Movie Review The Nun

The Nun (2018) 

Directed by Corin Hardy

Written by Gary Dauberman 

Starring Taissa Farmiga, Demian Bechir, Jonas Bloquet, Bonnie Aarons

Release Date September 7th, 2018

Published September 7th, 2023 

I love the visual of The Nun. Whether she's a malevolent painting or taking on a physical form that looks like The Terrifier crossed with a Nun cosplay, The Nun is a strong figure of terror. The face of actor Bonnie Aarons is twisted and contorted via makeup and effects to create a haunting visual that lingers in the imagination in the way great horror villains do. Aarons doesn't get enough credit for making this character so memorable, even iconic. Without here expressive face and the way she physically imposes this character on others is the main reason why The Nun is, perhaps, the best thing that has come from The Conjuring universe of horror movies. 

In fairness, however, The Nun is also blessed not to have the burden of the Warrens dragging her down in her solo movies. I admire Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga but they've extended the fame of a pair of con artists for far too long. The Conjuring movies are cut and paste demonic possession movies that play the same beats over and over again while playing the 'Based on True Events' card as is they can trick the audience into buying what the Warren's tried to sell the world for years, a pack of lies about their ability to speak to the dead. 

The Conjuring movies overflow with nonsense in which ghosts move furniture, dump items from open cabinets, and are a general nuisance. The Nun on the other hand proceeds from a supernatural premise and never asks that you buy into the reality of this malevolent being. The Nun is a demonic monster, it has almost limitless power, and there are only a rare few who can go against The Nun and live to tell the story. The Nun has a clear purpose, it wants to harm people so that it might affect an escape from the Abbey in which is trapped. 

Find my full length review of Horror.Media 

Movie Review: 1985

1985 (2018) 

Directed by Yen Tan

Written by Yen Tan 

Starring Cory Michael Smith, Virginia Madsen, Michael Chiklis, 

Release Date March 19th, 2018 

Published August 12th, 2018 

Director Yen Tan’s 1985 left me an emotional mess. This incredibly moving drama about a gay man returning home for the holidays to his conservative, religious, Texas family hit me right me in heart with its brave storytelling and artful construction. Filmed in 16 millimeter black and white, the film gives you a feeling of a memory being recalled with great detail, directly from the year 1985. 

1985 stars Corey Michael Smith, best known for his role on TV’s Gotham, as Adrian. Adrian moved away from his Texas home three years ago to live in New York City and, for the first time, to live openly as a gay man. Having never come out to his parents, expertly portrayed by Virginia Madsen and Michael Chiklis, Adrian decides immediately to keep himself in the closet while back home so as not to upset his family dynamic. 

Adrian’s sexuality however, is not the only secret he’s decided to keep from his family. Verbal and visual cues will slowly reveal as the film goes on that Adrian has been losing weight, he’s been getting ill frequently and in a beautifully telling moment, his beloved dog clings to his side as if to protect and comfort him. It’s not hard to suss out what Adrian’s secret is though the film does gently allow the secret to be unfolded throughout the story. 

1985 was directed by Yen Tan, a filmmaker who I am unfortunately not familiar with though this is his fourth feature film according to Wikipedia. In notes that accompanied the movie when I saw it, Tan discussed how working with AIDS patients years ago inspired him to want to tell the story of a closeted gay man and the sadness, frustration, and heartache that comes from keeping secrets so essential to who you are. 

There is a next level of sadness at play here that I am reluctant to go into. I was lucky to watch the film without having read other reviews on Wikipedia or IMDB, places that give away the secret Adrian is hiding. Again, it’s not a twist or even a major reveal, it’s an organic, growing part of the story. I just really loved watching it unfold even as the brilliant visual and vocal clues in the movie give the game away with intent. 

It’s a wonderful piece of filmmaking and it’s not intended to fool you or gut punch you, it makes sense to the plot why Adrian is hiding something and the journey toward him actually saying what is happening out loud is powerful. Actor Corey Michael Smith does an incredible job of making Adrian genial and awkward and delicately pragmatic. The secret of his sexuality isn’t really much of a secret, as we come to find out, but the way in which the film gently layers this into the characters and the story is remarkable and emotional. 

I haven’t even mentioned one of my favorite parts of 1985. Actress Jamie Chung plays Carly, Adrian’s ex-girlfriend whom he broke up with three years earlier when he left for New York. Now an aspiring stand up comic,  Carly has no idea that Adrian is gay and when the two reconnect there is some awkward and brilliantly relatable truth to their interaction. Carly may seem like an extraneous character in some ways but her presence underlines dramatic moments from Adrian’s backstory that pay off with strong emotional impact. 

1985 will be on my list of the best movies of the year. Few films have touched me as deeply as this movie has. It’s not an easy movie, it’s not a movie for an audience that doesn’t want to be challenged and it is not a movie that rewards you with easy answers. This is a deeply emotional and beautifully rendered film that, if you allow it to, will break your heart in ways that will make it stronger and more empathetic going forward. That, to me, is a better feeling than any 10 blockbusters can provide. 

What a year for Black and White movies huh? Roma dazzled us with its arrival on Netflix last week with it’s crisp, clean, black and white sleekness. And here, in 1985, we get a black and white movie that uses this type of film to give age to the story, to evoke the time it is set within and to give the film a dreamlike or memory-like feeling. The grainy, slightly dark, look of 1985 gives the film the feeling of a story being recalled from memory, a little hazy, a little fuzzy, yet recalled with detail and deep emotion, as if we were in the mind of someone recalling this story and feeling what they felt at the time. 

Movie Review Mission Impossible Rogue Nation and Ghost Protocol

Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol (2011) 

Directed by Brad Bird

Written by Josh Applebaum, Andre Nemec

Starring Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Paula Patton 

Release Date December 16th, 2011 

Mission Impossible Rogue Nation (2015) 

Directed by Christopher McQuarrie

Written by Christopher McQuarrie

Starring Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Rebecca Ferguson

Release Date July 31st, 2015 

Published July 25th, 2018 

Mission Impossible 3 made an indelible mark in my mind as the most entertaining and accomplished take on the entire Mission Impossible franchise. After seeing both Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and Mission Impossible Rogue Nation, I can now say with certainty that the series peaked with number 3. J.J Abrams' kinetic direction was artful and exciting with an eye toward drama, action and suspense all in the same package.

That’s not to say that Ghost Protocol and Rogue Nation are bad, they just lack the same clarity, focus and skill of MI3. Neither directors, Brad Bird or Christopher McQuarrie, appear capable of imposing their vision on the franchise, or at least, they didn’t impose it as well as Abrams did as each seems far more at the mercy of stunt coordinators and the daredevil antics of star Tom Cruise than Abrams was.

Ghost Protocol picks up the action of the MI story some five years after the action of MI3. Ethan Hunt is behind bars in a foreign country, accused of having murdered 6 Serbian nationals. We will eventually be told that his wife, Jules (Michelle Monaghan), a prominent part of the action in MI3, was killed, but death in a spy movie doesn’t always mean death. The big bad this time out is a man code named Cobalt (Michael Nykvist), an arms dealer with the aim of ending the world with a nuclear missile.

It will be up to Agent Hunt and his new IMF team, including Field Agent Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) and Jane Carter (Paula Patton). Carter is still reeling from the murder of her partner, Agent Hanaway (Josh Holloway, Lost) who was murdered by a killer for hire employed by Cobalt. They are joined by Analyst William Brandt (Jeremy Renner) who gets added to the team after his boss, the Secretary of the IMF (Tom Wilkinson) is murdered and the team is disavowed.

Brad Bird is a competent and highly capable director who keeps the pace up and the action well managed. Unfortunately, the film is little more than set-pieces strung together by a thin plot and a less than compelling villain. Ghost Protocol is remembered for the controversial CGI destruction of the Kremlin and a death-defying sequence in which Cruise appears to scale the outside of the world’s tallest building, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa.

Both sequences are solid and well captured with the Burj Khalifa climb coming the closest to evoking the best of the franchise. That said, they appeared to have the stunts before they had a script and wound up tailoring the story to the stunts. This was seemingly confirmed when writer Christopher McQuarrie was brought on half way into production for an uncredited rewrite of the script by Andre Nemec and Josh Applebaum.

Does this make Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol bad? No, it means that it comes up short of the legacy crafted by Mission Impossible 3. That film had big stunts and a big story to tell along with it. Ghost Protocol has ambition stunts but lacks the story to lift it to what I had hoped the series would be after MI3. Still, the movie is good enough, entertaining enough, and has just enough appeal that I don’t dislike it, but I don’t love it either.

Mission Impossible Rogue Nation, at the very least, improved upon Ghost Protocol. Here, Ethan Hunt opens the movie by being captured by the big bad, this time played by Sean Harris. Harris’ Solomon Lane has been eluding Ethan for two years since Ethan began to track him down. Lane has remained 2 steps ahead of Ethan while creating a series of tragedies intended to have a drastic effect on world markets.

Ethan is in so much hot water that the CIA, seen here in the form of a blustering Alec Baldwin, believes he is responsible for the terrorist acts caused by Lane’s outfit called, The Syndicate. In attempting to stop The Syndicate, Ethan recruits Benji to join him on the run from the CIA and they are joined by a British double agent named Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) who has infiltrated The Syndicate and is the key to getting to Lane.

Director Christopher McQuarrie both wrote and directed Mission Impossible Rogue Nation and that fact does lend some clarity to the storytelling. The conspiracy in play is a wild one and rather clever and well executed. The film is still defined by one big stunt, in which Cruise legendarily clung to the side of a plane as it was taking off, but the stunt doesn’t completely overshadow the movie as the Burj Khalifa sequence in Ghost Protocol certainly did.

McQuarrie marries the slick, shallow thrills of MI2 with a little of the grit of the original with the craftsmanship of MI3 and creates easily the second best of the then 5 film franchise. I especially enjoyed the use of Rebecca Ferguson whose lithe physicality matches that of co-star Tom Cruise. The way she floats about fluidly in major fight scenes is really cool and in keeping with the action style of most of the Mission movies. She’s a really solid addition.

Sadly, the villain of Rogue Nation is once again the weakest part of the film. Who’s Sean Harris? He’s not a bad actor but I have no reference point for who he is as an actor. He’s not remotely on the star level of the rest of the cast, even Ferguson who makes her debut in this film. Harris’s lack of a profile makes him forgettable and when compared to the best villain in the franchise, Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s exceptional, Owen Davian, he comes up well short.

The character of Solomon Lane is not all that compelling. His aims are clear but the character is a shell and a full-fledged villain should be. He has no life, no personality, he’s not tough and while he’s portrayed as super-smart, our first time seeing him, he immediately chooses not to kill Ethan Hunt even though he easily could. The sequence makes the character look silly, especially when the script gives him zero reason to keep alive the one man he’s aware could stop his agenda.

The lack of care in the details of the script of Rogue One is part of what keeps the film far from greatness. It’s still solid and has terrific stunt work and top-notch action scenes, but sadly I was hoping for more of a brain. Instead, we get yet another Tom Cruise running chase scene and another Tom Cruise motorcycle chase scene, obligatory action beats that likely existed before a script ever did.

McQuarrie is also the writer-director of Mission Impossible Fallout which hits theaters this weekend. I believe Fallout will be good but my expectations have dimmed for the franchise. I had hoped Ethan Hunt would usurp James Bond as the top movie spy of all time. Sadly, Bond’s legacy is kept safe by a star too eager for stunts and directors unable to make the stunts into a fully compelling story beyond the mere presentation of spectacle that just happens to be part of a story.

Movie Review: Destination Wedding

Destination Wedding (2018) 

Directed by Victor Levin 

Written by Victor Levin

Starring Winona Ryder, Keanu Reeves 

Release Date August 31st, 2018 

Published August 31st, 2018 

Destination Wedding stars Keanu Reeves as Frank and Winona Ryder as Lindsey, a pair of mismatched wedding guests. Frank’s brother is getting married in San Luis Obispo, a piece of information the filmmakers feel is important for us to know for some reason. Frank hates his brother and based on the evidence of the movie, he hates pretty much everyone so Frank setting aside special hatred for someone is notable. 

Lindsey, meanwhile, is Frank’s brother’s ex-fiancee. She accepted an invitation to this wedding some six years after Frank’s brother dumped her on the eve of their wedding. She’s come to San Luis Obispo in search of closure and acceptance and the ability to move on with her emotional life. And, she might be insane. The movie doesn’t deal with this fact directly, but Winona Ryder plays the character with some sort of undefined mental deficiency that, perhaps, is meant to be comedy. 

Frank’s main trait beyond extreme misanthropy is his habit of hocking phlegm. Yeah, this is a fun trait to give a character. Our introduction to Frank is him repeatedly and loudly attempting to clear his sinuses. It’s apparent that the movie thinks this is either charming or funny as they keep having him do it, multiple times throughout the movie. Somehow though the funny part of the hocking didn’t translate to those of us in the audience, it remains solely in the imagination of Keaun Reeves and writer-director Victor Levin. 

Keanu gets off easier than poor Winona Ryder who is forced to play Lindsey as what I assume is the victim of an off-screen head injury. Our introduction to Lindsey is her breathing heavily onto a dying plant. She does this and chants ‘come on photosynthesis’ and we are supposed to laugh I suppose, rather than cringe which my body did in instinctive sympathy for an actress I have always very much liked being made to look silly in a very unfunny fashion. 

Once Frank and Lindsey meet and find themselves repeatedly thrust together as the only singletons at this destination wedding, they begin to talk and immediately hate one another. The first quarter of this blessedly short 80 minute feature is Ryder and Reeves insulting one another in the most hateful and obnoxiously unfunny fashion. Imagine being trapped in a small space with a pair of obnoxiously miserable people and you get a sense of what watching Reeves and Ryder interact in Destination Wedding is like. 

I’m trying hard to imagine what either of these talented people thought would come of this unfunny, genuinely mean way their characters interact in this movie. I assume they were aware they were making a romantic comedy and not the prequel to a violent revenge movie, but I can’t be sure. Dialogue that is meant to be savagely misanthropic comes off as merely faux miserable ranting from characters we can’t stand and are yet the only characters in this movie. There are no other characters, just Lindsey and Frank the whole time. It's like being trapped in an elevator with relatives you hate but are too polite to scream at. 

When the love story began to unfold in Destination Wedding, I was dumbfounded that anyone thought these characters were capable of such a turn. Ryder and Reeves have established both of these hateful, obnoxious, miscreants as people who are more likely to commit murder-suicide than fall in love and yet we have to suffer listening to them bond over how they hate other people more than they hate each other so they must be good together. 

As the 'romance' progresses the two have one of the worst, unfunny, funny love scenes I have ever seen. Some of the hilariously funny dialogue includes Ryder telling Reeves that he looks like he's about to vomit on her. This happens during the love scene. Eventually, the romance progresses to a genuine and earnest moment when our head injury victim, Lindsey says, without a hint of irony or sarcasm, "what if our real destination was each other?" Now, I'm the one who looks like he might vomit. 

When I saw that Destination Wedding starred Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder I was sure it couldn’t be that bad. Oh how wrong I was. This is truly one of the worst movies of 2018. Even at a barely feature length 80 minutes, Destination Wedding is an unbearable disaster of a movie. Bitter, spiteful, hateful, idiotic characters pretending toward being funny misanthropes, Frank and Lindsey aren’t romantic comedy characters, they are the half-hearted offspring of screenwriters who watch half of a Judd Apatow movie and think they get the gist.

Movie Review: Escape Plan 2 Hades

Escape Plan 2 Hades (2018) 

Directed by Steven C. Miller

Written by Miles Chapman 

Starring Sylvester Stallone, Jesse Metcalf, Dave Bautista, Curtis Jackson

Release Date June 29th, 2018

Published June 29th, 2018 

I have seen amateur movies on YouTube, shot on an IPhone, that have better special effects than the cheeseball fluff featured in the new movie Escape Plan 2: Hades. This Sylvester Stallone starring sequel to the not-so-great to begin with, 2013 feature, Escape Plan starring Sly and Arnold Schwarzenegger, is among the worst movies of 2018. Bad special effects, inept direction, and abysmal editing make Escape Plan 2: Hades, nearly impossible to endure.

Once again Stallone is playing the character of security expert Ray Breslin. Here Ray and his team, including Jesse Metcalf, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson and Jamie King, are hired to rescue hostages in a foreign country by developing an executing an ‘escape plan,’ get it? When the escape plan goes bad, Ray is forced to part ways with two members of his team, Jasper (Wes Chatham) and Shu (Xiaming Huong).

After firing Jasper, Ray let’s Shu take  a leave of absence and from there, Shu goes home to Thailand and reunites with his cousin, a tech millionaire. The cousin is wanted for his deus ex machina technology and when he’s kidnapped, Shu gets taken as well. The two end up in Hades, a state of the art prison, said to be inescapable. Naturally, when Ray finds out his buddy is missing he knows what he needs, as escape plan.

My plot description is intentionally snarky but the movie deserves it. Little care is taken by director Stephen C. Miller to make Escape Plan 2: Hades watchable so the film deserves my condescending descriptors. Miller’s direction is borderline haphazard, as if we’re lucky when he’s able to plant his camera in the direction of the actors. The editing is employed to try and hide the directorial and storytelling deficiencies, using quick cuts to try and distract from the bad production design and bored acting.

Sly Stallone looks as if he’s not getting enough sleep these days. His speech has always been a tad slow but here, words fall from his mouth as if pushed with great effort but little energy or life. He doesn’t appear to care much about what he’s saying and comes off as content to deliver the minimum effort needed for his check. Director Miller tries to cover for his star’s disinterest by giving newcomer Xiaming Huong most of the heavy lifting but his martial arts can’t overcome Miller’s inability to capture martial arts in a visually interesting fashion.

The fight scenes in Escape Plan 2: Hades are nearly as sloppy as the special effects are laughable. Huong appears to be a capable fighter but the slapdash camera work and quick cut editing do more to hide his abilities than to exploit them. There are times during major fight scenes where it was impossible to even locate the lead characters amid the chaos of the staging of these scenes.

The CGI of Escape Plan 2 is camp level bad. The effects rendering on something as routine as muzzle flair from a handgun are laughably inept with tiny fireballs that look like cotton candy popping out of a gun. A big explosion in the opening of the film looked like an effect from the legendary modern bad movie Birdemic: Shock and Terror. That film however, at the very least, was entertainingly terrible, Escape Plan 2: Hades is merely embarrassingly cringe inducing.

Just what the heck was Dave Bautista thinking when he accepted this role? Was he desperate to share the screen with Sly Stallone? Bautista is billed as the second star of Escape Plan, equal to Stallone and yet he’s barely in the movie. Bautista doesn’t even have a fight scene, content to just hold a gun in one scene and fire the gun while lightly jogging toward danger later in the movie. Bautista matches Stallone’s lack of energy with his own barely there performance.

Escape Plan 2: Hades was supposed to be released theatrically, nationwide this weekend but someone thought better of that idea. Instead, this abysmal effort will haunt the DVD and Blu Ray racks as of Friday, tempting Stallone completists and those who can be tricked into thinking Bautista is doing another Drax like character. Don’t be fooled, Bautista is barely there and Stallone, in a sense, is barely there as well in one of the worst movies of 2018.

Movie Review: Dark Crimes

Dark Crimes (2018)

Directed by Alexandros Avranas 

Written by Jeremy Brock

Starring Jim Carrey, Martin Csokas, Charlotte Gainsbourg

Release Date May 18th, 2018

Published May 18th, 2018

Dark Crimes is a whole lot of nonsense. While I appreciate that Jim Carrey is taking a risk and playing a role well outside our perception of him as a performer, Dark Crimes is a risk that should not have been taken. This Poland set mystery involving a murder among a violent sex cult is so poorly constructed and so nonsensically plotted that even if Jim Carrey had been brilliant in his offbeat, against the grain, performance, it wouldn’t have mattered against this awful piece of storytelling.

In Dark Crimes, Jim Carrey stars as Tadek, a veteran detective in a major city in Poland. At one point, we’re told that Tadek is the last good cop in Poland but the movie does little to demonstrate that. Tadek is investigating the murder of a man who was found bound in an S & M style and dropped in a river. Tadek’s top suspect is a writer named Kozlov (Martin Csokas) whose latest book, a thriller, describes a murder exactly like the one Tadek is investigating.

The details depicted in the book, which we hear as Tadek is listening to the audiobook of Kozlov’s bestseller, are uncannily like the murder and Tadek is certain that Kozlov is the killer. That is, until he continues down the rabbit hole of this sex cult which is made up of some of the most powerful men in Poland, including Tadek’s work rival, Greger (Robert Wieckiewicz). Thus, Tadek had better be right before he goes so far he can’t come back.

That’s an okay thumbnail of Dark Crimes but it contains a good deal of inference on my part. Dark Crimes is so nonsensically assembled that it is impossible to actually know what is happening. Nudity and an orgy and a murder give us a sense of what the plot is about, and it certainly makes for a jarring opening to the movie, but then the movie abandons the sex cult in favor of one on one staring contests between Carrey and Csokas that stagnate an already sluggish story.

The assemblage of Dark Crimes is almost painful to piece together. A number of scenes appear to have significant revelations but the movie is so clumsy that I am not sure what was being revealed in what appeared to be intended as revelatory scenes. One scene finds Carrey reacting to something for a good long while and when we finally see what he’s reacting to, it’s so tangential to the plot of Dark Crimes that his intense psychic pain barely registers.

Charlotte Gainsbourg, whose work with Lars Von Trier likely made her time on Dark Crimes feel like a cakewalk, co-stars here as a woman abused in the sex cult. She’s also the girlfriend of Kozlov though she tells Carrey that the relationship with Kozlov is over before the two sleep together in one of the least sexy sex scenes I’ve ever seen. Is Gainsbourg’s character a frightened victim seeking protection or a sexy scheming killer? I have no idea and the movie is too vague and poorly put together for me to even venture a guess as to the nature of Gainsbourg's character or any other character for that matter, including Carrey's Tadek. 

The ending is the most nonsensical of bit of all. I watched and then re-watched the end of Dark Crimes in the vain hope that I could figure out what happened and two viewings yielded no definitive answer. The final moment is captured so poorly, literally at a bizarre distance at a cantilevered angle, that the fate of Jim Carrey’s character is unknown as the credits began to roll.

I will say, aside from a desperately unneeded close-up of Carrey's twisted face during a love scene, ugh, Dark Crimes is great looking movie. The cinematography, especially on a high quality Blu-Ray, looks phenomenal. Poland looks beautiful and foreboding, a character in its own right that in a better movie would matter to the plot. But not here, not among the skill free nonsense on display in Dark Crimes.

Dark Crimes is undoubtedly among the worst movies of 2018. Jim Carrey’s bold decision to play a character wildly out of his comfort zone, all the way down to a silly sounding Polish accent, is almost laughably terrible. I admire the big swing Carrey takes here but perhaps he should reign in the ambition just a little. Maybe start with a clever little independent feature delivered by a promising young upstart director. Try going to film festivals and looking for young and hungry filmmakers who could use your star power to get a movie made. Most importantly Jim, stay the heck out of Poland.

Column The Best Sequence in Hereditary

Hereditary (2018) 

Directed by Ari Aster 

Written by Ari Aster 

The Best Sequence in Hereditary 

The big death scene in Hereditary is the best scene in any movie in 2018. This article is about to go into great detail about this scene so if you have not seen Hereditary, which I feel is the best movie of 2018, you should stop reading after this introductory paragraph and come back after you have watched Ari Aster’s remarkable, debut masterpiece. This article will openly reveal a pivotal and shocking death of one of the main characters in Hereditary. 

A primer: Hereditary stars Toni Collette as Annie, an artist and stay at home mother. Annie crafts elaborate models of daily scenes from her home life, from the seemingly mundane, to the funeral of her recently deceased mother. Annie’s mother has recently died as the story begins but Annie is strangely lacking in profound emotion. Annie’s husband, Steve (Gabriel Byrne), is dutiful and supportive. While Annie and Steve’s son, Peter (Alex Wolff), is a typically aloof and above it all teenager. 

Daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro), however, appears to take her grandmother’s passing far harder than anyone else. Her emotion is not outward, per se, Charlie is a special needs child though the film is vague on her exact condition. Charlie expresses her grief in odd behaviors that include a disturbing fascination with a dead bird which she finds at school and brings home. What she does with the bird from there you can discover in the film. It’s a terrifying visual detail that pays off in terrific horror. 

Our scene is set when Peter wants to go to a party and his mother instructs him to take Charlie to the party with him. While Peter is off getting high at the party, Charlie has a piece of cake, unaware that the cake has nuts and she has an allergic reaction. As a paranoid and terrified Peter rushes Charlie to the hospital, Charlie struggles to breath and eventually leans her head out of the car window to get more air. 

An out of control Peter nearly crashes the car into a telephone pole but as he swerves to miss it, Charlie’s head strikes the pole and is taken completely off. Director Ari Aster never shows us what happened to Charlie. There is no outward gore in the scene. Instead, in a masterful, and far more terrifying move, Aster keeps the camera on Peter as the tragedy that has just taken place slowly dawns on him. 

A shocked Peter stays in the car, afraid to look behind him and confirm what has taken place. He lingers for some time before finally putting the car in gear and beginning to slowly drive away from the scene, a lonely, empty, highway not far from his family home but far enough from any city to remain empty for some time. Peter drives home and the only time Aster leaves Alex Wolff’s stunned face is to establish as Peter pulls into the family driveway, gets out of the car as if lost in a fugue state and wanders inside. 

We return to Peter’s incomprehensibly stunned face as he climbs into bed and lies there for hours unable to sleep and unable to remain awake to the terror that has befallen him. We sit with Alex as the night passes into morning. We stay on Alex’s face as the house comes alive with the sound of Alex’s parents rising and beginning their day. The camera never cuts away from Alex, the terror that is about to unfold is mostly in sound design and scraps of mundane dialogue. 

Annie and Steve call out for Charlie and Peter to come to breakfast. Annie begins to worry where Charlie is. She calls for her. She begins to go to the door, we hear only her footsteps and the sound of the front door opening, we’re still on Alex’s profoundly horrified and paralyzed face. The door opens, we hear the crunch of Annie’s footsteps on the rocks in the driveway, we hear her approach the car and finally, we hear a blood curdling scream before we finally cut away. 

Great directing is about choices and the choices that Ari Aster makes in this moment to stick closely to the face of actor Alex Wolff is a daring and ingenious choice. The horror of the moment can hardly match the horror of what we assume this moment looks like in reality. Our imagination fills in the horror and because we care for Peter, our horror is magnified by a deep and stomach churning empathy. 

This, for me, is among the finest pieces of direction I have ever seen in a horror or genre movie and really, among any kind of movie. It’s a relatively simple manipulation of our collective imagination and yet many directors would ruin it by trying to shock us with horror visuals. Aster knows that our imagination of this moment is more powerful than mere gore. Besides, the rest of the movie has plenty of gore to satisfy that part of our genre hunger.  

Movie Review Hunter Killer

Hunter Killer (2018) 

Directed by Donovan Marsh

Written by Arne Schmidt, Jamie Moss

Starring Gerard Butler, Gary Oldman, Common, Linda Cardellini, Toby Stephens 

Release Date October 26th, 2018

Published October 26th, 2018

Hunter Killer stars Gerard Butler as submarine commander Joe Glass. Glass has just been handed his very first command, aboard the USS Arkansas at a most inopportune moment. It is Joe’s task to take his hunter killer class sub crew into heavily guarded Russian territory and find out what happened to another hunter killer class sub which was sunk in the area, assumedly by a Russian sub that was also downed in the fight. 

What Joe and his crew find is something quite unexpected, both subs appear to have been attacked not by each other but by a third sub which subsequently begins attacking Joe’s sub. The Arkansas survives this encounter but having just sent another Russian sub to the bottom of the ocean, the international incident they were investigating may be exploding into World War 3 unless Joe can quickly figure out why this Russian sub has gone rogue. 

Meanwhile, back in Washington D.C, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Charles Donnegan (Gary Oldman) has tasked Rear Admiral John Fisk with sending a team of Green Berets into Russian territory so they can get close to where the Russian President Zakarin (Alexander Diachenko) and his top military secretary, Admiral Durov (Michael Gor) are holed up near where the subs have been downed. 

What the Green Berets, led by Bill Beaman (Toby Stephens) , find is that there is a coup in process, the Russian President is the hostage of his top military secretary and the secretary is bent on starting World War 3. Now three arms of the American military, along with an advisor from the NSA (Linda Cardellini) must work together to come up with a plan to rescue the Russian President and avert World War 3. 

I must admit, that sounds like a pretty great description of a first person shooter video game. Sadly, Hunter Killer is a movie and thus not nearly as much fun. Hunter Killer is the latest in a long line of lunkheaded military rehashes from Millennium Entertainment, the group that rescued Gerard Butler from the Hollywood ash heap and given him a second act as the purest example of lunkheaded, ill-conceived 80’s action movies, the new millennium Michael Dudikoff. 

For those not among the 10 people who got that Michael Dudikoff reference, Dudikoff was the bargain action hero of Cannon Films, the group behind such glorious 80’s cheese as American Ninja, Avenging Force and the Missing in Action Franchise. Those examples should give you a good idea of the quality of Hunter Killer, we’re not talking high end action here, we’re talking about the kind of slapdash trash that used to go directly to drive-ins and eventually, directly to VHS. 

Hunter Killer is supremely dumb and not in a fun way. Rather, Hunter Killer is dumb in the most boringly competent ways imaginable. Hunter Killer was directed by a newcomer named Donovan Marsh who is just inexperienced enough and just talented enough to miss the point of the movie he’s making. He doesn’t appear to understand that Hunter Killer is cheesy and thus he commits to the idea with all his talent, not realizing that everyone in the cast knows they’re working on something cheap and disposable. They know the company they’re working for. 

Butler and Oldman have worked with Millennium Entertainment for years. Butler is there because Millennium was the only company willing to touch him after his toxic run of bombs from 2008 to 2011 that culminated with him playing a leprechaun in an almost career endingly bad segment of Movie 43. Oldman worked with Millennium because his name was just big enough to work on the box cover of a direct to DVD crime movie and their checks weren’t bouncing. 

No surprise to learn that Hunter Killer was on the shelf for a while before Oldman re-established himself among the Hollywood elite with his Academy Award winning performance in Darkest Hour. Hunter Killer is the kind of movie that if it had come out around Oscar time last year it might have cost him Best Actor just as many speculated that Norbit cast Eddie Murphy Best Supporting Actor by arriving around the time he was nominated for Dreamgirls. 

We know Hunter Killer has been moldering on the shelf for a while because one of the supporting actors, Michael Nyqvist died more than 18 months ago. It’s tragic that a fine, under-recognized pro like Nyqvist has Hunter Killer as the last thing on his resume but at least he was gone before the world had seen what a terrible film he’d closed his fine career with. Here’s hoping he was well compensated. 

I realize that some people enjoy this stinky cheese of a movie but it’s definitely not for me. Butler is his usually dopey self, swaggering about spitting nonsense dialogue in his god-awful American accent. He doesn’t appear to care that he’s not acting but caricaturing American swagger in the most unfunny way possible. It’s hard to know if I pity Butler for his complete lack of talent or if I am meant to laugh at his dimwitted burlesque attempt at bringing back the 80’s action movie. 

Hunter Killer is bad in a most bland and peculiar fashion. It’s not shot poorly, it’s inoffensive in that the jingoism is tempered by having so many foreigners lead the cast of this American action movie, Butler, Oldman, and Toby Stephens, are not Americans and appear to have no interest in selling America f*** Yeah attitude that a true 80’s action movie would. Had this film actually starred Michael Dudikoff it would have ended with him planting an American flag in the heart of the dead foreign secretary while American jets flew overhead dropping tiny American flags. 

I guess, in that sense, we can consider Hunter Killer restrained. Not any good, but restrained. Unfortunately that restraint keeps the movie too tasteful to be bad in a fun way. Instead, the film is bad for being deathly dull, populated by bored actors either over-performing or under-performing masculine military cliches and spouting nonsense jargon that sounds cool but comes off like boys playing with toys and not serious-minded military adults. 

Documentary Review: American Meme

The American Meme (2018) 

Directed by Bert Marcus 

Written by Documentary 

Starring Paris Hilton, Josh Ostrovsky, Hailey Baldwin, D.J Khaled

Release Date December 7th, 2018 

Published December 7th, 2018

American Meme is a recent document on Netflix that tells the story of a group of people who are ‘internet famous.’ What that means essentially is that they have achieved a level of notoriety on Instagram that has reached a level that in some ways transcends our popular culture. The documentary was directed by Bert Marcus as a rather dim profile of these internet famous people other than an actual investigation of this truly bizarre phenomenon. 

The documentary opens on Paris Hilton. In case you perhaps thought that her pop culture profile had diminished since she hasn’t been on television in several years, Hilton is still out there and her medium of choice is Instagram where she has more than 50 million followers. The main takeaway from this short segment is how according to Hilton herself, her family is concerned about how much time she spends with her online fans, including allowing them to stay at her house. 

The film proceeds next, and briefly, into the life of Brittary Furlan who has made her life on social media. Furlan does characters, impressions and straight up goofy nonsense. The documentary captures her as she is first performing an impression of Paris Hilton and then sets herself up for a photo shoot in which she recreates a famous Beyonce pose while holding an oversized burrito. The scene ends sadly when she finds that a rival called The Fat Jewish has recreated the same pose. 

Josh Ostrovsky is better known as The Fat Jewish, don’t ask about the name. The film details mostly his pictures with his dogs and his love of Paris Hilton. The Fat Jewish was famous most recently for stealing bits from comedians and posting them on his Instagram as his own jokes but America Meme does nothing to cover Josh Ostrovsky’s controversial side. Instead they allowed him to play up how he managed to get invited to the Washington Correspondents Dinner and got a picture with President Obama. 

This vapid documentary is nearly nearly as vapid as the meme worthy people it portrays. Model Emily Ratajkowski shows up for a moment to talk about how she became famous in Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines video and then she’s gone. DJ Khaled is another celebrity featured talking about how he documents nearly every aspect of his life on Instagram. Everything from his breakfast, lunch and dinner to his successes as a rap music producer. 

The worst of those profiled is a photographer named Kirill whose fame is based basically on light pornography, not unlike Girls Gone Wild. Kirll’s interview is hard to watch as his obnoxiousness radiates through the screen. I don’t have a problem with nudity, I am not a prude, I just really don’t like this guy based off of the interviews in American Meme. Kirill has been repeatedly kicked off of Instagram until he finally changed his name to SlutWhisperer and suddenly the platform just let him be for whatever reason. At least the name indicates his obnoxiousness. 

Kathy Hilton is the only person who really comes off well in this movie. According to what is in this documentary, she never wanted this for her daughters. Based on this information, much of what became Paris Hilton’s infamy came without her mother’s influence. Kathy is portrayed not as some out of touch stage mom, but a reasonable and concerned parent who expresses genuine concern regarding the ways in which her daughter’s celebrity emerged. 

American Meme briefly flirts with something meaningful in both the relationship between Kathy and Paris and in dealing directly and honestly with Paris’s sex tape. Paris expresses genuine sadness  over how the tape came to be. When Paris talks about how the tape changed her life and prevented her from reaching her potential, it’s honestly moving. It’s hard to feel much sympathy for someone of such ludicrous privilege but I can say I did feel for her here. 

That’s about as close to depth as you are going to get in American Meme. The documentary is about the lowest form of modern celebrity. Instagram is this empty place full of self-involved, obnoxious people who have made ridiculous amounts of money for doing things that would have had them in detention in High School. Or there is Kirill who is basically a pornographer posing as a provocateur. 

If you are fascinated by the culture that your kids and grandkids are investing in, American Meme is kind of valuable in that way. It’s a cautionary warning to make sure that you are keeping a close eye on what your kids are doing on social media. Pay close attention to your kids and if they are following these people on social media, heed that and be afraid, be very, very afraid.

Documentary Review: Free Solo

Free Solo (2018)

Directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin

Written by Documentary

Starring Alex Honnold, Tomy Caldwell 

Release Date September 28th, 2018

Published September 26th, 2018 

Free Solo is one of the most strange and harrowing experiences I have had at the movies in 2018. This deification of free climber Alex Honnold which attempts to portray Honnold as a heroic figure and not a man with a death wish or a callous disregard for life, is also wildly, enthralling. Free Solo contains a full 20 minute sequence that is one of the most riveting of this or any year as we watch Honnold do something no one has ever done before and lived to tell. 

Free Solo introduces Alex Honnold as a legend already in progress. Among rock climbers, Alex is a God. Alex has made some of the most difficult climbs in history, all around the globe and all without the use of safety equipment. What Alex does is called Free Solo and it very simply means that he climbs mountains without the use of a rope, a harness or anything else that could keep him alive if he were to lose his grip and fall from hundreds of feet in the air. 

We meet a restless Alex as he is once again pondering an attempt at the most difficult Free Solo Climb on American soil. No one in history has completed a free solo climb of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park in California but Alex has had the idea to do it for some time. As Alex recounts in the documentary, he had been to ‘El Cap’ three years in a row with the intent of possibly making the attempt at a free solo, only to back out. 

Nerves are a rarity for Alex and we don’t really know what it was that drove him to abandon his previous attempts. Was he afraid? Did his research of the mountain, climbing with safety equipment, discourage him? Don’t expect to find out much about Alex’s thought process. A key scene in Free Solo has Alex undergo an MRI to see if his brain works any differently than normal people and indeed, his amygdala, the part of the brain that senses an emergency or fear, is less active than the average brain. So, we can rule out fear, for the most part. 

Were it not for Alex’s girlfriend, a non-climber named Sanni, we might not learn much of anything about Alex beyond his climbing exploits. He’s not a big personality, he’s not particularly charismatic, he’s friendly enough but if you were to ask about anything other than climbing rocks it’s easy to imagine his level of discomfort or disinterest in any other topic. Rock Climbing is everything for Alex Honnold and El Cap is the closest thing he has to a religious experience. 

Free Solo was directed by Honnold’s friends Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin a married couple and fellow climbers who’ve been with Alex for a few years. They too have an obsession with climbing as their previous director effort was Meru which followed Chin’s ascent of the 4000 foot mountain climb in the Himalayas on a rock known as ‘the shark fin.’ Rock climbing, as portrayed in Meru and especially here in Free Solo is portrayed as pure obsession. 

There is a dark complexity to Free Solo that is inescapable for those of us in the audience. Free Solo at once is quite direct about the danger of free solo climbing and yet still manages to portray Alex Honnold as a hero. There is a sequence in Free Solo in which we hear about the number of people, some of whom are contemporaries of Alex, men he had admired and emulated who have died, falling from incredible heights during a free solo climb. 

Alex is almost indifferent to these facts. Alex is downright callous in his disregard of how these men died. The filmmakers are similarly unaffected by these scenes that they chose to include. They don’t so much as confront Alex with these men’s deaths as offer these men's’ lives as a plot point in order to demonstrate how incredible what Alex is doing truly is. It’s not hard to imagine that these scenes are in the movie simply to deflect the idea that they are simply making a hagiography of Alex that glories in his manly pursuit of his dangerous vocation. 

That would, at least, be a more honest movie. Instead, what we get is a movie that is rather dismissive of how dangerous free solo climbing is in favor of showing how cool free solo climbing is. Indeed, I cannot deny that free solo climbing is cool looking. I can’t sit here and pretend I wasn’t riveted with car wreck fascination over Alex’s climb, even as I knew he had survived it. Much like Nascar, we pretend that this is about the remarkable challenge but we secretly, darkly, are watching for something horrible that might happen. 

Do I recommend Free Solo? Yes, it’s undeniably compelling even as it is uncomfortably uncritical of how it glorifies an activity that will get more than a few people killed. Free Solo will inspire someone to want to try what Alex did. You could say this about a number of different movies but there is something more disquieting about Free Solo and how it appears to invite new daredevils to be the next Alex by making him a hero just for not falling to his death. 

The lengthy segment of Free Solo in which Alex Honnold is making his climb to the top of El Capitan is among the most exciting, unnerving and compelling scenes in any movie in 2018. There are very few words, just grunts and brief sounds updating the crew on where Alex is on the mountain. The crew is just as transfixed as we are and while the silence was certainly a dramatic choice, it was also because they are as absorbed in this sight as we are. These scenes are why I can’t dislike Free Solo even as I am uncomfortable with it. 

Movie Review: Zen Dog

Zen Dog (2018)

Directed by Rick Darge

Written by Rick Darge 

Starring Kyle Gallner, Celia Diane, Adam Herschman 

Release Date June 22nd, 2018

Published June 23rd, 2018 

Zen Dog stars Kyle Gallner from Shameless as Reed, a boring man stuck in a routine. He has a unique job attempting to create virtual reality tours of cities he’s never been to. Reed’s life is upended when his friend Dwayne (Adam Herschman) comes to stay. Dwayne interrupts all of Reed’s well crafted routine, messes up his apartment and generally throws Reed’s life into a general chaos.

One night Dwayne sees Reed having a nightmare, something that Reed admits is a regular occurrence. Dwayne claims to have a solution to Reed’s problem, lucid dreaming. Using a special kind of tea that he curiously refuses to reveal the origins of, Dwayne claims that Reed can control his dreams and get away from his recurring nightmare. Reed is dubious of Dwayne’s claims but tries the drink anyway.

In Reed’s dream, his name is Mud and he’s just quit a job where someone has just taken their life. The revelation sets Mud on a cross country odyssey from Los Angeles to New York City with a bizarre stop in Las Vegas and a fortuitous stop in Denver, Colorado. It is in Denver where Mud meets Maya (Celia Diane), a beautiful French woman with nowhere to go after breaking up with her boyfriend. Maya agrees to join Mud for a day which becomes a week and then a full romantic road trip.

Zen Dog can be confounding if you allow it to be but if you hang in there and get on the film’s unique vibe you will be rewarded. First time writer-director Rick Darge is a cinematographer turned director and his remarkable visual style carried me past my reservations about confusing story threads, including one about a character played by Clea Duvall that goes absolutely nowhere. The style of Zen Dog, the unique use of color saturation and the clever production design and costume pushed me past my reservations or confusion.

Zen Dog is a beautiful, meditative art piece featuring a lead performance by Kyle Gallner that is warm and inviting. Gallner’s unusual face is a great asset to his work here as he sleepiness, his heavy lidded eyes are a lovely way of delineating Reed from the much more lively, smiling and charismatic Mud, even as they are apparently the same person. Gallner’s face is so different yet the same from Reed to Mud that, much like the lively visual style of the film, it helps get you into both stories being told.

There is a legitimately Terence Malick quality to Zen Dog. It’s not nearly as polished or confident as a Malick film like Tree of Life or To the Wonder but the crisp visuals and the exploration of the psyche is similar. Like Malick, Darge likes to use changes in color as a visual shorthand for a memory or a dream. The desaturated look of Reed’s apartment and brightly colored Volkswagen that Mud drives are each lovely in their own way and help differentiate where we are in each story. It’s a lovely way to visually cue a story.

Celia Diane is wonderfully cast as a manic pixie dream girl. Diane’s face and manner have a lovely dream-like quality in the way she moves like a dancer, so effortlessly. Her French-ness is part of the fantasy, especially if you’re a movie fan. There is a 60’s quality to Mud’s journey, from his uniquely styled jacket, covered with 60’s art to his VW’s psychedelic paint job. If you’re a cinema snob of the 60’s then all you wanted in the world was a road trip with a beautiful French out of a Godard fantasy. That’s Celia Diane.

I am reading way more into Zen Dog than most maybe, probably because this kind of movie is right up my alley. In reality, Zen Dog is not a movie for all audiences. If you desperately need a linear story with a conventional plot, Zen Dog is not for you. If you are impatient, Zen Dog is not a movie for you. If you are not someone who gets swept up in beautiful visuals, Zen Dog is not for you. If however, you have a love for great cinematography, costumes and the romance of cinema, Zen Dog is exactly the kind of movie you’ve been looking for.

Zen Dog is available now to rent via most Video On-Demand or Streaming Services and is on Blu Ray in some stores. 

Movie Review: A Private War

A Private War (2018) 

Directed by Matthew Heineman

Written by Arash Amel 

Starring Rosamund Pike, Jamie Dornan, Tom Hollander, Stanley Tucci 

Release Date November 2nd, 2018

Published November 6th, 2018 

A Private War stars Rosamund Pike (Gone Girl) as Marie Colvin, famed war journalist who was killed in a bombing attack in Syria in 2012. To her dying breath, Marie Colvin was a reporter, fighting to bring the facts of the story to the masses with the power of words. It was what she’d done since the 80’s when she became one of the first western journalists to interview Muammar Gaddafi when he was the name in middle eastern terror as the leader of Libya. 

The story begins on a shot of devastation in Homs, Syria where Marie was killed in 2012. We then quickly flashback to 2001 when Marie was reporting on the conflict in East Timor, Sri Lanka. Against the explicit instructions of the government, Marie went to interview members of the Tamil Tigers who were fighting a vicious, inhuman war in East Timor and were ravaged by starvation and violence. 

It was during this event that Marie was nearly killed when government backed forces attacked the rebel guides leading Marie back to a safe area where she was to write and report her story. Even after Marie told the soldiers that she was a journalist, she was nearly struck by an RPG fired by government soldiers. In that attack Marie lost sight in her left eye but still found a way to write 3000 words about the conflict and do so in time for her deadline. 

The attack in Sri Lanka however, would have long term effects on Marie as few stories had. Marie suffered from PTSD, something she dismissed but her repeated nightmares and increased reliance on alcohol indicated was true. Even this was not enough to keep Marie from going to Afghanistan and then Iraq in the wake of the September 11th attacks. It was Marie Colvin and her photographer who, against the explicit instructions of the American government and Iraqi leaders, helped to uncover Saddam Hussein’s horrific mass graves in 2003. 

A Private War bounces around in time to an occasionally confusing degree. The film does use captions to orient us to what time we are in but it’s up to us to catch up to where we are, which might be Marie’s apartment in London in the midst of a nightmare or some foreign journalist hangout in some unnamed war zone. Director Matthew Heineman is a documentarian by trade so perhaps the weaknesses of the story structure of A Private War come from inexperience in the structure of a narrative film as opposed to the more edit heavy word of documentary. 

That said, Heineman is exactly the right director for Marie Colvin’s story. Heineman’s time in the documentary world placed him in many of the same dangerous circles of the Marie Colvin’s of the world. Heineman’s previous documentary feature, City of Ghosts was filmed in Raqqa, Syria among a group of citizen journalists who likely would have been inspired by Marie Colvin had they known her. Raqqa is just 4 hours from Homs, where Marie was killed. 

Heineman’s style is strong, especially considering that the move from the intimate digital of documentary to the more filmic and controlled style of narrative feature can be jarring for some directors. A Private War is a great looking movie and that should come as no surprise as it was lensed by Academy Award winner Robert Richardson, Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarentino protégé. The film has a similarly hazy, heady quality to Richardson’s work for Scorsese. 

Rosamund Pike is a complete badass in A Private War. She captures Marie Colvin as a human character in a way that we’re rarely allowed to see a woman in a movie. It’s not merely warts and all,  it’s honesty and bravery and the warts and all. Not only is Pike’s Marie tough, she’s also super sexy in a way that is similar to the swaggering way actors like Richard Gere are sexy when they play rebel journalists in war zones. 

Pike’s femininity is enhanced by her tenacity. The film shows her being bolder and crazier than some of her male counterparts and then shows her completely nude, stripping bare your perceptions of what it means to be tough and feminine. It’s a striking scene and one in which the nudity matters, it’s a demonstration of her character, a statement about her sexuality and desirability and how these are not separate qualities from toughness and intelligence. 

Rosamund Pike is on her way to a Best Actress nomination if there is justice in the world. Her Marie Colvin deserves that. This performance and this person deserve that tribute. It’s a shame that Marie Colvin didn’t receive this kind of recognition when she was alive to revel in it. She had already earned her stripes even before she helped put a face on the crisis in Syria and not merely her own. It was Marie Colvin’s stories about the dead and the dying in Syria that put the crisis in Syria into the homes and minds of the world and in ways many world powers would prefer she hadn’t. 

A Private War is imperfect as a movie, it’s far too episodic in nature to quite satisfy as a narrative feature but Rosamund Pike’s performance goes a long way to correct many of the qualms I had with the narrative structure of the movie. Pike is incredible and for her, A Private War is an absolute must-see.

Movie Review: Destroyer

Destroyer (2018) 

Directed by Karyn Kusama 

Written by Phil Hay, Matt Manfredi 

Starring Nicole Kidman, Sebastian Stan, Toby Kebbell, Tatiana Maslany, Bradley Whitford 

Release Date December 25th, 2018 

Published December 22nd, 2018

Destroyer stars Nicole Kidman as Erin Bell, a former undercover cop turned burned out homicide detective. We get two sides of Erin Bell, her life when she was promoted from a Sheriff’s Deputy to being an undercover operative embedded in a bank robbery gang, to today when Erin looks as if life has her thoroughly defeated. Oftentimes simply being de-glammed is enough to make us take notice of a performance but Kidman brings a genuine edge that goes beyond her looks and manner in Destroyer.  

We meet Detective Bell when she arrives in bad shape at a crime scene. At the scene, a body is laid out and Bell indicates she recognizes the corpse. Other detectives give us a strong sense of how Detective Bell is viewed by the rest of her department, they want her to leave the crime scene and let them handle it. That's likely because she looks as if she hasn’t slept in days and is in no shape to work. They have no idea how right they are. 

Destroyer was directed by the ingenious Karyn Kusama who is best known for her debut feature, Girlfight, about a female boxer. That film was notable in a similar way to Destroyer in that Michelle Rodriguez took a traditionally male character and invested it with a uniquely feminine toughness. Kusama is also known for the horror movie Jennifer’s Body which in recent months has been getting another look from critics who’ve taken note of the strong feminist themes that run throughout Kusama’s work.

This is notable in Destroyer in how Kidman is playing the kind of hard bitten, cynical character usually reserved for male protagonists. Detective Bell has faults that we’ve seen before in male characters but that get flipped around with it coming from a female perspective and it does freshen up the cliche a great deal. Kidman doesn’t play up any mannish qualities, it’s just that the specific traits of this character are usually assigned to men. 

It’s a fascinating performance and while I have focused too much on Kidman’s looks, I am doing so because her looks, the features, the worn, lived in, well-earned wrinkles and generally dishevelled look is an important part of this character. She's unvarnished for a reason, she’s given up on the basic comforts of life. Something so traumatic has happened that she’s turned most of her life over to either her job or to the hard drinking that helps to cope with the job and her memories, fears and shame. 

She’s also neglected her daughter, Shelby (Jade Pettyjohn) who appears to be headed down a wrong path, one all too similar to Erin’s. The relationship between Erin and her daughter has always been strained; Erin found out she was pregnant on the same day that Shelby’s father was killed in a gun battle. I won’t spoil the role that this played in Erin’s undercover work or the dark secret she’s hiding throughout the film but all of it coalesces into Erin’s dark story in devastating fashion. 

Toby Kebbell plays the main antagonist in Destroyer, a figure from Erin’s past whose return triggers a series of violent outbursts and leads to several bodies piling up. It’s a battle of wills with greed and revenge at the heart. Kebbell is a rather minimal presence physically in the film but his legend and his crimes hang over the entire story to the point where his appearances come to feel as if he is literally haunting Erin. 

It’s an exceptional and unique way to tell a revenge story. Destroyer is minimalist in story presentation with dialogue building Kebbell’s villain into a monster and Kidman delivering on making Bell desperate and feral like a cornered animal as she pursues him. The way the story plays out is a shocker and a real clever one. Pay close attention or you might miss a couple key details that play into the ending. I can tell you, it’s both satisfying and bleak. 

Destroyer is not a fun movie, it’s not an easy sit. The film is combative and pushy but Kidman’s performance makes it highly compelling. Kidman is Oscar-worthy not for her deglamorized look but for the grit that she brings to this character which combines vulnerability and street toughness into one of the most unique and yet familiar characters I’ve ever seen. It’s not just the novelty of a woman getting to portray characteristics typically assigned to male characters, Kidman makes Bell a uniquely fascinating figure, and for that, I recommend Destroyer. 

Movie Review: Bumblebee

Bumblebee (2018) 

Directed by Travis Knight 

Written by Christina Hodson

Starring Hailee Steinfeld, John Cena, Pamela Adlon, John Ortiz 

Release Date December 21st. 2018 

December 20th, 2018 

Michael Bay did Transformers fans the best possible favor he could do for them by not directing Bumblebee. Bay, who has directed each of the Transformers movies thus far and delivered some of the ugliest and most unwatchable, bad blockbusters of recent memory, stepped aside in favor of director Travis Knight in a move that has single handedly turned this franchise around. Bumblebee is terrific and is the first indication we’ve had that the Transformers could work as a big screen blockbuster. 

(FYI, I don’t care how much money the Transformers movies made, they are all terrible and I hate them, a lot.)

Bumblebee stars Hailee Steinfeld as Charlie, a teenager dealing with the loss of her father and a strained relationship with her mother, Pamela Adlon, who has remarried. Charlie’s love of cars came from her dad and when she fails to fix up a car she and her dad had been working on, she sets her sight upon a broken VW bug at a local junkyard. What she doesn’t know is that her new car is actually the alien robot, Bee-127, a warrior sent to guard the Earth against the evil Decepticons. 

In a prologue, we meet Bee-127 in the midst of a war on his home planet of Cybertron. When the battle appears lost, Bee-127 is sent to Earth to establish a safe landing zone for his fellow Autobots and to keep Earth safe from the Decepticons. Arriving on Earth, Bee is immediately thrust into trouble with members of the military, led by Agent Burns (John Cena). Bee landed in the midst of Burns’ war games in a California forest and was immediately pursued by the military. 

Unfortunately, Bee is also pursued by one of the Decepticons leading to a destructive battle. Bee is eventually left immobilized and taking the shape of the last thing he sees before losing consciousness, an ancient Volkswagen Beetle. That brings us up to date, Bumblebee is set in the 1980’s and well before the action of the Transformers films that precede it. That distance really helps the story and creates a mystery as to Charlie’s fate that lingers throughout the movie. 

One of the many significant failures of Michael Bay’s Transformers movies was the editing which shredded the robot on robot fight scenes into painfully unwatchable catastrophes. The fight scenes in each of the Transformers movies are clattering cacophonies of chaos where you can barely make out what robot is on which side and which one is hitting the other. And then you add the sound which was a punishingly loud mix of awful scoring and metal on metal screeching. 

No such trouble in Bumblebee. By keeping the camera static, for the most part, and keeping the editing at a readable pace, Travis Knight delivers robot on robot fighting that we can see and enjoy as if the robots were remotely real. That’s not to say that Knight reinvented anything, he and his team just appears to have taken more care to craft fight scenes in a fashion that is not offensive to the eyes and ears of the audience. 

Then there are the wonderful characters of Bumblebee. Knight, who broke into the mainstream with the tremendous animated feature Kubo and the Two Strings, takes great pains to give us characters we believe in, sympathize with and care about. Unlike the cartoon figures of the Bay movies who shout and preen and are nearly as unendurable as the fight scenes, Knight’s characters are warm and funny, fully formed human beings with backstories and inner lives we are interested in. 

Hailee Steinfeld is a wonderful young actress who infuses Charlie with a spiky puckishness that is a delight to watch. She’s not saccharine or mopey, she’s a believable teenage girl with agency and strength. You can sense her strength and character from her dialogue and her manner, her care and compassion when Bumblebee is revealed is a lovely character moment. Bay’s Transformers movies have not one single character with the kind of depth or humanity that Charlie exhibits in any one scene in Bumblebee. 

The supporting cast is slightly more broad but not nearly the ugly caricatures that Mr Bay traded on. John Cena brings a forceful energy to his tweener character. Agent Burns is no paper baddie, he has depths to be unveiled. He’s a loyal dedicated and talented soldier and a believable foe for our hero and our heroes true villains, The Decepticons. Cena is also effortlessly funny and charismatic in this role. And, Mr Cena gets the film’s biggest laugh with a reference to the name ‘Decepticons.’ 

Bumblebee isn’t perfect, the opening few minutes on Cybertron rush by a little and have a slightly awkward vibe. But, once Steinfeld’s Charlie is introduced the film improves immeasurably. The character of Bumblebee becomes whole in interacting with Charlie. Acting like a giant alien robot puppy, Bumblebee exhibits vulnerability and strength in equal measure. Where Mr Bay reduced Bumblebee many times to a gag delivery machine, Knight makes Bumblebee a character and quite a good one. 

The biggest difference in Bumblebee and the Transformers of Michael Bay is Travis Knight’s attention to detail. This attention to detail emerges in small, seemingly unimportant moments that take on meaning once you consider how those moments are lacking from the other Transformers movies. The ending is especially rich with attention to detail with a rearview mirror shot that is surprisingly emotional. 

I adore Bumblebee. This movie ranks behind only Black Panther as my favorite blockbuster of the year. This movie is fun, it’s hilarious and it is exciting. Most importantly, it’s the first time I have been able to enjoy the Transformers on the big screen. I was never deeply offended, I didn’t feel like the movie was actively hateful toward the audience and, when I walked out, my eyes and ears didn’t hurt. That alone could have made me admire Bumblebee, but Travis Knight made me genuinely enjoy Bumblebee.

Movie Review: Aquaman

Aquaman (2018) 

Directed by James Wan 

Written by David Leslie Johnson, Will Beal

Starring Jason Mamoa, Patrick Wilson, Amber Heard, Willem Dafoe, Dolph Lundgren, Yahya Abdul Mateen, Nicole Kidman

Release Date December 21st, 2018 

Published December 20th, 2018 

Aquaman stars Jason Mamoa as Arthur Curry, the one true King of Atlantis, though he doesn’t see it that way. Having been born to Queen Atlanna of Atlantis and a lighthouse keeper named Thomas (Temeura Morrison), Arthur doesn’t feel fully at home on either land or at sea. Despite having grown up under the tutelage of Vulko Willem Dafoe), his mother’s top advisor, and trained for royal combat, Arthur’s human side keeps him from embracing his Atlantean heritage. 

Arthur, known to many as Aquaman following the events of Justice League, will soon have to make a decision about Atlantis, whether to become its King or unwilling subject. Arthur’s brother, Ohrm (Patrick Wilson) has risen to the throne in the absence of Atlanna and he has plans to bring destruction to land-dwellers for the pollution and violence that human beings have brought to the oceans around Atlantis. 

To do this however, Ohrm must convince the seven kingdoms of the sea to get behind him as the Ocean Master, and allow him to take their armies into battle. All that stands in his way is Arthur who is guided by Mera (Amber Heard), the object of Ohrm’s affections and the daughter of one of the kings of the sea, King Nereus (Dolph Lundgren). Mera wants to prevent a war and believes that Arthur ascending to the throne is the only way to prevent it. 

It is Mera who drives the plot, convincing Arthur to seek the legendary Trident of Atlan, the weapon belonging to the very first King of Atlantis. The journey takes them from the deserts of the Sahara to the oceans around Sicily and eventually to the very center of the Earth where deadly combat awaits around every corner. All the while, Ohrm is raising an army and plotting to destroy all life on land unless Aquaman can stop him. 

Writing all of that out comes off even goofier than watching it unfold did. That said, it’s a good kind of goofy. Aquaman is a completely unpretentious comic book adventure that is both comic book nerdy and action movie macho. The film threads the needle of being just geeky enough and just enough of a macho action flick to satisfy audiences of both kinds. Jason Mamoa is the key to that tone. He’s a clever actor who gets the role he’s playing and does well to under-play the silliness to make room for his muscles. 

Director James Wan, though best known for the gruesome Saw franchise and the spooky The Conjuring universe, is proving to be a director who can do just about anything. It helps that he transitioned from horror movies to The Fast and the Furious franchise to Aquaman. Aquaman takes the self-seriousness of Wan’s horror work and combines it with the whacked out nonsense of the Furious franchise to create something that is incredibly silly but seriously well made. 

It’s a tricky tone that Aquaman has to pull off in order to not be laughed off the screen and James Wan nails it. Aquaman is silly in the way the Fast and Furious franchise is but it has the competence and chops of Wan's lower budget horror work. It’s a rather masterful piece of direction which manages to make great use of monstrous CGI without losing sight of the compelling characters at the heart of the story. 

Aquaman is not anything to be taken seriously but Wan is not careless, he takes pains to create a believable, dramatic world for Aquaman to exist within. This lends a context of believability to Aquaman, I believe in the universe that Aquaman exists in. It has a lived-in quality even as it is at times slick and stylized to an almost ludicrous degree. Mamoa’s earthy approach to Arthur, that includes some genuine vulnerability and humor, keeps Aquaman, the character and the movie, human and sympathetic. 

Mamoa isn’t going to win an Oscar anytime soon but he’s shown remarkable growth from Justice League to here with Aquaman. The all swaggering macho nonsense of Justice League is here shattered in favor of a lovable lug persona who happens to have super-strength, speed, agility and will. I was concerned that Mamoa would be the weakest part of Aquaman, given his lackluster and limited filmic track record but he’s far better than what I imagined.  

For Mamoa and for James Wan’s remarkable direction that manages to keep this unwieldy, untidy monstrosity in a human and relatable place, I feel comfortable recommending Aquaman to anyone who has been curious about this character. If you liked Jason Mamoa from Game of Thrones or Justice League, you will very much enjoy him in Aquaman where he delivers a superstar performance filled with good humor, charisma and machismo. 

Movie Review If Beale Street Could Talk

If Beale Street Could Talk (2018) 

Directed by Barry Jenkins 

Written by Barry Jenkins 

Starring Stephen James, Kiki Layne, Regina Hall, Colman Domingo 

Release Date December 14th, 2018 

Published December 10th, 2018

If Beale Street Could Talk is one of the best movies of 2018. This deeply affecting drama from the director of the Academy Award winning Moonlight, Barry Jenkins, is one of the most human and thoughtful films about life, love, and race we’ve seen in some time. Jenkins, adapting the work of the late, brilliant author James Baldwin, having cultural renaissance with this movie and last year’s documentary on his life, I Am Not Your Negro, gets to the heart of the cultural experience of racism like few films ever have. 

If Beale Street Could Talk tells the story of a young couple in love, Tish (Kiki Layne) and Fonny (Stephen James). Tish and Fonny have known each other since before they could remember. Their earliest memories are of baths together at an age when sex was merely a gender. They’ve spent their entire lives falling in love until finally they are old enough to understand it. Unfortunately, for their love story, they are torn apart by hatred. 

We meet Fonny when he is behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit. We will come to know what happened but for the earliest part of the film we must trust that Trish’s entreaties about how she is working to get him out of jail center on his innocence. Just as important however, as Fonny’s incarceration is the news that Tish is pregnant. At just 19 years old and with Fonny behind bars, they are going to be parents. 

Given the circumstances, it falls to Tish to inform their families of their situation. Tish’s mother Sharon (Regina Hall) is practical but also loving and deeply compassionate. Her father, Joseph (Colman Domingo) is unpredictable but deeply loyal. The trouble comes from Fonny’s divorced parents, the deeply devout Mrs Hunt (Aunjanue Ellis) and her hustler ex-husband Frank (Michael Beach) who is prepared to do anything for his son, if only to make up for having been an absent father. 

That’s the set up of sorts but the heart of If Beale Street Could Talk is not in a linear narrative but in the flashback structure that builds brilliantly toward the reveal of how Fonny ended up in jail and how that reflects the moment in which the film is set, the early 1970’s in Harlem and how that reflects on America in 2018. At that time, it was as if all young black men in Harlem had to spend time in jail by some predetermination of racist police activity. It’s as if it was merely Fonny’s turn and that seeming inevitability is devastating.

The incredible Bryan Tyree Henry plays a supporting role in If Beale Street Could Talk as Daniel, an old friend of Fonny’s. We come to know Daniel’s story of having similarly been recently in jail and his story provides a gut-wrenching prologue to what is lurking in Fonny’s near future. Daniel could provide an alibi for Fonny in the crime he is accused of but his recent stint in jail is seen as disqualifying of his credibility and an awful cycle of such things emerges to deepen the tragedy. 

I’m painting a bleak picture of If Beale Street Could Talk but the film is not entirely what I have described. Much of what I mentioned here is subtext, the front of the story, the bulk of the narrative and the beauty of If Beale Street Could Talk is the remarkably poetic and thrilling love story between Fonny and Tish. Much like the story of how Fonny ends up in jail, director Barry Jenkins layers in the love story of Fonny and Tish using flashbacks to the beauty, innocence and romance of their burgeoning love story. 

If Beale Street Could Talk contains one of the best, if not the absolute BEST scene in any movie in 2018. Having just looked at an apartment together and Fonny having charmed Tish into taking a risk with him on a place that isn’t quite finished being built, the two walk down the street holding hands and basking in the moment. It’s an almost wordless scene, gracefully filmed and knowing that this is the scene that immediately precedes how Fonny ended up in jail only serves to underline the beauty of the moment. It’s a perfect scene, gorgeously cinematic, heart fluttering romantic and haunting. 

The score also underlines the perfection of this moment. Composer Nicholas Britell’s gorgeous string symphony is at its most moving and evocative in this moment. It’s one of the finest moments of score and image that I have seen in any movie in a long while and it was this moment that made me completely fall in love with If Beale Street Could Talk, a film that combines image, story and sound in breathtaking fashion. 

If Beale Street Could Talk is a masterpiece, a lyrical, lovely, exceptionally acted masterpiece. Stephen James, Kiki Layne, Regina Hall and Colman Domingo deliver perfect performances and director Barry Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton capture the performances in immaculate fashion. Few films in 2018, and indeed, the last decade or so, have moved me as deeply as If Beale Street Could Talk. 

Movie Review: Ben is Back

Ben is Back (2018) 

Directed by Peter Hedges 

Written by Peter Hedges 

Starring Julia Roberts, Lucas Hedges, Courtney B. Vance 

Release Date December 7th, 2018 

Published December 4th, 2018 

Ben is Back is a day in the life drama about a family dealing with one member's drug addiction. It's about a mother and a son and the lifetime’s worth of trauma that can be inflicted in such short amounts of time because of drugs. Writer-Director Peter Hedges has trod upon this ground before with difficult relationships between parents and children with the wonderful Piece of April being a strong example of his talent. 

Ben is Back stars Lucas Hedges as Ben and Julia Roberts as Ben’s mom, Holly. Ben has been in rehab for about three months and has much more time left there but he’s somehow arrived back home. The tension is immediate as Ben’s sister, Ivy (Kathryn Newton) is alarmed to see him out of rehab. Holly, however, could not be happier to have him home. It’s Christmas and Holly is overjoyed to have her oldest son home, especially after he passes an at home drug test. 

As excited as Holly is to have Ben home she nevertheless hides all of the prescription drugs and valuables. Ben has a history of having broken into the home in the past to steal things to sell for drugs. Holly’s husband, Neil (Courtney B. Vance) is suspicious and thinks Ben should go back to rehab. After some guilty feelings however, he relents to let Ben stay the night and attend a Christmas play that his younger siblings are in at church. 

When the family gets back from church, they find the house has been broken into and their dog is gone. Ben knows who did it and wants to get him back. The film then follows him into a tour of his past misdeeds as he searches through his own history for the person who took the family dog. Mom chases after, concerned that the search could lead him back to drugs, a concern that grows deeper as the hours pass. 

Ben is Back takes place over a single day, Christmas eve. The story is tightly contained and well told. Each of these actors is exceptionally well cast with Julia Roberts giving her all as the grieving, terrified mother. Lucas Hedges continues to be one of our most compelling young actors. He makes smart choices and here, working with his father, Peter Hedges, he delivers a deeply affecting performance. 

Ben is Back is melodrama, to be sure, but it is solid and well meaning melodrama. As this day passes we can’t help but get caught up in the lives of these characters and the small signifiers of their lives together. I really loved the performance of Kathryn Newton whose mixture of fear and hope for her brother is palpable. Newton’s Ivy has the perspective that her mother lacks and she’s a terrific counterpoint to Vance’s character as well as she’s willing to give Ben more of a chance while reserving a good deal of suspicion and fear. 

I have no experience with drugs personally. I have never used drugs or helped anyone obtain them. There is a reason for that: have you seen the places people go to get and use drugs? Honestly, crack houses and dirty cold riversides are the spots in Ben is Back along with a dangerous looking neighborhood and a very shady looking pawn shop. I can’t understand how anyone would want to go to places like these. 

Ben is Back is certainly effective in setting, reminding us of the places that drugs can take even someone like Ben who had every advantage and still could not stay clean. The film doesn’t spend much time analyzing Ben, it’s more about observing Ben and his family and their dynamic and how this one day is unfolding. That tight focus works for the movie and the day in the life style is absorbing. 

Ben is Back is being released in time for the Academy Awards and you can sense that this has the aim of an awards drama. That said, Lucas Hedges is much more likely to get attention for his role as a young gay man forced into gay conversion therapy in Boy Erased than he is here. The Oscar hopes of Ben is Back likely fall on Roberts who hasn’t had this kind of spotlight on her since Eat, Pray, Love. It would come as no surprise to see her name called on nomination day. 

Movie Review The Favourite

The Favourite (2018) 

Directed by Yorgos  Lanthimos

Written by Deborah Davis, Tony McNamara 

Starring Rachel Weisz, Emma Stone, Olivia Coleman

Release Date November 23rd, 2018 

Published November 20th, 2018 

The Favourite stars Rachel Weisz as Lady Marlborough, aka Sara Churchill, the best friend of Queen Anne (Olivia Colman). Lady Marlborough was Queen Anne’s right hand during her reign until the two had a falling out over Lady Marlborough’s cousin, Abigail (Emma Stone), who arrived in the kingdom penniless and insinuates herself into the Queen’s good graces. Lady Marlborough is initially kind but wary of Abigail but soon the rivalry grows into a mutual disdain. 

What director Yorgos Lanthimos does brilliantly with this story is not merely allow his characters to be catty or stereotypical. Lady Marlborough appears especially intelligent and politically adept. Abigail is conniving and cunning but it comes from a well-honed instinct for survival and not some simplified notion of how women act toward other women. Abigail has known no other way of life than survival, having grown up with a father who once lost her in a card game. 

Tiny little nasty details punctuate numerous scenes in The Favourite and the delight with which these brilliant actresses deliver these points, such as the card game anecdote, is glorious. Stone and Weisz relish the nastiness they share with one another as they battle for the Queen’s affections, quite literally, as both women find their way into the salacious Queen’s bed, one because she genuinely cares and the other because it is advantageous. You can watch and find out which. 

Nicholas Hoult rounds out the main cast as Robert Harley the 1st Earl of Oxford. He’s in a war of wits with Lady Marlborough over the ongoing war with France and how his landed gentry are paying for the war while the city-dwelling shopkeepers benefit from providing supplies via contract. There is a touch of modern politics to the power plays between Marlborough and Hartley and Weisz and Hoult have tremendous fun biting back and forth. 

Olivia Colman portrays Queen Anne as a very sad and often ill woman. Her affinity for rabbits has a sad backstory that informs the film’s stunning ending, one of the most fascinating endings of the year undoubtedly. Throughout the film Colman’s Anne is a powerfully weak presence, pushed hither and yon by whichever powerful personality is leading the way at that moment. She seeks only pleasure until even her greatest pleasures lack any authentic joy. 

For director Yorgos Lanthimos, The Favourite is the most mainstream movie he’s made in his relatively young career. His American features, The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer have been so deliberately esoteric that it is some kind of wonder that he was allowed to make them. The Lobster is literally about a man’s journey toward potentially being turned into a lobster if he can’t find love. As for The Killing of a Sacred Deer, as much as I found it riveting, it’s more of an exercise in style than it is the kind of thriller a movie studio would want you to believe it to be. 

The Favourite is therefore easily more mainstream just by virtue of not being deliberately off-putting. That plus who doesn’t love a good bit of palace intrigue. The Favourite follows in the footsteps of films like Elizabeth or Marie Antoinette or any other movie to do with the inner sanctum of royalty. America may have left the Queen behind but we’ve remained fascinated by the history, mystery and especially the dysfunction behind the scenes of royalty since the day we left the monarchy behind. 

The Favourite has all sorts of juicy, gossipy, details delivered with nasty glee by actresses who know just how to bite off a good insult or connive their way to another deliberate obfuscation of their rival. We love to hate characters like these while secretly delighting in their bad behavior because it’s so wonderfully entertaining. Weisz especially is playing a character of remarkable charisma who always speaks her mind and is always the smartest person in the room, until she gets a little too smart. 

The Favourite is one of the smartest and most devilishly, darkly clever movies of the year. Right up until that ending I mentioned earlier which will divide audiences between those who admire how daring and artful it is and those who won’t quite know how to feel. The Favourite leaves you with a great deal to think about and not much of it is pleasant. It worked on me as a bleak grace note for a story with no winners, only survivors.