The Scent of Rain & Lightning (2017)

17 Saturday Feb 2018

Tags

Blake Robbins, Drama, Literary adaptation, Maggie Grace, Maika Monroe, Mark Webber, Murder, Revenge, Review, Thriller, Will Patton

D: Blake Robbins / 103m

Cast: Maika Monroe, Mark Webber, Will Patton, Maggie Grace, Justin Chatwin, Bonnie Bedelia, Aaron Poole, Brad Carter, Logan Miller, Kassia Conway, Sarah Noble Peck

A small town murder mystery with an arthouse feel, The Scent of Rain & Lightning opens with bad news for Jody Linder (Monroe): Billy Croyle (Carter), the man who was jailed for killing her parents, Laurie and Hugh (Grace, Chatwin), twelve years before has had his sentence commuted and is being released from prison. Understandably, Jody and the rest of her family – grandfather ‘Senior’ (Patton), grandmother Annabelle (Bedelia), uncles Chace (Webber) and Meryl (Poole) – aren’t too happy about this, but when Jody confronts Croyle and he accuses ‘Senior’ of getting the verdict he wanted, as well as denying he killed her parents, Jody begins to ask questions around town, questions that make her believe that not everything about her parents’ deaths is as cut and dried as she’s been led to believe. As the town – and her family – start to give up their secrets, Jody is forced to accept that the answers she’s looking for may lie closer to home. But then a senseless act of violence occurs, one that puts Jody in danger, and which threatens her family as well…

A slow burn thriller that looks and feels like an arthouse movie, The Scent of Rain & Lightning (adapted from the novel of the same name by Nancy Pickard) doesn’t offer anything new for viewers with a liking for small town murder mysteries, but it does provide a non-linear narrative that interweaves Jody’s somewhat random approach to investigating her parents’ deaths, with flashbacks to the events that led up to the murders, and finally, what actually happened. These flashbacks are necessary, as Jody proves to be the Rick Deckard of small town murder mysteries, and never learns anything of real value. Thankfully, while she’s looking for answers, the script by Casey Twenter and Jeff Robison (also two of the movie’s producers) keeps the viewer up to speed with what happened, why, how, and who was responsible. It makes for an uneven narrative, with neither strand complementing each other, or finding common moments where they might connect effectively, and as a result, it’s a movie that often feels like it’s been stitched together Frankenstein Monster-style, with no clear idea of which part goes with which. This also leaves some scenes feeling a little lost, or there just to pad out the running time.

Performance-wise, the movie is a bit of a mixed bag also. None of the characters are particularly well developed, and Jody’s expected character arc fizzles out around two thirds in. Monroe, a very talented young actress who’s still looking for that perfect follow up to her breakout role in It Follows (2014), hasn’t much to do beyond ask awkward questions and have those questions go unanswered. As the movie progresses, her role diminishes further and further, and the need to solve the mystery takes precedence. This brings Grace’s character to the fore, but Laurie and her secret prove to be very stereotypical, which leaves any emotional connection the viewer might be looking to make as unlikely as Kevin Spacey winning a Best Supporting Actor award at this year’s Oscars. Elsewhere, the likes of Patton, Bedelia and Poole flit in and out of the narrative, while Webber struggles to make his character ambivalent enough to be considered a viable suspect. Robbins, making his second feature (and appearing as the town sheriff), opts for a muted visual style that is at least atmospheric, but which doesn’t elevate the material, and there are too many occasions where the image is refracted through water as if it has an important psychological resonance.

Rating: 5/10 – with two narrative strands that work independently of each other, and a sense that no amount of screenplay jiggery-pokery could have brought them together, The Scent of Rain & Lightning lacks the impact needed to make its mystery elements work, and its small town milieu appropriately claustrophobic; disappointing then – though not unwatchable – it’s another indie thriller that tries hard to be different while forgetting that it’s using very basic materials to begin with.

Independence Day: Resurgence (2016)

04 Monday Jul 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Action, Aliens, Bill Pullman, Drama, Invasion, Jeff Goldblum, Jessie T. Usher, Judd Hirsch, Liam Hemsworth, Maika Monroe, Review, Roland Emmerich, Sela Ward, Sequel, Spaceships, Thriller, Twenty years, William Fichtner

D: Roland Emmerich / 120m

Cast: Liam Hemsworth, Jeff Goldblum, Jessie T. Usher, Bill Pullman, Maika Monroe, Sela Ward, William Fichtner, Judd Hirsch, Brent Spiner, Travis Tope, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Angelababy, Deobia Oparei, Nicolas Wright, Patrick St. Esprit, Chin Han, Vivica A. Fox

The tagline says it all: “We had twenty years to prepare.” And after all the waiting, this is the sequel we get, a bloated, lumbering, obscenely stupid movie that takes its predecessor’s legacy and repeatedly takes a dump on it. It’s a movie that insults the audience’s intelligence, and patience, at almost every turn in its efforts to tell the kind of half-baked story that should have been abandoned at the earliest stage possible. It took five people to pen the screenplay, two of them Emmerich and his long-time producing partner Dean Devlin, and it shows in the way that no two scenes run together seamlessly or with any sense of on-going purpose. Make no mistake about it: Independence Day: Resurgence is not worth your time.

The signs are there early on. Ex-President Whitmore (Pullman) is having dreams that anticipate the aliens returning. Once awake he’s plagued by a vision of an image he takes to be another of the aliens’ spaceships. Meanwhile, in Africa, a tribal warlord Dikembe Umbutu (Oparei), is visited by David Levinson (Goldblum), but there’s no reason given for Levinson’s being there. When Umbutu takes him to the site of a crashed alien spaceship they discover that it’s been sending out a distress call. Uh oh, we all know what that means!

Cue the Moon-based planetary defence systems coming under apparent attack from a giant sphere that appears out of some kind of black hole. Taking the approach that it’s safer to shoot first then ask questions later, current US President Lanford (Ward) orders its destruction. Maverick pilot Jake Morrison (Hemsworth), though grounded for saving a weapon from destroying the moon base (don’t ask), “borrows” a spaceship and heads for Africa to pick up Levinson so that he can take a look at the wreckage of the sphere (again, don’t ask). Umbutu tags along, as does Dr Catherine Marceaux (Gainsbourg), Umbutu’s shrink-cum-alien researcher, and a cowardly auditor, Floyd Rosenberg (Wright), who’s followng Levinson around for no other reason than the script has put him there. (Is it bizarre enough yet?)

Other characters are added to the mix. There’s ex-President Whitmore’s daughter, Patricia (Monroe), an ex-fighter pilot now working as part of President Lanford’s entourage. There’s Dylan Hiller (Usher), the son of Steven Hiller, the hero of the first movie who has died in a training exercise; he’s in a relationship with Patricia. Then there’s Dr Brakish Okun (Spiner). He’s been in a coma for the last twenty years since his “close encounter” with one of the aliens. Once the distress call goes out, he wakes up, older certainly, but suffering none of the side effects of being in a coma for such a long time (there’s certainly no muscle atrophy). Falling into line are General Adams (Fichtner), the military leader of the US forces, Dylan’s mother, Jasmine (Fox), who works in a hospital, and Jake’s co-pilot/gunner Charlie Miller (Tope), who acts as a comic alternative to Jake’s more serious demeanour. Oh, and let’s not forget Julius Levinson (Hirsch), David’s father, another character from the first movie who’s shoehorned into this one to add even more familiarity to the proceedings (and who miraculously survives what should be the world’s most destructive tsunami). (And that’s all without even mentioning the giant sphere that proves to have the personality of a stuffy doctor’s receptionist – still not bizarre enough?)

All these characters flit in and out of the narrative, adding little beyond their required presence at various points, and only occasionally making an impact. Even Levinson is sidelined by events, while Whitmore fills the role of this movie’s Russell Casse, and President Lanford proves expendable in a sequence that comes and goes without making audiences feel anything other than apathy. Even the movie’s principal hero, Jake, is cruelly underwritten, leaving Hemsworth in the unenviable position of playing a role that highlights his shortcomings as an actor. With the likes of Monroe, Usher and Fichtner reduced to the status of bit part players, the movie ignores its cast for the most part and concentrates on providing more spectacle than you can shake a giant spaceship at.

It’s while Emmerich piles on the destruction that the tagline for Gareth Edwards’ reboot of Godzilla (2014) springs to mind: “Size does matter.” For as the director gets carried away crashing an enormous spaceship into the North Atlantic, and displacing Singapore only as long as it takes to float it halfway around the world and drop it on London, the message comes across loud and clear, that this movie is better because it’s bigger, both in scope and special effects. But it’s all soulless and uninvolving, populated by whizz-bang dogfights and lacklustre retreads of moments from Indepedence Day that only serve to remind viewers just how enjoyable that movie was, and still is.

And where Independence Day kept its laughs to a minimum, its bloated but thankfully shorter sequel adds humour and silliness by the bucket load, largely whenever Okun or Floyd is on screen, and in the plethora of one-liners sprinkled throughout the script. This may have seemed like a good idea at the time but this reliance on making the audience laugh undercuts the seriousness of the situation, leaving the movie feeling uneven and, sometimes, crass in its efforts to entertain instead of having us on the edge of our seats. The world is about to end, but that’s okay, here comes Brent Spiner with another less-than-pithy wisecrack.

That this is so woeful proves the old adage, penned by William Goldman, that in Hollywood, “nobody knows anything”. If they did, then Messrs Emmerich and Devlin wouldn’t have transferred such a dreadful script to the screen and attempted to pass it off as a worthy successor to the movie that made both their names. Where Amy Schumer appeared in a movie called Trainwreck (2015), it wouldn’t be inappropriate for this farrago to be re-titled Spaceshipwreck – it’s a far more apt description.

Rating: 3/10 – without a doubt the worst – so far – of this year’s summer blockbusters, Independence Day: Resurgence lacks apppreciable thrills, appreciable drama, appreciable tension or emotion, and any clear idea of the story it wants to tell; frustrating on so many levels, it’s a movie that consistently defies belief, and does the one thing the viewer will be praying it won’t do: set things up for another sequel.

It Follows (2014)

05 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Daniel Zovatto, David Robert Mitchell, Death, Disasterpeace, Drama, Entity, Horror, Keir Gilchrist, Maika Monroe, Review, Sex

D: David Robert Mitchell / 100m

Cast: Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Daniel Zovatto, Olivia Luccardi, Lili Sepe, Jake Weary

Jay (Monroe) is nineteen and embarking on a new relationship with Hugh (Weary). At the cinema one night they play a game where they have to choose someone they can see that they’d like to change places with. Jay gets Hugh’s choice wrong, but when it’s his turn, Hugh points out a woman in a yellow dress that Jay can’t see; with Hugh visibly upset, they leave the cinema. On their next date, Jay and Hugh have sex in his car. Afterwards he drugs her. When she wakes, she’s tied to a wheelchair in a ruined building. Hugh tells her he’s sorry but he’s had no choice: he’s passed on to her a curse that means she will be stalked by an unknown entity until it catches her and kills her. Then it will go after him and then on down the line of everybody who’s ever been affected.

They both see a naked woman walking slowly but steadily toward them. Now that Jay has seen an example of how the entity may appear – to make matters worse, it might also appear as someone she knows – Hugh takes her back to his car and leaves her outside her house. Jay reports the incident to the police but they find no evidence of the naked woman, and Hugh has disappeared. When Jay goes back to school she sees an old woman in a hospital gown walking toward her across the grounds and then inside the building. Jay flees and tells her sister Kelly (Luccardi) and friend Paul (Gilchrist) about the curse and what it means. Along with another friend, Yara (Sepe), they agree to stay with her that night for support.

A smashed window in the kitchen leads to the entity gaining entry to Jay’s house. It tries to attack Jay but she escapes and flees to a nearby playground. Her sister and friends catch up with her, as does her neighbour, Greg (Zovatto), who’s seen Jay leave in a panic. He offers to help. Using his car to get there, they go to Hugh’s address but it’s abandoned. However, they find a clue that leads them to his real address. They confront him but he refuses to help, except to advise Jay that she should sleep with someone else to pass on the curse.

The group travel to Greg’s lake house but Jay is attacked there as well. Fleeing in Greg’s car she crashes it, ending up in hospital with her right arm in a cast. While there she sleeps with Greg (much to Paul’s disappointment as he has a crush on her). Days pass and the entity isn’t seen by either of them, until one night when Jay sees Greg break into his own house. She rushes across the street in time to see the entity kill Greg in the guise of his mother. She flees, but when she returns, Paul tells her he has a plan that might kill the entity once and for all.

Every now and then a horror movie comes along that critics praise to the skies as being the “new best thing” in horror. Recently it was The Babadook (2014). Now we have It Follows, a movie that brings us a new creature to fear. But where the Babadook made itself known through the pages of a book – Babadook is an anagram of a bad book (the clue’s there for anyone to see) – the implacable entity in It Follows makes itself known through sex. As the logical extension of all those slasher movies from the Seventies and Eighties where promiscuous teenagers made up the bulk of the killer’s victims, and the virgin was left to fend off and despatch said psycho, David Robert Mitchell’s second feature gives the sexually active no way out from their predicament.

It’s a great idea, one that should be filed under “careful what you wish for” perhaps, and the script cleverly introduces the idea that passing on the curse won’t make any difference, almost from the start. This makes the movie the most nihilistic horror movie in years, and it becomes an object lesson in how to maintain hope against all odds. Mitchell makes it clear: Jay and Hugh and anyone else they have sex with are – cue: ominous predatory silence – doomed. And yet we still root for Jay and her friends in their efforts to avoid the inevitable. Even when Paul says he has an idea of how to kill the entity, and despite all the evidence to the contrary, we still hold out hope that he’s right. For if he’s not, then aren’t we all – say it quietly now – doomed as well?

Having a supernatural creature in the role of sexually transmitted disease is a fine metaphor, and one that Mitchell has great deal of fun with. By allowing the creature to appear in any guise it chooses, the movie becomes a series of guessing games for the increasingly paranoid audience (forget the characters – half the time they’re not even looking). And although Mitchell shows a preference for having his entity appear as a nude or semi-nude woman, they’re sufficiently creepy, reanimated even, to add a chill when they’re first spotted (the director does redress the nudity issue though, with the sight of a naked man on the roof of Jay’s house – what he’s doing there specifically is a bit puzzling, however). And there’s an added resonance when it appears as a family member – eagle-eyed viewers will recognise its first appearance as Hugh’s mother when she turns up later in the movie. That said, being chased, however slowly, by your naked, corpse-like mother is wrong in all sorts of ways, and again, Mitchell shows he’s unafraid to pile on the psychological horror in his efforts to make the viewer uncomfortable.

With an ending that’s suitably ambiguous, and likely to annoy viewers who like a more clear-cut resolution to their movies, It Follows is a horror movie that does its best to offer something new and different, and by and large it succeeds. It doesn’t try to explain everything – like where and how the curse got started in the first place – and it doesn’t try to over-elaborate its basic plot. Instead it tells things plain and simple, and if the sight of Jay running away time after time seems too repetitive, then what else can she do? It will find her; all she can do is postpone the inevitable.

As the beleaguered Jay, Monroe gives a finely tuned performance that anchors the movie and gives it an emotional core for the viewer to connect with. Jay’s not as strong as you might expect the heroine of a horror movie to be, but Monroe gives her a tenacity that helps carry Jay through. Gilchrist has a slightly unenviable role as the lovelorn friend who gets passed over for the hot guy across the street, but he shades the character well, expressing Paul’s disappointment and pain with an economy of expression and attitude. Zovatto and Luccardi have little to do in comparison, and Sepe even less, but Weary makes Hugh appropriately anxious and frightened.

The movie is bolstered by some of the finest camerawork – courtesy of Mike Gioulakis – in a horror movie since John Carpenter let Dean Cundey loose on the streets of Haddonfield. Mitchell’s use of space and distance, particularly the way in which he utilises the foreground in a shot, is remarkably reminiscent of Carpenter’s work, and as a homage, offers some superb moments that linger in the memory: Hugh’s car with the ruined building looming ominously behind it; the entity as a tall, cadaverous man appearing out of the shadows in Jay’s house; the vast space to the left of shot as Jay sits on a swing in the playground; seeing Yara appear on the beach when she’s already on a lilo offshore; Jay’s point of view when she sees Greg breaking into his own house; and in perhaps the most obvious visual nod to Halloween (1978), the entity having a sheet thrown over it so that Paul et al can see it.

There’s a terrific score as well by Disasterpeace that is as unsettling as the visuals, a dark electronic discordance that is sinister and harrowing at the same time. With all this, the movie proves as well-constructed and well delivered as you could hope for, and if there is to be a sequel – entirely likely given its critical and commercial reception – then let’s hope Mitchell is the one to see it through. In anyone else’s hands it’s likely to be a letdown.

Rating: 8/10 – a genuine surprise, It Follows is that rare beast: a horror movie that is fresh and surprising and creepy and keeps its scares and any gore to a minimum, choosing instead to focus on the terror inherent in its protagonists’ situation; beautifully shot and with a killer soundtrack, this is bold, compelling stuff, and a shot in the arm for a genre that seems to have one foot in the grave more often than not.

The Guest (2014)

21 Sunday Sep 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Adam Wingard, Brendan Meyer, Cuckoo in the nest, Dan Stevens, Dead son, Drama, Leland Orser, Maika Monroe, Military, Murder, Psychopath, Review, Sheila Kelley, Simon Barrett, Thriller

D: Adam Wingard / 99m

Cast: Dan Stevens, Maika Monroe, Brendan Meyer, Leland Orser, Sheila Kelley, Lance Reddick, Chase Williamson, Joel David Moore, Ethan Embry, Tabatha Shaun

Shortly after the death of her son Caleb while he was in Afghanistan, Laura Peterson (Kelley) receives an unexpected visit from a young man who served with Caleb and has come to honour a promise he made. David (Stevens) is welcomed into the Peterson household and despite initially unsure reactions from dad Spencer (Orser), daughter Anna (Monroe) and younger son Luke (Meyer), he soon wins their trust.

But when strange incidents begin to happen around town – Spencer’s boss is killed in mysterious circumstances, Anna’s boyfriend is implicated in a murder – incidents that in some way benefit the Peterson family, Anna starts to wonder if David is everything that he says he is, even down to his having served with Caleb. While Anna’s suspicions grow, Luke overhears David talking to a plastic surgeon on the phone (though he doesn’t tell anyone). When Anna calls the military base that David said he was last stationed at before he was discharged, their response is to send an armed unit, led by Major Carver (Reddick) to apprehend him.

With David needing to move on sooner than he’d planned, it becomes clear that he has no intention of letting anyone he’s met in the last few days be left behind for the military (or anyone else) to talk to. He sets about killing the Peterson’s and anyone else he feels is a liability. With Carver in hot pursuit, David tracks Anna and Luke to their local high school, and an inevitable showdown.

After the less than sophisticated home invasion story depicted in You’re Next (2011), director Wingard and writer Simon Barrett turn their attention to a more subtle variation on the same theme, with a cuckoo in the nest approach that reaps dividends thanks to a more controlled script, and strong performances from Stevens, Monroe, Kelley et al.

Thanks to Barrett’s more credible set up, The Guest draws the viewer in, allaying any initial fears the audience may have that this will turn out to be as predictable as, say, The Stepfather (1987). But, while it’s a fair assumption to make – David is handsome, charming and polite, there are family tensions that mark out the Petersons as easily dividable – the way in which David’s more dubious undertakings are carried out have a disturbing frisson to them that obscures their obvious wrongdoing (and makes them partly acceptable for the audience). Laura’s need for secondary contact with her son via David is understandable, and her vulnerability is well played by Kelley; there’s a quiet desperation to her scenes with Stevens that is often more touching than expected.

Spencer is a man at a standstill, attempting to make sense of his life through railing at what he sees as its inequalities, and yet, when he learns of his boss’s demise, and the promotion it means for him, his sense of place is so disturbed he can’t fathom how to react. Orser (a much underrated actor) excels in what is an unsung role, and it’s great to see him in a movie where he’s not there to make up the numbers as in the Taken trilogy.

As their troubled offspring, Monroe and Meyer have larger roles but they’re a little too generic, with Anna’s doubtful behaviour and Luke’s need for an older brother substitute feeling more tired than dramatically necessary, and despite good performances from both, they can’t elevate their characters above the limitations set within the script.

With so much attention given to the Peterson family dynamic, it’s reassuring to find that David is much more complex than you might expect, and Stevens relishes the opportunity to take a trip to the dark side, making David attractive and dangerous at the same time, his military “training” having created a monster whose sense of morality is fleeting and impersonal. That he chooses to help the Petersons in the way that he does is never fully explained (and is one of the ways in which the movie often feels more contrived than it needs to be). Stevens is riveting as David, dispelling any memories of his role in TV’s Downton Abbey, and proving a superb choice in the title role, alternately charismatic and treacherous, and showing no contrition for his actions.

Beautifully filmed on location in New Mexico by Robby Baumgartner, The Guest benefits from a great cast and is smartly directed by Wingard who is improving with each movie he makes. The movie’s midpoint sees some pacing issues and the Eighties style slasher finale at Anna and Luke’s high school is a little out of place – and makes the viewer wonder just what the school’s budget was to have created such a Halloween inspired maze/dancefloor/entrance etc. And there’s a final shot that both echoes that Eighties conclusion and undermines it all at the same time. It’s an understandable move by Wingard and Barrett but a bad one nevertheless, and is the cinematic version of leaving a sour taste in the mouth.

Rating: 7/10 – its unexpectedly derivative ending aside, The Guest is a welcome addition to the psycho thriller genre; gripping for most of its running time, it features a terrific performance from Stevens and shows no problem in being seductively cruel throughout.