Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (2018)

24 Thursday Jan 2019

Tags

Biography, Children, Documentary, Education, Fred Rogers, Joanne Rogers, King Friday XIII, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, Morgan Neville, Review

D: Morgan Neville / 94m

With: Fred Rogers (archive footage), Joanne Rogers, John Rogers, Jim Rogers, Tom Junod, Junlei Li, Joe Negri, David Newell, François Clemmons, Nick Tallo, Yo-Yo Ma, Margaret Whitmer

For someone whose primary career was in television, Fred Rogers wasn’t its biggest fan when he first encountered it at his parents’ home in 1951. Originally planning to enter the seminary – he was eventually ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1963 – Rogers took up the challenge of television because he felt it could be a useful educational tool for children. After a stint in New York, Rogers went to work at Pittsburgh’s public television station, WQED. Soon he had co-created The Children’s Corner, an elaborate (for its time) puppet show that introduced many characters that would stay with him for the rest of his career. In 1963 he was contracted to work on a new show for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation called Misterogers; it was the first time Rogers appeared on camera, something that would prove to be a wise decision on CBC’s part. The show ran until 1967, at which point Rogers returned to Pittsburgh and began to develop Misterogers into a new programme for the National Education Television network. And that show was eventually called Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood…

One of the most amazing moments in Won’t You Be My Neighbor? occurs in the wake of a brief archive clip of Robert F. Kennedy. We next see one of Rogers’ puppet characters, King Friday XIII, ask what the word “assassination” means. It’s a tribute to Rogers’ skill as a children’s educator that he could raise such a topic on his show and discuss it in such a way that it became accessible to his young audience, and in a way that they could understand. Rogers would introduce other serious topics over the years, but as Morgan Neville’s heartfelt documentary explains, it was all in the context of helping children make sense of the world around them. Rogers was unique in this, and he was doing so at a time when children’s television was becoming overloaded with fast-paced cartoons and wacky character-based shows such as The Banana Splits. Intent on doing his own thing in his own time, Rogers wasn’t afraid to break the rules by being reflective or pensive, or even plain silent. And he did it all in a friendly, low-key manner that was also sincere, honest, and considering his religious background, refreshingly free of references to faith or spiritual matters. He was a remarkable man, and he had a remarkable effect on everyone around him, including (in another amazing moment) Senator John Pastore.

In exploring the life and work of Fred Rogers, Morgan Neville has made a documentary that not only celebrates the man and his influence on millions of children, but places him in a very important historical context. The late Sixties and early Seventies were a tumultuous period in US history, and through the reminiscences of his wife Joanne, and others who worked with him at the time, Rogers’ determination not to leave children out of what was happening in the world is brought sincerely and honestly to the forefront. His shows were educational and entertaining, and enchanting too, their stripped-back simplicity still unequalled to this day. What also comes across is just how likeable he was, and how some of his own fears and concerns were expressed through his puppet characters, a way for the man himself to make sense of the world. Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is a potent, enervating documentary that packs several emotional wallops during a run time that doesn’t feel rushed (like Rogers’s shows), and which ends on a perfect grace note. In honouring the man, Neville’s movie, like Rogers himself, also honours all those children he had such a profound effect on. And that’s an amazing achievement…

Rating: 9/10 – one of the best movies of 2018, and in any category, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is a beautifully observant and wonderfully poignant look at a man whose impact on children and their emotional welfare and development can’t be underestimated; snubbed by this year’s Academy Awards – what is wrong with them? – this is genuinely moving in places, and a fitting tribute to Fred Rogers, the zip-up sweater man.

A Conspiracy of Faith (2016)

16 Saturday Jul 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Abduction, Children, Crime, Department Q, Drama, Fares Fares, Hans Petter Moland, Jakob Ulrik Lohmann, Jehovah's Witnesses, Jussi Adler-Olsen, Literary adaptation, Message in a bottle, Murder, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Pål Sverre Hagen, Review, Thriller

Original title: Flaskepost fra P

D: Hans Petter Moland / 112m

Cast: Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Fares Fares, Pål Sverre Hagen, Jakob Ulrik Lohmann, Amanda Collin, Johanne Louise Schmidt, Jakob Oftebro, Signe Anastassia Mannov, Søren Pilmark, Olivia Terpet Gammelgaard, Jasper Møller Friis

The third in the series of Department Q adaptations – from the novels of Jussi Adler-Olsen – sees the discovery of, literally, a message in a bottle being forwarded to said department in the hope that they can deduce if it’s some kind of prank or if the message is for real. With the head of Department Q, Carl Mørck (Kaas), still on sick leave following the events of the previous instalment, The Absent One (2014), his partner, Assad (Fares), and their assistant, Rose (Schmidt), begin to tease out the puzzle of the message, faded and corrupted as it is after being in the water for eight years. When Mørck does return to work he makes an important point: that there have been only two children reported missing in Sweden in the last ten years.

A name in the message – Poul – leads the team to looking at schools in the general area where the message was washed ashore. They discover that around seven years ago a boy named Poul and his brother Trygve were removed from a school by their parents, and were apparently sent to live with a relative. But when Mørck and Assad manage to track down Trygve he eventually tells them an entirely different story: that of being abducted by a man who ransomed the two boys, and who killed Poul. What also becomes clear is that the man who has done this was known to Trygve’s parents, and they said nothing at the time. Meanwhile, the man in question, known as Johannes (Hagen) and posing as a minister, meets with a couple, Elias (Lohmann) and Rakel (Collin), and their two children, Magdalena (Gammelgaard) and Samuel (Friis). Later, Johannes abducts the two children but is spotted doing so. Mørck and Assad are informed by a local police officer, Lisa (Mannov), and the three of them visit Elias and Rakel.

At first, Elias is defiant, and doesn’t want their help, but when Johannes demands Elias bring him the ransom, Mørck insists the police mount a large-scale operation designed to catch Johannes when he collects the money. With Elias tasked with taking a train until being given further instructions, when those instructions involve throwing the money off the train at a certain point, the anxious father does something no one could have expected: he jumps from the train. But in doing so, his attempt at confronting Johannes himself goes awry, and the hunted soon becomes the hunter as he learns of Mørck’s involvement, and decides to target the detective – and anyone who gets in his way.

Three movies in and this adaptation of Jussi Adler-Olsen’s novel is still uniquely Scandinavian, and is still as gripping as its predecessors. This is a series that trades on the bleakness at the heart of its central character’s soul, so it’s fitting that A Conspiracy of Faith should challenge Mørck’s insistence that having faith in any kind of deity is “stupid” – even Assad is derided by his partner’s intransigence on the matter. But as anyone who’s been following the series since it began with The Keeper of Lost Causes (2013) can attest, Mørck does have faith, it’s just that it’s been damaged by the terrible things that have happened to him over the years. He’s out of touch with people and his surroundings – at the beginning of the movie, Assad finds Mørck dressed and ready to return to work but sitting motionless in his apartment as if he’s waiting for something to give him purpose. The message does this, but the nature of the case, and the realisation that the parents of previously abducted children kept quiet about what had happened and made up lies about it, merely serves to reinforce his view that religion has no place in the real world.

By the movie’s end, Mørck may have had a revelation of his own, and he may have discovered a way to accept a degree of faith for himself, but the viewer will have to make up their own mind about that. Returning screenwriter Nikolaj Arcel is too clever to make such a consequence of Mørck’s involvement in the case so literal, but the clues are there, and it will be interesting to see where this takes the character in the next, and final, movie. With Mørck being so adamant about religion and worship, it’s good to see Assad take him to task over his own faith, and the way in which Mørck is disrespectful of him. Again, three movies in and Assad is a far cry from the slightly under-developed character he was in the first movie. Here his intelligence and leaps of, well – faith, help propel the investigation, and for much of the movie he’s the one in charge, not Mørck. It’s good to see that Assad has become such an integral part of the series, and not just the average sidekick who might get the odd moment to shine if the script allows it.

Both Kaas and Fares know their roles so well by now that they pick up where they left off without missing a beat. Returning minor characters Rose and Marcus Jacobsen (Pilmark) provide further links with the previous movies and are welcome aspects of the series’ continuity, while the various newcomers all do extremely well, from Lohmann’s prideful father, to Oftebro’s pretty boy police officer, and all the way to Hagen’s impressive turn as the murderous Johannes. Hagen is perhaps the series’ best adversary for Mørck and Assad, his passive face and physical stillness providing a keen counterpoint to the urgency that they bring to their roles, as inevitably, they encounter a race against time.

The story does skim over the motivations of characters such as Elias, and the central sequence involving the train and the ransom drop looks too much like it’s been visually inspired by the climax of Mission: Impossible (1996) – without the helicopter in a tunnel, naturally – but these are minor issues in a movie that has a solid emotional base beneath all the thriller elements, and a movie that further confirms the producers decision to make four movies altogether was the right one (though they could adapt the other three Department Q novels Adler-Olsen has written – if they wanted to). Stepping into the director’s chair for the first time, Moland has made a fine job of seamlessly integrating this movie into the series as a whole, and along with DoP John Andreas Andersen and editors Olivier Bugge Coutté and Nicolaj Monberg, has retained the series’ beautifully dour visual style and narrative rhythms. With one more movie to go, let’s hope the producers can maintain the quality of the series so far, and bow out on a continuing high.

Rating: 8/10 – there’s much to admire (and enjoy) here, from some truly mordaunt humour to the creepy behavioural tics that Hagen brings to his role, but overall this is another fine instalment from a series that really, really needs a wider audience; by maintaining its focus on its lead character, and the problems that plague him, A Conspiracy of Faith avoids comparisons with any other crime thrillers out there, and confirms its place in modern cinema as a second sequel that works equally as well as the original.

Hellions (2015)

08 Thursday Oct 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Bruce McDonald, Children, Chloe Rose, Demons, Drama, Halloween, Home invasion, Horror, Pregnancy, Review, Robert Patrick, Rossif Sutherland, Thriller

D: Bruce McDonald / 82m

Cast: Chloe Rose, Robert Patrick, Rossif Sutherland, Rachel Wilson, Luke Bilyk, Peter DaCunha, Emir Hirad Mokhtarieh, Joe Silvaggio, Sydney Cross

Dora Vogel (Rose), is a seventeen-year-old who lives with her mother, Kate (Wilson), and younger brother Remi (DaCunha). She has a boyfriend, Jace (Bilyk), who she’s intending to go to a Halloween dance with, but the news that she’s four weeks’ pregnant gives her pause. Afraid to tell her mother who has high hopes for her, Dora decides to stay at home and not go to the dance, but she doesn’t tell Jace. When her mother and brother go out trick or treating, Dora discovers that being home alone isn’t as comforting as she’d hoped, not least because of the oddly costumed child that calls at her door. Deciding she will go to the dance, she gets dressed up but now two children call, and this time one of them places their hand on her stomach leaving a bloody handprint. Shortly after, Dora begins to experience painful stomach cramps and calls her physician, Doctor Gabe Henry (Sutherland), to come over.

The cramps subside but when they do there’s a further knock at the door. Angry, Dora throws the remainder of the candy into the children’s sack – and sees something else there that shocks and petrifies her. She calls the police and while she’s on the line to the police dispatcher the house is seemingly possessed by a violent storm that sees various items hurled around by a powerful wind. The line goes dead and in time the storm subsides, but now Dora can see that there are more and more children outside, all wearing odd costumes. The arrival of an injured Doctor Henry sees the nature of what is now a siege intensify, and he and Dora lock themselves in the basement. But the children show tenancity and find their way in; Dora escapes through the laundry chute but the doctor isn’t so lucky. Dora tries to escape the house, and in the kitchen she comes face to face with one of the children. In her efforts to escape, Dora throws whatever comes to hand at the child, with no effect, until a salt shaker hits the child and the salt causes it to dissolve.

Now outside, Dora finds the sky transformed thanks to a bloody full moon that saturates everything in an eerie reddish-pink colour. She hides in an outhouse where the voice of one of the children speaks to her in her mind. It tells her they want her baby, the baby that is now growing at an advanced rate. Scared and horrified, Dora is found by Officer Corman (Patrick). They prepare to leave but hear Doctor Henry’s voice calling to them from the house. They go in, but Henry’s survival proves to be a cruel joke, but it’s one that allows Corman to realise what’s happening, and just how much danger Dora is in…

In 2008, Bruce McDonald gave us one of the most cleverly assembled zombie movies of the last ten years in the deliciously quirky Pontypool. Since then he’s laboured mostly in television, with the occasional feature thrown in (his last, The Husband (2013), is well worth checking out). Returing to the horror genre, McDonald has done his best to make a movie that combines a creepy, single-location setting with a broader supernatural raison d’etre (the children are demons looking to swell their ranks with Dora’s unborn child). In bringing Pascal Trottier’s script to life, however, McDonald is unable to overcome the deficiencies of the script, and as the movie breasts the hour mark and descends into fever dream territory, the tightness of the script up til that point drifts off into a soup of elliptical imagery and random occurrences that seem designed to pad out the remainder of the movie instead of bringing it to a satisfactory conclusion.

The set up is simple and effective, and the children – decked out in sackcloth hoods, unnerving masks, and surprisingly sinister metalware – are menacing, freakish and nightmarish to look at. Part of their effectiveness lies in their costumes, corrupted versions of children’s characters such as Raggedy Ann and Pinocchio; there’s nothing innocent about these kids, or what they want. McDonald highlights this horror at every opportunity, and even the kid wearing a tin bucket on his head (the leader, appropriately named Buckethead in the credits) is uncomfortably menacing. The children are the movie’s best asset, and whenever they appear the horror of Dora’s situation is more apparent and more terrifying.

What is less successful is the lame attempt to explain that this isn’t the first time they’ve done this, as Patrick’s dogged officer recalls the same thing happening to his wife, and the legacy of Carrie (1976) is resurrected in a superfluous final “scare” that fans of the genre will see coming a mile off. Elsewhere, Halloween is used as a backdrop for the supernatural shenanigans, but there’s no clear connection between the occasion and the children’s actions, and the field of exploding pumpkins is a triumph of unconvincing CGI. As a home invasion movie, Hellions is on firmer ground, and Rose’s performance is the glue that knits all the disparate elements together, from her shocked gaze at learning she’s pregnant, to her annoyance with the first child to knock (“Good luck with puberty”), to the moment when her realisation that salt can kill the children offers her a brief respite from being scared out of her wits.

Although the script’s unevenness hurts the movie overall, there’s more than enough to keep the viewer interested, even if it does go off the rails in the last twenty minutes. Dora is a sympathetic heroine, and it’s not hard to root for her, even if at one point she’s incapable of navigating her way through several hanging bedsheets. The various violent encounters are well handled, and the movie is refreshingly free of the post-modern irony and self-awareness that’s blighted so many horror movies in recent years. And the movie may be the first of its kind to make the colour pink seem ominous and sickly at the same time.

Rating: 6/10 – making a virtue of its restricted setting and an intelligent performance from Rose, Hellions is an above average horror/thriller that features some truly scary demon children and intuitive direction from McDonald; spoiled by a dilution of the threat towards the end, and a lack of focus the longer it goes on, it’s still a movie worth catching up with, and another example of what its director can do on a limited budget.

Pay the Ghost (2015)

19 Saturday Sep 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Child abduction, Children, Curse, Drama, Halloween, Literary adaptation, Nicolas Cage, Review, Sarah Wayne Callies, Supernatural, Thriller, Uli Edel

D: Uli Edel / 94m

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Sarah Wayne Callies, Lyriq Bent, Jack Fulton, Veronica Ferres, Susannah Hoffmann, Lauren Beatty, Stephen McHattie

It’s Halloween, and newly tenured professor Mike Lawford (Cage) arrives home just in time to take his young son Charlie (Fulton) to a nearby Halloween carnival. Charlie is a little nervous as the night before he saw something outside his bedroom window, and at the carnival he sees a large vulture circling overhead, though Mike doesn’t. When they queue up to get ice cream, Charlie asks his dad if they can “pay the ghost”, and in seconds he’s disappeared. Mike searches frantically for him but there’s no trace of Charlie, only the pirate hat he was wearing as part of his Halloween costume. The police are called, and the lead detective, Reynolds (Bent) assures Mike that these things usually resolve themselves within twenty-four hours.

A year later, with three days to go before Halloween, Mike and his wife Kristen (Callies) have separated, and Charlie is still missing. Mike pesters Detective Reynolds, accusing him of not trying hard enough, while also putting up flyers detailing Charlie’s disappearance. When he begins to hear Charlie’s voice, he initially doubts his senses, but when he sees him on a bus and chases after it, it leads him to an abandoned warehouse that’s become home to a group of vagrants. On the outside of the building the phrase “pay the ghost” has been painted. Mike asks if anyone knows what it means, and a blind man (McHattie) shows him a wall covered with the phrase; however he has little more to offer.

Mike tries to convince Kristen that Charlie might be trying to communicate with them from wherever he’s been taken. He discovers that a child who went missing on the Halloween before Charlie’s disappearance also said the same thing to her father. Kristen refuses to believe him until she has her own supernatural encounter. Together, Charlie’s parents begin to look into the number of child disappearances that have occurred on Halloween; a disturbing pattern emerges, one that leads them to believe that this has been happening for a very long time. They dig deeper, and find that the abductions are related to a tragedy that happened over three hundred years before.

For fans of Nicolas Cage, it’s been a rough few years since his lauded turn in Kick-Ass (2010). Since then, only Joe (2013) has shown audiences what Cage can do when he’s fully engaged with a project. Otherwise, the movies he’s chosen to star in have been so lacking in quality they could only have been taken on as a way of paying off his mortgage. Anyone who’s sat through the likes of Seeking Justice (2011), Rage (2014), and/or Left Behind (2014) will have wondered what’s happened to an actor who won an Oscar for one of the most powerful portrayals of an alcoholic ever committed to celluloid. With each new movie, his loyal fans must hope that this will be the one to change his dwindling fortunes and prove he still has what it takes.

Alas, Pay the Ghost isn’t the one. Here Cage doesn’t so much phone in his performance as fax it over an intermittent connection. Trying to maintain a semblance of commitment to the material, Cage goes through the motions with all the intensity of someone who can’t wait to move on to the next project. At one point, after Kristen has made it clear she blames Mike for losing Charlie, Cage is required to fall to the floor and begin crying. It should be an uncomfortable moment of parental grief, but instead it’s uncomfortable because Cage can’t sell the emotion (or any tears). In comparison with Callies, who at least makes an effort to be traumatised by Charlie’s disappearance, Cage sleepwalks through their scenes together, only showing any passion when called upon to share his growing suspicions about Charlie’s abduction.

To be fair to Cage, he isn’t helped by the material, a hodgepodge of supernatural thriller clichés stitched together by screenwriter Dan Gay and adapted from the novella by Tim Lebbon. Fans of the genre will have fun spotting the references to other, similar movies, while the makers of the Insidious franchise will have good cause to wonder if Edel and co. haven’t made an unofficial companion movie to that particular series (Hoffmann’s medium is certainly no match for Lin Shaye’s Elise Rainier). You know a movie hasn’t got a clue when the supernatural entity at the heart of everything is able to organise all kinds of mischief at the drop of a hat – including killing someone by spontaneous combustion – but fails to put Cage off his stride at any point (yes, he’s the hero, but really, shouldn’t he be put in danger at least once during the movie?).

Further incongruities occur throughout, with Bent’s credulous detective used to poor effect and removed from the movie once he experiences his own supernatural awakening. Fulton spends most of the movie in a pirate costume, and sporting an eye patch applied with black make up that makes him look like a reject from a KISS audition. The evil entity has evolved from a curse made centuries before but its modern day raison d’être is arbitrary and convenient at the same time, reinforcing the idea that the makers have adopted a kitchen sink approach to its behaviour (just why Charlie has been chosen is one of the many questions the movie fails to even ask let alone explain).

In charge of all this, Edel never shows he has a grip on the material, and several scenes seem under-rehearsed or sloppily staged. Even the de rigeuer scares are heavily signposted and too reminiscent of similar ones from the Insidious series, while the final showdown between Mike and the entity takes place on a gantry that’s surrounded by some of the worst visual effects seen for some time. It’s almost as if everyone concerned just wanted to do enough to get the movie made and then move on.

Rating: 3/10 – Cage has made few worse movies, but Pay the Ghost comes pretty close to being at the top of the list; derivative, uninspired, dull, laughable, ridiculous, awful – it’s all these things and more, and serves as yet another unfortunate nail in the coffin of Cage’s career.