Top 10 Films of 2017

Altogether, 2017 wasn’t a bad year for movies. Even if I had to travel to art houses to watch something worthwhile, there was never a shortage of interesting things to see. There were also a handful of mainstream movies such as Patty Jenkin's "Wonder Woman," Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk,” and  Marvel’s “Thor: Ragnarok” that made an impression beyond their minimum financial requirements. My list contains many unabashed genre movies, including three monster movies, one superhero film, and two psychological horror films. In fact, only three of the films listed tell relatively common stories within a fairly naturalized version of the world we live in. Nevertheless, the list below represents last year’s films that stuck with me the most.

10 – Okja
South Korean director Bong Joon Ho’s subversive allegory tells the story of a girl who fights the powers of the food industrial complex to keep her genetically modified super-pig from being killed. It’s heartwarming, weird, campy, smart, disturbing, and politically conscious without forgetting to keep you entertained.

09 – Call Me by Your Name
Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of Andre Aciman’s novel of the same name explores first love and the complicated emotions associated with young hormones and queer awakening with the perfect proportions of guilt, lust, and righteous indignation. The performances by romantic leads Timothee Chalamet and Armie Hammer are honest and the movie’s total sensory immersion within this 1981, summer vista in Northern Italy only helps to drench this dream-like romance in youthful idealism.

08 – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri
Every year has a great crime film, and this year’s entry by playwright/director Martin McDonagh, while not without a few tonal and narrative stumbles along the way, left a lasting impression.  McDonagh embraces the story’s pulpy post-Cohen trappings while finding surprising ways to empathize with every morally complicated character in his southern-gothic murder ballad.

 07 – Logan
 “Logan” went far and above anyone’s expectations, considering it was the third spinoff from 20th Century Fox’s wildly uneven X-Men franchise. This hard-R action thriller only concerned itself with its comic book origins when it needed to advance the thoughtful arc of its title character. This is the type of action fare that originally set the bar for fanboys, back when movies like “Robocop” and “Terminator 2” were the standards, instead of toothless, PG-13 cartoons, designed by committee.

06 – Colossal
Anne Hathaway and Jason Sudeikis explore gendered power dynamics and alcoholism in Nacho Vigalondo’s unique comedic fantasy “Colossal.”  The relationship depicted here is mirrored by (and perhaps in control of) giant monster attacks in Seoul, South Korea. This is unquestionably one of the most creative and underappreciated films released in 2017.

05 – The Shape of Water 
After a decade of playing in his toy-box and exploring new technology with films such as “Hellboy: The Golden Army” and “Pacific Rim,” Guillermo del Toro was in desperate need to scale things back and explore emotional storytelling again, and that’s exactly what he did with his spectacular inter-species, cold-war romance, “The Shape of Water.” This takes familiar sci-fi/horror tropes and weaves them into a sophisticated love story about living in the margins of society.

04 – Get Out
Comedian Jordon Peele released his post-racial horror-comedy “Get Out” just as our country began to reexamine the old prejudices that we had been trying to ignore for decades. His film cleverly reinterprets the tradition of paranoid, socio-political supernatural thrillers such as “The Stepford Wives” and “Rosemary’s Baby,” but it’s also become a conversation piece around a time when Americans were forced to deal with the fact that polite racism is still racism.

03 – Raw
This Belgian horror film explores the sexual awakening of a college-aged vegetarian through the metaphor of cannibalism and manages to be vicious, disgusting, and painfully relatable at the same time. Scenes of grotesque mutilation and bloody meat-eating are fetishized through the laser-focused perspective of our confused protagonist. While being one of the gnarliest seat-squirmers released in recent memory, this also happens to contain one of the most honest portrayals of competitive sisterhood captured on film.

02 – The Florida Project
Sean Baker’s film about struggling families living week to week in cheap hotels outside Disneyworld was one of the more affecting movies I came across last year. This contains strong performances by children and non-actors and a subtle compassion that glows through the entire production. Baker presents these marginal lives with an insider’s objectivity that refuses to other them or turn into magically-wise gypsies.

01 – Lady Bird 
“Lady Bird” is my favorite film of the year for the sheer reason that it kept me in a good mood for at least forty-eight hours after I watched it. The level of specificity in its character dynamics and its 2002 Sacramento setting, alongside the underlying mother-daughter story and its themes about embracing your small-town roots, sets this film apart from the usual ‘quirky’ Sundance fodder. This is what great American filmmaking should look like.

Honorable Mentions: The Big Sick, Thor: Ragnarok, Downsizing, Happy Death Day, It, Blade Runner: 2049

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about our year-end lists.

The Disaster Artist review

The cult-movie phenomenon “The Room” has had an interesting arc in pop-culture since its single-theater release in 2003. The film was a word-of-mouth curiosity among a growing fan-base of LA hipsters looking for a good chuckle, which then became a frequent subject of online conversation about the train wreck that is Tommy Wiseau’s (producer/director/star) vanity project. Only a few years later, Adult Swim began airing an edited version of the film, and soon enough, the movie began its new life an unintentional comedic masterpiece of so-bad-it’s-good paracinema.

James Franco’s “The Disaster Artist” tells the story of how Wiseau’s mess originally came together. The story is told through Tommy’s (James Franco) friendship with The Room’s second lead actor Greg Sestero (Dave Franco). After meeting in a San Francisco acting class, the two set their sales for Los Angeles, where they hope to break into film and television. Greg puts all of his trust in the enigmatic and independently wealthy Tommy, who refuses to disclose his age, his source of seemingly bottomless income, and his country of origin. After flailing from one audition to another, Tommy decides to write and direct his own feature, casting himself and his best friend as the movie’s stars. What ensues is the troubled conditions and inept filmmaking that lead to The Room’s now-quotable English as second-language dialogue, awkwardly hilarious soft-core sex scenes, and the film’s many football-tossing conversation set-pieces.

This eccentric biopic has a few notable standouts; firstly there’s James Franco’s wild and committed performance, in which it’s obvious that the actor has spent hours studying every tick and every idiosyncratic gesture of his ambiguously European muse. The story arc between Greg and Tommy, the rise and fall of their friendship, and how it making of their film relates to their careers and legacies is interesting and played with some amount of charm and heart, even if this angle is offset by a large chunk of the film that is more concerned with recreating fan-favorite moments from “The Room,” as well as Dave Franco’s unfortunate underacting. 

Sestero, who wrote the tell-all for which this film is based, is a whitebread, undescriptive Hollywood baby-face, but his role in Tommy’s life gives him a jolt of unearned intrigue. Dave Franco’s performance as the actor turned author never quite settles beneath the surface of either the movie’s comedic potential or its emotional intent. Because of this, James’ Wiseau performance becomes more of a long-form impression than a fully realized character.

Ultimately, there’s nothing that one can say about “The Room” that the “The Room” doesn’t already say about itself, and to devote a so much screen time on pointing out the untethered ego of its director and the film’s obvious artistic shortcomings simply becomes a tedious act of picking low-hanging fruit. With that said, “The Disaster Artist” is entertaining enough as an extension of a cinematic meme. If you’ve ever endured Wiseau’s 2003 opus, or, despite being objectively bad, you find it endlessly watchable because of its otherworldly tone, then Franco’s extended inside joke will give you enough laughs to justify its existence, but I'm not sure how well any of this will play for those who are entirely uninitiated.

Grade: B-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2017

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The Shape of Water review

Mexican born filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro is fascinated by the idea that people are often drawn to what initially scares them, usually only because they fundamentally misunderstand themselves and the greater context of their own fears. As such, his films--both indie darlings like “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “The Devil’s Backbone,” as well as studio blockbusters like “Pacific Rim” and “Hellboy"--are chock full of interesting and intricately designed monsters. As a visual artist and a storyteller Del Toro loves his monsters and for him, they always represent a complex emotional truth about the nature of humanity. With his latest film, “The Shape of Water,” the balance between his directorial compassion and his genre obsessions is blended delicately into a contemporary “Beauty and Beast” style narrative, with a central focus on diversity, tolerance, and equality.

The story is set in the cold-war 1960s at the height of the red scare. Sally Hawkins plays Elisa Esposito, a mute janitor who cleans a secret government science compound. Things get interesting when an amphibious humanoid merman is captured from his underwater home in South America and brought into the facility to be studied. Some of the scientists wish to keep him alive to understand his capability to learn, and others, like the stone-faced, military-minded Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon), plan to dissect the creature to develop new science to use against their Russian enemies. Hawkins secret friendship and eventual romance with the amphibious man leads to a rescue effort that involves co-worker Zelda (Octavia Spencer), the sympathetic Dr. Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg), and her graphic designer neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins).

Given the time period this movie is set and the basic structure of the plot, it would have been easy to allow a story of this kind of coast of genre expectations alone. What makes the film stand out from being yet another high-concept take on “E.T” or “Free Willy” is Del Toro’s willingness to dig deep into a psychology of his characters and their worldview. The film's theme of what it is to be ostracized as a minority dominates and naturalizes the fantasy.  Hawkins’ character is mute, Spencer is black, and they both work as women in a government-industry dominated by white men. Likewise, Jenkins plays a closeted gay man, and it’s the unified ‘other-ness’ of this grouping of minorities that is manifested through the struggle of this abused and imprisoned merman. As we see the civil rights struggle in the background of this story, it becomes all the more evident that the creature's rescue becomes their rescue. 

The central love story between Elisa and this mysterious being, played with wonderful physicality by Doug Jones, takes risks and goes beyond the usual slow build to acceptance and eventual affection. Hawkins’ wordless performance strips away the possibility for coyness or coded language when it comes to all of her emotions and as the story progresses their love is expressed both emotionally and physically. This, along with Guillermo’s biting sense of humor, and the occasional jolts of visceral violence may alienate some audience members, but even if this is too weird for you to swallow, it’s difficult to deny the movie’s bold commitment to its premise.

Everyone already knows that Del Toro is Hollywood's current king of creature design and art direction. “The Shape of Water” is no exception. However, by putting his focus on one central creature, instead of a smorgasbord of weird looking monsters we are usually treated to in one of his previous films, he is able to dig deeper into the wider human world his characters inhabit. The 60s sets are well lit and creatively designed and the “Creature From The Black Lagoon” inspired look of Jones’ costume is textured and utterly believable, but it's Del Toro’s capacity to empathize with these characters and ground this world into an emotional reality that elevates this movie beyond its fairytale tropes and trappings.

Grade: A

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2017

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Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri review

Writer, director, and playwright Martin McDonagh has reached new heights and new ambitions with his latest effort “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri.” This is a strangely American story for the Irish filmmaker; a dark, rural noir about a community plagued by tragedy and bitter rivalries. The film’s dark sense of humor and colorful dialogue, as well as actress Frances McDormand as the lead, brings to mind bleaker work of the Coen brothers, and while “Three Billboards” isn’t quite as structurally sound or tonally confident as something like “Blood Simple” or “Fargo,” this Midwest murder ballad has its own eccentricities to boast.

 McDormand stars as Mildred Hayes, a hardened town’s woman who is still in mourning after a year of waiting for the local police to solve the sexual assault and brutal murder of her teenage daughter. When it seems like the local authorities have exhausted all their leads and have let the case get cold, Mildred takes action by renting three un-used billboards on an old highway, calling out the police chief Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) for his inaction. Sam Rockwell plays Jason Dixon, the hot-headed officer who works under Willoughby and whose reputation as an underachiever places him in a conflicting position between the locals, the vengeful Mildred, and his boss.

Speaking only for his cinematic work, McDonagh is one of the many filmmakers who graduated from the school of post-Tarantino, making bratty, self-conscious and genre-defying crime movies. In this regard, he shares a lot of same obsessions as his British crime comrades such as Matthew Vaughn (“Layer Cake”) and Guy Ritchie (“Snatch”), but where he departs from all of these influence, is his ability to be arch and ultra-violent while never losing sight of his interest in deep-rooted emotional storytelling. His debut “In Bruges” as well as “Three Billboards…” lets the flashy style and sassy dialogue carry us to unexpected tenderness flowing beneath the surface of his movies’ genre appeal. This latest work pushes the sincerity of its lurid subject matter even further and finds McDonagh dialing into his actors’ performances with more clarity and a new sense of Zen confidence. This is why it's all the more frustrating when the movie undercuts its emotional core with corny punchlines or crass jokes.

The majority of the film balances the dark humor and the darker tragedy with commendable grace and agility, but occasionally when these two tones run into each other, they loudly clang. “Game of Thrones” actor Peter Dinklage is essentially included in the cast for the sole purpose of delivering an extended little-person joke, and both Harrelson as Chief Willoughby and John Hawkes as Mildred’s abusive ex-husband are both sporting young trophy wives played by Abbie Cornish and Samara Weaving; a strange parallel that isn’t addressed and is often played for tonally-inappropriate laughs. Though McDonagh is stretching his abilities here and has perhaps made his most fulfilling and ambitious movie yet, the stretch-marks are definitely visible.

“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri” isn’t a perfect film but it’s a welcome surprise during the usually-stuffy prestige season. It’s a twisting crime yarn that you can never predict and that’s equally concerned with presenting the film as both an art-form as well as a means for populist entertainment. This is the director’s best-looking film to date, with cinematographer Ben Davis capturing the landscape in a way that informs the movie’s southern-gothic undertones perfectly. And yet, even with a bigger canvas being utilized, the performances never drift too far from the intimate relationship they successfully build with the audience.

Grade: B+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2017

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Lady Bird review

Quentin Tarantino once said of Kevin Smith’s “Chasing Amy” “Yeah, it’s personal, but if it isn’t good who cares?” This was, of course, Tarantino’s lead into a strong endorsement of the indie filmmakers critically high-point, before Smith eventually squandered most his good will on half-baked stoner comedies and non-sense podcast fodder. But it’s this sentiment that comes to mind when reviewing actress Greta Gerwig's “Lady Bird,” her debut film as both writer and director. Based heavily on the 34-year old’s  own coming of age experiences in 2002 Sacramento, the movie plays as both a love letter to the California capital, as well as a tender-hearted comedy about a big fish in a little pond who’s awkwardly splashing her way to grander opportunities.

Christine McPherson (Saoirse Ronan) is a high-school senior who is desperately trying to leave her small town life. While forced to live a lower-middle-class existence, fighting with her pragmatist mother (Laurie Metcalf) and preparing graduation from her strict Catholic education. As she tries on many new personalities she ready’s herself for a more cultured life at one of the prospective east-coast universities she hopes to attend. This is made explicitly known to her friends and family when she forces them to refer to her as Lady Bird instead of her given name. After deciding she needs an artistic outlet, her and best friend Julie (Beanie Feldstein) take small parts in the school musical, just before Lady Bird finds a new group of partying, pseudo-intellectual parking-lot rebels. In the background of this, with the help of her out-of-work father (Tracy Letts), our protagonist tries to apply to as many out-of-state schools as she can without her easily-worried mother finding out.

Gerwig’s treatment of this coming-of-age story is grounded by its specificity. It’s not a story that has to take place in Sacramento to work, but in doing so the city becomes another character whose relationship with Lady Bird is just as nuanced as the other human relationships in the movie. This didn’t need to be set in 2002, but the music and wardrobe choices, as well as the pre-smartphone, pre-social media time-frame that’s captured here, keep the characters isolated in their suburban malaise that’s lovingly recreated. It’s also nice to see a story about a realistically middle-class family who is struggling financially but without shifting the narrative away from the protagonists

The other element that separates this effort from the film’s generic teen-movie lineage, is the quality of the performances combined with Gerwig’s funny yet truthful, conversational dialogue. The many prickly scenes between Metcalf and Ronan’s mother-daughter exchanges is like watching two tennis pros bat the ball back and forth without ever letting it hit the ground. These actors are totally in tune with each other but not at the expense of movie’s larger impact. As real and emotional as the acting is, it never overwhelms the story or dampens the scripts many comedic highlights. Actor/playwright Letts also has complicated arc throughout the story as his personal and professional failures are redeemed through his daughter’s naive ambitions. It’s a heartbreaking arc that the film doesn’t explicate in an overly sentimental way. 

Not only is “Lady Bird” an exceptional effort from a first time director, this has been one of the strongest films to come out this year--though it should be stated Gerwig’s collaborations with directors Noah Baumbach and Joe Swanberg was more extensive than the usual co-writer or actor. Every scene advances or complicates the characters and never lets them settle into a comfortable archetype, and the craft behind the earthy, amber-hued visual design of the picture also shows a level of stylistic confidence that elevates the project beyond either the teen genre or the usual Sundance crowd-pleaser.  Like any great filmmaker who understands how to balance story with style, Gerwig’s snappy dialogue and personal touches are in perfect sync with the rhythm of the narrative and in service to the overall quality of the final result.

Grade A+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2017

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Thor: Ragnarok review

Marvel’s “Thor: Ragnarok” sits neatly into the newest phase of the post-millennial cinematic superhero boom; the ironic, smart-aleck phase. After years of sincere, emotionally grounded superhero films and a couple years of gritty, nihilistic superhero films, with the focus mostly on charismatic, reluctant savior archetypes, it would appear that the genre is now in a self-reflexive, experimental mood, no-longer interested in retelling the same tired Campbellian origin stories. This is best exemplified with the success of Marvel’s quirky “Guardians of the Galaxy” films, Fox’s snarky “Deadpool” movie and Warner’s recut and confused “Suicide Squad.” We’ve seen referential superhero comedies before, like Mathew Vaughn’s “Kick-Ass” and James Gunn’s pre-Guardians indie film “Super,” but it’s that these new films are made within the established cannon of their respective cinematic universes that their tonal risks are all the more pronounced.

Chris Hemsworth as Thor returns to the magic realm of Asgard, only to discover that his father Odin (Anthony Hopkins) has failed to keep away his long lost sister Hela (Cate Blanchett), who was banished from the kingdom centuries ago for being a murderous war monger. Having returned stronger than ever, she pushes Thor and his trickster brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) into a junk-yard planet that is ruled by a flaky aristocrat (Jeff Goldblum) who keeps his subjugated people entertained with gladiatorial battles. Thor is eventually captured by a binge-drinking ex-Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) and forced to fight his fellow Avenger, Bruce Banner/Hulk (Mark Ruffalo). Meanwhile, Hela has reclaimed the Asgardian throne and is making her plans to invade neighboring realms.

“Thor: Ragnarok” separates itself from the previous two entrees in the franchise by embracing this new shift into broader storytelling and wilder myth-making. The movie’s aesthetic is knowingly campy and filled with flashy, colorful visuals that zip through every frame. Along with Mark Mothersbaugh’s synth-laden score, this new look and approach—very much informed by “Guardians of the Galaxy”—taps into a pinball arcade peppiness that activates every artistic choice New Zealand director Tiaka Waititi commits to. Unlike the first two Thor films, which were beholden to some earth-bound characters and natural settings to help fit the character into the norms of the conventional superhero mold, Ragnarok has untethered its earthly concerns and introduces us to a host of new space-ships, aliens, mythic monsters and ancient prophecies.

There are times when Ragnarok’s ties to the other Marvel films is cumbersome. Many plot points refers back to the other adventures by the Avengers and many of the movie’s in-jokes refer to what we have come to know about these characters over the last six years. As such, I’m not sure how well this installment stands on its own. The wild joy-ride this story takes us on is unpredictable and refreshing in its full embrace of silliness but there are also moments when the movie is throwing so much at us all at once, that things get momentarily cluttered and borderline incoherent. Waititi keeps all the moving pieces connected just enough that the narrative doesn’t split at the seams, but Blanchett’s darker Asgardian takeover plot is largely pushed away by the lighter gladiatorial stuff, with Jeff Goldblum looking like an extra from the 1980 disco cult-film “The Apple.” This isn’t a detriment to a movie that wants to be funnier and louder in its aesthetic approach, but it does leave the mechanics of the storytelling noticeably uneven.

Waititi took this material, which by 2013’s dower “Thor: The Dark World” had overstayed its welcome, and injected new life into it by strategically stepping away from superhero formulas. Everyone here is having a good time, and you should too. This is a wild, messy space-opera buffet, and as such, feel free to bring a bib and dig in. While there isn’t much here in the way nutritious substance beyond the simple joys of its creative surfaces,  but “Thor: Ragnarok” certainly lives up to its objective as being a spectacle with it's own comedic personality.

Grade: B+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2017

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The Florida Project review

Sean Baker’s “The Florida Project” is a near-perfect snapshot of real-world Americana. Unlike the usual glut of LA/NY films about the lives of ad executives and graphic designers, Baker gives us the fly on the wall point of view of a lively Orlando motel filled with immigrants, tourists and vagrants who are all doing what they can to make it through day to day.  Hollywood routinely ignores the poor unless they wish to exploit them or turn them into cartoonish stereotypes, and while Baker doesn’t shy away from the grimmer realities of those who have slipped beneath America’s social cracks, he never judges them and gracefully creates a deep sense of untraditional family with his cast of mostly unknowns.

Newcomer Brooklyn Prince plays the film’s unofficial lead Mooney, a spunky six year old with a potty mouth and an adventurous spirit that gets her and her friends into trouble. Scooty (Christopher Rivera) and Jancey (Valeria Cotto) follow their instigator as they panhandle for ice-cream money, break into the hotel’s breaker room, and vandalize near-by abandoned homes. Mooney lives with her notably young mother Halley (Bria Valley), who sells hot merchandise and prostitutes herself to pay a weekly rent for their room at a Disneyworld-adjacent hotel, which is managed by the bighearted but overstretched Bobby, played by Willem Dafoe.

While there is clear character arcs the narrative there isn’t a clear three act structure with an inciting incident or second act moment of conflict to be resolved. Because of the movie’s impressionistic, montage approach to storytelling, some might find the lack of a “plot” frustrating. Baker doesn’t want to bog these characters down with a plot contrivance like a personal mission to achieve or a big problem to overcome. Instead this focuses more on the moments between the plot-points in our lives, and since most of this is being experienced through the perspective of a child, we are sometimes shielded from the harder aspects of Mooney’s daily experiences. What Baker creates is a painterly collage of brief moments of recognizable American childhood, where harder adult truths like making rent, finding free food and avoiding the police is treated like a fun game or a way of keeping yourself occupied during summer vacation.

With the exception of Dafoe as Bobby, who turns in a wonderful un-Dafoe performance as the hotel’s surrogate father, the rest of the cast blends into Baker’s attempt at documentary-style verisimilitude.  This means that the acting, like in Baker’s last picture—the iPhone filmed dark comedy “Tangerine”—is too real to focus on performance as an individual element. Much of the dialogue feels improvised and the children often scream and squeak their lines over each other, giving the audience the impression that they aren’t watching a movie, so much as peering through their window, wondering like a nosy neighbor just what the hell these kids are up to.  This, along with the non-traditional narrative structure, is likely to weed out viewers who are more accustomed to Wheaties- commercial style annunciation from their child actors.

The accumulative effect of “The Florida Project” is devastating if you’re willing to open your mind to its unique rhythm. The cinematography by Alexis Zabe combines the handheld immediacy of “Tangerine” with warmly lit, deliberate camera placement that recalls the moodier moments of last year’s Florida-based indie drama, “Moonlight.” Though all the individual components of the film work in harmony, with the exception of some random bathtub shots that are seemingly shuffled in to break up later scenes, the movie’s big takeaway is the compassion it displays for its characters and the tangible, relatable world they inhabit.    

Grade: A-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2017

The Babysitter review

Netflix’s “The Babysitter” is a horror-tinged action-comedy with a surprising amount of charisma and charm. Surprising because it's directed by McG, best known for hacky schlock like “This Means War,” “Terminator Salvation” and the “Charlies Angels” movies, Here he scales down his budget and the broad scope of his desired audience, and in doing so manages to helm something that feels specific and personal, while also retaining enough visceral hijinks and well-intended snark to keep things entertaining.

The film centers on the relationship between a nerdy twelve year old named Cole (Judah Lewis) and his babysitter Bee (Samara Weaving). Cole is getting old enough to know that he’s probably too old for a babysitter, but Bee is everything a bullied brain needs in middle-school; she’s smart, she listens, she gives great advice and she’s smoking-hot. The only downside is she also happens to be the leader of a teenage devil-worshipers cult. One night, while Cole’s parents are away, he stays up late to see what Bee and her friends are up to, only to disrupt a murderous death ceremony, which kicks off a night-long game of cat and mouse between our worry-wort protagonist and this group of sinister high schoolers. 

This movie mostly works because of the well-established dynamic between Lewis and Weaving. We have to fall in love with Bee just as Cole does, so that when the story reveals her for what she is, we feel the same kind of betrayal. To the director’s credit, he does the proper leg-work with these characters so that the drama is informed and the action stakes are energized. Samara Weaving gives what would normally be a star-making performance as Bee--she’s confident, funny and powerfully sexy, without ever leaning into vacuous objectification. The versatility she displays with this wildly audacious role is better than any acting reel one could hope to cobble together.  Judah Lewis is also good at portraying believable innocents in a film that revels in poppy ultra-violence and subversive fun.  It’s for this reason that the other teens, played by Bella Thorne, Hanna Mae Lee, Robbie Amell and Andrew Bachelor feel all the more underwritten in comparison.

While Weaving and Lewis are fully realized and complicated from the page to their performances, these other roles are far more comfortable existing as basic teen horror archetypes, often spouting sophomoric, unfunny dialogue. But despite the quality imbalance between all the characterizations, “The Babysitter” still knows how to build small-scale action set-pieces with creative kills and effective moments of splattering slapstick.

Besides working well as a violent dark comedy, Brian Duffield’s screenplay also remembers to root everything within the context of an effective coming-of-age arc. As a result, this left-of-center project is without a doubt the most original and heartfelt film to come out of McG’s spotty catalog, and that’s saying something for a picture littered with satanic blood rituals, hangings and indoor car crashes.

Grade: B-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Oct-2017

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Happy Death Day review

There was a time, not too long ago, when horror movies used to be made for teenagers.  The 80s was full of populist scary flicks that catered to the 11-24 marked, with films such as “Friday the 13^th,” “Fright Night,” “Slumber Party Massacre,” “Night of the Comet,” “The Lost Boys” and many more. Wes Craven’s first “Scream,” and its subsequent sequels and rip-offs, might have been the last era of that tradition. In its absence, we’ve seen grim supernatural chillers, cheap found-footage shocks and a small splattering of gore films, derisively labeled ‘torture porn.’  Christopher Landon’s “Happy Death Day,” released by Blumhouse Productions, tries to find that sweet spot between made-for-TV tween-age Halloween movies and the slightly more sophisticated slashers of the 1980s.

Jessica Rothe stars as Tree Gelbman, a young sorority girl who, on her birthday, finds herself waking in a strange boy’s dorm room after a hard night of partying. Quickly gathering her things and leaving, she’s goes about her day with smeared eye-liner and a short fuse, pissing off everyone she encounters, including Carter, the boy she presumably spent the night with (Israel Broussard), her college roommate (Ruby Modine) and the professor with whom she’s currently having an extra-marital affair (Charles Aitken). Her night ends at the end of knife held by a masked killer, and after she's murdered, she awakes on the same day, in the same bed, only to relive these encounters over and over until she’s able to outsmart her attacker.

The fun of this “Groundhog’s Day” premise is that Landon and his screenwriter Scott Lobdell can fully explore the geography of their set-pieces and they can tease the mystery element with a gimmick that allows the audience to play along with the protagonist. In this way, the movie succeeds in its slumber party ambitions, but it excels in its layered character work. Tree begins the film as a terrible person who has little to no regard for anyone other than herself. Her journey, by reliving a horrible death over and over again, is to explore who she’s wronged and what their motivations might be. In doing so, she is forced to think about the feelings of others and she is also forced to come to terms with her own past trauma that made her become so cold to begin with. This Scrooge-ish character arc might not be the most revolutionary angle to go with, but there’s at least an emotionally rooted purpose for it’s the screenplay’s high-concept.

All the performances are strong. Rothe has the most do, as she learns to become a better person throughout the runtime, but her eventual partnership with Broussard is also a highlight, as we watch them plan and scheme together like the Hardy Boys. The film only slips when it over plays its red herrings. An element is introduced near the mid-point that steps too far away from what was carefully established in the first third. This plot point is eventually dealt with in a way that’s satisfying and still rooted in character, but given the obvious mechanics of the plot, the placement of this story element is the only thing that registers as labored and forced.

“Happy Death Day” is a love letter to a simpler time in horror. It uses post-modern techniques to explore these simpler, somewhat optimistic themes, but in doing so, manages to cleverly deconstruct the slasher genre in way that isn’t too ponderous or academic.  It’s probably not as scary as it could have been but this is the type of horror date-movie that was made to enjoy some popcorn with, and sometimes that’s okay.

Grade: B

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Oct-2017

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Blade Runner 2049 review

There’s a lot to admire about Denis Villeneuve’s “Blade Runner 2049.” This long-awaited sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 cult-masterpiece attempts to step up the cyberpunk aesthetics and moody atmosphere of its sci-fi predecessor, while also tackling similar themes about the meaning of consciousness and what it is to be human. Given his past success with handsomely directed genre fare such as “Sicario” and 2016’s “Arrival,” Villeneuve’s involvement signaled to fans that this follow up would be a serious attempt at continuing the mysterious and oft-debated subject matter of the original. Serious is certainly a word that could be used to describe what we  ended up with here. The pulpy dime-store detective fiction that inspired Scott’s previous entry has now been glossed over with a more dreamlike, somber take on the material that fits more into Villeneuve’s bleak authorial world-view.

Ryan Gosling plays a bio-engineered police officer called Agent-K. He’s a Blade Runner that is hired by the LAPD to ‘retire’ older replicants that have gone rogue. While working on a case involving a shocking cover-up, in which a female replicant gave natural birth, he finds his mysterious past and his implanted memories coming into question. The further he digs into the case, he becomes more fervently pursued by his governmental employers, as well as the nefarious manufacturers known as the Wallace Corporation. Both of these parties have a lot to lose in the world finding out how much closer to humans the replicants have become.

This film boasts a large and eclectic cast including Robin Wright as Gosling’s tough boss Lieutenant Joshi, Jared Leto as the sadistic Niander Wallace, as well as relative newcomers like Ana De Armas as Goslings digital companion Joi, and Sylvia Hoek’s as Niander’s lethal mercenary Luv. Gosling is essentially our cipher into this world, traveling though his existential journey, which eventually leads us to Harrison Ford’s return as Rick Dekkard. But it’s the women in the film and K’s relationship to these women that dominates the narrative. Wright represents the sociological and bureaucratic structures that keeps K ignorant of his life beyond his function as a Blade Runner and replicant. Joi represents his yearning for something more profound, while the dangerous Luv represents his fear of the truth.  In some ways this backdoor approach to Gosling’s character diminishes his role as a protagonist, making him far less proactive in his own journey. As a result, though his performance is appropriate for the material, he’s can be a passive drip to follow. Nevertheless, Villeneuve gives all of these characters enough screen time and stakes in the plot to realize their motivations beyond their function as stock, pulpy archetypes.

Working again with cinematographer Roger Deakins, this movie is a marvel to gaze upon. The sleek production design and Deakin’s moody capturing of light and shadow, along with Villeneuve’s symmetrical shot set-ups and steady direction, creates for a monolithic, sometimes oppressive style that always keeps the eye engaged through this close-to three hour feature. Characters are often shot much smaller in the frame, placed around larger, totemic buildings and structures in the background and foreground, underlining the director’s point that they are overwhelmed by the cold, technological reality around them.

“Blade Runner 2049” only falls a little short in its ability to connect the audience with the movie’s larger themes through the characters wants and desires. This issue tries to correct itself through a few emotional arcs, the most successful being Gosling’s relationship with his IOS girlfriend—De Armas doing most of the heavy lifting there. But as a secondary plot point, it can’t lift the spirits of this admittedly dower project as a whole. However, it would also be a lie to call this anything less than an achievement of quality filmmaking. It’s large and ambitious without devolving into mindless destruction and the action set-pieces are always rooted in story concerns. Villeneuve is confident in his own cinematic abilities and though this work is colder than the 1982 neo-noir classic, it does advance the lore in a respectful and artful manner.

Grade: B

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Oct-2017

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It review

A faithful adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 novel “It” has been a long time coming. Of course, there was the two-part miniseries that aired on network television in 1990, and though it hasn’t aged particularly well and was constrained from delving into most of the visceral terror described in King’s book, the series has its fans and Tim Curry’s performance as the evil clown Pennywise has become something of a cult-horror icon. The development of the first true cinematic adaptation of this novel has finally been realized by Argentinian director Andy Muschietti and with the help of New Line Cinema, this adaptation finally has the budget and the R-rating that it needs to realize this story with more creative freedom.

King has never been known for his brevity, but “It” stands as one of his largest and most ambitious works, containing over a thousand pages describing a group of bullied pre-teens who have to band together to kill the monster that’s been terrorizing their town of Derry, Maine. The book first tells the story of how the self-branded Losers Club meet while on their summer vacation, and then it revisits these same characters 27 years later, when they are forced to return to their hometown to once again destroy the evil entity they once thought was destroyed. For obvious reasons, Muschietti has decided to cut the story in half and streamline the remains, only concerning himself with the Loser’s as a kids, setting up a sequel for the adult half.  Here he does his best to balance their childhood traumas with that of their confrontations with the demented clown.

A group of child actors can always be mixed bag of performances and acting styles, but luckily for Muschietti, this cast has been assembled with care. Their reactions to the movie’s horrific imagery, as well as their perceived comradery as outsiders and friends is perfectly pitched. We’ve seen Jaeden Lieberher before in pictures such as “St. Vincent” and last year’s “Midnight Special,” but his performance here as Bill Denbrough steps up to the emotional weight of the character whose still mourning the murder of his younger brother Georgie. Finn Wolfhard, of the very King-esq Netflix series “Stranger Things,” also turns in a great performance as Richie, the group’s wise-cracker. The rest of the cast is a little less familiar, with Jeremy Ray Taylor as the overweight library geek Ben, Chosen Jacobs as the racially-targeted Mike, Wyett Oleff as the nervous Stanley, Jack Dylan Grazer as the hypochondriac Eddie, and Sophia Lillis as tough but fragile Beverly Marsh. The screenplay wisely gives each character enough screen time to build the necessary empathy and to underline the story’s dominant metaphors about over-coming childhood trauma.

As a horror film, this is somewhat conventional, but scary enough. Bill Skarsgard’s turn as Pennywise finds a delicate balance between mystery and menace, though it’s sometimes apparent that Muschietti leans into the devilish clown when he doesn’t know how else to build tension in a scene. As such, the more Pennywise is on screen the less we’re afraid of him. The scares are creative and sometimes intentionally blackly humorous—bringing to mind New Line’s flagship horror icon Freddy Krueger--but the film’s pacing, largely dictated by how and where the screenplay decides to skip around King’s tome of a novel, becomes repetitive and episodic towards the movie’s extended second act. All the important scenes are touched on and the book’s themes are still intact, but the rhythm of the film feels oddly metronomic and mechanical. The scares, while individually effective, sometimes cry for variation throughout.

As an adaptation, “It” has its problems, some structural, some tonal, but overall this is an imaginative and evocative horror film. What makes it stand outside of usual ghostly chiller that’s retreaded every year is the attention paid to its characters and their relatable woes as outsiders. The bullies and many of the adult roles lack the same amount of depth, but Muschietti’s sensitivity for his primary cast elevates and informs the movie’s broader monster shocks.

Grade: B

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Sep-2017

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Spider-Man: Homecoming review

After a battle of tug of war between Disney’s Marvel Studios and Sony Pictures, the rights of the Marvel’s flagship character Spider-Man has finally reverted back to its company of origin. We got our first glimpse of their version of the hero in 2016’s “Captain America: Civil War” and here he’s back with his own movie, but unlike the two previous Spider-Man franchises, directed by Marc Webb and Sam Raimi, “Spider-Man: Homecoming” is not interested in retelling the Peter Parker’s origin story or centering the action around a love story. 

Tom Holland stars as the film’s lead, and this story picks up right where his appearance in “Civil War” left off. Peter is 15 years old and having just kicked some butt with Avengers, he’s now desperate to do anything that can get their attention. Tony Stark/Iron-Man (Robert Downey Jr.) gives him and his automated spider-suit a ride back to his suburban home in Queens, but demands that the young lad keeps his web-slinging to a minimum and that he wait for an official call before jumping back into some serious action. Being a teenager with superpowers, Peter ignores these requests and stumbles upon an adventure in which he has to stop a group of local thieves from stealing and manufacturing alien technology to aid in their selling of dangerous and unstable weaponry.

Similar to Raimi’s Spider-Man/Green Goblin arc in his 2001 entry, Holland’s secret life of doing good deeds around his neighborhood is mirrored by Michael Keaton’s tech-inspired power-high as the villain The Vulture. The two paths cross and intertwine more and more as the story unfolds and their hero/villain dynamics are some of the strongest we’ve seen from Marvel Studios, who often struggle to portray compelling villain narratives.

Given that we’ve seen the Spider-Man origin story twice now, and we’ve seen him inspired to rescue a love interest by the movie’s end, I was happy to see this movie avoid those tired tropes. I am also very impressed with Holland’s upbeat, naïve take on the character, yet I found myself regularly pulled out of the film by Marvel’s insistence with interjecting this standalone adventure with its own branding. Because Spider-Man doesn’t have to prove himself to Mary Jane, squelch his guilt over his dead uncle or save the humanity of Harry Osborne, his sole motivation for being a superhero this time around is to someday join the Avengers. That’s fine, I guess, but by treating Spider-Man as just another Marvel fanboy it makes it harder for us to invest in his wants and desires as a protagonist and it renders the more dramatic moments of the film’s conflict rather light and minimal in scope.  

“Spider-Man: Homecoming” is a new take on the character. The supporting cast is full of a lot more color and diversity, Aunt May is now played by the younger Marisa Tomei (wish she been given a little more to do) and Peter even has an uncomplicated friendship with another geeky outsider named Ned, played by newcomer Jacob Batalon (wish he had been given a little less to do.)  I appreciate the small stakes of this Queens-specific story, the action scenes work well enough—in that expensive, unspecific way we’ve come to know from the MCU—and, generally speaking, I like the amiable tone of this version of Spider-Man, but every time Tony Stark had to fly in to save the day or every time another Avengers reference was dropped I found myself rolling my eyes at the Studio’s desperation to remind us that they’ve won IP rights back from Sony.

Grade: B

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/July-2017

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All Eyez on Me review

At the time of his death in 1996 Rapper/actor Tupac Shakur was seen as a successful musician but a controversial figure in pop-culture, having been shot and imprisoned within the short span of his life as a professional “gangster” rapper in the early 90s. His message of message of ‘thug life’ and his profanity laced lyrics that detailed the hard conditions of inner city black youth made him the target of white politicians who tried to blame him and other hip-hop artists at the time for inciting violence towards each other and the police.

Despite the controversy that surrounded his life, in retrospect Shakur has become something of a John Lennon for American people of color. His lyrics were sometimes crass and violent but having been raised by an ex black-panther and trained in Elizabethan poetry at the Baltimore School for the Arts , his political views on poverty and class dynamics were decades ahead of his time, sharpening rhetoric that both the Bernie Sanders campaign and the Black Lives Matter movement would classify today as #woke.  It’s too bad that director Benny Boom’s two hour and twenty biopic “All Eyez on Me” couldn’t live up to the expectations of representing Shakur’s life in a way that isn’t painfully literal or linear.

Newly discovered 2Pac lookalike Demetrius Shipp Jr. is a convincing lead and clearly has spent a long time studying the artist’s speech patterns, gestures and ticks.  Given that half the work is already done for him physically—the similarities are at times uncanny—it’s commendable that he also worked hard to internalize the role and bring forth an emotional reality to his character. Boom however did not make as a strong of considerations towards the project surrounding this performance, and what is left is an awkwardly paced, Wikipedia-scripted, birth-to-burial biopic that often feels like a made-for-TV melodrama that’s full of jarring transitions and hokey, soap-opera dialogue.

Danai Gurira as Tupac’a mother Afeni is usually dialed two or three notches above where her performance should be, and the who’s who of actors who stumble in to cameo as Tupac’s hip-hop contemporaries, such as Biggie Smalls (Jamal Woolard), Snoop Dogg (Jarrett Ellis), and Suge Knight (Dominic L. Santana), are given so little to do and have so little agency in the plot that the movie quickly becomes a slide-show of hip-hop royalty. This, along with the incessant cutting back and forth in the timeline to explicate each scene with a jail-interview framing device that’s abandoned half way through, breaks up the dramatic tension, creating the feeling that the film is longer than necessary and obnoxiously episodic.

Among the larger problems plaguing the feature, there are a few moments that to aid the movie’s cinematic momentum. The concert sequences have palpably electric and they help to keep things lively. In the few moments of dialogue that aren’t incredibly on-the-nose, such as some of the tense exchanges between Pac and Suge and a small but nice scene with Shakur and his high-school girlfriend earlier in the film, the movie occasionally lands on the perfect frequency between blacksploitation camp and Oscar-clip self-parody.

Too much of the film is poorly executed to be great, but a decent 90 minute cut exists somewhere in this labored assembly. As is usually the case with biopics about past icons and celebrities, Benny Boom needed to narrow his scope and decide what story he wanted to tell about the artist, rather than skipping along the loose themes about death and redemption and daddy issues as they float past the narrative.  Since “All Eyez on Me” is currently our only 2pac movie we have, it will have to suffice, and the performance by Demetrius Shipp Jr. is something to behold, but the movie lacks the discipline and the economic storytelling that it needs to emotionally connect with an audience.

Grade: C-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Jul-2017

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It Comes At Night review

Trey Edward Shults’ meditation on paranoia “It Comes at Night” is a creeping thriller, about a family held together by fear.  Many filmmakers and storytellers have mined numerous post-apocalyptic scenarios to further explore the darkest corners of the human experience, and in that regard this picture prides itself in starring deeply into the abyss without blinking.

The film centers on a small family played by Joel Edgerton and Carmen Ejogo as the parents Paul and Sarah and Kelvin Harrison Jr. as their 17 year old son Travis. Only a few days after having to quarantine Sarah’s elderly father from the house,  later killing him and burning his body in the backwoods to insure that the deadly disease he contracted can’t be further spread, a stranger from a few miles away named Will (Christopher Abbott) begs the family for food and refuge for himself and wife and toddler. After arguing with his hopeful wife and sternly vetting the newcomer, Paul decides to aid in this rescue effort. Will and his young wife Kim (Riley Keough) are grateful for the food and sanctuary but the specter of tribalism and tragedy looms large over this stressful new dynamic.

Shults does a good job at establishing the emotional stakes of this story early on so that when even the smallest disturbances are breached, we are made as hyper cautious as our worried protagonists. Like John Carpenter’s 1982 meditation on paranoia “The Thing,” this film puts the characters in a position where common decency is not the rational choice in close quarters. The overarching themes about stubborn masculinity and loss of humanity in the face of panic are not new to this socially conscious sci-fi sub-genre, but it’s the directorial precision and complicated performances that set this film apart from the mountains of forgettable virus/zombie movies that precede it.

Some have complained that the film’s marketing campaign by distributor A24 has been misleading. The titl, as well as the jumpy trailer that focuses more on the viscera and eerie imagery  than it does the movie’s core family drama, have lead some disappointed viewers to believe that this was supposed to be more conventional horror film. While this experience is thoroughly entrenched in bleak tragedy and the implications of the plot are fairly horrific, the movie doesn’t ramp up every scene towards a jump scare and there aren’t any monsters or cannibals scratching on the outside doors of the protagonists secluded home. What that said, there is a strange omniscient point of view that hangs over the drama as it unfolds and it sometimes feels like a demonic hex that’s been put upon this sensitive circumstance.

“It Comes at Night” may not be the traditional horror programmer that people thought they were getting but it is a very dark film that’s meant to challenge our views on human empathy and familial loyalties. Cinematographer Drew Daniels uses minimal lighting schemes to sculpt his subjects out of ink-black darkness, and his slow push-ins on red doors and elongated hallways recalls the nightmarish imagination of David Lynch and monumental intimidation of Stanley Kubrick.  I can’t say that the sci-fi subject matter presented here is all together new or innovative and as a thriller the movie’s reveals are somewhat predicted, but the filmic craft exemplified and the actor’s dedication to their character’s emotional motivations elevate the stock premise into being a taught exercise in suspicion.

Grade: B+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Jun-2017 

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Alien Covenant review

Ridley Scott returned to the “Alien” franchise with his 2012 prequel “Prometheus,”  showing  that the veteran Hollywood director still had a love for monumental science fiction storytelling and an eye for evocative imagery. Yet the viewers who were waiting decades to know more about the origins of 1979’s “Alien” were left with a handsome production undercut by a messy screenplay by writer Damon Lindelof that only teased an explanation, while leaving more questions to be answered.  Hopes that this year’s “Alien Covenant” would finally tie the narrative threads together are hopes to be had in vain, as this latest installment ventures down another lateral tangent that further broadens the mythology.

Much like the first third of the original “Alien,” “Covenant” sends another crew of explorers to an uncharted planet after receiving a fuzzed-out message by Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), the lost survivor of the Prometheus ship. This traveling colony, having recently suffered from an electrical storm that killed many of their inhabitants in hyper-sleep, decides to change course to see if this mysterious planet can support human life. Aboard the vessel is their self-doubting, proudly religious Captain Oram (Billy Crudup), who’s insisting they take the risk to save time, while second-in-command officer Daniels (Katherine Waterston) has just lost her husband in the devastating accident and wants the Covenant to stay on course.  Once a pod of explorers is sent down to investigate the earth-like sphere, the crew discovers a biological terror they weren’t prepared to deal with.

Rounding out the cast is Danny McBride as red-neck pilot Tennessee, Amy Seimets as his wife Faris, Damian Birchir as Lope, and Michael Fassbender as the group’s resident android Walter.  They’re many other smaller performances in the picture and characters to be named, including an oddly short James Franco cameo, but John Logan and Dante Harper’s screenplay relegates most of these roles to serving the story as faceless creature-feature fodder and these extra crew members barely peak out of the movie’s larger obsession with awkwardly-paced, talky scenes of needless exposition.

While the initial introduction to this crew in mourning is an interesting place to begin a darker more sorrowful tone, the movie ultimately lacks the humanity and soul it needs to inform this choice. Instead, the film abandons this set-up and moves on to other concerns. The final moments of “Alien Covenant” contains a traditional attack sequence that feels tired and familiar by the time we get there and superfluous after an hour and forty minutes of exhausting scenes of cave-dwelling, interspersed with mindless attempts at shock

Longtime fans that are curious to see how Scott expands the Alien mythos will likely be divided on the Covenant’s retroactive continuity, as it seems to disregard a lot of speciation rules from the previous installments that followed writer Dan O’Bannon’s original “Alien.” In its place, we are introduced to various forms of alien spores, white monkey-looking creatures that burst out of people’s backs and early forms of the classic eggs and face-huggers. People new to the franchise will and should be totally lost in this minutia and those trying to follow along may need to create a complicated flow-chart to connect all the disparate creatures into one lineage. Whereas the original alien-lifecycle was once elegant and believable, O’Bannon’s simple mythology has now been muddied by two prequels that let the overarching thematic concerns and a handful of bad ideas overtake the storytelling.  This installment in particular is somehow both overreaching and lazy in its execution.

Like “Prometheus,” Michael Fassbender’s duel performance as the androids Walter and David steal the show; though within these scenes, the film’s divergence into highfalutin discussions about life, grief, religion, creation, obsession and flute playing loosens the necessary narrative tension for the movie to work as an effective thriller. Most of the monster attack scenes are only sprinkled in to remind us that this pre-sequel is still related to the known franchise, but the overall structure of the picture is compromised by wasted performances by otherwise good actors, under-rendered CGI, moments of ponderous meditation on themes that are never fully realized and rushed sequences of unearned gore.  

Grade: D+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/May-2017\

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Get Out review

Keagan Michael Key and Jordan Peele rose to prominence by using their comedic platform to discuss issues of race, sociology and identity, but Peele’s treatment of these topics as the basis of a mostly-serious horror film has added an urgency and anger that wasn’t always present in their Comedy Central show. With the election coming fresh off the outrage surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement and having recently seen many young black men killed by the authorities, churches burned down and minority voting rights being compromised, this retrograde of civil rights has had an emotional and psychological impact on many non-white communities. 

“Get Out” takes the basic structure of the 1967 Sidney Poitier film “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” and subverts it with the sci-fi-horror paranoia of classics such as “Rosemary’s Baby,” “The Stepford Wives” and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” 

Daniel Kaluuya plays Chris Washington, the young African American boyfriend of Rose Armitage, played “Girls” star Allison Williams. They’ve been dating for five months and Chris has decided travel with his gal to upstate New York to meet her white, affluent, town-and-country family for the first time. While nervous about the encounter, everything seems to be relatively normal. Rose’s neurosurgeon dad (Bradley Whitford) clumsily tries to code-switch, speaking in what he thinks of as ‘street’ lingo, and is perhaps too quick to assure Chris that if he could have voted for Obama for a third term, he would have.  And while Rose’s hypnotherapist mother (Catherine Keener) is a little too insistent on helping Chris shed his smoking habits with a free session, basically, the two parents seem warm and accommodating. On the other hand, Rose’s MMA-obsessed brother (Caleb Landry Jones) displays an intensity that’s a little less predictable.

Things only begin to get especially strange when Chris approaches the family’s African American hired help, Walter and Georgina (Marcus Henderson, Betty Gabriel). They’re awake and active at weird hours of the night, they walk around dazed and unresponsive and they’re hostile or defensive whenever Chris tries to engage them in conversation. As the story unfolds and plot points are later revealed, Peele’s script continues to take bigger, wilder risks and digs deep into the overt social commentary that permeates the film’s subtext.

It might have been very tempting to portray the devious whites here as post-colonial, traditional conservatives from the south, but the movie instead chooses to tap into a much less obvious stereotype; upper-middle-class, educated neo-liberals. Peele examines the often-parasitic relationship between the races, and how some classes of whites will co-opt the struggle of the black experience for their own political or monetary gain, without ever giving back to the communities they exploit to successfully take power.

The movie brilliantly and thoroughly eases the audience into Chris’s perspective so that we are looking at every white character with as much suspicion as he is. When the privileged guests off the parent’s snooty garden party ask stupid questions like “what’s the African American experience been like for you,” even a white audience can feel the sting of condescension in that moment. Peele’s immersive subjective direction along with Kaluuya’s nuanced performance helps to sell what, stripped away from its political context, could come off as fairly goofy genre material.

“Get Out” is a step further away from the broad sketch comedy of “Key and Peele,” but it also provides many well-earned laughs of its own. LilRey Howery is cleverly placed as Chris’s best friend character Rod, working within the story as the audience’s cipher. Through jokey conversations with the protagonist, this character points out the inherent pulpiness of the plot and reminds us that this director understands and has a sense of humor regarding the horror/thriller traditions he’s working in. Nevertheless, when the rubber needs to hit the road Peele fully commits to his thought provoking thesis and allows his racial allegories to approach their brutal conclusions.

Grade: A 

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/March-2017

Split review

M. Knight Shyamalan’s latest film “Split” combines his love of Hitchcockian thrills and with his predilection for high-concept myth-making and fuses these obsessions in a way that’s surprisingly energetic and captivating. I have to say surprising because since the heights of his career in early 2000 Shyamalan has only recently come off a long losing-streak s. After big budget genre-flops such as “Lady in the Water” and “The Last Airbender” he lost of lot of credibility as a coherent storyteller with both audiences and critics alike. Halving his costs under the pop-horror banner of Blumhouse Productions, it seems that he’s now able to make smaller, more efficient work without the pretenses of prestige. 

James McAvoy is given the spotlight playing a troubled man named Kevin who constantly switches between multiple personalities. After a complicated battle of dominance between the personalities inside of his mind, he kidnaps three teenage girls in the hopes to appease a brooding darkness growing from within. Anya Taylor-Joy plays Casey Cook, the most introverted and ostracized of these women, and through this kidnapping experience she's forced to relive her past abuse. Haley Lu Richardson and Jessica Sula portray the other two girls who can’t understand why Casey has no will to fight. As they try to come up with clever ways to escape McAvoy’s underground lair, Casey tries to get to know and manipulate Kevin’s separate personalities.

We get to know McAvoy as a brutish clean-freak and fetishist named Dennis, a passive-aggressive English woman named Patricia, a nine-year-old attention-seeker named Hedwig, a nervous fashionista named Barry and a demonic force of nature known only as The Beast. While Dennis and Patricia--the personalities responsible for the kidnapping--have the most control over their host, the others have sought the help of a psychiatrist named Dr. Karen Fletcher (Betty Buckley), who's beginning to notice that her patient has something to hide.

Like any Shyamalan film, there’s a lot of plot here and his characters are subservient to the whims of the director’s set-ups and reveals. His depiction of mental illness has less to do with diagnose-able science and more with pulp mythology that’s rooted in past psychodramas and paranormal science-fiction.  If you’re willing to suspend your disbelief and give in to the script’s wacky concepts, as a thriller, the movie works well enough. The ticking-clock set up at the beginning of the film allows for constant tension that keeps everything on a track, even as scenes digresses into long-winded explanations of the movie rules through clunky, expository dialogue.

McAvoy’s having a lot of fun with these multiple roles and approaches the film’s goofy plot with just the right amount on whit and sarcasm to aid in its occasional black comedy. Anya Taylor-Joy is more informed by her character’s flashbacks than by her performance, but her emotional stillness helps to ground the movie’s themes and dramatic stakes.

“Split” is a mixed bag; it’s overwritten, it’s a bit hokey and Shyamalan has some problematic and concerning ideas about abuse-survival as a means of martyrdom, but the film is never boring and it managed to keep me engaged with the story as it moved along.  Thrill rides don’t necessarily have to be realistic, and though I wish this ride hadn’t stopped every ten minute to explain something that didn’t need explaining, despite it's failings, I appreciated the end-result.

Grade: B-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Feb-2017

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Split."