Tag Archives: Disappearance

Black Tide (2018)

14 Thursday Feb 2019

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Original title: Fleuve noir

D: Erick Zonca / 113m

Cast: Vincent Cassel, Romain Duris, Sandrine Kiberlain, Élodie Bouchez, Charles Berling, Hafsia Herzi, Jérôme Pouly, Félix Back, Lauréna Thellier

When a teenage boy disappears, it looks at first as though he’s run away. But as police commander François Visconti (Cassel) begins his investigation, an encounter with one of the boy’s neighbours, Yan Bellaile (Duris), causes him to wonder if this is actually a murder case. Bellaile reveals he tutored the boy the previous summer, and his opinion is that the boy’s disappearance is due to his need to rebel against his parents. Something about Bellaile’s attitude rings alarm bells for Visconti, and he begins to investigate the man. Meanwhile, Visconti begins to find himself falling for the boy’s mother, Solange (Kiberlain). An anonymous tip off leads to a search of the nearby woods, and Bellaile’s presence there – plus his use of a phrase used in the tip off – causes Visconti to become certain that the teacher has killed the boy and hidden his body. As the investigation continues, Visconti becomes more involved with Solange, and his suspicions about Bellaile grow ever stronger. And then the boy’s parents receive a letter from him…

Adapted from the novel Disappearing Disappearance by Dror Mishani, Erick Zonca’s first big screen movie since Julia (2008) is a dark, brooding and unrelentingly grim trawl through the darker side of human nature that offers no absolution for the majority of its characters, or imbues them with any sense of remorse (or even understanding of the term). From the start, with Cassel’s magnificently monstrous Visconti bellowing and swearing at his son (Back) who’s been caught dealing drugs (in a subplot that seems like it should be the focus of another movie altogether), Zonca invites us to enter a world where moral ambiguity butts up against compromised morality so much that the two have become indistinguishable from each other. Visconti drinks on the job, thinks nothing of having sex with prostitutes, and bullies his way through the rest of his life as if it’s of no consequence. He is good at his job, though, the one thing that goes some way to excusing his behaviour, but as the movie progresses and more and more secrets are revealed, Visconti doesn’t even have the luxury of being regarded as an anti-hero. And like Rick Deckard in Blade Runner, he doesn’t even solve the case; circumstances gift him the solution, and even then he’s still wrong about what happened.

Cassel is on blistering form as Visconti, but he’s matched for intensity – though in quieter, more self-contained fashion – by Duris’ turn as Bellaile. Their game of cat and mouse drives the middle section of the movie, and it’s fascinating to see how Duris’ performance sparks and spars with Cassel’s, the two men circling each other like prize fighters looking to land that one knockout punch that will end the fight. Bellaile is an unsettling character, one who has a hollow centre where his conscience should be, but it’s the manner of his duplicity that is truly shocking, along with the pride he feels. And then there’s Solange, a femme fatale in any other version of this tale, but here a numb, almost dumbstruck presence whose grief at the loss of her son hides a terrible complicity. Zonca ensures that the viewer is unable to trust anyone, even Visconti, and the resulting nihilistic miasma that the narrative unfolds under is deliberately oppressive. Aided by some impressive framing by DoP Paolo Carnera that corrals and contains the characters in any given scene, and Philippe Kotlarski’s skillful editing, Zonca and co-screenwriter Lou de Fanget Signolet have created a disturbing, yet compelling movie that doesn’t shy away from exposing the worst ways in which human nature can exploit and justify itself in equal measure.

Rating: 8/10 – a movie that is deliberately bleak and uncompromising, Black Tide offers a twisting, off-kilter narrative that doesn’t always go where you think it’s going, and which doesn’t believe in happy endings for the sake of them; a modern-day noir thriller that plays by its own rules, Zonca’s latest is a potent reminder of the director’s abilities, and is also a movie that gets under the viewer’s skin – and nestles there uncomfortably.

The Vanishing of Sidney Hall (2017)

22 Sunday Jul 2018

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Original title: Sidney Hall

D: Shawn Christensen / 120m

Cast: Logan Lerman, Elle Fanning, Michelle Monaghan, Kyle Chandler, Blake Jenner, Nathan Lane, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Margaret Qualley, Janina Gavankar, Tim Blake Nelson, Darren Pettie

A publishing phenomenon, Sidney Hall (Lerman) writes a first novel called Suburban Tragedy that is nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; he’s only eighteen when he starts writing it. By the time he’s twenty-four, he’s written a follow-up, State of Execution; both novels sit atop the New York Times Best Seller list. But Sidney isn’t happy. His past, and in particular, the source of inspiration for Suburban Tragedy, haunts him. He has married his teenage sweetheart, Melody (Fanning), but is unable to resist the attentions of his publisher’s daughter, Alexandra (Qualley), leading to an affair. As time passes, Sidney becomes more and more reclusive, until he disappears altogether. Soon after, a spate of arson attacks in bookshops and libraries, where the only books burnt are Hall’s, attracts the attention of a police detective (Chandler). Tracing the arson attacks across the Midwest, the detective becomes convinced that the perpetrator is Hall himself. But why would he do such a thing, and why disappear in the first place? What could have made Sidney Hall throw away everything he’d achieved?

Non-linear stories such as The Vanishing of Sidney Hall have two benefits: they can tease out important plot points in a way that keeps the viewer intrigued and wanting to know more, and they can reshape a movie’s storyline to ensure a greater emotional or dramatic impact when the mystery (whatever it is) is finally revealed. Shawn Christensen’s second feature aims for both, and is moderately successful as a whole, but makes one fatal flaw that stops the movie from achieving the goals Christensen has set for it: it makes Hall himself too miserable – and unrelentingly so – for the viewer to feel much sympathy for him. While the roots of his melancholy lie in a terrible tragedy that he feels responsible for, it’s a long time before the movie reveals this. And by the time that it does, and those all important plot points have been left as clues for us to piece together, the movie has become lethargic and banal. A late-on reveal feels forced (and less than entirely credible), while key moments are replayed without ever adding any greater emotional or dramatic impact. At the same time, the movie’s structure is both its best and worst component.

Something of a labour of love for Christensen, the movie often wears its heart on its sleeve, and though Hall is the kind of tortured literary genius we’ve seen so many times before, the co-writer/director surrounds him with a number of supporting characters that often prove more interesting. Sidney’s mother (Monaghan) is the kind of toxic parent who blames their child for being born and ruining their life, while his English teacher (Abdul-Mateen II) is so desperate to ride Hall’s coat-tails to literary success that his neediness is embarrassing. These are stories that, on their own, could comprise a number of separate movies, but Christensen keeps them in Sidney’s orbit, satellites bouncing off his celebrity, and feeling hard done by because of it. In the end, Sidney’s determination to punish himself pushes everyone away from him (hence, in part, his disappearance), but the script always makes it feel deserved. As the complex literary genius, Lerman is a solid presence, better at playing him as a teenager than as an adult, while Fanning offers strong support as the love of his life. There are good performances throughout, and the movie is beautifully photographed by Daniel Katz, but in its themes and ambitions, it lacks the overall cogency needed to make it all gel.

Rating: 6/10 – a worthy attempt at portraying the devastating effects of one tragic event on a young man’s much deserved success, The Vanishing of Sidney Hall falls short thanks to its title character’s unnecessary (and hard to condone) self-flagellation; with its insistence on breaking the story down into bite-size chunks of culpable exposition, it’s also a movie that says a lot but forgets to add enough substance to back it all up.

Bottom of the World (2017)

26 Saturday May 2018

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D: Richard Sears / 85m

Cast: Jena Malone, Douglas Smith, Ted Levine, Tamara Duarte, Kevin Owen McDonald, Jon McLaren, Mark Sivertsen

While on their way to LA and travelling through the South West, young couple Scarlett (Malone) and Alex (Smith) find themselves staying at a hotel overnight where they appear to be the only guests. At one point, Alex sees a man in a hoodie (McDonald) outside their room, looking up. When they leave the next morning, the man is there again. Back on the road, Scarlett becomes ill and they turn back, staying overnight at another hotel. The same thing happens again the next day, but this time, Scarlett disappears while Alex is in the hotel bar. When he tries to find her he meets the man in the hoodie who takes him out into the desert where he tells Alex there are bodies that he’s buried there at a certain spot; he then vanishes. Certain that Scarlett is with a locally based evangelist (Levine), Alex tracks him down to his church, but their confrontation offers more questions than answers, and Alex is forced to accept (or deny) that his trip with Scarlett has all been a dream when he wakes up and finds he is married to Paige (Duarte), and his next door neighbour looks exactly like Scarlett…

Early on in Richard Sears’ mystery mindbender of a movie, Scarlett asks Alex what’s the worst thing he’s ever done. His reply is boring, and no match for her tale of her mistreatment of a severely brain damaged cousin that she was meant to be looking after when she was younger. It’s a disturbing account, and feels somewhat out of place so early in the narrative, but it’s key to the events that transpire once Alex finds himself searching for Scarlett and then trying to decide if his life with her or his life with Paige is his true reality. With elements of both seeping and bleeding through and into each other, Alex’s quest for “the truth” becomes something that threatens to undermine his sanity. Through it all though, Brian Gottlieb’s script keeps bringing Alex back to Scarlett’s grim admission, and the mystery of her complicity – real or not? – becomes an obsession. It also leads Alex (and the viewer) to question the veracity of his memories, and the nature of his relationship with Scarlett. In his “dream” were they running away from a guilty truth, or toward one?

The answer(s) aren’t all forthcoming. Gottlieb’s script isn’t entirely successful when it comes to explaining just what exactly is going on, and while a fair degree of ambiguity is necessary to keep the scenario intriguing, a couple of narrative corners require a “one bound and he was free” approach to resolve matters. This leaves some moments feeling contrived and less than completely credible, and though Sears keeps things resolutely cryptic through a combination of hallucinatory visuals and an unsettling soundtrack, too much comes across as forced and/or unnecessary (Alex obsessing over the one black pea in a can is a case in point). So while the mystery of Scarlett’s story is eventually decided on, it’s at a disservice to the characters, who are required to behave bizarrely just to match the requirements of the plot. Playing two roles, Malone is a captivating presence as Scarlett, and ice cool as the more traditional femme fatale Alex has for a neighbour. As the tortured and conflicted Alex, Smith copes well with a role that could have been too arch and mannered for comfort (though it’s a close call at times), while Levine provides brief but effective support, and Adrian Langley’s apposite cinematography creates two distinct worlds for the price of one.

Rating: 6/10 – there are echoes of David Lynch here that aren’t as successfully integrated as they might have been, and the fusion of dream and reality doesn’t always gel, but there’s enough in Bottom of the World to make it worth watching; a valid attempt to create a waking nightmare, it nevertheless relies too heavily on the kinds of narrative “claim jumping” that requires too many occasions where belief has to be tempered thanks to narrative necessity.

Monthly Roundup – August 2017

31 Thursday Aug 2017

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The Feathered Serpent (1948) / D: William Beaudine / 61m

Cast: Roland Winters, Keye Luke, Mantan Moreland, Victor Sen Yung, Carol Forman, Robert Livingston, Nils Asther, Beverly Jons, Martin Garralaga

Rating: 4/10 – while on vacation in Mexico, Charlie Chan finds himself drawn into a mystery involving murder and the search for an ancient Aztec temple; the penultimate Charlie Chan movie, The Feathered Serpent is as disappointing as the rest of the entries made by Monogram, but does at least see the return of Luke as Number One Son after eleven years, though even this can’t mitigate for the tired, recycled script (originally a Three Mesquiteers outing), and performances that aim for perfunctory – and almost achieve it.

The Black Camel (1931) / D: Hamilton MacFadden / 71m

Cast: Warner Oland, Sally Eilers, Bela Lugosi, Dorothy Revier, Victor Varconi, Murray Kinnell, William Post Jr, Robert Young, Violet Dunn, Otto Yamaoka, Dwight Frye

Rating: 6/10 – Charlie Chan investigates when an actress is found murdered, and discovers that her death relates to another murder that occurred three years previously; the second Charlie Chan movie proper, The Black Camel keeps the Oriental detective in Honolulu (where creator Earl Derr Biggers based him), and at the forefront of a murder mystery that has more twists and turns and suspects than usual, and which proves an enjoyable outing thanks to good supporting turns by Kinnell and Young (making his debut and irrepressible as ever), and a more relaxed performance by Lugosi than most people will be used to.

I Am Your Father (2015) / D: Toni Basterd, Marcos Cabotá / 82m

Narrator: Colm Meaney

With: David Prowse, Marcos Cabotá, Gary Kurtz, Robert Watts, Marcus Hearn, Jonathan Rigby, Robert Prowse, James Prowse

Rating: 7/10 – Spanish movie maker Marcos Cabotá hits on an idea to tell the story of the man behind the mask of Darth Vader, and to restage Vader’s death scene with Prowse finally acting the part as he’s always felt he should have done; a likeable documentary, I Am Your Father is a tribute to Prowse’s continued commitment to the role of Darth Vader, and along the way paints Lucasfilm in a very poor light for mistreating him during shooting of Episodes V and VI, and blackballing Prowse since 1983 (over his “revealing” Vader’s death in Return of the Jedi), but the movie is let down by a haphazard structure, and not being able to show the re-shot scene (no doubt thanks to Lucasfilm).

White Coffin (2016) / D: Daniel de la Vega / 71m

Original title: Ataúd Blanco: El Juego Diabólico

Cast: Julieta Cardinali, Eleonora Wexler, Rafael Ferro, Damián Dreizik, Fiorela Duranda, Verónica Intile

Rating: 5/10 – when a young girl (Duranda) is kidnapped by a mysterious cult, her mother (Cardinali) discovers that not even death is an obstacle to getting her back; five features in and Argentinian horror maestro de la Vega still can’t assemble a coherent script to accompany his homages to Seventies Euro horror, making White Coffin a frustrating viewing experience that offers too many moments of unrealised potential, and leaves its cast adrift in terms of meaningful or sympathetic characterisations.

Bad Santa 2 (2016) / D: Mark Waters / 92m

Cast: Billy Bob Thornton, Kathy Bates, Tony Cox, Christina Hendricks, Brett Kelly, Ryan Hansen, Jenny Zigrino, Jeff Skowron, Mike Starr, Octavia Spencer

Rating: 6/10 – against his better judgment, alcoholic ex-criminal Willie (Thornton) teams up with his old friend Marcus (Cox) to steal two million dollars from a charity at Xmas time, which means donning a Santa suit once more; more defiantly scurrilous and offensive than the original, Bad Santa 2 benefits from Thornton’s ambivalent attitude as Willie, a plethora of cruel yet hilarious one-liners, and a great turn by Bates as Willie’s mother, but it also fails to pull together a decent plot, contains too many scenes that fall flat, and can’t quite replicate the energy of its predecessor.

Baires (2015) / D: Marcelo Páez Cubells / 82m

Cast: Germán Palacios, Benjamín Vicuña, Sabrina Garciarena, Juana Viale, Carlos Belloso

Rating: 4/10 – gullible Spanish tourist Mateo (Vicuña) parties with the wrong crowd in Buenos Aires and finds his girlfriend, Trini (Garciarena), threatened with a sticky end unless he transports drugs back to Spain; a thick-ear thriller Argentinian-style, Baires is mercifully short but dreary in its set up and cumbersome in its “thump a villain every five minutes” approach to tracking down the chief villain(s), all of which leaves little room for sympathetic characters, a credible narrative, or anything more than flat-pack direction from Cubells.

Two Men in Manhattan (1959) / D: Jean-Pierre Melville / 84m

Original title: Deux hommes dans Manhattan

Cast: Pierre Grasset, Jean-Pierre Melville, Christiane Eudes, Ginger Hall, Glenda Leigh, Colette Fleury, Monique Hennessy, Jean Darcante, Jerry Mengo, Jean Lara

Rating: 6/10 – when the French UN delegate disappears in New York, the job of tracking him down is given to a reporter (Melville), and a photographer (Grasset) who has his own agenda; practically dismissed by French critics on its first release, Melville’s ode to New York and film noir, Two Men in Manhattan is a nimble yet forgettable movie that prompted the writer/director to move away from the Nouvelle Vague movement he’d helped to create, leaving this as an enjoyable if predictable drama that could have done without Melville’s awkward presence in front of the cameras.

Come and Find Me (2016)

02 Friday Dec 2016

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D: Zack Whedon / 112m

Cast: Aaron Paul, Annabelle Wallis, Garret Dillahunt, Dean Redman, Zachary Knighton, Enver Gjokaj, Terry Chen, Michael Kopsa

The Black List is an annual survey of the “most liked” motion picture screenplays not yet produced. 2012 was a pretty good year, with screenplays for the likes of Arrival, John Wick, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and Hell or High Water all making the list. But so did the screenplay for Come and Find Me, which just goes to show that the Black List doesn’t always get it right.

Written by Zack Whedon (brother of Josh), the script aims for being several things at once: a romantic drama, a thriller, and a mystery. In addition, it seeks to include meditations on what it is to really know someone, and the permanence of love. It’s an ambitious script, and one that has clear intentions to be more than just another run-of-the-mill why-has-my-girlfriend-suddenly-disappeared-when-we-were-so-happy-together? style of movie. Signs of these intentions can be seen throughout Come and Find Me’s drawn-out running time, but however effective these elements may have been on the page, it’s Whedon the director who sabotages any chances they had of being just as effective on the screen.

come-and-find-me

At the beginning, Aaron Paul’s graphic web designer, David, gets on a bus where he spots an attractive blonde (Wallis). When she gets off the bus, so does he. He follows her. Eventually she turns and asks him bluntly if he’s following her. David looks appalled, says no, and carries on past her. Soon, she is following him until they reach a house that they both claim is where they live. David opens the door, the woman goes in without being invited. Inside they find a photograph that shows they know each other… Now, at this point, viewers who have seen way too many movies will know exactly what happens next. But for anyone who hasn’t seen way too many movies, this is an exciting start: how can two people live in the same house and apparently not know each other? Is this going to be some kind of variation on The Lake House (2006)?

Well, no, it isn’t. If Whedon had written a mystery drama that evolved from this opening sequence, and had kept the mystery unfolding piece by tantalising piece then Come and Find Me would have been an entertaining, enjoyable movie. But instead, he explains away this early “mystery” and goes in a different direction altogether – but one we’ve seen in the movies, and on television, and in books and plays, time and time again. And he doesn’t bring anything new to the table, or find a way of presenting his tale with any kind of visual flair or panache.

aaron

After watching Come and Find Me for a while – say, twenty minutes – the average viewer will be wondering if the bland shooting style, with its dour lighting scheme and flat imagery, is going to continue throughout. Well, it does. Whedon’s framing is a major letdown (which makes you wonder if DoP Sean Steigemeier had any say in the matter), and he constantly shoots from a low angle, as if this will add to the drama unfolding on screen. But all it does is prove annoying and distracting, and make the average viewer wonder if Steigemeier’s back was okay, what with all this low level camera work. With its drab interior design adding to the movie’s visual problems, even when it heads out into the countryside, Whedon and his crew do their best to downplay any of Nature’s beauty. A shot from the top of a hillside looking toward a row of other hills should be a jaw-dropper; instead it’s literally, just a backdrop.

But even that isn’t the worst of the movie’s problems under Whedon’s stewardship. The central mystery, once it’s explained, proves to be underwhelming, but there’s still a long way to go as David engages in a less-than-riveting series of bluff and counter-bluff in his efforts to bring the bad guys to… to… well, actually, we never know if he’s looking for justice, revenge, a combination of the two, or something else entirely, as Whedon doesn’t think to tell us. Throughout, David has one motivation: to find out what happened to his girlfriend, Claire. But he does so in such a ham-fisted, you-won’t-believe-he-did-that kind of way that it’s a wonder he gets as far as he does. He’s a passive-aggressive victim who’s never as ahead of the game as he thinks he is, and as a result, and despite Paul’s best efforts, he remains unsympathetic throughout.

come_and_find_me_-_aaron_paul_annabelle_wallis_-_still_-_h_-_2016

Paul is a good choice for the character of David, but like so much of the movie, is undermined by Whedon’s inexperience in the director’s chair. Everyone else is a supporting character, and though the likes of Dillahunt and Gjokaj do their best with less than challenging material, there’s no chance than anyone is going to stand out from the crowd. Even Wallis, whose role is largely seen through a variety of flashbacks, gets to be less than a fully fledged character and more of a cypher; or more awkwardly, a McGuffin.

When it comes to first-time writer/directors, Whedon is another in a long line of movie makers who believe they can get it right on their maiden attempt, but often the opposite is true. Such is the case with Come and Find Me. Perhaps there should be a moratorium on first-time writer/directors. Perhaps directors shouldn’t make their own scripts until they’ve been directing for a while, and have worked on other writers’ scripts. Perhaps then they’ll have a better understanding of how to assemble a movie without undermining it at the very same time. Who knows? It might lead to them making better movies.

Rating: 4/10 – leaden, and with an ending that will leave most viewers slack-jawed through disbelief, Come and Find Me is a misfire on almost every level; lacking a clear purpose, or any depth or subtext, the movie plods along, then stumbles along, then plods along again etc. in its quest to be an absorbing mystery thriller, when it’s plain to see that it’s so far from that ambition as to be in a different universe altogether.

Flightplan (2005)

07 Sunday Feb 2016

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Flightplan

D: Robert Schwentke / 98m

Cast: Jodie Foster, Peter Sarsgaard, Sean Bean, Kate Beahan, Erika Christensen, Michael Irby, Assaf Cohen, Marlene Lawston, Greta Scacchi

Every once in a while a movie comes along that is one part absurd, one part stupid, and two parts ridiculous. Back in 2005 that movie was Flightplan, a modest thriller starring Jodie Foster as super-anxious widow Kyle Pratt who’s travelling with her six-year-old daughter Julia (Lawston), from Berlin to New York by plane after the unexpected death of her husband (whose body is travelling with them in the hold). Hours into the flight, Kyle awakes from a nap to find that Julia has disappeared. Panicked, she accosts passengers and cabin crew alike in her efforts to find her daughter, but everyone tells Kyle the same thing: no one has seen her, not even the flight attendant, Fiona (Christensen) who saw them on board.

The plot thickens when Kyle tries to enlist the aid of the captain, Marcus Rich (Bean), who is initially sympathetic, even though a check of the plane’s manifest reveals the seat Julia was sitting in is officially empty. A search of the plane is conducted, and as expected, Julia isn’t found. When Kyle insists she and the crew search the cargo hold and the avionics section, Rich finds her abrupt, pushy attitude hard to handle. He finds things even harder when he receives notification from the morgue that has shipped her husband’s body, that Julia is also dead, killed at the same time as her father. Kyle vigorously denies this to be true, but now everyone sees her as the deluded, grieving widow. With the aid of the flight’s air marshal, Carson (Sarsgaard), Rich does his best to contain the situation from getting any worse.

Flightplan - scene1

And then it gets worse. Kyle accuses two Arab passengers (Irby, Cohen) of being complicit in Julia’s disappearance and attacks one of them. Carson intervenes but in the ensuing scuffle, she gets free. Carson chases after her but one of the Arabs intercepts her and throws her to the floor and she is knocked unconscious. When Kyle comes to she finds herself talking to a therapist (Scacchi) who nearly convinces her that her grief over her husband and daughters’ deaths have caused her to imagine that Julia is still alive (as this is easier to deal with). Kyle is almost convinced but sees evidence that Julia is alive, and she redoubles her efforts to find her. She eludes Carson and gets up into the roof of the plane where she causes the emergency oxygen masks to drop down and the loss of lighting throughout the plane.

Her efforts at sabotage allow her to go below decks to the cargo hold. She opens her husband’s coffin just as Carson catches up with her. In handcuffs and with the captain diverting the plane to land in Newfoundland, Kyle doesn’t have long to find her daughter and work out why she’s been abducted in the first place. Can she find out who’s behind it all, stop them, and get her daughter back? Are you kidding? Of course she can, she’s Jodie Foster.

Watching Flightplan again so long after seeing it for the first time is a strangely unrewarding experience. Memory – that elusive mistress – has covered the movie in a soft rosy blanket and if pressed, offers up a 7/10 rating, confident that it won’t be questioned too closely. But isn’t that the nature sometimes of first-time viewings, that with the passage of time some movies take on a brighter, shinier hue than was actually the case? Flightplan is definitely one of those movies, its high altitude hysterics and gaping plot holes you could fly a 747 through – oh, wait, they actually did – seemingly impervious to criticism eleven years ago because the movie was a whole lot of fun. But now with the dubious benefit of a second viewing, it’s a movie that’s revealed in all its lacklustre glory (oxymoron intended).

FLIGHTPLAN, Jodie Foster, Peter Sarsgaard, 2005, (c) Touchstone

Now it’s true we don’t always expect air-tight screenplays that follow every logical line when it comes to thrillers, especially so-called “high concept” ones. And sometimes, the ones that only come close to credibility by accident are often the thrillers we can enjoy the most, but Flightplan misses out on even this by virtue of two very grave errors made right from the start. The first is that it casts Jodie Foster as a grieving widow who may be hallucinating the existence of her daughter. Right away, the idea that Foster could be hallucinating anything, no matter how sad or grieving her character may be is patently absurd (that’s the first part, remember?). She’s Jodie Foster; she only ever plays strong women. And secondly, her daughter disappears on a plane, which in itself is a variation on the hoary old locked-room mystery, so of course she’s been abducted. Any other explanation would be just plain stupid (and that’s the second part).

The movie battles against these issues valiantly, but soon resorts to running Foster around in circles in her efforts to discover her daughter’s whereabouts. All the while she looks like she’s about to have a coronary, so prominent is the vein in her forehead.  But she perseveres, and is helped/hindered/helped by Sarsgaard’s dopey-looking air marshal (he really does look like he’s going to nod off right in the middle of a scene). With so few of the cast as plausible suspects for the villain role, Sarsgaard becomes the obvious choice, and despite the presence of Bean. But then he’s ruled out of the competition, then he’s back in again – oh wait, now he’s just been nice again. Yes it’s designed to add tension to a plot that lacks any kind of edge, but it only succeeds in being annoying and ridiculous (part three), though not quite as ridiculous as the reason for Julia’s abduction in the first place, which makes no sense at all and is patently ridiculous (and there we have it, part four).

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Still, Foster is good value, even when she’s running down aisles like a champion sprinter, or punching out stewardesses, and she’s as watchable as always, imbuing Kyle with that patented inner strength that Foster, as an actress at least, possesses in abundance. Sarsgaard limps along behind her in comparison, trying to find a way in to a character who appears to have no inner life at all and exists purely for the script’s lazy benefit. Bean gets to play exasperated at various points, but is compensated by being handed the movie’s best line: “I am responsible for the safety of every passenger on this plane – even the delusional ones!” Sadly, everyone else is forgettable, but that’s because their roles are.

Schwentke directs in a bland, perfunctory style that does nothing to elevate the material (not that much could), and signals his desire early on to focus exclusively on Foster, and to the detriment of everyone else. Florian Ballhaus’s cinematography shows Berlin in the bleakest light possible before trying to make us go “Wow!” at the glamorous interior of the plane, and there’s a turgid, ineffective score from James Horner. All of which goes to prove that high concept thrillers need a whole lot more than a committed lead and a hokey script to be successful.

Rating: 5/10 – Flightplan plays like a toned-down Die Hard of the skies, but with its central plot and storyline proving too uninspired for comfort, it’s left to Foster to keep things moving and the audience from straying; if you want to see an imperilled Foster trapped in a confined space, see Panic Room (2002) instead.

Paper Towns (2015)

09 Friday Oct 2015

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Paper Towns

D: Jake Schreier / 109m

Cast: Nat Wolff, Cara Delevingne, Austin Abrams, Justice Smith, Halston Sage, Jaz Sinclair, Cara Buono

Ever since Margo Roth Spiegelman (Delevingne) moved in across the street from Quentin “Q” Jacobsen (Wolff) when they were kids, Quentin has looked on her as his one true love. But even though they grew up together as friends, and spent a great deal of time together, they’ve drifted apart and no longer even acknowledge each other in high school. All that changes however when, one night, Margo comes in through Q’s bedroom window and asks to borrow a car. She tells him that she has nine things she needs to do that night (some of which are illegal), and she needs his help. Reluctant at first, Q agrees to help her, and they take his mother’s car and head to the nearest Costco.

There they pick up various supplies including duct tape, a lot of Saran wrap, and a raw catfish. Margo explains that she’s out to get revenge on her boyfriend and her close friends; her boyfriend has been cheating on her with one of her friends, and at least one more friend knew it was happening and didn’t say anything. As the night progresses, and they play prank after prank, it becomes more and more like the times they spent together as kids, and Q finds his attraction for Margo rekindled. The next day though there’s no sign of Margo; a few more days pass before it becomes clear that Margo has disappeared.

Q is certain that Margo has left for a reason and that she wants to be found. He bribes her younger sister to look for clues in her bedroom. A Walt Whitman quote leads Q to finding a note with an address on it. With his friends Radar (Smith) and Ben (Abrams), he goes there and finds an abandoned store but they don’t find another clue. The next day, Q is approached by Lacey (Sage), one of Margo’s friends who is concerned about what’s happened to her. When the boys go back to the abandoned store she follows them there, and the four of them discover an atlas with a page torn out, a page that indicates Margo has gone to a small town in upstate New York called Agloe.

Q decides to throw caution to the wind and travel to Agloe. His friends, and Lacey, all agree to go with him, but only as long as they can get back in time for the upcoming prom. Radar’s girlfriend, Angela (Sinclair), comes along with them. Along the way they have a near-miss with a cow that sees their car spin off the road. Stranded for the night, Ben and Lacey develop a fondness for each other, while Radar and Angela pre-empt the plans they have for after the prom. The next day, with the car repaired, they finally make it to Agloe, but what they find there isn’t exactly what Q expected…

Paper Towns - scene

A teen romance where the romance is potentially illusory, and a teen drama where the drama is assembled through the filter of a mystery, Paper Towns is a heartfelt ode to teenage longing and seizing the moment. It features several moments where it seems the narrative is being forced along by contrivance and crude coincidence, but the movie has the presence of mind to excuse itself by a trick of the very same narrative. This is to do with the clues Margo has left behind, and the way in which Q responds to them, but as they are the crux of the matter – even more so than Q and Margo’s relationship – it’s hard to imagine the movie working out in any other way, faithful as it is to the structure and tone of John Green’s novel.

However, what is difficult to pin down successfully in the novel is also difficult to pin down in the movie. Q’s commitment/devotion/attachment to Margo is never quite believable, despite Wolff’s compelling performance, and hinges on that one night of prankdom that in itself seems unlikely. Some viewers might not be too concerned by Margo’s appearance in Q’s room after so long, but it’s hard to believe that after so long “apart” that she would rekindle their friendship, and then make it so memorable for Q before disappearing. And Q’s disappointment only lasts until it becomes clear that Margo has run away, but instead of feeling taken advantage of, he becomes certain she wants him to find her. All of which begs the question, is Q just lovesick, or a stalker in training?

Michael H. Weber and Scott Neustadter’s adaptation does its best to portray Q’s search for Margo as the grand romantic gesture it appears to be, but the script never manages to make his obsession credible or based on anything but an intellectual challenge (can he find her from the clues she’s left behind?). As a result, and again despite Wolff’s engaging portrayal, Q comes across as a loyal puppy dog willing to do whatever he believes his mistress wants him to do. So wedded to the idea of his being with Margo does Q become that a more appropriate liaison with Lacey is quickly nipped in the bud by pairing her off with Ben, a relationship that would be more credible in a Revenge of the Nerds movie.

In the end the movie’s central concept is that we – or more particularly Q – should live for the moment, and create our own dreams instead of following someone else’s, and while this is a tenet that’s worth taking to heart, here it follows in the footsteps of too many other teen dramas to be either relevant or anything other than jaded. But thanks to its gifted cast, and a sense of fun that is more appealing than the drama that occupies centre stage, the movie is by no means a chore to watch, and features warm, soothing cinematography by David Lanzenberg, and a charming score by Son Lux. Schreier’s direction is unobtrusive for the most part, and with the help of Wolff and Delevingne he imbues the scenes between Q and Margo with a sense of unspoken yet mutual affection that is entirely touching.

Rating: 7/10 – in many respects a missed opportunity, Paper Towns has a superficial fascination that draws in the viewer but will leave them feeling less than fully satisfied by the movie’s end; competently made but missing that vital spark needed to make the material sing, it has another delightful performance from Wolff, and gives Delevingne the chance to shine in what is the movie’s most important, and unexpectedly fascinating, supporting role.

Forgetting the Girl (2012)

07 Sunday Sep 2014

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Forgetting the Girl

D: Nate Taylor / 85m

Cast: Christopher Denham, Lindsay Beamish, Elizabeth Rice, Paul Sparks, Anna Camp, Phyllis Somerville, Joel de la Fuente, Caitlin Carmichael, Holley Fain

Head shot photographer Kevin Wolfe (Denham) has a small studio from which he runs his business, aided by make up assistant Jamie (Beamish).  Kevin is looking for the right girl to settle down with but he’s socially awkward, quick to assume a “connection” with the women he does date, and unable to deal with the emotional fallout when his mostly short-lived romances come to an end.  In order to deal with the negative feelings he experiences, he has developed a system of forgetting, a way in which he can erase the bad memories of that person from his mind.

Kevin is also trying to deal with the memory of the death of his sister, Nicole (Carmichael) as a young child.  He feels responsible as he was there when it happened but he can’t fully remember all the details.  He asks his grandmother (Somerville) about it but she’s as haunted by the event as he is, and resists his enquiries, leaving him to deal with this childhood trauma as best he can.  When Kevin asks out Adrienne (Camp), a client, his surprise at her agreeing to see him causes him – as usual – to make more of the relationship than is actually the case and he quickly ruins things between them.  He tries to make amends but Adrienne tells him in no uncertain terms that they can’t be a couple.

Kevin tries to forget Adrienne but some time later he receives a visit from her sister, Denise (Fain).  Adrienne is missing, and Kevin is one of the last people to have seen her.  Kevin is unable to help and throws himself into his work in an effort to further erase Adrienne from his memory.  One of his clients, Beth (Rice) agrees to go out with him.  They go to the theatre and later Beth invites Kevin into her apartment for a nightcap.  He tries to force himself on her, believing again that they have a “special connection”.  Beth is frightened and pushes him away; Kevin leaves, thinking he’s ruined everything.

Through all this, Jamie has been struggling with her feelings for Kevin, and her sense of self-worth which is pushing her toward suicide.  One night, she takes the plunge and reveals her feelings to Kevin.  At first he’s receptive, but he still has hopes of getting back with Beth.  Unable to deal with the mixed emotions he’s feeling, Kevin decides to resort to an extreme solution in order to resolve his growing problems.

Forgetting the Girl - scene

Shot and framed as a video diary, Forgetting the Girl is a fairly straightforward thriller tricked out with overt psychological trimmings.  It has that low-budget indie feel that relies on short scenes, mannered performances and sometimes oblique direction.  As an exercise in paranoid psychosis it’s not entirely convincing, but features a handful of facile performances, not the least of which is Denham’s as the eerily blank-faced Kevin, his emotions buried so far behind his eyes you have to wonder if he really feels anything at all.  His speech is often short, clipped almost, as if by saying too much he’ll lay himself open to people in ways he won’t be able to control (and yet he wants to be “normal”, to have that everyday interaction everyone else has).

With such a tightly-wound character as its focus, the movie only rarely strays away from Kevin, focusing more and more on Jamie only as the movie progresses towards its tragic conclusion (and as a necessity).  This broadening of the story is at odds with Kevin’s video diary confession – how can he know even half of what’s been happening with her? – but provides a much needed contrast from Kevin’s subdued susceptibilities.  They’re a couple waiting to implode together, and Peter Moore Smith’s screenplay, based on his own story, has a dreadful fascination about it as these two damaged individuals use each other to achieve (temporary) happiness.

Forgetting the Girl works well as an examination of one man’s attempt to control the emotional content of his life, but in true indie style, it pays little attention to the standard thriller elements that it presents, opting to downplay these elements in favour of more exacting expressions of personal angst.  It’s not until the final twenty minutes that the introspection and clever insights give way in favour of a denouement that demands a final twist (that, sadly, doesn’t come).  Adrienne’s disappearance is used to point suspicion at secondary character Tanner (Sparks), but this attempt comes across as a little too pat, and long-time thriller fans won’t be fooled at all.  And the truth about what happened to Nicole, though left unrevealed until late on, is a little too predictable to provide the resonance that’s needed later on.

Denham captures Kevin’s slow-burn detachment with precision, offering a performance that is by turns creepy and sympathetic.  As the desperately lonely Jamie, Beamish uses her character’s punk clothing and make up to point up the emotional defences she uses to stop herself from being hurt, and the supporting cast flesh out their characters appropriately.  But, ultimately, this is Denham’s movie from start to finish, ably encouraged and directed by Taylor, and at times, frighteningly realistic in his attempts to prove he can “connect”, when in truth he never will.

Rating: 7/10 – Denham’s superb central performance anchors the movie and is often unnerving to watch; with an unexpectedly powerful last act redeeming the more pedestrian aspects of the rest of the movie, Forgetting the Girl emerges as a small-scale winner deserving of a wider audience.

 

I’ll Follow You Down (2013)

12 Tuesday Aug 2014

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I'll Follow You Down

D: Richie Mehta / 93m

Cast: Haley Joel Osment, Gillian Anderson, Rufus Sewell, Victor Garber, Susanna Fournier, John Paul Ruttan, Sherry Miller

When scientist Gabe Whyte (Sewell) flies off to New York for a convention, his wife Marika (Anderson) and young son Erol (Ruttan) have no idea that it’s the last time they’ll ever see him.  The mystery deepens when they discover that he never checked out of his hotel room, and he never attended the conference.  With the aid of her father, Sal (Garber), a physics professor, Marika discovers a basement laboratory that Gabe was using, along with his wallet and mobile phone, and crates of equipment.

Twelve years pass.  Erol is now attending university, while Marika is a successful artist though she has yet to come to terms with Gabe’s disappearance.  They have an uneasy relationship, both excelling in their relative fields but also going through the motions in many respects.  When Sal approaches Erol with details about Gabe’s work, details which indicate that Gabe was working on some kind of time travel device, Erol’s reaction is that it’s all a fantasy and he walks away from it.  He puts Sal’s revelation behind him, but when Marika takes an overdose it spurs him on to replicate his father’s work, and to try and find out if his father really did travel back to 1947 as his notebooks indicate, and if he met Albert Einstein as he’d planned.

But certain elements elude him and the project always fails.  Erol also learns that a man similar in description to his father was killed in 1947.  Now Erol has a twofold mission: to save his father, and to bring him back to the present in order that his family’s lives can resume from when his father was due back from New York.  In the meantime his relationship with his girlfriend Grace (Fournier) runs aground when she finds out what he’s trying to do; if Erol succeeds then the life they’ve built together from when they were children, and the child she is carrying, will disappear, leaving no guarantee that she and Erol will have the same life if his father goes back.  Undeterred, he redoubles his efforts and having solved the problem that had been eluding him, travels back to 1947 with a plan to make sure his father returns home.

I'll Follow You Down - scene

More of a family drama than a sci-fi movie, I’ll Follow You Down downplays the science in favour of a measured approach to its domestic tribulations.  Sadly, this decision makes for a somewhat dour, unattractive looking movie that relies heavily on its cast’s commitment to the material, but which never really springs to life, despite its intriguing premise.  Its low budget doesn’t help either, lending the movie the look of a TV drama of the week, with its drab lighting and flat photography exacerbating things from start to finish.

The performances are the best thing here: from Osment’s tortured son, to Anderson’s depressed wife and mother, to Fournier’s challenging girlfriend, the cast do wonders with a script that skirts banality with uncomfortable regularity.  As Erol, Osment has a tough time developing his character beyond that of the enfant terrible whose genius outshines his father’s, and while he’s convincing enough, when he reveals his solution for persuading his father to return to his own time, it’s hard to credit that Erol would do what he does, as sudden and unexpected as it is.  Before that, Erol is a young man adrift in the world, his father’s disappearance having caused an impediment to his emotional development.  In his scenes with his girlfriend, Grace (Fournier), his lack of understanding of her needs make him seem ungrateful rather than appreciative, and in these scenes his single-mindedness leaves a lingering aftertaste that undermines any sympathy the audience is supposed to feel for him.  But Osment makes Erol as fatally determined as his father, and this symmetry works in the movie’s favour.  It’s not a great performance, but it’s better than the character deserves.

As his overwhelmed mother, Anderson gives a persuasive portrayal of a woman as adrift as her son, but who struggles to lead a normal life after her husband vanishes.  It’s the mystery surrounding his disappearance – the unexplained nature of it – that swamps her and causes her to withdraw from so much of her “normal” life.  Thanks to Anderson, Marika draws the audience’s sympathy in ways that Erol isn’t even close to, and she does it with a minimum of fuss, eliciting the viewer’s support without them being aware of it.  The same can’t be said for Gabe, who in the opening scenes is seen as a doting father, loving husband and all-round good guy.  By the end, these aspects of his character seem more like a charade, as he is revealed to be self-centred and not as considerate of his family as you’d expect him to be.  Sewell has probably the most difficult job of all in trying to make Gabe as credible as he should be, but the script is against him, and never fully expands on his reasons for creating the time machine in the first place.

Garber and Fournier are fine in supporting roles, but again it’s the script – by writer/director Mehta – that lets things down, its plotting too contrived at times (and also, strangely predictable) to be entirely coherent (not to mention that it avoids any philosophical or metaphysical implications relating to the issue of time travel).  In addition, Mehta’s direction fails to add any tension to proceedings, and leaves the final confrontation between Erol and his father lacking in both drama and plausibility; it’s as if the movie needed to end as quickly as possible by this point, and this scene was the only thing Mehta could come up with to do so.  I’ll Follow You Down could have been a deeper, richer, more cinematic experience but instead it opts for a level tone that it rarely deviates from, and which ultimately stops it from being as absorbing and entirely worthwhile.

Rating: 5/10 – viewers expecting a sombre drama centred around the impact of a father’s disappearance on his family, will be disappointed, while sci-fi fans will find the haphazard focus on time travel quite annoying; a bit of a misfire, then, I’ll Follow You Down lacks both emotional substance and a fervent approach to the material, leading to a movie that hopes the viewer will engage with it, while it makes almost the least amount of effort.

Lucky Them (2013)

02 Monday Jun 2014

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Lucky Them

D: Megan Griffiths / 97m

Cast: Toni Collette, Thomas Haden Church, Oliver Platt, Ryan Eggold, Nina Arianda, Ahna O’Reilly

Ellie Klug (Collette) is a music journalist working for Stax magazine.  Ten years before, her then boyfriend – and well-loved musician – Matthew Smith disappeared; his car was found abandoned and it was assumed he’d committed suicide, though his body was never found.  Ellie has never really recovered from Matthew’s disappearance, and has yet to put it behind her.  Her boss, Giles (Platt), challenges her to write a story about Matthew and how much his music means ten years on.  Ellie is hesitant but grudgingly accepts the assignment, though she’s unsure of just what she’s going to write.  Her friend, Dana (Arianda), asks the all-important question: doesn’t Ellie want to know, once and for all, what happened?

Ellie is still unsure.  While she works out the best way to approach the assignment she meets aspiring musician Lucas (Eggold).  They begin a tentative relationship, but Ellie isn’t sure about about committing to this either.  At a bar she bumps into Charlie (Church), an ex-boyfriend who decides it would be a great idea if he made a documentary about Ellie’s search for Matthew (as he’s just completed a documentary filmmaking course).  They embark on a road trip, visiting places that were important in the early days of Ellie and Matthew’s relationship, including his home.  They also have a lead on Matthew’s whereabouts, footage of a singer in a club who may or may not be the missing musician.  Although the man who says he shot the footage turns out to be a fraud, Ellie comes to believe the footage really is of Matthew.  Meanwhile her relationship with Lucas becomes more serious, and when Charlie announces his engagement to Charlotte (O’Reilly), Ellie and Lucas are happy to go as a couple.

With the story on hold, Ellie attends Charlie’s wedding by herself, Lucas having gone to L.A. for talks with a record company (though he promises he’ll be back in time).  When Lucas fails to turn up, Ellie winds up in bed with one of the other guests.  Lucas discovers them together; to make matters worse she insults Charlie as well.  Ellie hides away in her apartment, ignoring her calls and fixating on the supposed footage of Matthew.  It’s only when Dana shows up to jolt her out of her misery that Ellie realises she may know a way of finding Matthew after all.  She apologises to Charlie and they resume their road trip…

Lucky Them - scene

Lucky Them has several themes woven through its meandering script, though none of them are particularly original.  There’s lost love, perceived betrayal, irreconciled emotions, and they all lead to Ellie’s unwitting withdrawal from Life.  She’s a close approximation of the person she was ten years before, surrounded by reminders of the time she spent with Matthew, and tortured by not knowing why he disappeared (and if she’d only admit it, still in love with him).  Ellie hasn’t moved on from that time, hasn’t found a way to let go of the past.  She takes part in Life at a superficial level and derives no real enjoyment from it; she lacks passion, though it’s instructive that she becomes more expressive when talking about Matthew’s disappearance to a woman in a bar, almost defending him.  She’s also easily led, allowing Giles to dictate the nature of the assignment to her, allowing Lucas to pursue her and almost force their relationship into being, letting Charlie decide about the documentary and cajoling her to reveal more and more about herself during the filming.  Without the people around her, Ellie would be living her life completely in the past.

As Ellie, Collette has a tough time making the character sympathetic.  She’s a walking bundle of apathy and negativity, and while the reasons for her being so are clearly outlined, it doesn’t help draw the viewer in; there’s no point at which you’re hoping that she’ll turn everything around (though obviously she will).  With Ellie being so emotionally constipated, Collette doesn’t quite manage to make her a more interesting character, and settles for a kind of low-key cynicism in order to provide Ellie with a defining trait.  Charlie refers to relationships being unable to last if they can be summed up in a single sentence (e.g. “I was the exotic aesthete to her mid-Western homebody”).  For Ellie, the extrapolation would be, “A woman who refuses to see the good life going on around her”.  With this obstacle established from the beginning, Lucky Them struggles to give the viewer anyone to root for.

That said, it’s a relief that screenwriters Huck Botko and Emily Wachtel have come up with the character of Charlie, a socially awkward, dry-humoured man who doesn’t always appreciate the finer points of social interaction or etiquette.  In Church’s more-than-capable hands, Charlie is the movie’s saving grace, a direct, emotionally distant demi-pedagogue who’s funny throughout and the kind of true friend that Ellie really doesn’t deserve.  Church adopts an almost stentorian way of speaking that makes Charlie sound pompous at first until you realise just how awkward his manner is.  He’s also a bit of a bully, but in a caring, let’s-have-none-of-that-nonsense kind of way.  As the movie progresses, Ellie warms to him, and they bring each other out of their respective shells.  It’s these moments that have the greatest resonance in the movie, and as played by Collette and Church are also the most emotionally rewarding.

With Ellie proving such a poorly drawn character, and with her troubles being entirely self-inflicted, Lucky Them often goes off at a tangent in its efforts to hold its audience’s attention, and the search for Matthew often takes a back seat while Ellie continues to behave selfishly.  The answer to the question, is Matthew alive after all, is resolved in a satisfying manner, but without all the digressions could have been arrived at a lot sooner.  The subplot involving Lucas is both predictable and dull, while Giles is the kind of patrician mentor figure who seems out of place in today’s publishing world.  It’s not surprising then that the movie is directed in unspectacular fashion by Griffiths, and there’s little in the way of visual styling or flair, while the soundtrack is populated by a succession of indie tracks that only occasionally enhance what’s happening on screen (though fans of Rachael Yamagata will enjoy the end credits song she provides).

Rating: 5/10 – a disappointing exploration of how someone copes when the person they love most disappears suddenly without explanation, Lucky Them flounders for most of its running time and rarely convinces; saved (rescued even) by Church’s note-perfect performance, and best approached as a curious mix of emotional apathy and (very) low-key romanticism.

Cold Weather (2010)

09 Sunday Mar 2014

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Cold Weather

D: Aaron Katz / 96m

Cast: Cris Lankenau, Trieste Kelly Dunn, Raúl Castillo, Robyn Rikoon, Jeb Pearson, Brendan McFadden

Doug (Lankenau) is a twenty-something slacker with a background in forensic science but no motivation to make a career from it.  When Cold Weather begins he’s without a job, without a girlfriend, and reduced to sleeping on his sister’s couch.  He’s a classic underachiever.  Eventually he gets a job working nights at an ice factory where he meets Carlos (Castillo).  They become friends, and the usually aimless Doug begins to come out of his shell, admitting his love of Sherlock Holmes and his dream to become a detective some day, like the sleuth of 221b Baker Street (also, throughout the movie Doug carries a copy of E.W. Hornung’s Raffles around with him).  When Doug’s ex-girlfriend, Rachel (Rikoon) appears on the scene her subsequent disappearance leads Doug, aided and pushed in equal measure by his sister, Gail (Dunn) and Carlos, into using his nascent detective skills to find her.

Cold Weather is a curious movie.  It mixes modern film noir with a slacker aesthetic and adopts a slow-burn pace in an effort to heighten the drama and the mystery of Rachel’s disappearance.  However, the mix fails to gel, and the viewer is left waiting for the movie to pull itself together.  When Doug and Carlos are in Rachel’s motel room looking for clues – a scene normally ripe for increased tension – there’s some rudimentary checking of drawers and the bathroom before Doug notices something in the parking lot.  Instead of this being a sudden revelation geared to reinforcing the audience’s attention, it falls flat due to a) Lankenau’s reading of the line (it’s not his fault, to be fair, it’s how the character has been written by Katz), and b) the static camerawork that leaves Carlos’ reaction almost offscreen.

Cold Weather - scene

There’s a fair degree of intelligence at work here but it’s undermined by the decision to pace the movie so glacially, and by having its central character be so socially awkward and unable to engage with others.  When we meet Rachel it’s hard to understand what she might have seen in Doug; plus it’s already obvious that the only female relationship that Doug is comfortable with is with Gail, and she is often more of a mother to him than a sister.  As the movie struggles on to its annoyingly abrupt ending, Doug does become less and less insular but only registers any real emotion when delighting in some minor vandalism.  What becomes clear is that without the involvement of Carlos and Gail, Doug would never have looked into Rachel’s disappearance at all.  With this in mind, the movie now feels contrived, and Doug given no motivation to act unless his friend and sister bully him into it.

Against this, there’s also the aforementioned glacial pacing.  Katz directs at a snail’s pace, dragging out shots and scenes for no other purpose (it seems) than to extend what would otherwise be a pretty short movie.  One sequence, where Gail and Doug are driving up to the top of a multi-storey car park, is filmed from the backseat and contains no dialogue as they ascend.  The view through the windscreen is over-exposed, so there’s no detail… and the whole sequence serves no valid purpose.  There are other, similar moments and while slow-paced movies can be rewarding in their own right, they still have to be engaging and astute in the assembly of the material.

Fortunately the performances are good, with Lankenau – who also appeared in Katz’s Quiet City (2007) – effective as the bordering-on-Asperger’s Doug, while Dunn quietly outshines everyone with her take on a sister who seems to have willingly put her life on hold to look after her brother.  Castillo and Rikoon provide solid support and the suitably wintry location photography – all steely greys and blues – is lensed by Andrew Reed to great effect.  And while Katz’s screenplay is packed with unnecessary longueurs, there is still enough of merit to warrant looking out for his other works (he just needs to sack his current editor – himself).

Rating: 5/10 – it drags badly in places but Cold Weather has a quirky feel to it that helps it through; there’s a deeper meaning here too but it all depends on whether or not the viewer is interested enough to dig for it.

Originally posted on thedullwoodexperiment website.

Skinwalker Ranch (2013)

21 Tuesday Jan 2014

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Skinwalker Ranch

D: Devin McGinn / 86m

Cast: Jon Gries, Kyle Davis, Erin Cahill, Devin McGinn, Steve Berg, Matthew Rocheleau, Michael Horse, Michael Black

A short time after his son disappears inexplicably, Hoyt Miller (Gries) agrees for a team of paranormal researchers to spend time at his ranch in an effort to explain what happened to his son. The team, led by Sam (Berg), include veterinarian Lisa (Cahill), security and surveillance expert Ray (Davis), investigative journalist Cameron (McGinn), cameraman Britton (Black) plus media technician, driver, cook and resident bitch Matt (Rocheleau). Over the course of the next few days, Hoyt and the team experience all manner of weird phenomena, including strange lights, ghostly apparitions and loud, ear-splitting noises. As things get increasingly weirder, Matt leaves after getting injured, and exhorts everyone else to do the same. Nevertheless the rest all stay until events spiral wildly out of control…

Skinwalker Ranch - scene

Yet another found footage movie – and don’t we need even more of them? – Skinwalker Ranch at least tries to do something different by virtue of its location and the cause of the weird phenomena: this time around it’s (probably) aliens.  Taking some of the folklore surrounding UFO sightings and bending it to fit the storyline, the movie begins well enough, with comments from several locals about the boy’s disappearance, and with each character clearly defined and the team’s goal(s) clearly marked out.  McGinn invests these early sequences with the intention of making the audience identify to a degree with Hoyt and the team, but as the movie progresses that identification peters out as they all behave either stupidly or strangely, or both.

Skinwalker Ranch fails to address the same conundrum that undermines all found footage movies: when does someone pay heed to the danger around them and drop the ruddy camera?  That said, the movie gets extra mileage out of the fixed camera set ups the team employ around the ranch, and the open spaces make for an unexpectedly eerie visual theme.  But there’s still too much running with the camera.  By now we’re all aware that jostling the camera and/or employing interference is often a way of hiding an effect – here most effectively done in the barn sequence involving Hoyt’s dog – but this knowledge further undermines the effectiveness of the “fright” scenes.  Pulling off an apparently in-camera effect is half the fun of watching these movies – the girl being hoisted up in the air by her hair in Paranormal Activity 2 anyone? – but there’s little fun to be had now, there’s no sense of anticipation or dread either here, or anywhere else these days.

The movie takes an unexpected turn into Hound of the Baskervilles territory for a while before returning to its alien abduction theme, and the decision by Matt to leave after being thrown through the air is refreshing, but these aspects aside, there’s nothing really new here, just the setting.  A figure still passes by a window in the background but isn’t seen, one of the characters is forced to do something terrible by unseen hands, bright lights flash on and off for no discernible reason, and when the culprit is revealed there’s no element of terror, just a relief that, at last, things must be coming to an end.  And even though another side trip into the past where evidence comes to light that the organisation Sam works for – MDE – has been involved in previous strange events in the area, ticks the potential prequel box, this subplot leans more heavily in the direction of demonic possession than alien abduction, and actively lessens the effectiveness of the story as a whole.

Making his feature debut, McGinn copes well enough with the demands of the genre, but proves a better actor than director.  Gries is convincing throughout, and the rest of the cast do their best to flesh out characters that are largely stereotypes.  The location is the movie’s main strength, and is used tellingly, creating what little credible tension there is.  But more annoyingly, you never discover why it’s called Skinwalker ranch.

Rating: 6/10 – not the worst found footage movie, but not the best either, Skinwalker Ranch has some good ideas but they’re too often fumbled in the quest for the next scare; ultimately, a shallow experience and one that doesn’t follow through on its initial set up.

Deer Crossing (2012)

24 Sunday Nov 2013

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Deer Crossing

D: Christian Jude Grillo / 110m

Cast: Christopher Mann, Laura L. Cottrel, K.J. Linhein, Doug Bradley, Tom Detrik, Carmela Hayslett, Jennifer Butler, Warren Hemenway, Kevin Fennell

Part thriller, part drama, part horror, Deer Crossing is a mixed bag to say the least, with elements from so many different genres it’s hard to keep track of them all. Just when you think you’ve got a handle on what’s going on writer/director Grillo turns the tables on you and leaves you thinking WTF?

At the film’s beginning, Maggie (Cottrel) and her six year old son Cole (Sebastian Banes) set out on a trip to visit her mother. They have an accident and are never seen again by husband and father Michael (Hemenway). Eight years pass and one day Michael receives a phone call from a boy claiming to be Cole and telling him that Maggie has died. Michael contacts the detective who was in charge of the original investigation, Stanswood (Mann), and asks him to look into it. At first the detective, recently retired and looking after his invalid wife, declines. Tragedy ensues and Stanswood then agrees to help. He travels to Carvin County and the small town where the phone call was made. Once there he encounters Sheriff Lock (Bradley) who proves less than helpful without being openly obstructive. It isn’t long however before suspicion points its ugly head in the direction of psychotic mountain man Lukas Walton (Linhein). And what Stanswood discovers proves to be only half the story…

By now, if you’ve reached this point in the movie you will already know Maggie and Cole’s fate and what part Walton has played in it. You’ll also know that director Christian Jude Grillo – here making his feature film debut – isn’t one for subtlety or a tight script. What you’ll also discover is that in a Christian Jude Grillo movie, padding comes along every five minutes or so in the shape of town hairdresser/brothel owner/drug dealer Gail Kennedy (Butler) and her amoral partner Randy (Detrik). Their antics take up far too much time and while both actors, Detrik in particular, are entirely watchable, their scenes are an unwelcome interruption to the main storyline. (Having said that, one scene featuring Randy threatening to lop off one gay punter’s nuts if he doesn’t obey the brothel’s rules is both disturbing and hypnotic at the same time. It may even be the movie’s best written scene; it just doesn’t fit with the rest of them.)

Deer Crossing - scene

As Stanswood gets nearer to finding the truth, a truth the viewer is fully aware of, Grillo pulls off one majorly mean trick on the audience and two of his characters. It’s a real shocker, make no mistake. It also leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, and one that female viewers will probably not appreciate. By this stage, though, the level of misogynism the movie is unafraid to portray will probably have alienated them anyway.

But is the movie any good? On the whole, no. There are too many random scenes that have no relevance to the ones before them, too few characters to feel sympathy or root for, haphazard pacing and plotting, hazy character motivation, dialogue that sounds forced, okay performances (though Linhein makes a great villain), and at least two storylines that add nothing to the movie as a whole. Grillo does have talent, he just needs someone, a strong producer perhaps, to rein him in when he starts to throw everything including the kitchen sink into his movies.

Rating: 5/10 – a muddled thriller with torture porn overtones sadly sabotaged by its own director’s over-reaching ambition.

Originally posted on thedullwoodexperiment website.