take shelter

Take Shelter by writer / director Jeff Nichols is a cinematic attempt at capturing these uneasy American times by focusing on the mental deterioration (or just psychic apocalyptic visions?) of a blue collar Ohio construction worker named Curtis (played by Michael Shannon).  His wife Samantha (Jessica Chastain) has a small needlework business.  Both are trying to make ends meet and are caring for their young hearing impaired daughter (Tova Stewart).  Curtis becomes increasingly paranoid from violent, unsettling dreams and hallucinations which leads him to curious decisions like taking out a lavish bank loan to build a fallout shelter in the backyard.  Because his mother (Kathy Baker) suffered from schizophrenia, Curtis is worried this may be happening to him as well.  The movie clumsily juggles between being a serious movie about mental illness and an almost-horror movie (CGI flocks of birds) about paranoia of fantastical doom.

While Nichols shows some visual flair, the film is a study in bland America.  The dream sequences are the best assets--including a great shot of a dripping-wet Chastain about to pick up a knife--but all of them become increasingly repetitive.  What ends up being the scariest aspects of the movie are the struggles of everyday life: insurance, gas prices, losing work.  They are reminders of what most of us have to go back to after leaving this picture.  Shannon is certainly believable but I felt a bit detached from his performance, especially in a calculated, overwrought meltdown scene.  Detached would describe Chastain's character who doesn't respond with much urgency to her husband's bizarre behavior.  Both are interesting actors and do the best they can with the stilted material.  In a minuscule part as a therapist, I found Lisa Gay Hamilton to be the most authentic and a breath of fresh air.  The film has some relation to Polanski's vivid Repulsion, Aronofksy's Black Swan and Steven Spielberg's epic Close Encounters of the Third Kind where an every man goes to great, odd lengths to get to the bottom of his obsessive visions.  And while there's much to admire with what Nichols can do on a small budget, for a two hour film about dread, it doesn't offer much thrill.  There is little going on with the soundtrack (the sparse score is derivative) and it arrives at a frustratingly weak conclusion. Disappointingly it ends up being too restrained, an overlong Twilight Zone episode, almost Shyamalan-lite.

weekend

Here are some beautiful stills by Quinnford + Scout from the lovely new film Weekend.

I have a crush on Tom Cullen.

Read my review here.

"have you ever been properly alone?"

Weekend feels like the first gay movie that never hits a false note and that is no small feat.  It's the antithesis of all the bright-eyed (and brightly-lit) romances (there's an obvious dig to Notting Hill) and of gay films where sex and romance are portrayed as fulfilling and sustaining.  Tom Cullen plays the reticent Russell, a lifeguard, whose existence is summed up in one of the film's incredibly precise shots: him standing alone at the edge of the pool, uneasy and bored, a clock ticking above his head.  Russell meets Glen (Chris New) at the local gay bar (amusingly named Propaganda) and takes him home.  Instead of having the usual one night stand, Russell and Glen hit it off and the two share an intimate weekend.  The characters are full of contradictions: Russell likes old things, like his hodgepodge of second hand teacups but he likes his new kicks.  He's closeted to many around him but persuades Glen to ride on his bike with him in the middle of the street.  Glen is outspoken, forceful, quite loquacious about his sexual escapades (he records the tales of his sexual partners as a sort of artistic project... though the reason for that becomes somewhat ambivalent by the film's end) and he's not a fan of gay marriage ("...it feeds into the system").

The intimacy between the two is very involving and sensitively played.  It helps that they aren't generic stereotypes or typical generic beauties.  The inherent differences between the two can also speak, intentional or not, of larger frictions within the gay community at this moment in time.  The long takes, somewhat off-kilter hand-held shots (framing from behind a fence or between train seats or above from a 14th floor window), dull dialogue, banal settings (the obnoxiously noisy bars, Russell's bland concrete apartment complex) illustrate a sort of urban angst.  There isn't the philosophical banter in the golden-hued Before Sunrise and Before Sunset and there are no veiled daggers as in Who's Afraid of  Virginia Woolf? and Sunday Bloody Sunday, (films which seem like influences on, or at least comrades with Weekend).  The climax occurs during a coke-fueled argument which brings about their insecurities and painful realizations. The movie wanders languidly but arrives at an ending that's quietly haunting.  It isn't a cinematic journey I'm eager to repeat though overall I deeply cherish how Haigh's film deals with the uneasiness of being gay in a way I don't think any film I've seen before has been able to communicate.  Hopefully there will be more as good as this to follow.

-Jeffery Berg

moneyball

I like that Moneyball is an unorthodox sports movie about an unorthodox way to assemble a team.  Both have mixed results, but in the end, are a success.  Brad Pitt inhabits washed-up major leaguer Billy Beane who runs the scrappy Oakland A's.  When the team loses to the multi-million Yankees, and a few of its top players, Beane decides to make a risky move--hiring brainy Yale-grad Peter Brand (Jonah Hill).  Beane and Brand build a new roster based not on the usual criteria but upon the statistics of player behavior.

Baseball fans and readers of Michael Lewis's Moneyball may know what happens along the way, but it was a particular thrill for me not to know, so I won't spoil it.  The highs and lows are all masterfully handled by Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zallian's script, a good cast, and director Bennett Miller (Capote).  Miller's Capote was a somber, appropriately cold, almost clinical study of a writer's ethics.  It's hard to believe that the same director made this warm, uplifting movie.  Both films show Miller's elegant craftsmanship, an ability to spotlight good performers, and a knack for the biopic.  Sorkin's dialogue is appropriately less grandstanding than the computer geek banter in The Social Network but still has lots of funny moments (David Justice complaining over paying for soda is one of them). Interestingly enough, the brainiest characters, Brand, is also one of the quietest.  The film is less snappy too, with a simpler structure and almost languid pace.  In one of his most charismatic performances, Brad Pitt displays his character's bouts of frustration, isolationism (he barely tunes into watch or listen to the games), and his charm.  I've gotten tired of Hill's doe-eyed pothead shtick but here Hill is finally given a character that shows he can be an insightful, emotional human being. Aided by a script that knows what to do with them, the two make a memorable team.  The rest of the cast is believable including Philip Seymour Hoffman as the coach, Stephen Bishop as an aging but tough Justice and Chris Pratt--stunned and nervous at being one of the new picks.  Even if the movie runs long and even if I found Beane's daughter's song is a little too cloyingly perfect, the movie is one of the more interesting and compelling sports movies this non sports fan can think of.

-Jeffery Berg

drive

The title and marketing campaign for Drive as a rousing action flick may be misleading.  I hardly remember the car chases (for those looking for that, Bullitt or Fast and the Furious might be a better watch) but the mesmerizing, gloomy throb of director Nicolas Winding Refn's film is unforgettable.  Perhaps because I'm gay I relished all the idiosyncratic details: Ryan Gosling's shiny satin synthetic coat is emblazoned with a scorpion and like Tippi Hedren's mint green suit skirt in The Birds, it becomes more and more encrusted with gore as the film wears on. I related too to that shimmery soundtrack of French electropop. And I felt a sort of joy looking at that Risky Business-inspired hot pink cursive font in the main titles, backed by Kavinsky's pulsing "Nightcall" (appropriate to the storyline: the male voice in the song has a machine-like vocoder in a minor key, the female voice is softly reverbed in the major).

Ryan Gosling plays an unnamed character (dubbed in many reviews as The Driver), a stunt driver for Hollywood action flicks who also moonlights as a getaway driver.  Carey Mulligan plays his neighbor and sudden love interest.  Her husband (Oscar Isaac) is about to get out of jail and reunite with her and their young son (non-annoying child actor Kaden Leos).  Gosling soon gets embroiled into a botched heist and an East Coast mob.

Handsome, stoic, deep-voiced Gosling usually oozes with sympathy and charm even when he's playing empty losers.  This is a perfect role for him and his laconic sensuality. His glum-eyed machoness is both physical (those big biceps and shoulders) and also emotional.  I love the way he is able to display nervousness--the way he sweetly breaks when he accepts a glass of water from Mulligan and the way he sweats and shakes with both fear and menacing determination wielding a hammer above a victim's head.  Besides Gosling, Refn provides a sort of memorable ragtag cast. Albert Brooks, a much missed presence in film, is an unlikely slimeball who flourishes with persuasion and sharp objects.  Ron Perlman's Jewish mobster is a blatant caricature made somewhat sad (he notes at one point that his family still treats him like a child).  The scenes with Mad Men's busty Christina Hendricks are so tensely directed, I wasn't too distracted by the fact that she's a de-glammed Joan (though her casting seems to be a little bit of a part of the film's kitsch).  Only Mulligan seems a little out of sorts--too sweet and pretty for her Denny's uniform (she still hasn't been cast right since her glowing performance in An Education) but she's able to believably carry the emotions of her character.

Refn's work is often stunningly tense (and gory... violence seems so sanitized by CGI in American films these days that the comic gore here is often shocking).  The gore and suspense saves it from being slick retro cheese.  Refn's Drive has a myriad of influences from the wandering, impotent male action pictures of the 70s to the dirges of John Carpenter and Michael Mann to Steven Soderbergh (Soderbergh's music collaborator Cliff Martinez provides the eerie score). And often Refn defies expectations (a final showdown is not as climatic as one would think... an operatic murder of a more minor character on a beach under the sweep of a lighthouse is more arresting).  The script by Iranian scribe Hossein Amini (who penned the 1997 adaptation of The Wings of the Dove) is pretty spare, never Tarantino chatty.  Before those divine main titles, the film opens in a stunner of a nighttime getaway sequence that doesn't have much dialogue at all except for background chatter (the clashing voices of a police scanner and a radio broadcast of a Dodgers game).  The dialogue may be a bit bland for those who favor mouthier vigilante pictures like Taxi Driver.  Yet Refn's play with gloss, substance, silence and sound is some of what makes Drive so controlled and so seductive.


-Jeffery Berg

catching up with some films of 2011

Trust - Consider me surprised that David Schwimmer has directed such a deft drama.  The plot is a bit Lifetime-melodrama: 14-young girl Annie (well-acted by Liana Liberato) becomes victim of a sexual predator from the net.  Family breaks down and father (Clive Owen) becomes more and more manically obsessed with revenge while mother (the always naturally good Catherine Keener) tries her best to connect with her distraught daughter.  The best aspects of the film--including Liberato's portrayal, the ambivalent nature of Annie's hookup, the bland, matter-of-fact presentation of her predator--are deeply unnerving.  Too often though, the script is a bit clunky; Owen's psychological breakdown and his job as a developer of provocative tween ads are a bit contrived.  Schwimmer seems to pay homage to one of cinema's best family dramas--Robert Redford's Ordinary People.  Both are set in wealthy Chicago suburbs, have sympathetic counselors at the helm (here, Viola Davis in another thinly-sketched part that doesn't demand enough of her skills as an actor), show the effects of tragedy on a family in low-key style, and end with fathers crying and coming to terms in cold backyards.  Trust is not nearly as complex of a jolt as Redford's film but it's still an unsettling, often compelling cautionary tale.

We Were Here - David Weissman & Bill Weber's (The Cockettes) quietly elegiac documentary traces the devastation of AIDS in the San Franciscan gay community in the 1980s and 90s.  The film's sensitive interviews of five people who survived a terrible era are powerful.  By focusing on such a small group of individuals and the details and accounts of their lives (a poster with pictures warning of a new "gay cancer," wrenching drug trials, a flower man's witnessing of death and trauma of those around him) makes the film an arresting and important testament.

Hanna - Joe Wright's (Pride & Prejudice, Atonement) Hanna is a bit of thin-skinned schlock but it's also an entertaining tale of Finnish-bred assassin (Saoirse Ronan) on the run from wicked witch agent (Cate Blanchett).  Reminiscent of Firestarter (another film with another wickedly powerful blonde girl on the lam), the movie owes much of its atmosphere and fun to its offbeat European settings, the pulsating Giorgio Moroder-inspired Chemical Brothers score and a campy Blanchett.

gus van sant

Check out my write up on Gus Van Sant on PopMatters.

the babysitter's dead threads

Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead was on Cinemax this morning and I was tempted to call out sick and watch. It's been a while since I've seen it last (I watched it a lot in '91 / '92)... and it's just so fun.  Remember the entertainment center that one of the kiddies buys with stolen "petty cash"? It looks laughably archaic today, a nice reminder that the technological things we covet quickly become obsolete. Some may say that about the incredible clothes so vividly on display in the film. Especially eye-opening is Sue Ellen's (Christina Applegate) fashion show in her backyard. I hope the remake never comes to light because this film is so pure with its early 90s aura.

Sue Ellen's fashion show in all its glory...






Check out Emily C's fun review here.

And 'The Suprising Seriousness' of the movie on Jezebel.

Sue Ellen inspiration.

Important life lessons from the film!

Costume Designer Carol Ramsey's site.

teen night

About as deep as twee-pop, The Myth of the American Sleepover follows an array of suburban Michigan teens navigating crushes, parties, and first kisses.  Even if the film lacked an emotional payoff and reminded me too often of American Eagle ads, in his debut, David Robert Mitchell impressively blends multiple story lines together and confidently establishes a quietly dreamy, late-summer mood.  The spare dialogue and earnest, awkward performances (especially an expressive Claire Sloma as a short-haired, pierced lipped girl with a lifeguard longing) work well.  If the experience of Sofia Coppola's Somewhere and Marie Antoinette was about the claustrophobia of the privileged, Mitchell's Myth is a much deeper meditation on the claustrophobia of teenagerdom and the difficulty to communicate desire.  Mitchell aptly makes small, uncomplicated moments seem grand (Sloma's decision over kissing her lifeguard on a water slide is one of the most poignant scenes). The film's most interesting character, and perhaps the easiest one for adult audiences to relate to, is an older brother of one of the teens who suddenly becomes obsessed with linking up with younger twins from his high school theater glory days.  The idea that "he can't have both" is a nicely drawn conceit.

There is something wistful about the movie and the way it left me, especially since it doesn't really seem to pertain to today's Facebook, text and chat obsessed culture (diaries, letters, and writing phone numbers on hands, arms, and scraps of paper are all largely symbolic motifs).  I was often perturbed by the restless, long haired girls in the row in front of me, intermittently in the glow of their cell phones but they added to the viewing by contrasting what this film pines for.

Interview with the film's director David Robert Mitchell in Black Book

trilogy of terrors: 3 films by dan curtis

Karen Black strikes the right tone in 1975's TV movie Trilogy of Terror, directed by campy, goth horror trailblazer Dan Curtis (Dark Shadows).  "Amelia" is the best known of the three, based upon a Richard Matheson story "Prey" (originally published in Playboy), the title character buys a Zuni fetish doll with hopes of impressing her anthropologist boyfriend.  Soon enough she is viciously attacked by the unrelenting doll in her  apartment in a gleefully wicked sequence.  The ending is fun as well.  

It's easy to see how "Amelia" was seared in childhood memories of anyone watching in '75.  The other stories are much more mild, hokey affairs with predictable twists but worth a watch for Karen Black's impressive range: she plays a geeky, tightly-wound teacher in "Julie" and dueling twins in "Millicent and Therese."  With her strange, compelling eyes, and ability to change the register in her voice on a whim, only Black seems suited for all these parts.  She has said that the film's subsequent notoriety and cult status typecast-ed her for horror: "I think this little movie took my life and put it on a path that it didn't even belong in."

The directorial work of Curtis is much more hackneyed in his 1996 sequel.  Lysette Anthony, not as beguiling as Karen Black, takes on three of the main roles.  In "The Graveyard Rats," she plays a cold wife, who, along with her lover (Geraint Wyn Davies), plots her husband's death.  It's a slow build-up (with a references to noir like Kiss of Death) and it takes too long for the giant, animatronic rats to make their entrance. 

For those looking for a good laugh, the last entry, a sub-par sequel to "Amelia," "He Who Kills" features the Zuni doll on-the-loose in a museum after-hours, assaulting a scientist (Anthony). 

Curtis' '96 version of "Bobby" (also based upon a Matheson story) features a way too over-the-top Anthony mourning her dead son and bringing him back from the sea.  The theatrics, ridiculous mansion setting, makes it feel soap opera glossy instead of scary.

A far better version of "Bobby" figures in Curtis' 1977 anthology Dead of Night (not to be confused with the brilliant 1945 film with the same title).  Joan Hackett stars as the grieving mother, who uses black candles and a spell to bring her son (Lee Montgomery) back. Her '70s split level is creepy enough, with its potted plants, orange shag carpets, and pea-green tinted lighting.  With such an eerie atmosphere and complex menace (stalking about in his blue pajamas and bedroom slippers), it might be my favorite Curtis film of the pack and it's pretty stunning, especially in comparison to his '96 rehash.  

The other two films in Dead of Night aren't as frightening. There's a predictable, pre-Back to the Future, pre-Midnight in Paris ditty about a 1920s car that transports Ed Begley, Jr. back in time and a plodding vampire tale, so over-the-top with its goth, I quickly lost interest. Overall it's worth a look... but mostly for "Bobby."

Other reviews of these films by Dan Curtis:

The Bloody Pit of Horror

Kindertrauma

The Terror Trap

The Video Graveyard

and a cute little write-up on Karen Black's style in Trilogy of Terror on White Lightning