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More Fresh Hells

Chet Kozlowski — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 02:59:15 +0000

More Fresh Hells Chet Kozlowski October 7, 2024 - 22:59

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You have to feel for poor Eladio: the man’s a mess. Bad luck and bad habits have left him a scrawny nub, and his family in poverty. So when Don Francisco, the region’s big boss, offers him a job it looks like a second chance. He becomes a “keeper,” essentially a game warden, overseeing hunting parties. He moves his wife and son to the Spanish mountains, a remote place of brown grass and evil intentions.

A boss, Don Carlos, offers Eladio a bribe to up the number of hunting stations, situating the stations dangerously close to each other. Eladio resists the temptation; this would go against Don Francisco’s contract. He wants to live a more upstanding life. But his family takes him to task. His son begs to learn to hunt; his long-suffering wife Marcia calls him a coward. Eladio gives in and takes the bribe.

Bad choice. A series of catastrophes play out. Disasters, omens and ghosts convince him he’s cursed. His miseries, worthy of Dostoyevsky (or James M. Cain) are many and mercies are few. He goes from one fresh hell to another.

F. Javier Gutierrez’s new film The Wait (La espera) could as easily be called The Weight for all the protagonist has to bear. It’s engrossing and powerful; the sweat and grime of the setting are practically characters onto themselves. Mr. Gutierrez is a skillful filmmaker. He employs horror movie tropes to underscore Eladio’s suffering, to great effect. The Wait is framed in a web of closeups and rack focuses: one stirring image—a sugar cube dipped in black coffee, an insect crawling on a dirty bottle, a tough rope chewed through—dissolves into another, implying that Eladio’s actions, no matter how well-meaning, will lead to consequences much worse.

Victor Clavijo as Eladio leads a fine cast that includes Ruth Díaz as his wife and Moisés Ruiz as his son Floren. Manuel Morón and Antonio Estrada are convincing as sinister figures. All are familiar to Spanish audiences from their work in television.

Mr. Clavijo plays Eladio as a wan supplicant, fighting fate and his urge to drink. His soulful eyes elicit our sympathy as he goes through each torment, and our spirits lift when signs appear that he might not be a victim of circumstance at all, but the victim of a nefarious plot. Which implies that he might be able to save what’s left of his life.

(Spoiler alert: I’m going to discuss the ending; if you plan to see The Wait, you may want to come back to this review later.)

In a narrative like The Wait, we the audience are asked to suspend disbelief and invest in the character. The tougher the obstacles, the more we want (expect) the protagonist to prevail. Why else go through this if salvation isn’t at the end of it?

Mr. Gutierrez’s film presents itself as a mystery to be solved. Clues pile up, the shape of something bigger becomes evident. It’s not, however, the mystery it appears to be. It’s a parable, a cautionary tale. But what exactly is it cautioning against? The Wait’s resolution has the ambiguity of, say, Rosemary’s Baby. But that film’s ambiguity left Rosemary with a choice and warned the audience that the Devil might live next store.

What does The Wait warn us of? What choice is Eladio left with? What good is his sacrifice without redemption? Eladio the sad sack just becomes sadder. And the film’s nihilism just leaves us deflated, waiting for...what, exactly?

___________________________

The Wait. Directed by F. Javier Gutierrez. 2023. From Film Movement and Nostromo Pictures. 102 minutes. In theaters and on VOD.

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Total Immersion

Chet Kozlowski — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 19:08:30 +0000

Total Immersion Chet Kozlowski July 23, 2024 - 15:08

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The Last Breath gets off to a shaky start. Set on a sunny island off Malta, it begins with four friends coming to visit one who got away. Noah has dropped out, now lives a modest life on the island, and runs a scuba operation. The characters are stereotypes: Noah the solid one; Brett the rich asshole, Sam the levelheaded one, Riley the scared one, and Logan the goofy one. They meet at an island bar, laugh and drink and cavort in a cringe-making sequence. It plays like the filmmakers are imitating a (better) movie they’ve seen and have trouble staging and masking their low budget.

Oh, there’s one other character: crusty old Levi, the boat’s captain, who happens to be played by Julian Sands, an actor in his last role before his untimely death in real life. His presence, even in a relative bit part, keeps us watching.

And it’s good that we hang on: the friends go on an excursion, a dive in the wreckage of a US warship sunk during WWII. Once in the water, The Last Breath comes to life and becomes a suspenseful thriller. It’s all clichés, but we don’t come to these movies expecting anything but squirmy thrills.

Swedish director Joachim Hedén specializes in undersea adventures—his other films include Breaking Surface (2020) and The Dive (2023)—and he is clearly in his element here. On land, his blocking and stiff bonhomie are clumsy. Put those guys in wetsuits and confine them to the bowels of a shipwreck and the action sharpens. By keeping it close, Mr. Hedén ups the tension. The interactions are simplified, all black shapes, radio voices and illuminated eyes.

Then add a roving deep-sea predator…

In these sequences (which make up the bulk of the runtime), characters come into their own. The stereotypes work; character development doesn’t gunk up the action. The actors become natural and compelling: Jack Parr as Noah (he’s been in Peaky Blinders), Kim Spearman as Samantha (As I Am), Alexander Arnold as Brett (Yesterday), Erin Mullen as Riley (TV’s Midsomer Murders), Arlo Carter as Logan (TV’s Doc Martin). And who can forget Julian Sands in A Room with a View?

The action is sharp, the suspense ratcheted up well, and the CGI work impressive. The cinematography by Eric Börjeson, production design by Thomas Delord, art direction by Jon Banthorpe, and VFX work by Goodbye Kansas Studios make the most of the murky waters and underwater shadows (compositors and CGI artists are too numerous to mention, but kudos to you all). Patrick Kirst’s score lays a solid foundation.

What would summer be without a good shark movie? The Last Breath will do quite nicely.

_______________________________________________________

The Last Breath. Directed by Joachim Hedén. 2024. From IFC films. In theaters and on VOD. 92 minutes.

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Vengeful Spirits

Chet Kozlowski — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 13:41:39 +0000

Vengeful Spirits Chet Kozlowski June 20, 2024 - 09:41

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Exhuming a grave can be a complicated business. Ancient rituals must be performed correctly and in order, especially if the cadaver is morally corrupted. The removal must be “clean,” or the disharmony can affect generations to come.

This mythology drives the new film Exhuma, a spirited (excuse the pun) and terrifically entertaining tale that’s part ghost story, part procedural, part thriller, and part creature feature. It’s hyped as a “Korean occult film,” but it crosses genres. Its cast is engaging, and its action works in exhilarating elements of magic, folklore, martial arts, and dance.

A renowned shaman and her protégé are hired by a mysterious wealthy family to investigate the cause of an illness that affects only the firstborn children of each generation. They trace it back to an enigmatic ancestor who died a century ago and was buried in an unknown location.

Turns out the grave is situated on a dark mountaintop, guarded by foxes. A geomancer is brought in to evaluate the soil; its mineral richness indicates the moral state of the body it hosts. The shamans summon and extract the spirits and cleanse the grave with dances and spells, clearing out ghosts and any clinging spiritual debris before relocating or cremating the remains.

The casket removed, things go haywire: one gravedigger finds a colorful serpent winding at his feet and skewers it before seeing it has a human head (!) That’s just the beginning. Something much darker emerges, and the exhumation team discovers what’s in store for those who disturb the wrong grave.

Exhuma has the best energy of what’s currently coming out of South Korea. It’s kinetic and has a Wack-a-mole plot: one threat is vanquished, and then another rears its head. The movie’s fizz comes from its characters, themselves recognizable from the K-fare shown on venues like Netflix. The vigor of the youthful shamans played by Kim Go-eun (from Hero and the South Korean series Little Women), and Lee Do-hyun (from Honeysweet and The Night Owl) is counterbalanced by the middle-aged team of fatherly Choi Mi-sik (so good in Oldboy and I Saw the Devil) as the geomancer and his assistant, mortician Young-geun, played by Yoo Hai-Jin (of Dog Days and Honeysweet).

Director Jang Jae-hyun is best known for films of the occult, Svaha: The Sixth Finger and The Priests. Here, he navigates the sinuous course of events with the confidence of a seasoned genre director. Exhuma is both epic and intimate. By going with, in his words, "the most realistic and intuitive" approach, Jang Jae-hyun creates a visceral cinema experience.

Exhuma’s scale keeps the action close to the ground, making the sudden appearance of supernatural elements even more suspenseful. Lee Mo-gae’s cinematography and Seo Sung-kyung’s production design make the most of its palette of earth tones. Set pieces abound: a solo tango dancer, lost in the passion, is joined by a ghostly partner in front of a massive TV monitor; an intricately choreographed ceremony, “Dances of the Dead,” is filmed and edited with a minimum of CGI (the production is proud of that).

Politics is an underpinning as well. The haunted gravesite offers an unobstructed view of North Korea. The uneasy history of Korea and Japan is an issue in the form of a gargantuan warrior who is accidentally released from limbo. He’s not a ghost or a demon, being more substantial than an apparition. He’s an anima: a malevolent being solid enough to leave a footprint and a shadow. “He screamed for a century, but no one came to free him. Only his resentment remained.” And now unbound, he's ready to wreak havoc.

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Exhuma. Directed by Jang Jae-hyun. 2024. From Well Go USA Entertainment.

On VOD, DVD, and Blue-Ray. 134 minutes.

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There Should Be Blood

Chet Kozlowski — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 00:45:54 +0000

There Should Be Blood Chet Kozlowski October 11, 2023 - 20:45

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Just in time for Halloween, we get The Man in the White Van, a new thriller by first time director Warren Skeels. The producers say it's inspired by the real-life exploits of serial killer Billy Mansfield Jr., who terrorized rural Florida in the 1970s.

Teenager Annie (Madison Wolfe) lives in a country home with her nuclear family: Mom (Ali Larter), Dad (Sean Astin), younger brother Daniel (Gavin Warren), and prissy older sister Margaret (Brec Bassinger). Every day, Annie walks across a highway to stables where she rides her horse, and lately she's noticed a white van, there every time she turns around. The van's driver, "The Man" of the title, is barely glimpsed, except as a shadow through his dirty windshield. It waits for Annie on the roadside, and ominously cruises by while she's with friends at school. Tensions rise, and Annie tries to alert the family, but Margaret, her debutante-in-waiting sister, chides her about crying wolf. It isn't until the danger is right upon them that anybody believes her.

An onscreen odometer, starting in 1980 and cranking back year by year, shows flashbacks to The Man's previous kills. What's noticeable is that if The Man has a "type," it's not obvious. He's an equal opportunity abductor, as likely to lift a young girl on a camping trip as he is a 30-something waitress just off her shift. Now he's chosen tomboy Annie, who turns out to be a worthy match. She is scared but not deterred. The scenes in which Annie faces off at dusk against the van, idling like a lion, are eerily effective.

The Man in the White Van is a well-crafted production. Mr. Skeels' direction and Billy Gaggins' editing are lively and full of surprises: a scene of a victim being pulled backwards out of the front seat of her car cuts to an egg yolk plopping in a pan. As a character is being garroted, another character, in close vicinity yet oblivious, talks on a rotary phone while winding its cord around a bed banister.

Executive producer credits go to Ali Larter, an actor best known for her roles in the Final Destination series, and Sean Astin (where you been, Rudy?). Both of them star as well, and their presence alone lends legitimacy. You’ll know Madison Wolfe (Annie) from The Conjuring II and HBO's True Detective, and Bre (Margaret) has been featured in TV series like Stargirl and Bella and the Bulldogs. Skai Jackson is appealingly perky as Annie's best friend Patty.

The year 1974 is staged with carefully chosen verisimilitude: Annie's room is adorned with a vintage Lynyrd Skynyrd poster, and her stacked-discs turntable serves up needle drops like the Cowsills' "I Think I Love You" and The Edgar Winters Group's "Free Ride." A spiffy period gas station is the site of one of The Man's more daring kidnappings.

Yet there's really no reason to set the film in the past at all. The odometer timings confuse: are we in the past, present or future? Why go to the trouble of recreating the past when crimes just like these are tragically the stuff of today's headlines?

The press materials tell us their model is an obscure serial killer, but that hardly matters, either. The Man is as generic as killers come, a pretender to the title of Jason and Michael Myers. The film has franchise on its mind; the end shot suggests more mayhem to come.

But a technical question: What does The Man do to his victims? We assume murder and worse, but it all happens offscreen. Suspense suffers: we don't know what The Man has in store for Annie because we're spared the grisly details.

That said, a movie in this genre seems an odd choice for a film that touts a "female-led producing team." Films in this genre are the stuff of overheated male imaginations. Okay, in the case of The Man in the White Van, one could make the case for female empowerment—Annie coming into her own—but the conflict is still centered on violation of women.

The Man in the White Van is scrubbed clean, Stalker/Slasher Lite. It could very well be a Lifetime Movie. Not that sex and violence are necessary, but they are essential elements to the genre. Their absence begs the question: do the producers know who their target audience is? Don’t they know they come for the carnage?

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The Man in the White Van. 2023. Directed by Warren Skeels. From Garrison Film, Legion M, and XYZ Films. 110 minutes.

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Don’t Mess with Pentagrams

Chet Kozlowski — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 14:00:00 +0000

Don’t Mess with Pentagrams Chet Kozlowski September 19, 2023 - 10:00

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A bedraggled woman sits in a parked car, muttering prayers while clutching a gold crucifix. She gets out of her car, a pack slung over her shoulder. She walks into an as-yet unidentified building. She meets people she knows and warns them away as she parts double doors and enters a church mass in progress. The serving priest hesitates, seeing her standing there alone flanked by seated parishioners. He addresses her as she unslings her pack, takes out an automatic weapon, and opens fire.

This is the opening scene of Condition of Return, a new film by director Tommy Stovall.

The woman is Eve Sullivan, played with poise by AnnaLynne McCord. After her act of carnage, Eve is taken into custody, shackled, and awaits a psychoanalyst, Dr. Donald Thomas (Dean Cain) whose exam will deem her fit for trial. Which presiding officer Stafford (James Russo) sorely wants—put this nut behind bars, he hisses, in an open-and-shut hate crime case. Blame it on loose gun laws? Mental illness? Nope. Eve insists the Devil made her do it.

What ensues is a series of flashbacks showing how Eve, a second-grade teacher in Phoenix, Arizona (where Condition was filmed), came to commit such a heinous act. Her backstory includes sex in the men's room, a miscarriage, adultery, child porn, murder, and incarceration. The cat-and-mouse parrying between Eve and Dr. Thomas goes on for an hour (in a film with a 93-minute runtime), so long that we might forget why we're here. Eve believes in God, but in the big house her prayers take her on a detour. And that launches what the movie is really (?) about: Eve's calling up demons and how they lead her to commit mass murder.

Condition of Return is a lot. Every character has baggage, not just Eve but her husband Darren (Ryan Bates), her twofaced best friend Jessica (Cami Storm), and even her shrink. Dr. Thomas has been discredited in his field, his house is about to be foreclosed upon, and his book career is going nowhere. Between his questioning of Eve, he takes calls from his wife, who berates his ability to provide.

But Condition of Return is AnnaLynne McCord's movie. As Eve, she's in practically every scene and plays a range of attitudes, from party girl to penitent. Ms. McCord is known for her TV work, including FX's Nip/Tuck and the CW's 90210. She throws herself into the part, playing reasonable, resigned, coy, hysterical, often employing that regal stillness she developed as a fashion model.

Dean Cain is affable enough as Dr. Thomas but—speaking of baggage—comes with his own inescapable Wikipedia profile: ex-Buffalo Bill, ex-Superman, NRA spokesperson, reality show host, real estate flipper. His strongest role recently has been as Maria Bamford's ex-fiancé in her Netflix series Lady Dynamite. Character actor James Russo, memorable as far back as Beverly Hills Cop and Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America, is suitably grizzled as the top cop but has too few scenes: he mostly waits for Thomas in corridors and growls at him for not signing off on Eve's sanity. And the statuesque Natasha Henstridge, she of the Species series and a former fashion model herself, arrives to tempt everybody to hell.

Condition of Return is Tommy Stovall fifth film, after 2005's Hate Crime and 2019's Room for Rent. His direction and editing choices are fresh: they surprise us and pull us in. Director of Photography Mic Waugh's limited color palette—iron grays and stately blues--gives the whole enterprise a sophisticated sheen. John Spare's script kicks up a lot of dust, plot-wise, but it's unclear how it all adds up. For example, a significant character's entrance comes late in the film and changes the tone entirely.

Is Condition of Return a genre movie? If so, its publicity materials downplay its strengths. The official trailer has a flash of a scene with a pentagram (the five-sided star symbol used to summon Satan) before turning back to the human drama. The poster features the principals—Cain, McCord, and Henstridge—staring at the viewer as if in a Lifetime movie. Eve's hands are joined in prayer, snaked through with a rosary, the only religious iconography in evidence. Not a pentagram in sight.

Even the title Condition of Return is confounding: "condition" placed on whom, to "return" to what, exactly? Eve has no chance of returning to anything like a normal life: Dr. Thomas' evaluation either sends her to prison or to an institution.

Or does Condition of Return have an agenda? Do we miss key messages while expecting genre tropes? The rise of digital filmmaking and streaming has made it easy for producers outside of Hollywood to distribute their own cultural takes and codes. What is Condition of Return saying, really, about the role of religion in mass shootings, or the efficacy of the devil? Why, in the final scene, is a character "punished" simply for having bad luck?

Or maybe it's not bait-and-switch at all, just confused storytelling. But if decades of devil worship movies have taught us anything, it's that you don’t mess with pentagrams unless you mean business.

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Condition of Return. Directed by Tommy Stovall. 2023. Released by Pasidg Productions. 93 minutes. In theaters nationwide, and on Cable VOD and Vudu.

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Who's The Man?

Chet Kozlowski — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 14:20:39 +0000

Who's The Man? Chet Kozlowski September 6, 2023 - 10:20

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The new film from the wittily named company Cinephobia Releasing is the wittily titled The Latent Image, which is a witty and intelligent, if modest, thriller.

Mild-mannered Ben has retreated to a secluded cabin to finally write his mystery novel. He’s posted on the wall clippings of missing men, connected by colored thread like at a police crime investigation. The cabin is no shack. Its furniture is expensive; it has thermal-locking sliding glass doors, opening to the dead of night outside. Its stairway is festooned with Christmas lights. The impression is that the action is set in the past until events prove otherwise.

Ben has a penchant for vintage technology. He's all analogue: he composes on a manual typewriter and eschews the internet. He plays home movies with a reel-to-reel projector. When filming with a Super-8 camera, he's asked, "Don't you use anything modern?" to which he replies, "This will last forever." Ben is alone with his thoughts—including that he's also come here for time off from his significant other—when on a stormy night a mysterious stranger appears like a mirage inside the cabin.

Identified only as The Man, the stranger is a tall, surly, longhaired, turtlenecked fantasy. He couldn't be better if Ben made him up. Besides his swagger, this guy brings a host of mysteries, including bruised knuckles and a trunkful of God-knows-what. He insinuates himself into Ben's life and creative process. Ben's given to hallucinations (he frequently confers with Jamie, the lover from whom he absconded, though nobody's there), and we wonder if The Man isn't a similar figment of his imagination. The Man offers no explanation for his presence and makes seemingly unreasonable demands on Ben's attention. The whole thing comes to a boil when the pair act out a "hypothetical" murder, as a way of patching up the plot holes in Ben's book.

To reveal more would risk spoilers. The Latent Image is a sophisticated cat-and-mouse scenario that keeps us guessing. Though Hitchcock naturally comes to mind, writer/director Alexander McGregor Birrell is confident enough to keep it simple and straightforward. He has faith in his actors (it's essentially a two-man show), and the flashiest he gets is a motif of rack-focus shots, stressing the play between the foreground and background, which underscores his premise: who's making up whom?

Mr. Birrell is a London-based filmmaker. The Latent Image is his first film, based on his 2019 short. His actors have a mostly theater background: Joshua Tonks as Ben (who's credited with co-writing the story); Jay Clift as The Man (whose heroic features account for TV roles in DC's Legends of Tomorrow, Batwoman, and Supergirl); and William Tippery as the apparitional Jamie. Director of Photography Michael Elias Thomas maintains a dark, spectral mood, and music by Jack Hughes and Alex Gregson provides an ominous but unobtrusive bed for the proceedings.

It's rare to come upon so unpretentious and clever an effort, especially when dealing a subject like with homicidal psychology. Fans of films like The Silent Partner (1978) and The Perfect Host (2010) will find much to savor in The Latent Image.

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The Latent Image. Written and directed by Alexander McGregor Birrell. 2022. Cinephobia Releasing. 83 minutes.

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Lights! Camera! Paranoia!

Chet Kozlowski — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 08:51:22 +0000

Lights! Camera! Paranoia! Chet Kozlowski August 17, 2023 - 04:51

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Unable to accept the official version of dramatic events, a previously apolitical man plunges into a web of intrigue: the government is run by unseen forces of evil intent on world domination. Nothing is as it seems. We are all being lied to.

Sound familiar? This is the plot of writer/director William Richert's legendary film Winter Kills, which decades ago anticipated the Q Anon and Deep State Conspiracy mood of today. And which, thanks to Quentin Tarantino and Rialto Pictures, is enjoying a rerelease.

Winter Kills' legend derives from Mr. Richert's quest to make the film and the obstacles he faced. Production began in 1977 and the film was finally released in 1979, then quickly shelved due to legal disputes. Before streaming, it was largely unavailable except on bootleg VHS tapes. It's also one of a subgenre of films reflecting The New Hollywood's burgeoning liberal politics post-Vietnam and Watergate, when filmmakers were intent on exposing the moral and political corruption at the heart of the American Dream.

Based on a novel by renowned pulp author Richard Condon (whose book The Manchurian Candidate became part of our national paranoia lexicon), Winter Kills' gnarled production endured budget overages, shady payments, equipment repossessions, bankruptcies, and a producer's murder, events chronicled in the article "Who Killed Winter Kills?" by Condon himself, available online at harpers.org.

Winter Kills takes on the Kennedy assassination. Nick Kegan (a fresh-faced Jeff Bridges), the half-brother of slain president Timothy Kegan is made aware that a lone assassin was not, as the official version had it, responsible. A second shooter set up crossfire, and in pursuing the who and why, Nick goes up against his powerful father (John Huston) to expose a conspiracy of international proportions. America is not what it seems and is instead run by power-mad demagogues who monitor and manipulate the populace. As a character says of Bridges' investigation, "(You get) falsehood upon falsehood until you can't tell the truth and you don't want to."

Winter Kills covers ground trodden by Six Days of the Condor and Alan J. Pakula's JFK conspiracy themed The Parallax View. At the time, it was billed a black comedy and had the street cred: production designed by Robert Boyle of Hitchcock fame, mythic cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond. And its cast was a virtual who’s who of Hollywood star power -- Jeff Bridges! John Huston! Dorothy Malone! Anthony Perkins! Sterling Hayden! Eli Wallach! Elizabeth Taylor! -- all lending their considerable wattage to a rebellious thumbing of the nose at the political establishment by the entertainment establishment.

Does Winter Kills hold up 40 years later? Its production woes show in its disjointed structure. Jeff Bridges is on screen most of the time and goes from slack-jawed bewilderment to heroic self-righteousness without logic. Belinda Bauer as Bridge's elusive love interest takes part in an interminable scene whose only purpose is to supply the nudity required of films of the time. Eli Wallach and Elizabeth Taylor's individual sequences look to be from other movies entirely. Incoherent scenes are stitched together by Maurice Jarre’s incongruent score.

But the film does, to its credit, give old dogs Ralph Meeker and Richard Boone meaty roles to chew on. And you can spot Erin Gray (from TV's Buck Rogers) as "Beautiful Woman 4" in a party scene and Berry Berenson as a morgue attendant (in real life, Ms. Berenson was Anthony Perkins wife, and would die in the September 11 attacks as a passenger on American Airlines flight 11.)

So what is Quentin Tarantino's fascination with this film, besides his love of obscure pulp? Parts of Winter Kills are prescient, particularly the eleventh-hour appearance of Anthony Perkins as an insane (and oddly ethnic) nemesis. Here, Winter Kills serves an early warning of what has since been wrought by social media. Clunkily, it comes in a barrage of voiceover exposition designed to explain what the preceding scenes haven't.

Winter Kills is a colorful, glossy mess, a work of slipshod genius. That it got made at all is a miracle. It aspires to be Dr. Strangelove by way of James Bond. It wants John Huston's slide down an enormous American flag to be as iconic a cinema image as Slim Pickens' bull ride on the bomb. But it's undone by inconsistent tone and lapses in lucidity. Winter Kills is the kind of movie where a character in an open field can't detect a platoon of tanks waiting in ambush.

Still, it's an entertaining time capsule of a simpler time, when we were all quite naïve, and Hollywood has the hubris to crusade against what it would eventually become.

Winter Kills plays in a newly struck 35mm print at The Film Forum in New York City, and at Quentin Tarantino's own New Beverly Theater in Los Angeles

Winter Kills. Written and directed by William Richert. 1979. Released by Rialto Pictures. 96 minutes.

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Don't Forget to Flush After Viewing

Brandon Judell — Sat, 08 Jun 2013 19:29:37 +0000

Don't Forget to Flush After Viewing Brandon Judell June 8, 2013 - 15:29

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Whatever sentiments the title Wish You Were Here evokes in you, flush them. Here is no lighthearted vacation comedy but, instead, a well-acted "psychological thriller" with few thrills but much angst.

In fact, the scariest aspect about watching Aussie writer/director Kieran Darcy-Smith's feature debut is the sinking feeling that the finale will not be worth the wait -- and when the penultimate scenes start unspooling and you realize you were clairvoyant, you will find yourself, as you mope towards the aisle, crunching any left-behind popcorn on the theater floor with unrepentant anger.

This saga begins rather joyfully with two Australian sisters vacationing in southern Cambodia in 2010. Pregnant Alice (Felicity Price) is accompanied by her rather stolid spouse, Dave (Joel Edgerton), while carefree and unwed Steph (Teresa Palmer) is under the wing of a prepossessing importer of Cambodian goods, jovial Jeremy (Anthony Starr).

The four sightsee, go to a museum featuring skulls, interact with the poor, nosh on local offerings, dance, take Ecstasy, and dance some more. And then one night Jeremy disappears. Oh, no!

Alice and Dave have to return home because they have two children staying with grandma, but Steph remains for a while before leaving the Jeremy mystery in the hands of local government officials. After all, dematerialized tourists are not uncommon occurrences in Cambodia.

But once back home, Dave can't seem to get back into his old groove. Increasingly paranoic, jealous, and secretive, this once loving dad seems headed for a breakdown or worse. Hey, are these signs that this quickly degenerating soul was somehow involved in Jeremy's vanishment? Could Dave be a murderer? And is he just a bit too hyped up when near Alice's young and slightly prettier sibling, at least in the frequent flashbacks? And where's Hitchcock when you need him more than ever?

Stretching far too hard for social relevance, Darcy-Smith unintentionally undermines this respectable but soft-hitting enterprise. Not surprisingly, this not untalented helmer has noted, "My absolute priority, from script to screen, is truth. Truth of performance, of character, and of story." Here's a case where the truth did not win out. - Brandon Judell

Title or Warning?

Brandon Judell — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 22:32:53 +0000

Title or Warning? Brandon Judell March 17, 2013 - 18:32

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A dreary, flaccid, far-fetched “thriller,” Inescapable (available on VOD) arouses the little interest it does due to its locale, Syria, and its time period, early 2011. What topic could be more felicitously chosen? Yet, even forgetting the film was shot in South Africa, Ruba Nada’s subpar direction and screenplay and Teresa Hannigan’s zonked editing waste the opportunity to add any insight into the armed conflict that has already traumatized a people for far too long.

As for the lead actor, Alexander Siddig, who’s best known as Dr. Julian Bashir on the long-running series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, his inability to muster up an iota of charisma or any depth of character is the final nail in this celluloid coffin.

Siddig portrays Adib Abdel Kareem, who escaped to Canada a quarter of a century ago from Syria after being accused falsely of being an Israeli spy. Now with his wife and two daughters, Muna and Leila, he’s created the ideal family. Well, all is ideal until Muna, a photographer, decides to secretly visit Syria to discover her dad’s past, a past apparently not available over the Internet.

Well, six days after her arrival in Damascus, in fact after Muna eats at MarMar, a local eatery, she is detained as a spy. Oh no! Dad has to go back to the old country to save his offspring.

There he hooks up with his old fiancée Fatima (Marissa Tomei), whom he jilted so long ago. Miss Tomei, who appears to have had two days' worth of work in the film, walks about or more often sits down with a wounded look that’s emphasized with enough mascara to makeup a gaggle of 1960s Baltimore biker chicks for a week or two. She’s Inescapable’s lone saving grace.

When Fatima’s not around, Siddig runs about to various menfolk, yelling, “WHERE’S MY DAUGHTER?” Sometimes he gets beaten up rather badly. Once he hits a member of one of Syria’s fifteen secret agencies with a golf club on the noggin, but to little avail. He then tries to kick the guy like Leonardo of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but he comes off more as Barney on The Andy Griffith Show. After Siddig loses this battle, the agent shouts, “Your daughter is a traitor and a whore. Who was her contact at the University?”

Meanwhile, Paul, a Canadian Consular official, heinously played by Joshua Jackson, reminds you why you wish you were watching Argo again.

Clearly meaning Inescapable as an act of love, Ms. Nada, a Canadian filmmaker with Syrian/Palestinian parents, has instead done a great disservice to her gene pool and our film-loving sensibilities. Irksome would be a more appropriate title.

I Was a Preteen Sociopath

Brandon Judell — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 17:56:46 +0000

I Was a Preteen Sociopath Brandon Judell January 23, 2011 - 12:56

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This surprise Golden Globe winner for Best Foreign Film spotlights what a delightful haven Denmark is for children with homicidal tendencies. A young boy can beat up another with a bicycle pump, blow up vans, and punch his father in the stomach, and the youth will be completely forgiven and allowed to stay in school. And in the end, he will transform into a loving lad, of course.

Moral: Coddle the potential cutthroat in your life and he'll become a pussycat, unlike in real life where bastards become bigger bastards.

In a Better World does endeavor to be more complex than that, but its screenwriter Anders Thomas Jensen, who's fared much better with The King is Alive (2000), Brothers (2004), and Mifune's Last Song (1999), has shoehorned a happy ending onto all of his characters, one that clearly belongs to Pollyanna II.

The Disney-esque finale aside, what Anders is trying to explore here is how a mortal should cope in an unendingly violent society. Should he follow the advice of Matthew: "Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also." Or should he take a stand? But doesn't retribution breed more retribution that will eventually lead to war? Or can a man of peace make a difference?

Such a man is Anton (Mikael Persbrandt), a doctor working in an African refugee camp, who's daily dealing with victims of malnutrition and violence: patients missing limbs or just slightly hacked up. But then pregnant women are suddenly being carried into his makeshift hospital on a regular basis with their stomachs slashed open. It seems a brutal local tyrant is betting on the fetuses' sex, and then has to find out the answer immediately. So what happens when this monster himself shows up needing treatment? What is Anton's moral responsibility?

Jump to Denmark where Anton's wife Marianne (Trine Dyrholm), from whom he's currently separated, is trying to raise their two sons. The oldest Elias (Markus Rygaard), however, is not blossoming under her care. Bullied at school daily, he also has to constantly deal with his bicycle tires being deflated. Life is hell for him until the arrival from London of a new schoolmate, Christian (Willian Johnk Nielsen).

Christian, whose mother has just died from cancer, is mad at the world and refuses to be anyone's underdog. He befriends Elias and beats off the bullies between lashing out at his own father, whom he accuses of wishing his mother's death.

Then Anton shows up on the scene and takes his two sons and Christian on a daytrip. In the midst of this outing, Anton gets punched in the face by a ruffian and refuses to punch back. He becomes a wimp in the eyes of the boys, but he tries to explain the uselessness of combating brute force with brute force. The lads won't have any of it. But then remember how upset Jim Stark (James Dean) got that his dad (Jim Backus) wore an apron at home in Rebel Without a Cause. Young males, in Western society, need a butch pa as a role model apparently.

So what is the right ethical stance to take with bullies, hooligans, and sociopaths? Apparently, it depends. There is a time for Gandhi's restraint and a time for Rommel's fierceness.

But instead of actually making you care, the film's disjointedness, clichés, and reality irregularities pull you away as much as the fine performers sometimes pull you back into the tale. One wishes Danish director Susanne Bier, who has an affinity for the overwrought and who succeeded to a greater degree with Brothers (2004) and After the Wedding (2006), had watched Truffaut's 400 Blows before commencing on this project. She might have then learned that less can be more and that a final frozen screen shot that doesn't answer every question is more forceful than a hug.

In the end, though, here are two stories that instead of complementing each other rather rub each other raw competing for screen time. In a better film, they would have left you devastated.