“LILY TOPPLES THE WORLD” My rating: B(On Discovery +)
90 minutes | No MPAA rating
While still a teen, Lily Hevesh became the best domino artist on Earth.
She excels at creating huge, complex designs with colored dominoes, which are then toppled in a chain reaction of gravity and kinetic force. The effects are mesmerizing…often it takes several minutes for one of her creations to deconstruct.
It’s like watching some sort of living creature collapsing and decaying…except that even in ruins Lily’s creations make an artistic statement.
Jeremy Workman’s documentary “Lily Topples the World” is a celebration of an unusual art form and a study of a young woman who appears to be almost painfully normal except for her ability to envision and execute these mind-boggling constructions.
A decade ago, when she was only 10, Lily started toying around with domino designs. She recorded their spectacular collapses and posted the videos on her own YouTube channel. She got a huge following…but pointedly never appeared in the footage.
This had the effect of making her a sort of mystery figure…particularly since there was no hint that the creator of these works was a) a teenage girl and b) Asian.
Lily was born in China, abandoned by her natural parents, and adopted by an American couple who already had two children. Her father now accompanies her as she travels around the world for domino toppling tournaments and workshops and to create domino designs for movies, television and advertising.
Workman’s film is basically about Lily’s burgeoning career (we see her rubbing elbows with the likes of Jimmy Fallon).
It is less about her as a person…indeed, at heart she seems your run-of-the-mill nerd girl who lives for her obsession. There’s no mention of dating, although Lily tells us that her one year of college was noteworthy as the most heavily socialized nine months of her life.
Perhaps this lack of revealing detail is why “Lily Topples the World” feels padded at 90 minutes.
The good news is that at least a third of the doc is footage of her marvelous mandelas of tiny tumbling monoliths, and these segments are hypnotic.
Film festival veterans know how under those pressure-cooker circumstances public and critical praise can be showered on a movie which, once it hits the theaters, goes down in flames.
Here’s the deal…when you’re watching four to six feature films a day, the critical faculties get blunted. Before long you’re turning to your companions and asking: ”Is this any good? I can’t tell any more.”
Such appears to be the case with Leos Carax’s “Annette,” which was the darling of this year’s Cannes Film Festival and last week debuted on Amazon Prime to near-universal head scratching.
I won’t call the movie a failure, exactly. On many levels it is arresting. It’s got a fearless performance from Adam Driver. Great visuals.
Basically I admire “Annette” without actually liking it.
But it says something when the online chatter is filled with viewers describing the point in “Annette” when they could take no more and looked for other entertainments. It’s like some sort of cinematic ice bucket challenge in reverse.
The object of all this flapdoodle is a show-biz romance (you could call it a perversion of “A Star Is Born”) told largely through carefully choreographed set pieces and musical numbers.
The film was written by the musical brothers Ron and Russell Mael, whose long-running rock band Sparks has a worldwide cult following.
In fact. the film’s long opening tracking shot begins in an LA recording studio where Carax sits in the control booth while the Mael Brothers perform surrounded by the film’s cast. Then everybody gets up, still singing, and marches down the street. By the end of the song the actors have donned their costumes and the film proper is ready to begin.
The first 40 minutes follow the romance of Henry McHenry (Adam Driver), a standup comic, and operatic soprano Ann Defrasnoux (Marion Cotillard).
He’s a brooding dude who buzzes around town atop a motorcycle in dark clothes and a feature-hiding helmet…like one of Death’s messengers from Cocteau’s “Orpheus.” His live act is equally intimidating…he bounces on stage in a fighter’s hooded robe, and spends most of his time sighing and insulting the audience. It’s less traditional standup than performance art…imagine Andy Kauffman as a mean-spirited misanthrope. (It’s at this point that most folks will bail.)
Ann, on the other hand, is a classic diva, beloved of fans and treated as musical royalty.
It’s sort of a beauty and the beast relationship.
Anyway, Henry and Ann woo and wed (their affair is chronicled in “Entertainment Tonight”-type news segments) and eventually become parents.
Simon Helberg with Baby Annette
Their baby is called Annette and she’s played — at least until the very last scene — by a series of eerily realistic puppets.
Enter an an old show business cliche: Ann’s career continues to soar while Henry’s flounders. He was always a grumpy s.o.b., but this has turned him boozy-violent. During a family boating trip tragedy strikes…or is it murder?
Anyway, Henry finds himself a single parent. And when he discovers that Baby Annette (still a puppet, right?) has the singing voice of an angel, he launches a worldwide tour to capitalize on the mania.
Basically it’s child abuse.
There’s a third character here, Ann’s conductor and one-time paramour (Simon Helberg) who stuck around after she took up with Henry and now serves as a buffer between the little girl and her domineering and manipulative father. It’s not a good place to be.
“Annette” has no shortage of themes and ideas, and is peppered with visual showstoppers (the musical score left me underwhelmed)…but it never engaged the emotions, never made me care.
The movie belongs to Driver, whose Henry is some sort of ego-driven monster. He’s undeniably good, but it’s a thankless enterprise. The better he is at his job, the more we despise his character.
It is the feature writing/directing debut of Lisa Joy, the co-creator of HBO’s “Westworld.” A while back her “Reminiscence” screenplay was included on the Black List, an annual survey of the Hollywood’s most promising unproduced scripts.
The cast includes heavy hitters like Hugh Jackman and Thandiwe Newton, with assists from the likes of Rebecca Ferguson and Cliff Curtis.
And yet the film is borderline unwatchable, a clumsily assembled pastiche of sci-fi and film noir cliches that fails to generate excitement or emotional involvement. After devoting two hours to watching this project I can see what Joy was going for, but she didn’t come close to getting me there.
Jackman stars as cynical, world-weary Nick Bannister, who in the not-too-distant future lives and works in Miami…or what the filmmakers imagine Miami will be like after a few decades of global warming and rising ocean levels.
Now the city resembles Venice with high rises. Streets are flooded. Dams keep out some, but hardly all, of the encroaching waves. The rich reside in “dry” areas, while everyone else must resign themselves to perpetual sogginess.
Nick and former Army buddy Watts (Newton) run a service that employs futuristic tech to recover the dreams and memories of their clients. Folks in this watery future are so bummed out that many prefer to live in the past; while in Nick’s immersion tank they can be guided back to the happiest moments of their lives and, for a few minutes and a few dollars, dwell there.
Their memories are projected via hologram, allowing Nick and Watts to eavesdrop on what is usually a very private experience.
Enter super hot Mae (Rebecca Ferguson), a nightclub chanteuse (of course) who wants to use Nick’s machine to discover where she misplaced her house keys. Uh huh.
Anyway, he falls. Hard.
Hugh Jackman, Rebecca Ferguson
We know because he tells us. And tells us. And tells us.
“Reminiscence” relies heavily on Nick’s angsty, tough-guy voiceover narration. It’s so clumsily overwritten that after a while I started to wince every time Jackman’s disembodied voice flooded the soundtrack. Perhaps it’s meant to be a playful parody of pulp fiction first-person navel gazing; whatever…doesn’t work.
Anyway, one day Mae vanishes. To Watts’ dismay, Nick starts spending countless hours in his own machine, mining his reminiscences of their affair. Eventually he decides to get off his ass in an attempt to track Mae down.
Along the way he runs afoul of a New Orleans gangster (Daniel Wu) from Mae’s past, a crooked cop (Curtis) and a family of wealthy creeps who are rapidly taking over what’s left of society.
And he discovers that his beloved may have been playing him all along.
Joy’s plot is so full of twists that I cannot begin to explain what actually happens in the film’s second half. It may have something to do with the fact that I felt nothing for any of the characters, was totally uninvested in their fates.
“Reminiscence” does a fair amount of cinematic name dropping. Mae is the mysterious femme fatale of countless potboilers; Nick is an updated Bogie. The script Nick employs to guide his clients through their memories sounds uncannily like Rod Serling’s spoken introduction to the old “Twilight Zone” episodes.
The film’s version of Miami is right out of “Waterworld” and countless other movies about a dystopian future. The whole memory machine gimmick seems to have been inspired by “Total Recall” and there’s a slugfest with hammers that Joy has stated is her homage to the hallway brawl in “Old Boy.”
None of it worked, at least not for me. In the end I felt as numbed and bummed as Jackman’s character, but for all the wrong reasons.
“Britannia” is like a Limey version of “Drunk History,” only instead of whiskey shots the storytellers are doing acid tabs.
Were you to turn off the sound and just go with the visuals, this series from creators Jez Butterworth, Tom Butterworth and James Richardson would look like a pretty straightforward drama about the Roman conquest of Britain a generation after Julius Caesar.
You’ve got an occupying army of legionaries, painted and plaited Celts who resent the invasion, mud-daubed Druid mystics overflowing with visions.
Episode to episode you can watch a Roman city being built, from a ditched military encampment to a walled fortress.
There’s plenty of violence, and some of the most realistic viscera seen outside a surgical training film.
Tons of drop-dead gorgeous scenery.
It’s when you turn on the sound that you realize what a wonderfully bizarre reality “Britannia” has created.
People here — whether natives or Romans — speak in contemporary colloquial English (“Bummer,” observes a Roman soldier). They say “fuck” so often you look for the names of Quentin Tarantino and David Mamet in the credits.
Moreover, the entire enterprise is a sardonic black comedy, peppered with slapstick moments.
And the music choices are marvelously incongruous yet somehow absolutely spot on: Donovan, Fairport Convention, Cream, Richard Thompson.
Comparisons to “Game of Thrones” are unavoidable. Like that HBO monster, “Britannia” features a couple dozen major characters, all of whom have their own stories that periodically intersect and/or collide.
Mackenzie Crook
To the extent that the series has a central character, it is David Morresssey’s Roman commander, Aulus, who’s only been in Britain a few hours before he’s fallen under the place’s spell and started to go native.
Not that he lets anyone know of his ever-growing obsession with Druid culture. To the world he’s just a cynical soldier/administrator doing the Emperor’s bidding. But as the series progresses it’s obvious that Aulus has his own bonkers agenda.
Whatever. He’s a master manipulator who excels at playing the warring British clans off one another. You know…divide and conquer.
One faction is led by the aged King Pellinor (Ian McDiarmid…that’s right, “Star Wars’” EMPEROR PALPATINE!!!!), who has an ineffectual son (Julian Rhind-Tutt) and one kick-ass warrior-woman daughter (“Yellowstone’s” Kelly Reilly, who looks awesome with face paint and bow and arrow).
The other tribe is presided over by the white-maned matriarch Antedia (Zoe Wanamaker), who never lets go of a grudge and tells the Roman leader to “lick my crack.” Very ladylike.
Kelly Reilly
Mackenzie Crook (you may know him from the series “The Detectorists” or his recurring role in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” series) is flat out brilliant as Veran, the skeletal chief Druid and the power behind all of Britain’s thrones. He presides over drum-fueled orgies that looks like Golden Gate Park on a Sunday afternoon in the late ’60s.
Even under normal circumstances Crook is an odd-looking dude, but the show’s makeup artists have done a mind-boggling job to transform him into a tattooed, black-eyed wraith.
And if that wasn’t enough, in the show’s second season Crook also plays Veran’s brother, resurrected after a millennia in limbo and bent on overthrowing his sibling’s rule.
So one of the problems here is that virtually every character is a deceitful, scheming, two-faced, murderous snake. Hard to know who to root for.
Thankfully there’s teenage Cait (Eleanor Worthington-Cox), whose coming out party was ruined by the Roman landing. Cait is about the only psychologically healthy person in sight. Except that she’s been more or less adopted by Divis, a Druid dropout who believes she will be the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy.
Eleanor Worthington-Cox, Nikolaj Lie Kaas
Divis is played by Nikolaj Lie Kaas, who looks and acts like a hirsute Jason Bateman, right down to the sardonic asides. He’s like an inept Yoda who’s always cursing in exasperation.
If “Britannia” has a major flaw it’s that the show has no sense of urgency. The emphasis is not so much on storytelling as on creating comic character moments — like those delivered by a couple of Roman soldiers who go AWOL and spend their days stoned on the local pharmacopeia.
And just when you figure things can’t get weirder, Season Two opens with a flashback informing us that Aulus and his second-in-command (Hugo Speer) a decade earlier presided over Jesus’ crucifixion.
It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out over the next season (which reportedly begins later this month).
“Searching for Mr. Rugoff” kicks off with a montage of co-workers, friends and family members discussing the late Donald Rugoff.
“A piece of work.”
“Reviled, feared.”
“A thorny, difficult man.”
“Self-destructive.”
“Really good at what he did.”
“A giant nobody knows about.”
That last comment is most telling, for Ira Deutchman’s documentary makes a case for Rugoff (1927 – 1989) being one of the most important figures in the film business.
Ruggoff didn’t make movies. He showed them. Throughout the 1960s and ‘70s his New York-based Cinema 5 distributed the creme-de-la-creme of foreign films, independents, art efforts and documentaries.
Moreover the iconic theaters he operated in Manhattan — the Beekman, Sutton, Paris, Plaza, Grammercy and Cinema I and Cinema II — became the physical embodiment of the whole film-as-art movement.
If back in the day you thrilled to the Maysles’ “Gimmer Shelter,” Nicholas Roeg’s “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” Bruce Brown’s “Endless Summer,” Robert Downey Sr.’s “Putney Swope,” Bergman’s “Scenes from a Marriage” or Werner Herzog’s “The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser,” you had Donald Rugoff to thank.
Director Deutchman — who in addition to his own wildly successful career as a distributor of art movies has for 30 years taught the Business of Motion Pictures class at Columbia — worked briefly for Rugoff in the ’70s. He explains for the camera that he was moved to make this documentary because a Google search revealed next to nothing about his infuriating, intimidating, insanely important mentor.
Dozens of Rugoff acquaintances — including filmmakers Costa-Gavras, Lena Wertmuller and Downey, critics like Annette Indsorff and a whole slew of past Cinema 5 grunts — lined up to talk about the man.
The picture that emerges is of an overweight schlub in mustard-stained shirts and ties who loved the movie biz above all human connections. He regularly reduced employees to tears — one recalls that he could be charming when hiring you, but that once on board you were his slave.
At the same time Rugoff was decades ahead of the curve in giving young women a foothold in a male-dominated industry (and apparently without even a hint of Weinstein-level predation). One source calls him “an equal-opportunity exploiter.”
Employees recall being stunned at coming to work to find Francois Truffaut or Jean-Luc Godard schmoozing in Rugoff’s office. If Don Rugoff picked up your film, he worked like a madman to make it a commercial and artistic success. (Curiously, he was notorious for falling asleep during screenings; it may have had something to do with the brain tumor that eventually killed him, though there was also an urban myth that he had a steel plate in his head.)
His Russian-immigrant father founded a nickelodeon business at the turn of the last century; Rugoff inherited the theaters (now showing films, naturally) when the old man died.
He was a visionary, if a mildly crazy one. His theaters looked like museum displays of modern-art furniture and decoration; he had an artist build life-size dioramas of each new movie and featured them prominently in his lobbies.
His idea of elegant theaters for upscale audiences was wildly successful, pulling the center of New York cinema from grungy Times Square to the Upper East Side. Under his ministrations the opening of a new art film became a cultural event; hip audiences lined up for blocks to see movies that might barely play elsewhere in the States.
Rugoff was also a genius at old-school hucksterism. To publicize “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” he dressed employees in costume company armor and had them gallump up and down the city streets to the clip-clopping of coconuts.
Because there’s relatively little archival material available on Rugoff (a few family photos, virtually no home movies or newsreels), “Searching for Mr. Rugoff” relies heavily on talking-head interviews. These have been brilliantly edited to give the doc a specific rhythm.
And one cannot underestimate the mental/emotional/cultural charge of the many clips from films Rugoff distributed…if like me you’re a veteran of that era, it’s a hugely pleasurable wallow in nostalgia.
Somewhat less effective — though modestly interesting — is Deutchman’s research into Rugoff’s final years on Cape Cod where, after having lost his company to a hostile takeover, he spent his last years converting a century-old church into a neighborhood film society. As is often the case with stories like this, he died a pauper.
After watching this doc you are left with the conviction that Don Rugoff, whatever his personal demons, changed film culture. He’s got my thanks.
Can a horror movie be too classy for its own good?
That’s the question raised by Just Philippot’s “The Swarm,” a French entry that spends most of its time carefully picking apart a family in crisis before going all Irwin Allen in the last reel.
Virginie (Suliane Brahim) is struggling to stay afloat financially…and mentally, as it turns out.
Her family farm (she used to operate it as a goat breeding operation with her husband, but he hanged himself) is circling the drain.
Her latest venture — raising locusts (us Midwesterners would immediately identify them as big grasshoppers) to use as feed for commercial poultry operations — is collapsing. The damn bugs make a lot of noise but won’t reproduce.
Virginie’s son Gaston (Raphael Romand) is a sweet kid whose life centers on soccer and the one goat remaining from the family’s earlier business. His older sister Laura (Marie Narbonne), on the other hand, is a seething cauldron of adolescent resentments, fed up with her bullying provincial classmates and desperate to start life anew in a more copacetic environment. She blames Mom for her unhappiness.
Franck Victor’s screenplay devotes the lion’s share of it pages to exposing the tensions in the family. Virginie is so consumed with making a go of the locust operation that she’s veering into madness.
Suliame Brahim
She has a supportive friend and tentative suitor in Karim (Sfian Khammes), who runs a nearby vineyard, but the poor guy is doomed to frustration. Virginie has no time for romance.
Against these totally believable real-world issues Philippot and Victor poses a Frankenstein-ian dilemma, Virginie accidentally discovers that her locusts thrive when given a diet heavy with fresh blood. She tries offering her own body for snacking, but clearly her bug buddies are going to need more juice than she can provide.
Pretty soon the neighbor’s pets and farm animals are at risk (somebody’s been watching “Little Shop of Horrors”).
Given the movie’s title, it’s a foregone conclusion that eventually all those voracious insects are going to escape their plastic greenhouses and get to chomping.
All this is played with absolute sincerity and not a hint of camp. Which makes one wonder…is the film’s emphasis on family dynamics going to bore the horror crowd…and will the final conflagration seem simply silly to folks who take their drama seriously? (I mean, they’re only bugs, after all.)
A couple of things keep us invested in “The Swarm.” First there’s the performance of leading lady Brahim, a member of the acclaimed Comedy Francaise who does a fine job of locating the nuttiness beneath an everyday exterior. (She’s also the lead in Netflix’s “Twin Peaks”-ish series “Black Spot.”)
Then there’s the cinematography by Romain Carvanade, who I presume is behind the super close-up shots of the feeding locusts. I’m not freaked out by creepy crawlies, but if you’ve got a bug phobia this could probably generate a nightmare or two.
A shroud of been-there-done-that is draped around “Lorelei,” the feature writing/directing debut of Sabrina Doyle. At times the film seems to have been assembled from leftover parts of other movies.
But the show has been magnificently anchored by Pablo Schreiber and Jena Malone, performers who usually get supporting roles but here waste no time in seizing the material and making the most of it. In the end, they put “Lorelei” across the finish line.
The film opens with Wayland (Schreiber) leaving prison after a 15-year sentence for armed robbery. He’s met at the gates by members of his old motorcycle gang; by keeping quiet and taking the fall he spared his buddies jail time.
Now he returns to his small town in rural Oregon, moving into a church-run halfway house. But it’s all too clear that he could easily slide back into his old criminal ways; moreover, the tough-love preacher who is housing him (Trish Egan) and his parole officer (Joseph Bertot) aren’t about to cut him much slack. They’ve seen too many ex cons return to stir.
And then Wayland spots Dolores (Malone) attending the church’s support group for single moms. He and Dolores were high school lovers, and after some tentative verbal sparing (the film’s sexual subtext could raise blisters) they pick up where they left off.
Well, sorta. Dolores seems to have spent the last 15 years sleeping around. She has three kids by three different men; she gets by with a part-time gig changing sheets at a sleazy motel and collecting welfare.
So while she’s at work the reluctant Wayland is forced into the role of father figure.
Yeah, it’s a familiar narrative. Practically a cliche.
On one level “Lorelei” is a brutally honest examination of desperate love among the struggling class. The pleasure Wayland and Delores take in each other is infectious; at the same time it is diluted by the constant battle to survive and the daily indignities of poverty.
But Doyle’s screenplay should be called for excessive wokeness. Dolores’ oldest child (Chancellor Perry) is mixed race; the middle kid (Amelia Borgerding) is a furiously angry tweener; the youngest (Parker Pascoe-Sheppard) is clearly trans.
Lets see…are there any hot-button social issues we’ve left out?
But here’s the thing: It works. I got caught up in the love story and the family dynamic…so much so that not even a wildly improbable third act development (it’ll explain where the title “Lorelei” comes from) could dilute my pleasure.
Whatever Doyle’s shortcomings as a scenarist, she shows terrific control as a director.
In the end “Lorelei” emerges as a flawed but deeply felt piece of humanistic cinema, heart-tugging without sticky sentimentality.
“The Green Knight” is writer/director David Lowery’s big-screen adaptation of the 500-year-old epic poem (we don’t know the author) “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.”
As such you might expect a big dose of sword and sorcery and some major-league action/adventure violence.
Think again. Lowery’s narrative approach has more in common with Robert Bresson’s austere “Lancelot du Lac” than with, say, the atavistic carnage of “Braveheart.”
Here he is attempting cinematically to approximate the experience of reading a long poem from a distant past. In doing so he embraces storytelling that eschews rational explanations and psychological realism.
And yet “The Green Knight” is not a relic preserved in amber. The film is a visual tour de force thanks to the splendid cinematography of Andrew Droz Palermo (he shot Lowery’s “A Ghost Story,” as well as the KC-area lensed documentary “Rich Hill”), the costumes by Malgosia Turnsganza and the production design of Jade Healy.
Periodically Lowery inserts distinctively modern perspectives into this ancient tale. An example: We first meet knight-in-training Gawain (Dev Patel in a true star-making performance) awakening in a whorehouse on Christmas morning. Actually, he gets a bucket of water in the face, courtesy of his playful plebian lover (Alicia Vikander).
As he wanders through the bustling bordello in search of his boots, Gawain is teased by other guests and harlots, who kid him about spending more time partying than on his knightly training. The dialogue and camerawork bring a sense of naturalism and everyday immediacy.
Dev Patel
The movie’s distinctively modern moments coexist with a sort of formal pageantry. The result is a film that is overwhelmingly an intellectual/visual experience rather than an emotional one.
“The Green Knight” is probably going to divide audiences into lovers (it’s an overwhelmingly poetic/mystical experience) and haters (too long, too slow, not enough action).
A Yuletide celebration in the court of Gawain’s uncle King Arthur (Sean Harris) and his queen (Kate Dickie) is interrupted by the arrival of the Green Knight (Ralph Ineson), a towering figure who appears to be half tree (I was reminded of Groot from the “Guardians of the Galaxy” franchise). This ominous visitor proposes a contest. He will receive a blow from any of Arthur’s knights; in a year’s time that knight must seek out the Green Knight and stand to receive the same blow.
Young Gawain, apparently smitten with visions of glory, accepts the challenge and with Arthur’s sword strikes off the visitor’s head. The Green Knight is nonplussed…he picks up his severed noggin and rides off with a laugh and a reminder that they will meet again next Christmas.
The bulk of the film unfolds on Gawain’s trek north to meet his fate. Along the way he is befriended by a fox (Is it a real animal? A CG effect? Whatever, it’s really convincing). He is waylaid by a talky peasant (Barry Keoghan) who pilfers the remains of slain soldiers.
He spends a chaste night with a young woman named Winnifred (Erin Kellyman), and shares several days with a Lord (Joel Edgarton) and his cooly seductive wife (Vikander again).
At one point on his wanderings he encounters a migration of fog-enshrouded giants, huge naked hairless figures who might have stepped out of one of the recent “Alien” movies.
“The Green Knight” is jammed with symbolism that will probably be lost on anyone not schooled in medievalism. Some of the episodes seem arbitrary and pointless.
Much as he did with “A Ghost Story,” Lowery explores alternate realities. In one instance the camera spins to show Gawain hogtied on the ground, then as a rotting skeleton, and then alive again as he struggles to free himself.
And the last 10 minutes is a sort of “Last Temptation of Christ” fantasy in which Gawain’s mind explores the life he might have had (a life in which he is a mighty king).
At its core this is a tale about a young man who acts impulsively and then must live with the consequences; will Gawain have the inner resolve to submit to the Green Knight’s blade? Or will he bring shame on himself and Arthur’s court?
What’s remarkable about Patel’s performance is that he talks about none of this, but the emotions bubbling beneath the surface are perfectly clear. Sometimes words aren’t necessary.
If Keanu Reeve’s John Wick will kill 100 thugs to avenge his pet puppy, how far will Nicolas Cage’s truffle-hunting hermit go to retrieve his kidnapped porcine pet and coworker?
That’s the setup of writer/director Michael Sarnoski’s “Pig,” a good idea that takes itself way too seriously.
The opening moments establish the relationship of the uber-hairy Robin (Cage) and his pig colleague in a cabin in the forests of the great Pacific Northwest.
Robin — who survives without telephone, electricity, running water or even a functional vehicle — hunts truffles, the gourmet fungi that grow among the tree roots and can sell for big bucks.
He locates these delectables with the help of his swine buddy (who’s a whiz at sniffing out their prey); then sells them to Amir (Alex Wolff), who transports them in his ridiculous yellow sports car to Portland and resells the delicacies to the city’s finest restaurants.
We’ve barely able to absorb the details of Robin and Pig’s lives when tragedy strikes. One night the cabin is invaded by unseen baddies; the pig is kidnapped and Robin beaten bloody.
Refusing to even wash the gore off his face (by film’s end he resembles Jim Caviezel in the latter stages of “Passion of the Christ”), Robin takes off for the big city, first on foot and then commandeering Amir and his posh wheels.
Amir throws a blanket over the passenger seat in a probably futile effort to keep Robin’s body odor from impregnating the leather upholstery.
One of Robin’s first stops is at an underground fight club — yeah, just like the movie “Fight Club” — where our man allows himself to once more be beaten senseless in return for hints as to where his pig pal might be.
Eventually the trail leads to Amir’s estranged father (Adam Arkin), a sort of restaurant godfather who rules his culinary world through intimidation and, if necessary, violence.
Along the way we discover that Robin was once a legendary chef but dropped out 15 years earlier for unspecified reasons. Possibly it’s because he hated the direction the restaurant biz was heading ($50 for what appears to be a single berry frozen in a cloud of dry ice fumes). Even more likely it’s because Robin is seriously damaged goods.
“Pig” is Sarnoski’s feature debut; it’s a good-looking film if an emotionally and intellectually impenetrable one.
Aside from his determination to get his pig back (it’s his only friend), Robin is a glowering cipher.
That said, Cage has such a commanding screen presence that I kept watching just to see what he’d do next. This one-time Oscar winner may in recent years have descended into hackdom, but he’s a hack with astounding charisma.
As Amir, Wolff has the thankless task of playing a weak-willed poseur in constant fear of Daddy damnation.
Arkin fares somewhat better; though his character is simply preposterous, the actor finds a vulnerable center.
There are opportunities for humor here which Sarnoski studious ignores. Instead he leans heavily on the pretention button, giving the film chapter titles like “Rustic Mushroom Tort” and “Mom’s French Toast and Deconstructed Scallops.”
SPOILER ALERT!!! This film contains a forehead-slapping reveal about halfway through; unfortunately, it’s just about impossible to describe the plot without revealing the big news. So…if you want a pristine viewing experience, STOP READING RIGHT NOW!
For the rest of you, here goes:
“Blood Red Sky” is like “Die Hard” on a trans-oceanic airplane flight. With terrorists. And vampires.
It’s an utterly ridiculous idea performed with such unflinching gravitas that somehow the whole lurid mess works.
The film opens with a commercial airliner touching down at a remote military base in Scotland. There’s a terrorist situation on board. A lone passenger, a little boy, escapes from a cargo door; the authorities try to question him but the kid seems too traumatized to talk.
Flash back to a few hours earlier. Single mom Nadja (Peri Baumeister) and her 10-year-old son Elias (Carl Anton Koch) are boarding a night flight from Europe to the USA.
Nadja apparently is a cancer victim…she hides her bald head beneath a wig and has the gaunt features of someone who’s been through serious chemo. Think Noomi Rapace as a crack addict
Nadja has an appointment in NYC with a medical specialist who may have answers for her condition.
But wouldn’t you know it? There’s a bunch of international terrorists on board. Their motives are fuzzy — they are posing as Islamic extremists but that may be a cover for a more mercenary goal — and they’ve incorporated into their conspiracy a co-pilot and flight attendant.
One of them, a sadist known as Eightball (Alexander Scheer), is so perverse in his treatment of the terrified passengers that even his criminal cohorts are appalled.
The highjackers herd the passengers to the rear of the plane, separating Nadja from her emergency medical kit. We assume the injections she’s been taking have something to do with her cancer, but denied her medication she begins changing. Her eyes transform into those of a cat; her bones seem to have grown sharp beneath her features. Her teeth…well, they’re getting ugly.
Tha’s right, ladies and gents, Nadja is a vampire. Flashbacks reveal how she was bitten by one of those nasty bloodsuckers while on a family vacation (her husband didn’t make it); now she relies on injections to keep her human form. Without them she’s getting very, very hungry for blood.
You’d think a twist like that would be enough for director Peter Thorwarth and co-writers Stefan Holtz. But no. Before long the terrorists have deliberately exposed themselves to the vampire’s bite and are transforming into flesh-gnashing fiends.
So now you’ve got bad vampires (the terrorists) and a good vampire (Nadja) squaring off in an epic confrontation. The crawlspaces and cargo areas in the belly of the aircraft become a claustrophobic battleground. Elias, because he’s a tiny person, takes a key role in exploring the labyrinthian maze.
And to make things even more complicated, Nadja is fighting desperately to ignore the call of blood and retain her human consciousness. Will she be able to save little Elias before reverting 100 percent to vampirism? And what happens when the sun comes up?
The premise of “Blood Red Sky” is too ludicrous to countenance…and yet I found myself hugely entertained by the whole preposterous enterprise.
Butler's Cinema Scene 