Movies By Month: March 2012, part 2

Nightmares in Red, White & Blue:  2009 documentary by Andrew Monument about the history of the American horror film.  It’s a good general refresher about the genre, nice to hear from Romero and Carpenter, but nothing to write home about.  A good place to start if you’d like to hit the horror highlights.

Monsters:  2010 British sci-fi movie written, shot and directed by Gareth Edwards, and starring Whitney Able and Scoot McNairy.  Yes.  Scoot.  Areas of northern Mexico have been quarantined by the U.S. military because aliens crash-landed there, you know the drill.   A slightly unkempt, slightly dashing photojournalist has been tasked with getting his boss’s daughter through the area and home to marry her boring fiancé.  Think Jurassic Park redux, kind of.  I must say, this + The African Queen + Apocalypse Now = no riverboat travel for me, thanks all the same.  It’s matter-of-fact, good pacing, the music is nice and low key, and the ending is unexpected and kind of perfect.  It’s a feel-good monster movie without being too touchy-feely-feel-good.  Very “real.”   Definitely see it.

Catching Hell:  OK, technically this is a 2011 episode of the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary series, but I’m counting it as a movie.   On October 14, 2003, Game 6 of the National League Championship Series, a Cubs fan named Steve Bartman attempted to catch a pop foul and, depending on which version you believe, RUINED EVERYTHING FOREVER.  This poor guy.  A single flubbed play does not make or break the ball game.  Just ask Bill Buckner (who, p.s., was given way too much screen time in this movie).  Other fans at the game tried to start fights with Bartman, threw beer on him, the poor SOB had to be disguised and driven home by Wrigley Field security.  Rod “Totally In Jail Now” Blagojevich was quoted as saying, “If he commits a crime, he won’t get a pardon from this governor.”  Now Bartman is the “JD Salinger of Cubs fans,” he’s gone underground.  It’s a pretty solid sports documentary that highlights one of the many reasons people hate Cubs fans – we’re like Yankees fans without all the winning.

Casino Jack & The United States of Money:  2010 documentary by Alex Gibney.  Man, people suck.  Jack Abramoff, Grover Norquist, Tom DeLay and Ralph Reed in particular, totally suck.  It’s a fascinating documentary about the modern conservative movement, how lobbying works, and how corrupt the system of political influence is.  It’s also fairly depressing when you realize that the scandals never cease.  See it, just be prepared to feel jaded and cynical by the end.

Hanna:  2011 thriller directed by Joe Wright and starring Eric Bana, Saoirse Ronan, and Cate Blanchett.  Since she was a baby, Hanna and her former-CIA-operative father have been hiding out in the hinterlands, preparing.  Blanchett is the operative’s former handler who wants him dead.  Once Hanna is prepared, she sets off on her mysterious mission and just starts ruling the shit out of the entire intelligence community.  I thought some of the flashy camera shots were unnecessary, but that’s really my only quibble with it.  Ronan and Blanchett are fantastic, and excellent adversaries.

The Rules of Attraction:  2002 dark satirical comedy based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis, directed by Roger Avary and starring Shannyn Sossamon, James van der Beek, and Ian Somerhalder.   A bunch of apathetic college students all have unrequited crushes on each other and are assholes.  I tried to watch this soon after it came out but never got through it.  Now I remember why.  Not only is everyone annoying, they also keep retelling scenes from a different character’s perspective by, like, rewinding and starting the scene all over again.  It’s intolerable.

The Interrupters:  2011 documentary by Steve James, about a branch of the Chicago community organization CeaseFire that sends former gang enforcers out into the neighborhoods to prevent violence.  HOLY FUCKING SHIT.  See this movie.  Go watch it right now.   Right now!  Is my enthusiastic endorsement not enough for you?  Then watch the trailer.

Beyond Hatred:  2005 French documentary directed by Olivier Meyrou, about the trial of young skinheads accused of killing a gay man.  It’s heart wrenching, and hella confusing.  His family is interviewed throughout the trial, and these scenes are powerful and moving.  But then there’s the writing of the family’s public statement, and the squabbling over the exact wording to use, and talk of liberte, egalite, fraternite, and the trial that made no sense to me because I don’t understand French law.  How many people were on trial?  What exactly were they being accused of?  Is that a lawyer for the defense or the prosecution?  Can you really still smoke like everywhere in France?

So, unless you feel comfortable spending a lot of time researching the French legal system, I would maybe skip it.

Resident Evil Afterlife:  2010 sci-fi action movie directed by Paul W.S. Anderson and starring Milla Jovovich and Ali Larter.  Sigh.  I understand that my love of the first Resident Evil movie is baffling, and that none of the movies that followed were worth watching.  And yet, I keep coming back.  It’s terrible.  Not as terrible as the second, not as “good” as the third, but no.  Do not.

Chronicle:  2012 found footage sci-fi movie directed by Josh Trank, starring Dane DeHaan, Michael B. Jordan, and Alex Russel.  Andrew Detmer’s life is pretty much in the shitter:  his mom is dying, his dad is an abusive alcoholic, and he’s invisible to his classmates except for when they’re beating him up.  Then he starts hanging out with his cousin and one of the popular guys, then they find some weird giant crystal thing, then they notice that they’ve developed telekinetic powers.  It all starts out great, they’re having a good time, pulling harmless pranks by using their minds to move things. . . but what do you think happens when you give a depressed, misanthropic teenage boy unlimited psychic ability?  Can you say Carrie?  It was decent, not amazing.

Beautiful Boy vs. We Need To Talk About Kevin

I recently ended up watching two movies about the aftermath of a school shooting through the eyes of the shooter’s parents.  Uh, grim.  And since the subject matter was roughly similar and I had strong feelings about both movies, I decided to do a slightly longer write-up of each, back to back.

Danger, Will Robinson!  Spoilers abound in these lengthier reviews.  So if you want just the yes/no, here you have it:  Definitely skip Beautiful Boy.  We Need to Talk About Kevin is really good but also soul-reaping, kinda like a Cormac McCarthy novel.  If you’re going to watch it, do so early on a sunny day when you can go outside afterwards and play with kittens and think about rainbows and magic instead of the futility of the human endeavor.

Beautiful Boy:  2010 drama directed by Shawn Ku and starring Michael Sheen and Maria Bello.  Bill (Sheen) and Kate (Bello) are a nice suburban couple on the verge of divorce.  They are planning a last-ditch-effort family vacation when their son Sam (Kyle Gallner) goes on a shooting spree at his university, killing 17 people and himself.  So the movie is ostensibly about how they deal with the aftermath of the tragedy.  

                  Everything was so predictable.  Their actions and reactions are so utterly, just, DUH.  First Bill is going to approach the situation like a Problem To Be Fixed, now Kate will call him on it, now Kate will hover over her nephew like he’s a weird son-substitute, now Kate’s sister-in-law will overreact about Kate hovering, now a total stranger will make a flippant comment not knowing that Bill is the shooter’s dad, now Bill and Kate will drink and have make-up sex, now some new information will cause them to fight and forget their brief reconciliation, now Bill will finally come to terms and Kate will rescue him.

                  There were so many opportunities to dig deeper.  The one area they really could have expanded on was the reactions of other people.  Honestly?  Everyone is super understanding?  They’re never personally confronted by the other parents or the media in a real way.  That, too, would have been expected, but also might have had the potential to be interesting.  

Example:  Kate befriends a young writer who you immediately know is a skeezball.  It would have been so much better for the story if he had turned out to be an agenda-less, platonic friend who actually cared about her, rather than a pseudo romantic interest pumping her for information so he can exploit her grief for fodder for his shitty novel.  But the second he just happens to run into her at the grocery store, you know exactly what’s coming.   There are no surprises, ever, from any character.

I give it credit for trying, but it’s one of the most rote, formulaic, emotionally stupid movies I have ever seen.  I am a devoted Michael Sheen fan.  I very much appreciate an actor who is willing to do a movie like Underworld: Rise of the Lycans directly on the heels of Frost/Nixon.  So he gets a pass.  But after this BS, I’m putting Maria Bello in the Shitty Movie Litmus Test category with Charlotte Gainsbourg and Malcolm McDowell.  Is one of them in it?  Then it’s probably terrible.

We Need To Talk About Kevin:  2011 drama directed by Lynne Ramsay and starring Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly, and Ezra Miller.  It’s based on a book of the same name by Lionel Shriver, which I haven’t read.  And don’t plan to.  ‘Cause damn. 

The story flips back and forth between the current life of Eva (Swinton) and flashbacks of the events leading up to the school shooting committed by her son, Kevin.  Present Eva is an ostracized, nervous loner who is shakily attempting to rebuild her life.  As she slowly makes progress in finding a job and fixing up her small new house, she is occasionally accosted by a rude stranger or supposedly friendly coworker and the wounds rip open freshly.

Interspersed with all the present pain are the flashbacks in chronological order, beginning when she first gets pregnant.  She and her husband, Franklin (Reilly), share a quiet evening, roaming the streets, carefree.  Then she’s a hesitant mother-to-be.  Then she’s an anxious mother of a toddler who doesn’t respond to her, and then of a churlish young boy who seems to inexplicably, spitefully act against her.  And you can see the wheels turning behind her eyes as the years advance:  is he autistic, or just developing slowly?  Why does he respond to my husband and not to me?  Does he hate me?  How could he hate me?  Am I a bad mother?  Am I a bad mother?  Is my son a monster?  Am I a bad mother?

I found this far more realistic than Beautiful Boy, even given the nearly garish, rich color schemes in her flashbacks and the almost comically over-the-top manner in which he kills his classmates.  It has a dreamy, Gregory Crewdson feel to it, but that somehow made more sense to me.  It captures the surrealistic qualities of grief that I think few movies do. 

I didn’t really understand the ending.  Is it a penance?  A strange act of contrition to please her son?  Because if she had just gone along with him, had not been his antagonist, maybe he wouldn’t have done this?  Perhaps the point is for the viewer to wonder.  I don’t believe there is such a thing as closure after death.  So maybe it’s just an example of how she’s coping, a bizarre attempt to exert some control over her life.

It’s a beautiful, crushing movie that I kind of recommend you see.

Movies By Month: March 2012, part 1

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21 Hours at Munich:  1976 drama directed by William A. Graham and starring William Holden, Shirley Knight, and Franco Nero.  A rather lame retelling of the events of September 4, 1972, when a Palestinian militant group took members of the Israeli Olympic team hostage during the Summer Games in Munich.  It seemed like the filmmakers tried to take a stab at showing some of the political difficulties facing the West German police, the human side of the militants, and the planning errors that led to tragedy at the end of the day.  But they weren’t really able to pull it off.  It’s about a real international crisis, fraught with potentially disastrous implications for the volatile Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and it’s all taking place in GERMANY for F’s sake!  It shouldn’t drag!  Fraught!  And the acting is a mixed bag.  Why doesn’t Holden have an accent?

Some movies keep you in suspense even if you know what’s going to happen—this isn’t one of them.  Watch One Day in September instead.

The Roommate:  2011 thriller directed by Christian E. Christiansen and starring Leighton Meester and Minka Kelly.  Actors from various CW television shows, the Twilight films and Billy Zane unite for what is essentially a shot-by-shot remake of Single White Female: girl gets roommate, roommate becomes obsessed with girl, tries to become girl, obsession becomes deadly.  Watch SWF instead.  But I must give Meester snaps for doing almost as freaky-excellent a job as Jennifer Jason Leigh.

Wild Hunt:  2009 Canadian horror/drama directed by Alexandre Franchi and starring Mark A. Krupa, Ricky Mabe, and Tiio Horn.  Erik has a father with Alzheimer’s, an older brother who is super into the LARPing lifestyle and shirking his familial responsibilities, and a girlfriend whose interest in him is waning.  When Evelyn starts following Erik’s brother to the LARP events, he gets suspicious that something shady is going on and hightails it to the land of elves and Vikings and shamans to win her back. 

I really didn’t like it at first.  It was weirdly funny enough to keep me interested, so I kept with it and holy CRAP I’m so glad I did.  I didn’t think this Evelyn chick was worth the hassle.  I will admit to yelling at the screen something like:  “She cheated on you with a dude who thinks he’s a wizard named Murtagh.  With a LARPER, man.  Grow a pair.”  But against my sage advice he goes there and is forced to enter the game as a player, and ends up disrupting the plans of Murtagh’s crew by stealing the fair Evelyn away.  Shit gets real when the lines between game and reality blur.  The ending was very The Departed.  Totally see it.

Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey:  2011 documentary directed by Constance Marks and narrated by Whoopi Goldberg, about Kevin Clash, the puppeteer behind Elmo.  Um, it’s adorable.  I had no idea he’s been involved in so many other projects besides Sesame Street.  He played the obnoxious Baby Sinclair in the TV show Dinosaurs (try not to hold that against him), Splinter in the first live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, and did muppeteering work on Labyrinth, Follow That Bird, and several Muppets movies.  Anyway.  I’m not really an Elmo person; I was far more partial to characters like Snuffy.  C’mon: a huge furry elephant with an Eeyore-like disposition and giant eyelashes?  Of course I liked him.

But I still liked this a lot.  He seems like a really solid dude, it was nice hearing his history and learning more about the early days of the Henson crew.  Definitely worth seeing.

The Guard:  2011 Irish black comedy directed by John Michael McDonagh and starring Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle.  Gleeson is an unconventional, hilariously un-PC Irish policeman who finds himself working with Cheadle’s buttoned-up FBI agent to bring down a drug smuggling ring.  I’d rather not say more.  It’s darkly silly, engaging, uncomfortable at times, and I highly recommend it.  It may not be for everyone, but if you liked In Bruges or Brendan Gleeson generally, then see it.

An American Haunting:  2005 horror film directed by Courtney Solomon and starring Donald Sutherland, Sissy Spacek, James D’Arcy, and Rachel Hurd-Wood.  It’s based on the Bell Witch ghost story, and holy crap is it pedestrian.  It’s boring, not the least bit scary, and up until the end seemed very much like a Disney version of a horror film.  Except Pinocchio was scarier than this nonsense.  The swooping ghost-POV camera shots were discombobulating, and sadly that was the only part of the movie that caused a reaction from me.  The ending is really inconsistent with the almost wholesome tone of the rest of the film, which I guess may have been what Solomon was going for?  But it comes off like a last-ditch effort to elicit scares and ends up just grossing you out.

Oh Jesus, not FEATHERS!

If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front:  2011 documentary directed by Marshall Curry.  It tells the history of the eco-activist group Earth Liberation Front, and the trials of several of its members.  If you set a fire as a political statement, is it arson or terrorism?  Should the ELF members on trial be shown leniency, given that they went out of their way to ensure no one was physically harmed by their actions?  Do the ends justify the means?  And what were the ends they were aiming for?  How realistic were those goals?  Have things actually improved, or did they set the environmentalism movement back?  It’s a really intriguing documentary, very well done, and regardless of where you fall on the green spectrum I think it’s worth watching.

The Mist:  2007 sci-fi horror film directed by Frank Darabont and starring Thomas Jane, Andre Braugher, Marcia Gay Harden, Toby Jones, and like 5 people from The Walking Dead.   A heavy fog rolls into town the morning after a nasty thunderstorm, and several townspeople take shelter in a grocery store when they realize the mist is somehow killing people.  OK, I know.  At first I was all “Oooooh mist . . . scary.”  But it does get pretty scary once the source of the mist’s killing power is revealed.  The acting is fairly solid all around.  Harden is hilarious as the uber-Christian soothsayer who attempts to convince her fellow refugees that God’s Judgment is at hand.  I wanted her to be less crazy in the beginning, and let it ramp up more slowly, but it’s still a solid performance.  It’s not at all what I expected, half an hour too long, and the ending is brutal.  I say give it a shot if you like Walking Dead, or the bleak no-light-at-tunnel’s-end kind of horror movies.

Incident at Oglala:  1992 documentary directed by Michael Apted, about the trial of three members of the American Indian Movement for the death of two FBI agents at the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975.  The story is fascinating, but it’s a scattershot mess of a movie.  The introduction is jumbled and clunky, the viewer is seldom reminded who the subjects being interviewed are, and even when that information is briefly provided it’s not often put into context.  Who are these people, and what role did they play in the incident?  I found it pretty disappointing.  I expected much more given the solid subject matter.

Serenity:  2005 feature-length continuation of the space-western television series Firefly, directed by Joss Whedon and starring Nathan Fillion, Gina Torres, Alan Tudyk, Jewel Staite, the whole gang.  Both the series and the movie follow a ragtag group of smugglers trying to get by on the fringes of space society in the year 2517.  I don’t want to give anything more away.  If you like Joss Whedon, then watch the series (start with episode 2, not the pilot) and Serenity, and revel in the Whedonius.  I resisted this for a long time because I never could get into Angel and Dollhouse looked just awful and it’s a space western.  I’m glad I finally came to my senses.