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Lazy Eye (2016)

Rated R

T42 Entertainment

Dean is not so concerned with the lazy eye condition he’s had since youth. What frustrates him, though, is a recent necessity for progressive lenses. As he’s rounding middle age, Dean struggles to see things in the distance and up close. His condition becomes an analogy of sorts that plays out as he reconnects with an ex-boyfriend.

Tim Kirkman’s Lazy Eye is a pleasant and diverting romantic indie drama despite its stage-play feel. It’s a short, focused film and that feels right.

Dean (Lucas Near-Verbrugghe), a married and complacent graphic artist, decides to steal away to his Mojave Desert vacation home with the seeming intent to put work tensions on pause. Unbeknownst to his coworker Mel (Michaela Watkins, who joyfully makes the most of her limited screen time) and Dean’s often-absent husband, the weekend getaway is actually a rendezvous with Alex (Aaron Costa Ganis), a long-ago lover. In flashbacks cleverly intercut with Dean’s ruminating present, we learn that the men reconnected through carefully worded and playful emails. A span of 15 years separates them—certainly a longer time than the men were together.

toonMarvinBlogDean’s libido is ignited at the prospect of Alex actually showing up (though Dean’s love of self-love suggests it doesn’t take much to get him going), and their initial reunion brings not-unexpected carnal abandon.

Soon after, glowing and happy, the men began to talk, and talk. Walk and talk. Swim and talk. Eat and talk. There are issues to be hashed out over this weekend: Why did they break up? Why did Alex fall off the grid? Why reach out to Dean after all this time? Why is Dean settling in his career, and perhaps his marriage? Were the men ever even compatible?

I don’t mind the talk because it’s mostly interesting and pressed me to consider my own feelings on lost love, career choices and indecision. I’m am reminded of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995), a film mainly concerned with following two people around as they discuss life, love, success and failure and what it all means going forward.

This film’s basically comprised of snapshot moments (and wonderful location photography) of their relationship’s start (their meet cute in an East Village bar with Dean sketching Alex’s picture on a napkin; Alex, meanwhile, is a flighty recent college graduate), breakup (Dean’s obsessive hunt for answers after Alex dumps him; Alex’s deception in their relationship), reunion (a waitress intrusively comments on them being a cute gay couple), and conclusion. Kirkman uses facial hair as a transitional device: In flashbacks the men are clean shaven to contrast their bearded contemporary looks.

Even though Dean is the main character I gravitated toward Alex. Dean initially seems to be the more focused adult. He has the respectable job and husband, while Alex seems roguish and mysterious. But then we realize Dean is the one who’s circling his life, cheating on his spouse and selfishly wanting …  everything. Alex seems to have lived the carefree life and is trying now to zero in on something more—children and lasting love, perhaps.

But ultimately this is a study of Dean’s progressive-lens life. We watch him struggling to keep the distant past, up-close present and near future in perspective.

Oh, and the dead rats made me smile.

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TV series review 

The Killing Season (2016)

TV-MA

killingseasongrab

The most powerful moment in A&E’s eight-part docu-series, The Killing Season, arrives midpoint when documentarians Josh Zeman and Rachel Mills make the startling revelation that their dogged search for a serial killer of at least four prostitutes turns out to be the preverbal tip of the iceberg.

Up to this point we’ve joined them on whirlwind tours of crime scenes and talking-head recollections, punctuated by images of regional maps marked red at the spots where victims were discoveretoonMarvinBlogd. After journeying through at least seven states, countless police departments, harrowing locales, the intrepid duo connects with a Florida journalist whose work dovetails with the documentarians’ in the worst of ways. We cut to a map of the whole United States as it explodes with red markers denoting unsolved murders of hundreds of prostitutes/drug-addled women from what looks to be the work of hundreds of serial killers. Finally, a series that was careening from one serial-killer theory and conspiracy to another snaps into chilling focus.

Executive produced by Alex Gibney and produced by Jigsaw Productions and Gigantic Pictures, the series arrives Nov. 12 at 9 p.m. ET on the A&E network. It’s like a student project that starts simply but increases victims, killers and theories exponentially, becoming instead a master’s thesis on the subject.

READ MY INTERVIEW WITH JOSH ZEMAN AND RACHEL MILLS

Things start off in typically disturbing yet familiar documentary fashion: Zeman and Mills’ workaday detailing of the history of the Long Island, New York, serial killer (LISK). Soon, the team is in a neighboring community, studying its victims, who have similar and conflicting links to LISK, suggesting two killers may be at work—and even at odds with each other. Next, we follow the team to Atlantic City, drawn there by similar victims and a killer with a similar MO. Then, prostitute killings in Daytona Beach, Florida, seem to be yet another link and/or distraction in this ever-sprawling case. Here the killer may be hidden amongst throngs of spring breakers. All of this sleuthing eventually leads to unnerving revelations of whole-sale slaughter of women spanning the country.

Zeman, like one of those bold reporters willing to go wherever the story takes him before asking whether it’s safe, seems to subsist on caffeine rather than sleep. He’s traversed the serial-killer terrain before in his co-helmed Cropsey, 2009. Mills, equally bold, is harder to read; she’d be a good poker player. She’s quick to follow a lead, to take a ride with a possible suspect, to share space in a trucker’s cab as he tells her she’s dressed to temp rapists; and yet here she is shedding tears speaking with a victim’s relative. The team, which includes at least a cameraman who follows them into every uncertainty, is persistent, whether whacking its way through overgrown fields, exploring decrepit junkyards, traversing lands occupied by disturbing campers, or flirting with an outlaw biker club.

The Killing Season is most effective, though, when meeting friends and family of victims. One such woman keeps ashes of the victim, her best friend, in a box at her feet. Gratuitous, yes, but who else mourns for this all-but-forgotten victim? Another victim’s daughter—seeking understanding and closure—is eager to join the team on an ominous journey to the occupied backwoods where her mom’s body was discovered.

The doc also intrigues with its look into and use of cyber-sleuthing, websites and blogs dedicated with varying degrees to sussing out facts, creating serial-killer profiles and propagating theories. Websleuths.com stands out as a one of the more-credible resources.

We learn that long-haul trucking is a job “perfectly suited for picking up a woman in one state and dumping her body in another.” We are told truck-stop prostitution is the “lowest rung” of prostitution, and we believe it. These women seem to be whispers and faded photographs in a cyclone of terror and bureaucracy, whose sad lives are teased out by the few who knew and loved them. Different theories, different obstacles, different cities—New York, New Jersey, Florida, Oklahoma, Cleveland—but the same creeping terror abounds.

Where we start, on Long Island with the discovery of four female bodies wrapped in burlap, allegedly the victims of a coast-surfing serial killer, to where we end up, Cleveland, following the destruction of hundreds of woman at the hands of two hundred serial killers is a wakeup call—to both our lack of interest in the sadly invisible mothers, sisters and daughters on the fringes of society, and the demons among us left uncheck to fester in the crevices of this nation.

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Quik Flix Hit

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Summer Movie Series

Tomorrowland (2015)

Rated PG

tomorrowland

Disney Pictures

Tomorrowland is the kind of movie that would have inspired me as a kid. Nearly every moment of this film’s runtime is devoted to underscoring the power and necessity of imagination and invention. That our fertile human minds can lead us not only to weapons of destruction and instruments of healing but to a more essential purpose, as thinking beings, of our capacity to shape our destiny in the best of ways. I’m proud to write that as an adult I found this movie inspiring. In this era of bloated politics, cultural indifference, incuriousness and xenophobia, I tapped into the filmmakers’ schema that a through-line of invention is always among the clutter, a path waiting to be exposed and taken. It’s as if the movie is a test of our belief in our better angels, the power of imagination. Those who cotton to that may be moved by the film’s attempts to inspire; those who don’t may dismiss this as corny.

In the BloghouseWhen we think of the imagination it took to allow man to travel beyond the planet and walk on the surface of the moon, or even imagining a day when it would be commonplace for men, women and children to board a pressurized tube of aluminum and plastic to be hurled hundreds of miles and hour, tens of thousands of feet about the ground as a form of commercialized travel, how did we get to a time and place where that kind of ingenuity is buried under the latest political wrangling or financial scandals or reality-TV obsession? We don’t invent things anymore, we stand on the shoulders of inventions we now mock, while repackage them in the latest colors, slim shapes and hipster slogans.

Imagination and those who celebrate it are often punchlines these days. And yet from our earliest imaginings we’ve created motion pictures and automobiles and computers and microwave ovens and antibiotics and x-ray machines.

Tomorrowland presupposes that most of us have grown up and away from ideas of awe and visions that stir us to move in wonderfully radical directions. We’re resigned to our fate of future days that will erase, decade upon decade, our joy of possibilities and possible better times. Who today looks ahead and envisions days of abundant resources and peaceful cultures and cooperative nations? But what of this mythical place where the imagination could be allowed to run free? The story jumps off at New York’s 1964 World’s Fair, where we meet the best, brightest, boldest thinkers and imaginers.

One such thinker, 10-year-old Frank Walker with his self-made jetpack (of course!) in tow, will attend the fair with the intention of changing the world with its possibilities. While a fair official (Hugh Laurie) sees promise in Frank but dismisses the boy as not yet ready for prime time, a curious little girl, Athena (Raffey Cassidy), thinks otherwise, seeing something urgent in Frank’s imagination. The boy is surreptitiously invited to a world beyond the world he thinks he knows. This prologue gives us a marvelous glimpse of Tomorrowland—a gleaming, Disney Kingdom-like wonderland of rockets and flying trains and inventions as small as a button pin and as large as the sky—before we’re catapulted to the present day where we meet Casey (Britt Robertson), a wise-beyond-her-20 years daughter of a NASA scientist (Tim McGraw). Casey, already a dreamer, makes a spectacular and brief visit to Tomorrowland and doesn’t hesitate to chase its possibilities. This puts her in the sights of powerful forces who’d rather not have the place discovered and will use deadly means to keep things secret.

She eventually connects with a much older, disillusioned Frank (George Clooney) who has long put his residency of Tomorrowland behind him, as well as, perhaps, the promise he once held as a boy. Clooney does wonderful work as the craggy, jilted Frank who nevertheless maintains a little-boy longing in his eyes. It’s great to see Casey’s imagination reignite his.

Casey’s plight aligns her with Frank and a still-young Athena as Casey uncovers not just the wonders of the future, but, as grownups know, its frightening uncertainties as well. The stakes—at first the exposure of Tomorrowland, then the possible end of the real world itself—felt like serious business to me. But don’t let my crowing about the film’s underpinnings make you think there’s no fun to be had. There are great action set pieces, including giant robots fighting, a time-freezing weapon, a journey into space and through a wormhole, an attack on a country house decked out with a most impressive defense system, and a fight that takes place in two time streams.

What does it say about a film that gambles its success on the hopes that the audience buys into a dream? It saddens me to see this film turn out low box office numbers and negative reviews, basically making the film’s point of humanity’s time-worn nature to run headlong into cynicism and doubt, instead of it daring to dream, to believe that better, yet-to-be-imagined days lie ahead.

No matter. I was inspired and I hope younger viewers, who are our tomorrows, will be as well. I found the last shot of the film powerful. Does that make me a sap, or hopelessly optimistic?

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Quik Flix Hit

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Summer Movie Series

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Rated R

madmax_fr

Warner Bros. Pictures

Mad Max: Fury Road is told almost entirely in terms of action. It’s an extended chase from Point A to Point B and then back. That director George Miller elevates this chase to visual, sonic and kinetic elegance proves that you can turn nearly any story into a great film if you know what you’re doing.

In the BloghouseHow many car chases have we witnessed in action films? At this point, what can be done to distinguish a good car chase from all others? I’d say distinctive style, which Miller has in spades, harkening all the way back to 1979’s Mad Max.

The character Max Rockantansky has been reimagined for a new generation. Tom Hardy is even less chatty than Mel Gibson’s iconic version, who had three films of his own. We meet this new Max as he’s eating a live lizard and repairing his supped up ’73 Ford Falcon “Interceptor,” a holdover from the original film. We know he’s lost his family because of the fleeting images that haunt him. And while he’s ostensibly the hero, the film’s about Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa (get used to names like that, the film’s loaded with them). Her haunted eyes, prosthetic left arm and branded neck tell us she’s endured things beyond belief. In a post-apocalyptic world we’ve known from the previous films, Furiosa lives in one corner, The Citadel, ruled by Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) who uses women as chattel (for milk, pleasure and breeding), while hoarding a water supply from the dusty, dirty masses. He’s supported by his War Boys henchmen, also dusty and dirty but better fed and given vehicles.

Furiosa takes a stand and escapes with Joe’s five wives, two of whom are pregnant. Hiding the women within a tanker, Furiosa turns a supposed fuel run into an escape agenda to her homeland—and the chase is on. During the run she crosses paths with Max and Nux (Nicholas Hoult), one of Joe’s cancer-addled War Boys.

The rest is Miller magic. The post-apocalypse has never looked so bleak yet wonderful. Miller reminds us he’s a visionary. Masterful, whether he’s packing the frame with visual puns and throwaway imagery or dazzling with beautiful wide-angle vistas. One haunting scene shows humans lumbering on stilts across a dried-out, poisoned landscape like giraffes on a bombed-out Africa veldt. And the colors! They explode from flames and flair-gun tendrils and blowing sand and dust from cascading rocks. The chase takes us through canyons, across sinking fields, along bone-dry wastelands, past a grassy oasis and into impossible sand storms.

To say nothing of the people inhabiting this world: wiry and muscled, sun-blasted and chalked-up, mutated post-nuke hellions and soft-skinned beauties. The inhabitants are scarred with brandings and tumors and tattoos, and festooned with tribal paint, leather and furs.

Miller’s vision extends to the vehicles, which are basically characters themselves. We have motorcycles and tractor trailers, customized dune buggies and sedans and retrofitted trucks with cranes and scoops, and double-decker wagons. Machinery is fetishized with artifacts and spot welded into hybrid monstrosities, adorned with banners and long flexible poles that support swaying War Boys; even moving scaffolding support huge bass drums that set the pace, and a heavy-metal guitarist whose riffs spew dragon-fire.

Water, food and foliage may be scarce, but not gasoline. These big-wheeled vehicles boom and zoom through vast desert and salt flats with abandon, heedless of fuel or repair needs.

Forget over-the-top, this film is custom made to rev us up and beyond, around, underneath and through its chase-plot by any means necessary.

Any character development we get is through sorrowful gazes or crazed expressions or primal screams or knowing grunts; Miller’s a pro at this. Amid the chaos he knits in his themes: vengeance, solidarity and finally redemption. I remember again his skill at sketching dozens of characters—and vehicles—from corky traits, blunt visuals, and above all, action.

This movie totally succeeds in its agenda. It’s action-packed, visual astounding, simply plotted and completely contained. Every moment works.

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Quik Flix Hit

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Danny Collins (2015)

Rated R

danny-collins

Big Indie Pictures

Danny Collins isn’t as famous as Al Pacino, who plays the fictional aging rock singer in this film, but Danny’s type of fame will do well enough. He’s recognized nearly everywhere he goes, not just by long-time fans but also youths familiar with his celebrity.

In the BloghouseBefore he was a celebrity living off his name and long-ago hit songs, he was a talented singer/songwriter. So talented, in fact, a circa ’70s interview he did for a Rolling Stone-like periodical caught the attention of John Lennon.

It transpires that Lennon was moved by the interview and wrote an admiring and encouraging letter that included Lennon’s phone number. The skittish Danny, who was eager for success but apprehensive of stardom, could have benefitted from such a letter. Alas, through couldn’t-believe-it-if-it-weren’t-based-on-true-events circumstances, Danny wouldn’t receive the letter for more than 40 years. By the time it’s gifted to him by his steadfast manager (the great Christopher Plummer) he’s going through the motions of fame. Trophy girlfriend, fair-weather friends, casual drugs, expensive gated home and sports cars. He slogs through his performances as best he can, singing songs he’s long since tired of, resigned that he is more celebrity than singer.

The letter blasts him free of absorbing thoughts that he’s in the final throes of his life, sending him on a new trajectory. He packs up, dumps the girlfriend and sets off on a quest to find the life he should have had, and tie up some loose ends.

Up to this point the film has moved briskly and Pacino keeps Danny engaging, no doubt. When Danny checks into a rinky-dink New Jersey hotel to get back to writing the songs that Lennon-endorsed Danny Collins was supposed to have written years back, Danny’s likeable personality really comes into focus. In quick order he charms the hotel valet (Josh Peck), the young concierge, and more intentionally the hotel manager (a wonderfully low-key Annette Bening).

The loose ends involve wriggling himself into the life of his adult estranged son. The son (Bobby Cannavale) has a wife (Jennifer Garner) and daughter and no intention of having a relationship with his long-absent father. Danny’s well-written introduction to the family (Garner shines) effectively sets the stage for the first father-son encounter.

The film’s not so much about the plot, but there are key twists I will not spoil. And it’s not even about whether Danny will succeed in writing and singing this comeback song, though Pacino makes us root for him.

Cannavale, Garner, Bening and Plummer are all wonderfully realized character and each has at least one well-written scene that allows them to shine. This is one of those movies where you don’t mind spending time with any of the characters because they’re all interesting and say interesting things. But it’s all held together by grandmaster Pacino who knows this character inside and out. I like that Danny’s smart (he’s often taking notes) and is remarkable at reading people and assessing situations. The flashy-but-outdated clothes, hair style and cheesy songs don’t keep us from seeing what a good heart the man has, or what a warm-hearted, humorous film this is.

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Quik Flix Hit

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It Follows (2014)

Rated R

it-follows

Radius-TWC

With Oculus (2013), The Babadook (2014) and now It Follows, I’m beginning to believe again in my beloved and disappointing mistress, the horror genre, which for years has left me with heartache and heartburn. These recent gems bring hope that there are writers, directors, producers mining this genre who aren’t simply beholden to teen-demographic pandering, PG-13 half-assery and unnecessary remakes.

In the BloghouseHow’s this premise strike you? Jay (Maika Monroe), a post-high school teen whiling away waning autumn days with her sister and friends, goes out on a date with a cute guy she’s had her eye on. After a sexual encounter in the backseat of his car, cute guy informs her that during sex he “passed” something on to her. If that isn’t a horrifying setup right there, then what he’s passed on certainly is: a creature that can look like anyone, even those she loves, will begin to pursue her at a leisurely, but determined pace. “It’s very slow, but not dumb,” Jay is warned. It will unceasingly stalk her by slowly walking toward her—day or night, in empty places or crowded rooms. Only Jay (and those who have/had the curse) can see it, but it’s real. The brief and brutal opening scenes involving a previous female victim of this curse informs us of what this thing might do if it gets ahold of Jay. Cute guy tells her that if the creature kills her, it returns its attention to the last person to pass it on, and so on. It’s in his and Jay’s best interests, he says, for her to quickly sleep with someone else to move the curse on down the line.

With that setup, taking the teen-sex-equals-death horror trope to new extremes, It Follows builds up more tension than I would have imagined. It’s easy to outrun the thing, unless you’re unfortunate enough to allow yourself to get trapped in a corner, but its relentlessness is what terrifies. Jay can’t ever let her guard down to sleep, to attend classes at the community college. Even being surrounded by loving friends who can’t see the creature offers little comfort. It’s always out there, in some form—familiar or hideous, naked or clothed—walking toward her.

Somehow, director David Robert Mitchell’s film is able to evoke fear simultaneously in wide-open, populated areas and closed-off, isolated spaces. Think about that for a moment. When was the last time a horror film got you coming and going like that? At a park, in school hallways, at the beach, someone among the throngs of people is walking toward you—only you—with the intention of doing things to your body and mind you can’t dream up in nightmares. Hiding away in a sealed-up room or boathouse doesn’t leave you with an exit plan when something comes wrapping at the door or crashing through a window. So effective is the director’s use of wide shots (who or what is that moving in the distance behind Jay?), that any time he moves in for close-ups and tight shots, I tensed up wondering what’s occurring just out of frame. Poor Jay. She wasn’t a virgin to begin with, but was sex worth this? And as things become increasingly hopeless will she turn to sex again as a means to sidestep this curse? Certainly a pair of lustful friends are more than willing to help out. But Jay understands that sleeping with someone could condemn him to death.

Adding to this tense and intense film is the director’s sure hand at fashioning a dreamlike atmosphere. Sure, there’s the intrusive sync score that’s an intentional homage to ’80s soundtracks from horror maestro John Carpenter. Sure, Mitchell tries to affect a timeless quality by giving the film a retro look: tube televisions, phones with cords, cars your father drove. But above all, I think the director’s efforts are in service of tapping a visceral nightscape of inescapable terror that ultimately wears you down. This film: not only does it follow, it lingers.

I like how the kids give simple, natural performances; the lack of snarky, meta-dialogue that passes for cleverness these days is actually refreshing. When the finale at an abandoned public pool brings us to the head-on confrontation we’ve been awaiting and dreading, it’s a bit of a letdown only because everything else has been so effective. Turns out, what the creature might do is a more unnerving prospect than what it actually does.

I don’t need a sequel to this, which I’m sure is coming, but I would like to see more genre films strike out for original territory and tone, even at the risk of alienating the demographic that doesn’t seem to have a problem throwing money at mindless, gory, easily forgotten horror films.

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Quik Flix Hit

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Summer Movie Series

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

Rated PG-13

guardians_of_the_galaxy

Marvel Studios

This summer superhero action flick is going to be a hit because its emphasis is on humor and music—two elements that enhance any film when done well. We get to see things blown up real good, but mostly we like the songs and the banter and brawling between the Guardians. Marvel smartly gambled that audiences needing a respite from the onslaught of first-string superheroes might give this a try.

In the BloghouseThe Guardians is a ragtag team of, you guessed it, outlaws forced to combine its talents and snarky comments to take on a force bent on the destruction of, you guessed it, the galaxy. The enemies, the instruments of destruction, the far-flung interstellar locales, the double-crosses all fall within the scope of this kind of movie. But when Star-Lord pops a worn cassette tape into his Walkman and starts jamming out to earthbound hits circa 1970s, you smile at the absurdity and go along with it. Why not? Sure, we’re light years from earth and decades ahead of modern times, but why should that hinder our love for The Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back”?

Each of the five Guardians left an impression on me, but for my money I liked Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper), a genetically altered raccoon who’s sadly aware of his manufactured nature and really into heavy weapons. That he doesn’t look ridiculous piloting starships or blasting away with guns at least as large as himself is a testament to the f/x team. I also like human Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), aka Star-Lord, who’s handsome, skillful, arrogant—the qualities always evident in superheroes—but more importantly good-hearted and repeatedly willing to make bold sacrifices for others. The kids will like Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), a treelike being whose mode of communicating consists entirely of the phrase “I am Groot!”

There’s a sad-sweet prologue of young Peter confronting his dying mother that’s well executed but gains depth when we return to the moment late in the film and truly recognize its value. I also like how the movie established pretty quickly that each of the Guardians for the most part like and accept each other. It’s a time saver. We know they’re going to make good teammates, they know they make good teammates so why waste time pretending like they’re not?

Guardians of the Galaxy goes down easy and certainly leaves space for a sequel—that’s the Marvel way. I suspect it’ll do even more business on video when those who didn’t think they had a taste for it finally see it at home and realize how much fun it is. And the music? Come on! “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” “Ooh Child.” “Cherry Bomb.” “Come and Get Your Love.” And its use of “Hooked on a Feeling” steals away that song’s long association with Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.

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Summer Movie Series

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (2014)

Rated R

sin_city

Aldamisa Entertainment

I was gobsmacked as I watched the first Sin City in 2005. Not only was it visually sumptuous, but its noir-drenched characters were smartly drawn and its bleak interconnecting stories, individually and collectively, engaged. Every frame of the Robert Rodriguez–Frank Miller codirected effort vibrated with originality and purpose.

In the BloghouseI was deflated watching this sequel. Not only was there nothing new to the proceedings, its visuals seemed to rest firmly on its laurels. No real effort seemed to be made to one-up the masterful look of the original. The films boast crisp, hyper-real black-and-white cinematography, with color splashed in here and there for effect. To recreate the look of Miller’s groundbreaking graphic novels, the films employ stylized camera angles and movement, smoke and shadow, jump-cuts, smash-cuts, projection, animation—everything.

Watching the first film, I remembered thinking a lot of effort went into how and when to apply color in an essentially colorless landscape. Blood or lips or eyes and teeth or eyeglass lens tipped the viewer to method and motive. This time there’s a randomness to the use of color, like there was a mission to put some color somewhere in every frame, without thought of why (or if) it’s needed.

The plot is a rehash of tales better told the first time around. We return to Basin City, a lethal, sess-pool metropolitan city inhabited by hardboiled lowlifes and dames in distress. In the first film, we spent time with the characters before the mayhem began; this time characters are tripping over each other with nary an arc between them. And remember the visit to Old Town, the red-light district where even the cops are afraid to go? In the original film, it’s populated and protected by prostitutes, several of whom are given names, personalities and things to do. This time, there’s a perfunctory trip to Old Town that renders the nameless women as relevant as any number of thugs running throughout the film.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Inception, 300 Days of Summer) brings bluster and consideration to a role that ultimately is much ado about nada. His plight and fate seemed completely avoidable and he seemed smart enough to sidestep all of it. Jessica Alba’s stripper character Nancy worked better the first time when she was a minor player; this time her expanded role underscores the character’s thinness. Josh Brolin (Oldboy, 2013), who usually engages, here is wasted in a snarling role that’s one note; at least Clive Owen had fun with the same character in the original film. Eva Green as the oft-nude femme fatale is ridiculously obvious from the moment she slinks into a bar until her final moments on screen. I never believed her character. Even Mickey Rourke’s fan favorite Marv (he returns out of chronology) can’t get this mess off the ground. Only Powers Boothe’s power-mad senator brings energy to the proceedings.

What a bust.

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Campus MovieFest 2014

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Film Review
Very Good Girls (2013)
Rated R

vgg

Groundswell Productions

Very Good Girls is an uneven coming-of-age drama featuring Dakota Fanning and Elizabeth Olsen (Godzilla, Martha Marcy May Marlene). The ingredients are here—two skilled actors, a summer of sexual awakening, a lovers’ triangle, a sudden death—but the film never gels.

The BloghouseBest friends, college-bound Lily (Fanning) and earth-child Gerry (Olsen), make a pact to lose their virginity before summer’s end. Things get complicated when they fall for the same fellow, David (Boyd Holbrook, looking indistinguishable from actor Charlie Hunnam).

The film immediately engages with an impressive cast, then, strangely, begins to falter, scene by scene. The problem, I think, resides at the screenplay level.

Writer/director Naomi Foner Gyllenhall’s secondary characters are wasted in snapshot scenes. Gerry’s Bohemian parents—Richard Dreyfus and Demi Moore—are the expected hippy-attired, folk-music-playing cutouts. Lily’s folks—Clark Gregg and Ellen Barkin—are standard middle-class, middle-aged, boozy professionals. To be fair, Gregg has a couple of father-daughter scenes he attempts wrangle from cliche.

Every time a scene arrives—a death, an infidelity—it’s blunted by pacing or odd character responses. One exception is a gentle first-time love-making scene that is effective in its use of music, framing, acting and tone.

The film might have held together better, been more impactful, if balance had been brought to the main characters. This is Fanning’s show, and she can act. But Olsen, who can also act, is wasted. If equal measure had been brought to each girl, the conflict—both girls falling for the same artsy bad boy—might have moved us.

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Quik Flix Hit

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Summer Movie Series

Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

Rated PG-13

edge-of-tomorrow

Warner Bros./Village Roadshow

I have a thing for time-travel movies. When protagonists scramble backward or forward in time attempting to correct wrongs or save the day or recapture love, for me, it hits a sweet spot. Based upon the trailers, I went into Edge of Tomorrow eager to see how the time-jumping theme would be put to use. It didn’t disappoint.

In the BloghouseGiven that the film takes place in the near future and that the time-traveling mechanism is actually created by aliens and not built by humans provides a fresh approach. Based on a Japanese light novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, Edge is Groundhog Day (1993) crossed with Source Code (2011).

We follow Major William Cage (Tom Cruise), a brash public relations officer in the military, who’s also cowardly on the actually soldiering side of things. Through a bit of plot contrivance, Cage is forced into frontline combat against a seemingly unbeatable alien force.

Cruise imbues his character with enough forced confidence, which crumbles in the face of real danger, that I connected with his terror as he is literally shoved into a heavy, weaponized bodysuit and airdropped onto a field of battle no less horrific than Normandy on D-Day.

The aliens, Mimics, are fiercely conceived as octopus-like monsters that burrow through the earth like caffeinated groundhogs, then emerge to tear through adversaries with multiple buzz-saw appendages.

Cage’s mission goes horribly wrong for every soldier involved, but not before he takes sight of legendary soldier Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt).

Instead of waking up in the afterlife, Cage is reborn into the same day and at the same spot where his mission began. Yes, the same commanding officer (Bill Paxton) will berate him, the same elite squad will mock his recruitment into its ranks, the same doomed mission plans will be laid out. After things go badly again, and he’s reborn again, he and we get the drift of things. After a few rounds of being horrified by his circumstances, Cage begins to use the knowledge at hand not only to mold himself into a better soldier, but to get to know his enemy and to construct something of a survivable battle plan.

Director Doug Liman (The Borne Identity, Go) has fun with Cage’s learning curve, finding creative ways to repeatedly kill our hero. I won’t spoil how or why Cage faces this dilemma, but it holds the key to possibly winning the war.

Cage eventually connects with Rita, who knows more than expected about his plight. She’s a hardened soldier—not completely convincingly played by Blunt; Michelle Rodriguez would have been typecasting but also perfect—who’s all about the mission.

The plot isn’t as complex as it could have been, which will ease confusion for those who struggle with gimmicky scenarios like time travel. I think Edge starts strong, builds up quite a bit of steam with its “live, die, repeat” format, but ultimately runs its course before its endgame arrives. But I’m still a softie for time-travel movies.

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