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thedullwoodexperiment

~ Viewing movies in a different light

thedullwoodexperiment

Tag Archives: Blackmail

Struck by Lightning (2012)

07 Tuesday Aug 2018

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Allison Janney, Blackmail, Brian Dannelly, Chris Colfer, Christina Hendricks, Comedy, Dermot Mulroney, Drama, High School, Literary magazine, Rebel Wilson, Review

D: Brian Dannelly / 84m

Cast: Chris Colfer, Allison Janney, Rebel Wilson, Dermot Mulroney, Christina Hendricks, Sarah Hyland, Carter Jenkins, Brad William Henke, Angela Kinsey, Polly Bergen

Carson Phillips (Colfer) is a high school senior with a major literary ambition: to be the youngest ever editor of The New Yorker magazine. But life in high school isn’t exactly a bed of roses for Carson: he’s the kind of sarcastic, openly contemptuous of his peers teenager who’s treated harshly by his fellow students, and who can’t get a break to save his life. He’s the editor and sole contributor of the school paper – which no one reads, and his mother, Sheryl (Janney), is an over-medicated alcoholic who continually reminds him she would have had a better life if he hadn’t been born. But a chance discovery leads Carson to the possibility of getting his revenge on some of his fellow high schoolers while also adding to his prospects in getting into Northwestern University. His plan involves blackmailing his peers into providing material for a literary magazine, but while at first his plan seems to be paying dividends, Carson’s belligerent, anti-authoritarian attitude throws a massive spanner in the works, and what seemed like a foolproof idea, soon turns horribly wrong…

Told in flashback after Carson is struck by lightning and killed, this literally titled movie is a teen comedy-drama that puts its narrator front and centre while also taking a risk in doing so. Carson is so dismissive of everyone around him, adults and peers alike (with the exception of Wilson’s plagiaristic Malerie: “Call me Ishmael”), that Colfer’s script comes very close to making him completely unlikeable. His arrogance, though, is a thin line of defence against the blows he’s experienced throughout his life. From his parents’ break-up – dad Neal (Mulroney) has a new partner, April (Hendricks), who’s six months’ pregnant – to his grandmother (Bergen) developing Alzheimer’s, Carson’s unstable home life has left him sad and permanently at odds with everyone around him. He’s a figure to be pitied though rather than dismissed, and Colfer works hard to make the character more rounded than he appears on the page. Take away Colfer’s performance and you have a character who behaves meanly on purpose, and lacks any sense of proportion in his loathing of his peers (who he doesn’t regard as such). It’s only thanks to Colfer – who clearly understands Carson completely (and so he should) – that the role isn’t continuously one-note and irritating.

It’s the script and the performances that resonate the most. Colfer has a good ear for the rhythms and diction of high school teenagers, and though some of Carson’s co-seniors border on the stereotypical, there’s enough depth and detail provided by the mostly young cast to offset any over-familiarity (plus they’re having a lot of fun at the same time). Amongst the adults, Janney is good value as ever, giving Sheryl a weary self-awareness beneath the character’s own tattered dreams, while Mulroney’s feckless father is a purely comic creation that the actor also has a lot of fun with. Colfer adds a handful of sub-plots to his tale of foiled ambition, with the most notable being the awkward relationship between Sheryl and April, and there’s a strong sense of carpe diem that is used to spur the blackmailed students into writing for the magazine. Dannelly keeps things amusing and laced with teenage angst as appropriate, and the whole thing relies on an easy-going if pointed charm that works well in supporting the material. There’s a good balance between drama and comedy, and Colfer is a confident enough writer that he can mix the two in the same scene without it feeling contrived. And for a first-time script, that’s impressive.

Rating: 7/10 – an underdog movie where the protagonist doesn’t overcome all the challenges thrown at him, Struck by Lightning is instead an often witty, acerbic comedy of despair that doesn’t short change its main character or the audience; a familiar tale that can’t always shake off its more prosaic influences, it’s still a movie with a lot to offer, and several moments of (very) impressive and inspired humour.

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Love, Simon (2018)

23 Saturday Jun 2018

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Blackmail, Comedy, Coming out, Drama, Greg Berlanti, High School, Jennifer Garner, Josh Duhamel, LGBTQ+, Literary adaptation, Nick Robinson, Review, Romance

D: Greg Berlanti / 110m

Cast: Nick Robinson, Jennifer Garner, Josh Duhamel, Katherine Langford, Alexandra Shipp, Logan Miller, Keiynan Lonsdale, Jorge Lendeborg Jr, Talitha Eliana Bateman, Tony Hale, Natasha Rothwell, Miles Heizer

Simon Spier (Robinson) is in high school. He has three best friends – Leah (Langford), Abby (Shipp), and Nick (Lendeborg Jr) – loving parents (Garner, Duhamel), a kid sister, Nora (Bateman), whose culinary efforts he praises whether they’re good or (usually) bad, an interest in drama, and a big secret: he’s gay. Being a teenager, of course, nobody knows that he’s gay, but when Leah tells him that another pupil at their high school has come out anonymously online, Simon begins talking to him via e-mail. Soon, he and “Blue” are exchanging their mutual thoughts and feelings on their personal circumstances. When another pupil, Martin (Miller), discovers Simon’s e-mails, he uses them to blackmail Simon into helping him get together with Abby. Afraid of being outed, Simon does his best to set them up with each other, while also trying to bring Nick and Leah together (because Nick is attracted to Abby). But his attempts at matchmaking backfire, and Martin does what Simon has feared all along: he outs Simon to the entire school…

Widely touted as the first movie by a major Hollywood studio to focus on a gay teenage romance (and it’s only taken until 2018 to happen – way to go, 20th Century Fox), Love, Simon is a tender, heartfelt, and overwhelmingly sweet movie based on the novel Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli. It features a good central performance by Robinson as the modest but likeable Simon, and it hits all the right notes in its attempts to focus on his struggle to deal with the implications of being gay, the fear of being outed, and what it means to have to protect that knowledge. And yet, once Simon’s secret is revealed to one and all, what has been a confidently handled, and sincerely expressed story – with a nice mystery sideline in trying to work out Blue’s identity – suddenly becomes an unexpected fantasy based somewhere between the world of John Hughes’ teen dramas and a return trip to the Land of Oz. All along, Simon has been dreading everyone finding out that he’s gay, and it’s at this point in the movie where you could be forgiven for thinking that things will start to get really difficult for him.

Au contraire, mon ami. Aside from a (very) brief moment of uninspired, and childish, leg-pulling (bullying is really too strong a word for it), the only other fallout from Simon’s outing is the decision of his three best friends to avoid him – he did manipulate them after all. Otherwise, his family prove to be mega-supportive, his teachers express zero tolerance for any homophobic behaviour by the other students, Martin apologises to him while admitting his own insecurities, and when Simon challenges Blue to meet him at an upcoming carnival, what seems to be the whole high school turns out to be there for them (oh, and his friends forgive him as well). Now, there’s nothing wrong with a happy ending, but this is like something out of the Thirties and early Forties when happy endings were guaranteed (back then it might have been called Andy Hardy Comes Out… of the Barn). If the movie’s message – coming out is easy-peasy – is intentional, then that’s fair enough, it’s still a piece of entertainment, and designed to do well in the mass market. But as a reflection of what is likely to happen in the real world when coming out, then Love, Simon is a far from perfect choice from which to take your cues.

Rating: 7/10 – a wish fulfillment tale that’s breezy and fun but also deliberately anodyne in places, Love, Simon is enjoyable and refreshing for its choice of topic, and benefits from good performances throughout – Rothwell’s drama teacher with attitude is a highlight – as well as Berlanti’s sensitive direction; becoming an entirely different movie altogether once Simon is outed, though, undermines the character’s emotional struggle, and paints first gay love in such rainbow-like colours that any real sense of drama is abandoned altogether.

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Dismissed (2017)

26 Sunday Nov 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Benjamin Arfmann, Blackmail, Drama, Dylan Sprouse, Grade A, High School, Kent Osborne, Murder, Psychopath, Review, Thriller

D: Benjamin Arfmann / 87m

Cast: Kent Osborne, Dylan Sprouse, Rae Gray, Alycia Delmore, Chris Bauer, Leslie Thurston, Robert Longstreet, Mark Kelly, Randall Park

Movies where the central character is menaced by someone they’ve upset or betrayed, or just plain let down in some way (at least in the eyes of that someone), aren’t exactly new, and in many ways the format has been done to death over the years. With each new release riffing on storylines and characters and situations that have been done so often before, it’s difficult for any new movie to buck the trend or provide viewers with anything tangible enough to qualify as “original” or even “offbeat”. With so many movies out there having paved such a wide path already, anyone attempting a psychological thriller has their work cut out for them from day one. So what can an aspiring thriller do to overcome such hurdles?

In the case of Dismissed, the first feature from Benjamin Arfmann, the solution is to embrace those already firmly established tropes and values that come with the territory, and in doing so, treat them with a healthy dose of respect. The result is a thriller that is very much aware that it’s not telling a new story, or that it’s venturing into territory that won’t be over-familiar to anyone watching it. But what the movie does do, is to present everything in a low-key, matter-of-fact way that makes it look and feel more persuasive than if it had played as a flashy, strident melodrama. Thanks to Arfmann’s patient direction, and Yong Ok Lee’s deliberately unremarkable production design, Dismissed is that rare beast: a psychological thriller that doesn’t make the mistake of going overboard in its efforts to keep the viewer on the edge of their seats. Instead it builds tension by degrees, and the screenplay by Brian McAuley allows each new development to happen with a grim sense of inevitability, as what starts off with petty acts of revenge becomes more and more sinister and violent.

The central protagonists are high school English teacher David Butler (Osborne), and new transfer student, Lucas Ward (Sprouse). David’s class is largely disinterested in his teaching them about Othello, or Crime and Punishment (though this level, and kind of lethargy is only seen in the movies), so when super-knowledgeable Lucas makes his presence felt, David is only too glad to have a student who actually knows some (if not all) of the answers. But when David gives one of Lucas’s assignments a B+, Lucas makes his displeasure known: he’s a straight-A student, and that’s what David should have given him for his work. David sticks to his guns, and so begins a series of incidents that are the beginning of Lucas’s retaliation. David leaves for school only to find his tyre is flat. In the classroom his marker pens don’t work, and in the staffroom, his lunch is missing from the fridge. But it’s when his application to a prestigious university, one that will make him a professor and give him tenure, is replaced by a version that costs him the position, David begins to realise that Lucas is behind everything.

Now, at this stage, you might be saying, all this is over a grade? And while that does sound a little shallow, or even a little risible as a motive for Lucas’ behaviour, what the movie does really cleverly is to make Lucas’s psychopathy not only about being the best at all costs, but also what it means in terms of his “place” in the world. The opening scene shows video footage of a young child practising facial expressions, and from this we can understand that Lucas wants to fit in, even if ultimately it’s on his terms. The why is more understandable, and McAuley’s script leaves subtle clues here and there as to the details of why, but in keeping with the genre, it’s the how that leaves much to be desired. Lucas may be outwardly charming and persuasive, but like all good movie psychopaths, inside he’s as hollow as an Easter egg. Cue the aforementioned incidents of petty retaliation, plus the emotional manipulation of another student (Gray), attempted blackmail, veiled threats, murder, and evidence of Lucas having done similar things before.

In assembling all this, the movie does suffer from a handful of narrative short cuts that hurry things along, particularly in the last half an hour, and some of these short cuts are awkward in nature and upset the movie’s measured pace. But these are small prices to pay in respect of a movie that is otherwise confidently handled by Arfmann, and which features two central performances that anchor the story and give both central characters sincerity and credibility. Osborne is quietly effective as the English teacher who’s initially out of his depth in dealing with a teenage psychopath, but as the movie progresses his genial, accommodating persona becomes more steely and determined. At the point where he tells Lucas that if he comes near David’s family, he’ll kill him, Osborne delivers the line in just the way you’d expect an average man to say it: not like an action hero, but with genuine feeling. It’s moments like these, where the supposedly weaker character “turns” but it’s done with care and attention to the character’s personality, that helps make the movie more impressive than expected.

For some viewers though, the main attraction will be Sprouse, making his first acting foray since saying goodbye to  the role of Zack Martin in The Suite Life on Deck (2008-11). From TV star to murderous psychopath, one could be forgiven for thinking that Sprouse is doing his best to put behind him the lovable moppet he played for six years, and for the most part he does, making Lucas the kind of over-achiever who really should set off more warning bells than he does. As his plan to get that all-important A inevitably falls apart, Sprouse stays true to the character and keeps him removed from any recognisable emotion until the screenplay requires him to ramp things up for an overly melodramatic showdown that’s as unnecessary as it is unfortunate (the one time the script really drops the ball). Sprouse is on solid ground with his portrayal, and in his own way, is as quietly effective as Osborne. Both actors seem aware of the requirements of the genre they’re working in, and provided with good support from Arfmann, who facilitates the action with a darkly portentous quality that makes it more involving than you might think at first glance, they help the movie overcome some of the more uninspired aspects of the material, and ensure that the game of cat-and-mouse David and Lucas engage in remains as credible as possible.

Rating: 7/10 – a movie that does a lot more with its simple premise than is immediately apparent, Dismissed is let down by the inconsistent way in which it treats some of its supporting characters (David’s wife, Rachel (Delmore), is a perfect example), and those previously noted narrative short cuts; with much to admire, it’s the movie’s decision to adhere to many of the genre’s devices but in a way that’s not lazy or convenient that marks it out from all the other psychological thrillers out there.

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Kill Your Friends (2015)

14 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Black comedy, Blackmail, Craig Roberts, Drama, Drugs, Ed Skrein, Georgia King, James Corden, John Niven, Junkie XL, Literary adaptation, Murder, Music industry, Nicholas Hoult, Owen Harris, Review, Unigram

Kill Your Friends

D: Owen Harris / 103m

Cast: Nicholas Hoult, Craig Roberts, Georgia King, Joseph Mawle, Edward Hogg, Tom Riley, Jim Piddock, James Corden, Ed Skrein, Rosanna Arquette, Moritz Bleibtreu, Dustin Demri-Burns, Osy Ikhile, Ella Smith

For a movie that’s set in 1997 and focuses on an ambitious A&R man, Kill Your Friends actually has little to do with the music of the time (except when it comes to its soundtrack), and instead creates its own musicians and bands for the audience to groove to. It’s a curious thing to experience, that such a movie would choose to ignore the music that was around at the time, especially when there was so many good records out there. ’97 was the year that The Verve gave us their Bitter Sweet Symphony, Chumbawamba were Tubthumping, Natalie Imbruglia was Torn, and Elton John reworked Candle in the Wind in tribute to Diana, Princess of Wales. But Kill Your Friends operates in a bubble of its own making, restricting itself to a narrow musical world where the deal is all important and not the music, and the means absolutely justifies the end.

That the world of the A&R man is a cutthroat world where everyone is out to succeed at the expense of everyone else shouldn’t come as any surprise, but the movie is often grindingly obvious in its approach to this idea, and the level to which it takes this idea is often glaringly excessive. The movie’s anti-hero, Steven Stelfox (Hoult), is determined to get to the top and he’s not too worried how he gets there. When we first meet him he’s in the company of fellow A&R man Waters (Corden), snorting cocaine and mixing drug-fuelled cocktails in an attempt to render his colleague either dead or too far gone to function. (Sadly for Steven, Waters’ ability to ingest hard drugs and still come to work the next day is quite impressive.)

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With record deals to be made and hits to be manufactured, Steven takes a young talent scout called Darren (Roberts) under his wing, and starts to teach him how to get ahead in the music business. But Steven’s idea of “teaching” consists of constant reminders that no one knows anything (as in the movie industry?), and to misquote Sparks, that “talent isn’t an asset”. When an old friend of Steven’s, Rent (Skrein), introduces him to the girl band he’s managing, it’s no surprise that they’re four tuneless, talentless wannabes, manufactured into producing a “surprise” number one record. It’s at moments like these that the satire slaps the viewer in the face and yells, “Did you see what we did there? Did you?” If the movie wasn’t so tiresome and cynical, the viewer wouldn’t be either.

As Steven connives and manipulates and eventually murders his way to the top, the movie does its best to get the audience to root for him, but it’s not actually possible. Despite Hoult’s best efforts to make him likeable, Steven is a crude caricature of a man, his better qualities stifled to the point of non-existence and lacking any kind of moral attributes – however deeply buried – for the viewer to latch onto. He’s an ambitious, soulless, predatory, evil-minded bastard, a lower-tier monster who doesn’t deserve to make it to the top, or gain our attention. There’s a moment when he’s talking to a band in a club and they’re asking him what will happen if they sign with his record company. For around thirty seconds Steven regales them with the various ways in which he and his company will abuse and mistreat them, and then spit them out when they’re no longer viable. It’s meant to be funny and disturbingly honest all at the same time, but instead it’s another heavy-handed example of what we already know: that in the music industry you should always beware: because you’re swimming with sharks. (And, predictably, it’s all a dream sequence.)

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With the movie lacking subtlety or appreciable flair throughout, there’s little beyond the traditional topics of sex and drugs and work envy to get excited about. Owen Harris’s direction consists of throwing the characters into sharp relief, such as when Steven’s PA, the equally ambitious Rebecca (King), blackmails him into helping her reach the top. It’s not exactly a surprise – this movie doesn’t do surprises – and most viewers will have been waiting for her to drop the faithful servant routine, but as one of the few characters we can have some sympathy for (at least to start with), her transformation into calculating co-conspirator smacks of laziness on the part of John Niven (here adapting his own novel).

With so much amoral, yet banal behaviour going on, it’s amazing then that the movie retains as much energy as it does, claiming the viewer’s undivided attention from time to time (often in its club scenes) and using said energy to push the rest of the scenes through in a kind of bizarre version of cinematic life support. There are also sporadic moments of humour, but none memorable enough to help the movie overall, and certainly not enough to help erase the memory of Edward Hogg’s dumb-as-a-bag-of-nails policeman, a character so brain-curdlingly simplistic in his creation that he’s not even of the rank of caricature.

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But what of the music itself? As created by Junkie XL (aka Tom Holkenborg), the original songs are the movie’s best feature, an apropos mix of Nineties indie vitality and modern day stylings, anthemic when necessary, and completely free of any relevance to the story or the plot. You could take each tune and play it in a club or music venue and attract people’s attention. It’s the same here, and leads the viewer to wonder if there’s a cut of the movie where every scene takes place in a club or at a concert. But anyone paying attention will appreciate the dichotomy of what the movie is saying, that the music isn’t important, that it’s the last element of the deal that’s taken into consideration, but thanks to Mr Holkenborg and his “killer” tunes, it’s a boast that Kill Your Friends gets spectacularly wrong.

Rating: 4/10 – if you’re going to make a movie about the cutthroat nature of the music industry, then it’s important that your characters are at least halfway relatable – a point that Kill Your Friends ignores deliberately – otherwise it will look and sound like the naïve fantasy of a teenager; with thematic nods to American Psycho (2000) that are awkward and misjudged, this is a movie that skimps on the pleasantries and drags the viewer through a mire of its own choosing, and without ever offering said viewer any reward for the experience.

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Misconduct (2016)

06 Saturday Feb 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Al Pacino, Alice Eve, Anthony Hopkins, Blackmail, Crime, Drama, Fraud, Josh Duhamel, Lawsuits, Legal drama, Malin Akerman, Manhunt, Murder, Review, Shintaro Shimasawa, Thriller

Misconduct

D: Shintaro Shimasawa / 106m

Cast: Josh Duhamel, Alice Eve, Anthony Hopkins, Al Pacino, Malin Akerman, Byung-hun Lee, Julia Stiles, Glen Powell, Marcus Lyle Brown

Released as a Lionsgate Premiere (rough translation: not good enough to be shown in cinemas), Misconduct is an early contender for Worst Movie of 2016. It’s ostensibly a thriller but veers off in so many different directions in an effort to be interesting that in the end it’s just a jumbled mess. There’s not even the germ of a good idea here, the script by Simon Boyes and Adam Mason resorting to cliché after cliché and line after line of awful dialogue in its efforts to appear somehow less than the sum of its parts (or the parts of its sum even).

It’s a movie where everybody is up to no good. Sadly, the audience knows this right from the start, so any “revelations” or twists and turns have the effect of inducing a headache rather than any surprises. The storyline tries to be convoluted in an attempt to mystify anyone unfortunate enough to watch Misconduct, and the basic plot – Hopkins’ pharmaceutical CO is accused of deliberately falsifying bad test results – struggles even to be relevant within the movie’s own structure. Once a badly attached blackmail plot is added to the mix, it gives the movie carte blanche to be as stupid as it wants, a move it takes full advantage of.

Misconduct - scene3

As well as the blackmail plot – instigated by Hopkins’ unbalanced girlfriend (played by Akerman) and involving Duhamel’s ambitious attorney – Misconduct features a dire attempt at adding depth to two of the characters’ lives, Duhamel and his moody, depressed wife Eve, by having them recovering from the loss of a child during pregnancy. Why this subplot is even present is a mystery the movie never answers, along with the presence of Lee as a corporate-sponsored assassin who for some inexplicable reason is dying from some unstated disease (again you have to ask yourself why any of this has been included).

There’s more, but as the movie continues piling absurdity on top of absurdity, the unlucky viewer will find themselves wondering if this is intended more as a parody than a thriller, and will be laughing accordingly, but if it is then no one informed the cast, who struggle through scene after scene with resolutely straight faces and a grim determination to get through it all and reach the end with a degree of integrity still intact. Duhamel is a capable actor, but here he’s as wooden as a fence post and spends most of his screen time looking petulant, or as if there’s a bad smell under his nose (there is, and it’s coming from the script). Matching him for petulance, and using staring off into space a lot as a character trait, Eve gives probably the worst performance of her career so far, as she tries to distance herself from everyone and everything connected with the movie.

Misconduct - scene2

Akerman is a poor femme fatale, her attempt to seduce Duhamel having all the allure of a drunken one-night stand with someone you hope doesn’t give you their number the next morning. As mentioned above, Lee is the assassin who’s close to death, and he sleepwalks through his role making supposedly “deep” comments and trying to appear above it all by refusing to acknowledge that this is one acting gig his agent should be apologising for profusely. And then there’s Stiles, an actress who really should be given better roles than the one she has here, a Kidnap and Response expert who gets to shout at Hopkins a lot and look suitably badass (and that’s basically it).

You get the picture: Misconduct has its fair share of bad performances to match its bad script and wayward direction – Shimasawa, making his first feature, gives an approximation of what a director should be doing – but then there’s Hopkins and Pacino, two Oscar winners now content (like De Niro) to throw away their talent and make terrible movie after terrible movie. Hopkins has the larger amount of screen time, but phones in his performance, and falls back on the kind of aloof, manipulative, all-knowing characterisation he’s played way too often in recent years. When you’ve got Hopkins in a movie and he’s playing a powerful businessman you just know in advance that he’s not going to be putting much effort in, and that’s exactly the case here. Amazingly though, Pacino is worse, his law firm boss coming across as a pale imitation of his role in The Devil’s Advocate (1997). He’s also upstaged by his own hair, which in one scene, looks like the worst comb-back in history. Why either of them took on their roles is the one abiding mystery the movie cannot solve.

Misconduct - scene1

From starting out as a legal thriller – you get the idea the movie might just be about bringing Hopkins’ fraudulent CO to justice, and the hunt for the evidence to prove his negligence – it soon descends into a welter of murder and violence and betrayal on all sides, as the script decides it needs to be more punchy than in its earlier scenes. It leads to one of the movie’s more absurd scenes where Duhamel, having gouged his stomach escaping from the police, buys some glue in a convenience store and uses it to close his wound. And of course, he then runs around as if it had never happened. Lazy, lazy, lazy.

There is an attempt at providing a central murder mystery to keep the audience intrigued, but regular viewers of this kind of movie will spot the culprit from a mile off. But this is in keeping with the movie’s inability to come up with anything new or unpredictable, and again, regular viewers of this kind of star-happy dross will have resigned themselves to the movie’s inevitable outcome(s) long before they reach the end. The makers probably didn’t intend the title Misconduct to be so relevant to its own content and execution, but in one respect they can be applauded: they made sure the movie certainly lived up to it.

Rating: 3/10 – with only its standard, by-the-numbers production effort propping it up in the ratings stakes, Misconduct is a woeful, massively disappointing movie that falls down each and every time it tries to be interesting; with awful dialogue and some truly atrocious performances, it’s a movie that defies explanation as to its existence, and ranks as one of the worst “corporate/legal thrillers” in recent memory.

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Monthly Roundup – November 2015

01 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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A Close Call for Boston Blackie, Alien abduction, Blackmail, Boston Blackie, Brittany Allen, Chester Morris, Christmas Icetastrophe, Cory Monteith, Crime, Criminal, David Morse, Detective, Disaster, DJ, Drama, Emily Ratajkowski, Extraterrestrial, Flash freeze, Freddie Stroma, Friendships, Horror, Jennifer Spence, Jonathan Winfrey, Josh C. Waller, Lew Landers, Lynn Merrick, Max Joseph, McCanick, Meteor, Mike Vogel, Murder, Review, Sheriff, SyFy, The Vicious Brothers, Victor Webster, We Are Your Friends, Wes Bentley, Zac Efron

Extraterrestrial (2014) / D: The Vicious Brothers / 101m

Cast: Brittany Allen, Freddie Stroma, Melanie Papalia, Jesse Moss, Anja Savcic, Gil Bellows, Michael Ironside, Sean Rogerson, Emily Perkins

Extraterrestrial

Rating: 4/10 – Teens in a remote cabin discover a crash-landed UFO, and soon learn that this isn’t an isolated incident, and that aliens have been abducting people for some time; yet another tired, gloomy-looking sci-fi/horror that starts promisingly and soon runs out of steam, Extraterrestrial aims to be edgy but is compromised by a convoluted narrative and some frustratingly poor performances.

A Close Call for Boston Blackie (1946) / D: Lew Landers / 60m

aka Lady of Mystery

Cast: Chester Morris, Lynn Merrick, Richard Lane, Frank Sully, George E. Stone, Claire Carleton, Erik Rolf, Mark Roberts, Russell Hicks

A Close Call for Boston Blackie

Rating: 6/10 – Private detective Boston Blackie (Morris) becomes embroiled in a scam involving a missing baby and an old flame, and finds himself accused of murder; one of the better entries in the series, A Close Call for Boston Blackie sees Morris having a ball as Blackie and the movie as a whole is a lot of fun, the simple, fast-paced approach to the material making the whole thing enjoyable even if you’re not a fan.

Christmas Icetastrophe (2014) / D: Jonathan Winfrey / 87m

Cast: Victor Webster, Jennifer Spence, Richard Harmon, Tiera Skovbye, Mike Dopud, Johannah Newmarch, Andrew Francis, Ben Cotton, Boti Bliss

Christmas Icetastophe

Rating: 4/10 – A meteorite splits in two in the Earth’s atmosphere, and one half crashes to earth in the small mountain town of Lennox causing everything in the area to flash-freeze; another slice of sci-fi hokum from the SyFy channel, Christmas Icetastrophe narrowly avoids being complete rubbish thanks to some good location work and a sense of its own absurdity, but when all’s said and done, it’s still rubbish.

McCanick (2013) / D: Josh C. Waller / 96m

Cast: David Morse, Cory Monteith, Mike Vogel, Ciarán Hinds, Rachel Nichols, Trevor Morgan, Tracie Thoms, Aaron Yoo

McCanick

Rating: 6/10 – Veteran detective Eugene McCanick (Morse) goes after a small-time crook (Monteith), but not for the reason everyone around him thinks; a feature role for the ever-reliable Morse is set in psychological thriller territory and gives the actor plenty of room and time to play “disturbed”, but Waller’s sterile direction lets him and the movie down, and McCanick becomes disturbing for all the wrong reasons.

We Are Your Friends (2015) / D: Max Joseph / 96m

Cast: Zac Efron, Wes Bentley, Emily Ratajkowski, Jonny Weston, Shiloh Fernandez, Alex Schaffer, Jon Bernthal

We Are Your Friends

Rating: 6/10 – An aspiring DJ (Efron) finds the road to fame and fortune paved with obstacles: the friends who are unwittingly holding him back, the girl who can’t fully commit, and the mentor who may or may not help him fulfill his dream; a surprisingly aimless movie with little actual drama to sustain its running time, We Are Your Friends is too lightweight in its execution to make much of an impact, and as a result, never gets off the ground.

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Monthly Roundup – October 2015

01 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

AnnaLynne McCord, Blackmail, Charlie Chan, Crime, Detective, Donald Sutherland, Drama, Gambling, George Eads, Gold bullion, Gutshot Straight, Justin Steele, Las Vegas, Lesley-Anne Down, Literary adaptation, Mantan Moreland, Michael Crichton, Murder, Radio station, Reviews, Robbery, Sean Connery, Sidney Toler, Stephen Lang, Steven Seagal, The First Great Train Robbery, The Scarlet Clue, Thriller, Victorian England, Vinnie Jones

It’s been a pretty quiet month, so only a few movies make the roundup.

The First Great Train Robbery (1979) / D: Michael Crichton / 110m

Cast: Sean Connery, Donald Sutherland, Lesley-Anne Down, Alan Webb, Malcolm Terris, Robert Lang, Michael Elphick, Wayne Sleep, Pamela Salem, Gabrielle Lloyd

Rating: 7/10 – in Victorian England, master criminal Pierce (Connery) recruits a motley gang of criminals (including Sutherland’s dandy pickpocket) to pull off an audacious heist: the robbery of gold bullion from a moving train; Crichton adapts his own novel with wit and style, and even though he finds himself hampered by budgetary restrictions, still manages to make The First Great Train Robbery an enjoyable, if predictable, diversion.

First Great Train Robbery, The

The Scarlet Clue (1945) / D: Phil Rosen / 65m

Cast: Sidney Toler, Mantan Moreland, Ben Carter, Benson Fong, Virginia Brissac, Robert Homans, Jack Norton, I. Stanford Jolley, Janet Shaw

Rating: 5/10 – murder and espionage are the order of the day for Charlie Chan (Toler) as he investigates criminal goings-on in a building that houses both a radio station and a science laboratory (which are, of course, connected); not one of the Oriental detective’s better outings but still possessed of an admirable energy, The Scarlet Clue has a meandering script but it’s offset by good performances (though Toler does look tired) and better-than-average injections of humour.

Scarlet Clue, The

Gutshot Straight (2014) / D: Justin Steele / 89m

aka: Gutshot

Cast: George Eads, AnnaLynne McCord, Stephen Lang, Ted Levine, Steven Seagal, Vinnie Jones, Tia Carrere, Fiona Dourif

Rating: 4/10 – when Las Vegas-based gambler Jack (Eads) meets fellow gambler Duffy (Lang) he finds himself entangled in a web of murder and deceit centred around Duffy’s wife, May (McCord); boasting a half-decent performance by Seagal, this vanity project for Eads signposts its clunky plot developments with all the finesse of a punch to the face, and never finds a way of overcoming its star’s shortcomings as an actor.

Gutshot Straight

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Kill Me Three Times (2014)

19 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Alice Braga, Australia, Black comedy, Blackmail, Bryan Brown, Crime, Drama, Eagle's Nest, Insurance fraud, Kriv Stenders, Murder, Review, Simon Pegg, Sullivan Stapleton, Teresa Palmer, Thriller

Kill Me Three Times

D: Kriv Stenders / 90m

Cast: Simon Pegg, Sullivan Stapleton, Alice Braga, Teresa Palmer, Callan Mulvey, Bryan Brown, Luke Hemsworth

In the small Western Australian town of Eagle’s Nest, bar owner Jack (Mulvey) suspects his wife, Alice (Braga), is having an affair.  He’s a jealous man, and hires a “consultant”, Charlie Wolfe (Pegg), to find out if his suspicions are true.  Meanwhile, Alice has been chosen by dentist Nathan Webb (Stapleton) and his wife Lucy (Palmer) to be the substitute corpse in their plan to fake Lucy’s death and claim on her life insurance (Nathan has huge gambling debts that he needs to clear as quickly as possible).  When Wolfe provides proof of Alice’s infidelity – with garage owner Dylan (Hemsworth) who she plans to run away with – Jack wants her dead and asks Wolfe to take care of it.

Alice books an appointment with Nathan for later that day, and the Webbs decide it’s the perfect opportunity to put their plan into action.  When Alice arrives, she’s drugged  and put into the boot of Nathan’s car.  Lucy drives Alice’s car to a nearby quarry while Nathan heads there in his car, though he has to stop off at Dylan’s garage for some petrol first.  At the quarry, a mishap with Alice’s car sees it still end up in the water as planned, and the Webbs head back to the main road where, despite an attempt by Alice to get away, they put her in Lucy’s car, douse it in petrol and set light to it, and send it over the cliff edge.

Unknown to the Webbs, Wolfe has been following and taking photos of them.  When they reach a local beach house where the owners are away travelling (and where Lucy will hide out until the insurance money comes through), Wolfe sends Nathan an e-mail containing some of the photos he’s taken and demanding $250,000.  As if that wasn’t bad enough, local bent cop Bruce Jones (Brown), having seen Lucy’s car in flames at the bottom of the cliff has put two and two together and believes Nathan has actually killed her for the insurance money.  He blackmails Nathan for half the insurance money.

Back at the bar, Wolfe tells Jack that Alice is dead (though he keeps quiet about the details) and asks for his money.  It’s now that Jack discovers Alice has robbed him over three hundred thousand dollars he had in his safe.  He manages to put off paying Wolfe until the next day, but finds himself in even more trouble when Dylan turns up demanding to know where Alice is and what he’s done to her.  And while all that’s happening, Nathan agrees to meet Wolfe at the quarry to pay the blackmail demand…

Kill Me Three Times - scene

What follows on is an increasingly maze-like series of twists and turns and counter-twists that make Kill Me Three Times a hugely enjoyable and darkly comic thriller that picks up momentum after a slow start, and gleefully begins killing off its cast in ever more violent ways.  It’s a fine balancing act, mixing traditional thriller elements with a more extravagant comic sensibility, but without letting either ingredient overwhelm the other.  It’s the kind of off-kilter movie the Australians do so well and here, under the auspices of director Stenders, proves that they’re still more than capable of making this kind of movie and instilling it with originality and verve.

The movie’s chief asset is the script by first-timer James McFarland.  Structured in three parts – part one focuses on Alice’s murder by the Webbs, part two on the various back stories and how things move forward following Alice’s death, while part three ties things up neatly and in a nice big bloodstained bow – Kill Me Three Times avoids any potential pitfalls in its narrative by making its characters’ motivations quite clearcut and even relatable (whether you like them or not).  With such an investment made in the characters, the story is that much easier to accept and go along with, and despite an opening half hour where everything is established (and is necessarily slower than the rest of the movie), once all that is dispensed with, the movie becomes faster, funnier and more engrossing.

Behind the camera, Stenders – who made the criminally under seen Red Dog (2011) – shows a keen understanding and appreciation for the impulses driving the characters and elicits great performances from all concerned.  He’s also got a great eye for composition, highlighting the natural beauty of the Western Australia landscape and shoreline, and framing each shot with skill and conviction.  As a result the movie is often stunning to look at, his collaboration with very talented DoP Geoffrey Simpson paying off in dividends.

As the amoral psychopath Charlie Wolfe, Pegg is on fine form, inhabiting him with a carefree exuberance and just the right amount of bemused mirth.  As the observer of all the machinations and double-crosses and manipulations and blackmail going on, Wolfe is our eyes and ears, allowing us to see just how awful these people are – Alice and Dylan aside, though they’re not entirely innocent.  In a sense, his lack of artifice and straightforward approach to matters makes him seem less “evil” and more of an anti-hero.  Whichever way you view it, it’s still one of Pegg’s more enjoyable performances (and he gets the movie’s best line).

In support, Stapleton is great as the nervous, weak-minded Nathan (a million miles away from his turn as Themistocles in this year’s 300: Rise of an Empire), Palmer is suitably abrasive as his Lady Macbeth-like wife, and Braga earns the audience’s sympathy and support by virtue of being entirely likeable as the put-upon Alice.  Brown does glib menace with aplomb, Hemsworth makes dumb seem appealing, and Mulvey broods as if Jack’s life depends on it (which, actually, it does).  It’s a great ensemble cast, and you can see the fun everyone had making the movie coming out in the spirited and enthusiastic performances.

Kill Me Three Times won’t change anyone’s life, or inspire people to go on to do great things, but it is an entertaining and rewarding way to spend an hour and a half, and if it does so by shamelessly drawing in the viewer and keeping them hooked on what’s going to happen next, then that’s no bad thing, even if things do get (very) nasty and violent.

Rating: 8/10 – a hugely enjoyable romp that takes itself just seriously enough to make the thriller elements bitingly effective, Kill Me Three Times is at times happily “wrong” in all the right ways; with beautiful locations and a great cast clearly having a blast, this is strong, confident stuff that’s definitely worth seeking out.

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Sex Tape (2014)

09 Tuesday Sep 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Blackmail, Cameron Diaz, Comedy, iPad, Jake Kasdan, Jason Segel, Marriage, Review, Rob Corddry, Rob Lowe, Sex, Sex life, The Joy of Sex, YouPorn

Sex Tape

D: Jake Kasdan / 94m

Cast: Cameron Diaz, Jason Segel, Rob Corddry, Ellie Kemper, Rob Lowe, Nat Faxon, Nancy Lenehan, Giselle Eisenberg, Harrison Holzer, Sebastian Hedges Thomas

When Annie (Diaz) and Jay (Segel) first meet they have sex all the time.  They have sex in different places (sometimes in public), and they try lots of different positions; in short, they can’t get enough of each other.  But then they get married, have a couple of kids and the spark and the spontaneity goes out of their sex life, and they’re reduced to making vague plans around getting together, but their plans never work out.  Jay is continually busy with work, while Annie writes a blog about being a “mommy” that’s about to be picked up by a company, Piper Brothers, that promotes family values.

To celebrate an imminent offer from Piper Brothers, Annie arranges for her mom (Lenehan) to have the kids overnight so that she and Jay can have some “alone” time. Initially raring to go they soon find that getting back to having sex isn’t as easy as they’d thought.  Then Annie suggests they make a sex tape of themselves doing all the positions in The Joy of Sex.  Jay agrees and three hours later, exhausted and done, Annie tells Jay to erase the video.  The next morning, Jay is surprised to receive text messages from someone who says they liked the video.  Jay is horrified to learn that instead of deleting the video from his iPad, instead he’s synched it with all the other iPads he’s used recently and given to friends as a gift when he’s finished with them.

Annie is horrified that their friends – and the mailman – may get to see their sex tape, and tells Jay they have to get the other iPads back.  First they head over to their friends, Robby (Corddry) and Tess (Kemper), and retrieve theirs, but not before they inadvertently reveal why they want it back.  It’s then that Annie realises that she gave an iPad to Hank, the Piper Brothers bigwig who is preparing the offer for her blog.  The four of them go to his house where Annie and Jay go inside; while Annie keeps Hank busy, Jay searches the house for the iPad.  Having done enough for the night, Annie and Jay drop Robby and Tess back at their house, where their son, Howard (Holzer) reveals he sent the texts, and he wants $25,000 or he’ll let the tape be uploaded to the YouPorn website.  Refusing to be blackmailed, Annie and Jay find out where YouPorn has its base, and go there with the intention of damaging the servers and stopping the upload.  But they’re disturbed by the owner while in the act…

Sex Tape - scene

There are several moments in Sex Tape where disbelief has to be suspended so much that it hurts the movie irreparably.  One such moment is when the owner of YouPorn sits down with Annie and Jay and acts as a counsellor to them both, putting aside any issues with their breaking and entering his warehouse and causing damage to his servers as if it was only a minor annoyance (though fortunately they’re not let off the hook entirely – that would have been way too much to swallow).  This scene also slows down the movie and highlights the episodic nature of the script, one that feels like it’s an amalgamation of scenes the filmmakers thought would be funny to see, and which were then included in the nearest screenplay.  Other scenes where this occurs include Robby and Tess on Hank’s doorstep, and an unnecessary final act at a presentation at Annie and Jay’s son’s school.

For a movie with an average running time, this amount of careless padding (as mentioned above) hurts the movie and stops it from being the laugh-a-minute success it could have been.  A lot of Hollywood comedies these days are predictable and play it safe, feeling cool if they throw in a few indie-style gross-out gags for effect, and Sex Tape isn’t any different, but it has two very committed performances from Diaz and Segel, both unafraid to get naked (though not full-frontal) and both unafraid to look silly as they try to reignite the passion that’s deserted Annie and Jay.  The chemistry between them helps as well, and the scene where they sound off at each other for “showing their true colours” in a crisis has all the credibility of a real couple arguing with each other.

But the duo excel when the comedy gets frantic, especially when trying to retrieve Hank’s iPad, and where Jay finds himself traversing the house trying to find it and avoid the deadly intentions of Hank’s alsatian at the same time.  Meanwhile, Annie learns that Hank’s attitude to family values is definitely one that’s left at the office as he persuades her to do some cocaine.  With both of them under duress, how they deal with each dilemma is the highlight of the movie.

There’s adequate support from the rest of the cast, though only Lowe stands out, his role given more attention than the others, and there’s an extended cameo from an actor who’s worked with both Diaz and Segel in the past.  But thanks to the limitations imposed by the script (courtesy of Kate Angelo, Segel and Nicholas Stoller), they do what’s needed and little else.  In the director’s chair, Kasdan orchestrates things comfortably but with very little flair, though the editing by Steve Edwards and Tara Timpone is astute enough to make the movie flow more easily than it might have done otherwise.

All in all, Sex Tape isn’t going to win any awards but it does provide some solid laughs and, now and again, shows a sense of its own absurdity.  Some of the sit-com aspects sit uncomfortably with the more “adult” humour, but there are plenty of laughs to be had in amongst the unfortunate downtimes.

Rating: 6/10 – a little lightweight in too many areas to be fully rewarding, Sex Tape still manages to entertain for the most part, and that’s thanks to its two leads; with a tighter script and less straying from the main plot, this could have been a sure-fire hit.

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The Inner Circle (1946)

13 Sunday Apr 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Adele Mara, Blackmail, Crime, Johnny Strange, Murder, Mystery, Philip Ford, Republic Pictures, Review, Secretary, Warren Douglas

Inner Circle, The

D: Philip Ford / 57m

Cast: Adele Mara, Warren Douglas, William Frawley, Ricardo Cortez, Virginia Christine, Will Wright, Dorothy Adams

When private eye Johnny Strange (Douglas) wants a new secretary, he calls an agency and explains what he needs: “a blonde, beautiful, between 22-28, unmarried, with skin you love to touch, and a heart you can’t”.  His wish is granted immediately in the form of Geraldine Travis (Mara), who appears before he can finish the call, and effectively gives herself the job.  Overwhelmed and on the back foot from the moment she appears, Strange agrees to her employment just as the phone rings.  Geraldine deals with the call which is from a Spanish woman, asking for Strange to meet her later that evening; she has something very important she needs to talk to him about.

Strange meets the woman, who insists on hiding her identity behind a thick black veil.  They drive to her home where Strange is surprised to find the body of a man who’s been shot dead.  The Spanish woman attempts to bribe Strange into dealing with the body her way but when he declines and begins to call the police, she knocks him unconscious.  At this point, the movie reveals a major twist in the plot, and it becomes as much a whodunit as a whydunit?  The police, headed by ultra-suspicious Detective Lieutenant Webb (Frawley), think Strange killed the man – revealed as notorious gossip columnist Anthony Fitch – but with little evidence to secure a conviction, and the testimony of his new secretary keeping him out of jail, Strange resolves to find the killer and clear his name completely.

It soon becomes evident that Fitch wasn’t well-liked, and a number of people had motive and opportunity: there’s club owner Duke York (Cortez); singer Rhoda Roberts (Christine); Fitch’s housekeeper Emma Wilson (Adams); and Fitch’s gardener Henry Boggs (Wright).  Each behaves suspiciously but each denies any involvement in Fitch’s murder, even though they all saw him on the day he was killed.  When Strange learns that Fitch was about to reveal somebody’s big secret in his next radio broadcast, the why becomes clear but the who remains a mystery (unless you’ve seen some of these kind of movies before).

Inner Circle, The - scene

The Inner Circle has a jaunty, often comic feel to it that is nicely underplayed by its cast, and there are some great one-liners (mostly at Strange’s expense).  The humorous tone softens and complements the mystery elements, while the drama spins out at a surprisingly leisurely pace given the movie’s short running time.  It’s an easy movie to watch, and has a distinct charm that lifts it above the usual fare delivered by Republic Pictures during the Forties.  Mara and Douglas are a good match for each other, displaying a real chemistry together, and adding a spark to their scenes that benefits the movie throughout.  The mystery itself is hardly original, and there are moments when the audience’s credulity is strained as Strange makes yet another goof (is he really as good a private investigator as he thinks he is?), but taken as a whole, The Inner Circle succeeds with defiant ebullience.

What helps is it’s determination not to take the easy route.  So much of the movie – courtesy of Dorrell and Stuart E. McGowan’s fractious screenplay – turns on a willingness to upset its audience’s preconceptions.  The twist revealed after Strange is knocked unconscious gives a great indication of how slyly subversive the rest of the movie will turn out to be, with the murder complicated by side orders of blackmail, theft and unexpected revelations.  It all culminates in a radio broadcast where all the suspects are persuaded to play themselves in reenactments of key moments from earlier in the plot.  It’s like an Agatha Christie homage but with extra attitude in the staging and playing.

The cast all give good performances – Wright is a particular joy as the irascible gardener – and Ford’s direction shows a firm grasp of the material.  With its short running time and pleasant air, The Inner Circle deserves a wider audience than it’s likely to get these days.  As an example from the days when Poverty Row often meant appalling sets and even worse acting and/or directing, this is one movie that bucks the trend, and does it with a wonderful lack of concern.

Rating: 7/10 – often surprisingly witty and with a slightly eccentric approach to telling its story, The Inner Circle is a delight from beginning to end; proof as well that even Republic could grind out a winner every now and then.

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