OFFICIAL SECRETS (Canada/UK/China/US/Switzerland - 2019)
The saga of British whistleblower Katherine Gun is, at least stateside, one of the least-remembered chapters of the misguided journey to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In a way, it's oddly fitting that OFFICIAL SECRETS, which stars Keira Knightley as Gun, was barely released in theaters by IFC Films. That's a shame, because it's a well-done political thriller as well as a solid investigative journalism drama from director/co-writer Gavin Hood, who most recently helmed 2016's riveting drone strike nailbiter EYE IN THE SKY. As the film opens in January 2003, Katherine, who was raised in Taiwan by British parents, works as a Mandarin translator for GCHQ, the signals intelligence division of the British government. It's a largely uneventful job until her entire department is sent a mysterious e-mail from the NSA that goes into detail about an intelligence plot between the US and UK governments to essentially bully and blackmail the less powerful members of the UN Security Council into going to war with Iraq under the guise of Saddam Hussein having WMDs. As everyone has signed an agreement that every aspect of their work falls under the 1989 "Official Secrets" Act, none of Katherine's co-workers give the e-mail much thought and refrain from discussing it. But she's troubled enough by its implications that she passes it on to a trusted government employee friend (MyAnna Buring), who in turn passes it to a controversial activist (Hattie Morahan) who then forwards it to Observer staff writer Martin Bright (Matt Smith). The Observer is fully onboard with the coming war, much to the chagrin of their bad-tempered US politics columnist Ed Vulliamy (Rhys Ifans), who berates managing editor Roger Alton (Conleth Hill) with frequent tirades that they should be doing their jobs as reporters instead of regurgitating Prime Minister Tony Blair's press releases. Alton reluctantly lets Bright run with the story, which eventually blows up in Katherine's face, as she never thought anything would come of it, and now the intelligence higher-ups are calling in the interrogators and breaking out the lie detectors because they know the leak had to come from the GCHQ department.
The resulting shitstorm offers Katherine the usual Alan J. Pakula-esque paranoia of bugged phones, surveillance, and being followed everywhere she goes, and it very nearly gets Katherine's Muslim husband Yasar (Adam Bakri) deported to Iraq. She eventually retains the services of civil liberties attorney Ben Emmerson (Ralph Fiennes) when it becomes clear that the British government intends to prosecute her and send her to prison, with the added threat that even discussing any aspects of the case with a lawyer is itself cause for more charges of violating the Official Secrets Act. OFFICIAL SECRETS is a compelling drama that hits the ground running (it's not even 20 minutes in before we get a clandestine meeting in a dimly-lit parking garage), with a credible and restrained performance by Knightley that wisely avoids all the big awards-bait moments to keep her depiction of Katherine Gun as grounded as possible. The back end does suffer from a bit of some fawning Gun hagiography, and it may seem a little fashionably late as far as Iraq War-related movies go, but for the most part, OFFICIAL SECRETS is a fine film that deserved more attention than it got and probably could've been a decent word-of-mouth hit on the arthouse circuit (other familiar faces in the solid ensemble cast include Matthew Goode, Jeremy Northam, Indira Varma, and Kenneth Cranham). The closing scene, and particularly Fiennes' final line, would've been a real crowd-pleaser. (R, 112 mins)
MARY (US/Canada - 2019)
Remember when Gary Oldman won an Oscar for 2017's DARKEST HOUR? By any chance, does Gary Oldman remember? Just a few months ago, he appeared in the unwatchable support-group-for-assassins "comedy" KILLERS ANONYMOUS and he currently stars in the straight-to-VOD actioner THE COURIER (don't worry, I'm sure I'll get to it soon enough), where he's second-billed to Olga Kurylenko, currently third on the action heroine depth chart behind Milla Jovovich and Noomi Rapace. These aren't the kind of projects you tackle when you've just been awarded an actor's highest honor. They're the kind of jobs Nicolas Cage accepts to pay his bills for another month. And in the case with the moronic "possessed yacht" horror movie MARY, it's even worse as Oldman reportedly stepped in to replace--wait for it--Nicolas Cage. Dude, you're less than two years out from an Academy Award and you're taking Nicolas Cage's 2019 turndowns? To damn with faint praise, MARY is slightly better than KILLERS ANONYMOUS, but then, so are most new Nic Cage movies. MARY is a weak hodgepodge of at least a half-dozen underdeveloped ideas that are mostly abandoned amidst the incoherent mayhem that develops. Oldman phones it in as Dave, a Florida fisherman who impulsively buys a ramshackle old yacht called Mary in an attempt to set up his own boat charter business. It's also his way of trying to bring his family back together after his wife Sarah (Emily Mortimer) had a brief fling that put a strain on both their marriage and her relationship with their oldest daughter Lindsey (Stefanie Scott), while younger daughter Mary (Chloe Perrin) remains blissfully unaware of all the tension. I don't know...if Dave thinks buying a shitty old boat is gonna save his marriage, then I can see why Sarah stepped out on him.
They set sail on the Mary for a journey to the waters of Bermuda (uh oh), along with Dave's friend and business partner Mike (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) and Lindsey crush Tommy (Owen Teague), and it isn't long before strange shit starts happening: Mary has a new imaginary friend and is drawing creepy pictures and smashes a glass in Lindsey's face (the only genuinely shocking moment); Tommy carves a symbol into his chest and attacks Dave; a ghostly figure pulls some INSIDIOUS jump scare moves on Sarah; and Mike loses it and tries to throw the family overboard. The entire film is told in flashback by Sarah to Jacksonville detective Clarkson (Jennifer Esposito), who's been brought in by the Coast Guard after Sarah and her daughters appeared to be the only survivors of a shipwreck. Clarkson quickly recommends a padded cell and a psych eval after listening to Sarah's story of a possessed boat and that "Evil needs a body to exist...the body was that boat." Written by Anthony Jaswinski (THE SHALLOWS) and directed by Michael Goi (who's helmed several episodes of AMERICAN HORROR STORY), MARY revels in every hackneyed horror cliche in the book, like Sarah conveniently finding a scrapbook of old-timey news clippings--that look like they were quickly generated on a production assistant's laptop that morning--detailing all the crews that set sail on the Mary going back to 1883 and were never seen again, and that the ghost haunting the ship is that of the drowned daughter of the very first Mary captain. Who left the scrapbook there for her? The ghost? That was awfully helpful of her. And how powerful is this malevolent spirit when Sarah can incapacitate it with a flare gun? The closing credits roll at 77 minutes after a twist ending you'll absolutely see coming, and the only mystery is why Oldman (and Mortimer, for that matter) is wasting his time with junk like this. The guy pretty much swept the Best Actor category throughout the 2018 awards season. I'd like to think he could parlay that into something more substantive than "Gary Oldman's MOON IN SCORPIO." (R, 84 mins)
Directed by Oliver Stone. Written by Kieran Fitzgerald and Oliver Stone. Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Shailene Woodley, Melissa Leo, Zachary Quinto, Tom Wilkinson, Nicolas Cage, Rhys Ifans, Scott Eastwood, Logan Marshall-Green, Timothy Olyphant, Ben Schnetzer, Lakeith Lee Stanfield, Joely Richardson, Ben Chaplin, Nicholas Rowe, Basker Patel, Edward Snowden. (R, 134 mins) It would be nice if Oscar-winning filmmaker and tinfoil-hat fashionista Oliver Stone was back in provocateur mode with SNOWDEN, but the message is lost in the auteur's didactic execution. Told with myopic tunnelvision and with nothing but gushing admiration for its subject, SNOWDEN lumbers along with little in the way of nuance or subtlety, and nothing in the way of questioning the ex-CIA/NSA whistleblower. It's canonizing hagiography of the most one-sided order, with Edward Snowden the sole voice of morality in a world of evil big government surveillance that exists only to piss on the freedoms of Americans and can't possibly have any positive purpose whatsoever. This should be a nailbiting thriller but Stone is so distracted by his Snowden man-crush that it never has a chance to reach the heights of his in-his-prime conspiracy/paranoia triumphs like JFK or NIXON. It's more in line with the hokey, neutered simplicity of something like WORLD TRADE CENTER. Snowden is a complex, complicated figure, but you wouldn't know it by watching SNOWDEN. Stone isn't interesting in getting in Snowden's head, so you're better off checking out Laura Poitras' Oscar-winning 2014 Snowden documentary CITIZENFOUR instead.
That said, Joseph Gordon-Levitt does a terrific job of capturing Snowden's voice and mannerisms with uncanny accuracy. The film opens in 2013 as an on-the-run Snowden is holed up in a Hong Kong hotel preparing to leak secret CIA and NSA files to documentary filmmaker Poitras (Melissa Leo) and Guardian journalists Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) and Ewen MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson). Jumping back and forth from 2004 to 2013, we follow Snowden through a short stint in the Army, where his goal of joining the Special Forces is stalled by brittle bones and a pair of fragile legs that get him a discharge. Told by his doctor that there's other ways to serve his country, the conservative, Ayn Rand-admiring Snowden is admitted into The Hill, the CIA training facility in Virginia where he becomes the top prospect of (fictional) instructor Corbin O'Brian (a vampiric Rhys Ifans). He also falls in love with liberal Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley), who joins him when his new CIA job takes him to places like Switzerland and Japan, where his focus is cybersecurity and designing programs that are ostensibly used to monitor post-9/11 terrorist activities. He leaves the CIA but works for them on a contractual basis later on, and is disturbed to find that much of the US government's surveillance focus is spying on its own citizens and that one of his programs is used for drone strikes in the Middle East. Growing increasingly concerned about the nature of his work and how far the surveillance goes (he's informed at one point that his suspicions about Lindsay having an affair are unfounded, proof that the omnipresent They are watching her and monitoring her computer and phone activity), he decides to blow the whistle, stealing thousands of secret files and fleeing the country before reaching out to activist filmmaker Poitras.
How heavy-handed is SNOWDEN? The surveillance program is called "Prism," and when invoking it, Stone feels the need to frame shots with a prism effect that's also used when epileptic Snowden has seizures. It actually caused snickering in the audience about the 10th or 12th time it's used. How unsubtle is SNOWDEN? Ifans has been directed to play O'Brian in the most ominously sinister fashion possible, making it difficult to tell if he's a top CIA official or the Antichrist. Watch when he's shown speaking with Snowden in a conference room, Snowden physically there, but O'Brian on a giant, theater-sized screen as Ifans' looming, side-eyed visage takes up the entire display, just in case the whole "Big Brother is watching" concept wasn't already clear. The performances are generally solid, though Nicolas Cage is squandered in an intriguing but tiny role as a benched analyst curating antiquated espionage equipment, his sole purpose being to unknowingly supply the Rubik's Cube that Snowden will use years later to stash the SD card with all the files. But it's Ifans' bizarre portrayal that really sticks out, bringing to mind what might happen if PHANTASM's The Tall Man worked for the CIA. There's a nerve-shredding, Alan J. Pakula-type paranoia thriller to made about Snowden's exploits, and less preachy filmmakers could've done wonders with the subject. Remember that incredible Donald Sutherland exposition drop in JFK? That Oliver Stone could've done something with SNOWDEN. So could Michael Mann in INSIDER mode or David Fincher channeling ZODIAC. There's also a nice Mann vibe in some of Anthony Dod Mantle's digital cinematography in locations all over the world that recalls last year's criminally underrated hacker thriller BLACKHAT. Unfortunately, Stone the filmmaker defers to Dr. Stone the lecturing activist with an agenda. The film completely flies off the rails in a catastrophic climax that recalls Professor Steven Seagal's speech at the end of ON DEADLY GROUND, as Gordon-Levitt actually exits the film and Snowden takes over, playing himself being interviewed via internet from Russia, basking in the standing ovation he gets at a TEDTalk event. This drawn-out finale--more like a tacked-on Snowden infomercial--concludes with an inspirational, manipulative score crescendoing as a pensive Snowden finishes the interview, closes his laptop and turns away, in profile, triumphantly staring out the window of his Russian apartment and smiling, looking like he's waiting for Stone to cue up Foo Fighters' "My Hero" for the closing credits.
Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier (2004's BROTHERS) cracked the US market with the 2007 Halle Berry vehicle THINGS WE LOST IN THE FIRE, but is best known for the 2010 Best Foreign Film Oscar-winner IN A BETTER WORLD. SERENA, however, will not go down as one of her career highlights, despite the notoriety of being another Bradley Cooper-Jennifer Lawrence teaming that didn't exactly generate the buzz of SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK and AMERICAN HUSTLE. SERENA was shot in the Czech Republic in the spring and summer of 2012, several months prior to SILVER LININGS' release and before the stars moved on to AMERICAN HUSTLE, which hit theaters in December 2013. Bier displayed what must've seemed like an alarming lack of urgency to her backers, spending a year and a half tinkering with the footage while her stars went on to awards and accolades as SERENA languished in a state of perpetual incompletion. Even on the heels of Lawrence's blockbuster HUNGER GAMES success and Cooper's megahit AMERICAN SNIPER, the $30 million SERENA went straight-to-VOD in the spring of 2015 with just a 59-screen rollout following, for a gross of $176,000. You'd be correct in assuming SERENA is terrible--for all the time she spent assembling various cuts, Bier seems to have no idea what she wanted to accomplish with this film. Character behavior and motivation seem to change from scene to scene, and considering how well they worked together in SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK, Cooper and Lawrence just appear lost throughout. They're certainly capable actors, but neither get a handle on how they're supposed to play their characters, and both looking hopelessly out of their element in a rural period setting.
In the Smoky Mountains in North Carolina in 1929, timber magnate George Pemberton (Cooper) marries the unpredictable Serena (Lawrence) after a whirlwind courtship, or at least Bier's depiction of a whirlwind courtship: they meet, introduce themselves, screw, step off a train as man and wife, and she's immediately running his business, all in about 75 seconds of screen time. George's business is in trouble, he's been cooking the books, and the stock market crash has rendered his holdings worthless. On top of all that, he has an illegitimate son with dirt-poor Rachel (Ana Ularu), secretly supporting the boy behind Serena's back. Their marriage deteriorates after Serena miscarries and begins manipulating the clearly insane Galloway (Rhys Ifans), a glowering employee who gets his hand hacked off and believes Serena has been prophesied to him as he swears to do her bidding, whether it's killing a disgruntled employee (Sean Harris) who provided the irate sheriff (Toby Jones) with evidence of George's corruption, or killing Rachel and her son as George slowly comes to realize that his wife is a sociopathic shrew. Of course, George is no angel either, whether he's callously breaking Rachel's heart or killing his business partner (David Dencik) when his plans don't gel with what Serena wants to do with the company. It's hard to get behind George as a hero when he's not, and we never know enough about him or Serena to get a handle on either of them. There's stretches of the film where Bier seems to be assembling scenes at random, with no consistent time element whatsoever. Screenwriter Christopher Kyle took significant liberies with Ron Rash's 2008 novel, but that doesn't explain the poorly-defined characters and their vague and often nonsensical motivations. Bier just seems actively disengaged from the story and her actors, and instead demonstrates an almost Cimino-like fixation on the look and the atmospheric background details. Indeed, the only real positive of SERENA is the marvelously picturesque production design and period detail, which bring the era to vivid life in the same way that HEAVEN'S GATE did with its late 19th century Wyoming setting for the Johnson County War. If nothing else, SERENA looks like it costs a lot more than $30 million, but that's all it has going for it. It's under-the-radar enough that it'll likely be a minor footnote in the careers of its stars, but I'm still willing to bet that their publicists will be erring on the side of caution and instructing media types and TV talk show hosts to avoid bringing it up for the foreseeable future. (R, 110 mins)
MONSTERS: DARK CONTINENT (UK - 2015)
2010's MONSTERS, a monster movie that seemed to go out of its way to spend as little time as possible dealing with the titular tentacled creatures, nevertheless received much acclaim and vaulted writer/director Gareth Edwards to the big-time, winning him the job of last year's GODZILLA reboot. Edwards' GODZILLA utilized his MONSTERS ethos by sidelining Godzilla to a point where he was virtually a minor supporting character in his own movie. Edwards is onboard as an executive producer for MONSTERS: DARK CONTINENT, which is more of a spinoff than a sequel, taking place ten years after the events of the first film, with clusters of the giant creatures now scattered all over the globe. Director/co-writer Tom Green (not the FREDDY GOT FINGERED Tom Green, though that undoubtedly would've been more interesting) is even less concerned with making a giant monster flick than Edwards was, and both strike me as the kind of guys whose favorite Frankenstein movies are the mid-1940s Universal monster rallies where Glenn Strange's Frankenstein monster doesn't even get off the table until the last two minutes of the movie, when he stands up, stumbles over some electrical equipment, and blows up the lab. The End. If these guys remade JAWS, the opening hour would be devoted to Sheriff Brody dealing with the karate school kids who keep "karate-ing" that old islander's fence down. If they remade THE EXORCIST, they'd spend the first 90 minutes of the film focusing on the trials and tribulations of Chris MacNeil and Burke Dennings ironing out the script details for the movie they're shooting in Georgetown. If they made a ROCKY reboot, it would focus on Adrian working at the pet store, with Rocky occasionally mentioned and maybe dropping in once or twice to say hello. These guys are so actively against giving the audience what they came for that they wouldn't even have Rocky say "Yo, Adrian."
MONSTERS: DARK CONTINENT focuses on a trio of Detroit guys who are part of a military unit deployed to the Middle East, where they're taken under the wing of battle-hardended Sgt. Frater (Johnny Harris, in an intense performance) and captured by insurgents after numerous combat sequences. The monsters are offscreen for long stretches, and when they're seen, they're just sort of doing their thing in the background, now an accepted part of the scenery after a decade of migrating over the world. With a few CGI touch-ups to remove shots of the monsters, this could just as easily be called THE HURT LOCKER II: DARK CONTINENT. Green's insistence on keeping the monsters--you know, the title of the movie--offscreen and out of the action is initially baffling and ultimately infuriating. Edwards' minimalist approach to the monster element with the overrated first film was annoying, but at least he got to them eventually. Green doesn't even give us that, instead letting the whole film build up to a showdown between a crazed, shell-shocked Frater and young soldier Parkes (Sam Keeley), while a couple of skyscraper-high creatures dick around in the background, seemingly as confused as the viewer as to exactly what they're doing here. Green is clearly more interested in making a war drama than a sci-fi/horror film, and while the dramatic elements aren't bad (and Harris is very good), it still begs the question: what is the point of this movie? Is there some allegorical, "I wonder who the real monsters are" statement about the American military presence in the Middle East? Green neither knows nor cares. If he's not interested in making a giant monster movie, then why is he wasting his time and ours? Green made an ostensible sequel to MONSTERS, with the word "monsters" in the title, but what he's got is a Middle East-set combat movie with very sporadic shots of creatures lingering the background, having no effect on the story whatsoever. I'm sure there's apologists out there prepping bullshit MONSTERS: DARK CONTINENT think pieces about "subverting genre expectations" in a hapless attempt to defend this pathetic sham of a movie, but here's the deal: rarely in modern cinema has a film so stubbornly refused to live up to its end of the bargain. (R, 119 mins)
ASMODEXIA (Spain - 2014)
On the surface, the Spanish horror film ASMODEXIA is yet another in a seemingly endless parade of possession potboilers, with aging exorcist Eloy (Lluis Marco) traveling around Spain with his 15-year-old granddaughter and partner-in-exorcism Alba (Claudia Pons). They're drawn to possession victims and perform exorcisms on their way to an unspoken destination in the days leading up to 12-21-12, the Mayan calendar end of the world. There are parallel storylines involving an institutionalized woman (Irene Montala), and that woman's sister (Marta Belmonte), a Barcelona detective who's frantically searching for Eloy and Alba, as well as a hooded figure and a black van that also make sporadic appearances. Screenwriters Marc Carrete (who also directed) and Mike Hostench (who scripted a couple of Brian Yuzna's Spanish horror films a decade ago) take a pretty much in medias res approach to the story and it's a good 45 of the film's 81 minutes before all of the pieces are in place and things start making sense. The demonic possession angle is a bait-and-switch as Carrete and Hostench just start throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks. There's some Fulci, there's some of THE SENTINEL, there's a little of THE KEEP, and there's a great twist late in the film that up-ends everything, but Carrete has some serious pacing issues, the script is entirely too convoluted, and the filmmakers try to take it in more directions than 81 minutes will allow. There's some good ideas in ASMODEXIA but the execution is lacking. The script needed another draft and the film could actually use maybe five or ten more minutes to give it some breathing room to flow and maybe clarify some plot points to eliminate some of the confusion that dominates the sometimes frustrating opening half. As it is, ASMODEXIA is constantly taking one step forward and two steps back. There's something here, but it really could've been a lot better. (Unrated, 81 mins, also streaming on Netflix Instant)
