Carla, where the recently divorced Lucy Emerson (Dianne Wiest) relocates with her sons Michael (Jason Patric) and Sam (Corey Haim). The older Michael immediately becomes smitten with Star (Jami Gertz), even though she’s embedded in a rough crowd of biker boys who aren’t allowed on the boardwalk. The gang is led by the Billy Idol-looking David (Kiefer Sutherland), who notes Michael’s attraction to Star and takes the “keep your friends close and your enemies closer” approach with the new kid in town. After pressure from David and his crew, Michael drinks from a bottle filled with blood and learns of their secret the hard way: they’re all vampires, and now, he is too.

At the same time, Sam garners interest from brothers Edgar (Corey Feldman) and Alan Frog (Jamison Newlander), thanks to Sam’s expertise in comic book lore. He thinks they’ve read one issue too many when they intimate that Santa Carla is secretly overrun with vampires but after Sam notices several alarming changes in Michael, he takes the claims of the Frog Brothers more seriously. The three set out to eliminate the head vampire that turned all of the teens in town, hoping that cutting the head off the proverbial snake will free them from their vampirism. All the while, they’re fending off another threat in the form of Max (Edward Herrmann), Lucy’s boss at the local video store who sure seems like he’s aiming to be Michael and Sam’s new stepdad.

Richard Donner, who was originally slated to direct The Lost Boys before he was offered Lethal Weapon, stayed on the film in an executive producer role and his influence is felt most in the Amblinesque plotline with Sam and the Frog boys. Their ragtag mission to take out the vampire trash is like a horror-tinged riff on what happened further up the coast in the Goon Docks in 1985’s Donner-directed The Goonies, which also starred Corey Feldman. He was a bit of a ubiquitous figure the entire decade, so it’s perhaps inevitable that this movie has ties to 1986’s Stand By Me, which also features Kiefer Sutherland as a menacing gang leader and a pivotal scene set on train tracks. The railway sequence in Schumacher’s film is significant enough that it was used as the artwork for the 35th anniversary 4K release in 2022, replacing the rebellious floating head poster.

You don’t have to look hard to find homoerotic subtext in a Joel Schumacher movie and The Lost Boys is no exception. David is initially introduced as a romantic competitor to Michael, calling Star over to his motorcycle after Michael spends some time with her on the boardwalk. Challenging Michael to a bike race to Hudson’s Bluff, David leads the way through increasingly foggy surroundings until Michael catches up with him and Star on their bike. With editor Robert Brown, Schumacher cuts between Michael gripping the phallic throttle and brow-drenched close-ups of him and David gyrating over the bumpy terrain. As they make their way into the vampiric lair, there’s an element of seduction in the way David outlines their hedonistic way of life before offering Michael that fateful bottle. Their cave even sports that legendarily, devil-may-care photo of Jim Morrison, paralleled by the “People Are Strange” cover Echo & The Bunnymen contribute to the soundtrack.

Fog continues to play a crucial role in the scenes that outline Michael’s initiation into the bad boy bunch. Walking down a shrouded railway bridge, the gang members drop one by one to hang off the track bars below. “Come with us, Michael,” David whistles before leaping down and leaving Michael above the four of them with a decision to join or not. As he tentatively crawls down, their feet dangle over dense fog while a train passes furiously above them. David bellows, “You are one of us, Michael!” as he lets go after the rest of his rapscallions have done the same. Michael dangles there, hanging on to the conventions of heteronormativity and tempted to join the boys in their mysterious but alluring lifestyle. You can actually hear David flirtatiously chuckle the moment before Michael’s fingers relent and he joins them in the misty unknown below. It’s no accident the next cross dissolve is to Michael crashing onto his bed at home, dirty and spent after a long night.

If it seems like I’ve written Michael’s name quite a few times in this piece, it’s nothing compared to the amount of times characters in The Lost Boys utter the main character’s name. There are no fewer than 100 mentions of “Michael” and its derivations (Mike, Mikey, et al.) out of the mouths of the ensemble cast through the 97-minute runtime; I’m not great at math but that’s an average of more than 1 every minute. It’s not clear to me exactly why his name pops up so frequently in the dialogue but it could point to a larger 1980s horror trope, as Siskel & Ebert pointed out in their 1988 review of Poltergeist III. Fortunately, the script by the “J” trio of Janice Fischer, James Jeremias and Jeffrey Boam does have more than “Michael” on its mind and peppers in some fun one-liners to break up the brooding teen melodrama. They even save the best for last, as the film’s fun final line is delivered with memorable cantankerousness by the oddball grandpa character, played by Barnard Hughes.

Reel Views, Review

Sense And Sensibility

Even though more than 30 years have passed since its release, Ang Lee’s Sense And Sensibility isn’t the kind of literary adaptation I would be particularly keen on trying to update. Bolstered by an incredible ensemble cast, it’s an endlessly enchanting and rapturous rendering that remains one of the finest cinematic interpretations of Jane Austen’s work. Nonetheless, director Georgia Oakley and screenwriter Diana Reid have crafted their own version of the classic novel that distinguishes itself enough tonally from other takes. It’s a more urgent and less stately production, favoring muted colors and an omnipresent music score over the bright and whimsical Austen screen dramatizations of the mid-90s. Arriving early in this year’s award season, this Sense And Sensibility finds Focus Features attempting to recreate the success they had with the somber Hamnet last year.

Set in England during the early 19th century, the story opens with news of Henry Dashwood’s death, leaving Mrs. Dashwood (Caitríona Balfe) with their three daughters Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones), Marianne (Esmé Creed-Miles), and Margaret (Bodhi Rae Breathnach). Forced to downsize to a country cottage and faced with the prospect of poverty, the eldest daughters set out to find suitors who will improve their situation. Soon after, Elinor meets the dashing and debonair Edward Ferrars (George MacKay), quickly falls for him and patiently waits for him to ask for her hand in marriage. Marianne, the more impulsive and idealistic of the sisters, is set up with reserved and reticent family friend Colonel Brandon (Herbert Nordrum) but is drawn to the flighty and fanciful John Willoughby (Frank Dillane) instead.

In addition to the inclusion of the Norwegian Nordrum in an ensemble traditionally comprised of English performers, Sense And Sensibility possesses a few other inspired casting choices that help it stand out. The always magnificent Fiona Shaw is a hoot as the gabby and gregarious Mrs. Jennings, who invites the Dashwoods to a consequential trip to bustling London. Conversely, Stacy Martin is perfectly prickly as Edward’s disapproving sister, the closest thing this tale has to a proper antagonist, apart from the unpredictable wicket gates of romance. But as the soft-spoken Colonel Brandon, Nordrum gives the film’s most nuanced performance that paints the character with colors we haven’t seen in other adaptations before. Elsewhere, Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles do fine and familiar work in their exploration of the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood between the two oldest Dashwood daughters.

In terms of presentation, director Georgia Oakley jettisons the more whimsical touches we associated with Austen’s work to make her Sense And Sensibility a more solemn and serious-minded affair. The staid cinematography by Arnaud Potier drains the warmer colors of those 1990s Austen adaptations, favoring a more subdued palette that makes more frequent use of dramatic close-ups as opposed to wide shots. Instead of the aristocratic frolic of Patrick Doyle’s music from the 1995 movie, composer Roger Goula’s score is more melodramatic and melancholy, typified by mournful choirs and downcast strings. The music is generally more insistent in its accompaniment as well, even drowning out some of the laugh lines at key moments of comic relief. I counted multiple instances where Fiona Shaw tries to rattle off a one-liner but the score undercuts the attempted witticism.

Still, this Sense And Sensibility is a reasonable entry point to on-screen Austen and younger folks willing to give this a chance may prefer this moodier version to the refined, “capital-P productions” from decades earlier. Perhaps those more stagey cinematic creations are seen as stilted and old-fashioned now, just as musicals from the 1960s seemed to me when I was a kid in the 90s. The more dour tone of this latest iteration may more keenly reflect the way Gen Z and Alpha feel about the current conditions of financial and romantic hardships they face in their everyday lives. Do we want level-headed art that reflects how things are in the real world or do we want escapist art that lets our minds wander in fantastical worlds for a couple hours? It’s a dilemma that mirrors the two opposing temperaments at the heart of Sense And Sensibility. The “sense” crowd might eat it up but the “sensibility” group may find it stifling.

Score – 3/5

More new movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Street Fighter, starring Noah Centineo and Andrew Koji, adapts the long-running video game series in which a pair of estranged fighters are recruited to enter the World Warrior Tournament and, unbeknownst to them, the two are slated to square off against each other.
Whalefall, starring Austin Abrams and Josh Brolin, is a survival thriller in which a scuba diver searching for his father’s remains in the ocean is swallowed by a sperm whale, leaving him a short window of time to find a way to escape.
Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, starring Mahershala Ali and John Cho, follows a devoutly religious hitman who embarks on a desperate journey across Houston to protect his children after his wife dies, confronting forces closing in and beliefs threatening to unravel.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Digger

At the risk of suggesting that Alejandro González Iñárritu change the first letter in the title of his catastrophe (and nigh-catastrophic) comedy Digger, the auteur’s latest swing for the fences could just as easily be called Bigger. Shot on VistaVision for premium formats and carrying a budget that bubbled up to $180 million after production delays, the distended satire at least has the courtesy to let you see where all of that money ended up. The immaculate production design, led by Academy Award winner Dennis Gassner and Richard Johnson, is some of the finest you’re likely to see this year — any year, really. Every frame is so rich with detail, so packed with visual clues into how this exquisite world revolves, the film practically flows off the edges of the screen and extends infinitely in every direction. It’s the digging beyond this spectacular surface that proves perilous.

In his most intrepid performance since 2008’s Tropic Thunder, Tom Cruise leads the way as Digger Rockwell, a rowdy, rootin’ tootin’ oil tycoon who oversees extraction facilities all over the world. After brushing off numerous warnings from his team in Greenland, methane released from drilling the ice below the production plant has led to a massive explosion. Now, not only is their platform on fire but a gigantic ice shelf has separated from the coast and, according to Rockwell United’s Head of Environmental Safety and Security Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), is on its way to Norway. With no time to waste, U.S. President Compson (John Goodman) and members of his cabinet rush over to Digger’s mansion and put their heads together as to how to run damage control before the rogue iceberg spells disaster for European sea levels.

By design, Iñárritu positions Cruise, and his larger-than-life persona on and off the screen, at the epicenter of Digger and for the film’s opening stretch, it’s a gamble that mostly pays off. Peripheral characters, like Digger’s sister Emma (Sandra Hüller) and his assistant Lina (Emma D’Arcy), float in and out of his orbit as he scrambles from one lavish room to another. Before the fracking fracas commences, the morning’s first emergency is the immediate health concerns of Digger’s geriatric cat Maggie and it’s immediately clear he doesn’t take bad news well. When the on-call veterinarian comes in to give the latest on her myriad ailments, Digger hastily fires him and seeks the counsel of his personal doc instead; “Yes, you are an expert, and you are not remotely afraid to disappoint me,” Digger barks at the vet before dismissing him.

It’s not surprising that the primary Digger trailer that’s been playing in theaters the past few months has literally been two and a half minutes of a Tom Cruise retrospective, followed by 30 seconds of actual footage from the movie. There’s star power, there’s bankability and then there’s whatever level of religious-adjacent fervor Cruise and his team are hoping to inspire with this marketing. The miscalculation is in putting the type of character he’s playing as the film’s gravitational force, since Digger is quite a chore to spend long periods of time with. If you look at Cruise’s most “off-brand” roles, like Les Grossman from the aforementioned Tropic Thunder or his tell-it-like-it-is pickup artist from Magnolia, there’s a reason these fellas aren’t our protagonists. Cruise is working as hard here as when he’s performing his death-defying stunts in the Mission: Impossible franchise but Iñárritu and his three credited co-writers don’t have his back.

Early on, Digger treats a subordinate to an anecdote about how he hit a home run as a kid in the only one of his baseball games that his grandfather attended. He wasn’t impressed, commenting that hitting it out of the park is easy but actually having to run the bases for a triple is more challenging: “Triples is what’s impressive. Triples requires hustle,” he determined. It’s a meta commentary not only on Cruise and the effort he puts into his work but also on Iñárritu and his career. If winning back-to-back Best Director Oscars for Birdman and The Revenant in the mid-2010s qualify as his “home runs”, then Bardo and now Digger solidify that he’s in his “triples” era. They’re not films that work for everyone but he’s certainly working hard to make them happen. The same can be said for Warner Bros., whose big bets on visionary directors also gave us two of last year’s best films in One Battle After Another and Sinners. Digger marks the studio’s final release before their imminent acquisition by Paramount Skydance and while the shift in strategies remains uncertain, I’ll miss their triples.

Score – 2.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Other Mommy, a supernatural horror film starring Jessica Chastain and Jay Duplass, which follows a mother who must do everything to protect her 8-year-old daughter from a supernatural entity that resembles her.
Also coming to theaters is The Social Reckoning, a legal thriller starring Mikey Madison and Jeremy Allen White, which tells the true story of a young Facebook engineer and a Wall Street Journal reporter working together to blow the whistle on the social network’s most guarded secrets.
Streaming on Netflix is Animals, a crime thriller starring Ben Affleck and Kerry Washington, centering around a mayoral candidate and his wife as they resort to extreme measures in paying the ransom for their kidnapped son.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Primetime

He breaks through the curtains, like a superhero. He knows his lines, he hits his mark. His name is Chris Hansen from Dateline NBC, and since he’s played in the compulsively watchable thriller Primetime by Robert Pattinson, it’s hard not to think of Batman as he proceeds down the stairs of a Long Beach home in 2006. The low camera angles and deliberate pace of his steps connote dominance but Pattinson’s not dealing with the Rogues Gallery he squared off against in 2022’s The Batman. Instead, it’s a would-be child predator (played by Tony Revolori), who has a seat, right over there, helpless as Hansen slowly reveals the trap he’s walked into. Anyone familiar with To Catch A Predator, the hidden camera phenomenon that ran for three seasons in the mid-aughts, has seen this scene before but you’ve never seen it quite like this.

Given the response from the real-life Hansen, who has predictably made quite the stink about Primetime in the press, perhaps the biggest surprise director Lance Oppenheim offers in his narrative feature film debut is parity in screen time for the numerous forces behind Predator machine. There’s Andie Bender (Merritt Wever), the show’s executive producer, who manages the delicate logistics behind the sting operations that make up the climax of each episode. We meet Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo), an actor looking for his first real credit so he can score that SAG card, who gets more than he bargained for when he’s cast as a “decoy” to lure in potential pedophiles. Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher), the founder of the vigilante group Perverted-Justice, poses as a minor in online chat rooms to get the perverts to agree to meet in real life.

What Primetime isn’t is an exposé about how everyone who worked on this show, which took on the tricky task of attempting to thwart sexual criminals before they could act, is bad and wrong. I think it’s fair to say a film that moralized that unambiguously would seem foolish and somewhat pointless. Instead, Oppenheim and his screenwriter Ajon Singh (adapting from the Luke Dittrich article “Tonight On Dateline This Man Will Die”) use the pursuit to make To Catch A Predator a hit an allegory for the corrupting influence of fame and money on ridding the world of evil. Much like the reality series it’s covering, the movie gradually becomes less interested in punishing pedophilia through the justice system and more attuned to the insatiable bloodlust of network execs and viewers alike. A conversation Hansen has with a plane passenger, played by a face that will be familiar to those who watched sitcoms around the Predator era, highlights how audiences came to desire violence for the perps over their day in court.

Like Marty Supreme last year, which incidentally sported Robert Pattinson in an uncredited voice cameo, Primetime features audacious casting choices that further bolster its bonafides as an ensemble piece. Bokeem Woodbine is a hoot, as always, as a Texas sheriff who is so revved up to catch him a pederast that he brandishes a comically oversized pistol and promises to do the job himself. Singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers proves she could have more cinematic roles in her future with a nice turn as a decoy that schools Dan in the ways of vocal manipulation for phone calls with the creeps. Somehow, Oppenheim even convinced NBCUniversal executive Jeff Zucker to portray an exaggerated version of himself as he pushes Hansen and Bender to compete against ABC’s Wednesday night juggernaut LOST.

Even though it’s an important meeting, Hansen is actually a few minutes late to it, sparring with his wife (played by Anna Faris) over the phone while glaring at a dangling Rice Krispie Treat in the vending machine in front of him. He hangs up on her, not to run to the face-to-face, but to call the vending service number and protest that one of their machines stole from him. It’s a perfect encapsulation of Hansen’s twisted sense of priority when it comes to right and wrong in the universe and Pattinson plays his pomposity perfectly. Merritt Wever is stellar as his collaborating producer who sees his talent and knows how to wrangle his savior complex but slowly reveals her exasperation at having to constantly smooth over his smug demeanor. Primetime isn’t the measured look at To Catch A Predator that last year’s spellbinding documentary Predators is but it’s certainly an electrifying white whale tale.

Score – 4/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Digger, starring Tom Cruise and Riz Ahmed, finds a power-mad wealthy oil tycoon embark on a frantic mission to prove he is humanity’s savior before the disaster he’s unleashed destroys everything.
Verity, starring Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson, follows a ghostwriter hired to complete the work of a bestselling author who’s unable to continue her successful book series due to a mysterious accident she’s kept from the public.
Opening at Cinema Center is The History Of Concrete, an idiosyncratic documentary from the creator of How To With John Wilson that turns into a humorous and philosophical exploration of urbanism, the built environment, and the mundane textures of American life.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Forgotten Island

A vibrant and lightning-paced ode to female friendship and Filipino folklore, Forgotten Island is the latest from DreamWorks Animation, which has built an impressive resume in the 25 years since Shrek first hit theaters. While the animation quality of its primary competitor, Pixar, has gotten exponentially crisper and more detailed since their debut in the mid-90s, the actual style itself has largely remained the same. It certainly hasn’t held them back and, in many ways, remains their calling card; when you ask AI to generate an image of your cat, there’s a reason the result looks like a frame from a Pixar movie. But DreamWorks has been evolving the aesthetic of their output over the past few years with films like The Bad Guys and The Wild Robot, moving past Pixaresque photorealism and instead favoring hand-drawn influences.

Set in the Philippines sometime during the 90s, Forgotten Island anchors on the tight-knit friendship between a pair of high school seniors: the rambunctious Jo (H.E.R.) and the brainy Raissa (Liza Soberano). Through countless sleepovers over the years, they’ve become enamored with stories told by Jo’s grandmother Lola (Dolly de Leon) about the magical island of Nakali that she claims to have visited as a child. Though their respective friendship bracelets are heavy with charms to commemorate their shared experiences, circumstances conspire to separate them when Raissa gets accepted to CalTech in the States. Spending one last night near the ocean together, the two discover a glowing sand dollar that transports them to the mystical land they spent much of their teen years hearing about in Lola’s tales.

Jo and Raissa wake up on a Nakali beach with no memory of the past 12 hours and questions like “what happened last night?” and “why does Raissa have a set of wings latched on her shoulders?” From there, we meet mythical creatures like the lively were-aspin Raww (Dave Franco) and the cherubic demon Bungi (Manny Jacinto) who endeavor to help our best friends regain their memories and get home. If you were to put Dude, Where’s My Car? and Booksmart in a blender with dashes of Japanese anime and American action cinema, Forgotten Island is what you’d get when the blade assembly stopped spinning. As someone who appreciated its disparate influences, I confess the film from Puss in Boots: The Last Wish co-directors Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado is occasionally too hyperactive for its own good.

But as the film zig-zags back and forth to piece together Jo and Raissa’s lost time, it continues to find clever ways to pay off and recontextualize narrative bits set up early in their journey on the mysterious island. With Polaroids that assist in clearing the fog of memory and Raww’s declaration that he, Jo and Raissa are now a part of “The Wild Pack”, Forgotten Island also cribs a bit from the conceit of The Hangover, albeit in a more family friendly manner. Along those lines, the movie leans on spirited characters who untangle the convoluted plotline, like the Handsome Squidward-like Kataw named Prince Mermahn, voiced by Kevin McCann. Raww, who grows concerned that too many folks are interceding on The Wild Pack, dubs the merfolk prince “The Creature From The Crap Lagoon” at one point.

The influence of anime pillars like Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon on American animated output can be detected in exceptional projects like The Mitchells Vs. The Machines and Turning Red and while Forgotten Island might not be up to that level, it’s a strong continuation of the trend. The movie also merges the sensibilities of both shōnen and shōjo manga, making room for epic action scenes and sparkly facial reactions. Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado, who also wrote the script together, find nuggets of inspiration from more unlikely sources, shifting the muscular focus of the Dutch-Dillon handshake from Predator to a running visual metaphor about the unbreakability of friendship. Forgotten Island is the kind of kinetic animated offering that I could imagine young people making memories watching (and re-watching) together for years to come.

Score – 3.5/5

More new movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Heart Of The Beast, starring Brad Pitt and J. K. Simmons, follows a Special Forces officer and his retired combat dog after a plane crash leaves them stranded in the middle of the vast and dangerous Alaskan wilderness.
Primetime, starring Robert Pattinson and Merritt Wever, tells the true story of journalist Chris Hansen and his role in making the NBC reality crime series To Catch A Predator an infamous piece of television history.
Opening at Cinema Center is Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!, starring Rinko Kikuchi and Alberto Guerra, which finds a passionate competitor in the Tokyo ballroom dance scene withdrawing into isolation due to personal tragedy but developing an infatuation with a new instructor when she returns.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

The Weight

Set in the Depression-era Pacific Northwest, the new quasi-Western The Weight stacks the cards against its protagonist quite heavily in its opening moments. We’re introduced to God-fearing mechanic Samuel Murphy (Ethan Hawke), joyriding his Ford Model 18 through the Eugene countryside with his daughter Penny (Avy Berry) in the backseat, but the good times don’t last. The two return to their apartment, where they’ve just been evicted and while going into town trying to sort things out with the bank, Samuel gets into an altercation with undercover cops and is sent to prison as a result. Months later, he’s transferred to a labor camp in Deschutes, where Warden Clancy (Russell Crowe) breaks inmates in while they’re forced to break rocks on the rough landscape. When Samuel is dubbed “Hercules” after leading an effort to dislodge a particularly difficult boulder, Clancy has another job in mind for him.

Along with Samuel’s fellow prisoners Rankin (Austin Amelio), Singh (Avi Nash) and Olson (Lucas Lynggaad Tonnesen), Clancy tasks Samuel with a dangerous mission to recover government gold and sneak it through the treacherous wilderness. Under the intense supervision of Clancy’s lackeys Amis (Sam Hazeldine) and Letender (George Burgess), the crew is flown up to the Black Hawk Gold Mines and charts out on a five-day trek back to Clancy’s outpost. With bag straps dug deep into their shoulders from the heavy cargo, the quartet of convicts with their two babysitters maneuver around the tricky terrain and accrue Indigenous runaway Anna (Julia Jones) along the way. Samuel has a guarantee from Clancy that once the job is done, he’ll sign his release papers and Samuel will be reunited with his Penny but the gold in tow is bound to generate the wrong kind of attention.

Working from a sturdy script by Matthew Booi and Shelby Gaines, seasoned editor and first-time director Padraic McKinley is a bit like Samuel, metaphorically making his way through a forest of storytelling rife with obstacles. During the journey, he indeed gets tripped up by artistic choices that are over-calculated for the kind of movie this is. Given McKinley’s long career in editing, it’s disappointing that The Weight feels fussed-over when it comes to how certain sequences are cut. It’s a sword that cuts both ways, as certain takes feel like they go on too long and others are rushed, to the extent that the action in some of the latter can be difficult to track. There’s a storm-set scene at night, lit by lightning flashes several seconds apart, where it’s difficult to discern exactly what’s happening until the sun comes up the next day. Some of the intentional long takes, particularly one where Rankin and Singh discuss socialism, don’t benefit from a conversational pace or the accompanying wide shot.

The cinematography from Matteo Cocco often favors a depth of focus so shallow that it obscures most of the lush nature surrounding our beleaguered smugglers. It plays great for close-ups, especially on Ethan Hawke as our harrowed hero, but the intensely fuzzy edges don’t work as well in medium shots and certainly not in wider shots. Some of the handheld sequences, like a grueling riverside skirmish late in the film, are thrilling in the way we’re thrust into the action, but another such scene shortly afterwards falls victim to a camera so shaky that it misses a crucial gunshot. Cocco’s reliance on natural lighting certainly tracks, given how much of The Weight takes place in the woods, although it means that the nighttime shots have to rely too much on campfires and lamplight with limited visibility.

Despite these technical aspects, the movie works overall due to the elemental endurance of what a parent will overcome to be reunited with their child. Ethan Hawke wears the conflict of the scenario beautifully, conveying Samuel’s knowledge that once this task is complete, Clancy could go back on his word and keep him imprisoned. Russell Crowe makes a meal of his brow-beating overseer and Julia Jones brings a grace to her Anna that contrasts well with the rough-and-tumble cons and cronies in her midst. Like the rickety rope bridge at the center of The Weight‘s most tense setpiece, Padraic McKinley’s latest effort is not the most structurally sound piece of cinema but it gets its point across nonetheless.

Score – 3/5

More new movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Resident Evil, starring Austin Abrams and Zach Cherry, reboots the horror video game franchise wherein a hapless courier is tasked with delivering a package to a remote hospital and soon finds himself caught in the middle of an mutated creature outbreak.
Shaun The Sheep: The Beast Of Mossy Bottom, starring Justin Fletcher and John Sparkes, is a stop motion animated comedy following the titular sheep as he attempts to save Halloween when the flock’s farmer suddenly goes missing while a beast wanders the woods.
Opening at Cinema Center is The Samurai And The Prisoner, starring Masahiro Motoki and Masaki Suda, which tells the true story of a warlord who rebels against a ruthless unifier by barricading himself and his clan inside Arioka Castle in 16th century Japan.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

It Ends

Between the surprise blockbuster Backrooms and the video game adaptation Exit 8, liminal horror has been all the rage this season and at summer’s end, we get one more entry with It Ends. Though the source of the specific scares from these three films varies, each is set in its own unnerving purgatorial in-between place where the laws of nature and physics don’t apply. From an allegorical sense, these movies all use seemingly endless corridors of repetition to represent anxieties about crushing monotony and being unable to change one’s current state. It’s also a subgenre that conveniently dovetails with independent cinema, as minimal spaces typically translate to a sparse number of shooting locations that can work nicely with smaller production budgets. In his feature debut, director-writer Alexander Ullom has the subtext down but doesn’t have quite enough in the narrative gas in the tank to fill up 90 minutes.

It Ends centers around three recent college graduates Day (Akira Jackson), James (Phinehas Yoon), and Fisher (Noah Toth) as they’re picked up by for a fast food run their friend Tyler (Mitchell Cole) in his Jeep. While the passengers bat around an animal-based thought experiment about which options would be best for attack or defense, Tyler misses a turn on his GPS. When he circles back, it’s clear he didn’t overlook anything, as the road remains sandwiched between tree lines and goes straight as far as they can see. Confusion soon turns into paranoia when it becomes clear to all four that no matter how they got on this road, it appears they’re stuck on it with no end in sight. Days turn into weeks as the group attempts to navigate off the impossibly unending highway without feeling hungry or tired in the process. Naturally, they ponder over the philosophical possibilities that led them to this terrifying predicament and try to keep their psyches intact as they search for their way home.

Structurally, It Ends settles into the rhythm of a time loop movie à la Groundhog Day or Palm Springs, where characters are trapped within a temporal snow globe and must find a way to escape. Where those films become typified by the variations in their Möbius strip-like plotlines, Ullom’s existential thriller becomes stubbornly defined by its repetition. Aside from the dazzling action scenes, what makes a movie like Edge Of Tomorrow work is that Tom Cruise’s soldier tries a smorgasbord of tactics on the battlefield that would get him killed, if he weren’t stuck in a “live, die, repeat” cycle. Exit 8, which hinges on the unnamed protagonist’s ability to spot “anomalies” within levels of a looping subway corridor, similarly realizes that the audience craves these breaks in the pattern to break up the malaise. While I can appreciate the likelihood that Ullom is intentionally omitting these footholds from his screenplay, there’s not enough on the page to keep the film engaging on its own terms.

Out here in the real world, time marches on and as I age, so becomes clearer the disturbing reality that I’m no longer in my twenties and there’s now a whole generation of adults who were born after 9/11. Whatever Millennial-Zoomer gap that exists in my brain doesn’t typically preclude me from enjoying the output of young filmmakers but it’s fair to say the characters in It Ends weren’t exactly folks I’d want to be stuck with on a road trip. Given the scenario, perhaps no group of people wouldn’t wear on me psychologically across thousands of “motionless” miles but the manicured sociolect between these four grated on me. Making memes so you don’t lose your marbles is as fair a coping strategy as any but the precious dialogue, particular a scene where three characters volley around “fair, but” statements, made me want to reach for a sick bag.

The quartet of twentysomething actors certainly do their best with the sparse storyline and carve out archetypes that allow us to note the personality differences as they pile up. While Tyler and James air on the side of practicality and outthinking the problem, Day and Fisher become more resigned to their fate and seek a moral repentance for absolution. Akira Jackson is the standout in terms of performance, as she’s given the most fleshed-out character of the four and also has the funniest line reads of the film. If Jean-Paul Sartre had been born 100 years later, perhaps No Exit would’ve included the line, “You have negative drip, and you get no [ladies], and you [freaking] stink.”

Score – 2.5/5

More new movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Practical Magic 2, starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman, reunites a multi generational family of witches, cursed to be loveless for centuries, as they attempt to break the spell by confronting dark secrets and sacrificing for each other.
Runner, starring Alan Ritchson and Owen Wilson, finds a former soldier and his unlikely partner becoming the targets of a ruthless cartel while racing to complete a critical medical delivery and save the life of a little girl.
The Uprising, starring Andrew Garfield and Jamie Bell, tells the true story of the Peasants’ Revolt that inspired the legend of Robin Hood, as a rebellion leader forms an army of the people to face against the tyranny of King Richard II of England.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Column, Midwest Film Journal

Woo!: Broken Arrow

Originally posted on Midwest Film Journal

For many years, the only thing I knew about Broken Arrow, John Woo’s second Hollywood swing after 1993’s Hard Target, is that it was the only movie about which Roger Ebert convinced Gene Siskel to change his mind. The “thumb twist” occurs on a glorious February 1996 episode of Siskel & Ebert & The Movies, in which Siskel also admits to an envious Ebert that he walked out early on the Chris Farley comedy Black Sheep. Siskel opines first on Broken Arrow, citing high-energy action scenes for his admitted half-hearted endorsement, but Ebert’s rebuttal, outlining his disappointment around story and characters he found to be boring, led Siskel to confess, “it doesn’t work.” While I appreciate that Ebert put together a convincing enough argument to get Siskel to go from “thumbs up” to “thumbs down”, I wish one had convinced the other to join their “thumbs up”. Broken Arrow isn’t Woo’s strongest work but it remains, as Siskel originally observes, “simply a lot of fun.”

The movie stars John Travolta and Christian Slater as rival Air Force pilots Major Vic “Deak” Deakins and Captain Riley Hale, respectively. The pair spar in a boxing ring over intense opening credits, with Deak schooling Hale on all things “rope-a-dope”, before receiving their next top-secret mission. They’re tasked with flying a pair of nuclear weapons through the Utah desert on a stealth bomber to determine if the radiation on-board can be detected by external instruments. As Deak and Hale fly under cover of darkness, we cross-cut to scenes introducing park ranger Terry Carmichael (Samantha Mathis) as she heads home from her shift, and henchmen completing on-ground misdeeds at the command of Members Only jacket-wearing Mr. Pritchett (Bob Gunton). It turns out Deak is working with Pritchett to steal the nukes and threaten the US government with them to secure a huge payday and, naturally, it’s up to Hale and Carmichael to foil the blackmail plot.

The title of Broken Arrow is derived from the flagword for when a nuke goes missing; as a DoD agent, played by Frank Whaley, points out, “I don’t know what’s scarier: losing nuclear weapons or that it happens so often, there’s actually a term for it!” Whaley and Travolta had briefly squared off two years prior in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, the iconic indie that served as an adrenaline needle to the heart of Travolta’s stalled career. Tarantino helped Travolta get on John Woo’s radar in more ways than one, as the Hong Kong action aficionado screened a copy of Woo’s The Killer for the Vincent Vega actor. As great as that film is, watching a subtitle-free version while Quentin Tarantino translates the lines from Cantonese to English in real time sounds like a nightmare to me. Nevertheless, Travolta was gung ho for the gun fu gem, declaring “I want to be Chow Yun-Fat!” upon the movie’s conclusion. Get in line, Johnny.

I can’t say I detect much Yun-Fat in what Travolta is serving up as Deak — Hale not referring to him as “Deak The Freak” at any point feels like an oversight — but he’s certainly channeling something. Clearly relishing his first time playing an outright villain, Travolta gets to flick cigarettes and bark through clenched teeth at Bob Gunton, whose Warden in The Shawshank Redemption was an even bigger SOB than Deak. It’s also fitting that he spends a fair amount of screen time rubbing his face and chin, as if to contemplate contingencies in his high-stakes plan. Unarmed nukes travel by air, land and water in Broken Arrow, with the payload traveling via helicopter, Humvee and hydroplane at various points in the story. Deak’s evil scheme accounts for a hilarious amount of wrinkles and obstacles but fortunately, Woo settles on a train as the setting for the majority of the movie’s climax. Even more fortuitously, a character falling far out of the locomotive triggers use of a stock sound nicknamed the “Howie Yell”, a legendary guttural scream superior to the done-to-death Wilhelm Scream.

Sonically, Broken Arrow offers its own legacy, with excerpts of the chest-puffing music score by Hans Zimmer that went on to pop up later in sequels to Scream and Speed. “Deakin’s Theme”, which Zimmer describes as “big man” music, is spearheaded by a vibrato-heavy guitar lead set to the sinister strut of its titular character as he enters a locker room. The Morricone moment brings home the Western influence on Woo’s Utah-set actioner, although the film undoubtedly feels of a piece with the action auteur’s oeuvre. No scene is packed tighter with a panoply of Wooisms than the cockpit duel where Hale and Deak wrestle for control of the B-3 bomber. Between gun tussling, intense eye close-ups and an operatic choral score, the only thing that’s missing is a flock of doves to strike the plane’s windshield and engines.

Fairly or unfairly, Broken Arrow has gotten left in the dust compared to 90s action contemporaries like The Rock, which came out a few months later in the summer of ’96, and Face/Off, Woo’s follow-up that arrived just a year later. It shares a similar plot with the former, involving a decorated military man ransoming the United States with their own covert weaponry, and a star with the latter, as Travolta returns to the baddie territory he established with Deak. Both of those movies also feature Nicolas Cage, who, it needn’t be said, is a much more manically magnetic screen presence than Christian Slater. Then again, neither of those movies feature Slater attempting to whitesplain the Ali-Foreman Rumble In The Jungle match to Delroy Lindo.

Reel Views, Review

The Rivals Of Amziah King

It’s difficult to imagine the first two feature films in a director’s filmography being as diverse as the initial pair from Oklahoma-based writer-director Andrew Patterson. His debut, The Vast Of Night, is a small-town sci-fi mystery that plays like a 90-minute Twilight Zone episode, marked by audacious oners, a minimalist story and its cast of lesser-known actors. His follow-up, the crackling country-fried caper The Rivals Of Amziah King, blows out the story of a beekeeper and his stolen hives into a 2+ hour crime saga, buzzing with crisply-cut storytelling and the ineffable star power of Matthew McConaughey. Why his first live-action leading role for a theatrical release in six and a half years hasn’t elicited more fanfare (and more robust distribution) is both puzzling and disappointing. This is some of the finest work of his career, on par with his stellar “McConaissance” run in the 2010s.

McConaughey plays the titular rascally business mind behind King Honey, which gets its product from hives and equipment that Amziah owns and operates in rural Oklahoma. King also moonlights as a mandolin player, recruiting bluegrass musicians to fill venues from drive-up food joints to potluck-hosting ballrooms with their dulcet tones. Grabbing coffee at a diner one morning, King’s served by his former foster daughter Kateri (Angelina LookingGlass), whose mother recently passed away. A born-again Christian, Amziah sees their meeting as a chance to right the wrongs of his past and takes Kateri under his wing as he teaches her the ways of beekeeping and farming. When King’s hives are stolen out from under him, shady magnate Dob McCoy (Kurt Russell) is pinpointed as the primary suspect and a plan for retribution is hatched.

Metaphors about colony order for a tight-knit Southern community may seem obvious for a movie ostensibly about bees but The Rivals Of Amziah King gets it honest. Explaining the roles of the three primary players of a beehive — the drones, the worker bees, the queen — apiarist Amziah aptly sums up their way of life: “Everybody lookin’ out for each other. That’s a healthy hive.” It’s a core value to the storytelling here, which makes excellent use of an ensemble cast, including Tony Revolori and Rob Morgan, who step up when the “honey” hits the fan. Whether it’s pushing a barrel off an overpass at just the right time or lending a pickup truck hearty enough to power through a stream, the characters all do their part to retrieve the pilfered hives. Even in a far-fetched fable like this one, it’s heartening to watch folks coming together for the greater good and if it’s also to share the occasional music performance, all the better.

Befitting its wily protagonist, The Rivals Of Amziah King gets charmingly sidetracked from its primary plotline but even the tangents add their own sweetness and flavor to the cinematic meal. As an example, there’s a detour at a bee-infested elementary school that doesn’t advance the story but shows us a different side of Amziah outside of his apiary. He and Kateri are called on during an emergency when a swarm of bees in a classroom has made its way through the ventilation system, leading to panic and an evacuation by students and teachers. Arriving in his beekeeping veil and smock, Amziah assures the petrified principal, “this whole scenario is way more melodramatic than it needs to be,” and gets right to work. McConaughey, if no one else, has been the on-screen embodiment of “cool, calm, and collected” for decades now but his specific brand of confidence makes that setpiece sing.

I’m not sure how much mandolin McConaughey learned for The Rivals Of Amziah King — I’ve only heard tell of his eccentric bongo playing — but he certainly pulls off the band scenes (like the one over the opening credits) convincingly. King’s apprenticeship of Kateri doesn’t stop at beekeeping, as he prods her to join in with group harmonies during impromptu music performances with company over in his living room. I’m not sure exactly which parts are technically music score and original songs written for the film but in any event, the music throughout Patterson’s rollicking sophomore effort is infectious as all get out. If you consider yourself a fan of the Soggy Bottom Boys from O Brother, Where Art Thou?, you need to make a beeline for the soundtrack on your music streaming platform of choice. As for the film, if you can’t catch it in theater, it’ll be available to rent starting September 15th.

Score – 4/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Onslaught, starring Adria Arjona and Dan Stevens, follows an army sniper as she struggles to protect her young daughter from an army of genetically engineered super soldiers who escaped from a secret military facility.
By Any Means, starring Mark Wahlberg and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, sees a notorious mafia hitman and a young Black FBI agent teaming up to investigate the murders of civil rights leaders in 1966 Mississippi.
Fall 2: Deadpoint, starring Harriet Slater and Arsema Thomas, centers around a pair of rock climbers who plan to conquer a treacherous plank walk in Thailand but a sudden rockslide leaves them trapped at a terrifying height of 3,000 feet.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

My thoughts on the movies