Tag: 20111013

Review: What’s Your Number?

[stextbox id=”grey” caption=”What’s Your Number? (2011)” float=”true” align=”right” width=”200″]

Director: Mark Mylod

Runtime: 120 minutes

Starring: Anna Faris, Chris Evans, Zachary Quinto, Andy Samberg, Ari Graynor, Martin Freeman

Distributor: Fox

Country: US

Rating: It’s Your Money (?)

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‘Romantic comedy’ has become a bit of a misleading label of late, with the romance being synonymous with foreplay as the focal point of the story. Gone are the days in which a romantic encounter atop the Empire State Building would suffice, or a cross-country trip between two mismatched soul-mates would result in true love, with everything from No Strings Attached to the identical Friends With Benefits attempting to stick a square peg into the mainstream’s all-too-willing hole. Not for nothing either: the success of risqué comedies Knocked Up and Bridesmaids have established the public’s craving for something they can enjoy with their best mates and their favourite squeeze equally.

In What’s Your Number?, based on Karyn Bosnak’s novel 20 Times a Lady, Ally Darling (Anna Faris, Yogi Bear) breaks with the latest in a long line of bad relationships and discovers, in the pages of a women’s glossy magazine, that she has slept with more men than double the national average. Concerned she will exceed twenty lovers without ever finding “the one”, she enlists the help of the promiscuous Colin (Chris Evans, Captain America: The First Avenger), who lives in the apartment across the hall. In exchange for using her apartment to hide out from his endless string of morning after girls, he aids her in tracking down past lovers in the hope that one of them will be what she has been looking for.

Every romantic comedy has a conceit that needs to be overcome. Without these arbitrary rules, there would be no conflict and the two people on the poster would probably get together in the first reel. What’s Your Number? has the particularly obnoxious setup of using the number of sexual partners a woman is “supposed” to have before finding the true man. The aim appears to be to present Ally Darling as a modern woman, fully in control of her destiny, but just blind to the fact that she has always been best when beating her own drum. That’s not the euphemism you think it is. Instead, before Ally comes to her final and inevitable realisation, it is almost as though the film is punishing its lead for having a less than “virtuous” history. Is that really the message behind this film? Too much sex might stop you from bagging a man? Indeed, several gags about worn-out vaginas seem to subtly suggest so.

Anna Faris continues her trend of spotty film role selections, despite the fact that we know she is capable of so much more from Brokeback Mountain, Lost in Translation and her appearances on TV’s Entourage. Here she does nothing to redeem the endless parade of Scary Movie films or rom-coms that someone in her talent agency needs to be shot out of a canon for. Meanwhile, genuine megastar Chris Evans, fresh from Captain America and soon to return to the role in The Avengers, is too good for this slender material. Is he still paying penance to Fox for the Fantastic Four films? That said, his previous experience doesn’t go entirely to waste. Shots in which he wears little more than a hand-towel are sure to please all the right demographics.

It’s not a complete disaster, with a handful of genuinely funny lines throughout. One of the best Twitter jokes to grace the screen comes in Ally’s enquiry to Colin as to the location of her coffee pot. “I broke it. If you were on Twitter you would know that already,” comes the knowing reply. Of course, this is all ruined by Ed Begley Jr’s role as a Twitter obsessed father, who perpetuates the bad rep that Tweeters get. It’s the dick jokes that are the real zingers, including a bit from Anthony Mackie as a closeted ex with political aspirations, but as with many recent rom-coms, it falls short of genuine edge with its reliance on coy winks over outrageous zingers.

[stextbox id=”custom”]What’s Your Number? is a question that should be answered in single digits, although if nudge-nudge-wink-wink references and naked Avengers are a thing, this is your movie.[/stextbox]

October 13, 2011
Review: Take Shelter

[stextbox id=”grey” caption=”Take Shelter (2011)” float=”true” align=”right” width=”200″]

Director: Jeff Nichols

Runtime: 120 minutes

Starring: Michael Shannon, Jessica Chatain

Distributor: Sony

Country: US

Rating: Highly Recommended (?)

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Jeff Nichols arrived on the scene with 2008’s Shotgun Stories, a powerful drama that not only earned him a nomination for the John Cassavetes Award at the Independent Spirit Awards, but highlighted the incredibly talents of its star Michael Shannon. With Shannon going from strength to strength with appearances in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, including a pilot directed by Martin Scorsese, and being due to appear as General Zod in the Superman reboot Man of Steel, the duo have reunited for another gripping character piece that is already causing a buzz around the world.

After a series of nightmarish apocalyptic visions, husband and father Curtis (Shannon) begins to focus on the building of a storm shelter in the backyard of his small time Ohio home. What at first seems like simple therapy soon becomes obsessive, causing his wife Samantha (Jessica Chastain, The Help) to doubt his sanity.

From Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly through to Black Swan, cinema has used a variety of ways of visually expressing the state of the schizophrenic mind. Although Take Shelter begins with the kind of prophetic warnings seen in big-budget disaster films such as The Happening or Hereafter, what follows is just as much a mystery as it is a document of an unravelling mind. The confounding behaviour that Curtis exhibits, in an amazing performance by Michael Shannon, is all the more powerful because it seems real. Yet the power of the film is that his sleeping and waking dreams are also presented in a way that seems entirely plausible, causing the audience to equally doubt the legitimacy of what they are seeing.

Viewed more broadly, Take Shelter is also a fascinating study in obsession, with Shannon reflecting the fanatical FBI man he plays regularly on Boardwalk Empire. There are more than a few shades of Richard Dreyfuss’ Roy Neary (Close Encounters of the Third Kind) in Curtis, an instead of building mashed-potato mountains and emptying dirt into the kitchen, Shannon’s character constructs a bunker. He becomes violent and irrational to the outside world, but to the audience, who has seen inside his dreams, we are left with a quandary: have we seen a vision of doom, or a glimpse into a fractured mind?

Take Shelter has a kind of a Todd Haynes’ Safe vibe, with Nicholas skillfully navigating the loud and quiet moments, giving some genuinely touching intimate confessions between Shannon and rising star Chastain, see prominently in The Tree of Life, in what is essentially a two-hander of a showcase for the phenomenally talented pair. Indeed, if these award-worthy performances don’t at least net some nominations in the award season, then there is little justice in the world. Nichols provides no easy answers for the audience, even in its ambiguous conclusion, and perhaps he is simply saying that this is modern life. Filled with gripping performances from two stars ready to burst into the stratosphere, Take Shelter is a film that totally captures the zeitgeist.

Take Shelter is released on 13 October 2011 in Australia from Sony.

October 12, 2011
Review: The Thing

[stextbox id=”grey” caption=”The Thing (2011)” float=”true” align=”right” width=”200″]

Director: Matthijs van Heijningen Jr

Runtime: 103 minutes

Starring: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton, Ulrich Thomsen

Distributor: Universal

Country: US

Rating: Highly Recommended (?)

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John Carpenter’s The Thing is a masterpiece of horror and suspense, perhaps only bettered by its contemporary in Ridley Scott’s Alien. The claustrophobic 1982 film was in fact based on John W. Campbell’s short story Who Goes There?, and was originally adapted by Howard Hawks in 1951 as The Thing From Another World. Carpenter’s film carved out its own niche in the well-worn genre of bodily invasion, but this latest adaptation/prequel to the classic sci-fi yarn from director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. is designed to directly recall its predecessor. They’ve even kept the title.

When an alien spacecraft is discovered in Antarctica, an international group of scientists including paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World), is called in to help extract the frozen life-form found near the wreckage. When the being comes to life, it is soon discovered that the thing has the ability to take the form of any of the team. As the group becomes increasingly paranoid and suspicious of everyone around them, it is up to Kate and the crew’s pilot, Carter (Joel Edgerton, Warrior), to identify and eradicate the thing before they are all killed…or worse.

It is difficult to avoid comparisons with John Carpenter’s classic, largely because the new version of The Thing is structured to lead us up to the start of the original film. Much of the suspense of that earlier film came from not knowing what happened to the Norwegian camp, short of the horrible and visceral images of impossibly twisted and charred remains of creatures that couldn’t possibly be entirely human. In essence, The Thing attempts to answer the question posed in the dialogue of John Carpenter’s The Thing: “My god, what the hell happened here?”. In doing so, it continues contemporary US cinema’s obsession with explaining everything. Yet Heijningen and Eric Heisserer’s (Final Destination 5) screenplay, free of the burden of having to make its own conclusion, fully exploits the freedom it’s been given to simply create some old-fashioned suspense in guessing who will be the next to fall.

Fuelled by Marco Beltrami’s score, borrowing notes from his hero Ennio Morricone’s original, there is genuine tension in the first two-thirds of the film. The great paranoia that sets in, and the splatter-injected fear that the claustrophobia of an isolated camp engenders, leads to some terrifying moments and things that go bump, squish and boom in the dark. Never mind that the majority of the crew don’t seem to care terribly that they are walking around inside a flaming inferno, we all get the sense that anybody and anything could quite literally make our new-found friends jump out of their skin at a moment’s notice. Here it is the most faithful to the original, tapping into the same dark fears of parasitic invasion we all unconsciously share.

Even if one were to remove the film’s connections with the original, The Thing would remain a entertaining schlock-fest. Indeed, it might even heighten its strengths. It is only in the film’s final stages, which emphasises the origins and otherworldly nature of the creature, that The Thing falters and flounders before finding its way to the foregone conclusion. We have an established end point, one that will be wholly familiar to fans of the original film, and it is with this that the creators of this prequel struggle the most. Loose ends like survivors are never wholly tied up, and the location of the climactic showdown is out of step with the rest of the film. Regardless, The Thing is a high-tension horror film that impresses with a creative use of a limited location and period setting, a terrific group of characters and genuine scares along the way.

[stextbox id=”custom”]A superior horror feature from debut director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr, capturing the spirit of the original and providing a worthy companion to that classic film.[/stextbox]

The Thing is released on 13 October 2011 in Australia from Universal.

October 11, 2011
Review: Red State

[stextbox id=”grey” caption=”Red State (2011)” float=”true” align=”right” width=”200″]

Director: Kevin Smith

Runtime: 88 minutes

Starring: Michael Parks, John Goodman, Melissa Leo, Kerry Bishé

Distributor: Curious Films

Country: US

Rating: Worth a Look (?)

More info

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Kevin Smith is impossible to ignore. From his humble beginnings of creating the ‘little-independent-film-that-could’ Clerks on a shoestring budget of maxed-out credit cards, to his current status as a god of podcasting and social media, Smith’s projects have always been talking points. In fact, Smith has done most of the talking himself. A self-confessed storyteller, Smith has explored 80s-style teen comedies (Mallrats), love and loss (Chasing Amy), religion (Dogma) and fatherhood (Jersey Girl) on screen, but just about everything else in his multiple podcasts, blog writings, Tweets, public speaking engagements and comic books. With Red State, it turns out he still has plenty left to say.

Three teenage boys head up to Cooper’s Dell, the home of the Christian fundamentalist Five Points Church, on the promise of group sex with Sarah Cooper (Melissa Leo, The Fighter). They soon find that they have been lured into the world of preacher and family leader Abin Cooper (Michael Parks, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford ), a man intent on cleansing the world of what he sees as its filth and perversions. Events take a dramatic turn when ATF Agent Joseph Keenan (John Goodman, TV’s Treme) begins to set up for an investigation of Cooper’s Dell, and a Waco-style siege begins.

One bit of misdirection in the Red State marketing is painting this as a horror film. While there are undoubtedly violent and necessarily horrific moments in the film, this is not a film that can be easily placed inside a box. First and foremost, it appears to be a polemic on religion in America. The focal point of this rant is a lengthy speech by the formidable Michael Parks, spitting fire and brimstone at his assembled congregation. With one of the trio of boys in a cage, and another of their captives wrapped to a cross, the imagery is chilling. Red State, and indeed Smith, is most accomplished in these moments, suggesting the grimy and gritty horror of the 1970s and early 1980s (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, Last House on the Left spring to mind), a period that Smith was undoubtedly influenced by. Yet as with all such moments in the film, the speech overstays its welcome by a margin, sapping the necessary tension from the scene.

Red State rapidly descends into an endless shootout, from both the hip and the lip, buoyed only by the performances of the leads. Parks is scary-good, and is certainly worthy of an awards-season nomination at the very least. Having made a recent career of playing the same Sheriff for Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, the seasoned actor owns this sometimes slender material. Likewise, Goodman brings his laconic charms to his federal agent, and provides the voice of reason in the war of ideologies. Yet the splattering squibs and hail of bullets that follows the first shot are often tedious, but not so much as the laboured and often simplistic Fred Phelps-inspired tirades. Seemingly not knowing how to end the film, we are met with more talking, and while the speech is well delivered by Goodman, it is a hollow anti-climax. Indeed, at a slender 88 minutes, there was plenty of room for the kind of character development that Smith has excelled at in the past both on screen and in his comic book work.

Kevin Smith needs to be praised for Red State. His unique marketing strategy has guaranteed an audience, and once again has given hope to independent filmmakers with a big enough voice to find a home for their own films. More to the point, with the possible exception of Chasing Amy, and his view of parenting in Jersey Girl, this is certainly his most mature film to date. There are plenty of great moments in the film, and this would be the start of a whole ‘new Kev’, were it not for his announcement that his two-part hockey epic Hit Somebody will be his final film. This is the greatest shame, for while the film is a little too patchy to be called his masterpiece, it is undoubtedly the film he needed to make to point him in the right direction.

[stextbox id=”custom”]Red State is an intriguing, and sometimes gripping, departure from comedy for Kevin Smith, but its over-simplicity and underdeveloped script often hampers what could have been a mighty good rant on religion. [/stextbox]

Red State is released in Australia on 13 October 2011 from Curious. It is also available to order from Amazon on Blu-ray and DVD.

October 10, 2011