THE LOBSTER
(Ireland/UK/Greece/France/Netherlands - 2015; US release 2016)
The English-language debut of Greek DOGTOOTH auteur Yorgos Lanthimos, THE LOBSTER is an absurdist, dystopian satire that's equal parts Stanley Kubrick, Lars von Trier, and Franz Kafka. Set in a near future where being romantically unattached is forbidden, college professor David (a schlubby Colin Farrell) is dumped by his wife for another guy. The authorities cuff him and escort him to The Hotel, a government-sanctioned facility where people have 45 days to find their perfect partner or they'll be turned into an animal of their choice. Accompanying David to The Hotel is his dog, who used to be his older brother until he failed to find a partner by the end of his last 45 days. The rules at The Hotel are ironclad and strictly enforced: you must have some similar physical trait with a potential mate, prompting a limping widower (Ben Whishaw)--even those whose spouses have died must report to The Hotel immediately following the funeral--to cause injuries that make his nose bleed when he's attracted to a chronic nosebleeder (Jessica Barden); sexual stimulation can only be provided by dry-humping the maid/sex therapist (Ariane Labed), and masturbation is forbidden, as a lisping man (John C. Reilly) learns when the punishment is having his hand burned in a toaster in front of everyone. The unattached can buy more days by going on daily "Hunts," where they find illegal loners in the surrounding woods and shoot them with tranquilizer guns and bring them back to The Hotel. Down to his seven days, David desperately attempts to bond with The Heartless Woman (Angeliki Papoulia), so named because she's the record holder at capturing loners and extending her stay. When that fails, he stages a daring escape and is welcomed into the woods by the Loner leader (Lea Seydoux), where he finds love with a similarly near-sighted woman (Rachel Weisz), only to find that the Loner philosophy is the exact opposite: love is forbidden.
Even that synopsis is just scratching the surface with everything going on in THE LOBSTER. Once out of The Hotel, the story takes some unexpected twists and turns, but Lanthimos also slows it down, and it isn't quite as effective as the absolutely brilliant first hour, which has some of the most bizarre and wildly inventive ideas in any movie this year. Lanthimos and co-writer Efthymus Filippou don't clearly lay out the rules of this unnamed society, though the characters themselves are aware and never seem shocked by the insanity of what's their "normal." Instead, they just drop one baffling revelation and rule after another on the audience, making David's predicament both nightmarish and darkly hilarious. It's laugh out loud funny when David turns into a total prick to convince The Heartless Woman that he's her guy, like kicking a little girl in the shin or not lifting a finger to help her when she pretends to be choking as a way to test just how much of a heartless asshole--like her--that he is. The same goes for The Heartless Woman's utterly robotic display of dirty talk ("Do you mind if we fuck in the position where I can see your face?" she asks David as she's bent over, face down on the bed). THE LOBSTER--so named because that's David's choice of animal to be turned into should he not find a partner in 45 days--loses some momentum in the "loner" half of the story, though there's interesting parallels in the way the Loner leader is just as totalitarian and barbaric as the people who run The Hotel (her ultimate revenge on the hotel manager, played by Olivia Colman, is quite good). A love it-or-hate it proposition, THE LOBSTER is a dark, disturbing, and often hysterically funny one-of-a-kind work from a consistently bold and provocative filmmaker (if you haven't seen DOGTOOTH, you need to), and an instant cult classic. I wish the second half was as strong as the first, but this is still one of the year's best films, and one that sticks with you long after it's over. (R, 119 mins)
I AM WRATH
(US - 2016)
Continuing his slide into the netherworld of VOD, John Travolta dons his CRIMINAL ACTIVITIES Big Boy helmet wig for this C-grade JOHN WICK ripoff, playing a seemingly ordinary guy avenging the murder of his wife. Shot and set in Columbus, OH, I AM WRATH has Travolta as Stanley Hall, a former auto plant manager who's jumped by three assailants, one of whom, Charley (Luis Da Silva, Jr) stabs his wife Vivian (Rebecca De Mornay) to death. Vivian was part of an independent team hired by Governor Meserve (Patrick St. Esprit) to verify the state's clean water percentages. Stanley isn't convinced it was a random attack when Charley is apprehended and useless Det. Gibson (Sam Trammell as Not Quite Colin Farrell) shrugs and lets him go with the explanation "Eh, people like him don't last long. He'll O.D. soon enough." Of course, Stanley happens to have been a lethal black-ops mercenary prior to giving that all up for Vivian, so he calls his old buddy Dennis (Christopher Meloni) to track down Charley for him so he can get to the reason Vivian was killed. Gee, is there any chance the corrupt cops are in cahoots with the governor, who didn't like the numbers Vivian turned in, therefore needing her to be silenced? Maybe, considering it's riddled with cliched lines like "This goes all the way to the top."
Written by Paul Sloan (who plays one of the villains), I AM WRATH is the kind of movie that has zero trust in its audience, overexplaining everything and flashing back to past comments as if its simple plot is too complex to follow. It's heavy-handed to the point of self-parody, such as the shot where an enraged Stanley throws a Bible across the room and it lands with the page opened to the Jeremiah passage about "the wrath of the Lord." Gibson is one of the most absurdly and obviously corrupt cops you'll ever see in this kind of movie. There's no subtlety to the direction of Chuck Russell (THE MASK, ERASER), helming his first film since 2002's THE SCORPION KING. Travolta and Russell came onboard late, as the film was originally pitched to Nicolas Cage with William Friedkin (!) set to direct. That would've turned out better than the thoroughly generic film I AM WRATH ended up being. It's so sloppy that it can't even keep the name of its villain straight--in some scenes, he's "Meserve" and in others "Merserve." Travolta has a few scenes where he puts forth some acting effort, though it's pretty obvious that the 62-year-old icon is doubled almost Seagal-style in the the action scenes. The one bright spot in I AM WRATH, which skipped theaters entirely and debuted on VOD, is Meloni, once again busting his hump to salvage a middling, forgettable actioner (though MARAUDERS was a bit better than this). Travolta's just at the "Who gives a shit?" stage of his career, but Meloni throws in enough wiseass asides and bizarre quirks that he's always interesting to watch even when he's just standing there wondering why he ever left LAW & ORDER: SVU. (R, 91 mins) SNIPER: GHOST SHOOTER (US - 2016)
The sixth entry in the SNIPER franchise--not counting the misleadingly-titled recent Steven Seagal vehicle SNIPER: SPECIAL OPS--SNIPER: GHOST SHOOTER is the third to star the almost-lifelike Chad Michael Collins as Brandon Beckett, son of original SNIPER Thomas Beckett, played by Tom Berenger in the first, second, third, and fifth films. Berenger, who wasn't in the 2011 reboot SNIPER: RELOADED, but returned for 2014's SNIPER: LEGACY, sits this one out, though Billy Zane, who co-starred in the first and fourth films, is back as Sniper Jr's commander Richard Miller. This time, they're on a mission in Eastern Europe, surveilling the Trans-Georgian Pipeline, a terrorist-targeted gas line stretching from Georgia into Europe. All the while, every move they make, coordinated by their commander (when Dennis Haysbert announces "I'll be quarterbacking this from the JSOC office in Turkey," that's straight-to-DVD code for "I'm barely going to be in the rest of this movie") and a civilian contractor/Sniper Jr. love interest (Stephanie Vogt), is anticipated by the nefarious Gazakov (Velislav Pavlov). Gazakov is the "ghost shooter" of the title, a lethal sniper who's able to pinpoint the exact location of the American military team, indicating the operation has a mole or he's been able to hack into their network. It's never really explained how he tracks them, but it hardly makes a difference, as veteran DTV sequel director Don Michael Paul (LAKE PLACID: THE FINAL CHAPTER, JARHEAD 2, TREMORS 5, KINDERGARTEN COP 2) is more focused on firefights, digital blood, and CGI explosions. Collins is as bland as ever, and Zane has little to do other than bark orders and tough-guy jargon ("There is no next time...there's only ONE time!"), while other characters talk like people who've seen too many action movies ("Say hello to my Russian friend!" cackles a Russian liaison as he blows some bad guys away, before telling Sniper Jr "Welcome to the wild, wild east!"). SNIPER: GHOST SHOOTER is pretty standard-issue, jingoistic, DTV, shot-in-Bulgaria military porn--with Paul repeatedly letting the camera linger on fetishized shots of empty shells as they spill out of weapons--and offers little that's new or interesting beyond killing 100 minutes. You could do a lot worse, but that doesn't mean you should expect much. (R, 99 mins)
Spellbinding and tedious in equal measures, French auteur Leos Carax's practically impenetrable HOLY MOTORS is, in a word, difficult. What you bring to it is a major factor in what you get from it, and the more you know about the history of French cinema, the more you can read into what's going on. In following the mysterious Mr. Oscar (Carax regular Denis Lavant) on a series of nine "appointments" over the course of a very long day, Carax is apparently conducting an examination of "the death of cinema" in a world where technology runs rampant and everyone is "acting" all the time. We never know the real "Mr. Oscar"--only the actor driven around Paris in a stretch limo by his dutiful assistant Celine (Edith Scob), donning makeup and disguises between appointments. Mr. Oscar is alternately a homeless woman begging for change; a banker; a motion-capture performance artist supplying the moves of a CGI serpent; the gnomish Mr. Merde, abducting fashion model Kay M (Eva Mendes); a father berating his teenage daughter; a dying old man; an assassin hired to kill his lookalike and then himself; a lonely, heartbroken man spending a few fleeting moments with a former love (Kylie Minogue) on the roof of an abandoned theater overlooking Paris. There's even an intermission where Lavant leads an accordion jam session through a church.
"Anarchic" is a word frequently used to describe HOLY MOTORS and Carax's films in general (he's best known for 1991's THE LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE; HOLY MOTORS is his first feature in 13 years), but this may be his defining statement with its endless references to French cinema going back to the classics (at one point, Scob is seen donning the same mask she wore in Georges Franju's 1959 classic EYES WITHOUT A FACE) and all the way up to himself (Mr. Merde was a character played in Carax's segment of the 2008 anthology film TOKYO!). At some point, you have to question whether Mr. Oscar is even a real person or if he's ever not playing a part (French screen legend Michel Piccoli has a brief role as what seems to be Mr. Oscar's employer). During one "appointment," he's running behind schedule and has to leave, and the person to whom he's talking mentions she has another appointment as well. Everyone is "acting." Life--and everything--is one big performance. Do we ever know our true selves? Or is there such thing? Or something like that. HOLY MOTORS is intentionally vague and ambiguous and it can be a horse pill at times. For every sequence as dazzling and stunning as the motion capture segment, there's one as meandering and plodding as Mr. Merde's, with the freakish troll showing off his monstrous, crooked erection to the mystified Kay M (Mendes does seem a little out of place here). Combining elements of nearly every movie genre from film noir to old musicals to thrillers to gory horror, with Mr. Merde's introduction accompanied by Akira Ikufube's GODZILLA theme, HOLY MOTORS is both brilliant and maddeningly self-indulgent, demonstrating the best and worst tendencies of a genuine auteur: it's both beautifully inspired and pompously smug. Love it or hate it, there's never been another film like it, and Lavant is quite wonderful in about ten complex roles that require him to do just about anything you can ask from an actor. (Unrated, 116 mins)
BORDER RUN (US - 2013)
It's hard to believe it's been over 20 years since Sharon Stone secured her spot in film history with cinema's most famous leg-crossing in 1992's BASIC INSTINCT. She'd been paying her dues and working her ass off for over a decade and she finally found fame at the age of 34, a relatively late bloomer by Hollywood standards. And almost immediately, she became someone that people loved to hate and wanted to see fail, so much so that when she got an Oscar nomination just three years later for Martin Scorsese's CASINO, it was viewed as a "comeback." Stone pops up in decent projects every now and again, most recently Jim Jarmusch's BROKEN FLOWERS (2005) or Nick Cassavetes' ALPHA DOG (2007), but she really hasn't been relevant since CASINO, and arguably was never an A-list box office draw at all, a point proven by 2006's truly sad and desperate BASIC INSTINCT 2. She can be a fine actress and she's done excellent work (she's great in CASINO), but it's possible that she was doomed the moment she uncrossed her legs in that interrogation room in BASIC INSTINCT.
Stone's latest film is the straight-to-DVD thriller BORDER RUN and sorry to say, it's an almost complete embarrassment, and Stone, one of twelve credited producers, is a major reason why. Stone is a bitch-on-wheels, right-wing TV reporter with a hardline stance on illegal immigration. Her views change when her relief worker brother (Billy Zane) is kidnapped in Mexico. When the INS and the government show no interest in Zane's disappearance, she heads down there herself and gets involved in a drug-and-human trafficking ring overseen by an overacting Giovanna Zacarias, who plays the part as a crazed, psycho lesbian prone to sticking her hand down a teenage captive's pants and declaring "She smells like a peach!" and is later seen stomping on a pregnant woman's stomach. Zacarias' performance still pales in comparison to the hysterical, frothing-at-the-mouth work of Stone, who goes off the deep end after she's drugged and raped and starts to genuinely care for those trying to sneak into the US for their piece of the American dream (gee, who didn't see that coming?). The film was shot under the title THE MULE, which actually gives away a late plot twist involving Zacarias and her cohorts pretending to be coyotes sneaking Mexicans over the border--it's all a cover for their smuggling operation and the drugs the illegals have unknowingly ingested while they were drugged. Stone's look of gastrointestinal distress when the MARIA FULL OF GRACE pellets start to break is a sight to behold. Not only is Stone's performance bad--her crutch seems to be to just start shrieking CASINO-style--but she's sporting a really hideous black Medusa fright wig and some very distractingly unflattering eyebrows that aren't doing her any favors in quieting her critics. I like Sharon Stone and I think she's capable of great work in the right project with a director who can keep her contained (which Gabriela Tagliavini does not do here, most likely because she answers to producer Sharon Stone), but for whatever reason (she has been labeled "difficult"), Hollywood has all but abandoned her and she just seems lost with no idea where to turn. She's 55, and despite the inexplicable ugly wig and bad makeup, she looks good and is still in great shape, and she even has a couple of topless shots here. She should look at how the still-stunning Susan Sarandon has gracefully moved into character roles and is busier than ever in a ruthless business that historically casts 60-and-over actresses aside, and follow her example. Though she's mostly culpable for it, Stone deserves better than BORDER RUN at this point in her career. (R, 96 mins)
NOBODY WALKS (US - 2012)
This low-key character piece was only on seven screens at its widest release despite being co-written by the much-hyped, divisive GIRLS creator/star Lena Dunham. It's on the more commercial, JEFF, WHO LIVES AT HOME side of mumblecore and though it meanders into typical L.A. ennui, it's well-acted and offers some moments of squirming discomfort. NYC visual artist Martine (Olivia Thirlby) arrives in L.A. to stay with Peter (John Krasinski), a movie/TV sound design specialist who's agreed to help her with sound effects on her latest short film project since his psychologist wife Julie (Rosemarie DeWitt) knows a friend of a friend of Martine's and got him to do the young artist a favor between assignments. Peter develops a crush on Martine, which doesn't go unnoticed by Julie, who simply says "Don't embarrass me." Martine also gets involved with Peter and Julie's young handyman David (Rhys Wakefield), who doesn't notice how much Julie's 16-year-old daughter Kolt (India Ennenga of TREME) by her has-been rocker ex-husband Leroy (Dylan McDermott), is interested in him. Julie also has to deal with the advances of a leering screenwriter patient (Justin Kirk). Obviously, none of this ends pleasantly. Directed and co-written by Ry Russo-Young, NOBODY WALKS boasts some very good performances, particularly by DeWitt (best known as Rachel of RACHEL GETTING MARRIED), who has an icy, withering glare like few others, but it's pretty slight and doesn't have much to say beyond "marriage is complicated," which is actually said by someone at one point. There's nothing wrong with NOBODY WALKS: it's worth a watch, and at just 83 minutes, doesn't overstay its welcome, but it's the kind of film that you more or less forget as soon it's over. (R, 83 mins, also streaming on Netflix)
