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Archive for April, 2016

“MIDNIGHT SPECIAL”: Shine a light

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on April 7, 2016| Leave a Comment »

midmaxresdefault“MIDNIGHT SPECIAL”  My rating: B

112 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

There is almost no element of “Midnight Special” that hasn’t been already thoroughly mined by other science fiction/fantasy films over the last 40 or so years.

And yet through some sort of cinema alchemy writer/director Jeff Nichols makes it all fresh and compelling.

Nichols is the Arkansas auteur of oddball down-home dramas like “Shotgun Stories,” “Take Shelter” and “Mud.” Here he ventures into full-blown genre moviemaking, and for the most part sucks us in and leaves us wanting even more.

The film begins with three individuals on the run. Roy (Michael Shannon), his eight-year-old son Alton (Jaeden Lieberher, the scene-stealing kid from “St. Vincent”), and Lucas (Joel Edgerton) are making their way across Texas and into Louisiana in a beat-up car that has more Bondo than paint.

Alton is a strange kid who sits in the back seat wearing sound-damping headphones and blue swimming goggles. Since they travel only at night he uses a flashlight to read a stack of comic books.

Turns out the trio are the object of a massive manhunt, not only by the feds (FBI, CIA, whatever else you got) but by the members of a Texas religious cult with whom Elton has lived for the last two years.

Apparently the kid has had visions which have now become as much a part of the sect as the shapeless sisterwife dresses worn by their womenfolk. Incensed that Elton’s dad has snatched him up, the cult leader (Sam Shepherd) dispatches a couple of heavily-armed members of the congregation (Bill Camp, Scott Haze) to recover the boy in the few days remaining before a prophesized day of judgment.

Nichols’ strength as a storyteller is that he doesn’t drop too much up front. His films are voyages of discovery in which audiences pick up the characters’ backgrounds and info about the plot in dribs and drabs.

(more…)

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“KRISHA”: Home is where they have to let you in

Posted in Uncategorized on April 7, 2016| Leave a Comment »

Krisha Fairchild

Krisha Fairchild

“KRISHA” My rating: B

83 minutes | MPAA rating: R

The dysfunctional Thanksgiving gathering has long been the subject of cinematic exploration, usually played for knowing laughs.

But writer/director Trey Edward Shults’ debut effort “Krisha” plumbs harrowing depths other filmmakers flee in horror, along the way establishing a narrative style so realistic that you can almost smell the turkey roasting.

In a long, uninterrupted tracking shot, we’re introduced to Krisha (Krisha Fairchild), who parks her ratty pickup truck in an upscale suburban neighborhood and goes door to door looking for her sister’s address.

With a wild mane of nearly-white hair and the sort of long granny dress that screams “hippie Earth mother,” the sixtysomething Krisha locates the right McMansion, is admitted, and finds herself surrounded by an extended family. There’s the usual oohing and aahing about how the kids have grown (they’re mostly college age now) and nice things are said about the new baby.

Everyone seems welcoming, but it’s clear that Krisha is something of a black sheep seeking to be readmitted to the fold. While a dozen or more relations fuss over the big meal, roar at the televised football game, or roughhouse out in the back yard, Krisha stands a bit apart, soaking it all up and looking just a bit fearful.

The first 40 or so minutes of the film are purely observational, and anyone who’s attended a big family holiday celebration will feel right at home with the happy chaos, the babble of several simultaneous conversations, the small pack of dogs underfoot.

(more…)

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“MARGUERITE”: Tin ear, warm heart

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on April 7, 2016| Leave a Comment »

Catherine Frot

Catherine Frot

“MARGUERITE” My rating: B+

129 minutes | MPAA rating: R

You can approach “Marguerite”  as a cruel joke, a satire of a wannabe opera singer who doesn’t realize just how awful her voice is.

Fine. Come to laugh. But you’ll leave in a much more sober and contemplative frame of mind.

Xavier Giannoli’s lush period film is set in the early 1920s and was inspired by Florence Foster Jenkins (1868-1944), an American socialite who despite a total absence of vocal talent forged a career as an operatic soprano. She became a minor celebrity based on the entertainment value of her off-key recitals.

Giannoli’s fictional “heroine” is Baroness Marguerite Dumont (a spectacular Catherine Frot), who as the film begins is hosting a charity concert on her estate outside Paris.  The highlight of the event will be a rare performance by the Baroness.

A tone-deaf, music-mangling performance, as it turns out, one marked by grandiose theatrical gestures and much caterwauling.

The members of the Mozart Society, which runs mostly on donations from the Baroness, applaud furiously. Others in the crowd — like Lucien (Sylvain Dieuaide) and Kyrill (Aubert Fenoy), two young artistic radicals who have crashed the party — are simultaneously appalled and delighted.

Kyrill declares the performance — and Marguerite’s total lack of self-awareness — a daring new art form (“She’s so sublimely off-key”).  Lucien critiques the concert for a Paris newspaper, parsing his words so carefully that it can be read either as a ringing endorsement or a devastating pan.

The ever-hopeful Baroness takes the review as proof that she should move her career out of the parlor and onto the world’s great concert stages. The plot of “Marguerite” is about her determination to share her “gift” with the world, and the efforts to prevent that great embarrassment.

(more…)

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“DEMOLITION”: Dismantling numbness

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on April 7, 2016| Leave a Comment »

Jake Gyllenhaal

Jake Gyllenhaal…tearing stuff down

“DEMOLITION”  My rating: B- (Opening April 8 at the Glenwood Arts)

101 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Mental health professionals tell us there’s no “correct” way to grieve. How you mourn depends on who you are.

Even so, it’s hard to sympathize with Davis (Jake Gyllenhaal), the young widower at the heart of Jean-Marc Vallee’s “Demolition,” a film that for much of its running time dares you to care before enventually finding its emotional center.

After losing his wife in an auto accident, it quickly dawns on Davis that he doesn’t feel grief. Or much of anything.

Before the funeral he practices crying in front of a mirror, just so he’ll be able to pass himself off as the bereaved spouse people expect.

But it’s all for show. While Phil (Kansas City’s Chris Cooper), Davis’ father-in-law and boss at a Wall Street investment firm, is obviously shattered by loss, the dead-eyed Davis is simply numb.

He does get worked up by one thing. While waiting in the emergency room, Davis was ripped off by a hospital vending machine that took his money and failed to deliver the M&Ms. Now he sends bizarre rambling letters to the vending machine company’s complaints department.

He’ll tell you it’s not about the money. It’s about the principle. But what it’s really about is having something to obsess over so he doesn’t have to face himself, his loss and his growing sense that he really didn’t know his wife at all.

Vallee, whose “The Dallas Buyers Club” and “Wild” melded art film sensibilities with great acting and strong storytelling, goes out on a limb with “Demolition.” For big swatches of the film he and screenwriter Bryan Sipe give us a protagonist  we can’t figure out or necessarily like.

They create an emotional palette that veers from overt displays of gut-tearing sorrow (from Cooper’s character) to black humor and atavistic outbursts.

The film’s title refers to Davis’ growing mania for destruction. He devotes a night to dismantling his home refrigerator. At the office he takes apart the partitions in the men’s room. Eventually he stops showing up for work and instead pitches in — without pay — to help tear down a house. Still wearing his business suit he takes a sledgehammer to walls and beams. (more…)

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“BASKIN”: Bogeyman

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged on April 7, 2016| Leave a Comment »

Welcome to hell...

Welcome to hell…

“BASKIN” My rating: C+ 

97 minutes | No MPAA rating

It’s not my cup of viscera, but the Turkish horror entry “Baskin” gets points for the supreme confidence with which first-time director Can Evrenol handles a preposterous story.

Like a campfire yarn meant to scare the youngest kid in the Boy Scout troop, the film makes no sense narratively or logically, but instead develops an atmosphere of horror, dread and gross-me-out gore that will have some viewers closing their eyes in self defense.

The film opens in a roadside diner in rural Turkey where five cops are taking their evening meal. They’re like police officers everywhere — self-assured, cocky good ol’ boys fueled by questionable eating habits and displays of machismo.

Before they get in their van and head off to a nearby disturbance call one of the cops very nearly gets into a brawl with a waiter who doesn’t sufficiently defer to his authority.

Dispatched to a nearby town the officers first encounter a family of frog hunters camping out beside a swamp. Possible inbreeding (among the hunters, not the frogs) seems likely.

Then the cops enter an old abandoned police station, start poking around in the dark cellars, and become the prisoners of what I assume is a coven of witches.

One by one the coppers are dispatched in ghastly ways by a nightmarish figure identified in the credits as the Father.  This horrifying creature is played by Mehmet Cerrahoglu, reportedly an acting novice who was discovered working in a public parking lot. He may have been chosen for his bizarre physiognomy, but Cerrahoglu appears to be a natural actor — delivering  one of the most memorable depictions of evil I’ve ever seen.

Despite its conceptual shortcomings — like refusing to explain what’s going on — “Baskin” has been very well acted and the production effort is first-rate.

Good luck sleeping after this one.

| Robert W. Butler

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