On DVD/Blu-ray: JACKIE (2016); PATERSON (2016); and MAX ROSE (2016)

JACKIE
(US/France/Chile/China - 2016)

Affected and mannered by design, Natalie Portman's feature-length impression of Jackie Kennedy carries this artsy, dream-like collage by acclaimed Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain (TONY MANERO, NERUDA). Taking place in the week after the assassination of JFK (Danish actor Caspar Phillipson), JACKIE is a largely experimental work that isn't concerned being a straightforward biopic, and that works in its favor about as often as it works against it. A framing device has Jackie being interviewed by a journalist (Billy Crudup) at the family home in Hyannis Port several days after her husband's funeral. She makes it clear from the outset that she won't indulge the obvious ("You want me to describe the sound the bullet made when it collided with my husband's skull?"), and she will shape the story and have final edit over what is written and presented to the public. From the moment LBJ (John Carroll Lynch) is sworn in on the flight back to D.C., a shell-shocked, blood-splattered Jackie is adamant about making sure her husband is honored and his public persona preserved. Whether she's planning his memorial or telling her story to the journalist, Jackie is constructing an image, that will shape the world's perception of herself and JFK for years to come. Her goal is to present to the world "the brief, shining moment that there was a Camelot," while acknowledging "There won't be another Camelot...not another Camelot."

As intricately constructed as its subject's public image, JACKIE is equal parts Stanley Kubrick and Terrence Malick. The often stream-of-consciousness monologues delivered by Jackie aren't nearly as wandering and meandering as more recent Malick, and the cold, clinical presentation and long tracking shots are straight out of Kubrick 101. Shooting in Super 16 gives the film a grainy and almost voyeuristic immediacy into Jackie's grief, but the more it goes on, the more ponderous it becomes. Larrain lets Mica Levi's Oscar-nominated score do a lot of the dramatic heavy lifting, and while there's a number of striking images throughout, JACKIE's insistence on keeping everyone--from its supporting characters to the audience watching--at a distance becomes a detriment. The script by Noah Oppenheim (whose two previous writing credits are THE MAZE RUNNER and ALLEGIANT) gets lost in frequently pretentious pontification, with Jackie telling a priest (the late John Hurt in one of his last roles; he died a month after the film's release) things like "The characters you read on the page become more real than the characters who stand beside us." In JACKIE's interpretation of its subject, the First Lady is someone who always seems to playing a part or playing to an audience ("I love crowds!" she tells JFK in a flashback), and to that extent, Portman's performance is remarkable in that it conveys that sense of deliberately manufactured artifice. It's nice that Larrain attempted something more than a cookie-cutter biopic, but in using such tactics, he never lets you in, and the large supporting cast--Hurt, Crudup, Lynch, Peter Sarsgaard as an unconvincing Bobby Kennedy, Greta Gerwig as White House Social Secretary and Jackie's friend Nancy Tuckerman, Richard E. Grant as Bill Walton--exists largely to listen to Jackie wax philosophical and marvel at Portman's uncanny interpretation with her clipped, airy inflections. JACKIE is ambitious and beautifully crafted, but Larrain's technique is too distant and clinical for its own good. (R, 100 mins)



PATERSON
(US/Germany/France - 2016)

A quiet film even by Jim Jarmusch standards, PATERSON is a low-key character piece focusing on a Paterson, NJ bus driver named Paterson (Adam Driver) and--it's never really specified--his wife or girlfriend Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), and their English bulldog Marvin (a fine canine performance by eight-year-old Nellie, who was diagnosed with cancer during production and died shortly after filming). A creature of habit, Paterson wakes up every day between 6:10 and 6:15 am, eats a bowl of Cheerios, and walks to work. In his down time and on his lunch breaks, he writes poetry in a journal. When he gets home, Laura makes dinner and tells him about her day, which usually involves her constantly changing life goals ("I need to learn how to play the guitar so I can become a country singer and be as big as Tammy Wynette," she tells Paterson, who's obviously just hearing about this dream for the first time, right between her wanting to be a fashion designer, a painter, and hoping to start her own cupcake business), then he walks Marvin and stops at a neighborhood dive bar run by Doc (Barry Shabaka Henley), for one beer and some conversation before calling it a night. This is Paterson's daily routine, which we follow over the course of a week, and in the context of the film, we see little in the way of a social life (they go see ISLAND OF LOST SOULS at a revival house on Saturday) and nothing in the way of family or friends (a photo on a table tells us that Paterson is a former Marine). PATERSON is about finding heart and soul in the mundane and the everyday, whether it's Paterson being inspired by a box of Ohio Blue Tip matches or eavesdropping on slice-of-life passenger conversations while he's behind the wheel. To that extent, it feels a little like Wayne Wang and Paul Auster's 1995 arthouse hit SMOKE, but the daily repetition recalls Chantal Akerman's JEANNE DIELMAN and the general mood of the film comes off somewhat like Jarmusch's attempt at making a less-precious Wes Anderson film (the recurring use of twins gets a little too cute after a while). The atmosphere is intriguing--Jarmusch sets his scenes in old-school Jersey neighborhoods that have likely been unchanged for decades, and Paterson himself seems like a man not made for these times (he doesn't even have a cell phone). It's a film about the millions of average nobodies who have artistic ideas within them that need to come out but everyday life just happens. Flighty but loving Laura wants Paterson to publish his poetry, but he writes it mainly for himself. He's fine with that, and he's happy. There's a reverence for the history of Paterson, whether it's the invocation of revered Paterson-born poet William Carlos Williams, whose most well-known collection is titled Paterson, and in the framed photos of hometown heroes on the wall of Doc's bar. On a cursory glance, not much happens in PATERSON, but it very subtly sneaks up on you, as in a late sequence where Paterson, on one of his solitary walks, meets a kindred spirit in a traveler from Osaka (Masatoshi Nagase, who was in Jarmusch's MYSTERY TRAIN back in 1989) carrying a tattered Japanese translation of Paterson, that really carries some unexpected emotional resonance. (R, 118 mins)

MAX ROSE
(US - 2016)

Screened at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival and shelved for three years until it hit a few theaters in the fall of 2016, MAX ROSE marks the first significant big-screen role for Jerry Lewis since 1995's little-seen FUNNY BONES. Lewis brings much emotion and poignancy to the title character, a forgotten jazz pianist who had a brief day in the sun in the late 1950s but never became a star. As MAX ROSE opens, 87-year-old Max is dealing with the death of Eva (Claire Bloom), his wife of 65 years. He's understandably hit hard by it ("I can't even remember my life without her," he says) and despite the doting attention of his adult granddaughter Annie (Kerry Bishe) and attempts at bonding from his somewhat estranged son Chris (Kevin Pollak), Max grows obsessed with something he uncovered in the days before Eva's death: a makeup compact with a hidden inscription from a "Ben," dated November 5, 1959, the day he was in across the country in a NYC studio cutting his only record. Max is haunted by the notion that Eva had a secret lover and questions the whether his marriage and his entire life has been a lie, even breaking down and airing this potentially dirty laundry during the eulogy at Eva's funeral. A health scare permanently sends cantankerous Max to a retirement home, where he's not enthused about knitting and cooking classes but finds some buddies in a likable trio of fellow old-timer widowers (played by Rance Howard, Lee Weaver, and legendary political satirist Mort Sahl, and watching guys like Sahl and Lewis riff provides some of MAX ROSE's best moments), but he can't get "Ben" out of his mind. When he eventually finds out who Ben is and that he's still alive (Dean Stockwell turns up in the third act), Max realizes he can't have any kind of closure until he gets to the bottom of Eva's relationship with him.

MAX ROSE was written and directed by Daniel Noah, a producer on recent notable cult films like TOAD ROAD and A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT. Noah based the Max Rose character on his own grandfather, so there's no doubting his sincerity in the project, which was probably key in getting an essentially retired Lewis onboard. While things take a decidedly predictable turn (there's obviously an explanation for the inscription and no way the film will turn the saintly Eva into a cheating wife) and grow increasingly maudlin in the home stretch, with a closing scene that's audience manipulation at its most shameless, it's hard to not like MAX ROSE. This is almost entirely due to the sentimentality of seeing Lewis in a starring role once again after all these years. Like Clint Eastwood in GRAN TORINO, it's a film that sinks or swims on its star, in each case a cultural icon with decades of familiarity working in his favor. Lewis is a joy to watch here, even if he's grown notoriously prickly and abrasive with age, and he's convincing and heartbreaking in the small, quiet moments where Noah really nails the emotional impact of losing someone after so long: Max sitting alone in the living room, the house eerily silent; or deciding it's time to throw out Eva's toothbrush and her things in the medicine cabinet; or spotting the book she was reading, left on the coffee table with its bookmark sticking out at the halfway point, and realizing she'll never finish it. This is the kind of film that probably would've gotten a big push a decade or two ago, with a sentimental Oscar nod for Lewis all but guaranteed. But after some significant retooling following its panned Cannes screening in 2013 (which resulted in Fred Willard being cut from the film completely, which may be a factor in its truncated running time), there's no place for something like MAX ROSE in today's market. Some movies skew old and still get wide releases (the recent Shirley MacLaine-starring THE LAST WORD and the new remake of GOING IN STYLE come to mind), but is anyone under 80 going to pay to see a new Jerry Lewis movie in 2016? And while there are no doubt a good number of tech-savvy geriatrics, how many are into streaming and VOD? My dad is 73 and shakes his head and makes a face like he's sniffing Limburger when you mention "streaming" to him. MAX ROSE isn't any great shakes, but it's awfully hard to dislike, and a must for Jerry Lewis fans...if they're even aware of its existence. (Unrated, 84 mins, also streaming on Netflix)

On DVD/Blu-ray: THE HUMBLING (2015) and FEAR CLINIC (2015)

THE HUMBLING
(US/Italy - 2015)

Even though nobody really liked literary lion Philip Roth's universally-panned 2009 novel The Humbling, it's easy to see what appealed to Al Pacino when he bought the movie rights shortly after it was published. The protagonist, Simon Axler, is a legendary stage actor renowned for his devotion to Shakespeare, indirectly linking it to Pacino's terrific 1996 semi-documentary LOOKING FOR RICHARD and his portrayal of Shylock in 2004's THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, and is also roundly criticized for being past his prime and a hammy version of what he once was, charges often justifiably leveled at the inconsistent, hoo-aah!-prone 74-year-old screen legend. While Pacino does some top-notch--and restrained--work here, THE HUMBLING starts fine but quickly devolves into a grating, self-indulgent misfire, with Simon suffering an onstage breakdown and haplessly attempting to off himself with a shotgun as an homage to Hemingway ("Hemingway must've had longer arms," he concludes) before being admitted to a psych facility. Once released, he's visited by 31-year-old Pegeen (Greta Gerwig), the daughter of some past stage colleagues. Pegeen has nursed a crush on the 65-year-old Simon since childhood when he was a family friend, and though she's an out lesbian, she seduces him, much to the disapproval of her just-dumped ex (Kyra Sedgwick) as well as her parents, Simon's now-estranged friends Asa (Dan Hedaya) and Carol (Dianne Wiest). Meanwhile, Simon is badgered by his agent Jerry (Charles Grodin) to get back to work and is stalked by Sybil (Nina Arianda), a deranged fellow psych patient who wants him to kill her pedophile husband, who she claims has been molesting their young daughter.

Directed by Barry Levinson (who teamed with Pacino for the 2010 HBO film YOU DON'T KNOW JACK) and co-written by Buck Henry (penning just his fourth screenplay in the last 30 years), THE HUMBLING gives Pacino ample opportunity to shine in long, single-take monologues and he's up to the challenge. But too much of it plays like second-tier Woody Allen, right down to the very Allen-esque opening credits, the young woman throwing herself at the short old guy, and the presence of Wiest, who won both of her Oscars in Allen films (not to digress, but why hasn't Pacino ever worked with Allen?). There's also an unavoidable and wholly coincidental parallel to last year's BIRDMAN, another film that dealt with an aging, washed-up actor drifting in and out of reality while planning a comeback. The early promise gives way to endless pontificating and shouting matches, the possibly Alzheimer's-stricken Simon being an unreliable narrator in Skype sessions with his therapist (Dylan Baker), and even some tired "old lady being raunchy" humor with Simon's housekeeper (Mary Louise Wilson) matter-of-factly advising Pegeen on how to better store her sex toys, which is just an excuse to hear an elderly woman say things like "vibrator," "butt plug," and "double-dong." The subplot with Arianda's Sybil gets entirely too much screen time and goes nowhere, other than to underscore a hinted-at but never-confirmed detail about Simon and Carol's past that doesn't really need Sybil to enhance it. Pacino dials it down and plays it straight throughout and he's always great to watch when he's legitimately invested in a project, and Grodin gets some laughs as the very Charles Grodin-esque agent, but there's ultimately no reason to care about any of the characters in the forgettable THE HUMBLING. Among the critiques of Roth's novel was that it felt like a short story padded to barely-novel length at 140 pages. To that end, THE HUMBLING is faithful, having little to say and taking nearly two interminable hours to say it. (R, 107 mins)


FEAR CLINIC
(US - 2015)

Indiegogo crowd-funding helped make this feature-length spinoff of the six-episode 2009 FearNet web series a reality for its tens of fans. The web series starred A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET horror icon Robert Englund as Dr. Andover in six six-minute segments, each specifically devoted to a patient's phobia. In the film, shot in Medina, OH, Andover's clinic is in a state of disarray after comatose patient Paige (Bonnie Morgan) dies following a session in his "fear chamber," a machine that produces hallucinations of a patient's fears in order to directly face and fight them. Paige was one of several Andover patients who survived a restaurant shooting rampage a year earlier, and they've all noticed manifestations of the others' deepest fears creeping into their own reality. The FearNet series co-starred cult horror convention fixtures Danielle Harris and Kane Hodder because of course it did. Harris and Hodder dropped out of the film, so Englund is joined by future convention fixture and CURSE OF CHUCKY star Fiona Dourif (Brad's daughter) as the tough, proactive heroine Sara. You also get Kevin "Still Coasting on Being 'Waingro' in HEAT" Gage as a handyman named Gage; Thomas Dekker (TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES) as a wheelchair-bound shooting survivor whose big revelation won't surprise anyone; daytime soap vet Brandon Beemer; former porn star Angelina Armani; and Slipknot/Stone Sour frontman Corey Taylor as an insubordinate, bad-tempered orderly.

FEAR CLINIC was directed by Robert Hall, whose LAID TO REST (2009) and CHROMESKULL: LAID TO REST 2 (2011) have very minor cult followings with the most undemanding of today's horror fans. Hall and screenwriter Aaron Drane don't give Englund much to work with, but the veteran actor turns in a strong and surprisingly sympathetic performance that doesn't rely on standard mad doctor histrionics. At times recalling a subdued Jack Palance, Englund's Andover is a shattered altruist who was sincerely trying to help his patients only to find that his "fear chamber" inadvertently opened a portal to an alternate world whose evils begin materializing in the real one. A committed Englund (acquiescing to the demands of no one, he gets naked twice) is the film's sole saving grace but by the end, his work is all for naught when his face is stuck on some nonsensical CGI creature as Hall and Drane briefly elevate FEAR CLINIC from boring to shameless, opting to rip off Stuart Gordon's 1986 classic FROM BEYOND with fear subbing for the pineal gland. Robert Kurtzman--the "K" in KNB--handled some of the atrocious makeup and creature effects and just because Taylor is in the cast, the closing credits are accompanied by Stone Sour's lunkheaded cover of Metal Church's "The Dark." The film feels like it was made 20 years ago and has no ending, and afterwards, you realize the only thing you have to fear is not fear itself but rather, the idea of crowd-funding for FEAR CLINIC 2. (R, 95 mins)

On DVD/Blu-ray: FRANCES HA (2013) and I DECLARE WAR (2013)

FRANCES HA
(Brazil/US - 2013)

Since his acclaimed 1995 debut KICKING AND SCREAMING, writer/director Noah Baumbach has made a name for himself in indie circles but is probably still best known for his two screenwriting collaborations with friend Wes Anderson on the latter's THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU (2004) and FANTASTIC MR. FOX (2009).  I've always found Baumbach the more interesting filmmaker, often coming off like the dark side of Anderson, though I realize I'm in the minority by not buying much of what Anderson is selling.  Baumbach got a lot of attention for his devastating THE SQUID AND THE WHALE (2005), but his next film, MARGOT AT THE WEDDING (2007) proved too caustically abrasive for most audiences to handle, and though it features a career-best Nicole Kidman performance, it's almost unbearably uncomfortable at times, which is why it might be Baumbach's masterpiece.  2010's GREENBERG followed along those same lines, though the uncharacteristically dark Ben Stiller vehicle was stolen by co-star Greta Gerwig.  Gerwig, generally considered the face of the indie "mumblecore"  movement, brought out a more uplifting side to Baumbach's filmmaking that really resonates in the director's latest film, FRANCES HA, which Baumbach co-wrote with the actress.

Drawing inspiration from the French New Wave and Woody Allen, the black & white FRANCES HA is also a sort-of mumblecore ANNIE HALL, though comparisons to the HBO series GIRLS would probably be appropriate (Gerwig isn't the provocateur that Lena Dunham is).  Frances (Gerwig) is a 27-year-old college graduate and aspiring dancer in NYC who can't seem to get her act together.  Her shaky semblance of stability falls apart when she can't commit to moving in with her boyfriend, which ends the relationship, and then her best friend and roommate Sophie (Mickey Sumner, Sting's daughter) decides to move to Tribeca, an area Frances can't afford.  Unable to pay the rent on her own, Frances jumps from one temporary living arrangement to another, starting with two platonic male friends, Lev (Adam Driver) and Benji (Michael Zegen), who share a $4000/month loft with apparent help from a parental allowance (unemployed Benji spends his days penning unsolicited scripts for SNL and a third GREMLINS movie), and moving on to a dance academy acquaintance (Grace Gummer, Meryl Streep's lookalike daughter).  Frances often behaves erratically and seems emotionally stunted, and especially can't handle Sophie getting serious with boyfriend Patch (Patrick Heusinger), since she always felt the two of them were like "an old lesbian couple that doesn't have sex anymore."  Sophie is ready for adulthood and Frances is not (one of Lev's friends tells Frances "You look a lot older than Sophie, but you act a lot younger").  Unlike past Baumbach protagonists, Frances seems to have his sympathy and even when she's frustrating and obnoxious, which is a lot of the time, Gerwig makes you like this character.  She's struggling to find her place and like many of her friends, she's been coddled her entire life.  Very few of these people have jobs that can support their lifestyles (for a far more bitterly misanthropic look at this very NYC phenomenon, check out the Williamsburg hipster/trust-fund-kid-eviscerating THE COMEDY).  Perpetually irresponsible Frances impulsively flies off to Paris for two days--spending the bulk of it sleeping off the jetlag--simply because she got a new credit card in the mail.  But she means well.  Gerwig brings out the sweet side of Baumbach, never one to shy away from depicting people at their ugliest.  She's an actress who can be off-putting when you first experience her style, but she's very good at balancing the charming and grating elements of a character's personality, and she does it without being "quirky."  There's a lot of funny lines--Frances complaining about being poor and Benji telling her "You calling yourself poor is an insult to poor people," and Frances, allowed to smoke in Lev's apartment, quipping "This makes me feel like a bad mother in 1987"--but FRANCES HA (the title doesn't make sense until the very last shot) is perhaps a bit on the overrated side.  It's a good film, but I'm just not sold on it being a great one.  I'm not sure it's worthy of already being a Criterion Collection release, though that could be Baumbach's association with Criterion darling Anderson.  (R, 86 mins, also available on Netflix streaming)


I DECLARE WAR
(Canada - 2013)

Mixing elements of STAND BY ME with LORD OF THE FLIES and the 1994 cult film WAR OF THE BUTTONS, the Canadian indie I DECLARE WAR offers an inventive concept and some disturbingly subversive imagery but eventually belabors its point into heavy-handedness.  It's an interesting film, but I'm just not sure there's enough there to carry it to feature-length.  Directed by Jason Lepeyre and Robert Wilson, and scripted by Lepeyre, I DECLARE WAR has a group of kids playing Capture the Flag in a wooded area.  As if putting the viewer in the mindset of the kids, the directors show them firing guns and blowing each other away, but they're alive again after they count to ten.  We know they're just playing with sticks and branches, but in their heads, they're using weaponry.  Lepeyre's script also has them using war-movie jargon that's intermittently broken up by things like "Wanna come over after War?"  One side is represented by the strategy-obsessed P.K. (Gage Munroe), a military history fanatic whose side has never lost.  His opponent is Quinn (Aiden Gouveia), who's overthrown and "killed" (with a red water balloon "grenade") in a coup engineered by the angry Skinner (Michael Friend).  Skinner takes P.K.'s best friend Kwon (Siam Yu) as a prisoner of war to lure P.K. to their base.  Skinner uses "enhanced interrogation" on Kwon and clearly has a personal beef with both Kwon and P.K. and uses this day's game of Capture the Flag to exact his vengeance.

I DECLARE WAR showcases some fine young actors, all of whom are excellent, even if a major subplot about the one tomboyish female participant, Jess (Mackenzie Munro), is a bit hazy and not very fleshed-out (she has a crush on Quinn, imagining herself spending the afternoon with him as he appears as a "ghost" to her because he's "dead"--he actually just went home after Skinner "killed" him).  But even when the script stumbles, the cast have a natural screen presence that's often quite remarkable.  While they may not always succeed with their story, Lepeyre and Wilson did an outstanding job of picking their actors (Munroe is excellent as P.K., the kind of kid who bores all of his friends by making them watch PATTON when they come over to his house).  There's a lot of strengths to I DECLARE WAR, but it's an allegorical story that would probably play much better as a short story than as a 90-minute film where, once the central conceit is established and you're over the shock of seeing kids mowing one another down in a "game," it just starts to feel overly contrived and keeps spinning its wheels to a certain degree.  (Unrated, 94 mins)