The Boy review

“The Boy” is a near-bashful horror programmer that doesn’t overstay its welcome or reach too far outside the bounds of its base-line conceptual ambition. If you’ve seen more than 12 scary movies in your life it’s nearly impossible to be surprised or frightened by this effort, but it fits nicely into the type of PG-13 horror training-wheels that’s designed for pre-pubescent slumber parties and casual Netflix and chill invites and.

Lauren Cohen plays Greta, an American 20-something on the run from an abusive relationship, who finds herself in England looking for temporary work. Soon after, an elderly couple known as Heelshires hire Greta to watch their son Brahms while they leave their gothic stone-mansion for a long-needed vacation. Here’s the kicker; their actual son was killed in a fire 25 year before the events of this story and they have since been responding to a three-foot porcelain doll as if it were a sentient being. Because she needs the money or because being paid to watch a lifeless doll seems too easy to pass up, or possibly because of the hunky grocery boy Malcolm (Rupert Evans) who makes daily delivery visits, Greta decides to ignore the fact that she’s living a horror-movie cliché and takes the job. After a few days alone with a very specific list of ‘babysitting’ rules to follow she hears strange noises, things are moved involuntarily and yada yada yada, weird things happen.

Lauren Cohen, known primarily for role on television’s “The Walking Dead,” pretty much to carries this entire picture by herself. The production is sparse with very few locations, and the boilerplate nature of the story has the plot set on a light simmer for the majority of the run-time. Unlike the foul-mouthed sport killings performed from the charismatic Chucky character from the “Childs Play” movies, Brahms is a subtly creepy doll and because the movie wants us to question the protagonists sanity—a lofty narrative goal that isn’t fully explored—there is relatively little that actually happens from scene to scene. With that said, Cohen commendably keeps the non-events of film activated through her natural charisma and a wry charm bubbling just underneath the surface of her underwritten role. Her chemistry with Rupert Evans is believable and in brief moments you almost wish they were in a different movie with a better screenplay. 

The set design is just as stock as the plot and the even lighting of every shot renders the film quite televisual in its bland presentation. There’s some mild jump-scares sprinkled throughout and they are spaced accordingly with the film’s pacing but they’re also the only real source of tension derived from this self-serious B-movie. Towards the last third more reveals are made and the plot then decides to trade one well-worn genre trope for another and by this point director William Brent Bell, stylistically, has already have shown his entire hand.

As somber and patient as “The Boy” wants to present itself as being, the inherent camp of this tired story is inescapable, especially as every character behaves as if there were no horror movies within their world. With that said, this wasn’t a chore to watch and it asks very little of the audience. It’s undeniable that this movie is traditional to fault and much of it is certainly eye-roll inducing, but in a cheap, Goosebumps-y kind of way, it’s acceptable as disposable RedBox schlock.

Grade: C-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Jan-2016

Listen to more discussion about "The Boy" on this week's Jabber and the Drone Podcast.

My Top 10 Films of 2015

2015 was a particularly strange year for movies. Critics and fanboys lost their minds for George Miller’s “Mad Max: Fury Road,” a movie I thought was laudable as a piece of action filmmaking, but certainly not a new standard for the genre. Likewise, the year’s end brought in a wave of earnest prestige pictures that are sure to be forgotten once the awards campaigns have come to an end--*cough* I’m looking at you “Spotlight.” When looking back at my personal top-10 of last year, I find a strange mix of films that range wildly in genre, size and scope.

10 – Steve Jobs – Aaron Sorkin returns to familiar territory with his screenplay about Macintosh maestro Steve Jobs. For some, this might have come too close to the tone and characterizations depicted in his admittedly stronger screenplay for David Fincher’s “The Social Network,” but Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jeff Daniels and Seth Rogan internalize Sorkin’s dense, walk-and-talk dialogue confidently and Danny Boyle’s serviceable direction showcases this oddly-structured biopic with a sense of urgency.

09 – Tangerine – Sean Baker’s micro-budget indie, shot entirely on a modified iPhone5, is one of the most vital films to come out of the festival circuit in years. This comedy chronicles a wacky night of misadventure between two transgendered prostitutes who work out of a janky donut hut on Hollywood Boulevard. Though the situations and setting of this very-specific world might sound like the usual set-up for a naval-gazing cautionary tale, Baker injects immediacy and levity into the film and refuses to let the characters feel sorry for themselves.

08 – The Martian – This has to be on my list on the basis of that it's the least problematic Ridley Scott movie since 2000’s “Gladiator.” Matt Damon carries this “Call of the Wild” on Mars story with a good sense of comedic timing and relatability. Along with the 70s disco soundtrack, it’s the optimistic celebration of intelligence and science found in Drew Goddard’s adapted screenplay that culminates into an idiosyncratic and likeable sensibility--not often found in much of Scott’s recent work.

07 – Dope – Three nerds who attend a high-school in south-central Los Angeles are on the run from both the police and the gangs, when one of them accidentally gets the group involved in a drug ring while fumbling to impress a girl. This teen comedy/heist-movie highbred is full of contagious energy and an adventurous spirit towards the well-worn tropes it gladly subverts. The familiar teen-movie themes of trying to fit in are translated into interesting discussions of racial identity and class, as this movie depicts the difficulties of wanting to excel and stand-out within  urban communities.

06 – Room – Lenny Abrahamson’s “Room” explores the human condition and the power of childhood imagination through the dark tale of a women who fights for her son’s safety and innocents while forced to raise him within the woodshed of a deranged kidnapper. Abrahamson explores this enclosed space like a science fiction reality, slowly revealing to the audience more devastating truths as we learn the finer details through the perspective of Jacob Tremblay’s child protagonist. Brie Larson also gives a heartbreaking performance as the young mother.

05 – It Follows – This tribute to 80s minimalist horror takes the absurd premise of an evil entity that follows a person after he or she has slept with the last carrier of the curse and shoots it with such competency and atmosphere that the viewer is forced to think about the deeper connotations of its fantasy rules. The film’s soundtrack and the artful use of subject camera infuses every scene with palpable terror.

4 – Sicario – Speaking of subtly brooding thrillers, Denis Villeneuve’s boarder-noir “Sicario” stretches the movie’s narrative tightrope as much as it can and holds the tension in place for it's entire run-time as we descend into the film's criminal hell-scape. Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin and Benecio Del Toro all give career-best performances and Roger Deakin’s cinematography brings him back to the southwest desolation of 2007’s “No Country for Old Men.”

3 – Ex Machina – Alex Garland’s directorial debut delivers on the promise of his visionary screenwriting on projects such as “28 Days Later” and “Sunshine.” Here he explores the psychology and philosophic ramifications of developing artificial intelligence with a minimal chamber thriller starring Oscar Isaac as a lonely, billionaire tech-genius and Domhnall Gleeson as an unassuming coder, tasked with testing the self-awareness of the world’s first living machine,  who's played wonderfully by Alicia Vikander.

2 – Inside Out – Pixar has a history of breaking hearts with their tender family fare, but it’s difficult to be prepared for just how genuine and vulnerable “Inside Out” is. The mechanics of the narrative, following the anthropomorphized emotions within the mind of a 12 year old girl, are surprisingly complicated and multifaceted, but “Up” writer/director Peat Doctor never loses sight of the raw, emotional core of his story within a story. More importantly, this film reminds us that big-budget Hollywood product can be thoughtful and nuanced and doesn't need to pander to the lowest common denominator to have a wide appeal.

1 – The Tribe – I saw this Ukrainian drama within the first few months of 2015 and knew by its end that it was unlikely that I would see a better film within the remainder of the year. Miroslav Slaboshpitsky depicts a boarding-school for the deaf as a lawless wasteland, where survival of fittest is the only sense of order established between groups of unsupervised teenagers. It’s difficult to describe the power of the wordless apocalyptic world Slaboshpitsky creates, but it’s the nervous tension generated between the shock of what we are seeing and the deliberate patience in which it’s shot that makes for one of the most vital pieces of visceral cinema of 2015.

Honorable Mentions:

Creed, Beasts of No Nation, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, The Big Short, Mad Max: Fury Road, What We Do In The Shadows,  Kingsmen: The Secret Service and Carol 

Published in the Idaho State Journal/Jan-2016

Listen to more discussion about the best and worst films of the year on this episode of the Jabber and the Drone podcast.

The Hateful Eight review

Quentin Tarantino is a writer/director whose best work finds a harmony between both disciplines. His work is often stylish and idiosyncratic and brings attention to the process of whatever it is that distinguishes his filmmaking from everyone else. His scripts are often talky and verbose, with many extended dialogue sequences and as a director he dresses up his screenplays with quirky music choices, active camera work and shuffled, non-linear editing. In short, he doesn’t mind reminding his audience that they are watching a movie with a capital M. Quentin’s latest film “The Hateful Eight” is an ultra-violent, Agatha Christy-esq mystery masquerading as a western, and while it contains elements of his most patient and deliberate work as a filmmaker, it awkwardly struggles to negotiate between Tarantino the writer and Tarantino the director.

Currently there are two different versions of “The Hateful Eight” playing in theaters, a theatrical cut that plays continuously and a limited version that’s projected from 70 millimeter film stock with a five minute overture and a ten minute intermission. Both versions run pretty close to three hours, and most of the film’s running time is devoted to flowery dialogue set-pieces that build to a blood splattered third act.

Its post-civil war 19^th century America and Hangman John Ruth (Kurt Russell) is transporting a wanted murdurer named Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to Red Rock where she is to be killed by the state for her crimes. While traveling through the snow-covered mountains of Wyoming, he picks up black bounty hunter named Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) and an ex-rebel soldier named Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins). Both Warren and Mannix have a war-time reputation that precedes them and has followed them into Ruth’s carriage. Together, they seek shelter from an unforgiving blizzard at a remote cabin supply shop known as Minnie’s Haberdashery.  There they meet a another motley crew of character’s that includes a British born hangman named Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), a Southern General named Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern) and an all-too-quiet cowboy named Joe Gage (Michael Madsen).

Many things about this situation seem strange to Ruth and Warren, as Minnie is nowhere to be found, the door is broken from the inside and the man running the haberdashery is an unknown Mexican who goes by the name Bob (Damian Birchir). The two conclude the one or more of these men are secretly working for Daisy Domergue and that an attack on their group is eminent, and because this is a Tarantino film, that’s exactly what happens.

Like his debut feature “Reservoir Dogs,” “The Hateful Eight” is essentially a chamber play in which a small cast of characters are trying to weed out a mole within the group. But this film is twice the length and bejeweled in a number of indulgent cinematic fetishes. The movie was shot by Bob Richardson in an ultra-wide cinemascope frame, and during the opening sequences through the snowy mountains the establishing vistas are magnificent to look at. This choice makes less sense when the other two thirds of the film enclosed in a single interior setting, where close-ups and quick edits are more widely utilized for the storytelling.  Legendary composer Ennio Marconi’s original score for the film is memorable and used to good effect in building tension and creating a mood for the film's sense of snowbound isolation and paranoia, and yet Tarantino still insists on dropping in moments of contemporary rock and pop music, which often clangs against Marconi’s compositions.  There’s a tonally jarring flashback sequence in the middle that could have been cut all together and at one point, for no other reason than he likes to hear himself talk, Quentin provides needless narration that overlays competently shot visual exposition.

Despite these issues, I appreciate the minimal approach to the story and setting and there's a subversive edge to how the narrative eventually escalates into a full-on gore-fest by its end.  The movie mediates Tarantino’s classical influences with his exploitation irony, acting as bridge somewhere between Howard Hawk’s “Rio Bravo” and John Carpenter’s “The Thing.” The script's many discussions about race and civil war allegiances are fascinating and politically messy in way that other films usually try hard to avoid and they play out within the character arcs in unexpected ways. As you can expect from this filmmaker, the dialogue is well written as pros and contains thorny quotables, but it’s the stagey monologues and constant speechifying that gets in the way of the story, causing the film’s tension as a thriller to relax.

“The Hateful Eight” undeniably entertaining and its by far Tarantino’s darkest and meanest film to date. As a formally experimental piece of pop cinema it’s commendable, but it’s too overwritten and undisciplined to work as the crackling mystery it needs to be.

Grade: C+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Jan-2016

Listen to more discussion about "The Hateful Eight" and the films of Tarantino on this week's Jabber and the Drone podcast.

The Big Short review

Adam McKay, director of silly Will Ferrell vehicles such as “Anchorman” and “The Other Guys,” turned down the opportunity to helm Marvel’s “Ant-Man” in favor of “The Big Short,” a topical satire about a group of mavericks on the margins of Wall-Street who were able accurately predicted the housing collapse against the grain of conventional wisdom. Like 2014’s “The Wolf of Wall Street,” this film portrays America’s unhealthy reinforcement of cutthroat capitalism like Greek tragedy, in which the key figured of this morality play are tricked into a game where winning and losing is the exact same thing.

This film is boasts a large cast of heavy-hitters that includes Christian Bale as a an eccentric annalist named Michael Burry who first discovers a way to profit from the eventual bursting of the housing bubble in 2005, long before anyone could see it growing. Ryan Gosling plays Jared Vennet, a mercenary banker who catches wind of this prediction and hires a team of low-level Wall Street traders to check the progression of this collapse, with the aims of selling big just before the ground beneath them breaks. This team of foul mouthed number-crunchers is ran by Steve Carrell’s Mark Baum, a noble-to-a-fault day-trader who is caught in a moral quagmire when he quickly learns how far and how deeply in trouble the world economy has become and how it will effect living standards of the middle class. Producer Brad Pitt even makes an appearance as a nihilistic ex-yuppie who lends his expertise to two hapless dorks looking to break into the world of finance.

This movie juggles a lot of big personalities and plays almost like heist film in which the big score is cursed with a moral backfire. Based upon this description, you may assume that the film is a huge bummer, and it kind of is, but where McKay’s history in comedy comes in handy, both with his features and from his time as a writer on SNL, is that he allows for enough appropriate comedic distanced to nervously laugh at the story’s heady subject matter. The screenplay by McKay and Charles Randolph, works hard to break through the seemingly impenetrable amount of necessary exposition and finance jargon one has to recon with to accurately adapt the source text from Michael Lewis’ book of the same name. Lewis’ “Moneyball,” adapted for the screen by Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian, took a much more intimate and human approach to the subject of how the prediction of numbers effects the real lives of which those numbers represent, mostly because of the sober and melancholy style of its director Bennett Miller.

In contrast, McKay simply acknowledges that the Wall Street world is not one that most of the audience lives in and decides to play the tragedy of corporate corruption like a perverse farce of the American dream. One could say that the many stylistic choices used here, including the use of catchy rock music, quick edit and goofy, non-diegetic asides where celebrities explain economic concepts, is a sign of McKay’s lack of confidence with the material—over compensating by dressing up the “grown up talk” in a lot bling and flash—and one is probably correct in that assessment. Nevertheless, when it comes to the fundamentally activist aim of the movie’s themes, McKay’s showy delivery certainly helps to digest and discern the material and to simultaneously entertain and outraged at the same time.

Despite all of the star power involved in the cast the ensemble shines within individual scenes and while Bale’s jittery performance could have used maybe two less acting-ticks, Carell’s hysterical and empathetic portrayal as a man who is hanging on to the last shreds of dignity and morality helps to ground the audience into the movie’s complex emotional truth .

Sometimes “The Big Short” feels a little too eager to impress and you’ll never shake the feeling that McKay is trying to convince you that the movie's vegetables are an airplane, but overall it has enough subversive punk-rock energy and a noble enough purpose to keep the enjoyable style from overwhelming the sobering substance. 

Grade - B

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Jan-2016