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thedullwoodexperiment

~ Viewing movies in a different light

thedullwoodexperiment

Tag Archives: Jacki Weaver

Monthly Roundup – August 2016

03 Saturday Sep 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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A Perfect Day, Aid workers, Animation, Benicio Del Toro, Blue Sky, Curt Siodmak, Denis Leary, Drama, Espionage, EVP, Fedja Stukan, Fernando León de Aranoa, Galen T. Chu, Harrison Gilbertson, Haunt, Haunted house, Horror, Ice Age: Collision Course, Ione Skye, Jacki Weaver, Jean Byron, John Leguizamo, Ken Hughes, King Donovan, Liana Liberato, Little Red Monkey, Mac Carter, Mélanie Thierry, Meteorite, Mike Thurmeier, Morello Curse, Murder, Nuclear scientists, Olga Kurylenko, Queen Latifah, Ray Romano, Review, Richard Carlson, Richard Conte, Rona Anderson, Russell Napier, Sci-fi, Scrat, Simon Pegg, Spaceship, Sylva Langova, The Balkans, The Fifties, The Magnetic Monster, Thriller, Tim Robbins

The Magnetic Monster (1953) / D: Curt Siodmak / 76m

Cast: Richard Carlson, King Donovan, Jean Byron, Harry Ellerbe, Leo Britt, Leonard Mudie, Byron Foulger, Michael Fox

The Magnetic Monster

Rating: 6/10 – a sample of selenium, bombarded with alpha waves, becomes a lethal danger to mankind as it develops exponentially – and only the A-Men from the Office of Scientific Investigation can stop it; an exposition heavy sci-fi thriller that takes time out for (stranger) domestic interludes involving Carlson and Bryan, The Magnetic Monster packs a lot in to its relatively short running time and is unexpectedly entertaining for all its techno-speak and overly serious demeanour.

Haunt (2014) / D: Mac Carter / 86m

Cast: Harrison Gilbertson, Liana Liberato, Ione Skye, Jacki Weaver, Brian Wimmer, Danielle Chuchran, Ella Harris, Carl Hadra

Haunt

Rating: 3/10 – a family move into a house where tragedy struck the previous owners, and the son (Gilbertson), along with abused neighbour Sam (Liberato), discovers that the place is haunted by a vengeful spectre; muddled, confused and scare-free, Haunt aims for unsettling and frightening but misses by a mile thanks to weak plotting, a jumbled storyline, stock characters, absentee direction, and an overbearing score (and that’s without mentioning the performances, particularly Weaver’s – which is dreadful).

Ice Age: Collision Course (2016) / D: Mike Thurmeier, Galen T. Chu / 94m

Cast: Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, Denis Leary, Queen Latifah, Simon Pegg, Keke Palmer, Adam Devine, Wanda Sykes, Seann William Scott, Josh Peck, Jennifer Lopez, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Jessie J, Nick Offerman, Chris Wedge

Ice Age Collision Course

Rating: 5/10 – while Scrat does his best to keep his acorn safe aboard a spaceship, his actions lead to a massive meteorite heading for Earth, which in turn leads to Manny (Romano) and the usual gang having to formulate a plan to avoid the extinction of them all; while the series can still manage to sprinkle a handful of inspired visual gags throughout each entry (and this is no different), the law of diminishing returns is having a savage effect on the storylines, with this outing proving less than inspired, and leaving the characters teetering on the edge of becoming their own caricatures.

Little Red Monkey (1955) / D: Ken Hughes / 71m

aka The Case of the Red Monkey

Cast: Richard Conte, Rona Anderson, Russell Napier, Sylva Langova, Colin Gordon, Donald Bisset, John King-Kelly, Bernard Rebel, Arnold Marlé, John Horsley

Little Red Monkey

Rating: 7/10 – when several nuclear scientists are murdered, and the culprit appears to be a little red monkey, Scotland Yard and a visiting US State Department agent have to make sure that defecting Professor Leon Dushenko (Marlé) doesn’t end up dead as well; an agreeable, fast-paced thriller, Little Red Monkey mixes international espionage, early Cold War paranoia, romance, and intrigue to good effect, and thanks to the script by Hughes and James Eastwood, has a discreet Hitchcockian vibe that benefits it tremendously.

A Perfect Day (2015) / D: Fernando León de Aranoa / 106m

Cast: Benicio Del Toro, Tim Robbins, Olga Kurylenko, Mélanie Thierry, Fedja Stukan, Eldar Residovic, Sergi López

A Perfect Day

Rating: 7/10 – a group of aid workers in the war-torn Balkans try to have a dead body removed from a well that provides drinking water, and are met by every type of obstruction possible – bureaucratic, cultural, and just plain bizarre; A Perfect Day‘s very good cast can’t mitigate against the episodic nature of the story, or de Aranoa’s offhand treatment of some of the minor characters, but otherwise this is a pointed, unsentimental look at the quieter horrors that war can throw up, and when it wants to be, uses black humour as a trenchant counterpoint to all the tragedy.

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The Voices (2014)

11 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Anna Kendrick, Black comedy, Drama, Gemma Arterton, Jacki Weaver, Marjane Satrapi, Murder, Review, Ryan Reynolds, Schizophrenia

 

Voices, The

D: Marjane Satrapi / 103m

Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Gemma Arterton, Anna Kendrick, Jacki Weaver, Ella Smith, Paul Chahidi, Stanley Townsend, Adi Shankar, Sam Spruell

Jerry Hickfang (Reynolds) has a problem. Actually, he has quite a few problems, but the main one is that his cat, Mr Whiskers, and his dog, Bosco, talk to him. Mr Whiskers  wants Jerry to behave in all sorts of horrible ways and takes a caustic view of him when he refuses to listen. Bosch is more supportive of Jerry and tells him that he’s a better person than the one Mr Whiskers wants him to be. Jerry does his best to ignore both of them, but therein lies another problem: the reason he can hear them is because he’s not taking his medication… and anti-psychotic medication at that.

Jerry works in the shipping department at a bathtub factory. He gets on well with his fellow workers and is regarded highly by his supervisor Dennis (Chahidi). He has a crush on one of the accounts staff, Fiona (Arterton) and musters up the nerve to ask her out, remaining blissfully unaware that Lisa (Kendrick) (who works with Fiona) has a crush on him as well. However, Fiona stands him up and goes out with Lisa and Allison (Smith), another accounts clerk. When she tries to go home her car won’t start. Jerry happens to pass by and offers Fiona a lift. They decide to go for a drink together but on the way a deer hits the car. The deer tells Jerry that it’s too injured to survive and that he should kill it. Jerry takes out a knife and cuts its throat. Fiona freaks out and runs from the car into the woods. Jerry chases after her and when he catches up with her he stabs her… accidentally at first and then repeatedly.

He leaves the body there but Mr Whiskers persuades him to go back the next day and retrieve it. He takes it home, cuts it up into little pieces and puts Fiona’s head in his fridge. She’s not happy about being alone in the fridge and tries to persuade Jerry to find someone she can have as company. Jerry resists though and to try and improve things, resumes taking his medication. He and Lisa start to see each other, but when she decides to surprise Jerry at his place she sees what he’s been doing, and it leads to Fiona getting her wish after all. When Allison goes missing as well (after finding out about Jerry’s past), two of his workmates, John (Shankar) and Dave (Spruell), grow suspicious of Jerry and visit his home. What they find there leads them to call the police…

Voices, The - scene

First shown at the Sundance Festival back in January 2014, The Voices finally arrives in cinemas and on VoD but, despite several festival awards under its belt, with very little fanfare. Part of this may be to do with the movie’s content. If you watch the trailer it keeps things light and funny (you could even be forgiven for thinking it’s a serial killer rom-com with an emphasis on the com), but what the movie does in reality  is try to offset moments of goofy humour with darker insights into the mind of a seriously disturbed individual. But in doing so, The Voices proves to be as schizophrenic as its main character.

With the tone of the movie veering between whimsical and malicious, and with detours that take in quirky, creepy and absurd, it doesn’t take long for the viewer to realise that the material is going to be uneven and, as a result, not entirely convincing. Yes, Jerry is mentally ill, psychotic even, and yes, the way in which his two states of mind – on drugs, off drugs – are cleverly dramatised by the state of his apartment – gleaming and clean when off his meds, gnarly and grim when he’s on them – but there’s still not enough glue to hold all the pieces together. Part of the problem is that the script (by Michael R. Perry) gives the impression that once all the ideas for the movie were gone through the decision was made to include them all, whether they worked or not.

Off the back of this, Satrapi has fashioned a movie that works well in spurts but drags in others while meandering in-between times. It makes for a frustrating watch and while Reynolds gives an atypical performance that works well with the material (though his doofus smile makes him look mentally challenged rather than mentally ill), the feeling that a firmer hand was needed persists throughout. Reynolds certainly understands the character, and he makes Jerry entirely sympathetic. All Jerry wants to be is happy; it’s just the way he goes about it that’s inappropriate. And he makes it clear when the script doesn’t that Jerry has a degree of self-awareness about his illness and what it makes him do, but a couple of token instances of resistance aside, he can’t quite pull off the ease with which Jerry goes about killing people.

As for Mr Whiskers and Bosco, it’s clear that they’re meant to be the source of much of the movie’s humour, but once you’ve heard Mr Whiskers’ Scottish-sounding, foul-mouthed attempts at coercion the first time, it soon becomes a played-out plot device; he needs to be less aggressive and more insinuating. The same is true of Bosco, his down-home Southern drawl humorous at first but proving more of a vocal stunt as the movie progresses (Reynolds provides both voices, adding to the conceit that Jerry is hearing their voices inside his own head and they’re not really talking to him). Otherwise, the humour relies on severed heads proving peevish about their situation, awkward comments that Jerry makes to his co-workers, and a few cartoon-style moments that we’ve all seen before.

The rest of the cast cope well enough with largely under-developed characters, with Arterton and Kendrick reduced to window dressing, though Weaver (as Jerry’s court-appointed psychiatrist) acts like she’s in a farce and not something trying to be a little darker. Maxime Alexandre’s cinematography and Udo Kramer’s production design combine to make Berlin look like the US, and the movie is full of garish little touches, such as the work clothes Jerry and his co-workers have to wear. And at the end there’s a musical number that concludes things with one final (unnecessary) flourish.

Rating: 6/10 – while not as clever or as funny as it thinks it is, The Voices does have a (still beating) heart that helps the viewer wade through some of the more uneven aspects; better as well thanks to Reynolds’ involvement, it’s a movie that will probably gain cult credibility in the future but its delay in hitting cinemas should act as a warning as to its real quality.

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Mini-Review: Parkland (2013)

11 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Abraham Zapruder, Billy Bob Thornton, Dallas, Drama, Jacki Weaver, James Badge Dale, JFK, Lee Harvey Oswald, Parkland Hospital, Paul Giamatti, Peter Landesman, Review, True story, Zac Efron

Parkland

D: Peter Landesman / 93m

Cast: James Badge Dale, Zac Efron, Paul Giamatti, Jackie Earle Haley, Colin Hanks, David Harbour, Marcia Gay Harden, Ron Livingston, Jeremy Strong, Billy Bob Thornton, Jacki Weaver, Tom Welling

Covering events in Dallas, Texas from 22-25 November 1963, Parkland takes a behind-the-scenes look at the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and the people who were involved both on the day and in the aftermath. From the opening showing Kennedy at Fort Worth before travelling to Dallas to the final scenes involving the burial of Lee Harvey Oswald (Strong), the movie paints an intimate portrait of the men and women who dealt with one of the most emotive events in American history, from the trainee doctors and nursing staff at Parkland hospital – where Kennedy and Oswald were both taken after they were shot – to the President’s Secret Service detail led by Forrest Sorrels (Thornton), to Oswald’s brother Robert (Dale) and mother Marguerite (a frightening Weaver), to the local FBI office who had Oswald there only a week before, and most effectively, to Abraham Zapruder (Giamatti), the man fated to film the death of a President.

Parkland - scene

All these stories coalesce to make Parkland an engrossing, gripping drama where some of the smaller details have the greatest effect: the sheer number of people who gather in the emergency room where Kennedy is worked on; Robert Oswald asking a member of the press to be a pallbearer; Zapruder asking a lab technician for three copies of the film, one for the Secret Service, one for the FBI, and one for himself; and Jackie Kennedy clutching something in her hand that proves to be a piece of her husband’s skull. First-time director Landesman juggles the various story lines with an ease that belies his lack of experience, and the cast raise their game accordingly; Giamatti in particular is a standout. A fine addition to that sub-genre of American history movies, the JFK era, Parkland impresses with its level of detail and its clearcut approach to what is still a very contentious event.

Rating: 8/10 – studious and compelling in equal measure, Landesman’s debut draws you in and never lets go.

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