The Witch review

Robert Eggers debut horror film “The Witch” is one of those rare tour de force first features that spotlights a true talent to look out for.  This black metal folk tale is a near-perfect study in tone and immersive tension, with a keen sense of setting and period that boasts a handful of completely credible performances. It not only uses the macabre to sell its aesthetics as a horror film but it embraces a true sense of darkness and slithering evil that will stay in your consciousness long after the initial shock of its deranged third act.

Even more astonishing, “The Witch” has finally broken the hex that dictates that movies starring actors from “Game of Thrones” must suck (“Pompeii,” “The Other Woman,” “Terminator: Genisys”). Ralph Ineson and Kate Dickie play the mother and father of a 1630 puritan family who decide to leave their New England pilgrim community to settle their own property in the middle of a nearby gloomy forest. There they hope to build a purer relationship with God, away from the noise of regular society. Their eldest daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) has begun to question the logic of her parents, their son Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw) is coming to terms with his difficult puberty, their two young twins may or may not be talking to evil spirits through the family's farm goats and their unbaptized newborn has just gone missing. After the kidnapping, the family begins to find themselves crushed with religious guilt, exposing each member’s personal struggles with sin. Soon internal battles with lust, pride and dishonesty manifests themselves into real or perceived oppressions from the dark forces lurking within the shrouded forest.

What makes this film more narratively enriching than your average cabin in the woods shocker is that the screenplay, laced with biblical, old-English dialogue, is just as committed to the drama and the interior lives of the characters as it is with hitting all the intended genre beats as a thriller. The performances by the mostly-unknown cast are realistic and heartbreaking, especially by lead actress Taylor-Joy whose emotional and symbolic arc within the film is both complex and challenging. Rather than lacing the plot with empty boo-scares and gotchya moments, every character is tormented by their own guilt and their own fears, with the titular Witch preying on the family’s vulnerabilities in ways that are visually creative and truly horrific.  

The sets look lived in and the grim 1600's period imagery is never played for theatrical camp. Because of the intense attention to the film's cosmetic details, Eggers portrayal of pagan magic is strangely believable within the context of this satanic melodrama. Cinematographer Jarin Blaschke uses single-source lighting-schemes with metaphoric intent, etching the characters and subjects out of the natural darkness, while never defaulting to flat desaturation or an overuse of digital color-correction.

Some might search for a contemporary message within the story and when talking about dangerous accusations of witchcraft, feminism rises to the surface, and if you’re looking for it, that’s certainly in there. But the picture’s more prevalent theme is of man’s relationship with sin and the unhealthy consequences of repression. 

Given the character’s conflicts with their own faith alongside the high-contrast imagery that's obscured by spindly tree-branches, Swedish art-house auteur Ingmar Bergman would have been proud of this film's relative mainstream success.

“The Witch” was released wide and is being sold as a casual winter horror programmer but unlike the seemingly generic title, this movie is anything but a lazy and predictable experience. The pace is deliberately slow and not unlike Kubrick’s “The Shining,” its taught sense of dread moves closer to you as each sequence pulls the cord a little tighter. There’s certainly entertainment to be had in all its artful spookiness, but this is not really a popcorn film. Rather, this is a masterful study in atmosphere, history and religious philosophy that deserves as much discussion as it deserves your gasps and nightmares.

Grade: A+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Feb-2016

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

Deadpool review

(How should I frame my “Deadpool” review?  Do I continue to talk about the legacy of superhero movies and it’s oversaturation in pop-culture? At this point I think that tired thesis is just as oversaturated in media journalism. Do I play into Twentieth Century Fox’s clever PR campaign and talk about the supposed significance of an R-rated superhero movie, choosing to ignore the fact that we’ve already had three R-rated “Punisher” movies, three R-rated “Blade” films, as well as “Kick-Ass” and it’s misbegotten sequel? If I wanted, I could even throw in the “Sin City” flicks, James Gunn’s dark comedy “Super” and 1994’s “The Crow.” There’s probably more that I’ m forgetting… Maybe I could talk about how “Deadpool” is a fourth-tier, cult Marvel character in the comics and had it not been for its near-ubiquitous marketing, most people would have had no idea who this character is, that is unless they somehow remember Ryan Reynolds already played him in that god-awful “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” from 2009.

Perhaps it’s worth bringing up that I hated this movie’s marketing campaign, however successful it may have been. In fact, it’s a shock that the final-result did anything for me at all, what with all those smug, self-satisfied posters of Deadpool mugging for the camera in cutesy poses and those smirky trailers full of Reynolds spouting meme-ready one-liners.  I was ready to full-on hate this thing, and yet, somehow, by the time I paid to watch the movie I fully succumbed to its bratty tone. After all, films are stories and aggressive marketing campaigns are not.

I liked the way the film opened with a“Fight Club” inspired, slow-motion examination of its key action set-piece, replacing traditional names and credits with funny, self-referential titles like ‘The Comedic Side Character’ and ‘The Villain With a British Accent.” I guess I liked the supporting cast. T.J. Miller does some nice, snarky dialogue sparing with Reynolds – in fact, if he had Reynolds’ physique I could almost see him playing “Deadpool” just as easily.  Morena Baccarin holds her own as Wade Wilson’s girlfriend/hooker with a heart-of-gold. Too bad she’s relegated to a damsel in distress by the movie’s end. Kind of a lazy trope to rely on, for a film that boasts its subversion…

But if I’m being real with myself, there isn’t much here that’s all that subversive. Despite the hyper-violent dismembering, the raunchy sex scenes, the multiple swears, and all the meta, fourth-wall breaking, structurally this is still your basic superhero origin story, told non-linearly. Wade Wilson’s a mercenary who falls in love. Later he gets cancer and enters into a bio-weapons program that tortures him for weeks, leaving him disfigured, virtually immortal, and cancer-free, and then he suits-up and gets revenge. Come to think it, this is kind of similar to the oft-forgotten “Spawn” from the 90s—ooh, that’s ANOTHER R-rated superhero film this movie wants you to disregard!

*sigh* I won’t begrudge anybody who wants to like “Deadpool”—it’s dumb-fun and weirdly harmless for what it wants to be. I also won’t argue with anyone who thinks it’s a bag of crap. It’s not nearly as clever, post-modern or as novel as it thinks it being—the sexual-politics are pretty regressive, Ed Skrein’s Ajax is a boring villain and, like I already said, the story is so damn simple. But at least the movie doesn’t overstay its welcome and it never feels the need to fold in too many Marvel Universe details or have the character save the whole universe from an alien/robot/terrorist invasion.   As far as flicks tailor-made for 14 year boys go, this one’s mostly watchable, but I think a second or third viewing would grate on me a little more. I guess I’ll find out when I have to review the inevitable sequel.)

Grade: B-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Feb-2016

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

Hail Caesar! review

With their new farce “Hail Caesar!” the Coen Brothers conjure up the glory and garishness of gimmicky 1950s Hollywood. Like their other broad comedies, such as the cult-hit “The Big Lebowski,” their Americana ode to The Odyssey “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou” and the still-underrated espionage spoof “Burn After Reading,” “Hail Caesar!” is less interested in tight storytelling or following a discernable plot than it is with putting a genre’s idiosyncrasies under a microscope and under zooming in until they appear absurd.  There’s a love displayed for the type of bloated studio-era schlock that the Joel and Ethan are spoofing and that love shines through in perfect recreations of iconic film moments and stock genre tropes. In fact, the verisimilitude of the spoof is so earnest in its presentation that the comedy often gets lost in the movie’s high-concept production values.

If there is a single story to follow it’s that of Josh Brolin as a studio executive named Eddie Mannix - a no-nonsense busy-body who’s trying to juggle a handful of large film projects being mounted on the lot of Capital Pictures. The key film in development is a roman swords-and-sandals epic that features big-time prestige actor Baird Whitlock, played by George Clooney as a witless Charlton Heston type. The production is put on hold when an extra kidnaps the actor and holds him for ransom at a nearby beach mansion, occupied by a group of disgruntled Hollywood writers turned communist.  Alden Erhenreich plays a country bumpkin movie star who also finds himself caught up in the mystery.

There’s no lack of whimsy here and the movie is full of moments of pure exhilaration within its reimagining of Hollywood cinema, including the best song and dance sequence I’ve seen in the last 15 years, starring Channing Tatum and a group of actors dressed as sailors. Key scenes play out like sketch comedy, such as a silly dialogue set-piece between a small group of preachers, priests, and rabbis who are brought in to share their opinions on the depiction of Christ in one of the movies within the movie, as well as another scene in which Erhenreich tries to choke down his thick southern accent for a director played by Ralph Fiennes after getting cast last-minute in a formal costume drama.

Had these scenes, or the many others like them, existed without the connective tissue of the plot to justify their use within the film,  they could support themselves as Funny or Die videos or SNL digital shorts. The movie never quite gels as a story because said connective tissue--Josh Brolin and George Clooney’s overarching plot—is never tended to with the same amount of interest or care.  As the audience’s cypher Brolin never drums up enough pathos or relatability, or even enough of his own comedic presence—like, say, Jeff Bridges does as ‘The Dude’—to pull together all of the competing plot threads and many muddled themes regarding industry politics, personal morals and religion. That said, you can never ding the Coens for lack of trying.

Ehrenreich as the dopey Hobie Doyle, Tilda Swinton as a pair of yellow journalist twins and Scarlett Johansson as a jaded starlet all give loopy, mannered performances that live up the bigness of the movie’s comedic style, and if the “Hail Caesar!” had used one of them to follow as our main character, instead of Brolin’s bland almost-detective, it may have created a better sense of dramatic traction. The larger than life aesthetic gags are too slick and impressive on a technical level to register as comedy and a movie this big and this silly can’t sustain cinematic parlor tricks on this kind of scale without being a lot funnier. Ironically, the final result is a film that resembles the type of bloated, misguided star vehicles that the Coens are working so hard to send up.

Grade: C+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Feb-2016

Listen to more discussion about "Hail Caesar!" on this week's Jabber and the Drone Podcast.

Jane Got a Gun review

Over the last couple of years the troubled production history of “Jane Got a Gun” has been well publicized. “We Need to Talk About Kevin” director Lynn Ramsey was originally attached to direct, but left the project—or was fired, depending on who you ask—and Gavin O’Connor of “Warrior” and “Pride and Glory” fame was sent in to quickly salvage the production. Talks of hasty rewrites were buzzed in the media and the final result is a trim western with very little personality. And to be quite honest, given the circumstances, that’s actually something of an accomplishment.

Natalie Portman plays Jane, a frontiers woman who finds out that she’s being hunted down by a gang of outlaws after her husband, played by Noah Emmerich, is near-fatally injured and wanders back to their secluded home with a bullet in belly. Jane is then put in the awkward position of asking her ex-lover, played by Joel Egerton, to protect her and dying husband.  As you might expect, tough conversations are shared between the three as they set up nineteenth century home-alone traps around Jane’s property.

Leave it to Gavin O’Conner to turn a story about woman trying to protect her family into a story about competing masculinity. Portman help produce this picture for herself to star in, and the buzz about its feminist themes were supposed to be part of the project’s original appeal. Somewhere in the production process Portman’s Jane became a walking MacGuffin and a hapless damsel, defined only by the men fighting to protect her and the men out to denigrate and destroy her. Jane eventually does get the titular gun, these brief moments of empowerment are buried in a heap on down-home, country-fried mansplaning.

If we choose not to think about the thematic betrayal or its problematic sexual politics, Jane functions just well-enough as a dusty B-movie western. The flashback narrative is herky-jerky and the pacing is suffers because of it, but it’s made clear early-on who the bad guys are—Ewan McGregor with a rubber nose, looking not unlike a young James Garner—and it’s clear what the ultimate payoff of the film should be. As far as how said pay-off is played out, it could have come a little sooner and been explored with more cinematic breadth and depth than O’Conner allows within this truncated edit.

There should be an inherent drama in the “Rio Bravo”/“Assault on Precinct 13” set-up in which a protagonist stands their ground and prepares for an all-out assault by a group of heavily armed bandits. The way in which “Jane Got a Gun” decides to tell this story lacks in both the exploitation glee of something like Tarantino’s talky winter-western “The Hateful Eight” or the slow-burning cinematic majesty of Alejandro Inarritu’s exhausting revenge film “The Revenant.” There’s also much less grandiose over-direction than indulged by either of those directors and while this ephemeral disappointment lacks visual ambition and a specific vision, there’s something to be said about the refreshing honesty of this its humble mediocrity.

Grade: C-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Feb-2016

Listen to more discussion about "Jane Got a Gun" on this week's Jabber and the Drone Podcast.