Month: February 2016

Wearing its art film standing as a badge of honor, The Witch succeeds in thumbing its nose at the conventional horror genre. Replete with oblique period dialogue and actors often seemingly bent on delivering lines in a manner to further obscure comprehension rather than clarify it, The Witch isn’t an easy go. What makes it worthwhile is an uncanny sense of craftsmanship from director Robert Eggers. What makes it rather stunning is the emergence of actress Anya Taylor-Joy as Thomasin, who is beginning to “blossom as a woman”–not a good thing in New England in the 1630s.. Thomason is gradually suspected of witchcraft by her pious family after her younger brother, baby Samuel, suddenly disappears while under her care during a game of peek-a-boo.

Thomasin is the film’s focal point. As she becomes a reluctant catalyst to a hardening of tormented tolerance into full-blown vengeful paranoia, it’s easy to identify with her frustrations. An innocent provocative comment to her younger siblings about jokingly being a witch herself becomes an eventual tipping point in a family’s descent into hysteria.

A word about the dilagoue, reportedly pulled from Olde English documents of the early seventeenth century: imagine a largely incoherent Tom Hardy in both The Revanant and The Dark Knight Rises. Multiply by two or three. What would not be a problem if this were an Elizabethan period piece borders on pomposity in a horror film.

What keeps Eggers from going off the grid is a precise eye for set design and costuming and a good ear for the huge role that music plays in the horror genre. Taylor-Joy is a pure delight to behold, her buoyant innocence contrasted against the doom and gloom of The Puritan era. The Devil’s up-close presence in this world is as real as Donald Drumpf’s imprint on the present-day presidential campaign. Eggers may be going for a spooky, atmospherics-laden slow-burn with a little of The Excorcist on the side, but the killer effect is he’s painting a full fledge sneak-up-on-you Hieronymous Bosch. Without its playful ending, The Witch would likely be accused of being a mere academic exercise with genre trappings. As it stands, it’s the best thinking-man’s horror flick since The Babadook.

For Whom The Ax Tolls…4 stars (out of 5)

Deadpool throws so much snark and bluster against the wall that much of it sticks. If you are willing to overlook all the misses, there’s a good time to be had here. It’s mostly refreshing to encounter an R-rated Marvel celebration and takedown of a character who is a perpetually ranting lout. Sure, the film may have needed better editing in order to condense much of its motor-mouthed, potty-humor barrage, but as it stands I sure had a lot more laughs here than in viewing, say, Hail Caesar.

None of this admittedly self-congratulatory stuff would have worked nearly as well if the lead had been someone other than Ryan Reynolds. While it was evident Reynolds was clearly moving up in the acting world with his previous role in Mississippi Grind, here he continues to squelch the smart-alecky pretty boy image. Or at least the pretty-boy part.

With an opening sequence that should impress even the most jaded action movie fan and a surprisingly good performance by Morena Baccarin (Homeland) as Deadpool’s love interest, the film isn’t quite all snap and smut. There’s even a love story lurking here amidst the preoccupation with impalement, masturbation, and crotch punching.

Don’t worry if, like me, you’re a Superhero film dabbler, or even a novice. I was surprised to learn there was a Green Lantern reference though I have no idea where it was since I skipped that prior Ryan Reynolds DC Comics turkey. I did comprehend the reason People magazine with Ryan on the cover is product-placed a couple of times throughout Deadpool is a reference to his having won its Sexiest Man Alive designation.

Here, underneath his Spider Man-style red mask, Deadpool is harboring a serious disfigurement. So much so that he avoids revealing his newfound face to his old girlfriend even while trying to rescue her. Her first comment upon eventually seeing his face is a pretty funny line. Hey, it’s February, and unless you count 2015’s late-release art films, that means it’s the doldrums at the cinema. In the take-what-you-can-get mode, Deadpool rates as one pretty cool package.

An impudent, ill-tempered, R-rated Superhero….4 stars (out of 5)

In Hail Caesar! co-directors Joel and Ethan Coen lean fairly hard on silliness. In what amounts to a simultaneous spoof of, and tribute to the Studio Era of Hollywood, the Coens provide commendable optics of splendid cinematography and surefire editing. Their presentation of a 27-hour trajectory of a day-in-the-life of studio “fixer” Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) often amuses while ultimately wearing thin.

Set alongside a kidnapping plot where studio star Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) gets snatched by a group of communist Hollywood screenwriters calling themselves “The Future,” Hail Caesar! is on solid ground when replicating musical and comic scenes from Hollywood’s heyday. Adding just enough exaggeration, here’s Channing Tatum as a song-and-dance man leading a group of sailors on a “we’re sailing off and we’ll sure miss all the dames” tap-dancing number replete with beer bottles that seem to have a mind of their own. And there’s chipper Scarlet Johansson in a mermaid costume doing a water scene with Busby Berekeley-style choreography, only to finish and morph into a nasty trash-talking ingrate who loves talking back to Mannix. Side plots of Mannix being wooed for a job by Lockheed, and trying to quit smoking while showing up daily for Catholic confessions, however, further drag the film’s momentum.

Clooney is a hoot playing a Whitlock who mugs his lines while filming the full-of-hot-air biblical epic (also called “Hail Caesar!”) that is being shot at the unnamed studio which resembles MGM. It’s after Whitlock gets kidnapped that the film falters.

The screenwriters possess little believability, so what satire is intended drags more than zings. Their preposterous fate seems more like a bad joke than a terribly clever one. At this point I longed for more of Johansson’s character, DeeAnna Moran. Unfortunately, the outcome of her-out-of-wedlock pregnancy that jolts the PR-conscious studio also leaves a lot be desired. Her promising presence in the film seems unduly abridged and stilted.

Brolin manages to somewhat save the day. His self-assured Mannix keeps the studio running smoothly by means of coercion, bribery, and smooth-talking, the latter of which is ably demonstrated with his handling of twin gossip columnists, both wonderfully played by the irrepressible Tilda Swinton. Just when it’s tempting to grant Swinton the best supporting role in a film full of big name actors, Frances McDormand shows up as an old-school film editor who encounters a hilariously strange turn of events. With acting talent this good, this film should have been better.

Witty But Wearying Look at The Dream Factory….3 stars (out of 5)

The Nazi’s weren’t content with the devastation of all their other combined horrors. They also devised a Sonderkommando squad consisting of Jews forced to perform the disposal of bodies and other deplorable tasks related to the executions. Robbing them of their only comfort–that of innocence–the concentration camp commanders granted those in the Sonderkommando meager extras such as improved rations. They also gave them a slightly longer outlook for survival. Ultimately the Sonderkommando units were also killed. The goal was to eliminate “bearers of secrets” who witnessed the atrocities and could warn new arrivals of their likely fate.

In Son of Saul, first-time Hungarian director Laszlo Nemes, presents Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig), an intense member of the Sonderkommando. We get to know him well since he is in virtually every scene but we hardly know him. The conveyance of his thoughts are overshadowed by and made unnecessary by an uncanny representation of his now primal responses. His reactions to overwhelming sensations are expressed in the subtlety of a flicker of an eye or a twitch in the face. Shot mostly in close-up, Saul avoids the gaze of his jailers. He reacts like an animal scurrying in a surrealist survival mode.

Nemes use a shallow-focused frame that blurs atrocities in the distance. Much of the terror is manifested through the use of rancorous sound. This not only preserves the natural reluctance in Holocaust art to shy away from anything resembling literal representation but also mirrors Saul’s presumed inclination to tune out the numbing horrors. That Nemes gives us fleeting visual glimpses of the affects of the horrors can be viewed as paradoxically both a compromise to tradition and a challenge to it.

Saul’s survival instinct takes on an allegorical context when he decides to mount an ostensibly futile yet fervid crusade involving a dead child. Saul’s search for a rabbi to perform Kaddish on the child’s corpse is a heroic quest by a desperate man eager to hang on to the slimmest crumb of his humanity. Yet Saul’s mission also takes on the intensity of a genre thriller. That aspect of the film and its highly aesthetic style have created a critical backlash amidst mostly glowing reviews. The 38-year-old Nemes has taken the most sensitive of possible themes and attempted to turn the Holocaust film on its head. A film can certainly be the most unique of holocaust movies without being close to one of the best. Son of Saul, however, in sheer terms of sticking in your craw, is not only a rare achievement but a seriously sublime one.

A First-Time Director Enters The Pantheon of Great Holocaust Filmmakers….4.5 (out of 5) stars