The kind of glossy thriller that would've starred Michael Douglas and been the #1 movie at the box office for at least two weeks 20 years ago, SPINNING MAN instead went straight to VOD with the best cast that 2002 had to offer. It's pretty good most of the way, with college philosophy/linguistics prof Evan Birch (Guy Pearce) being mercilessly hounded by persistent detective Malloy (Pierce Brosnan), when a young college student named Joyce (Odeya Rush) goes missing. Joyce was last seen working at a kayak rental stand at the lake and a witness saw her talking to an older man in a car that looks just like Birch's. Malloy's investigation reopens old wounds for Birch's wife Ellen (Minnie Driver) who has some understandable trust issues with her husband after a scandalous affair with a student forced him out of another university five years ago. Malloy has done all the research on his suspect's lecherous past, and Birch still can't save himself from his inner entitled horndog, whether he's smugly accepting an apology from a student fling from last semester (Alexandra Shipp) when she blames herself for letting things get out of hand, or drifting off in the checkout line of a hardware store when he starts fantasizing about the college-aged cashier. Then Birch finds himself in a hole that keeps getting deeper: he can't keep his story straight, he can't explain why he was 40 minutes late picking up his daughter (Eliza Pryor) from a school event the day Joyce vanished; lip gloss that isn't Ellen's is found in his car, and Malloy has forensics impound his car and finds several strands of hair on the backseat that are a DNA match with Joyce.
So far, so good, with director Simon Kaijser and COCO screenwriter Matthew Aldrich (working from a 2003 novel by George Harrar) going with the bold decision to make Pearce's Birch kind of a prick, especially with the smirking self-satisfaction on his face when he sits there and lets a naive student blame herself for their affair (you'll want to punch him when he pauses and says "Well...I accept your apology"). At first, Driver's Ellen seems like a harping stereotype, but the more time you spend with Birch, the more you sympathize with her because he's a serial adulterer who can't stop lying and she's just trying to hold it together for her family (they also have a five-year-old son, played by Noah Salsbury Lipson). Best of all is Brosnan, who really sinks his teeth into a de facto Columbo character as Malloy, who turns up at the most inopportune times and clearly relishes being a pain in Birch's ass. Brosnan conducts a master class in passive-aggression the way his aging, seen-it-all cop cuts his prey down to size and asks "Excuse my ignorance...but what does a philosopher do?" and the way he offers his cutting critique of Birch's most recent book ("Thick!"). Clark Gregg even scores a few points in small role as Birch's cynical attorney buddy ("Cops don't ask questions, they plant landmines!"), and Jamie Kennedy has a small role as one of Birch's colleagues, for some reason. But just as it's reaching the final act, SPINNING MAN spins out of control and can't recover. It might've worked on the page (many Goodreads posts about Harrar's novel seem to indicate that it didn't) but it definitely doesn't on the screen. It wants to be abstract and philosophical but instead ends up coming off as a lazy deus ex machina that plays more like an ill-advised acknowledgment of Christopher Nolan's 2001 breakthrough MEMENTO, simply because Guy Pearce heads the cast. It's a shame, because it's an intriguing film that's a must-see for Brosnan fans until its weak and unsatisfying cop-out of an ending. (R, 101 mins)
TERMINAL (US/UK/Ireland - 2018)
Until it goes bonkers in its closing 15 minutes, TERMINAL could've saved a lot of time by just having debuting writer/director Vaughn Stein post pics of his Blu-ray collection on Instagram. A veteran assistant director on films like SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN and WORLD WAR Z, Stein displays some undeniable style with TERMINAL's neon, rain-soaked cityscapes that look like BLADE RUNNER crossed with an MGM musical. But the script is a tired retread of influential 1990s touchstones like Quentin Tarantino, Guy Ritchie, and THE USUAL SUSPECTS. Enigmatic mystery woman Annie (Margot Robbie, who also produced) encounters suicidal, terminally-ill schoolteacher Bill (Simon Pegg) at an empty train station while she works the graveyard shift at its bar, called the End of the Line Cafe. While they discuss ways for him to end his life, she tells a story that goes back three weeks where she crosses paths with two hit men, Vince (Dexter Fletcher) and Alfred (Max Irons), at a bar called The Rabbit Hole, and they're all in the employ of the ominous and unseen "Mr. Franklyn," who lords over the city's crime operation behind a voice scrambler in large control room.
There's a lot of yakking amongst the actors in that '90s Tarantino way, but instead of hip and funny pop culture references, everyone's dropping quotes from Alice in Wonderland. Yes, at a pivotal moment, someone actually declares "We are through the looking glass!" and "We've tumbled down the rabbit hole!" almost as if Stein has no idea that 2010's barely-released MALICE IN WONDERLAND already tried updating Lewis Carroll into a postmodern Guy Ritchie-inspired scenario with equally unsuccessful results. The Ritchie worship extends to the presence of LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS stars Fletcher and Nick Moran in a small role, and there's even a PULP FICTION POV shot from inside the trunk of a car as its opened, looking up at Fletcher and Irons, who still doesn't appear to be any closer to happening despite his busy schedule and being sired by Jeremy. Though TERMINAL looks great, Stein's direction is a lot of Dutch-angled self-indulgence and his shamelessly derivative script goes full USUAL SUSPECTS by setting up "Mr. Franklyn" as a Dipshit Keyser Soze. This was already in the can by the time Robbie got an Oscar nomination for I, TONYA, but who knows what she or anyone else saw in Stein's script, other than a chance for her to recycle some of her grinning, crazy-eyed Harley Quinn schtick? The impressive production design isn't enough to maintain interest while the actors are babbling incessantly, and it's always a good rule with movies of this sort to keep your eyes on any prominently-billed name actor who doesn't appear to have much to do with anything that's happening. Also with Mike Myers, in his first big-screen role since 2009's INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, under some aging makeup as a limping and perpetually "Danny Boy"-whistling janitor who occasionally pops up on the story's periphery and likethat...he's gone! Is Stein really making it that obvious? (Unrated, 96 mins)
Philip Roth has been a lion of American literature since the 1950s, though that success hasn't always translated to the screen, with a common description of Roth's writing being "unfilmable." 1969's GOODBYE, COLUMBUS, adapted from Roth's 1959 National Book Award winner, was a critical and commercial hit that put Richard Benjamin and Ali MacGraw on the map. But when Benjamin was tapped to star in another Roth adaptation with 1972's PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT, lightning didn't strike twice and the results were so disastrous that it would be over 30 years before anyone attempted another big-screen take on Roth. Robert Benton's THE HUMAN STAIN opened to middling reviews in 2003, and Barry Levinson's THE HUMBLING (based on one of Roth's most critically panned works) only made it to a handful of theaters in 2015. Other than GOODBYE, COLUMBUS, the only Roth adaptations to receive any notable degree of acclaim were 2008's ELEGY, based on his 2001 novel The Dying Animal, and 2016's INDIGNATION. 2016 also saw the release of the long-planned AMERICAN PASTORAL, based on Roth's 1997 Pulitzer Prize winner about a well-to-do family falling into turmoil in the late 1960s. In various stages of development since 2003, filming actually began on a version in 2012 with Fisher Stevens at the helm and husband and wife Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly starring, but the project fell apart and was scrapped almost immediately. It got rolling again in 2015 with some help from Chinese co-producers TIK Films, with Connelly still attached and now heading the cast with Ewan McGregor in place of Bettany, but when director Philip Noyce quit during pre-production, McGregor himself stepped in to make his directorial debut. AMERICAN PASTORAL was touted as a major 2016 awards contender but that never panned out, as the initial reviews were so overwhelmingly negative that Lionsgate bailed on the film, pulling the plug on its nationwide rollout and stalling its release at just 70 screens for a gross of $550,000.
Considering its internationally revered source novel, AMERICAN PASTORAL the film is a complete disaster, the kind of transparently phony awards bait that wears its bloated sense of self-importance on its sleeve. You can actually see the film completely collapse around the 23-minute mark, when we get our first look at stuttering 16-year-old Merry Levov (Dakota Fanning) as she's cooking burgers in the kitchen. She's having a pleasant conversation with her father Seymour "Swede" Levov (McGregor) when the sight of LBJ on TV provokes a profane, hysterical meltdown. She excoriates Swede and her mother Dawn (Connelly) over their upper-middle class complacence, with Swede running his dad's (Peter Riegert in cartoonish Oy, vey! mode) Newark glove factory and Dawn having her own cow pasture on their expansive property in rural Old Rimrock. When Dawn tells Merry "You're not anti-war...you're anti-everything!," Merry concludes this bug-eyed, out-of-nowhere tirade by shouting "And you're pro-cow!," spitting her burger on the floor and storming out of the house, prompting Swede to go into her bedroom to find the walls plastered with anti-war, Weather Underground-like pamphlets and flyers calling for revolution as Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth" cues up on the soundtrack, modern cinema's universal sign that the times they-are-a-changin' and it's...the Sixties, man! AMERICAN PASTORAL never recovers from this jaw-droppingly awful scene, as the Levovs' cushy existence is upended when Merry becomes a fugitive after blowing up the Old Rimrock post office and killing the local mailman. This leads to endless malaise and ennui in the lives of the Jewish Swede, a high-school football legend, and the Catholic Dawn, a shiksa who was Miss New Jersey in the 1947 Miss America pageant.
McGregor and journeyman screenwriter John Romano (who's had a long career in writing for TV on everything from HILL STREET BLUES to the recent HELL ON WHEELS) cut out huge chunks of Roth's novel willy-nilly to focus on how the general sense of the Sixties, man! takes its toll on the Levovs, though they do leave in a 2002-set framing device with recurring Roth character Nathan Zuckerman (David Strathairn) that really doesn't add anything to the story. AMERICAN PASTORAL relies on trite cliches and overwrought hysteria, with McGregor demonstrating no clue how to direct himself or his actors: Fanning's vein-popping overacting through clenched teech and flared nostrils is actually embarrassing to watch, especially since that palpable rage comes out of nowhere and wasn't present in the 12-year-old Merry we see played by a younger actress in earlier scenes. The first time we see Fanning, she's boiling with uncontrollable, shrieking fury and we don't know why. Even Connelly is terrible here, saddled with an unplayable character whose big scene has her showing up at Swede's factory, off her meds and babbling incoherently, dancing around totally nude except for her Miss New Jersey sash. At one point, a cop tells Swede "You've done everything wrong you possibly could've." I think that actor was breaking character and speaking directly to McGregor. AMERICAN PASTORAL is a botched misfire, but hey, congrats to PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT: you're no longer the worst big-screen Philip Roth adaptation. (R, 108 mins)
KING COBRA
(US - 2016)
Though it frequently succumbs to the cliches that come with almost any post-BOOGIE NIGHTS look at the seedy underbelly of the porn world, KING COBRA shifts gears into a grim and bleak thriller that benefits from the twists and turns of the real-life events on which it's based. Based on Andrew E. Stoner and Peter A. Conway's true crime chronicle Cobra Killer: Gay Porn Murder, the film follows wide-eyed innocent Sean Paul Lockhart (Garrett Clayton) as he arrives in the relatively non-descript northeastern Pennsylvania from San Diego, intent on becoming a star for Cobra Video, a web-based gay porn production company owned by Stephen (Christian Slater). Middle-aged Stephen (a character based on Cobra Video head Bryan Kocis) is drawn to young, late-teens "twinks," and he has a particular affinity for Sean, growing extremely jealous when he shows interest in other men. Stephen directs a series of videos with Sean starring under the name "Brent Corrigan," and after a falling out when Sean begins aggressively demanding more money and objecting to Stephen's controlling attitude, the pair part ways in an acrimonious split that jeopardizes both of their careers when Sean reveals he lied about his age and was only 17 when Stephen directed his first videos. Meanwhile, Joe Kerekes (James Franco, one of 29 credited producers) and Harlow Cuadra (Keegan Allen), a pair of sketchy escorts and amateur gay porn entrepreneurs running a low-rent company called Viper Boyz, are trying to break into the big time, living way beyond their means convincing themselves that they're on the level of Cobra Video. $500,000 in debt and increasingly desperate, the unstable and manipulative Joe reaches out to "Brent" to forge a business partnership based on the "Brent Corrigan" name, but Sean isn't legally allowed to use it since Stephen had the name copyrighted as a property of Cobra Video. While Sean tries to broker a peaceful agreement with Stephen, Joe and Harlow decide to deal with it in a manner that befits their thoughtless, volatile nature: they kill Stephen and set his house on fire in a half-assed attempt to cover it up.
All of this occurred from 2004 to 2007, and other than changing the name of Slater's character, it gets all the pertinent details down, albeit a bit glossed over and rushed considering the film only runs 90 minutes. It's a rare instance of a movie that could've been improved if it ran a little longer, with some more time allotted to explore the smaller details. Writer-director Justin Kelly keeps things moving briskly and copies from the best, with much of the film having that same tense vibe as the section of BOOGIE NIGHTS where everyone's hitting bottom (Dirk hustling, Rollergirl in the limo, etc). He gets mostly strong performances from his cast, with a really skeezy Franco doing his best to channel Willem Dafoe in AUTO-FOCUS mode but sometimes going overboard, and Clayton and Allen doing solid work as the naive and, in the case of Allen's Harlow, dumb young twinks being manipulated by the older men projecting their neuroses on to them. Molly Ringwald has a small role as Stephen's wholesome, oblivious sister and if you want to feel really old, Alicia Silverstone plays Sean's mom (yes, Alicia Silverstone is 40 now). But the real standout is Slater who, between Lars von Trier's NYMPHOMANIAC and his Golden Globe-winning work on the acclaimed TV series MR. ROBOT, has very quietly been taking his career seriously again in between his frequent gig as a guest co-host on LIVE WITH KELLY. Slater sells every facet of Stephen's mercurial personality. He puts up a front for his sister and his neighbors, pretending he makes a living as a photographer at kids' birthday parties, but when it comes to Cobra Video, he stops at nothing to get what he wants. He's soft-spoken and sensitive, insanely jealous, a creepy manipulator of barely-legal boys far away from their homes, and a ruthless businessman who never hesitates to remind Sean/"Brent" that he owns him. It's a complex and fearless performance by Slater, who manages to make you feel some degree of sympathy for Stephen--he fears growing old alone and Sean did lie about his age with a very well-crafted and believable fake ID. KING COBRA has to get to the circumstances surrounding Stephen's murder, but it loses something once Slater exits the movie with about 30 minutes to go. He's so good here that you almost wonder if a more interesting film could've been made by just focusing on his Bryan Kocis-inspired character. As it is, KING COBRA is a decent film, and one of the more relatively accessible James Franco indie productions of late (more than, say, INTERIOR. LEATHER BAR., for example), and the story is so intriguing that it may leave you wanting more substantive details into the world of Cobra Video. (Unrated, 92 mins, also streaming on Netflix)
THE CRASH
(US - 2017)
A financial thriller set in the near future that plays like the 1981 flop ROLLOVER if remade by the most annoying Ron Paul supporter in your Facebook newsfeed, THE CRASH is a lecture disguised as a movie. Written and directed by Aram Rappaport, last seen watering down 2013's SYRUP, a pointless adaptation of Max Barry's scathing 1999 novel satirizing corporate marketing and branding, THE CRASH renders itself dated immediately as it assumes Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election, with "Madame President" a fleetingly-seen character (played by Laurie Larson) late in the film. After cyber-terrorists hack the NYSE and threaten to bring down the global economy in 48 hours, Treasury Secretary Sarah Schwab (Mary McCormack) only sees one option: hiring master hacker and market manipulator Guy Clifton (Frank Grillo, also one of 29 credited producers) to thwart the attack. Clifton's currently facing SEC charges of hacking the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to benefit his own companies and previously hacked into the NYSE. He's somehow not in prison but he'll be granted immunity on the latest charges if he and his crack team of computer wizards and financial experts can stop the cyber attack and keep the economy stable. This mostly involves Clifton and his cohorts--sultry market analyst Amelia Rhondart (Dianna Agron), ALS-afflicted hacker George Diebold (John Leguizamo), and genius programmer Ben Collins (Ed Westwick)--spouting endless financial jargon while staring at monitors in the makeshift command center set up in Clifton's mansion. Clifton's got other things on his plate: his wife Shannon (Minnie Driver) isn't convinced this will keep him out of prison, and his 18-year-old daughter Creason (AnnaSophia Robb) is suffering from cancer and isn't responding to chemo. And she just got dumped by her secret boyfriend Ben.
THE CRASH runs just 84 minutes--and even then it's padded with super-slow-moving end credits kicking in around the 78-minute mark--yet it feels roughly three hours long. There's a way to make financial thrillers intriguing and suspenseful--BLACKHAT and the little-seen AUGUST come to mind--but Rappaport still feels the need throw in some disease-of-the-week TV-movie melodrama with Creason, and relies on too much in-your-face shaky cam, perhaps with the intention of making the viewer feel as backed-against-the-wall as Clifton, but it doesn't work. The more the film goes on, the more preachy and obvious it gets, especially with a corrupt, sneering Federal Reserve chairman named Richard Del Banco, who any seasoned moviegoer will correctly deduce is a scheming Dick from the Bank the moment they see he's being played by Christopher McDonald. By the end, with a mole inside Clifton's team planting a virus that creates a domino effect of collapsing world economies (of course, there's still time for Clifton and Ben to have a heart-to-heart and reach an understanding about dumping Creason) as "Madame President" stands around helplessly while her aides scramble and freak out, Clifton has a change of heart and just lets it fail, followed by an end crawl passive-aggressively advocating the abolishing of the Federal Reserve. Considering what I've seen of his work with SYRUP and now THE CRASH, I think the bigger priority is abolishing Aram Rappaport's DGA membership. (Unrated, 84 mins)
Legendary Chilean cult filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky has been best-known for his surrealistic midnight movie classics EL TOPO (1970) and THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (1973), as well as his 1989 masterpiece SANTA SANGRE. Now, however, at the age of 84, he's gotten the most attention of his career for a film he didn't make, an abandoned adaptation of Frank Herbert's classic 1965 sci-fi novel Dune. Jodorowsky and French producer Michel Seydoux began putting their DUNE together over 1974-75, with the director given carte blanche by the producer with a then-enormous $15 million budget. Jodorowsky's ambitions for the project almost went beyond what cinema of the time deemed capable--he wanted the film to resemble an acid trip without actually dropping acid--and he began to assemble a team of what he called "spiritual warriors" with the ability to pull it off. He commissioned artists like H.R. Giger, Jean Giraud (aka "Moebius"), and Chris Foss to design elaborate storyboards compiled in a tome thicker than a phone book, copies of which were eventually shipped to Hollywood studios. Jodorowsky got Pink Floyd and French prog band Magma to compose the music, and DARK STAR's Dan O'Bannon to design the special effects after declaring 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY's Douglas Trumbull too "technical" and not spiritual enough. He secured what would've been a once-in-a-lifetime cast including Salvador Dali as the Emperor, Orson Welles as Baron Harkonnen, David Carradine as Duke Leto, Jodorowsky's son Brontis as Duke's son Paul Atreides, Mick Jagger as Feyd Rautha, plus Udo Kier, Dali muse Amanda Lear, and Gloria Swanson. With the script, crew, and cast already locked down, Jodorowsky and Seydoux sought $5 million in additional financing from a Hollywood studio and the project--and Jodorowsky's dream--promptly collapsed. Studio execs balked at the extent of the filmmaker's vision and the lack of commercial appeal. The studios liked the storyboards but felt Jodorowsky, based on his sales pitch and his past films, was too "out there" and too unwilling to compromise. They wanted a 90-minute sci-fi movie, where Jodorowsky's script, if shot as it was, would've led to a film running at least 12 hours. With Jodorowsky and Seydoux unable to obtain further funding to construct the sets and begin filming, their DUNE was cancelled in pre-production, and the two men parted ways.
Documentary director Frank Pavich ultimately presents JODOROWSKY'S DUNE as a classic "art vs. commerce" scenario, with the gregarious but obsessive Jodorowsky committed to the DUNE he wanted to make and not really interested in how much money it would cost or lose. Only when the subject of money comes up does Jodorowsky demonstrate any bitterness and resentment, grabbing a wad of cash out of his pocket and bemoaning that "it's just paper...it has no soul." Of course, DUNE was eventually made by David Lynch for Dino De Laurenttis in 1984, and though Jodorowsky says he admires Lynch greatly, he was happy that he found the Lynch film "terrible." Jodorowsky's DUNE exists only as an epic storyboard book, and Pavich, via animation, plays out a number of the sequences in a film that never was. What's very intriguing is how much imagery and ideas in these storyboards ended up in other movies: O'Bannon, Giger, and Foss all worked on ALIEN (1979), and the influence in some of the designs, even in the much later ALIEN-related PROMETHEUS (2012) is obvious when you see the work they did for Jodorowsky. DRIVE director Nicolas Winding Refn states "His DUNE never got made, but its fingerprints are all over other movies that came after. If he made DUNE, history is changed. You wouldn't have ALIEN, and without that, you wouldn't have BLADE RUNNER or THE MATRIX," adding that the Hollywood studios were "afraid" of Jodorowsky and how his DUNE would've changed everything. Jodorowsky's storyboards circulated around Hollywood for years and Pavich shows that designs and artwork in them are apparent in numerous future films from that time, from STAR WARS (1977) to FLASH GORDON (1980) to THE TERMINATOR (1984), and the later CONTACT (1997). Pavich lets Jodorowsky speak at length and the film is just as much about his failed, would-be game-changer as it is his dedication to his art itself, which he conveys without ever coming off as pompous or pretentious, often telling great stories like one where he gets a firm commitment Welles by promising to hire his favorite chef to prepare his meals daily (some of the filmmaker's stories sound a little suspect, especially in the way he never seems to know how to contact the people he wants but instead keeps happening to bump into them somewhere in Paris). JODOROWSKY'S DUNE is a fascinating film that contemplates just how much film history might've been altered if Hollywood was willing to take a chance on one man's impossibly audacious and quite possibly lunatic vision. (PG-13, 90 mins)
STAGE FRIGHT (Canada/US - 2014)
This blood-splattered horror musical gets off to a solid start with a very Dario Argento/OPERA-esque prologue and a legitimately inspired opening credits production number before rapidly exhausting every bit of its gimmick. Films like Brian De Palma's classic PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE (1974) and SAW II, III, and IV director Darren Lynn Bousman's more recent REPO: THE GENETIC OPERA (2008) have done the horror musical thing in a stronger fashion in the past, and regardless of how you felt about REPO, at least it was sincere and stuck to its convictions, right down to the casting of Sarah Brightman in a key role. STAGE FRIGHT can't decide if it wants to be a legitimate musical or one that's ironically bad-on-purpose, with a killer who uses a butcher knife as a capo before a shredding guitar solo as he shrieks like a laryngitic Rob Halford-by-way-of-Axl Rose while offing his victims. The novelty wears off quickly, though writer/director Jerome Sable does a nice job with some of the outrageously gory giallo-derived killings. Teenager Camilla (Allie MacDonald) and her twin brother Buddy (Douglas Smith) work in the kitchen at Center Stage, a summer performing arts camp for kids run by the manager (Meat Loaf) of their late mother Kylie Swanson (Minnie Driver), a beloved stage star brutally murdered ten years earlier by a masked killer in the opening sequence. This summer's Center Stage production is the musical The Haunting of the Opera, which, of course, was Kylie's last production. Camilla tries out for the lead role to honor the memory of her mom, and naturally gets the part, and before long, the same masked killer--looking like a refugee from the EYES WIDE SHUT orgy--starts murdering those behind the production one by one. STAGE FRIGHT sometimes resembles an old-school '80s splatterfest and would probably function better as such, but after the opening credits (done in the John Carpenter font), the musical numbers do nothing but slow things down, making this fairly short film seem much longer than it is. Some of the killings are imaginative, and MacDonald is an appealing final girl, but the killer's identity and an accompanying twist are both obvious. A passable time-killer, but if you feel the need to watch a slasher film titled STAGE FRIGHT, where members of a theater troupe are dispatched one-by-one, you're better off checking out Argento protege Michele Soavi's identically-titled 1987 cult classic again instead. (R, 88 mins)
