THE SISTERS BROTHERS (US/France/Germany/Spain/Romania/Belgium - 2018)
The $40 million revisionist western THE SISTERS BROTHERS was an expensive flop when it opened in theaters in the fall of 2018 and grossed just $3 million. An unmarketable art-house offering that had no business being sold as commercial multplex fare, it's the English-language debut of acclaimed French filmmaker Jacques Audiard (THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED, A PROPHET, RUST AND BONE) and is based on a 2011 novel by Patrick deWitt. It was a long-gestating pet project for star John C. Reilly, who acquired the movie rights immediately after the book was published. It took Reilly six years and funding from six countries to finally get the film made, and with picturesque exteriors shot in Romania and the old spaghetti western stomping grounds of Almeria, Spain, cinematography by the great Benoit Debie, a score by Alexandre Desplat, and costume design by the legendary Milena Canonero, the money and the prestige are certainly up there on the screen. But the story is so sluggish and its intent so indecisive that the film never quite catches fire despite some excellent work by Reilly and his co-stars. Opening in 1851 Oregon during the Gold Rush, the story has sibling gunslingers Eli (Reilly) and Charlie Sisters (Joaquin Phoenix) assigned by their powerful robber baron boss The Commodore (Rutger Hauer, wasted in a silent cameo and seen only briefly through a window) to track down Kermit Herman Warm (Riz Ahmed), a chemist he claims has stolen something valuable from him. The Commodore already has another regulator, John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal), on Warm's trail, but the Sisters brothers are perpetually several days behind, due in large part to Charlie's heavy drinking. Eli is skeptical of the work they do for The Commodore, not really buying that so many people steal from someone so feared. Indeed, Warm has stolen nothing from The Commodore: he's invented a formula for a chemical that illuminates gold deposits when poured into a body of water, and he's got an investor in California ready to buy it from him, while The Commodore simply wants to steal it--and eliminate Warm altogether--for his own plentiful financial gain. The Sisters brothers eventually catch up with Morris and Warm, forming an uneasy alliance brought about largely by their collective loathing of The Commodore, but in particular, it's Eli who wants something different, even suggesting to Charlie that they ditch their outlaw life and "maybe open a store" (Charlie: "A store? What fucking store?!"). The good-hearted Eli longs to better himself, and Reilly really captures that sentiment in a wonderful little moment when he sees that the more sophisticated and erudite Morris also uses a toothbrush, a new and rare commodity in these environs that Eli just acquired but hasn't quite mastered.
THE SISTERS BROTHERS looks great and it's obvious that Reilly put his heart and soul into it, but maybe Audiard just wasn't the right guy for the job. He's made some terrific films, but this one can't really commit to being anything. It's too slow and dour to be a comedy, but it's also too offbeat and quirky with their bickering and brawling to be a serious western, trying to have it both ways and succeeding at neither. Both stars have worked multiple times with Paul Thomas Anderson (Reilly in HARD EIGHT, BOOGIE NIGHTS, and MAGNOLIA, and Phoenix in THE MASTER and INHERENT VICE), and I kept thinking that Anderson might've been more suited to what this seems to be going after as an introspective character piece about brotherly bonds and family trauma that stems from their abusive father. In the end, it's a noble, well-intentioned misfire that never really pulls itself together, and they seriously could've used a cardboard cutout of Rutger Hauer for as little as he's required to do in his scant seconds of screen time. (R, 121 mins)
THE GUILTY (Denmark - 2018)
Thrillers set in one location are always tricky to pull off, largely because the filmmakers often can't wait to get away from that specific location. It's hard to not recall the acclaimed Tom Hardy-in-a-car film LOCKE while watching the Danish thriller THE GUILTY. It's also reminiscent of the Halle Berry 911 thriller THE CALL, but with the patience and the discipline to stay in one place and, more importantly, with one person. Jakob Cedergren is on camera from the beginning to the end as Asger Holm, who's working as an emergency services dispatcher. Debuting director and co-writer Gustav Moller very deliberately fills in the pieces of Asger's back story as the film proceeds, but what we know up front is that he's a Copenhagen cop and he's been temporarily busted down to emergency dispatch for undisclosed disciplinary reasons. He's nearing the end of his shift, and he displays a visible impatience bordering on contempt--for the callers, his colleagues, and generally everything. He scoffs at a guy needing an ambulance because he's tripping on speed, and almost openly mocks a caller who was mugged by a hooker in the red light district. But then a call comes from a woman that caller ID lists as Iben Ostergard (voice of Jessica Dinnage). She's talking to Asger but pretending to talk to her daughter. Asger quickly deduces that she's been abducted and she's in a moving vehicle. He notifies the nearest precinct of her approximate location, then calls her home number to talk to her young daughter Mathilde (voice of Katinka Evers-Jahnsen). She's home alone with her infant brother and tells Asger that her parents had a fight and that Mommy (Iben) left with Daddy. Checking the records of Iben's estranged husband Michael, Asger discovers he's a convicted felon with a history of assault. Despite everyone--from his supervisor to the dispatchers at various precincts--telling him that he's done his job and they'll take it from here, the detective in Asger can't let it go. He calls his partner Rashid (voice of Omar Shargawi) and has him go to Michael's address to look for clues. Cops think they found the vehicle Iben is in, but it's a false alarm. The another team of cops arrive at Iben's house and are met with a shocking discovery. And all of this plays out with Asger listening in on a headset and staying on the line.
About 30 minutes in, Asger moves from his work station into a private office, which allows other developments to come to light. Why is he taking such an intense interest in this? Is he just that dedicated to his job? Will it get him out of the doghouse with his bosses? Is it a distraction from an oft-mentioned court appearance scheduled for the next morning? Why is a reporter calling him on his phone? Moller does an exemplary job with what essentially unfolds in real time, though specific time is never referenced nor a clock ever shown. It just feels like real time without the gimmick of drawing attention to itself. THE GUILTY is the kind of film that you find yourself watching with palpable tension and baited breath to the point where even the sound of vibrating phone is enough to put you on edge. It's like an 85-minute anxiety attack, especially when everything Asger does to help the situation in his take-charge fashion inevitably ends up making it worse. This wouldn't be nearly as effective as it is if not for the sure-handed vision of Moller and the riveting performance of Cedergren, who's logged a lot of time on Scandinavian TV (he co-starred in the original Danish version of the series THE KILLING) and is probably best known to foreign film enthusiasts for the 2008 black comedy TERRIBLY HAPPY. THE GUILTY got a good amount of acclaim during its limited US theatrical run, but nobody saw it. It's waiting to be discovered on Blu-ray and eventually streaming, and it wouldn't be at all surprising if it got a neutered Hollywood remake--which would likely have Asger ditching the dispatch center 15 minutes in and going on a city-wide rampage himself to find Iben--but this under-the-radar gem is a tightly-wound, expertly-constructed, and extremely well-played exercise in stomach-knotting tension. (R, 88 mins)
KONG: SKULL ISLAND (US/China - 2017) Directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts. Written by Dan Gilroy, Max Borenstein and Derek Connolly. Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, John Goodman, Brie Larson, John C. Reilly, Terry Notary, Toby Kebbell, Jing Tian, John Ortiz, Shea Whigham, Richard Jenkins, Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell, Thomas Mann, Eugene Cordero, Mark Evan Jackson, Will Brittain, Miyavi, Robert Taylor. (PG-13, 118 mins) Not a follow-up to Peter Jackson's 2005 version of KING KONG, but instead the second installment of Warner/Legendary's "MonsterVerse" franchise after 2014's GODZILLA, KONG: SKULL ISLAND delivers the monster mega-throwdown that audiences want, but is lacking almost everywhere else. It follows the JURASSIC WORLD template right down to hiring one of that film's writers (Derek Connolly) and handing directing chores to a relative newcomer with zero genre experience in Jordan Vogt-Roberts. Vogt-Roberts gives you what you want with huge CGI monster mayhem, but gets tripped up in the rest, which amounts to little more than a tribute to APOCALYPSE NOW. Set in 1973 at the end of the Vietnam War for no discernible reason other than kitschy production design and a classic rock soundtrack, KONG opens with Bill Randa (John Goodman), the head of a secret government outfit known as Monarch, requesting that he and seismologist Houston Brooks (Corey Hawkins) get a military escort to the uncharted "Skull Island" in the South Pacific for mapping purposes. Assigned to accompany Randa and Brooks is a helicopter squadron led by hardass warrior Col. Preston Packard (Samuel L. Jackson), with Randa bringing along high-priced mercenary tracker James Conrad (Tom Hiddleston) and anti-war photojournalist Mason Weaver (Brie Larson). Monarch isn't there to map an island, as everyone soon finds out when a giant ape starts swatting choppers out of the sky. Survivors are scattered into three groups--one with Conrad, Weaver, biologist San (Jing Tian),and some soldiers, another with Packard, Randa and a few other soldiers, and a third consisting of soldier Chapman (Toby Kebbell), who's left on his own.
Conrad's group eventually find their way to a cordoned-off settlement where the natives live with Hank Marlow (John C. Reilly), an affable, madman-bearded WWII pilot who was shot down over Skull Island in 1944 and presumed dead. Marlow informs them that "Kong is king around here," and protects Skull Island from an assortment of giant spiders and octopi but also the "Skullcrawlers," subterranean lizard creatures that live under the earth and are kept in check by his patrolling presence. Randa and Brooks--whose real mission is to prove the existence of these monsters--set off charges on the flight in and brought the Skullcrawlers to the surface. The situation is made worse by an increasingly unhinged Packard, who wants revenge on Kong for the death of his soldiers and is willing to sacrifice the lives of everyone to get it. Eventually, all parties band together to make the three-day trek to a rendezvous point as they haplessly try to evade being devoured by the Skullcrawlers and stop Packard from killing Kong.
Budgeted in the vicinity of $185 million, KONG: SKULL ISLAND has some spectacular Kong vs. creature brawls and at least corrects the mistakes of Gareth Edwards' GODZILLA by actually giving the title creature plenty of screen time (Kong is motion-captured by both Terry Notary and Kebbell, who pulls double duty along with his role as Chapman). But when the humans are taking center stage, things take a turn for the dreadful. Vogt-Roberts' endless APOCALYPSE NOW shout-outs are nice for a while, but get old quickly (there's also a shot with Shea Whigham that recalls a big Willem Dafoe moment in PLATOON), and the overcrowded cast is left with material that's pretty lacking. The script keeps forcing smart actors to play characters who do dumb things, and Reilly seems to be the only one having any fun. Jackson is cast radically against type as "Samuel L. Jackson," and about the 25th time we get a wild-eyed closeup where furious face is juxtaposed with a glaring Kong, you're tempted to shout "We get it...he's more dangerous than Kong!" Goodman has nothing to do once they get to Skull Island, Jing (recently seen in THE GREAT WALL) is given even less and may as well be wearing a T-shirt that says "Chinese co-production obligation," and Hiddleston and especially Larson look bored out of their minds, obviously cashing a fat paycheck in between serious gigs. Vogt-Roberts scores some points for pulling off some surprising kills that don't necessarily follow the order of billing, but the soundtrack is an annoying greatest hits package of predictable classic rock staples. Why is Black Sabbath's "Paranoid" being played on the flight to Skull Island? Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" during a Saigon bar scene? Check. The Chambers Brothers' "Time Has Come Today" played over Vietnam protests? Check. CCR's "Run Through the Jungle" heard as characters run through the jungle? Check, and give us a fucking break. Nit-picking? Perhaps. But it's indicative of a lack of imagination and the fact that this is a business deal with little feel for the classic that inspired it, regardless of occasional cute bits like a briefly-glimpsed file for a guy named "Cooper Schoedsack." There's no denying KONG: SKULL ISLAND delivers on the action, moves briskly, and is never boring, but the wildly uneven tone, the terrible script (with contributions by GODZILLA co-writer Max Borenstein and NIGHTCRAWLER writer/director Dan Gilroy), and the obvious going-through-the-motions demeanor of most of the cast take some of the fun out of it.
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)
It's hard to name the bigger mystery: why we're getting a sequel to the completely forgettable 2006 torture porn slasher SEE NO EVIL in 2014 or why the acclaimed Jen & Sylvia Soska--the "Twisted Twins"--are directing it. The Canadian siblings and Eli Roth protegees earned significant acclaim even from outside the usual horror circles with last year's body modification film AMERICAN MARY. It was a colorful and stylish, but ultimately empty and overrated film that nevertheless has found a major cult following thanks to the Soskas and GINGER SNAPS star Katharine Isabelle. The Soskas probably viewed the Lionsgate/WWE production SEE NO EVIL 2 as a stepping stone into the majors, but other than one inspired death scene and an admittedly clever "Directed by" credit placed over the sisters playing corpses in a morgue, the film is completely and utterly ordinary in every way. It's dimly shot, it's not scary, and neither the protagonists nor the killer are the least bit interesting. Even the idea of subverting audience expectation over the "final girl" isn't exactly new, so what we're left with is yet another rote slasher movie with an unstoppable killing machine working his way through a cast of soon-to-be dead meat.
SEE NO EVIL, directed by former porn auteur Gregory Dark (who previously made a slew of early '90s DTV erotic thrillers under variations of the name "Alexander Gregory Hippolyte" and a couple of action movies as "Gregory Brown"), had hulking murderer Jacob Goodnight (7 ft. tall WWE star Kane, real name Glenn Jacobs), aka "the God's Hand Killer," gouging out the eyes of a bunch of unlikable dickheads in an abandoned hotel as some obscure vengeance against his domineering, insane mother. He was killed at the end, and the Soskas' sequel opens with Goodnight (again played by Kane) being brought to the morgue during the graveyard shift, overseen by wheelchair-bound Holden (Michael Eklund) and his on-duty staff, Seth (Kaj-Erik Eriksen) and birthday girl Amy (convention circuit scream queen Danielle Harris). Holden lets Amy's friends in to party and things go south when the dead Goodnight inexplicably reanimates while serial-killer-obsessed Tamara (Isabelle) and Carter (Lee Majdoub) are screwing on a slab next to him. Soon enough, Kane slaughters the revelers one-by-one as they run through the endless corridors of the morgue, which starts to resemble Freddy Krueger's boiler room and has roughly the same square footage as a typical Costco, not to mention an alarming lack of exit doors. There is one well-executed kill that would get an audience wound up had this actually been released in theaters instead of VOD four days before its Blu-ray/DVD release, and it's more of a straightforward slasher film than its uglier and more SAW-inspired predecessor, but there's nothing here to get excited about. The fanboy/fangirl hype surrounding SEE NO EVIL 2 is more about the Soskas than anything in the film or any demand for the further slice-and-dice misadventures of Jacob Goodnight, and it's again indicative of the too sycophantic environment of horror fandom. Thanks to conventions and social media, horror filmmakers are without question the most accessible and fan-friendly of any genre. And they almost always seem like cool people who would be awesome to hang with and watch movies. That sometimes makes people maybe praise the movies more than they would if the people who worked on it weren't their "friends." The Soskas obviously have talent and the potential to be unique voices in cult horror cinema. They're smart, funny, and extremely charming in the "Twisted Twins" bonus feature. You'll totally want to hang out with them. I know I do. But AMERICAN MARY didn't work its magic on me and SEE NO EVIL 2, written not by the Soskas but by first-timers Nathan Brookes and Bobby Lee Darby, looks and plays like the director(s)-for-hire gig that it is, and if it didn't boast the novelty of the can't-miss selling point of hip, cool twin sisters behind the camera, there's a good chance nobody would give even give a shit about SEE NO EVIL 2. (R, 90 mins) LIFE AFTER BETH (US - 2014)
Are we done with zombies yet? I HEART HUCKABEE'S co-writer Jeff Baena apparently doesn't think so, as he returns from a decade-long absence to make his directorial debut with the bland and mostly unfunny zom-com LIFE AFTER BETH. Grieving emo-kid Zach (Dane DeHaan) can't get over the snakebite death of his girlfriend Beth (Aubrey Plaza) and isn't getting much sympathy from his parents (Paul Reiser, Cheryl Hines) or his asshole older brother (Matthew Gray Gubler). Things get worse when Beth's parents (John C. Reilly, Molly Shannon) seem to be avoiding him, but Zach soon finds out why: Beth has crawled out of her grave and returned home, completely unaware that she's dead. Her parents are overjoyed to have her back, and like Zach, they don't seem to mind that she's irrational, prone to banshee-howling, that she gradually starts physically deteriorating, and eventually develops a taste for human flesh, and perhaps most shockingly, smooth jazz. All the while, a zombie outbreak happens all over town, which leads to one of the film's few funny scenes when Zach's dead grandpa (Garry Marshall) returns home, along with the the zombified previous owners of Zach's parents' house. Most of LIFE AFTER BETH deals with Zach deluding himself into thinking a relationship with Zombie Beth is possible, and it's a one-joke premise that gets stretched entirely too thin before Baena just gives up, opting to go for cheap laughs with easy-listening tunes (Benny Mardones' "Into the Night" and Chuck Mangione's "Feels So Good"), and offering nothing but generic zombie apocalypse mayhem. A good cast is wasted (Anna Kendrick plays a potential new--and alive--girlfriend for Zach, and ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT's Alia Shawkat is still in the credits even though she was cut from the film), 30-year-old Plaza and 27-year-old DeHaan are too old for roles that seem like they were written with much younger actors in mind, and the film's tone veers around so wildly that it's hard to gauge exactly what Baena had in mind when he concocted this thing. Co-produced by Francis Ford Coppola's American Zoetrope for some reason, LIFE AFTER BETH debuted on VOD in July before getting a 30-screen theatrical release in September, grossing just $88,000. (R, 89 mins)
PERSECUTED (US - 2014)
From the annual Fox News hysteria over the "War on Christmas" to this year's earlier surprise hit GOD'S NOT DEAD, you'd think Christianity was under attack despite between 73-76% of Americans surveyed identifying themselves as Christians. The makers of PERSECUTED feed into that notion of victimization with a sort of faithsploitation version of THE FUGITIVE. Former alcoholic and drug addict and born-again family man John Luther (James Remar), the head of the hugely popular ministry Truth, steadfastly refuses to endorse the Faith and Fairness Act, a bill proposed by (presumably liberal, though the film pretends it's not playing politics) Sen. Donald Harrison (Bruce Davison) that would effectively force the inclusion and acceptance of all religions, equal across the board under the law. Harrison says it's "the most crucial piece of legislation since the Bill of Rights," but the influential Luther ("You reach more people than the evening news!" he's told at one point) refuses to get behind anything that would diminish Christianity. With Luther refusing to play ball, Harrison, working in cahoots with a vaguely Bill Clinton-esque president (James R. Higgins), dispatches a ruthless Secret Service assassin (Raoul Trujillo) to drug Luther and frame him for the murder of a scantily-clad young woman. Luther wakes up and goes on the run, giving proof of his innocence to his priest father (Fred Dalton Thompson), who's almost immediately killed by scary Secret Service hit men. Meanwhile, Luther's second-in-charge, Pastor Ryan Morris (conservative stand-up comic Brad Stine), is playing all sides in his quest to generate more revenue and tax breaks for Truth, and in the quest to clear his name, Luther realizes he's just a pawn in the game of politics and sets the record straight with top cable news host Diana Lucas, played in a real stretch by Fox News' Gretchen Carlson.
Unlike most "bus 'em in," preaching-to-the-converted evangelical titles, PERSECUTED is at least professionally-assembled and looks like a real movie (former Francis Ford Coppola associate Gray Frederickson is one of the producers). Other than being reduced to faithsploitation (where else will Remar get to play a big-screen lead these days?), the actors don't really embarrass themselves, but writer/director Daniel Lusko can't seem to figure out who the villains of the piece really are. As a result, the film more or less comes off as paranoid about everything, which is probably why your right-wing, talk-radio listening uncle will be recommending it to everyone at Thanksgiving. Even the board of directors for Luther's own ministry (including a frail-looking Dean Stockwell) are revealed to be a bunch of unscrupulous assholes quick to hang the heroic Luther out to dry, and when Harrison's true nefarious intentions are revealed and we learn just how unfathomably evil he is, he doesn't sound any different than any conservative politician you'd find if you turn on any random cable news show. And of course, the idea of a Clinton-like Commander-in-Chief dispatching hit men is just pure Viagra for the far-right conspiracy theorists to get their Vince Foster boner on. While PERSECUTED looks like a real movie, the script is laughable, with hilarious contrivances like a group of people hanging out in some bushes who just happen to film the frame-up of Luther, and the way Luther (who, if you recall, reaches more people than the evening news) can move about undetected--even blending in with the crowd at a major, televised Harrison speech--even though he's all over the news as the country's most wanted--and persecuted!--fugitive. Lusko demonstrates zero ability to lay out exposition in a remotely plausible way, as Luther's dad drops this humdinger while talking to his son about Harrison: "That's your friend...the Senator...the majority leader of the United States Senate." Really? Who talks like that? Wouldn't Luther already know that Harrison is the majority leader? Couldn't Lusko have found a less cumbersome way to pass that info to the audience? Critiques--like secular audiences--be damned, PERSECUTED's hysterical fantasies play to the most frothing Newsmax junkie but it at least gives some past-their-prime actors something to do while waiting for a LAW & ORDER: SVU guest spot. (PG-13, 91 mins)
GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY (US - 2014) Directed by James Gunn. Written by James Gunn and Nicole Perlman. Cast: Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Vin Diesel, Bradley Cooper, Lee Pace, Glenn Close, Benicio Del Toro, Michael Rooker, Djimon Hounsou, Karen Gillan, John C. Reilly, Gregg Henry, Peter Serafinowicz, Christopher Fairbank, Sean Gunn, Tomas Arana, Krystian Godlewski, Laura Haddock, Wyatt Oleff, Alexis Denisof, Ralph Ineson. (PG-13, 121 mins)
In keeping with the recent tradition of Marvel installments being tailored to the stylings of their directors--Shane Black's IRON MAN 3 and Anthony & Joe Russo's CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER--James Gunn fashions GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY as very much his own film in the guise of a Marvel production and the results are fantastic. Starting his career by scripting Troma's TROMEO & JULIET (1996), Gunn moved on to Hollywood and penned the two SCOOBY-DOO movies before making a name for himself by writing Zack Snyder's surprisingly good 2004 remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD. That got Gunn his first feature directing gig, 2006's tragically underappreciated and wonderfully oozy and slimy SLITHER. Never the most prolific of writers or directors, Gunn resurfaced five years later with the dark-humored indie SUPER and again with a segment in last year's awful MOVIE 43. Gunn seems an unlikely choice for Marvel, but really, it's that kind of outside-the-box thinking--turning IRON MAN 3 into a smartass Shane Black movie or CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER into the superhero version of a '70s paranoia thriller--that's made much of their recent run of films so successful. As someone who's not a comic book guy, I take these kinds of films at face value for what they are in and of themselves, not where they fit in the Marvel universe or how faithful they are or whatever. That said, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY is the best Marvel movie I've seen. It's the best movie of the summer. And it may very well be the STAR WARS of its generation, a film that helps shape a childhood with its spectacle and imagination. Yeah...it's that good.
Moviegoers of a certain age--I'm 41--look back fondly on the films of their youth, sometimes inducing sentimentality that's not really warranted. Let's face it, folks: not every '80s movie is a "classic." But to be someone who saw the STAR WARS movies, and RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, and E.T., and a lot of those timeless blockbusters in theaters, on their first runs when they were kids--it shaped you. You don't forget the first time you experience those movies. Seen-it-all-cineastes who have a sort of multiplex misanthropia--I include myself in that category--often sound like bitter old men lamenting how today's special effects-heavy blockbusters just aren't like they used to be. People still talk about those older movies today. Who's going to be talking about the fourth TRANSFORMERS movie or the second AMAZING SPIDER-MAN three decades from now? My point is this: watching GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY took me back to that time in a way that no film in recent memory has. It's a genuinely great crowd-pleaser of the classic sort: it's clever, it's funny, it's filled with action, and it's made with affection. This wasn't a job for Gunn--it was a labor of love. You can feel it in every scene. You can see a committed cast rallying behind their director, believing in his vision. Today's blockbusters have lost touch with that sense of commitment, and people have grown accustomed to the clock-punching soullessness and predictability of most of them and continue to see them out of...obligation? I'm not aware of a single person who was enthused about THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 a few months back, and yet it still grossed $200 million in the US. Enough people flocked to TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION for it to gross nearly $1 billion worldwide so far, but has anyone really enjoyed it? With any luck, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY will remind moviegoers of how things used to be and how they still should be, but you can't help but wonder if today's audiences have become so conditioned to accept mediocrity that they'll fail to appreciate what Gunn has accomplished here.
In a sequence that's an obvious nod to the opening of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, mercenary Ravager Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), who's given himself the name "Star Lord," acquires a mysterious orb for blue-skinned Ravager leader Yondu (Michael Rooker). Said orb is also desired by Kree supervillain Ronan (Lee Pace), working in the employ of the feared Thanos (voiced by an uncredited Josh Brolin). Ronan dispatches Thanos' daughter Gamora (Zoe Saldana) to intercept the orb. Quill and Gamora have an epic scuffle that ends up involving bounty hunter Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper), a cynical, genetically-altered raccoon with anger management issues, and his plant/muscle Groot (voiced and motion-captured by Vin Diesel), a tree whose vocabulary is limited to "I am Groot." All four are rounded up and sentenced to The Kyln, a space prison, where they meet vengeance-obsessed and metaphor-impaired Drax (Dave Bautista), whose family was killed by Ronan. The quintet of outcasts and misfits form a classic unholy alliance as they very slowly learn to trust one another, taking on Ronan's forces and working to keep the orb--which has the power to destroy worlds--out of the hands of both Ronan and the greedy but good-natured Yondu, and returned to the galactic leader Nova Prime (Glenn Close), where it belongs.
Filled with nods to Lucas and Spielberg, and some blink-and-you'll-miss-them cameos (in addition to the requisite Stan Lee appearance, you'll also spot Troma chief Lloyd Kaufman and Gunn pal Nathan Fillion, and stick around through the end credits for the best one), GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY is the summer movie to finally remind everyone what a summer movie should be. Funny without being snarky, using hit '70s singles without being ironic, and demonstrating some sincerely heartfelt affection for its characters, the film sends up the superhero/comic book genre while recalling the spirit of wonder and adventure that captivated moviegoers when STAR WARS became the phenomenon that not even 20th Century Fox was expecting. Laugh-out-loud funny but never slapsticky, GUARDIANS succeeds in working for both children and grown-up audiences (listen to all the adults in the theater laugh when Gamora tells Quill his ship his filthy and he says under his breath, "She has no idea...if I had a blacklight, this place would look like a Jackson Pollock painting"). Even the referential bits--so many films today think that just making the reference is good enough--are thoughtful and legitimately creative and funny: it's one thing to have the requisite "ragtag group of badasses walking in slo-mo" shot set to a classic rock tune (in this case, The Runaways' "Cherry Bomb"), but Gunn's take on it has Gamora yawning and Rocket adjusting his nutsack. The leads are perfectly cast, Pratt is a smartass without being grating, and Cooper's vocal delivery of the hard-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside Rocket is spot-on (Gunn's brother Sean filled in as Rocket during filming to provide sight-lines and a model for the actors to look at; similarly, Krystian Godlewski was the surrogate Groot on-set until the effects were completed and Diesel's motion capture work was CGI'd in). Everyone else, from the supporting actors on down--even Gunn regular Gregg Henry--gets a moment to shine, and the film is so good that you don't even mind that the great Djimon Hounsou is saddled with a stock henchman role when he could've made a terrific Ronan himself.
Hollywood needs to take note. The summer blockbuster has lost its way. The budgets are too big and the results are too bland. Too much blurry CGI and too much shaky-cam. A movie needs to gross $200 million before it's not considered a "flop." And regardless of how popular it is, it's still out of theaters in three weeks. Remember when movies played at first-run theaters for months? GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY and James Gunn are like curious visitors from another time and another place, arriving just in time to save the summer blockbuster from itself. You won't see a more infectiously fun, witty, and smart "big" movie this summer, and it's the best time I've had at the multiplex all year.
