Popcorn Kernels: Aw, Screw It (Again)

I always try to give full-length reviews to current movies, because I assume they’re the ones readers will be most invested in. But every December I race to catch up on the flicks I missed during the year and my backlog gets clogged like a yeti’s shower drain. So please forgive me as I knock out a couple of mini reviews for 2016 titles I don’t have particularly strong feelings for and came out long enough ago that I don’t feel guilty about cutting them short.

Demolition

Year: 2016

Director: Jean-Marc Vallée

Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Naomi Watts, Chris Cooper

Run Time: 1 hour 41 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A man loses his wife in a car accident, so he starts to take apart everything in his life to figure out what he needs to be happy. It makes sense in the movie, I promise. Sort of.

Imagine, if you will, that the kid from Donnie Darko grew up and got an actual job and a wife. There, you’re about halfway to the anthropomorphic pretention that is Jake Gyllenhaal in Demolition.

Demolition tries so hard to be an Important movie abut grief, life, and truth that it forgets to craft characters who aren’t one-note assholes. It’s like the folks from jackass accidentally stumbled into a Terrence Malick film. Gyllenhaal does a fine job even though his character is one centimeter away from going full American Psycho and the movie doesn’t seem to realize it. Then he hangs out with a terrible woman who threatens to be a love interest until he meets her terrible son and she ceases to exist.

Demolition is almost episodic in its carelessness, forgetting about what came before in pursuit of higher and higher melodrama. But it drowns itself in overwrought narration and a mise-en-scene that shrieks to be noticed with obvious lighting shifts and pointed, almost huffy framing. This is a movie that frequently cuts to slow motion shots of a beach for no reason before it pulls another card out of its Cliché Plot Devices deck.

It’s not terribly made. It’s just frustrating to sit through; a startlingly empty drama that gives the impression that it might be deep. Looking through my notes, I already can’t remember half of what I wrote down because the movie slips through your fingers like uninspired sand. When the most interesting thing in your movie is watching as Jake Gyllenhaal slowly grows a beard, maybe you’re not destined for the Oscar you’re so desperately making a bid for.

Rating: 4/10

Mascots

Year: 2016

Director: Christopher Guest

Cast: Zach Woods, Sarah Baker, Parker Posey

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: TV-MA

Various mascots compete to win first prize. One wins.

Christopher Guest is a very funny filmmaker. His ensemble improv comedy films are delightful treasures packed to the brim with genuine talents, but unfortunately he hasn’t made one since 2006. Now, ten years later, that has changed with the Netflix exclusive Mascots. But maybe there was a reason for this decade-long radio silence. If Mascots is any indication, the format has gone stale.

Maybe this is because the comedy genre has shifted so much, folding improvisation into more and more run-of-the-mill movies thanks to the influence of Judd Apatow and Paul Feig. It’s no longer a fresh, exciting style but rather something normalized, almost mundane. Or maybe we just don’t have much need for the slower-paced naturalism of Guest’s filmography that allows his characters to breathe. Or maybe, like all brilliant filmmakers, he just produced a dud, a one-time embarrassment to be swept under the rug as we move on.

Mascots is overstuffed with characters and understuffed with plot. Observe.

The plot: Various mascots compete to win first prize. One wins.

The characters: Unhappily married mascot duo Mike (Zach Woods) and Mindy Murray (Sarah Baker) – take my “take my wife” jokes… Please!; Owen Golly Jr. (Tom Bennett), a British mascot who feels pressured by his father to carry on the family legacy; Cindi Babineaux (Parker Posey), a possibly incestuous crypto-lesbian who performs interpretive dance pieces while dressed as an armadillo; Tommy “Zook” Zucarello (Chris O’Dowd), an Irish-Canadian ice hockey bad boy; and Phil Mayhew (Christopher Moynihan), who plays a mascot plumber. And that’s not even scratching the surface what with the hangers-on, family members, judges, TV executives, and so on that flesh out this hideous, bulging pustule of a cast.

These are very funny actors and thus they produce a handful of funny scenes, but that’s just not enough. There’s a severe lack of focus in this narrative, and when the jokes are mostly in the vein of the tired (nay, exhausted) sitcommy trope of “marriage sucks” or the overdone “stay in the family business” plot line, there’s not a lot to lean on when the movie does touch down on one subject for more than a couple seconds at a time.

Then, for the final half hour, Mascots throws all pretense of plot away for an extended sequence of mascot performances. Some are downright hilarious but by the halfway point of this grueling segment, the movie becomes just as banal as the competition it’s supposed to be skewering. In the end, it’s just difficult to tell why they expected anyone to care.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 878

Creatures Of The Night

Year: 2016

Director: Tom Ford

Cast: Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon

Run Time: 1 hour 56 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Fashion designer Tom Ford would not seem like the obvious candidate for a prestigious movie career, but his debut film A Single Man was just the right blend of overwrought ambigu-drama and stunning aestehtic that he caught the eye of the Hollywood elite. Now, 7 years later, we’re getting his sophomore feature, the thriller Nocturnal Animals. This is the most important movie of his career, the one that defines the direction of his narrative and aesthetic development to see if he can actually sustain a directorial career. Let’s see how that went.

So far so good.

The plot: Grotesquely rich visual artist Susan (Amy Adams) lives in Los Angeles with her husband Hutton (Armie Hammer) one of those moneyed types in suits who has a job so above the scope of day-to-day labor that you’re not actually sure what it is that he does. Also his named is f**king Hutton, so who needs more description than that.

Susan is reaching a personal crossroads, doubting every choice that she’s made in her life when her ex-husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal) sends her the manuscript of his new novel, which she reads over the course of one sleepless weekend while F**king Hutton is on a “business trip” with some slinky model.

In the novel, which contains some disturbing parallels to her own life, West Texas father Tony Hastings (also Jake Gyllenhaal) works with local policeman Bobby Andes (Michael Shannon) to track down the man (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) who murdered his wife (Isla Fisher) and daughter (Ellie Bamber) on the lonely highway one night. He attempts to overcome his own lack of strength to bring justice back into the world.

And take lots of showers.

Basically, Nocturnal Animals is a Western disguised as a prestige drama, which is actually pretty nifty. Did it need three layers of narrative to achieve this (her reading of the novel is also intercut with flashbacks of their life together)? Absolutely not. Does Amy Adams need to be involved? Well, definitely not as much as she is, but she’s a gorgeous canvas for Tom Ford’s most dazzling aesthetic, so we’ll let it slide. It’s a deliriously messy structure, but the story at its core is strong enough to survive the worst lashings of narrative incompetence.

First, let’s take a closer look at that core story, the Western thriller novel, also titled “Nocturnal Animals.” It’s definitely a narrative that would have made a decent film on its own, depicting the bond between two men who have nothing to lose and how their differing personalities chafe against a tense situation.

The roadside thriller sequence that opens this particular story is exquisitely terrifying, dominated by an unhinged Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who Deliverances it up without going too over-the-top. You can sense Tom Ford’s preference for grounded, character-driven drama in the way he nervously fumbles the film’s one true-blue action sequence: a car chase with no discernible geography that feels like two or three cars are just singular points barreling through the void with no particular relation to one another (seriously – I could have sworn three cars were involved, but only two come into play as the scene closes out) – but his work with the actors up-close and personal is phenomenal.

Jake Gyllenhaal is a marvel here, depicting his entire arc within a tremendously tactile performance that seamlessly differentiates his two characters through subtle physical cues.

And I don’t just mean shaving his beard, though that helps.

Gyllenhaal might be an offscreen character during the “present day,” but Nocturnal Animals is nevertheless all about him and he knows it. The only reason I’m not frustrated by the overused narrative-within-a-narrative conceit is that the film is explicitly taking a look at how we use fiction to cope with and redefine our reality. I really can’t overstate the subtlety of his performance in getting his message across.

But then you zoom out one tick more and land on Amy Adams. This section of the film is immensely frustrating, slashing up the flow of the novel with constant insert shots of her reading and looking sullen. Her performance is solid, but the script serves her extremely poorly. Her struggles add a frisson of social satire and four film-stealing, one-scene-only cameos from Laura Linney, Michael Sheen, Andrea Riseborough, and Jena Malone, but the tone is all over the place. These scenes are the mostly overtly comic, yet the atmosphere so clearly yearns to be dour and repressive.

This is also the area where Ford busts out his most self-consciously composed frames, using lush color blocking and glammed-up costume design for  carousel of poster moment that are stunning but don’t add up to much. When two-thirds of the film works so well, it feels wrong to complain about the rest – especially when it’s as well-composed as this- but this stuff just kind of fails to work. It sputters and stalls the film over and over and over again, in its desperation to be noticed (as evidenced by the opening credits, which rest on a truly shocking image that adds nothing to the film, existing just for its own sake).

Nocturnal Animals is far from a failure, but its just barely an improvement on A Single Man. Ford’ll have to work a little harder than this if he really wants to prove himself. But maybe he doesn’t, and that’s fine too. Nocturnal Animals is good enough to just be itself.

TL;DR: Nocturnal Animals is a gorgeous thriller that's a tentative step forward for director Tom Ford.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 941

Q2 Review Purge: Volume 2

You thought I’d finished clearly out my backlog with just five measly reviews? Ha! You underestimate my movie-watching prowess. We’ve got another set of hot ‘n ready reviews coming atcha.

Night of the Comet (For the Scream 101 episode about this film, click here. For the Scream 101 interview with Kelli Maroney, click here.)

Year: 1984
Director: Thom Eberhardt
Cast: Catherine Mary Stewart, Kelli Maroney, Robert Beltran
Run Time: 1 hour 35 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

After a deadly comet reduces the world’s population to ash, two valley girls must fight their way through a silent LA filled with radiation zombies, crooked scientists, and shopping montages.

Night of the Comet is one of those great 80’s movies that has not only a towering high concept, but an intimate, human story to tell within it. While the idea of “valley girls vs. the apocalypse” is like bread and butter for trashy horror fans, NotC is much more than meets the eye. Its valley girl veneer is certainly mined for comedy, but there’s something intensely thoughtful pulsing beneath the surface of the film. These are two girls with a severely narrow worldview (“This happened everywhere? Like, even in Burbank?”) that are stripped of everything they took for granted and forced to face a cold, dead world.

The shallow creature comforts they pursue pale in comparison to survival and connecting with the few humans that still remain. It’s hilarious because it’s so bleak, but the emotions that well up from time to time, especially in Kelli Maroney’s striking performance and Mary Woronov’s world-weary acceptance of destruction, are completely earned for that very same reason.

But Night of the Comet, despite its surprising heft, isn’t a tearjerker. It’s a cotton candy blast lit with bright, sci-fi comic slashes of neon color. While I do wish it had the budget to take its perfect concept even further, it’s an intelligent, fun movie with well-drawn characters, masterful production design, and a hellishly witty script jam packed with instantly memorable one-liners.

Rating: 8/10


The Changeling (For the Scream 101 episode about this film, click here.)

Year: 1980
Director: Peter Medak
Cast: George C. Scott, Trish Van Devere, Melvyn Douglas
Run Time: 1 hour 47 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

A bereaved composer takes up residence in a historical house that turns out to be haunted.

The Changeling is a very classical ghost story almost to a fault. Although the drawn-out, methodical scares pack a punch, sometimes the story lingers a little too much on the past. As our hero investigates the history of the house, the third act slowly unravels until it’s a feeble drama about two old men screeching at one another. Until, of course, it isn’t. The finale is the best kind of grandiose, plunging its low-key atmosphere into a shrieking inferno of special effects and frenzied, unpredictable editing.

While the third act swings from dull to gonzo, the first two are firmly set in traditional haunted house mode á là The Haunting. Though modern viewers may be numb to the effects of these scenes after decades of rip-offs and copycats, they’re expertly executed, with lurking camerawork suggesting an uninvited presence, sharp editing linking the protagonist’s tragic past to the history of the house, and an echoing, sinister sound design that will drives spikes of fear directly into your spine.

The two most startling sequences are birthed from this atmosphere: one the best séance I’ve ever seen, using performance and rhythm to scare rather than special effects, the other a subtle, lingering reaction shot that milks every last heebie jeebie out of something appearing somewhere it patently shouldn’t be.

Without talented filmmakers at the helm, The Changeling would be dry and predictable, but its perfectly crafted scares make it an indelible classic of the genre, even if the plot is a little been-there, done-that.

Rating: 7/10


Brokeback Mountain

Year: 2005
Director: Ang Lee
Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Heath Ledger, Michelle Williams
Run Time: 2 hours 14 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Two gay cowboys fall in gay love with each other and it’s very gay but mostly sad.

As a gay gentleman myself, it’s basically sacrilege that I waited this long to watch Brokeback Mountain. But you know what I almost never want to watch on an average day? A tearjerker about how super duper hard and sad it is to be gay. At least nobody gets AIDS, like in every other gay movie ever made.

So no, Brokeback Mountain is not in my wheelhouse, though it’s a terrific film. A sweeping romance that spans decades (as evidenced by Anne Hathaway’s chain of increasingly preposterous wigs), it highlights two fantastic performers working at the peak of their abilities. Gyllenhaal and Ledger are so credible and grounded in real emotion that this “gay cowboy” movie becomes a universal love story about passion, loss, and disappointing your parents.

Opening with what’s essentially a silent film about two men thrown together slowly developing respect for one another and culminating in a violently lustful act, Brokeback Mountain uses its epic sprawl to detail the impact that one encounter can have on an entire life. Two entire lives. Its scope is set as wide as the Wyoming sky, covering topics of class disparity, marriage compromise, gender warfare, and dozens more without breaking a sweat. Do I ever want to watch it again? No. But I know I will.

Rating: 8/10


Lust, Caution

Year: 2007
Director: Ang Lee
Cast: Tony Chiu Wai Leung, Wei Tang, Joan Chen
Run Time: 2 hours 37 minutes
MPAA Rating: NC-17

A Chinese actress working for the rebellion poses as the mistress of a cruel government official to draw him into an assassination, but falls in love with him in the process.

Ang Lee needs to hire a better editor. After converting the short story Brokeback Mountain into a sprawling epic, he has taken Eileen Chang’s novella Sè Jiè and stretched it on the rack until it’s over two and a half hours long. It does not serve the material well.

Sure, the opening hour is great. While Lust, Caution is an espionage picture about rank amateurs playacting rebellion until it gets too real, it’s a piano wire thriller with a soaring sense of danger and fun. But then it turns into – gag me with a spoon – a love story, and things quickly spiral out of control. Despite the best efforts of its talented leads, Lust, Caution fails miserably to make a case for these two actually falling in love. Their cold, S&M style liaisons might be rendered romantic with a Pedro Almodóvar or, hell, even a Clive Barker at the helm, but Ang Lee suffocates the film. He draws out the relationship far longer than it can be sustained and his relentless formalism keeps us at a constant remove from his characters’ humanity.

What I do admire about Lee’s work here is that the man knows how to craft a visual metaphor. The endless rounds of mahjong underscore our heroine’s constant awareness that she’s playing a high stakes game, and the latter half is sprinkled with shots that indicate how she’s feeling, even if the movie is too chilly to actually explicitly express it. Lust, Caution isn’t a bad movie, it’s just needlessly prolonged. It’s well crafted but empty, like a Ming vase.

Rating: 6/10


X-Men: The Last Stand

Year: 2006
Director: Brett Ratner
Cast: Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry
Run Time: 1 hour 44 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

The mutant community is dived over a cure for the mutant gene, leading to an all-out war with humanity caught in the middle.

X-Men: The Last Stand, the third and final movie in the original cinematic X-Men chronology, has somewhat of a reputation for sucking hard. While I wouldn’t argue against the fact that it’s a tremendously silly potboiler, it’s hardly the worst movie ever made. It’s not even close to the worst X-Men movie ever made.

Yes, it has deep, fundamental flaws. The final battle is a rickety, one-liner-ridden disaster, and its secondary villain, Jean Grey’s dark alter ego The Phoenix, is both a botched pull from the comics and an egregious anticlimax. But people forget that silly movies can be fun.

I love me an unpredictable piece of cinema, and The Last Stand’s almost psychotic willingness to kill off its own characters is captivating. And the CGI is unforgivably crummy, but it provides a flavor blast of summer movie fun by upping the number of effects sequences to a delirious degree. Little comic touches in the script actually work, and two performers pull the beast back from the brink of destruction: Hugh Jackman and Ian McKellen. Jackman is a charismatic badass that provides Wolverine with gruff sympathy so well that he spackles most of the holes in his mothbitten plot. And McKellen is once again a crackerjack villain with a wounded human soul, relishing in his own dastardly ego while drawing from his Holocaust background to provide an actually powerful, compelling turn as Magneto once again.

There’s not a ton to praise about X-Men: The Last Stand, but it’s a sugar rush that only hurt your stomach a teensy bit.

Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1528
Reviews In This Series
X-Men (Singer, 2000)
X2: X-Men United (Singer, 2003)
X-Men: The Last Stand (Ratner, 2006)
X-Men: First Class (Vaughn, 2011)
X-Men: Days of Future Past (Singer, 2014)
X-Men: Apocalypse (Singer, 2016)

New Year's Resolutions: Everything Else

OK, not all my mini review collections can have cute little themes. Here’s the rest of the less relevant viewing I’m clearing off my slate from 2015.

Source Code

Year: 2011

Director: Ducan Jones

Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga

Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

A helicopter pilot wakes up on a train in a different body, forced to keep reliving a terrorist bombing until he catches the culprit.

A movie doesn’t need to be complicated to be great. Source Code gets in, lays out its plot, wraps up, and jams the hell out of there. It’s a swift, exciting 90 minutes that triumphs by cutting the fat and delivering the gods. Just like Wes Craven’s Red Eye, it’s a stellar genre exercise for the very reason that it’s sleek and taut, using tropes the audience is already familiar with to bypass the exposition bottleneck and immediately begin pouring gasoline directly onto the flames.

A sci-fi reimagining of the Groundhog Day format, Source Code tells the bulk of tis story through subtle changes in the repeated formula, letting character and theme organically build off from that constant structure. Jake Gyllenhaal easily navigates the ever-shifting goals of his character, giving a breezy performance that reliably sells anger, humor, fear, and angst, sometimes sandwiched within seconds of each other. There’s a little slippery CGI and Jeffrey Wright’s performance as a shadowy government figure slips a little to often into honey-baked hamminess, but overall Source Code is a dazzling jolt of genre electricity.

Rating: 8/10

The Day After Tomorrow

Year: 2004

Director: Roland Emmerich

Cast: Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Emmy Rossum

Run Time: 2 hours 4 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

A scientist races to save his son, who is trapped in New York during a world-shattering superstorm brought on by global warming.

Here’s one of my favorite anecdotes about The Day After Tomorrow: Director Roland Emmerich screened an early cut for a group of scientists to get their opinion on its accuracy. They said it was laughably incorrect, but they still enjoyed the heck out of it. That’s a pretty accurate descriptor of the Emmerich style. Where he goes wrong in depicting hard science, viable survival techniques, and human emotion, he goes right in delivering an inimitable popcorn disaster movie experience.

Emmerich must have a really strong glasses prescription, because he sees everything bigger than anybody else can. He sees storms and story beats as grand, operatic measures, a parade of bold images and sounds totally devoid of detail or nuance. Characters that we’re never asked to care about will suddenly burst forth with a monologue about a wasted future of humanity’s hubris, because Emmerich will never subtly develop a theme for his audience when a sledgehammer will do.

Frankly, his style works. The man knows how to frame himself some elegant destruction. His commitment to capturing the most instantly iconic images possible does come at the expense of character, plot, and (occasionally) pacing, but since when does a disaster film need those things? When it comes to characters we actually know, he plays it annoyingly safe with their fates, but his destruction of inanimate objects and nameless extras is beyond compare. He does indulge a bit in his 2012 habit of “people outrunning improbably finite weather patterns,” but not enough to cause any lasting damage. All in all, The Day After Tomorrow is a fun, incredibly realized disaster flick with a message. It might be burned across the film in gasoline, but it means well.

Rating: 7/10

The Descendants

Year: 2011

Director: Alexander Payne

Cast: George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Amara Miller

Run Time: 1 hour 55 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Matt King’s wife has an accident and winds up in a coma, giving him the job of telling friends and family that she’s going to die. People can be unhappy even in Hawaii, see?

The Descendants is a movie for actors. A setting that’s a major vacation destination, a big ensemble cast that allows oodles of free time, and plenty of opportunities to cry? It’s a paradise! It’s not necessarily a movie for viewers, unless you want to see screensaver gorgeous B-roll of Hawaiian vistas. The drama provides some intriguing food for thought, but its relatively straightforward story is stretched on the rack until it can fill the two hour run time. Luckily, some laid-back comedy meanders its way into the proceedings so it’s not such an unbearable slog.

The movie is essentially composed of Big Cry scenes that stack like Tetris blocks until they create a big enough whole. Not a single actor slips, even young ingénue Shailene Woodley, though they do tend to run together by the end. Curiously, the film’s one true standout is comedy actress Judy Greer, whose character’s breakdown comes from many different directions, each of which she acknowledges with full sincerity. It’s compelling work, and it’s a same we don’t get to see more of her actually acting instead of just playing superheroes’ ex-wives. All in all, I’m not leaning toward recommending The Descendants, but if you happen to get trapped with it, it’s not the worst time at the movies.

Rating: 6/10

Titanic

Year: 1997

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane

Run Time: 3 hours 14 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Jack and Rose fall in love on the maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic. It won’t work because she’s rich and he’s poor. Also, the boat sinks.

The reason Titanic survives such an unsustainable runtime is that, in all actuality, it is two distinct movies. The latter of these is markedly superior, which also helps to keep audience interest from sinking to the bottom of the Atlantic. Split pretty neatly about the middle, Titanic is first a star-crossed love story, then a high octane action vehicle on a sinking ship.

Let’s tackle that behemoth love story, shall we? One of the true classic romances of modern cinema, it turns out to be just as clunky and frustrating as the true classic romances of early cinema. The character of Rose is anachronistically progressive to the point that she’s practically Rose-tradamus, expressing interest in artwork, psychology, and philosophy that wouldn’t be relevant for decades or more, in the hope of endearing her to modern audiences. This unbelievable character is shunted into a haphazard romance that is sold exclusively by her sizzling chemistry with young panty-dropper Leonardo DiCaprio rather than by actual plotting or dialogue, which feel like they were penned by a highschool playwright. Luckily, most of the talking is drowned out by the endless orchestral reprises of Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.” Frankly, it’s kind of a mess.

Luckily, James Cameron suddenly remembers that he’s an action filmmaker and all hell breaks loose. An iceberg T-bones the Titanic, sending crushing sprays of water through the engine rooms, splitting the boat in half, and tipping it almost vertical while people frantically board lifeboats and generally try to have a good time. It’s an explosive, adrenaline-pumping thrill ride that slams our young lovers through setpiece after freezing, flooded setpiece. For nearly an hour, it totally forgets about that wan romance nonsense and careens into blissful action oblivion. It’s the nearer my God to me, alright. Where the first half is dully adequate, the second is the ride of your life, full of state-of-the-art effects, bombastic emotions, and generally excellent filmmaking. Titanic is about as backloaded as the actual ship, but the means are totally justified by the end.

Rating: 7/10

My Big Fat Greek Wedding

Year: 2002

Director: Joel Zwick

Cast: Nia Vardalos, John Corbett, Michael Constantine

Run Time: 1 hour 35 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

A Greek woman wants to marry a white man, against the wishes of he loud, proud, enormous Greek family.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding is one of the most profitable indie movies of all time, so basically anything negative I have to say about it can just f*ck right off. Luckily, there’s almost nothing to complain about with this film, which kind of puts me out of a job. MBFGW is a charming romantic comedy filled with love for life, the world, and the people living in it. Essentially a diary of writer-star Nia Vardalos’ experience growing up Greek in a white world, its comedy almost exclusively derives from culture shock (and the extent to which the Geeks – still technically from a European nation – differ from the hyperbolically bland, WASPy Caucasians in the film is surprisingly vast) and the wacky antics of her herd of family members, a perfectly cast ensemble that for some reason has Joey Fatone in it. Remember when he was a thing? Yeah, me neither.

The biggest black mark on the film is that it has essentially no conflict. Sure, it has plenty of contrast, but the plot pretty much glides serenely forward without a hitch. The family has hangups that they quickly get over by repeating platitudes, Vardalos’ Tula has a teaspoon of internal struggle, and John Corbett’s fiancé character continues to be as boringly compliant as Silly Putty. Almost nothing actually happens, though when you’re spending your time in the company of a talented group of actors largely underserved by Hollywood (especially Andrea Martin, the film’s secret weapon), it’s difficult to find much of a problem with that. Opa!

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1556

Reviews In This Series

My Big Fat Greek Wedding (Zwick, 2002)

My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 (Jones, 2016)

False Evidence Appearing Real

Year: 2014

Director: Dan Gilroy

Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, Rick Garcia

Run Time: 1 hour 57 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Once you get past the initial disappointment that Nightcrawler is not an X-Men spin-off, you’ll find that it’s a remarkably excellent film, teleportation or no teleportation.

I wouldn't mind having the ability to teleport away from that hair.

Nightcrawler is about the scariest things that go bump in the night: freelance news agents. When Louis Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) discovers that he can trawl around Los Angeles in the middle of the night with a camcorder taping grisly crimes and sell the footage to news stations at a massive profit, he jumps at the opportunity. He’s career-driven, well-spoken, ambitious, and totally insane, which makes him pretty much perfect for the job.

Soon he finds himself an employee/navigator: Rick Garcia (Rick Garcia), a young, hungry man with nothing to lose. Together, they rise to prominence and Lou strikes up a relationship with Nina (Rene Russo), a news director at the lowest rated station in LA who is willing to pay top dollar to outdo her competitors. This includes ignoring the moral implications of Lou’s methods, which involve trespassing, obstructing police, and ignoring wailing victims in pursuit of the perfect shot. Their relationship is based on about 50 percent blackmail and 50 percent creepy carnage fetish.

They got a real healthy thing going on, those two.

Nightcrawler is a brooding and slow-paced exercise, plumbing the depths of the dark shadows and empty spaces of the city. It’s more mood piece than traditionally structured narrative, excellent for anybody who wants to take a quick wallow in the gritty underbelly of modern media. For those to whom that isn’t exactly an enticing prospect, the film also kicks up the slow boil to provide a bubbling, frothing, overflowing burst of supreme thriller action in the third act. But where it excels in the first two thirds are in the quiet, the contemplative, and the beautifully macabre.

This tone could not have been achieved without three things: The first is the slick cinematography by Robert Elswit, who must be an indescribably evil man considering his intimate, delicate kinship with darkness itself. His camera embraces the night, making shadows come to glistening life and even swathing the daylight scenes in cloying, omnipresent black. The second of these is the score by James Newton Howard (also the man behind last year’s “The Hanging Tree,” from Mockingjay – Part 1), which provides a beautiful, percussive, almost fantastical counterpoint to the gruesome nature of Lou’s subjects. The keening, soaring, indelible orchestration pulls the sweaty, ill-begotten excitement straight out of Bloom’s mind and converts it directly into music. It’s the sonic equivalent of the sick satisfaction of picking off a scab.

The third and final tentpole of Nightcrawler is Gyllenhaal himself, who is absurdly fantastic, trading out his movie star charisma to become a pale, sickly speck of a man who still manages to maintain that same sort of magnetic pull. His mannerisms, soft-spoken and almost prim, lend dreadful clarity to his amoral actions. Actually, he’s rather like Sheldon Cooper come sour, come to think of it. Gyllenhaal inhabits the role mentally and physically, more completely than I think anyone, including himself, could have imagined.

And yet Eddie Redmayne won for this.

In addition to being a nail-biting thriller welded onto a gloomy slow-boiler, Nightcrawler is a film where the subtext is almost more prominent than the text itself. It’s an unflinching look at how exactly the news (and, by extent, the media) shapes our reality. It’s no coincidence that Lou opens the film attempting to sell illicit scrap metal. He treats humans the same way, impassively collecting and packaging them like so much waste, creating a story that fits his own imaginary narrative rather than the one that life has laid out for him.

The excellent cinematography also endeavors to drive this point home, depicting its grisly subjects largely through the viewfinder of Lou’s camera rather than his own eyes. His own world – the world of news media – is profoundly separate from reality, and in the gulf of that separation lies the film’s true darkness.

Yes, Nightcrawler might be a little ponderous and a bit too keenly repetitive in its opening scenes, but that doesn’t stop it from being one of the most profoundly effective (and affecting) thrillers of the decade so far.

Take a wallow on the dark side, why don’t ya?

TL;DR: Nightcrawler is a dark, devilish mood piece driven by an astoundingly dark turn from an unexpected actor.
Rating: 8/10
Word Count: 765

T Is For Teen Angst

Today's Blogging From A to Z Challenge is a review of one of the last screenings in my Horror class before finals! We watched a classic film majory film that I was previously ashamed to admit I had never seen. Well now I have! So there! I'm waiting for my official film major acceptance package in the mail.

Year: 2001

Director: Richard Kelly

Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Jena Malone, Mary McDonnell

Run Time: 1 hour 53 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Donnie Darko is one of those films that the audience renders untouchable. Love it or hate it (and many of my peers do love it), nothing will change your mind after the first time you watch it. For me, being so far behind in my cinematic development that I never watched Donnie Darko during my tender formative years, I am perhaps the one person who landed in the camp exactly between the two.

Set in 1988, Donnie Darko tells the tale of... whatever you want it to be, really. The plot at even its most basic level is so full of time warps, bizarre philosophical discussions, and hallucinations that it's nearly impossible to describe simply except for the fact that Jake Gyllenhaal (who is a freaking baby in 2001) plays Donnie Darko, a troubled teen who lives in conservative suburbia in 1988.

After nearly escaping death when a jet engine crashes through his roof and demolishes his bedroom, Donnie starts seeing Frank, a six foot tall bunny rabbit who tells him that the world is going to end and commands him to perform disruptive acts like arson or flooding his high school. I won't delve too far into things because director and writer Richard Kelly builds an exceedingly complex mythology around the whole thing that would take more than its fair share of paragraphs to accurately convey.

And I wouldn't want to ruin the WTF experience for any first-timers. Love it or hate it, it's a valuable part of anybody's development as a moviegoer.

An accurate depiction of me showing people horror movies. 

From left to right: Put-Upon Friend, Sleepy Boyfriend, Me.

Before I say more, let me make it clear that the only version of this film I have seen is the director's cut which evidently differs from the theatrical cut in that it makes even a cursory attempt at explaining what is happening. Although it's still an opaque mystery, the use of intertitles provides a framework for understanding the film's structure that the theatrical audiences never had. 

Given that the director's cut is still a massively inscrutable rummage sale of symbolism and metaphor and angry teenage ramblings, I can't imagine how many Ibuprofen the original audiences must have popped in order to survive the thing.

But it became a cult sensation presumably through its depiction of a high school student who feels like an outsider despite being light years smarter than everybody around him. His community is lead by people who are driven by consumerism, get their philosophy from self-help tapes, and never question the world around them. 

His ability to see through this and expose the darkness, hypocrisy and lies in the carefully structured environment his parents raised him in must have struck a chord with students across America when the film was released 13 years ago. Set in 1988 at the height of the yuppie conservative boom, Donnie Darko is a cry for help from a man who felt stuck between the truth of the world and the facade of American prosperity.

It probably didn't hurt that baby Gyllenhaal has a quite compelling face.

Donnie's experience with a shifty psychiatrist and useless brain pills also mirrored the dissatisfaction of the ADD generation, who were feeling dislocated from schools and the desires of their parents. Seeing as that era is largely behind us and I'm pretty much a mostly adult, it's understandable why Donnie Darko didn't blow me away with its story and themes, a large portion of which I felt were too enigmatic for their own good.

Although I do sincerely appreciate this movie for inviting the audience to think hard about its meaning and the meaning of the world around them, to truly understand this film to its fullest extent is nearly impossible because in order to do that you probably have to be Richard Kelly.

But although the storytelling is dubious, one can not ignore the skill behind the camera. This is a beautifully shot film and one sequence in particular, an establishing montage of the high school set to Tears For Fears' "Head Over Heels" is majestic in a way that leaves me with no doubts why so many people claim this to be their favorite movie.

And again, the face.

Jake Gyllenhaal is perfectly cast as an alien in his own world whose every sentence cuts his conservative elders to the bone. With enough snark to become a stellar antihero and enough fear and warmth to endear himself to the teenage audience and keep them relating with his struggles, this is perhaps one of the talented performer's best film roles.

It's perhaps not my cup of tea for its spaghetti plot and thoroughly dark message, but I did really enjoy watching this film and its status as a cult classic shall never be contested on the pages of this blog.

TL;DR: Donnie Darko's creative visuals and dense symbolic storytelling don't lend it to easy consumption but mark it as a powerful effort from a green director.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 917