The Counselor review

             It’s a shame about Ridley Scott. He is, without a doubt, a very talented filmmaker and you can’t deny his skill as a stylist. In fact, I dare say that as far as visual aesthetics go, film for film, he is almost unparalleled.  Unfortunately, within the last 10 years or so, his work has been marred by bad screenplays and theatrical assemblies that edit his films to the point of incoherence.  “The Counselor”, another south-west noir penned by novelist Cormack McCarthy, suffers greatly from an overwritten screenplay and campy performances that overshadow the obvious talent that Scott tries to bring to the film.

                It’s hard not to watch this and compare it to Cormack’s near-perfect adaptation in the Coen Brother’s Oscar winning “No Country for Old Men”.  The set-up is similar and the pay off—though not effectively delivered in “The Counselor”—aims to please and depress the audience in the same way. But whereas the Coens were able to reduce the source novel to its essentials and tell the story in hauntingly sparse visual terms—choosing only key scenes to include McCarthy’s elusive prose—in this film, with Cormack now in charge of his first screenplay, a power imbalance muddles the storytelling, where his words and murky themes dominate the screen.

                The unnamed Counselor, played by the always watchable Michael Fassbender, is a lawyer who has recently become engaged to his dutiful girlfriend Laura (Penelope Cruz). To help fulfill her fantasies of wealth, the counselor decides to aid in an across-the-border drug deal with a flamboyant dealer (Javier Bardem) and his lethal cat-like lover (Cameron Diaz). In doing so, the lawyer gets lost  in a shadowy maze of deceit and murder and--as is usually the case--learns that crime never pays. Somewhere in all of this, Brad Pitt stops by to recite pages of uninteresting metaphors, Rosie Perez has a psychic link with her motorcycling drug-mule son and Cameron Diaz does an X-rated reenactment of Tawny Kitaen’s hood-of-the-car dance from Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” music video.

                In trying to fit a novel's worth of information in a two hour film, though not based on any of his previous work, McCarthy fills this script with endless dialogue set-pieces that weigh the movie down so much that it never seems to budge from scene to scene. The actors are all there to present their best work and it's clear in every scene that everyone is certainly trying. However, with Cameron as the vampy femme fatale—complete with pet cheetahs and silver claw-like fingernails—and with Bardem turning in another one of his crazy hair-cut performances, these pulpy elements jarringly clang against the dower moralizing of the plot and Scott's vista-laden visual design.

                I really wanted to like this film and I don’t fault it for being too weird or arty, but, in the end, this well-intentioned thriller is an insufferable snooze.  Michael Fassbender and Brad Pit, two of Hollywood’s most interesting actors, share several scenes together and yet here they couldn’t be more boring. The dialogue is stylized to the point of droning into a fuzzy static and McCarthy’s themes are somehow clumsily obvious and frustrating unclear at the same time. 

                Ridley Scott directs the hell out of this film and successfully makes a junky B-movie look and feel like a portentous A-picture. But even with a few creative decapitations and soft-core sex scenes sprinkled in, he still couldn’t save this inert, convoluted, lukewarm mess of a movie.

Grade: D+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2013

You're Next review

         There’s a moment in every slasher flick that everyone loves. A moment, no matter how dark or disturbing the film, that is designed to be crowd pleasing. It’s when the victim manages to outwit his/her attacker and for a moment is able to balance the bloody playing field. These instances are rare and are often usually only included as a way to add some ebb and flow to the movie’s cat and mouse pursuit. “You’re Next”, a classically-minded home invader flick, is a film that capitalizes on this very notion, while at the same time embracing it’s gore potential and it’s minimal budget.
         The story is seemingly simple: four contentious siblings drive out to a cottage mansion in the woods to visit their well-to-do parents. Brother Crispian (AJ Bowen), there with his Aussie fiancée Erin (Sharni Vinson) is in between jobs and he worries about suffering judgment from his capitalistic family. Middle brother Felix (Nicholas Tucci) brings his Joan-Jett-lookalike girlfriend Zee (Wendy Glenn) that everyone silently disapproves of. And the oldest brother Drake (Joe Swanberg) seems to have it all figured out, and doesn’t mind letting everyone else know. Their goody-goody sister Amiee (Amy Seimetz) decides to bring along her artsy filmmaker boyfriend Tarique (Ty West).
        By the time dinner rolls around, the rising tension between this dysfunctional unit begin to brew, just before a swarm of arrows fly through their kitchen window, thinning the herd. What they don't realize is that amidst their petty squabbles their family is being hunted by a pack of calculated murderers dressed in black-ops gear, and lifeless, plastic animal masks—a bear, a sheep, and a wolf—looking like a cross between bank robbers, SWAT team, and cult members from “The Wicker Man”.
           As the plot progresses we learn more and more about these killers and the family they are out to slay. All the while, the movie revels in its gleeful surprises, horror homages’, and magnificently viscous pay-offs. It’s refreshing, vibrant pop-corn horror--albeit one with a wobbly path, on the way to finding its tricky tone.
         With a cast of mostly unknown indie actors—and in the case of Ty West and Joe Swanberg, indie directors as well—shot for relatively nothing, B-filmmaker Adam Wingard challenges himself and works hard to create something fresh and unique within a well-worn thriller tradition. And most of the time him and his mumble-gore movie-buddies achieve this, though not without the occasion misstep.
         Though it didn't take me long to get on board, I spent much of the initial dinner scenes wondering if this film was supposed to be bad or if it was genuinely poorly made. The acting seemed a little forced, the characterizations were a tad obvious, and the group chemistry felt community-theater-esq. The missing ingredient, apparently, was murder and gallons of fake blood, because once machetes’ sliced and heads rolled, these problems quickly dissolve. However, in some of the earlier scenes of mayhem, much of the digital camera work tended towards an overused shake-rattle-and-roll style, that only muddled the violent intensity it’s was trying to imply.
         What not only saves, but elevates “You’re Next” is its youthful sense of energy, its blackly comedic bite and its subversive, post-modern, genre playfulness. What results can perhaps be described as “Home Alone” for gore-hounds. “Step-Up 3D” actress Sharni Vinson is one of the best and most capable female heroes since Sigourney Weaver in James Cameron’s “Aliens” and (for the most part) the film manages to stay a few steps ahead of the audience’s guessing game.
          You might feel a little sick at yourself for enjoying this movie, but by the time the closing credits roll, it’s pretty hard to deny the cathartic fun you had.

Grade: B -

Originally published for the Idaho State Journal/ Sep-2013