Seven Psychopaths (***)

I am pretty sure of this: Like the alcoholic and aspiring screenwriter played by Colin Farrell, Martin McDonagh, the writer-director of this comedy, came up with the title first. The fictional screenwriter has only a couple of ideas, like one about a Buddhist psychopath, but he also has the advantage of a helpfully nutty friend (Sam Rockwell) and some real-life events to inspire him. Whereas McDonagh, I think, largely made all this stuff up, which shows he has quite an imagination, but also that much of what passes here strains credulity.

As with In Bruges, McDonagh’s previous effort, or even more so, I felt too aware of the attempts at cleverness, though possibly I laughed more anyway. The Ferrell character dreams of creating a movie about psychopaths that’s nonetheless “life-affirming,” and so does McDonagh, I imagine, even though he’s mostly trying to be funny. The story largely revolves around a dognapping ring. Rockwell’s character is caught up in it, and so is another one played by Christopher Walken. Their dognappers’ victims include one of the psychopaths, played by Woody Harrelson. Harrelson’s character doesn’t hestitate to prey on the weak, or to pretend to kill someone just for a gag, but his quest is the return of his beloved dog, Bonnie, for whom his heart melts. So there’s the life-affirming part.

McDonagh does some of the same mixing of creative plotting, oddball characters, and arch dialogue that Quentin Tarantino employs with much less visible patchwork. Nonetheless, it would be difficult to have such colorful actors as Harrelson, Rockwell, and Walken in the same movie and have it be forgettable, or humorless. And, in fact, McDonagh meets his own challenge by coming up with an original conclusion, or a couple of them, actually, that’s dramatically satisfying, though “life-affirming” would be stretching things.

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viewed 10/4/12 7:30 at Rave University City and reviewed 10/5-12/12

Tuba Atlantic [short] (***1/4)

This absurdist, Norwegian mini-fable about a seaside-dwelling eccentric given six days to live is not for every taste, particularly the tastes of those who mind seeing birds harmed. Naturally, the codger decides to spend his last days ridding his vicinity of the seagulls whose constant presence ruins his tranquility. However, the unexpected arrival of a teenage girl, while not deterring the former project, inspires him to complete another one that began long ago.

IMDb link

viewed 2/17/12 9:35 at Ritz Bourse [Oscar-nominated live-action shorts program] and reviewed 2/18/12

Carnage (***1/2)

There will be those who describe this as stripping away the veneer of civility that hides our contempt for others. Some may see it as skewering a certain kind of liberal hypocrisy. Undoubtedly, some will think it’s just two unpleasant couples bickering for 80 minutes. I thought Roman Polanski’s adaptation of  Yasmina Reza’s play God of Carnage was all of those things, but mostly just funny.

Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz play one couple; they’ve arrived at the home of the other, played by Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly, to deal with an altercation between their eleven-year-old sons, who are not present. Actually, they’re about to leave as the story begins, the four of them having hashed out a description of the incident and committed it to print, all legal style. (Waltz’s character is, in fact, a lawyer.) The only thing that struck me as unrealistic, if clever, is how Reza/Polanski get them all to stay together the whole time. (Polanski does nothing to “open up” the story, which nearly all takes place in one fashionable Brooklyn apartment, though it didn’t bother me.)

Quickly enough, talk about the incident becomes talk about parenting, talk about marriage, and talk about whether the cobbler being served is a cake or a pie. The couples ally against the other; the men ally against the women; the wives argue with their husbands. The lawyer’s repeatedly ringing, familiarly annoying cell phone becomes an ongoing punch line. And though I tend to dislike body-function humor, this movie shows that even a gross-out scene can be funny if done right.

Foster’s sanctimonious writer character is simultaneously the least likeable character and the one I felt sorriest for, since she seems most unhappy. Actually, hers was only the one of the four I really felt much toward, other than amusement. I can still see the bulging veins in Foster’s neck when her character gets extremely angry. I suppose it would have been even more impressive watching these actors delivering the torrent of dialogue on the fly, live, but even on film it’s a showcase for all four. The nasty edge to all of these characters might put off some people, but it’s impressive that in the short space they are all well-defined, and they have such delicious dialogue.


IMDb link

viewed at Ritz Bourse 1/18/12 and reviewed 1/18/12

Bad Lieutenant—Port of Call: New Orleans (**3/4)

“It won’t be better, but I’ll settle for different,” sang the Waitresses in their non-hit “Redland.” So might be the justification for Wener Herzog’s odd reimagining of Abel Ferrara’s brutal 1992 cult drama. It’s odd enough that such a movie would be remade at all, let alone by the director of Grizzly Man, Rescue Dawn, and Encounters at the End of the World, true-life sagas of men in extreme settings. At first, this version seems like a somewhat ordinary detective drama, though the opening scene, in which cops played by Nicolas Cage and Val Kilmer debate about whether to rescue a trapped victim of Hurricane Katrina or bet on when rising water will drown him, gives an indication of things to come. (The setting is transplanted from New York.)

Cage plays the cop that gets promoted to lieutenant and heads up the search for whoever massacred a family of African immigrants. But this ordinary plot turns out to be the device by which we observe the lieutenant aiming to score drugs, illicit sex, and a means to recover from gambling debts. And that, in turn, proves a device for what might be Cage’s most over-the-top performance yet, which is saying something. Drama gives way to farce as he wiggles his way in and out of trouble with his bookie, his prostitute girlfriend (Eva Mendes), his alcoholic father, his father’s alcoholic girlfriend, drug dealers, and gangsters. In one scene, the routine search of an amorous couple turns into a wild-eyed Cage trading some blow and a blow job (by the girl, in front of the guy, in a parking lot) for not arresting the couple. And the lieutenant, though bad, is not even the most unsavory character in the movie. There’s enough happening to keep things interesting, and a wacky ending that suggests that life is God’s cosmic joke, but it’s a close call as to whether Herzog’s remake is satirical or just plain dumb.

IMDB link

viewed 11/23/09 at Prince [PFS screening] and reviewed 11/25/09 and 12/1/09

Jennifer’s Body (**3/4)

Screenwriters are the unsung heroes of the film world. Directors usually get the credit for a film’s success. But Diablo Cody is the exception to that rule. Maybe it was the weird name, maybe the stripper background, maybe her slangy teen-speak that helped her parlay a single produced screenplay into an Oscar, an Entertainment Weekly column, a Showtime series (The United States of Tara) and celebrity status befitting a starlet. So this, her follow-up cinematic effort (directed by Girlfight’s Karyn Kusuma) will probably garner this movie a little more attention that a genre flick like this might otherwise get. It fuses the high school drama with a teen horror film, and like Juno features a troubled teen girl at its center.

The troubled one is played by Amanda Seyfried, who gives a versatile performance starting with the opening, in which she's a very angry asylum inmate. We see her two-month journey from halter-topped good girl to orange-jump-suited badass. Semi-mean girl Jennifer, played by Transformers fox Megan Fox, is her BFF who truly transforms after an elaborate accident involving a bar, a band, and flirty banter. An unfortunate, bloody encounter brings out the diablo in Jennifer and, as often happens in this sort of movie, only her BFF can see it. (This requires you to believe that the police and almost everyone else are idiots.) Lots of guys want Jennifer’s body, and, after the accident, she wants theirs, though not quite in the same way.

Diablo’s hand is apparent in some of the dialogue, like the way the two girls refer to attractive guys as “salty,” and a few other elements stick out as original, like the application of the Faust legend to the indie rock band. (Seems it’s devilishly difficult to make it in today’s music scene.) The uneven relationship between the two girls is also a subtext. The scary parts are scary enough, the funny parts are funny enough, but nothing more. Jennifer’s Body would like to be the Heathers of the 2000s, or something along that line, but it’s not even up to the level of World’s Greatest Dad in satirizing high schoolers’ shallowness. Still, you could do worse if light horror is your thing.

IMDB link

Viewed 9/14/09 [screening at Ritz 5] and reviewed between then and 9/24/09

The Signal (***1/4)

This low-budget triptych is a collaboration among three directors and features one story with three distinct tones. The basic plot is that something has disrupted all mass communication forms; televisions only emit a disturbing pattern and noise. More importantly, the signal has distorted people’s perceptions, turning ordinary people into killers. The first section, called “Crazy in Love” is more or less a straight horror film following a cheating wife deciding about whether to leave with her lover. The second part, “The Jealousy Monster,” turns unexpectedly comical as the the signal distorts the reality of the survivors. A very recent widow wavers between mournfulness and concern about whether her party guests will show up. This is probably the only movie I’ve seen where “Who wants cocktails?” is a big laugh line. The third part, “Escape from Terminus,” continues playing out the confusion of the main characters, but with a more dramatic, humanistic tone.

There is some graphic violence utilizing a wide variety of household items, but the some of the grisliest scenes are off camera. AJ Bowen, as the cuckolded husband and apparent villain, gives a varied and nuanced performance that helps to hold this surprisingly original movie together. (The main plot idea is similar to the Stephen King novel Cell, but how it plays out is quite different.)

IMDB link

viewed 2/19/08; reviewed 2/21/08

Lars and the Real Girl (***)

This is a comedy that’s far less extreme than its odd premise might suggest. Ryan Gosling is Lars, an emotionally stunted office worker living in a garage next to the home of his older brother. His kindly sister-in-law (Emily Mortimer) is pleased and surprised to learn that Lars will have a companion for the cold Northern winter, but less so when it turns out that Lars’s new friend is Bianca, a love doll ordered off the Internet. I have to admit, this didn’t seem at first to be a promising plot, but I and, I think, most of the screening audience were won over by the unexpected sincerity with which it’s handled.

Yes, it’s a comedy, and a lot of the humor is exactly what you’d imagine, with the delusional but doting Lars treating Bianca just like, yes, a real girl and going through the stages of a relationship. (Sex, apparently, isn’t part of it; Bianca, though anatomically correct, is rather religious and wants to sleep in the house, not with Lars.) But the most obvious gags can only work for 15 minutes. What makes the movie something more is the sweet tale of a boy afraid of adulthood and the surprising reaction of the townspeople. Gosling, one of the few leading men who is effectively a character actor, crucially makes Lars believable. (Oddly, he has the same name as the other fictional Lars I could think of, Phyllis’s unseen husband Lars Lindstrom on The Mary Tyler Moore Show.) Patricia Clarkson plays a doctor/therapist who treats both Lars and Bianca.

IMDB link

reviewed 10/11/07

Death at a Funeral (***)

Family and friends come to a lovely house in the English countryside to mourn. Things start badly when the wrong body is delivered. The son of the deceased (Matthew MacFayden) worries that his eulogy will pale in comparison to the one his brother, a big-shot writer, could deliver. The niece worries about whether her crusty father will like her new fiancé. A family friend worries more about the rash on his arm. But this Frank Oz-directed farce ends up revolving around a small stranger (Peter Dinklage) and a pill bottle. There are one or two overfamiliar elements, like the cantankerous grandfather, but some orginality about the way they're handled. The plot requires undue carelessness surrounding the handling of both the pill bottle’s mislabeled contents and the mystery man. However, the characters are essentially believable, and one or two are colorful. There’s the odd bit of (literal) toilet humor but no fart jokes. Getting funnier as it goes along, this is a Funeral that most people should enjoy.

IMDB link

reviewed 8/30/07

Surf's Up (***)

Another animated movie about penguins, but actually something different. The story is told as a faux documentary, ostensibly being filmed set to air on the fictive sports SPEN network, about an underdog (underbird?), voiced by Shia LaBeouf, who heads for a big surfing championship, hoping to follow in the shoes of his idol, the late Big Z. Along the way he meets a hot female penguin (Zooey Deschanel) and her laid-back dad (Jeff Bridges, perhaps channeling his Big Lebowski character). The result is more often clever than funny, but it avoids most of the cloying sentimentality of family fare. However, the format, with its quick cuts and style reminiscent of actual surf movies like Riding Giants, means that younger kids won’t really follow it, and even older kids might miss some of the parody aspects of the story, which actually makes few jokes that have anything to do with penguins, and more to do with the clichés spouted by athletes being interviewed.

(Reviewed 6/15/07)
IMDB link

Severance (***1/2)

Think of The Office (the British version, thank you) reconfigured as a horror film and you get close to the sensibility of this bloody funny movie set in the woods of Eastern Europe. A motley group of coworkers for a weapons manufacturer has gathered for a corporate retreat. There’s the pothead, the tool of a boss, the American girl, and so on.

As one thing after another goes wrong, tensions flare, and that’s before anyone spots the large person stalking them. Well, anyone except the audience, who’s seen the opening teaser with the scared man hanging from the tree, and the pothead, whom the other characters don’t believe. The horror storyline is only a little better than the usual crazy-man-with-a-chainsaw scenario, but it’s deployed for maximum suspense.

The mayhem is extremely, though briefly, gruesome in a couple of places. The humor is welcome and demonstrates some of the personality of the characters. But it never undercuts the scares, which aren’t played for laughs.

In sum, terrifyingly funny.

[reviewed 5/31/07]

IMDB link

The Host (***)

? South Korea’s all-time box-office champion is a monster movie that, like the original Godzilla, has pretensions of social commentary. Extrapolated from an actual incident in 2000 when an American military employee poured a large quantity of formaldehyde down the drain, the story here is that chemicals released into the Han River cause a mutation that unleashes a truck-size amphibious creature thought to carry a deadly virus on the local populace.
+ The computer-rendered beast, looking like a reasonably realistic version of a fish with legs, is pretty good, and its initial rampage when it terrorizes the populace is mostly terrific, but the best thing about the movie overall is the characters. If you go by movies like Anaconda or Primeval, you’d expect that there’ll be, say, a brainy female journalist, a cocky male adventurer, a tourist or three, and assorted sidekicks who will get offed, one-by-one, until the two most attractive characters are left to kill the beast and probably hook up. But nope, here we get an ordinary family of five. The father’s narcoleptic and not too bright, the grandfather’s old, the brother’s a drunk, and even the sister, a competitive archer, compromises her superior skills by being seemingly afraid to pull the trigger. It’s this goofy lot that has to outwit the government trying to quarantine them and locate the youngest one, the daughter who’s been carried off by the beast. Just as writer-director Bong Joon-ho subverted the conventions of the serial-killer mystery (a little like Zodiac did) with his last movie, Memories of Murder, he injects a similar note of melancholia into this most unlikely vehicle for a family drama.
- After the beast’s opening rampage, things get a little too calm as the plot plays out. Also, some of the attempts at humor are on the hokey side. As for the plot, it didn’t bother me that the American government and military are villains (the Korean authorities fare no better, in any case), but if Bong had come up with a mad scientist instead it would have seemed only slightly more cartoonish and one-dimensional.
= *** Most of the action occurs at the beginning and end. So people looking for another King Kong, or even another Godzilla, might be disappointed if they start hoping the beast will start tearing up downtown Seoul. I expect the planned American remake will be more to their liking. I was on the fence about this one, but I’m giving it an upgraded rating for having a surprisingly poignant conclusion that, though containing familiar elements, has one really big surprise.

IMDB link

reviewed 3/16/07