On Blu-ray/DVD: AT ETERNITY'S GATE (2018), THE FRONT RUNNER (2018) and THE BOUNCER (2019)

AT ETERNITY'S GATE
(UK/Switzerland/Ireland/US/France - 2018)

Beautiful and ponderous in equal measures, AT ETERNITY'S GATE does have an Oscar-nominated performance by Willem Dafoe as Vincent Van Gogh to carry it most of the way. Dafoe is so good--here and in general--that he successfully manages to overcome the major obstacle of being a 62-year-old actor playing someone who died at the age of 37. Directed by artist-turned-filmmaker Julian Schnabel (BASQUIAT, BEFORE NIGHT FALLS, THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY), AT ETERNITY'S GATE focuses on the last few months of Van Gogh's life and his artistic obsession, with a lot of time devoted to his almost sycophantic clinging to his successful contemporary Paul Gauguin (Oscar Isaac). Financially supported by his younger brother Theo (Rupert Friend), Van Gogh and his work would never be recognized in his lifetime, and while Gauguin sees potential, he feels Van Gogh is too erratic and psychologically unstable to focus and think his painting through ("You're changing things so fast that you can't even see what you've done"). It's at Gauguin's suggestion that Van Gogh leaves Paris to find inspiration in Arles in the south of France, and when Gauguin visits him and has to leave to attend to some sales of paintings back home, a devastated Van Gogh melts down and cuts off his left ear to show his devotion. After a stint in a mental hospital, Van Gogh spends his final days on a furious tear of productivity in Auvers-sur-Oise before meeting a tragic end.

Working from a script co-written with 87-year-old Jean-Claude Carriere, a frequent Luis Bunuel collaborator (DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID, BELLE DE JOUR, THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE) still going strong as he approaches the seventh decade of his screenwriting career, Schnabel often stages his scenes as painterly images, where the screen starts to take on the look and texture of a Van Gogh work, a technique that's reminiscent of but not quite as immersive as Lech Majewski's 2011 film THE MILL AND THE CROSS. Elsewhere, Van Gogh's increasingly fragile mental state is conveyed by the intentional repetition of many lines of dialogue just seconds apart and in a series of distorted camera angles, blurred images, extreme close-ups, and shaky-cam that wouldn't be out of place in a found-footage horror film. Falling on the side of esoteric in comparison to the 1956 Hollywood biopic LUST FOR LIFE, with Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh, James Donald as Theo, and an Oscar-winning Anthony Quinn as Gauguin (or even Robert Altman's pre-comeback 1990 film VINCENT & THEO, with Tim Roth as Van Gogh, Paul Rhys as Theo, and Wladimir Yordanoff as Gauguin), but AT ETERNITY'S GATE is sometimes standoffish to a fault, with Schnabel's techniques growing self-indulgent and tedious after a while. Not surprisingly, it works best when he takes a break from the directorial wankery and lets Dafoe work his magic, whether it's a long monologue or in scenes with Isaac, Friend, Mads Mikkelsen as a priest counseling Van Gogh at the mental hospital, and Emmanuelle Seigner as Madame Ginoux, the "Woman from Arles" who inspired Van Gogh's famed series of "L'Arlesienne" paintings. (PG-13, 111 mins)



THE FRONT RUNNER
(US/Canada - 2018)

Hitting a handful of theaters on Election Day 2018, THE FRONT RUNNER didn't really catch on and only got a half-hearted, 800-screen rollout from Sony over the next couple of weeks, its gross stalling at $2 million and the film completely forgotten by December. A chronicle of the three weeks leading up to Colorado senator Gary Hart's withdrawal from the 1988 Presidential campaign over allegations of an affair with Donna Rice, THE FRONT RUNNER isn't very subtle about making connections to present-day issues, particularly in an embarrassingly heavy-handed scene late in the film between two Washington Post reporters. Hart, played here by Hugh Jackman, doesn't think the public cares about allegations and politicians' private lives, but as his campaign manager Bill Dixon (J.K. Simmons, cast radically against type as "J.K. Simmons") tells him, "It's not '72." In the Senate for 15 years and losing the 1984 Democratic nomination to Walter Mondale, Hart's political star was on the rise, and going into 1988, he was posited as the front runner until a Washington Post reporter (Mamoudou Athie) brings up a brief separation from his wife Lee (Vera Farmiga) several years earlier. Already whispered about in political circles as a womanizer, Hart doesn't even mask his indignation and invites the press to "follow me around, put a tail on me...they'll be very bored." Following an anonymous tip, a pair of Miami Herald reporters, Tom Fiedler (Steve Zissis) and Jim Savage (BEAVIS AND BUTTHEAD creator Mike Judge) do just that and see Rice (Sara Paxton) visiting Hart at his D.C. townhouse. The senator insists she was there for a job interview, though it soon surfaces that they met a short time earlier in Miami on a crowded booze cruise arranged by Hart's lobbyist friend Billy Broadhurst (Toby Huss), on a yacht prophetically christened "Monkey Business."

A relatively tame preview of the media circus that was the Clinton era, the Gary Hart scandal is generally considered ground zero of tabloid journalism working its way into present-day politics. Director/co-writer Jason Reitman (JUNO, UP IN THE AIR) wants to fashion THE FRONT RUNNER as a rallying cry against the 24/7 cable news coverage that was on the horizon, but the end result is superficial and strangely aloof. It takes neither a methodical, ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN approach nor one of satire along the lines of VICE. It's just...there. It gets off to a clunky, plodding start and takes a while to recover and find its footing (it doesn't help that every other character seems to be named "Bill" or "Bob"), and keeps everyone at a distance, never really getting into the heads of Hart or his family, with everything reduced to melodramatic proclamations like "The public doesn't care about this!" from Hart and "I told you to never embarrass me!" from Lee. Jackman does what he can with the shallow script (he's very good in a scene where Hart talks a nervous young journalist through some mid-flight turbulence), Alfred Molina is badly miscast as Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, and Paxton has some good moments with Hart's sympathetic top female campaign staffer (Molly Ephraim) who's quietly resentful that Hart is abandoning her to a media that paints her as a bimbo. But much of this ultimately rings hollow if you're aware that Ephraim's character, like the Post reporter played by Athie along with several others, is a composite or an outright fictional creation. There's a few worthwhile bits early on, like Hart and Rice's first meeting during the loud and rambunctious booze cruise, with their conversation barely audible and being drowned out by Boston's "Long Time" (watch Jackson's face when Hart first sees her and immediately turns on the charm), but THE FRONT RUNNER plays like a forgettable HBO biopic, offering about as much insight into the scandal and its impact on future political news coverage as Gary Hart's Wikipedia entry. (R, 113 mins)



THE BOUNCER
(France/Belgium - 2018; US release 2019)

Released in Europe last summer as LUKAS, THE BOUNCER finds Jean-Claude Van Damme in the kind of serious actor mode he's generally avoided since his 2008 meta arthouse confessional JCVD. It comes at the right time, as he's really been skidding in his headlining action vehicles of late, littered with forgettable duds like POUND OF FLESH, KILL 'EM ALL and BLACK WATER in between the rebooted KICKBOXER nostalgia trips. Dumped on US VOD in early January, the French-Belgian co-production THE BOUNCER is a bit different from the film's LUKAS cut in that it's shortened by several minutes and all of the characters have been dubbed into English, where LUKAS had a mix of English, French, and Flemish. Van Damme is speaking both English and French in the overseas LUKAS trailer, but it's all English in THE BOUNCER, and while he's dubbing himself, the obvious revoicing of the French-speaking actors does this version a bit of a disservice. That hiccup aside, THE BOUNCER is Van Damme's best film in years, a surprising departure in a grim, gritty, somber character piece with shocking bursts of violence and some Alfonso Cuaron-inspired tracking shots and unbroken takes by director Julian Leclercq (CHRYSALIS). In Brussels, Lukas (Van Damme) is a bouncer in a club that looks like a Gaspar Noe wet dream. He's tossing out an unruly patron for roughing up a waitress, and a scuffle ensues when the kid plays the "Do you know who I am?" card, ending up with a serious head injury after taking a swing at Lukas, and even though he was defending himself, Lukas still gets fired. He's a widower and single dad with a vague past as a bodyguard in South Africa, struggling to get by and raise his eight-year-old daughter Sarah (Alice Verset). Though he's a loving and doting father, he has no job skills other than beating the shit out of people, and as a result, he ends up looking for work as a bouncer at a strip joint where the job interview consists of six guys locked in a dimly-lit, Tyler Durden-esque basement and the last man standing gets the job. Of course, Lukas gets the job.

The club is owned by Jan Dekkers (Sam Louwyck of EX-DRUMMER), who's known in the Brussels underworld as "The Dutchman" and is running a counterfeiting ring. This puts Lukas in the sights of ambitious cop Maxim Zeroual (Sami Bouajila), who offers to take care of the pending assault charges from his last job if he works as an informant supplying information about The Dutchman and his chief henchman Geert (Kevin Janssens of REVENGE). Story-wise, THE BOUNCER doesn't really bring anything new to the table, but director Leclercq succeeds in creating a bleak and oppressive atmosphere as Lukas gets in too deep, with Van Damme turning in an effective and very internalized performance and using every line and wrinkle in his aged, weathered face to convey just how weary and tired and beaten-down-by-life Lukas has become. During the '00s when he was cranking out some quality DTV actioners and nobody was paying any attention, Van Damme very quietly became a character actor disguised as an action star. Lately, he's been coasting, but THE BOUNCER is a welcome look at the direction his career should've taken after JCVD. That's why it's too bad the only version that's available stateside has all of his scenes with Bouajila and young Verset dubbed into English (quite badly in Bouajila's case) when they were in French in the LUKAS cut. Still, THE BOUNCER is a must-see for JCVD fans interested in seeing him stretch beyond the confines of his usual Redbox fare. He's a much better actor than he's ever gotten credit for being. (R, 87 mins)

On DVD/Blu-ray: MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN (2014); HONEYMOON (2014); and REVENGE OF THE GREEN DRAGONS (2014)

MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN
(US - 2014)

Debuting to widespread dismay and derision at the 2014 Toronto Film Festival and opening to toxic reviews on 608 screens in October, MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN is currently ranked fifth on the list of all-time worst box office openings on 600 or more screens. Its total gross stalled at $705,000 but honestly, no film that allows you to hear Emma Thompson utter the words "titty-fucking cum queen" can possibly be completely worthless. Based on a novel by Chad Kultgen, MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN finds director Jason Reitman, once the toast of Hollywood and the Next Big Thing after THANK YOU FOR SMOKING (2005), JUNO (2007), UP IN THE AIR (2009), and the underappreciated YOUNG ADULT (2011), crashing and burning with this on the heels of the universally-lambasted apple pie fiasco LABOR DAY (2013). MW&C is an hysterically overwrought look at Our World Today and examines the ways technology and everything else in our environment makes us strangers to one another. People drift apart, communication is non-existent, and everyone lives in their own insulated bubbles. Written by Reitman and Erin Cressida Wilson, best known for scripting 2002's SECRETARY and Atom Egoyan's ridiculous 2010 erotic thriller CHLOE, MW&C is another of these "everything is connected," big ensemble movies along the lines of CRASH, but miraculously manages to out-Haggis Paul Haggis in hackneyed sanctimony. Reitman is only 37 years old, but he's somehow directed a film that seems to have been made by an embittered and out-of-touch 80-year-old with its "Old Man Yells At Cloud" attitude about the state of the world with all the texting and the internet and the oversexed kids with the selfies and the hooking up. Most of that stems from one character: Jennifer Garner's Patricia Beltmeyer, arguably the most smothering helicopter parent in the history of cinema, a killjoy of Nurse Ratched proportions, a drunk-with-power sadist who makes Piper Laurie's Margaret White in CARRIE seem lenient and easy-going. Patricia is a mom so fixated on controlling every aspect of her teenage daughter Brandy's (Kaitlyn Dever of SHORT TERM 12) life that she seems to spend all of her waking hours scrolling through her daughter's texts and Facebook profile, systematically unfriending anyone she deems a "threat," and even plugging in a keylogger that monitors every one of Brandy's keystrokes. There are no redeeming qualities about this character and no reason given for her behavior to be as extreme as it is. But that's MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN in a nutshell: everything is black or white, with no shades of gray. It exists in an ennui-drenched suburbia where everyone's neuroses, dysfunctions, and emotional voids are right there in their browser histories. Everyone is selfish, everyone is miserable, and if there's anything that disrupts that simplistic view--like Patricia's useless husband (Jason Douglas)--then they're just cast aside by the filmmakers. Ray's there, but only exists to shake his head as Patricia sifts through pages upon pages of Brandy's text message printouts, like a driven detective obsessively digging through cold case files. It's no fault of Garner, who does what Reitman requires her to do, but Patricia Beltmeyer is one of the most ludicrously conceived villains to pop up in a movie in ages, and it was that character who bore the brunt of the film's overwhelmingly negative reception.

Elsewhere, we get quite the parade of sad sacks, all accompanied by the soothing tones of Thompson serving as narrator, at least until Reitman seems to forget about her and we go an hour without hearing her, and when she breaks out the aforementioned "titty-fucking cum queen," you're kind of interested in what else she has to say. Instead, we get Don Truby (a schlubby Adam Sandler in drama mode) and his wife Helen (Rosemarie DeWitt), bored parents of two sons whose stagnant sex life is separately rejuvenated by Helen creating an account with Ashley Madison and Don hiring escorts. This provides him with a nice break from sneaking home from work in the middle of the day to rub one out at his son Chris' (Travis Tope) laptop since Don's computer is completely shut down due to malware and viruses from all the porn sites he's visited. Chris has spent so much time jerking off to bondage and creampie videos that he can't even function during "normal" sex with hot cheerleader and self-aggrandizing would-be model Hannah (Olivia Crocicchia), even after he practices by drilling a hole in a Nerf football and filling it with hand lotion. Hannah and her single mom Donna (Judy Greer) spend all their time working on making Hannah a star, taking photos of dubious merit--often with Hannah scantily-clad--and selling them online through Hannah's web site, where her "fans," unbeknownst to the impossibly naive Donna--who raised Hannah alone after being ditched by the father, a shitbag who promised to make her a star--are primarily pedophiles. Donna begins dating Kent (Dean Norris), whose wife abandoned him and star quarterback son Tim (Ansel Elgort) a year earlier. A disillusioned Tim has since quit the football team and spends all of his time playing a WORLD OF WARCRAFT-type game online, at least until he meets the similarly disconnected Brandy, who's looking for any way to escape her mother's psychosis. There's also the formerly overweight Allison (Elana Kampouris), who spent the last year starving herself and developing an eating disorder only to lose her virginity to an asshole jock (Will Peltz) who instantly ignores her. MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN is overbaked and hopelessly melodramatic, but it's hardly the grease fire that many reviews made it out to be. Despite the cartoonish characterizations, the cast acquits themselves well, especially Norris and Greer, at least until the script requires the characters to do something stupid. Norris' Kent is handled in a surprising fashion in the sense that he initially supports his son's decision to quit the football team, giving him his space to deal with an accept his mother walking out on them. In most situations like that, the dad would be an abusive bully pressuring his son to man up and get back out on the field. Even Sandler puts forth some effort, but eventually everyone is defeated by the ham-fisted, reactionary story that only provokes guffaws instead of serious thought. (R, 119 mins)

HONEYMOON
(US - 2014)

This North Carolina-lensed indie horror film looks at the disintegration of a relationship through an INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS filter. It's an alien invasion film with the intimate brutality of Andrzej Zulawski's POSSESSION and Lars von Trier's ANTICHRIST. While the derivative "pod people" angle sometimes feels like it's being forced into functioning as a metaphor by director/co-writer Leigh Janiak, HONEYMOON ultimately succeeds thanks to a pair of gutsy performances by its leads--the only actors onscreen for about 95% of the film--and a general queasy discomfort and one scene that recalls the kind of horrific set piece that fans cut their teeth on back in the '80s. Young newlyweds Paul (Harry Treadaway of PENNY DREADFUL) and Bea (Rose Leslie, best known as Ygritte on GAME OF THRONES) head to an isolated cottage in the middle of the woods for their honeymoon. After a couple days of wedded bliss, the party comes to an abrupt end when Paul finds Bea naked and confused in the woods in the middle of the night. She claims to have been sleepwalking but over the next day or so, she begins behaving oddly. She starts using familiar terms in a strange fashion (calling her suitcase a "clothes box") and forgets how to make coffee and French toast. She makes excuses for avoiding sex and has what look like deep bug bites on her inner thigh. She won't answer Paul's questions, leading him to believe she stepped out for a tryst with violent, hot-headed townie Will (Ben Huber) who owns the local diner and with whom Bea was obviously friendly as teenagers. Paul notes that Will's wife Annie (Hanna Brown) was also behaving in a disoriented manner. Strange lights shine into the cottage in the middle of the night and Paul catches Bea writing "My name is Bea, my husband's name is Paul" over and over in her journal, as Paul is convinced that something has happened to Bea and something has replaced her. "You look like her. You smell like her. You taste like her.  But you're not her," he says.

One of the interesting things HONEYMOON does is flirt with the idea that maybe it's Paul who's cracking up and that his concern over Bea is really just his jealousy boiling over after he quickly concludes from their brief meeting that Will is a long-ago ex of Bea's. The BODY SNATCHERS motif is a tried-and-true formula for utter paranoia, and applying it to what's essentially a two-character piece mostly taking place in a cottage makes for an intriguing contrast with the usual widespread, large-scale scope of most films of this sort. If ever there was an alien invasion character study, HONEYMOON would be it. The concept seems a little forced when Janiak tries to use it to illustrate the idea that no matter how much you love someone and think you know them, you can never really know everything about them. Mostly low-key and character-driven, HONEYMOON makes great use of light and shadows, and Janiak is to be commended for avoiding cheap jump scares and setting HONEYMOON up as a narrative feature when it would've been very easy to turn it into yet another found-footage offering. Instead, she keeps it old-school by building the characters and getting to know them, then letting the tension escalate and deftly handling not just the innately horrific concept of being a stranger in your own body, but the horror of realizing the person you married is not that person at all. The "been there, done that" BODY SNATCHERS-esque plot elements aside, HONEYMOON is a creepy and effective horror movie that Magnet only released on three screens, grossing $9300. (R, 87 mins)


REVENGE OF THE GREEN DRAGONS
(US - 2014)

Martin Scorsese's 2006 Oscar-winner THE DEPARTED was a remake of Andrew Lau and Andy Mak's acclaimed 2002 Hong Kong thriller INFERNAL AFFAIRS, and Scorsese "presents" and serves as one of 20 credited producers on REVENGE OF THE GREEN DRAGONS, collaboratively co-directed by Lau and Andrew Loo. Lau hasn't had much luck trying to crack the American market--his 2008 Richard Gere/Claire Danes serial killer thriller THE FLOCK was taken away from him in post-production and partially reshot by an uncredited Niels Mueller (2004's THE ASSASSINATION OF RICHARD NIXON) before it was given an unceremonious straight-to-DVD release. He gives it another go after his 2010 Donnie Yen hit LEGEND OF THE FIST: THE RETURN OF CHEN ZHAN and the 2012 period epic THE GUILLOTINES, and the results are a mess. "Inspired by true events," GREEN DRAGONS desperately wants to be a Chinese GOODFELLAS or MEAN STREETS, but it's a cliche-laden disaster that only serves as a reminder that you should just watch those films one more time, along with Abel Ferrara's KING OF NEW YORK and Michael Cimino's YEAR OF THE DRAGON. Populated by stock characters and weak performances in a film whose story is typically advanced by montages, the confusing and often completely incoherent GREEN DRAGONS plays like an epic crime saga cut down to about half its length, but even at 95 minutes, it feels four hours long. It had potential, with its look at Chinese street gangs in Queens and Flushing in the 1980s, seen through the eyes of Sonny (THE TWILIGHT SAGA's Justin Chon), an orphan adopted into the Green Dragons gang after being brought to the US in the illegal immigration operation overseen by Snake Head Mama (Eugenia Yuan). Sonny and his adoptive brother Steven (played as an adult by Kevin Wu) serve as soldiers under the command of Green Dragons boss Paul Wong (GLEE's Harry Shum Jr) as Lau, Loo, and co-writer Michael Di Jiacomo essentially proceed with a watered-down remake of GOODFELLAS.

The chief problem is that Sonny registers a complete zero as a character, with Chon's bland performance doing nothing to make him sympathetic or even remotely compelling. So many other characters appear and disappear throughout that it's often impossible to tell how they relate to wherever the filmmakers are in the story. Of course, the hot-tempered Steven (the Tommy DeVito of the story) will be the major troublemaker in the Green Dragons. Of course Wong (the Jimmy Conway surrogate) is a ruthless leader who thinks nothing of throwing his own partners and subordinates under the bus if means saving his own ass by bringing down his chief competitor in smuggling heroin inside Hong Kong mooncakes. And of course, like the Henry Hill stand-in he's supposed to be, Sonny will turn against the Green Dragons when it becomes clear Wong intends to kill him. Also adding to the GOODFELLAS love-fest is a pointless supporting role for Ray Liotta as a hard-nosed FBI agent obsessed with busting up Wong's operation and getting no support from his do-nothing bosses at the Bureau. Liotta's character basically serves as a cipher for racist white America's ignorance of Chinese culture and customs, as Lau and Loo engage in laughably clumsy exposition drops like having Liotta ask an undercover Chinese-American NYPD detective (Jin Auyeung) "Do you speak Chinese?" to which the cop responds with a lecturing "Chinese is not a language. It's a family of languages...Cantonese, Fukienese..." Aimlessly meandering throughout its duration, GREEN DRAGONS only manages to be intriguing when it's focused on Shum's duplicitous, self-serving Paul Wong, constantly looking out for number one and a far more interesting character than either Sonny or Steven. Lau and Loo also sacrifice "true events" for a dramatic but phony twist ending, which is completely disingenuous considering the real Sonny is in witness protection and made contact with Loo to give him pointers on the film, which the co-director clearly disregarded. Elsewhere, it says nothing about the immigrant experience, opting instead to rely on every post-Scorsese, post-Tarantino gangster/crime movie cliche in the book, starting with Sonny's Henry Hill-style narration, right down to numerous instances of guys in a room shouting at each other until one yells "Fuck you!" and gets a "NO, FUCK YOU!" in response as everyone draws their guns for a standoff. REVENGE OF THE GREEN DRAGONS is a straight-to-DVD-level misfire completely at odds with the exemplary work Lau has done in his Asian films, and it's hard to believe Scorsese would even attach his name to it. (R, 95 mins)