It was a most productive cinematic haul this weekend as I
enjoyed AT&T U-Verse’s free HBO/Cinemax weekend; I watched a bodaciously
large number of flicks courtesy of their On Demand service…and what offerings
weren’t On Demand I DVR’d off the schedule for transcription at a later time.
(Something that takes meticulous planning, I
should add…I’m like one of those generals you always see in the movies playing
with toy cannons and soldiers on a map.)
I was stymied by a power outage this morning (something that apparently
affected U-Verse subscribers all across this great land of ours) that kept me
from recording
Walk the Line (2005),
so I guess Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon will wait another day.
Oh, and a little poking around at AT&T U-Verse’s website
revealed that a free Showtime preview is in the works for May 9-11. And with that, here are some of the movies I
gazed at intently this weekend.
Abraham
Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012) – Okay, I knew from the title that this one
was going to induce a lot of eyeball-rolling…and it’s pretty much what you’d
expect: an over-the-top horror pic that posits that the sixteenth president of
the United States was also a badass destroyer of the undead in his copious free
time.
Based on a novel by Seth
Grahame-Smith (who also penned the screenplay),
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter stars Benjamin Walker as the
rail-splitter himself…who teams up with a man named Henry Sturges (Dominic
Cooper) to dispose of bloodsuckers willy-nilly when his ma (Robin McLeavy) dies
at the hand of a slave trader (also a vampire) named Jack Barts (Marton
Csokas).
Again, a guy who’s also written a book entitled Pride & Prejudice & Zombies
(which will be released to motion picture theaters in 2015) is naturally going
to take a little literary license…but I think Vampire Hunter would have worked better if they had left such figures
as Harriet Tubman (Jaqueline Fleming) and Jefferson Davis (John Rothman) out of
the narrative (in this alternate universe, the institution of slavery was set
up so that the undead would have access to a constant food source) as well as
concentrated Abe’s hobby to the years before he became president. Still, while I was able to tolerate a lot of
the explodiations and stuntery of this popcorn movie (including a fiery train
sequence that’s impressive in its sheer audaciousness) the disappointment came
in the performance of my beloved Mary Elizabeth Winstead (who I adored in Smashed) as Mary Todd Lincoln (way too
anachronistic, even in this wacked-out world).
Dark Shadows
(2012) –
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire
Hunter’s Seth Grahame-Smith also wrote the story and screenplay for this
one (so it seemed only fitting that I watched it after
Vampire Hunter—sort of a bloodsucker two-fer), inspired by the
Gothic soap opera
Dark Shadows, which was a cult favorite of TV audiences from
1966-71.
Johnny Depp plays Barnabas
Collins, the heir to the substantial Collins estate who receives a mojo from a vindictive
witch named Angelique Bouchard (Eva Green) that transforms him into a
vampire.
Imprisoned underground for
nearly two centuries, he’s freed from his coffin and sets out to restore the
family fortunes that have suffered from the machinations of the same sorceress
who cursed him.
Barnabas also falls for
the new family governess, Victoria Winters (Bella Heathcoate), whom he believes
to be the reincarnation of his dead wife.
When I saw the trailer for this movie back in 2012, I fell
prey to that familiar eye-rolling malady of mine because the coming attractions
played up the comedic aspects in the film—and while there are light moments in Dark Shadows it’s a fairly
straightforward homage to the TV series, with a few tongue-in-cheek tweaks here
and there. (I’m not sure if this was
such a good idea because part of the appeal of the TV show was that it was unintentionally funny.) Johnny Depp is not a favorite of mine, though
I am considerably more charitable to him than my mother (which is probably why
I watched this one alone), yet I’ll freely admit he’s pretty good reprising the
role made famous by Jonathan Frid (who makes his swan song in a cameo in this
film, along with Shadows alumni Kathryn Leigh Scott, David Selby and Lara Parker
in a party sequence)—particularly when he’s able to deliver a line like “Goest
thou to hell, and swiftly please, and there may Azmodaeus himself suckle from
your diseased teat!” while maintaining a straight face. (It helps that he’s a fan of the show.) Any movie that features Christopher Lee (as a
sea captain) and Alice Cooper (as himself—Depp’s Collins remarks he’s the
“ugliest woman I’ve ever seen”) can’t be a total loss, and I was amused that
famous movie creep Jackie Earle Haley plays Willie Loomis (essayed by future Cagney
& Lacey cast member John Karlen in the original TV version) because
it’s pretty much the part he was born to play.
Watch this one if you’re in the mood for something silly.
Disconnect
(2012) – One of the real gems I watched this weekend;
Disconnect highlights three stories—a couple (Paula Patton, Alexander
Skarsgård) find themselves victims of computer identity theft; a teenager
(Jonah Bobo) tries to take his life after being cyberbullied; and an ambitious
TV reporter (Andrea Riseborough) wants to interview a teen (Max Thieriot) who
earns his living at an adult webcam site.
Written by Andrew Stern and directed by Henry Alex Rubin, the movie’s
stories are separate yet intersect at two points: the father (Jason Bateman) of
the suicidal teen is also the lawyer for the station that employs the reporter
and the ex-cop (Frank Grillo) investigating the identity theft is the father of
one of the kids responsible for bullying the teenager.
This engrossing thriller hooked me from the get-go and
marvelously sustained itself from start to finish; I applaud its message of how
individuals find it difficult to relate to one another despite the leaps and
bounds made by “social media.” The
writing, direction and performances are all solid but I was pleased that one of
my favorite actresses, Hope Davis, plays the role of the suicidal teen’s ma
(I’ve loved her since the days of The
Daytrippers and Next Stop Wonderland)…and
Kasi Lemmons, best known as Jodie Foster’s roommate in The Silence of the Lambs, also appears as an FBI agent. (Lemmons’ directorial debut, Eve’s Bayou, was a film that I enjoyed
tremendously and recommended to one of my friends during my exile in
Morgantown. A decision I would soon
regret, since one of her friends watched it with her and never missed an
opportunity to inform me how much it “sucked.”
Philistine.)
The East
(2013) – If you stop by the blog on a regular—or even irregular—basis, you know
I’m not much of a fan of noisy movie blockbusters with their penchant for
blowing things up real good.
The East is a remedy for that: an
operative (Brit Marling) for a private security firm infiltrates an anarchist
collective (I will not refer to them as “eco-terrorists” because I don’t
believe any of them work for BP) whose mission is to give corporations a taste
of their own medicine; led by their charismatic leader (Alexander Skarsgård
again!), “The East” crashes a party and dopes the champagne swilled by
pharmaceutical execs with a drug that they sell (and claim is safe), for
example.
The agent, who identifies
herself as “Sarah,” soon develops an emotional attachment to the group members
that threatens to compromise her allegiance to the people for whom she works.
What impressed me so much about The East is that while it’s truly a first-rate suspense thriller…it
doesn’t need to throw in a bunch of car chases or explodiations. The movie’s star, Marling, co-wrote the
screenplay with director Zal Batmanglij, and the screenplay also promotes the
belief that irresponsible corporations need to be confronted about the severity
of their actions (even though Sarah doesn’t entirely improve of the methods
used by the group). Patricia Clarkson
co-stars as Marling’s formidable boss, with Ellen Page in a nice turn as one of
the group’s purely idealistic members and Jamey Sheridan as her dad, an exec
whose company’s chemicals resulted in a young boy’s death from cancer. (Julia Ormond is also on hand as one of the
Big Pharma bosses.) John Ritter’s son Jason
also has a small role as Sarah’s husband, demonstrating that talent is often
diluted the farther down the family tree you go.
Infamous
(2006) – George Plimpton’s book on Truman Capote (which interviews folks who
knew him) was the source for this movie written and directed by Douglas McGrath
that was released the year after the movie bio
Capote won the late Philip Seymour Hoffman a Best Actor Oscar.
Infamous
covers similar ground, focusing on the background that would inspire the author
(played by British thesp Toby Jones) to write what many consider to be his
finest novel,
In Cold Blood—in
fact, it wouldn’t be stretching things to note that the film is in many ways a
remake of the 1967
Blood…only told
from Capote’s point of view.
(McGrath
does take a few liberties with the book, including a sexual encounter between
Capote and Perry Smith that would not have happened unless
both of them were in the sneezer.)
Film critic Rex Reed went on record as saying that he wasn’t
particularly on board with Hoffman’s Academy Award triumph, noting “they gave
the Oscar to the wrong Truman Capote” and that Hoffman was doing more of an
impression while Jones “moves into Truman's skin, heart and brains.”
I never met the real Capote so I’m not going
to split hairs as to whether Reed is accurate (he would probably know him
better than I) but I did enjoy Jones’ performance, as well as Juliet
Stevenson’s dead-on portrayal of Diana Vreeland and Sigourney Weaver as Babe
Paley (the wife of CBS president William S.).
(Hope Davis is in
Infamous,
too—that was a plus.
But I will warn
people who are not
Bill Crider that
Gwyneth Paltrow is also in this movie…and that she sings.
Run fast, run far.)
I was less enamored of Peter Bogdanovich’s
attempt to convince folks he was Bennett Cerf…for the simple reason that
Bogdanovich was pretty much playing Bogdanovich.
I’ll admit that my longtime preference for
Catherine Keener gives her a slight edge in her
Capote interpretation of Truman’s longtime BBF (Nelle) Harper Lee
over Sandra Bullock (I’m just not a fan of hers—she’s like
TDOY bête noire Julia
Roberts, only with less teeth) but I did think Bullock acquitted herself nicely
here.
As for Daniel Craig—he’s a shoo-in
for the eventual Tommy Lee Jones biopic (the man known as the current 007 plays
murderer Smith).
Killer Joe
(2011) – Playwright Tracy Letts reworked his 1993 play into this film (directed
by William Friedkin) that casts recent Oscar winner Matthew McConaughey as an
ice-water-in-his-veins hit man who’s hired by a trailer-trash family to dispose
of a relative in order to collect the insurance.
The son (Emile Hirsch) can’t come up with the
$25,000 deposit for McConaughey’s services so McConaughey arranges to avail
himself of the sexual charms of the son’s
Baby
Doll-like sister (Juno Temple) as a “retainer.”
This jet-black comedy thriller is admittedly not for all
tastes but I thought it was a crackerjack piece of filmmaking; Friedkin nicely
captures that endearing (if dangerous) loopiness that often defines the Lone
Star State (there are a lot of Blood
Simple overtones in this) and the performances are superb, particularly
McConaughey as the titular assassin and Thomas Haden Church as the clueless
patriarch (I’ve been a longtime fan of Church’s since Wings, and his Ansel
Smith in Joe makes Lowell Mather
look like a Mensa candidate). Gina
Gershon is Church’s duplicitous wife, who performs a bit of fellatio on a KFC
chicken leg (she calls it “K-Fry-C”) that won’t disappear from your memory
banks anytime soon.
Mama (2013)
– Oddball horror film focuses on the plight of two little girls (Megan
Charpentier, Isabelle Nélisse) whose father (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) scoops them
up and takes them with him when he has to lam it out of town (he’s just killed
two of his business partners and his estranged wife), only to be murdered by a
mysterious “something” as he and his daughters become stranded in the
woods.
Five years later, the girls are
located (and are in a feral state) and returned to his twin brother (also Coster-Waldau),
who attempts to provide a home for them along with his girlfriend (Jessica
Chastain).
The problem is—that
“something” (which the girls call “Mama”) has followed them home—and when
“Mama” ain’t happy…ain’t nobody happy.
An exercise in “old school” horror, Mama terrified the absolute sh*t out of me even though a few of the
plot strands left me a little bewildered.
Directed by Andrés Muschietti (who elaborated on his 2008 short of the
same name), the movie delivers the fright goods in spades; I was thinking the
whole time that if I saw half of what goes on in Chastain and Coster-Waldau’s
house you’d be forwarding my mail to Cleveland someplace. Produced by famed director Guillermo del Toro,
whose The Devil’s Backbone (2001) I
would have DVR’d during the free Starz/Encore preview had U-Verse not
demonstrated such ruthless efficiency by removing the channel on schedule.
Man of Steel
(2013) – I don’t remember if it was Matt Zoller Seitz—or possibly the crazy
lady who stands outside the Golden Pantry every morning yelling at invisible
people (I didn’t take notes)—who mused some time ago that a movie like
Superman (1978) could never do well in
the current tenor of the times, when most of the “superhero” motion pictures
have a kind of dark quality about them (thank you, Tim Burton).
Man of
Steel adds a little “dark” to the Superman story (the screenplay is by
David S. Goyer and directed by Zack Snyder…but
Batman rebooter Christopher Nolan left a few fingerprints as
producer) by re-telling the legend of the superhero (played by Henry Cavill):
from his escape of doomed planet Krypton (Russell Crowe plays his pop) to
arrival on Earth (Kevin Costner as his Earth Pop), where he must do battle with
some renegades from planet K, led by bad guy General Zod (Michael Shannon).
Confession time: I am such a huge Superman fan (I even liked
Superman Returns—sue me) that I
enjoyed Man of Steel…even though I
was disappointed that a lot of the wonderment from the 1978 classic has given
way to that darkness I mentioned earlier.
I don’t think Cavill or Brandon Routh can measure up to Christopher
Reeve’s take on the World’s Mightiest Mortal so the strengths have to be
searched for elsewhere: Crowe and Costner are great as Jor-El and Jonathan
Kent, respectively (though I will admit Kev pales slightly in comparison to
Glenn Ford in the role) and Diane Lane was a revelation as Supe’s mom (I always
have difficulty seeing beyond her teen years in The Outsiders and Streets of
Fire). I also liked Amy Adams as
Lois Lane but I’m not sure I’m comfortable with a Daily Planet that erases Jimmy Olsen (I know he’s useless…but it’s
Superman, ferchrissake) from the masthead.
Man of Steel was pretty much
what I expected—stunts and explodiations—but I’d be lying to you if I didn’t
admit it makes me want to see the sequel.
(By the way, I told Mom that Christopher Meloni was in this movie—and
she still took a pass on seeing it.)
The Place
Beyond the Pines (2013) – Luke Glanton (Ryan Gosling) gives up his stunt
motorcycling gig with a traveling carnival to stick around the burg where his
girlfriend Romina (Eva Mendes) hangs her hat; he’s just learned that she has
sired him a son and to make life better for them he embarks on a career of
robbing banks with the help of a mechanic buddy (Ben Mendelsohn).
But Luke’s outlaw spree comes to an end
thanks to the expert police work of uniformed cop Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper),
who capitalizes on his “hero” status to fulfill his political ambitions.
Along the way, Cross gets an idea of what the
concept of what bearing “the sins of the fathers” is all about.
Derek Cianfrance’s three-act tragedy was promoted
relentlessly last year—it seems like every time I watched an episode of Community
or Parks
and Recreation on demand I’d also be treated to that damn trailer. My hesitancy to fully embrace The Place Beyond the Pines stems from
the fact that by the time the movie enters its third act—concentrating on Luke
and Avery’s sons (Dane DeHaan, Emory Cohen)—the viewer finds out that their
story just isn’t as compelling as their dads’.
Cianfrance is reunited with Gosling after the two of them worked
together on the critically-acclaimed Blue
Valentine; Pines also features
Ray Liotta (playing a corrupt cop, which is a bit out of his wheelhouse—don’t
you think?) and TDOY fave Harris
Yulin as Cooper’s dad.
Teeth (2007)
– Here’s another offbeat horror vehicle that didn’t quite scare me as much as
Mama (though I laughed a lot more): chaste
teen Dawn O’Keefe (Jess Wexler) is saving herself for marriage (she even
belongs to an abstinence group dubbed The Promise) but it’s not easy—she begins
to have impure thoughts about Tobey (Hale Apperman), a fellow Promiser she’s
just met, and the afternoon the two of them head off for an innocent swim
results in alarming consequences.
Tobey
starts to have his way with her the way rough boys often do…and discovers to
his horror that Dawn has what is referred to in various mythologies as
vagina dentata.
(Google it, non-Latin majors.)
For those males out there who just crossed their legs after
Googling that last part—Teeth
assures us in the closing credits that “No man was harmed in the making of this
film.” It’s a hysterically original film
that explores the horrifyingly comic side of teenage sexuality, with a
wonderful performance by Wexler (who won a Special Jury Prize at Sundance that
year). There’s plenty of smart satire on
hand, as well as none-too-subtle symbolism and in-jokes (my favorite is the
clip from The Black Scorpion)…and
the fate that befalls Dawn’s surly stepbrother (John Hensley) shouldn’t happen
to a dog. (Apologies for that last
part.) If anything, Teeth lets us know that Lenny Van Dohlen—who I remember from Tender Mercies and Electric Dreams (the Her
of its day)—is still working; he plays Dawn’s pa.
“The bear” was the nickname bestowed upon the
monsters/creatures featured in Outer Limits installments, an element
insisted upon by both ABC and producer Joseph Stefano to heighten fear and
suspense. (When Stefano vacated the
producer’s chair in the show’s second season, “the bear” went with him—though there
were episode exceptions.) OL
was created by Leslie Stevens, whose previous series Stoney Burke (an
underrated Western program starring Jack Lord) has been cancelled by ABC after
a solitary season. Stevens sold the
network on a show he called Please Stand By, but when ABC insisted
that the title of the series be changed, The Outer Limits became the
substitute. September 16, 1963 marked
the debut of OL with “The Galaxy Being,” a slightly-tweaked version of the Please
Stand By pilot.
