The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018)

03 Monday Dec 2018

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Chloë Grace Moretz, Desiree Akhavan, Drama, Forrest Goodluck, Gay conversion therapy, God's Promise, Jennifer Ehle, John Gallagher Jr, Lesbian, Literary adaptation, Review, Sasha Lane

D: Desiree Akhavan / 92m

Cast: Chloë Grace Moretz, John Gallagher Jr, Jennifer Ehle, Sasha Lane, Forrest Goodluck, Emily Skeggs, Owen Campbell, Melanie Ehrlich, Christopher Dylan White, Quinn Shephard, Kerry Butler

For Cameron Post (Moretz) and her best friend, Coley Taylor (Shephard), being discovered having sex in the back seat of one of their boyfriends’ cars on prom night was not how the evening was meant to turn out. Although not their first sexual experience together, they’ve kept their relationship a secret from everyone, and Cameron, though certain that she’s a lesbian, is still coming to terms with how it will affect her life. However, being discovered leads her aunt (Butler), who is a devout Christian (and who has been raising Cameron since the deaths of her parents), to enrol Cameron in a gay conversion therapy centre called God’s Promise. Run by brother and sister, Reverend Rick (Gallagher Jr) and Dr Lydia Marsh (Ehle), the centre views homosexuality as a sin, and its programme is designed to help young people who are “confused” by their sexuality into making the right changes and embracing heterosexuality. Cameron soon makes friends – mainly with fellow lesbian Jane (Lane) and two spirit Adam Red Eagle (Goodluck) – but she also finds her own certainty about being a lesbian brought into question…

Imbued with a healthy dose of skepticism about the whole notion of gay conversion therapy, The Miseducation of Cameron Post is not the strident call to have these institutions banned that you might think it would be. Instead, it’s a much more subtle piece, adapted from Emily M. Danforth’s novel, and thanks to its historical setting – the movie takes place in 1993 – the movie is able to explore the issues it raises – freedom of sexual expression, religious fundamentalism, nature vs nurture, even free will – with a lightness of tone that seems at odds with the seriousness of its subject matter, but which enables it to get its points across more effectively. This isn’t a movie that wants to pound its viewers over the head with damning rhetoric. Rather, it explores Cameron’s experiences at home and at the centre in a way that gets its message across without it feeling forced or contrived. Cameron poses her challenges to the centre’s programme in a wry, humorous way that makes clear her confusion – not about her sexuality, but whether or not Reverend Rick or Dr Lydia even know what they’re doing (tragically, they don’t). There’s no war of attrition, no acting out or playing up, just an awareness that God’s Promise is not an answer to anything, and so, perhaps not worth the effort to take it seriously.

In adapting Danforth’s novel, director Akhavan and her co-scripter, Cecilia Frugiuele, paint the adults as either blinkered or over-reaching, and the young people as doing what teenagers do best (or worst, depending on your point of view), and that’s working out what kind of people they’re going to be. Anchored by Moretz’s best performance in years, and with strong supporting turns from Lane, Goodluck and Skeggs, Akhavan draws out each character’s strengths and insecurities in such a way that they don’t feel like stereotypes, and the emotional upheaval that they’re experiencing feels genuine. It’s often a delicate balancing act, but Akhavan is more than up to the task, and this is a terrific follow up to her first feature, Appropriate Behaviour (2014). Bristling with confidence in the material, and the approach she’s taken, Akhavan finds nuance and perception in the smallest of details, and without feelig the need to hold the viewer’s hand throughout. The title claims that Cameron has been miseducated, but by the end of the movie, when Cameron, Jane and Adam decide to take matters into their own hands, you could argue that this has been a misstep rather than a miseducation. Either way, it’s a well observed piece that doesn’t skirt the issues it raises, or treat them lightly.

Rating: 8/10 – a movie that doesn’t labour the points it’s trying to make, and which avoids both sentimentality and the need for polemics, The Miseducation of Cameron Post is a sly dog of a movie that sneaks up on the viewer and makes a quiet, yet effective impact; whatever your feelings about religion and homosexuality, and the way the two butt heads so often, this is a movie that stresses humanity over dogma, and finds beauty in the struggle for personal acceptance.

Brain on Fire (2016)

08 Thursday Jun 2017

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Anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis, Carrie-Anne Moss, Chloë Grace Moretz, Drama, Gerard Barrett, Journalist, Literary adaptation, New York Post, Review, Richard Armitage, Susannah Cahalan, Thomas Mann, True story

D: Gerard Barrett / 89m

Cast: Chloë Grace Moretz, Thomas Mann, Richard Armitage, Carrie-Anne Moss, Jenny Slate, Tyler Perry, Navid Negahban, Robert Moloney, Vincent Gale, Janet Kidder, Alex Zahara, Jenn McLean-Angus

Susannah Cahalan (Moretz) is a young reporter working at the New York Post. Life for Susannah is good: she’s working at her dream job, she still has the love of her divorced parents, Tom (Armitage) and Rhona (Moss), and she’s in a relationship with budding musician Stephen (Mann). At the Post, her boss, Richard (Perry), is encouraging and acknowledges her good work, while one of her colleagues, Margo (Slate), has become a firm friend. But one day, while celebrating her birthday with her parents, their respective new partners, and Stephen, Susannah experiences a dissociative moment where she’s unable to focus on what’s being said or whether she should be responding. The moment passes without anyone noticing, and Susannah forgets about it, thinking it’s just a one-off.

But it happens again. And again. And again. Soon, Susannah is experiencing these dissociative moments five or six times a day, but she doesn’t mention them to anyone. She does mention bites on her arm that she thinks are caused by bed bugs, but when anyone else looks at her arm, they don’t see anything there. One night, while she’s with Stephen, Susannah has a fit, but while he gets her to hospital, the tests they carry out don’t reveal anything wrong. She sees a doctor (Gale) who has further tests carried out, but when they come back normal as well, his diagnosis is that Susannah is drinking too much and her symptoms are those of alcohol withdrawal. Tom and Rhona aren’t impressed by this, and they take turns in looking after Susannah at their respective homes. But Susannah’s beahviour worsens and she becomes paranoid and delusional. Another fit ensures a longer stay in hospital, where her condition worsens. As she edges into a semi-catatonic state, the hospital staff admit they have no idea what’s causing Susannah’s illness. It’s only the last-minute attendance of physician Dr Najjar (Negahban) that offers Susannah a chance at regaining her life, and finding a solution – and a cure – to the illness that’s crippling her.

The disease that was eventually diagnosed as causing the dissociative moments, the hallucinations, the manic outbursts, the paranoia and the semi-catatonia, was anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis. It was also a disease that had only been identified a mere three years before Susannah Cahalan was diagnosed as having it. Her subsequent memoir, Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness (2012), told her story from the viewpoint of when she woke up after having been in hospital after a month and couldn’t remember anything that she’d done, or had happened, during that period. Gerard Barrett’s adaptation of Cahalan’s book eschews that approach for a more linear, traditional way of presenting her story. It’s not an entirely surprising direction for the movie to take, but it does mean that many of the standard tropes associated with good old-fashioned disease-of-the-week TV movies are all present and correct.

It also means that the viewer has to contend with an ill-advised and unalterably trite opening voice over that has Susannah forewarn them that something is going to go terribly, terribly wrong (as if we couldn’t have already worked that one out for ourselves), and a succession of scenes that reinforce the idea that Susannah is leading a wonderful life. But when Susannah begins “zoning out” she doesn’t say anything to anyone, and attempts to carry on as if her “zoning out” is a minor inconvenience. But then the disease pulls the rug out from under her: an assignment that she believes she’s written on a Thursday for inclusion in the Post on Saturday, is rubbished by her boss on the ensuing Monday – the day he’s received it. Watching Brain on Fire, this is the point at which many viewers will be saying to themselves, Why doesn’t she say anything? Sure, she goes to the doctor but when that proves inconclusive of anything and her illness begins to worsen, her behaviour is written off as either an alcohol problem or potentially psychiatric in nature.

That the various medical professionals who examine Susannah fail to diagnose her condition properly, makes for another staple of this kind of movie, but while it’s a familiar presentation, what makes it particularly invidious on this occasion is a caveat that the movie avoids providing. Anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis was only identified three years before Susannah was affected by it, and the number of patients who had been diagnosed up until then was relatively small. This allows for Dr Najjar’s actions to appear almost miraculous in relation to the rapid decline that Susannah experiences (in her book if not in the movie; here her illness and its development is allowed to take place over what seems far longer than a month). Again, this is tried and tested stuff, as predictable as it is anodyne, and Barrett makes sure the audience knows just how terrible it all is by having Moretz looking spaced out and/or wasted at every opportunity.

Susannah herself is given short shrift by Barrett’s script, with too much emphasis on the illness instead of the character. This leaves Moretz adrift for much of the movie, looking vacuous for the most part, and never ensuring that the audience really cares about Susannah and her plight. As she stumbles through her life, effectively dismantling it from the inside out as she goes, Susannah (as portrayed by Moretz) is a helpless witness to what’s happening, and where this should offer some poignancy or even outright sympathy, it never quite pays off as it should. The viewer can readily acknowledge that what’s happening to Susannah is terrible, but beyond that it’s difficult to maintain any empathy for her. Moretz struggles with a number of scenes where she’s under the influence of her illness and either self-diagnosing – “I’m bipolar; I have multiple personality disorder” – or attempting to deal with it on her own. By the time Susannah is in a semi-catatonic state, the audience could be excused for breathing a sigh of relief: now we’re getting somewhere…

The characters around Susannah are mostly stereotypical, with Stephen’s initial self-absorption giving way to his staying resolutely at her bedside, while Tom agonises over her situation at every turn and Rhona acts calmly yet decisively and keeps it all together. Her doctors are either blasé or baffled, Margo is the concerned friend who makes just the one visit to her in the hospital, and her boss, Richard, behaves in a manner that stretches credulity as when Susannah botches an important interview and he doesn’t fire her. Throughout all this, these characters remain cyphers, given just enough to do to avoid being bystanders to it all, but at the same time, not having any depth that would prompt a connection with the audience.

Barrett’s script lacks the edge or the energy to make Susannah’s story compelling enough for more than a cursory investment by the viewer, and there are several stretches – mostly where Susannah wanders the streets of New York in an apparent daze – where the editing needed to be more judicious. As a director, Barrett doesn’t seem to know how to build on the story to make it more affecting and effective, and there are times when the movie’s pace founders and becomes less measured than at other times. All in all, the movie fails to engage properly with its audience, and though it’s a valiant attempt by Barrett et al to tell a fascinating story, there’s not enough attention to detail, and not enough in place to make this stand out from the crowd.

Rating: 5/10 – with its less than gripping plot and inconsistent narrative, Brain on Fire is persistent in its efforts to bring its audience on board, though its under-developed script makes it hard to pull that off; Moretz’s strained performance, the movie’s pedestrian tone, and its preponderance of fugue moments, all serve to make this a potentially intriguing movie that never quite makes the most of its incredible real life story.

Question of the Week – 20 October 2016

20 Thursday Oct 2016

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Actors, Actresses, Chloë Grace Moretz, Liam Hemsworth, Question of the Week

This week the question is a simple one, and is based on a simple premise. How do some actors and actresses manage to find regular employment in movies when they clearly can’t act their way out of a paper bag? (That’s not this week’s question, that’s just part of the preamble.) These are actors and actresses that are well-known, have appeared in many well-known movies, but have yet to give a decent performance in any of them (well, maybe once, to be fair). And yet they keep getting hired… and hired… Is it because they have great agents who are very good at getting them parts time after disappointing time? (That’s still not the question.) Or are they just very, very, lucky – or always available? (Wait for it…) So, in the light of all this, this week’s Question of the Week is:

Just how do Liam Hemsworth and Chloë Grace Moretz manage to keep on working?

Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising (2016)

06 Tuesday Sep 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Bad Neighbours 2, Chloë Grace Moretz, Comedy, Kappa Nu, Neighbours, Nicholas Stoller, Review, Rose Byrne, Sequel, Seth Rogen, Sorority, Zac Efron

aka Bad Neighbours 2

D: Nicholas Stoller / 92m

Cast: Seth Rogen, Zac Efron, Rose Byrne, Chloë Grace Moretz, Ike Barinholtz, Kiersey Clemons, Beanie Feldstein, Dave Franco, Jerrod Carmichael, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Elise Vargas, Zoey Vargas, John Early, Hannibal Buress, Selena Gomez, Kelsey Grammer, Lisa Kudrow

Meh (see also Mechanic: Resurrection and Bastille Day).

Rating: 3/10 – a disastrous sequel that should be subtitled The Movie Laughs Forgot, Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising is another “comedy” that barely succeeds in raising a smile, let alone any genuine outbursts of laughter; a lame retread of the original, the cast sleepwalk through their roles, the script allows for long stretches of tedium, Stoller appears to have been on holiday for the whole of shooting, and any chance of a good time is dismissed from the off, leaving the audience to wonder how on earth this was made in the first place.

The 5th Wave (2016)

13 Wednesday Apr 2016

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Alex Roe, Alien invasion, Aliens, Chloë Grace Moretz, Drama, J Blakeson, Liev Schreiber, Literary adaptation, Maria Bello, Nick Robinson, Review, Rick Yancey, Sci-fi, Thriller, Wright Patterson Air Force Base, YA novel

D: J Blakeson / 112m

Cast: Chloë Grace Moretz, Nick Robinson, Alex Roe, Liev Schreiber, Maria Bello, Ron Livingston, Maggie Siff, Zackary Arthur, Maika Monroe, Tony Revolori, Talitha Bateman, Cade Canon Ball, Alex MacNicoll, Nadji Jeter, Gabriela Lopez

It’s actually hard to know where to start with The 5th Wave. (It’s equally hard to know where to finish as well.) Yet another adaptation of the first in a trilogy of YA novels – this time by Rick Yancey – the movie has so many problems, and so many flaws it’s almost embarrassing. Up front and centre there’s Chloë Grace Moretz, an actress whose career has evolved – somehow – out of calling a bunch of goons “c*nts”, and who lacks the wherewithal to cry properly when her character’s father dies (look closely and you’ll find that Moretz’s face is not the definition of “tear-streaked”). Moretz just isn’t convincing enough as Cassie, the nominal heroine of the novels and the movie, and every time she’s asked to show some emotion it’s like there’s a war of attrition going on in her head, as she struggles to work out which facial expression will fit the bill. Often she settles for confused, or confused and angry, almost like they’re default modes for acting.

Then there’s the supporting cast, a mix of relative newcomers and veterans who all should have known better and sought employment elsewhere. On the veterans side there’s Liev Schreiber and Maria Bello, two very good, accomplished actors who are more than capable of giving award-winning performances (and they have). But here it’s a very different story (much like this adaptation of Yancey’s novel). Schreiber, playing a US military commander, looks bored and sounds bored throughout, as if he’s committed to the movie before reading the script and is now regretting the decision completely. Bello, on the other hand, at least has the luxury of being almost unrecognisable as another member of the military, but even she can’t bring anything resembling an effective portrayal to a role that requires her to jab her co-stars with a needle gun or spit out her lines as if they were poisonous.

On the relative newcomers side, it’s disheartening to see the likes of Revolori, excellent as the bellboy in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), and Monroe, also excellent as the heroine of It Follows (2014), reduced to making ends meet by playing characters who are either unmemorable (Revolori) or stereotypically superficial (Monroe – the tough as nails female who doesn’t take shit from anyone). If this is the best movie they could get to work on in 2015 then they need to seriously rethink who’s representing them. As the two male leads, Robinson (as Cassie’s high school crush, Ben) opts for sulky and remote, while Roe (as Evan, who helps Cassie when she’s injured) aims for a combination of Theo James and Ansel Elgort from the Divergent series, and misses them both by a mile.

The look of the movie is also a problem. At the beginning, as Cassie provides an overview of the alien invasion and the various waves that have occurred so far, there’s a definite feel of money being well-spent, and the movie has an exciting buzz about it. But once that section is over, and Cassie, her father (Livingston), and her younger brother Sam (Arthur), arrive at the refugee camp it all becomes very generic in terms of both the art direction and the cinematography. And by the movie’s end, the cast are consigned to running around empty underground corridors in a volley of scenes that could be taking place in any post-apocalyptic low-budget sci-fi movie.

All this can be laid firmly at the door of the script, a mishmash of YA tropes and sci-fi melodrama that’s been cobbled together by three writers, all of whom should have been able to do a better job than this. Susannah Grant wrote the script for Erin Brockovich (2000) and was nominated for an Oscar, while Jeff Pinkner has an envious track record on TV shows such as Lost and Fringe. And then there’s Akiva Goldsman, an Oscar winner for A Beautiful Mind (2001), and a recent participant in YA adaptations with the script for Insurgent (2015). But when all three can’t stop a movie from sounding like it was written by a trio of people who believe caricature and cliché are the best options, then the movie is pretty much abandoning all hope and waving a surrender flag.

But all this pales in comparison to the flaccid direction foisted on the movie by Blakeson. Making only his second feature after The Disappearance of Alice Creed (2009), Blakeson has trouble making any of it sound or look convincing, from the tepid romance between Cassie and Evan, to the video game sequences where Ben and his squad try and hunt down the aliens – possibly the worst example of the movie’s haphazard approach to editing – whatever the requirement, Blakeson finds some way to spoil it or prevent it from reaching its full potential. When you can’t even find a way of making Liev Schreiber look menacing, or inject any excitement into the destruction of a major air force base then you’ve got real problems. Maybe there’s a budgetary explanation for some of this but in the main, nothing works as well as it should.

Rating: 3/10 – its opening salvo of disaster aside, The 5th Wave works best as a cautionary tale to other makers of dystopian YA movies, in that they should avoid replicating this movie’s mistakes and do exactly the opposite of what it does here; limp and unappealing, with yet another inexplicable lead role for Moretz, it’s a movie that redefines the term “lacklustre” and has hopefully done enough to dissuade any sequels from being made.

Trailer – The 5th Wave (2016)

20 Sunday Sep 2015

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Alien invasion, Chloë Grace Moretz, Preview, Rick Yancey, Sci-fi, Trailer

As part of my look ahead to 2016, here’s the trailer to a movie whose combination of Independence Day destruction and Divergent series’ teen action heroics could prove to be an enormous crowd pleaser. Trading on her action star status from the Kick Ass movies, Chloë Grace Moretz looks convincing as the teenager taking a lonely stand against an alien invasion, while the visuals have that crisp, arresting style that allows for moments where the audience can safely allow their jaws to hit the floor. It’s based on a novel by Rick Yancey, and if successful, we’ll see two sequels hit our screens in the coming years (unless the last in the trilogy – still to be published – is split into two movies).

Laggies (2014)

13 Sunday Sep 2015

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Chloë Grace Moretz, Drama, Elopement, Engagement, Keira Knightley, Lynn Shelton, Mark Webber, Relationships, Review, Romance, Sam Rockwell, Single father

aka Say When

D: Lynn Shelton / 99m

Cast: Keira Knightley, Chloë Grace Moretz, Sam Rockwell, Mark Webber, Jeff Garlin, Ellie Kemper, Sara Coates, Kirsten deLohr Helland, Kaitlyn Dever, Daniel Zovatto, Dylan Arnold, Gretchen Mol

At twenty-six, Megan (Knightley) still doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life. She helps out her dad (Garlin) with his store, but otherwise does little beyond spend time with her friends, or her boyfriend, Anthony (Webber). When her friend Allison (Kemper) gets married, the day of the wedding proves traumatic when Anthony proposes to her unexpectedly and Megan sees her father fooling around with another woman. Unable to deal with the two events, she leaves the reception and drives around until she stops at a convenience store. There she’s stopped by a young girl, Annika (Moretz) and asked if she’ll buy alcohol for her and her friends. Megan agrees, and ends up spending the next few hours with them.

When she eventually gets back home, Anthony reveals that he thinks they should forgo a big wedding and elope to Las Vegas. Megan agrees that they should, but she still has qualms about getting married, and uses a trip to a planned careers advice seminar to delay their marriage for a week. Her idea is to give herself the space and time to decide if she wants to spend the rest of her life with Anthony. As she leaves Seattle, Megan receives a phone call from Annika asking if she can pose as her mother for a meeting with a school guidance counsellor. Megan does so, and asks Annika if, in return, she can stay with her for the upcoming week.

Annika is fine with the idea but knows her father, Craig (Rockwell), will be less enthusiastic about it, but Annika’s attempt to sneak Megan into the house fails, and Megan ends up being questioned by Craig – who’s a lawyer – about why she’s there. Megan lies and tells him she’s between apartments due to lease problems, and just needs somewhere to stay temporarily. Craig lets her stay, and as the week progresses he begins to trust her. So does Annika, so much so that she asks Megan to go with her to see her estranged mother, Bethany (Mol).

Craig and Megan spend an evening together at a bar and on their way home begin kissing. They have sex when they get home; next morning Craig offers to let Megan stay longer, but she reluctantly tells him she has to leave. They kiss again and this time Annika sees them. She later tells Megan that she doesn’t have a problem if they got together, but when they go shopping for a prom dress for Annika, Annika discovers Megan’s engagement ring. Forced to admit the truth, Megan’s deception proves to have lasting consequences…

After the disappointment of her previous movie, Touchy Feely (2013), hopes were high that Lynn Shelton’s next project would be an improvement, and re-cement her position as one of today’s more intriguing and perceptive directors. Working from a script by first-time screenwriter Andrea Siegel, Laggies – the phrase refers to people who are always late or lagging behind in some way – Shelton has certainly made a better feature than her last, but it’s still a movie that suffers from a lack of conviction.

Part of the problem is the central character of Megan, a young woman apparently experiencing a “quarter-life crisis”. While it’s not improbable for anyone to find themselves in their mid-twenties and without a clear idea of where their life is heading, where Megan is concerned it’s very clear that she’s an intelligent, independently-minded young woman, but someone who is unable to deal with the larger, more important aspects of becoming an adult. She avoids responsibility and appears emotionally shallow, but somehow manages to retain the affection and support of everyone around her. How she’s arrived at this point is never explained, and the movie never explores fully the implications of such an arrested lifestyle, preferring instead to have Megan float through her own life waiting for the answers to come to her rather than working them out for herself.

With Megan having little in the way of self-awareness (or even pride), it’s difficult to fully sympathise with her, especially when she falls for Craig so easily, a plot development that couldn’t have been signposted better if it had been written in fiery letters in the sky. It’s this conventional romantic approach that anchors the movie’s second half and leads to the kind of unsurprising resolution that’s been seen a million times before. That Shelton manages to keep the viewer interested despite all this is a tribute to her skills as a director, and the performance of Knightley, who adopts not only a convincing American accent, but also fleshes out the character of Megan against all the odds. There’s a scene after Megan has slept with Craig where she talks with her father; unable to judge him anymore, Megan’s lack of ambivalence over her own actions further hurts the scene, and it’s only rescued by Knightley’s decision to play it with a sense of newly discovered regret at the way she’s acted towards him.

Moretz is sidelined by the script’s insistence on her being a constant reminder of the simpler life Megan is looking for, while Rockwell brings his usual quirky schtick to a character who really needs to be more conservative, and not an older, wiser version of Megan. Spare a thought for Webber, though, playing a character so wet and puppy like you can only think Megan’s with him out of a sense of obligation, or worse, pity. With its four main characters either stretching credulity or in place to meet the wider needs of the storyline, the movie feels and sounds like an examination of a particularly callow way of living, and one that most of us would have little time for.

On the plus side, Shelton does make more of the material than it deserves, and she invests the movie with a rhythm that helps the viewer get through some of the more unlikely moments. Knightley dials down most of her usual mannerisms to give a polished portrayal of a lost soul who’d prefer to remain that way, and Mol deserves a mention for making Annika’s mother something more than the standard embittered ex-wife. Nat Sanders’ editing is another plus, especially when called upon to enhance a character’s emotional reaction in a scene, and there’s an often delightfully apt score by Benjamin Gibbard that subtly reflects Megan’s confusion.

Rating: 6/10 – while the movie’s structure is fairly sound, and Shelton shows an awareness of the script’s faults that compensates greatly, Laggies still feels undercooked, and as a result, falls short of what it’s aiming for; while it’s refreshing to see a woman in her mid-twenties having a life crisis, it’s also a shame to find said crisis left mostly unexplored.

Dark Places (2015)

02 Sunday Aug 2015

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1985, Charlize Theron, Chloë Grace Moretz, Christina Hendricks, Corey Stoll, Crime, Drama, Gilles Paquet-Brenner, Gillian Flynn, Kansas, Literary adaptation, Murder, Nicholas Hoult, Review, Satanism, The Kill Club

D: Gilles Paquet-Brenner / 113m

Cast: Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Christina Hendricks, Tye Sheridan, Chloë Grace Moretz, Corey Stoll, Sterling Jerins, Sean Bridgers, Andrea Roth, Shannon Kook, Drea de Matteo

In 1985, in a small rural community in Kansas, a single mother and two of her daughters are all killed one night at their farmhouse; later, the surviving daughter, Libby (Jerins), tells the police her brother Ben (Sheridan) did it. After his arrest and during his trial, Ben offers no defence and he’s sent to prison for the rest of his life.

In 2015, the adult Libby (Theron) is down on her luck and counting on her minor celebrity status to keep her afloat. When she’s contacted by Lyle Wirth (Hoult) with the offer of $500 for a speaking engagement, she arranges to meet with him first. Lyle tells her he belongs to a group called The Kill Club, an organisation of volunteers who look into old unsolved murders, or cases where they believe an innocent person has been put in jail. She attends one of their meetings and finds that several members believe Ben didn’t commit the murders, and Libby finds herself challenged over her version of events that night. Angry at first, Libby agrees to help the group look into the case, and begins her own investigation alongside theirs.

Lyle convinces her to visit her brother, something she’s never done. Ben (Stoll) is happy to see her, but Libby’s resentment of him means the visit goes badly. Back in her hometown she tries to find her father, Runner (Bridgers), who abandoned them when she was much younger. She also looks into the possibility of Ben having been part of a Satanic cult at the time, and why a young girl named Krissi Cates is relevant to what happened. As she learns more and more, she discovers Ben had a girlfriend called Diondra (Moretz). With Lyle’s help, Libby begins to put all the pieces together, and finds that what she believed happened all those years ago is far more complicated than she could ever imagined – and the repercussions of those events are still being played out in the present.

Adapted from the novel by Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl, Dark Places is a murder mystery where what appears to be a simple, unexplainable crime proves to be something a lot more complicated and strange, and with a bewildering set of coincidences that make up the solution to the murders. Paquet-Brenner’s adaptation keeps the narrative skipping backwards and forwards between 1985 and 2015, showing us the events that led to the murders in 1985, and linking these scenes to the discoveries Libby makes in the present. As the story gradually unfolds, and we see the drama that played out in the past, we gain a greater understanding of the whys and hows that govern the actions of Libby and those people who were involved.

It’s a delicate balancing act at times, with the structure dictating that there be some degree of repetition throughout, as what we see in the past is explained in the future. Thankfully, Paquet-Brenner avoids such a hazard by making each new discovery as confusing as the last, and by throwing in so many suspects it almost seems as if the entire community could have done it. As Libby’s investigation leads to some unsavoury truths and revelations, the director makes it clear that her memories of that night have always been tainted, but to what degree she and the audience have to find out for themselves.

The dark places of the title are the ones we go to in our minds when we contemplate issues of murder and perceived guilt. The movie explores these avenues via the adult Libby’s increasingly fractured certainty that Ben killed his mother and sisters. And while the script plants a very big clue early on as to what really happened, it’s more concerned with the various ways in which we, through Libby, justify our actions and sense of culpability. Libby is tormented by having not been able to do anything to stop Ben, but as his innocence becomes more and more likely, her own assertions (the ones that have carried her through all these years) begin to crumble and she’s faced with the daunting prospect that her testimony condemned her brother to prison for the rest of his life.

But it proves not to be so simple. Ben has his own reasons for staying quiet, and so we, like Libby, have to seek answers in those dark places mentioned already. Thanks to a tight, focused script, and a clutch of telling performances, the movie shifts and turns with every passing minute, making it more and more difficult to work out what actually happened. Theron is impressive as the outwardly angry but internally uncomfortable Libby, her strained features and abrasive attitude in keeping with a survivor who only has her celebrity to keep her going; without it she’d be aimless (another reason why she agrees to help the Kill Club). As Lyle, Hoult brings a determined optimism to the role that offsets and complements Libby’s antagonistic approach, while Hendricks stands out as the harried mother struggling to keep her home and family together in the face of impending financial ruin. With more than able support from the likes of Sheridan, Moretz and de Matteo as the older Krissi, Dark Places succeeds in making each character credible, even when they’re sometimes asked to behave in ways that don’t make sense until the final reveal.

To add to the effectiveness of the script, the acting and Paquet-Brenner’s solid, unshowy direction, the movie is filmed in a gloomy, downlit style by DoP Barry Ackroyd, his compositions and framing illustrating proceedings with confidence and giving scenes an eerie quality that makes it seem that there’s other, stranger stuff we should know about happening just out of frame. With a running time that allows more than sufficient time to detailing events in both time periods, and a score by Gregory Tripi that subtly adds a level of foreboding to the material, Dark Places is an intelligent thriller that holds the attention and makes for avid viewing.

Rating: 8/10 – riveting in a sombre, calculated way, Dark Places maintains its gloomy, oppressive mise en scene to good effect throughout, and makes its audience work hard to solve the mystery; a better than average adaptation that showcases another fine performance from Theron, and flits between the past and the present with assured clarity and focus.

Carrie (2013)

11 Saturday Jan 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Bullying, Chloë Grace Moretz, Horror, Julianne Moore, Kimberly Peirce, Prom, Religion, Remake, Review, Stephen King, Telekinesis

D: Kimberly Peirce / 100m

Cast: Chloë Grace Moretz, Julianne Moore, Gabriella Wilde, Portia Doubleday, Judy Greer, Alex Russell, Zoë Belkin, Ansel Elgort, Barry Shabaka Henley

When seventeen-year-old Carrie White (Moretz), already a social misfit at the school she attends, has her first period and doesn’t realise what’s happening, her fear and confusion leads to her classmates throwing tampons and sanitary napkins at her, and yelling at her to “plug it up”. This humiliating event is filmed by the worst of her tormentors, Chris Hargenson (Doubleday), and is later posted on the Internet. Stopped by their teacher Ms Desjardin (Greer), the girls are punished by having to stay after school and do repetitive exercises. Chris rebels against this and ends up being suspended; this means she will miss the upcoming school prom. Angered by what she feels is a terrible injustice, Chris vows to get even with Carrie (though not with Ms Desjardin).

For Carrie, her problems don’t end at the school gates. Her mother, Margaret (Moore), governs their lives according to her strict religious beliefs. Carrie tries to explain how terrified she’d been when her period started, but Margaret, her beliefs skewed by a pathological fear of sexual intimacy, berates her daughter for “becoming a woman” and locks her in a closet. Carrie’s anger surfaces and with just her mind she causes a jagged tear to appear down the centre of the closet door. With both mother and daughter realising there is going to be a shift in their relationship – and in Carrie’s favour – a tense line is drawn, and Margaret, now wary of the daughter she has controlled so easily until now, fears for both their futures.

While Chris plots her revenge, another of Carrie’s classmates, Sue Snell (Wilde), ashamed of how she behaved, tries to make amends by persuading her boyfriend Tommy (Elgort) to take Carrie to the prom instead of her. Tommy is initially resistant to the idea but eventually agrees, and asks Carrie if she’d like to go with him. Surprised but flattered (even if she doubts his sincerity to begin with), Carrie agrees. At the prom, and as part of Chris’s revenge, Carrie and Tommy are crowned Prom King and Queen. As they bask in the applause and approbation of their peers, Chris and her boyfriend Billy (Russell) drop two buckets of pig’s blood down onto Carrie and Tommy. The shock and the humiliation is too much and Carrie, using her nascent telekinetic powers, proceeds to take her revenge on everyone there.

Updated in minor ways for a new decade, Carrie plods its way uncomfortably from one leaden scene to the next, never fully convincing and never fully engaging the audience. As a remake it fails to justify its existence thanks to two main problems, both of which are insurmountable: Peirce’s direction and Moretz’s performance.

Peirce – still best known for Boys Don’t Cry (1999) – here proves a bad fit for the material, her approach leading to a curiously flat, matter-of-fact retelling that never takes off or impresses that much. It’s as if she’s decided to film events at a remove, keeping a distance between the audience and the characters so that any empathy the viewer may have is kept from flourishing. For a story with such a strong, emotional resonance, and centred around the age old topics of bullying and female empowerment, it’s even more surprising that Peirce has been unable to connect with the themes inherent in the script. This extends to the performances as well, which – Moore and Moretz aside – are perfunctory and/or lethargic.

Moore is a great choice for Margaret White, and expresses the religious paranoia that has blighted her life, and her daughter’s life, with a real sense of conviction. She’s like a coiled snake, biding its time until the right moment to strike. Moore is the best thing in Carrie but it’s effectively a supporting role and so she’s not on screen enough to make a difference.

Someone who is on screen too much, though, is Moretz, a moderately talented young actress whose rise to stardom on the back of the Kick-Ass movies has meant her being given more praise than is deserved, and who is cruelly shown to be lacking the acting skills needed to portray a character such as Carrie White. She may be the right age but the part requires an actress who is both older and more experienced. Moretz does her best but she’s just not up to it. She isn’t at all convincing as a put-upon teenager, and when required to show the pain and discomfort her life at home has engendered, there’s barely anything for the audience to latch on to. Worse still is the wide-eyed, “did-someone-just-goose-me?” stare she adopts for her telekinetic rampage; if it was intended to make her look scary then someone wasn’t checking the dailies.

With Peirce’s feather light touch on proceedings and Moretz’s underwhelming performance putting the movie at a disadvantage from the risible opening to the even more risible denouement, Carrie fails to meet its audience even halfway. The script is serviceable enough but there’s a lack of effort all round: even Carrie’s destruction of the prom is done half-heartedly, leaving a feeling of “was that it?” in the air. In horror terms, this has to be the biggest disappointment of 2013.

Rating: 4/10 – yet another poor adaptation of a Stephen King novel/short story/laundry list, Carrie lacks the brio and energy needed to carry it off; turgid in the extreme and saved only by Moore’s creepy performance and a sequence that wouldn’t look out of place in a Final Destination movie.