The Visit review

M. Knight Shyamalan is a name that’s hard to live-down for a lot movie-goers these days. After reviving the supernatural-thriller in 1999 with his Oscar-nominated film “The Sixth Sense” and solidifying his brand with a few notable follow-ups, his career hit an irrevocable downward slide, and over the last decade he’s been bumbling into mistake after another.  Films like “Lady in the Water” and “The Happening” revealed a tendency towards half-baked concepts, overwritten screenplays, and lack of directorial sense of self-awareness that’s burdened the bulk of his later work. Even taking-on for-hire projects like the “The Last Airbender,” adapted from the popular Nickelodeon cartoon, as well as the awkward Will and Jayden Smith vehicle “After Earth,” couldn’t refocus the floundering filmmaker, despite relying less on his own ideas.

 Shyamalan has now teamed with the successful horror production factory Blumehouse (“Paranormal Activity,” “Insidious,” “Sinister,” etc...) to get back to nuts and bolts of suspense directing. With this ninety minute, found-footage B-movie, he has no sights set on prestige or deliberately paced auteur ambitions, but even with nothing to prove and his toolbox taken away from him, his ego and writerly obsessions get in the way of this uneven and problematic popcorn thriller.

Olivia Dolange and Ed Oxenbould play Becca and Tyler, two suburban tweens who have been sent on a week-long trip to visit their distant grandparents for the first time. Their single mother (Kathryn Hahn) is up-front about the tense relationship she has with her parents, with whom she hasn’t spoken with in many years, but is rather cagey about the specifics of their estrangement. To uncovering the mystery about what happened the night her mother left her parent’s house, Becca has decided to film this trip as a documentary about reconciliation. Her younger brother Tyler, a wannabee hip-hop lyricist, is more interested in figuring out why their newly acquainted grandparents are acting so strange; Nana (Deanna Dunagan) wandering the halls nude in the middle of night, scratching at the walls like an animal, and pop pop (Peter McRobbie) taking many private trips to a locked shed in the back yard of their country property.

Conceptually “The Visit” is promising enough, tapping into the societal strain of generation gaps, the paranoia of isolation from familiarity, and the universal fear of growing old and losing your physical and mental capabilities. All the ingredients are present for a Hitchcockian Hansel and Gretel tale, but Shyamalan peppers the entire experience with derailing creative choices. In framing the narrative as a found-footage video project, the film is allowed to move quickly with a sudden cuts and time-hops, which admittedly streamlines M. Knight’s penchant for dimly-lit, slow-burning ponderousness, but it also constipates the picture’s aesthetics, deadening much of the suspense in justifying and limiting camera placement and shot set-ups.

 This conceit also feeds into the director’s weakness in defaulting to expository dialogue whenever he needs to reveal more about the characters or the world he’s building. After all, if we are viewing a diegetic documentary in the works, then characters are in the position to say what they are feeling and thinking and are given the opportunity to explain any other necessary back-story directly to the camera. As a result, the story is largely told instead of shown, which is bummer because most of the performances are either misdirected, hammy, or flat-out bad. Dolange has a spark of sincerity underneath her achingly affected cineaste dialogue about framing and mis-en-scene but Oxenbould’s bright-eyed audition-face, combined with the choice to have him spitting out bratty one-liners and battle raps, grates in way that’s almost as if the director is deliberately trying to cut our sympathies with the protagonists.

Occasionally the best version of this movie peaks through the tone-deaf fog that shrouds the majority of its run-time. Dunagan and McRobbie are fully committed to their bizarre performances and, by the third act, a shreiky, camp quality, combined with a twisted sense of dark humor, gels together in a way that’s entertainingly misanthropic. But these moments are too few and infrequent and clang quite abrasively against Shyamalan’s ham-fisted themes about broken-homes and forgiveness.  I really wish I could join the sizable chorus calling this a return to form for the troubled filmmaker, but I simply don’t see much here that’s effective, evocative or even scary enough to give it a pass.

Grade: D+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Sep-2015

American Ultra review

“American Ultra” is a moody action-dramedy that attempts a difficult balancing act between tone and genre expectation. Not only does it showcase two somewhat misunderstood actors in Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart as the leads—rekindling their indie-romance appeal from “Adventureland”—but it also wants to be taken seriously as a savage action-thriller and a hysterical satire.  The fact that it manages to hit these disparate targets fifty percent of the time speaks to the strength of Max Landis’ overly ambitious script and the earnestness of Eisenberg and Stewart’s slightly out-of-tune performances.

Eisenberg plays Mike Howell, a nervous stoner who’s in love with his layabout girlfriend Phoebe (Stewart), but can’t stomach the commitment it takes to move even slightly forward with their relationship.  After purposely postponing the vacation where he planned to pop the question, a mysterious woman approaches the counter of the convenience store where he works and activates a code in Mike’s brain that reveals years of spy training he received before having his mind wiped by the government. This proves to become helpful because, as it turns out, he’s been declared classified evidence of a failed program by the CIA.  As he’s being hunted down by psychotic operatives, and the media is covering up the trail of bodies behind him, he’s left with only his wits and his untapped physical skills to protect himself and his lover.

Like Landis’ debut screenplay “Chronicle,” this is a genre movie that deconstructs the tropes of genre movies through the ironic lens of millennial pop-culture curation. The way the plot is set up and moves forward is clearly drawing on video game mechanics, that’s complete with boss-battles and a princess to save at the end. The classic reluctant hero’s journey, combined with a Kevin-Smith-y smirkiness about the story tradition in which it’s engaging, speaks to Landis’ knowledge and appreciation of post-modern, alternative comic book meta-narratives.  All of this is interesting and plays out in surprising bursts of violence and scenes of real emotional weight, but never in a way that feels fully intergraded or cohesive.

Director Nima Nourizadeh, who previously helmed the teenage party movie “Project X,” is out of sync with the complicated material and the motivations of his actors. Nourizadeh is clearly making a darker action film with brutal fight choreography, the script is concerned with the nuance of the genre and the actors are concerned with the relatability of their performances. With three distinct drivers behind the wheel, the comedy and the satire that should have moved things along, was left on the side of the road and out of breath to keep up with the competing tones of the film.

John Leguizamo as a tweaked out drug dealer who has a neon basement and a rocker van is perhaps the only performer in the cast who understands what movie he’s actually in. Topher Grace as the CIA, yuppie bad-guy is tuned so unpleasant and mean-spirited that he comes off as genuinely hateful and shrill in way that better direction and editing should have protected him from stepping into.

Whether you love it or hate it, or are simply too confused to commit to an opinion, “American Ultra” is an original curiosity in which the things about it that are most compelling are very things that are obstructing its success as a movie. The central love story and emotions behind the film are surprisingly sensitive and effecting but ultimately exhausted in mitigating the heavy-metal direction and the screenplay’s allusive attitude.

Grade: C

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Sep-2015

Z for Zachariah review

The post-apocalyptic genre is officially back in vogue. This year alone we have seen the return of “Mad Max,” a “Walking Dead” spin-off series and there’s still one more “Hunger Games” before that franchise comes to a close. It’s the end of the world and not only do we feel fine, we want more. But unlike the studded leather jackets, crossbows and sandstorm car-chases that usually occupy the genre, Craig Zobel’s “Z for Zachariah” is a slow-burn melodrama, using the setup of the post-apocalypse as a way to tell a deeply intimate and small-scale parable that reflects the larger complications of society as we know it today.

“Wolf of Wall Street” actress Margot Robbie plays Ann, a bright-eyed survivor who lives in a mystical valley in the woods that’s somehow been spared from the nuclear fallout and radiation that has poisoned the rest of the world. After what was left of her religious family took to road find other survivors, she spent the better part of a year keeping the crops growing and preparing for the rough winter ahead, with only her dog at her side. This all changes when she meets Loomis (Chiwetal Ejiofor), a wandering civil-engineer who she decides takes in and nurse back to health after he nearly dies from radiation poisoning.

Together Ann and Loomis try to rebuild their lives and ration their food supply, and after sharing meals and memories together, they begin to develop an emotional connection. Enter Caleb (Chris Pine): a cocky young coalminer with piercing blue eyes and a GQ smile. As it turns out, three’s a crowd and with two men now in the house, Ann is forced to mitigate the bubbling competition between one man who’s charming and who shares her down-home Christian values and another who’s fatherly and practical but a spiritual skeptic.

With “Twilight” fresh in our rear-view, the love-triangle aspect of the film might seem trite and tired but Zobel doesn’t allow this familiar dynamic to sit on the surface as a simple fantasy born of sexually frustration. Instead he uses this trope to create a quiet and subtle chamber piece that alludes to much bigger questions about faith, skepticism and racial familiarity, all with feminist undertones.

At one point Loomis sees the budding attraction between Caleb and his would-be life-partner and quietly informs Ann that she can make whatever decision she wants—as if she needed his permission. Nevertheless Ann is then forced to feel pressure and guilt over an unfair choice that has been thrust upon her. Without realizing or asking for it, she is then put the touchy position of possibly being chastised by the men in her life, including the deified memory her father who’s hand-built church must be torn down to create a water combine to restore energy to the house.

“Z for Zachariah” is a film that stands back and lets the performances and the characters guide the bigger picture. As such, some might find the veiled motivations of the three leads, and the ambiguous nature of their actions to hold little dramatic traction as a science-fiction premise. I myself become entranced by the Garden of Eden/Cane and Able metaphor that plays out and the subverting of their original moral purpose.  Robbie, Ejiofor and Pine carry the whole the thing effortlessly and explore the quiet intensity of their character’s repressed conflicts. Though the movie might seem minimal in form, the nuanced performances and expressive camera work hints a world of mythic and political complexity that exists just underneath the love story.

Grade: B+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Sep-2015