I Think We’re Alone Now (2018)

12 Monday Nov 2018

Tags

Charlotte Gainsbourg, Drama, Elle Fanning, Mystery, Paul Giamatti, Peter Dinklage, Post-apocalypse, Reed Morano, Review, Sci-fi

D: Reed Morano / 99m

Cast: Peter Dinklage, Elle Fanning, Paul Giamatti, Charlotte Gainsbourg

In a small US coastal town, Del (Dinklage) is apparently the only survivor of a worldwide catastrophic event that has seen everyone else killed off. Something of a loner before this happened, Del has adjusted quickly to being alone, and divides his time between his job at the library, and systematically cleaning homes and disposing of bodies. He’s content, until one day he sees fireworks going off across the bay. The next day he encounters a young woman, Grace (Fanning), who has suffered a head injury in a car accident. His surprise at finding someone else alive is muted by his wanting to be alone; he tries to get Grace to move on, but she appears to be just as alone as he is. An uneasy relationship begins to develop between them, and Grace helps with the house cleanings and body disposals. Days pass in this way, with the pair coming to terms with each other’s quirks and foibles, including Del’s collecting photographs of the people who lived in the houses he’s cleaned. But it’s Grace’s story that intrudes more decisively – with the arrival of Patrick (Giamatti) and Violet (Gainsbourg)…

The second feature of cinematographer/director Reed Morano, I Think We’re Alone Now is a slow, meditative, yet absorbing examination of what it’s like to be alone, and what it’s like to want to be alone. In a muted, largely contained performance from Dinklage, Del comes across as the de facto embodiment of survivor’s guilt, taking on the responsibility of looking after the dead and their homes and belongings, as if by doing so he can atone for being alive when they’re not. No explanation is given for the apocalyptic event that has caused people to drop dead wherever they are (though not in the street apparently), and no explanation is given as to why Del hasn’t died as well. This adds to the melancholy feel of Del’s predicament, one that he’s embraced but which also feels like a guilty fait accompli. The arrival of Grace has a profound effect on him: how can he continue to feel the same way when she’s obviously happy to be alive, and this is how he should really be feeling? It’s not a question that Del – or Mike Makowsky’s screenplay – is able to answer with any authority, and before there’s any likelihood of the issue being addressed, along come Patrick and Violet to take the story in a different direction altogether.

To be fair, this narrative switch has been signposted a couple of times already by then, but when it does happen, the movie ceases to be about loneliness and becomes something else entirely. Examining what that involves would be to spoil things (mostly), but it can be noted that the movie ceases to be as effective or as absorbing as it’s been with just Del and Grace as our guides to this eerie new world (it also feels like something of a cheat, as if two competing narrative strands had been glued together for the sake of a dramatic final third). This also leaves the careful construction of the relationship between Del and Grace in limbo, and offers Del a chance to play the unlikely hero. Unconvincing as this may be, Morano, who directs in a formal yet expressive manner that adds a layer of hazy unreality to the overall mise en scene, provides moments of serene beauty but is unable to rectify the larger problems with the script. It’s a shame as Dinklage and Fanning make for a great “odd couple”, and there’s a decent enough central idea on display. But more work needed to be done on the movie as a whole, making this compelling and frustrating at the same time.

Rating: 6/10 – with its post-apocalypse background serving as the anchor for its tale of melancholy self-negation, I Think We’re Alone Now strives for resonance but falls short thanks to the vagaries of its script; good performances from all concerned are sadly not enough to prop up the movie, but Morano does more than enough to cement her growing reputation as a director to watch.

Mini-Review: The Boss (2016)

19 Sunday Jun 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Ben Falcone, Big business, Brownies, Comedy, Dandelions, Darnell's Darlings, Ella Anderson, Insider trading, Kristen Bell, Melissa McCarthy, Peter Dinklage, Prison, Review, Tyler Labine

D: Ben Falcone / 99m

Cast: Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Bell, Peter Dinklage, Ella Anderson, Tyler Labine, Kathy Bates, Cecily Strong, Mary Sohn, Kristen Schaal, Timothy Simons, Cedric Yarbrough

Just when you thought it was safe to sit down and watch a movie featuring Melissa McCarthy – and this based on her supporting turn in St. Vincent (2014) and the refreshing change of career pace that was Spy (2015) – along comes The Boss, a throwback to the haphazard comedies she was making in the wake of her break-out turn in Bridesmaids (2011). That McCarthy has both comedic and acting chops to spare makes her decision to appear in The Boss seem like a backward step, a contractual obligation perhaps, but even though she has the ability to step up a gear when required, this sees the future Ghostbuster idling in neutral for much of the movie’s running time.

It’s a slight tale. McCarthy is Michelle Darnell, the 47th richest woman in America, a businesswoman whose foster-care childhood has made her the self-absorbed, take no prisoners, care about no one else success story she’s always wanted to be. But when she’s careless with a deal set up via insider trading, arch-rival and one-time lover Renault (Dinklage), makes sure she’s arrested. Cue a stretch in prison that does nothing to change her attitude. When she gets out she has nowhere to go, so she offloads herself on her ex-PA Claire (Bell), and Claire’s daughter, Rachel (Anderson). Financial salvation (and ultimately personal redemption) comes in the unlikely combination of Rachel’s Dandelions group, and Claire’s ability to make amazing brownies. Using the group to sell the brownies, Michelle begins to claw her way back up the business ladder, but will it be at the expense of the new-found regard for others that she’s discovered, and will she recognise at last that trusting in others brings its own rewards?

If you have to think about the answer to that question then… where have you been, and wherever you were, what were doing all this time? This is a riches to rags to riches movie that plays fast and loose with its stitched together screenplay, and seems content to make Michelle as brainless/obtuse/horrible as possible before she experiences the usual road to Damascus moment required in movies such as this and turns into a loveable, and loving, heroine. You’ve seen this kind of movie too often for it to offer anything new, and to be fair to McCarthy and her co-screenwriters, Falcone and Steve Mallory, it doesn’t once try too hard to be anything but what it is: a so-so comedy that offers occasional laughs while its cast tries to make more out of it than is on the page (which results in one of Dinklage’s worst performances for some time, and Labine reduced to cuddly man-child duties as Claire’s potential boyfriend). If you’re a fan of McCarthy’s previous movies, such as Tammy (2014) and Identity Thief (2013), then you’ll be amused. But if not, then this will be a hard slog indeed.

Rating: 5/10 – a by-the-numbers comedy that relies too much on its star being objectionable for no real reason, The Boss also features some awkward scenes that go on for far too long in their efforts to make the viewer laugh – the scene where McCarthy plays with Bell’s breasts being a good case in point; it’s no earth-shaker to be sure, but when even the star isn’t trying too hard, then you know this is just filler before the next, hopefully more rewarding project.

Pixels (2015)

01 Thursday Oct 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Adam Sandler, Adventure, Centipede, Chris Columbus, Comedy, Donkey Kong, Galaga, Josh Gad, Kevin James, Light cannons, Michelle Monaghan, Pac Man, Peter Dinklage, Review, Sci-fi, US President, Video games

D: Chris Columbus / 106m

Cast: Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Michelle Monaghan, Josh Gad, Peter Dinklage, Matt Lintz, Brian Cox, Sean Bean, Jane Krakowski, Fiona Shaw

Ten things you’ll be wondering while watching Pixels, and the answers that may well pop into your head:

1) How on earth has Adam Sandler landed a four-picture deal with Netflix – didn’t anyone at Netflix see this before they signed on the dotted line? (He must have something on the guys who run it.)

2) Is it really necessary for Sandler and Michelle Monaghan to behave like five year olds in the White House? (No, but it does seem like the script’s idea of cutting edge humour.)

3) Will it be easier to watch if I shut my eyes? (Probably.)

4) Would Americans really elect a complete idiot to the highest office in the land? (Hang on, who was that guy George something or other?)

5) When is that unfunny Rob Schneider cameo going to turn up? (Hopefully when it’s time for a toilet break.)

6) If the aliens are using video game characters that were around in 1982, just how many video games that came out post-1982 are they going to be allowed to use as well? (Loads, because nobody could be bothered to do the research.)

7) When is Chris Columbus going to direct another decent movie? (On this evidence, not any time soon.)

8) Why are the human characters more like cartoons than the video game characters? (Perhaps it’s meant to be ironic? Maybe?)

9) Just how many young actors are there that look like Adam Sandler when he was a kid, and are they all receiving counselling? (Too many, and probably not; what help could they possibly be given?)

10) Hang on, hasn’t this been done before – and better – in an episode of Futurama? (Yes, it has, so why aren’t I watching that instead of this mess?)

Rating: 3/10 – sci-fi has had a rough summer this year, and Pixels, with its lazy script and so-what-if-it-doesn’t-make-sense-or-is-particularly-funny approach acts as yet another nail in the coffin of tent-pole sci-fi movies; Sandler coasts, James gives yet another unfunny embarrassing performance, Monaghan and Cox look inconsolable, and Gad is left to – well, it’s not clear – making this ill-advised project one of the biggest disappointments of the year.

The Angriest Man in Brooklyn (2014)

07 Monday Jul 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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90 Minutes, Brain aneurysm, Brooklyn bridge, Comedy, Drama, Hollywood remake, Melissa Leo, Mila Kunis, Peter Dinklage, Phil Alden Robinson, Reconciliation, Robin Williams

D: Phil Alden Robinson / 92m

Cast: Robin Williams, Mila Kunis, Peter Dinklage, Melissa Leo, Hamish Linklater, Chris Gethard, Bob Dishy, Isiah Whitlock Jr, James Earl Jones, Richard Kind, Daniel Raymont

Henry Altmann (Williams) is having a bad day. He’s on his way to a doctor’s appointment when his car is hit by a taxi. Being the angry man that he is, Henry antagonises the taxi driver (Raymont) who drives off. Meanwhile, junior doctor Sharon Gill (Kunis) is on her way to work, and feeling sad over the death of her cat. Sharon is standing in for Henry’s usual physician, Dr Fielding. When Henry gets to his appointment and is then kept waiting for two hours, and Sharon walks in instead of Dr Fielding (an uncredited Louis C.K.), Henry blows a(nother) gasket. Sharon does manage to tell Henry that the result of a recent test he’s had shows that he has a brain aneurysm and that his life expectancy is uncertain. Unimpressed by this, Henry bullies Sharon into giving him a timescale. Flustered, and just to get Henry off her back, Sharon tells him ninety minutes.

Henry leaves the hospital. He decides to spend his ninety minutes trying to tell his family – brother Aaron (Dinklage), ex-wife Bette (Leo), and son Tommy (Linklater) – that he loves them, but this is easier thought of than done. Henry’s anger has alienated him from everyone, so when he tries calling them they don’t take or return his calls. Back at the hospital, Sharon tells a colleague, Dr Reed (Gethard), what happened with Henry. He tells her she has to find him and put things right. While Henry attempts to put things right himself, Sharon tries to track him down but keeps missing him, enlisting the help of Aaron and Bette in her efforts. Having tried his best with his brother and ex-wife, Henry is now hell-bent on seeing Tommy, with whom he has unresolved issues over Tommy’s choice of career.

A remake of the Israeli movie Mar Baum (1997), The Angriest Man in Brooklyn jettisons that movie’s religious overtones and more “racy” content, for a somewhat distant and unremarkable look at a man for whom no slight should be ignored without ranting about it first. Henry is a man who shouts first and has no intention of asking questions later, a bully who thinks it’s okay to castigate people for ruining his day. As the movie’s main protagonist Henry is a thoroughly dislikable character; when he’s told about the aneurysm, chances are the audience will be cheering, so objectionable is he. But the movie can’t sustain such a premise, and as the story unfolds, Henry’s attempts to reconcile with his family show a softer, less antagonistic side to his nature. But then the movie remembers what it’s called, and once more Henry vents his spleen in ways that are neither funny or understandable. It’s a problem the movie never quite overcomes: should Henry remain a curmudgeon until the end, or should he see the error of his ways?

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, because the script by Daniel Taplitz combines with Robinson’s leaden direction to create a movie where the actors are about as convincing as a cat conducting an orchestra. The Angriest Man in Brooklyn is advertised as a comedy first and a drama second, but the humour is forced and the drama is undercooked, leaving the audience wondering if they were meant to root for Henry as some kind of underdog, or even Sharon, as she’s ostensibly a good person. Sadly, neither is possible, as both characters are shallow to the point of being puddles, and possess all the fascination of navel lint.

It’s actually difficult to say just how bad this movie is. There’s not one honest moment in the whole movie, not one moment that the viewer can relate to or empathise with, such is the ponderous, tired approach to the material. Robinson, who gave us the sublime Field of Dreams (1989), seems to have no clue as to how to set up even the simplest of scenes, and some appear as if they’re filmed rehearsals rather than the finished item. It’s also an incredibly cheap looking movie (highlighted by Henry’s walk across some girders on the Brooklyn bridge), and has all the visual appeal of a low-budget TV mystery of the week.

As mentioned above, the cast fail to bring anything remotely interesting to relieve the dullness of the enterprise. Williams is a fine dramatic actor, but here he coasts along, investing Henry with the bare minimum of pathos, and never once making him sympathetic (even when the script tries to make him so). Kunis is just as dilatory, endowing Sharon’s predicament with all the emotional resonance attendant on tracking down some kitty litter (hang on, no, she doesn’t need any, does she?). Dinklage and Leo do just enough to avoid being tedious, while Linklater (Williams’ co-star in the short-lived TV show The Crazy Ones) sports the expression of someone whose just realised his career may be stalling before it’s even begun.

Rating: 3/10 – incredibly dull throughout, and unrewarding beyond measure, The Angriest Man in Brooklyn should be retitled The Man Whose Aneurysm Didn’t Kill Him Quickly Enough; a career low point for most everyone concerned (Williams still has Patch Adams (1998) and Bicentennial Man (1999) on his résumé), and not even worth a watch to see if it is as bad as it looks.

Knights of Badassdom (2013)

28 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Comedy, Demons, Fantasy, Gore effects, Horror, Joe Lynch, LARPing, Live action role playing, Peter Dinklage, Review, Ryan Kwanten, Steve Zahn, Summer Glau

D: Joe Lynch / 86m

Cast: Steve Zahn, Ryan Kwanten, Summer Glau, Peter Dinklage, Margarita Levieva, Jimmie Simpson, Brett Gipson, Danny Pudi

When heavy metal loving Joe (Kwanten) is dumped by his girlfriend, Beth (Levieva), his best friends Eric (Zahn) and Hung (Dinklage) try to cheer him up by taking him on a larping weekend. Larping is short for Live Action Role Playing, the province of fantasy game players who want to act out their roles for “real” as well as doing so online. Eric is an enchanter, and has obtained a copy of a rare book said to have been written by Dr John Dee as an attempt to conjure angels but which was subsequently hidden when Dee found he was conjuring demons instead (though Eric thinks it’s just a prop he got off the Internet). Challenged by games organiser Ronny (Simpson) to come up with a casting spell that will allow Eric, Joe and Hung – accompanied by Lando (Pudi), Gwen (Glau) and Gunther (Gipson) – to progress to the games’ next level, they use an incantation from Dee’s book.

Unaware at first that in doing so they’ve raised a succubus – and that it’s taken on the form of Joe’s ex-girlfriend – the three friends and their new companions continue with the games. As the succubus begins killing stray larpers, it’s only when Hung, Ronny and Lando encounter her later that night that anyone becomes aware of what’s happening. She kills Hung and Lando but Ronny runs away; while he tries to find his way back to where the gamers are camped overnight, Joe and Gwen find Hung’s body and are joined by Eric and Gunther. They too try to get back to the campground but they run into the succubus; Eric recites another incantation to try and send it back to hell and the succubus runs off, apparently hurt. When Ronny sees the book he recognises it straight away and is horrified to learn what’s happened, and lambasts Eric for his stupidity, telling him that if he spoke Enochian (the book’s language) he would have known that the incantation wasn’t for sending the succubus back to hell, but for transforming it. Now the succubus is a demon, Abominog, and it’s down to the remaining group to stop it from feeding on the souls of anyone it encounters, and to destroy it.

Originally filmed in 2010, Knights of Badassdom has had a chequered history. A cut of the movie was shown at 2011’s Comic-Con but was held back from distribution by producers IndieVest Pictures (IVP). Rumours that IVP were cutting the movie without Lynch’s involvement were rife, and it seemed that the movie might end up being released in a bowdlerised version, one that didn’t match Lynch’s vision. Eventually a cut of the movie was screened in March 2013 and it was picked up by distributors Entertainment One. How the movie would have turned out without all that having happened we’ll probably never know, but even if Lynch did have a different approach to the one we’re presented with, it’s unlikely it would have saved the movie from being so bad.

The problem, mainly, is the movie’s tone. It wants to be a hip, clever horror comedy in the vein of Evil Dead II (1987), but where that movie was successful in its combination of extravagant, gory horror with laugh-out-loud sardonic humour, Knights of Badassdom is a crude misfire in comparison, providing lame jokes, gags that are shouted for emphasis by its cast, and which relies on Zahn’s intimidated baby face reactions to criticism as a humorous device. There’s also an over-reliance on having the cast speak in mock-Shakespearean English before relapsing back into modern-day slang or swearing; what the movie’s makers have failed to realise is that it’s not even funny once, let alone the numerous times it’s trotted out over eighty-six laborious minutes.

There’s a woeful lack of characterisation as well, with Joe turning out to be one of the blandest heroes to reach our screens, and the rest of the characters are given little to do but run around and shout a lot. Zahn does a watered-down version of his usual comedy schtick, Glau looks pretty but loses out to Levieva as the woman to watch (she gets far more to do as the bloodthirsty succubus), and Kwanten defaults to looking perplexed throughout (as well he might be). Only Dinklage makes an impression, embracing the intrinsic absurdity of getting dressed up and running around in the woods playing fantasy games, and having as much fun as possible; when his character is killed off, his presence is sorely missed.

With an emphasis on the gore that overwhelms the comedy (such as it is), Knights of Badassdom further demonstrates its inability to strike a balance between the two, leaving the viewer to wonder if Kevin Dreyfuss and Matt Wall’s screenplay really was this artless to begin with, or if the rumoured tampering is to blame. Either way, the movie fails on so many levels that by the time Abominog is despatched in a blaze of ill-conceived coloured lighting, the viewer can only heave a sigh of relief that it’s finally over (and for once there’s no hint of a possible sequel).

Rating: 3/10 – pleasingly old school gore effects aside, Knights of Badassdom has so little to recommend it that the viewer could well end up rooting for Abominog in its efforts to feast on the characters; dreadful and dire in equal measure and a warning to anyone trying to make a modern-day horror comedy.