He's 82 and shockingly frail, but living legend Burt Reynolds shows he's still got it in THE LAST MOVIE STAR, which is getting an unusual rollout from A24: it premiered on DirecTV a month ago and is being released on Blu-ray three days before its limited theatrical run. In his first significant big-screen role in at least a decade, Reynolds is aging movie legend Vic Edwards, but let there be no misunderstanding: he's playing Burt Reynolds. Edwards was the biggest movie star in the world for six straight years starting in the late '70s, but his fortunes have waned as time and age have shown no mercy. He's been divorced five times. He still lives in a nice L.A. mansion that looks like a Vic Edwards museum, but he hasn't acted in years, he walks hunched over with a cane, is in constant physical pain, and from the opening scene where he's at the vet's office and makes the difficult decision to put down Squanto, his terminally-ill, 15-year-old dog, it's clear that Vic Edwards is ready to say goodbye. He gets invited to the International Nashville Film Festival to accept a lifetime achievement award that he's been told has previously been bestowed upon the likes of Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood, and though he's hesitant and thinks it's bullshit, he decides to attend after being prodded by his buddy Sonny (Chevy Chase). Vic arrives in Nashville (after his first class tickets turn out to be coach) only to find that he's been put up in a cheap motel, the festival--which he confused with the Nashville International Film Festival--is being held in the backroom of a bar by local movie nerds Doug (Clark Duke) and Shane (BOYHOOD's Ellar Coltrane), and his promised assistant is Doug's loud, obnoxious, can't even, #whatever sister Lil (MODERN FAMILY's Ariel Winter). She's an aspiring artist whose work veers toward the disturbingly dark (Clive Barker, of all people, provided Lil's artwork), has no idea who Vic is and is too preoccupied with her cheating, douchebag boyfriend Bjorn (Juston Street) to care. Feeling he's been conned, Vic spends the first night of the festival getting drunk and insulting the attendees in Shatner/"Get a Life!" fashion (calling them "losers watching movies in your basement"). When Lil picks him up at the motel the next morning, he makes her drive him three hours away to Knoxville so he can visit his childhood home and try to find closure and meaning to his life and reconnect with the person he was once upon a time as these two unlikely travelers form an unexpected friendship on their impromptu road trip.
Burt is the whole show here, and it's a shame writer/director Adam Rifkin (THE DARK BACKWARD, THE CHASE, DETROIT ROCK CITY), a Reynolds superfan who wrote this specifically for his hero, didn't give him something more consistently substantive. Burt is terrific when Rifkin keeps the focus on him and lets the camera just take in his aged, craggy, cosmetically altered face and the sadness in his eyes. Reynolds is a guy who's burned a lot of bridges in Hollywood over his career. Movies that meant something to him were dismissed by critics and he ultimately stopped caring. He's been smeared by tabloids over his marriage to Loni Anderson and his mismanaged finances and bankruptcies, and was the subject of nasty AIDS rumors in the '80s after shattering his jaw in an on-set accident making 1984's CITY HEAT. He was shunned by industry insiders he thought were his friends, and it all left him with a seething bitterness that's affected his life and career to this day. Sometimes he's been his own worst enemy and just can't help himself, as when Paul Thomas Anderson gave him arguably the best role of his career (leading to his only Oscar nomination) in BOOGIE NIGHTS and Reynolds responded by shit-talking the movie before it was even released. Reynolds has fucked up a lot and he knows it, and he channels that anger and regret into Vic Edwards. Why then, does Rifkin spend so much time on a going-nowhere subplot about Lil being pissed at Bjorn for cheating on her? This is Burt Reynolds baring his soul--no offense to Ariel Winter, but no one cares about Lil. And no one cares about Doug's hurt feelings or Shane's unrequited love for Lil and how she doesn't even know he exists.
When THE LAST MOVIE STAR is about Vic, it's very good, and Reynolds rises to the occasion. For fans who have followed him for several decades, it's difficult seeing the Bandit taking slow baby steps and grunting with nearly every physical action, watching him mourn the loss of his dog and going grocery shopping alone, buying prune juice and Hungry Man TV dinners. There's a devastating scene late in the film where Vic visits his long-estranged, pre-fame first wife Claudia (Kathleen Nolan), who's in a Knoxville nursing home in the late stages of Alzheimer's. THE LAST MOVIE STAR needs more of these moments, or at least visually clever ones like Vic disappearing into his memories as present-day Reynolds is CGI'd into scenes from his old movies and converses with the Bandit during a SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT car chase or lounges in a canoe marveling at himself from DELIVERANCE ("Damn, you're good lookin'!" Vic tells his much-younger self). Since Burt is basically playing Burt, maybe a better film could've been made by dropping the film festival angle altogether and doing more things like that, like putting Burt into scenes from his old movies and reminiscing about them or what was going on in his life at that point, like a sort-of visual journey through Burt Reynolds' memories, guided by the man himself. THE LAST MOVIE STAR is filled with touching, heartfelt moments, but in the narrative constructed by Rifkin, the story is predictable and the dialogue too often trite, as when Burt is forced to say "I look in the mirror now, and I have no idea who that person is staring back at me." THE LAST MOVIE STAR is a real mixed-bag: there's enough good stuff here that Burt fans need to see it, but they'll probably walk away from it wishing it was something else. (R, 103 mins)
I REMEMBER YOU (Iceland/Norway/Denmark - 2017)
There's some great chilly atmosphere in this very slow-burning Icelandic thriller based on a novel by Yrsa Sigurdardottir. The story, at least in director/co-writer Oskar Por Axelsson's adaptation, tries to juggle a few too many elements to reach a wholly satisfying conclusion, but the big twist is such that you'll be wanting to go back and take another look at seemingly minor details in the early scenes that end up having a major impact later on. Having said that, viewers well-versed in twisty mysteries and thrillers of this sort are almost certainly going to figure out one late-film reveal long before psychiatrist Freyr (Johannes Haukur Johannesson, best known to American audiences for his brief stint as Lem Lemoncloak on GAME OF THRONES) and his detective friend Dagny (Sara Dogg Asgeirdottir) overtly spell it out for them. Freyr is still grieving the loss of his son Benni, presumed dead after he went missing three years earlier, last seen in footage from a security camera outside a nearby gas station. Every lead and tip led to nothing and Benni's case has gone cold, with Freyr and his ex-wife Sara's (Elma Stefania Agustsdottir) marriage imploding in the traumatic aftermath. Dagny calls Freyr for a medical opinion on a suicide case where an elderly woman named Halla hanged herself in a room with crosses and the word "Ohreinn" ("filthy" in English) drawn on the walls, and crosses--both fresh and several years old--carved into her flesh. The crosses and the handwriting match the vandalizing of a church 60 years ago, where the child culprit--a persistently bullied boy named Bernodus--disappeared immediately after, never to be seen again. Why Dagny has called Freyr is that Halla is the seventh elderly person found dead in an inexplicable fashion, with a photo from 1956 showing that the seven were all classmates of Bernodus and all of their faces have been scratched out. One such classmate happens to be a schizophrenic and virtually catatonic patient of Freyr's who tells him, out of the blue, "Benni is at the bottom! Everything is green!"
Meanwhile, in a parallel storyline (yes, this is one of those where it's a waiting game to see how two completely unrelated plots converge), Gardar (Porvaldur David Kristjansson) and Katrin (Anna Gunndis Gudmundsdottir) are a married couple still picking up the pieces after their son was stillborn a year earlier. They and their third wheel friend Lif (Agusta Eva Erlendsdottir) have traveled to a seaside ghost town to renovate an abandoned house that's been empty for 60 years. It isn't long before a love triangle rears its ugly head, and erratic Katrin starts seeing spectral flashes of a little boy, followed by the discovery of a long-mummified corpse in the cellar, its fingers clutching an old black & white photograph. There's a lot of plot for I REMEMBER YOU to cover, and the clunky shift from procedural to the supernatural comes off as a little forced. Things head in a direction that's equal parts Shyamalan and THE ORPHANAGE and while it isn't an in-your-face, jump-scare chiller, its foreboding mood and relentlessly downbeat tone make it a flawed but generally effective mystery for fans of Scandinavian gloom. (Unrated, 105 mins)
2013's TEXAS CHAINSAW functioned as a direct sequel to 1974's THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, negating the three previous sequels (1986's THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE PART 2, 1990's LEATHERFACE: THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE III, and 1997's TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: THE NEXT GENERATION) as well as the 2003 Michael Bay-produced remake THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and its 2006 prequel THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: THE BEGINNING. Even though THE BEGINNING addressed the early years of iconic chainsaw-wielding Leatherface in a prologue, LEATHERFACE sees fit to tell his origin story once more, but in feature-length detail. Shot in Bulgaria (some desolate farm areas and dirt roads doing a surprisingly credible job of doubling for Texas) in 2015 and shelved for two years before its gala premiere on DirecTV, LEATHERFACE was directed by the team of Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, the French duo responsible for the 2007 cult classic INSIDE, one of the key films of France's extreme horror boom from a decade or so back. After the international notoriety of INSIDE, Maury and Bustillo were initially attached to HALLOWEEN II until Rob Zombie decided to direct it himself, and for a long time, they worked on developing a remake of HELLRAISER before finally leaving over creative differences during pre-production. LEATHERFACE marks their first English-language effort and if nothing else, they brought their gift of transgression along, with one scene involving a threesome with a decaying corpse as the third participant going down as one of the more jaw-droppingly depraved moments in a 2017 horror movie. The film was cut to avoid an NC-17, but what's here is probably still the goriest entry in the CHAINSAW canon.
While Maury and Bustillo enthusiastically throw gallons of blood all over the place (most of it the convincingly wet, practical kind), the story really leaves a lot to be desired, coming off like a half-baked retread of Rob Zombie's filmography, which serves as proof that everything comes full circle as Zombie's entire career seems like a tribute to the first two CHAINSAW movies. Owing a tremendous debt to THE DEVIL'S REJECTS and Zombie's remake of HALLOWEEN in terms of style and characterizations, LEATHERFACE (which counts the late Tobe Hooper and his back-in-the-day creative partner Kim Henkel among its army of producers) takes place in the 1950s (only the cars provide any shred of period detail; everyone else looks and talks like they're from the present day), with young Jedidiah Sawyer declared a ward of the state after being taken away from his deranged mother Verna (Lili Taylor, who really should have better things to do). He's renamed Jackson and as a teenager (played by British actor Sam Strike), he ends up as an unwitting accomplice in a mental institution breakout after Mother Firefly...er, I mean Verna incites a riot upon being denied a chance to visit her long-estranged son. Jedidiah/Jackson and new nurse Lizzy (Vanessa Grasse) escape with homicidal lovers Ike (James Bloor) and Baby Firefly...er, I mean Clarice (Jessica Madsen) and lumbering oaf Bud (Sam Coleman). Ike and Clarice hold Jedidiah and Lizzy captive and go on a killing spree, with vengeful Sheriff John Quincy Wydell...er, I mean Sheriff Harwood (Stephen Dorff as William Forsythe) in pursuit and still seeking vengeance after Verna's elder son Otis Driftwood...er, I mean Drayton (Dimo Alexiev) killed his teenage daughter years earlier. The script by Seth M. Sherwood tries to generate sympathy for young Leatherface much like Zombie's HALLOWEEN attempted to do for Michael Myers, and as in Zombie's film, it's all for naught. No one needed one Leatherface origin story, let alone an extended revisionist take a decade later. For all their insistence on staying true to their vision--the main reason they walked away from the HELLRAISER remake that has yet to materialize--you'd think Maury and Bustillo would deliver something more than stale leftovers from the tattered, dog-eared pages of the Rob Zombie playbook once they got another shot at a major horror franchise. Sure, there's some good splatter here and that necrophile menage-a-trois is legitimately shocking, but the story is rote and uninspired, a copy of a copy, and ultimately does nothing to enrich or enhance the CHAINSAW mythos. (R, 88 mins) BLOOD MONEY
(US - 2017)
It never quite comes together, but there's occasional flashes of a better movie trying to break free with BLOOD MONEY, the latest from MAY director Lucky McKee. A millennial TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE mixed with a survivalist thriller, BLOOD MONEY has three college-aged, childhood friends--Victor (BOYHOOD's Ellar Coltrane), Lynn (Willa Fitzgerald of the TV series SCREAM), and Jeff (GLEE's Jacob Artist)--going on a weekend rafting and camping trip. The tension is already palpable: Victor and Lynn slept together once just before graduating from high school. It was a one-time thing, but he's never gotten over it, and it doesn't take him long to figure out that Lynn and Jeff have hooked up and haven't gotten around to telling him yet. Victor's also passive-aggressively resentful that Lynn went off to college with a scholarship and Jeff comes from a rich family while he's stuck at home with a shit job and his friends calling him a "townie." Things are already nearing a boil when Lynn finds four duffel bags filled with a total of $8 million, wedged up against some logs on a riverbank. The money belongs to Miller (John Cusack), who followed it out of a plane by parachute but got separated from it on the way down. The trio periodically run into Miller, who seems to be an aimless, eccentric hiker trying to bum smokes and even strikes up a sort-of friendship with Victor after he leaves Lynn and Jeff over being a third wheel in terms of their weekend and after he's outvoted in his feeling that they should turn the money over to the police. But it soon dawns on Miller that Lynn and Jeff have the money and he forces Victor to take him to them, resulting in a game of cat-and-mouse between the bickering friends and Miller, which will of course end up in a confrontation at an abandoned grain mill.
There isn't a single likable character in BLOOD MONEY, but that might've worked if the filmmakers committed to the kind of pitch black comedy that's the specialty of the Coen Bros. There's far too much time spent on the ennui of the three friends whose longtime bond gets more frayed by the minute. It's interesting the way expectations are subverted and Lynn becomes so incredibly ruthless about keeping the money. Fitzgerald also gets a great speech near the end where she lets Lynn's long-gestating frustration rage forth, telling Victor how much better it was when they were kids and they were all happy just being friends, "but then I got my period and grew a pair of tits, and became a prize for you two to compete for." Cusack fares much better here than in his recent VOD atrocity SINGULARITY, a career low where newly-shot scenes of the actor were plugged into a long-shelved sci-fi movie from several years earlier. He still seems to exist in another movie than his co-stars for the most part but it works in context, as does his newfound disheveled look with his all-black wardrobe and bandana (he didn't bring his black cap and vape pen along for this one). Given his dubious track record in recent years, it's a rarity these days that a film is most alive when Cusack is onscreen, but he actually seems to give a shit here, spouting funny and possibly ad-libbed dialogue when he's tearing into Victor, who won't stop whining in self-pity about how he lost Lynn. He mocks him over his shitty townie job ("You think that's enough for Miss Thing?"), he dispenses unhelpful romantic advice ("Take her back to your one-room hovel and romance her on minimum wage"), and even throws in pop culture observations ("Everybody loves Metallica!"). It's in those moments where Cusack seems to channel his inner Nic Cage, and in Lynn's lashing out at Victor along with her unexpected character arc, that BLOOD MONEY hints at something better and smarter. It needed more of that to be a success, but in relative terms, it's one of the better Cusackalypse Now titles of late. Admittedly, that's a pretty low bar. (R, 85 mins)
THE CIRCLE (France/UAE/US - 2017) Directed by James Ponsoldt. Written by James Ponsoldt and Dave Eggers. Cast: Emma Watson, Tom Hanks, John Boyega, Karen Gillan, Bill Paxton, Ellar Coltrane, Patton Oswalt, Glenne Headly, Nate Corddry, Judy Reyes, Mamoudou Athie, Smith Cho, Amir Talai, Poorna Jagannathan, Eve Gordon. (PG-13, 110 mins) Based on the 2013 novel by Dave Eggers, who shares screenplay credit with director James Ponsoldt (THE SPECTACULAR NOW), THE CIRCLE has a premise with such a short window of topicality that the movie adaptation feels dated just four years later. It doesn't help that TV shows like MR. ROBOT and BLACK MIRROR have already explored similar themes much more effectively, but THE CIRCLE loses the satirical elements of Eggers' novel and opts for a much more heavy-handed approach. What might've worked on the page doesn't work always work on the screen, as characters here don't have conversations as much as they drop exposition and make important speeches. Everything has to be simplified so the audience can stay caught up, then it starts glossing over things so much that the entire second half of the film is a complete mess. A lot of this was likely due to negative test screenings leading to extensive reshoots being done in January 2017, just three months before the film's release and long after filming wrapped in late 2015. The film goes in a completely different direction than the book, so much so that it's a safe assumption that the finished film isn't exactly a collaborative effort between Eggers and Ponsoldt.
Mae Holland (Emma Watson) is temping in customer service at the local water department when her Scottish college friend Annie (Karen Gillan) lands her an interview with her employer, The Circle. A Google-like tech empire in Silicon Valley, The Circle is always pioneering advances in social media and software dedicated to making people "connected." Their latest product launch involves "SeeChange," a tiny, round camera that can be placed anywhere and go unnoticed, utilizing GPS and facial recognition software and generating much in the way of moral and ethical dilemmas over privacy and surveillance. Circle founder and CEO Eamon Bailey (Tom Hanks) claims that such advances are for the greater good of humanity, but loner Mae's gut reaction is one of apprehension. The mostly millennial employees base their lives around The Circle, living in dorm-like apartments "on campus," and participating in "suggested" activities on their off time with a fervent and almost cult-like devotion to their employer. Mae is passive-aggressively reprimanded by a Circle social media adviser for not taking part in the events and for going home to visit her parents--mom Bonnie (Glenne Headly) and dad Vinnie (the late Bill Paxton in his last film)--and she's somewhat alarmed that The Circle already knows her father is suffering from multiple sclerosis. Mae is chastised for taking a job with The Circle by her childhood friend Mercer (Ellar Coltrane of BOYHOOD), who hates texting and the internet and has no doubt condescendingly uttered, at least once in his life, "I don't even own a TV." Her friendship with Mercer falls apart after she shares a pic of his custom-made antler chandeliers and outraged millennials start following him around to harass him get in his face, and shout "deer killer!" After an incident involving her trespassing to go kayaking ends with her being rescued after being seen on a SeeChange camera aimed at the bay, Mae makes the ultimate commitment to The Circle: she goes "transparent," wearing a small camera 24/7 to document every moment of her life for Circle's 240 million members. This plot turn could've been a great BLACK MIRROR episode in the hands of Charlie Brooker, and it also recalls both Bertrand Tavernier's remarkably ahead-of-its-time cult film DEATH WATCH (1980) as well as Peter Weir's THE TRUMAN SHOW (1998), but once Circler comments turn up on the screen for most of the remainder of the film, it more or less starts to look like INSTAGRAM: THE MOVIE.
Mae's advance up the ladder at The Circle puts a strain on her friendship with Annie as well as her relationship with her parents, who are also required to install cameras at their house. Those cameras are taken offline when Mae's followers, seeing what Mae sees, accidentally catch a glimpse of her parents having sex with the aid of a penis pump for her disabled father, humiliating both of them. Mae also forms a muddled alliance with Ty Lavitte (John Boyega of STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS), a legendary hacker who works for The Circle, designing a program that's been hijacked by Bailey and his business partner Tom Stenton (Patton Oswalt) to spy on every Circle user and store all of their personal information, phone calls, e-mails, texts, etc. Much to Lavitte's disgust, Bailey and Stenton use this information to blackmail a senator (Eve Gordon) who's been publicly critical of The Circle, and with Mae's help, they even concoct a plan to tie The Circle into voter registration records and not only allow users to vote through their Circle account, but require them to be Circle users in order to vote ("The US government needs us more than we need them," Stenton says). There's some heady implications in a lot of what goes on in THE CIRCLE, especially the ultimate fate of Mercer as a scathing critique of social media hysteria, but Ponsoldt bungles it at every turn. THE CIRCLE is content to lecture the audience and too often comes off like it's taking an approach to technology that's equal parts Stubborn Luddite and Scared Old Man. What could've been a smart, topical critique of our reliance on technology and our willingness to sacrifice privacy and human interaction for convenience and a feeling of connection with the rest of the world comes off as smug and sanctimonious, complete with a laughably simplistic non-ending that has Mae staging a revolt against Bailey and Stenton and literally Pied Pipering her newly-woke colleagues out of a darkened, pitch black auditorium through an exit door, outside into the light. Watson is a capable actress but she's strangely one-note here. Boyega seems to have been affected most by the reshoots, looking like he spent his entire time on the set unsuccessfully trying to locate Ponsoldt, while Paxton musters what trace amounts of dignity he can with a penis pump and in another scene that requires him to piss himself. What little novelty this misfire offers comes from seeing Hanks and Oswalt atypically cast as quietly sinister villains, but neither seems to have spent more than a few days working on this, enough for one to surmise that when Bailey turns to Stenton at the end and says "We are so fucked," it's very possible that it was just Hanks talking to Oswalt without knowing the cameras were rolling. Altered extensively from Eggers' novel, THE CIRCLE is disjointed, already past its sell-by date, and completely unsure of what point its even trying to make.
