movie reviews

Three Things to Watch at Thanksgivingtime

November 21, 2018 by David Dubrow 1 Comment

All sports except for boxing and MMA bore the living tits off of me, so football is never my choice for screen entertainment during Thanksgivingtime. No, Thanksgivingtime isn’t a word like Christmastime is, but it should be. Yes. Anyhoo, if you’re looking to watch something during Thanksgivingtime, here are a few recommendations.

The Endless: An indie film of no fixed genre, The Endless tells the story of Aaron and Justin, two men who claim to have escaped a UFO-style cult ten years ago, and are having trouble adjusting to today’s world. When they get a package from the cult they left, they return to the compound to see how things have fared over the last decade. What’s great about good indie films like The Endless is that they’re imaginative in a way that corporate-produced Hollywood genre movies can’t quite match, with rare exceptions. You’ll find a lot of sticks-with-you visuals and terrific bits of storytelling in The Endless, and the mistakes it makes don’t distract from the overall quality of the production. There’s weird stuff, there’s funny stuff, there’s even some family stuff, and it works, for the most part. Trust me. I’m not wrong about a lot.

American Vandal: If you’ve seen multi-episode true crime shows like Making a Murderer or The Keepers, you have to watch American Vandal. It’s a pitch-perfect parody of true crime programs, from the close-up profile interviews and hours of B-roll to the multiple plot lines and red herrings. The first season deals with the investigation of a prank in which someone spray-painted penises on the teachers’ cars in a local high school’s parking lot, so you know where the humor is going. It’s both an eerily realistic dissection of the high school ecosystem and a deconstruction of the true crime genre. Season two addresses a different crime, this one committed by someone called The Turd Burglar. Social media and its attendant dangers/pitfalls get skewered here, with both hilarious and disgusting results. Both seasons are engrossing and incredibly well made.

First Reformed: Horribly flawed but impossible to look away from, First Reformed is a Paul Schrader movie that focuses on Ethan Hawke as Reverend Toller, the priest of a small church known more for its history than its holiness. Toller is a man with a haunted past and a terribly grim present, and he’s too conflicted to like but too human to hate. Everything’s bleak and stark and cold and meticulously placed, making it a visual masterpiece that you have to watch in awe. The performances couldn’t be better, adding to the film’s visual perfection. And yet the story’s muddled, the plot’s unclear, and the message is hackneyed. It tackles the issue of faith imperfectly at best, and misses the mark on deeper themes. What bothered me most was the ending, summed up by the director himself: “I don’t know what the ending is.” I’m not a movie director, but I am a fiction writer and an adult, and I say that that’s unfair to the audience. If we trust you with our time and attention, you owe us a proper story. I’m not saying that every ending has to be cut-and-dried, but if you don’t know how it ends and you made it, you’re betraying our trust. Don’t do that. I’ve written my share of open-ended endings, but I always knew how they do and should end. You may feel differently. Watch the movie and let me know what you think.

Happy Thanksgiving! And start using the term Thanksgivingtime so I don’t look like too much of a ding-dong.

A Quartet of Movie Reviews

September 19, 2018 by David Dubrow 1 Comment

Sometimes I see movies. Sometimes I enjoy them.

And sometimes I don’t.

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If you’re looking to be bored for long stretches of time, I can’t think of a better sci-fi thriller than Alien Invasion: S.U.M.1. It stars Iwan Rheon as the titular character S.U.M.1, and by the end of the film you’ll be quite familiar with the sight of his naked backside. The story is that an alien race known as the Nonesuch has wiped out most of the human population on Earth; the rest live underground except for soldier-types like S.U.M.1, who do solitary 100-day tours of duty inside concrete towers, looking for human survivors to save and Nonesuches to flee from. Between the silly plot, terrible storytelling, and risible dialogue, I found this film to be a gigantic waste of time. The only sympathetic character was the white rat Doc, who, unfortunately, didn’t make it. (They never do.) The movie’s no doubt supposed to be a gritty tale of isolation and mental anguish, but it failed to build up to anything worth paying attention to. I pray Doc finds a better agent.

I was really looking forward to Hereditary. Who doesn’t like Toni Collette and Gabriel Byrne? Nobody I want to know. Yes. What? Anyway, it starts out terribly dark and depressing and disquieting, and none of the characters are particularly likable but it’s okay because the visuals are so darned creepy, and then something inexpressibly awful happens 40 minutes in and I spent the rest of the film deciding if I should turn it off or not because it stopped being the least bit enjoyable and became a litany of dreadful things happening to people I didn’t care about. The supernatural elements would have been more interesting if they’d been fleshed out better. The horrific images would have had more punch if I disliked the characters less. Director Ari Aster said, “I wanted the film to function first as a vivid family drama before I even bothered attending to the horror elements,” and I believe him, because we got a lot more of the family drama than the horror, which made neither genre work. This was no Ordinary People or Terms of Endearment, and it wasn’t The Conjuring or The Amityville Horror, either.

About eighteen years after its release, I finally got to see Battle Royale. It’s an uplifting (kidding) tale of a bus filled with Japanese high-schoolers that gets taken to a deserted island. The high-schoolers are then given weapons and told to kill each other, and the winner of this disgusting game is allowed to live. Plenty of books and movies owe a lot to this film (looking at you, Hunger Games) in both story and visuals. Great care was taken to make us like these kids, and to see them fight and die and try to save each other is more wrenching than you might think. There’s a lot of blood and gore, but it’s not as sickening as subsequent Japanese horror efforts tended to get. Battle Royale is the OG of this bizarre genre, and if you want to get your tragic nihilist violence boner on, give it a look.

For a second helping of Japanese horror, I bring you the movie Tag, known as Riaru Onigokko in Japan. Completely and utterly incomprehensible, it tackles alternate universes, the nature of reality, video games, and identity in the same way that Jackson Pollock addressed realism in painting. I defy anyone to make sense of anything that happens in this film. As is typical for Japanese productions, the special effects were terrific, especially when showing some unbelievably horrific stuff. I didn’t like the movie, but I didn’t not like it. Some of the visuals are had to forget. Does that make it a successful film? To quote Rudy from Season One of Survivor, I don’t know.

Three Brief Movie Reviews

February 6, 2018 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

Like you, I saw the trailer for the movie The Snowman and thought: awesome! Creepy and frightening. Then the reviews came in, and they were near-universally negative. Everyone hated it. Still, I figured that I’d see for myself; after all, I’ve really liked a bunch of terrible stuff and loathed some quite popular stuff. I mean, how bad could it be?

Well, The Snowman wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good, either. I’m generally pretty terrible when it comes to guessing the murderer in whodunit-style movies, but I figured out who the villain was less than halfway through. Every actor except for Michael Fassbender was wasted in thankless, minor roles, from Chloe Sevigny to Val Kilmer to J.K. Simmons. I got the impression that the film was the Cliffs Notes version of the novel, with important parts glossed over, red herrings unfished-for, and subplots ignored completely. They did the worst job possible dubbing in Val Kilmer’s lines (I know the man was recovering from cancer treatment, but his two-minute role would have been better played by someone who could talk). Everything seemed freezing cold, but the filmmakers completely eliminated all cultural references to Norway, giving the viewer no sense of place. I was entertained, but not thrilled. I’m sure the book was better. If you’re going to do a Harry Hole movie, why not do another series like Wallander or something and sell it to Netflix?

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For a more subtle sort of zombie apocalypse film, you need look no further than Here Alone, which is light on the zombies but heavy on the drama. Much of the movie is focused on protagonist Ann, who lost her husband and child in the chaos of a viral zombie apocalypse and is just doing what she can to survive day to day in the Pacific Northwest. (Like so many of us, I guess.) Lucy Walters as Ann carries the role with a skillful mixture of pathos and bloody-mindedness. Despite having lost everything, she’s a survivor. How she came to be alone is told in flashbacks, some of which are terribly wrenching and hard to watch. Her carefully-balanced existence is, of course, upended when a couple of other people wander in, and things shake out more or less the way you’d expect in a movie like this. If everybody got along, it’d be pretty boring. Nevertheless, there are some surprises here and there, particularly the ending, which makes little sense even with the attempt to bolster character motivations in flashbacks. That was the part I didn’t like so much. Overall, though, I’m glad I watched it. It’s a good movie.

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I’ll round out the roundup with another apocalyptic film, The Survivalist. No zombies here: just some kind of dreadful end of civilization catastrophe that may or may not be centered around an environmental event or other. Too much fossil fuels, I guess. Or everyone ate too many Tide pods. Martin McCann plays the unnamed, eponymous Survivalist, a man with a tiny farm in the middle of nowhere. He kills the foragers who come to raid his farm, jerks off into plant seedlings, and doesn’t say a word for the first 17 minutes of the film. Then, as is too often the case, a couple of other people wander in, and his carefully-balanced existence is upended. Whoa. Déjà vu. Anyway, the movie’s a lot better than I’m making it seem. The characters have to make terrible choices: trading sex for a bowl of soup, who to murder and who not to murder, and who’s more important: lover or mother. It’s terribly grim despite the beautiful Irish scenery, with tall grass and meadows and lots of rain. The performances are excellent, with actors conveying great affect in expressions and shared looks. You can’t expect happy endings in movies like this, but perhaps you can hope for a less-terrible tomorrow. Do you get that in The Survivalist? You’ll have to watch it to find out. And you should watch it.

Three Brief Science Fiction Reviews

March 28, 2017 by David Dubrow 2 Comments

Over the last ten days or so I’ve been dealing with an illness that has taken both antibiotics and steroids to return me to a semblance of health, so during that time I watched a good bit of television (in-between chills, cold sweats, massive headaches, and numerous other symptoms too tedious to describe). In the interest of making my recent unpleasantness a learning experience, I will review what I watched as I lay shivering on the couch.

Travelling Salesman: At the risk of sounding pretentious and lah-di-dah, I will label this movie an “intellectual thriller.” Not that non-intellectual thrillers aren’t entertaining; I liked John Wick and The Accountant, for example. Anyway, what makes Travelling Salesman an intellectual thriller is how much of the film takes place in a single room, focused on a conversation. Sounds boring, right? It’s not. What they’re talking about is an amazing thing they’ve done under contract to the U.S. government: they’ve solved one of the most difficult problems mathematics has available, and now must deal with the repercussions. The mathematician characters all act according to type: the stuffy professor complete with sweater vest, the quirky weirdo, the brilliant slob, and the wunderkind star who did most of the work. Everyone perfectly cast, particularly the government functionary who comes to negotiate the remainder of their contract: a smooth-talking, blandly handsome man who’s obviously over his head yet still tries to hold his own in a room of literal geniuses. Aside from a few incomprehensible bits it’s a great film, one that I enjoyed immensely. 5 out of 5 stars.

The Zero Theorem: It’s a kind of spiritual successor to Terry Gilliam’s earlier film Brazil, though utterly lacking Brazil‘s heart. Sharing the same bizarre, surreal aesthetic, it attempts to handle heavy themes like faith, purpose in life, and existential crisis, but fails to elevate any of them. Christoph Waltz does a good enough job with what he’s been given, making him the only thing in the movie worth watching. Matt Damon, despite his camouflage suits, doesn’t add anything. Everyone else is forgettable, particularly the love interest. I wanted to like it because I loved Brazil, but couldn’t. 2 out of 5 stars.

Travelers: A Netflix series of twelve episodes, it has a familiar premise: people from a future dystopia mentally time-travel to the present day, take over the bodies of people who are about to die, and work like heck to prevent the horrible events of the future from occurring. Been there, done that, right? Yes, but somehow this works. Part of it is the casting: everyone’s very, very good, including Eric McCormack, who pulls off his role with just enough humor and weakness to make himself believable. The stand-out performance is Jared Abrahamson, a teenager taken over by a much older time-traveler who, to his great credit, doesn’t do a George Burns impression from the movie 18 Again!. Even though Travelers doesn’t reveal its secrets until rather late in the series, which gets frustrating, there’s still a lot to like. If we don’t know the stakes, we can’t be depended on to care about what happens; nevertheless, each episode still manages to make itself an entertaining experience. The crew makes the best of a relatively low budget through acting, writing, and heart. And yes, it obviously takes place in Vancouver. It’s okay. You get used to it. 4 out of 5 stars.

Did I spend my sick time wisely? I hope so.

Family Film Reviews

November 23, 2016 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

Football won’t last the whole weekend, so with the family gathered ’round, you might watch a film. Here are two short reviews of family-themed movies that you may want to consider.

The first is a Netflix movie: Tallulah. It’s not a family movie, but it does center around family. If you get my drift. The premise is that a homeless woman kidnaps a baby from a drunken housewife to raise on her own, and adventures ensue. Aside from a few genuinely affecting moments, Tallulah was mostly a failure from beginning to end. The actors did a great job of portraying unlikable characters who you can’t help but want to never see again for the rest of your life. Certain story elements required bizarre character decisions to move the plot forward, like the eponymous Tallulah character deciding, after kidnapping the baby, to re-visit her ex-boyfriend’s hostile mother for help. Nobody asked the right questions regarding the sudden appearance of the baby, and the resolution of the story was too pat. Tammy Blanchard was the stand-out as the horrible drunken mom who you love to hate. Frederic Lehne and John Benjamin Hickey played the same characters they always play on the screen. Allison Janney was a looming, stork-like presence. You probably have better things to do with your time than watch it. Two stars out of five.

The second film is called Little Boy. A piece of magical realism, it revolves around themes of family, grief, alienation, and friendship. In it, an eight-year-old boy named Pepper tries to make a deal, of sorts, with God to end World War II so his dad could come back home. It has all the elements of magical realism: unexpected (and bizarre humor), strange coincidences, and weird characters, wrapped around the solid core of faith. Some of the themes worked better than others, but it comes together in a powerful story. It’s dreadfully manipulative, yes, with plenty of tears for the audience, but this isn’t a subtle film, nor is it meant to be. Jakob Salvati, the actor who plays Pepper, turned in a terrific performance. Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa was great, as usual, as were Michael Rapaport and Tom Wilkinson. Just go see it and let me know what you think. Four stars out of five.

Have a great Thanksgiving.

Three Brief Reviews of Horror Films

August 23, 2016 by David Dubrow 2 Comments

I watched a few horror movies recently. Rather than write long, drawn-out reviews of them, I’m giving you more bang for your buck and presenting a short review of each film.

Open Grave: The movie starts out well, with Sharlto Copley awakening in a gigantic pit of corpses, crawling out, and finding a group of people who, like him, suffer from amnesia. The early interactions are fraught, interesting, and multilayered. And then, somewhat predictably, it all comes apart in the second half when they start to discover the truth of their situation. The plot becomes contrived and the film drags in the last half-hour, destroying the first ten minutes’ promise. Everything else was decent, so it gets 3 out of 5 stars.

The Invitation: A man and his girlfriend go to a dinner party hosted by his ex-wife, who divorced him two years ago in the wake of the accidental death of their young son. Killing a child can be a very cheap way to create pathos, particularly in film, but The Invitation pulls it off through excellent performances and good writing. I would have liked a little more set-up with the invitation itself and some establishment of the relationships between the characters, but overall I really quite liked it. The always-awesome John Carroll Lynch as the perfectly-named Pruitt rounds out a great cast. 4 out of 5 stars.

Hush: It’s survival horror, featuring a deaf woman contending with a sadistic home intruder. If you like that sort of thing you’ll love this movie. I don’t. Hush had no plot, no depth, no reason to keep you interested if you don’t identify with the protagonist. At no point do you learn why the antagonist does what he does, which doesn’t improve the film. Truly random violence in the real world is extremely rare; predators attack people for specific reasons, even if it’s just opportunity. But this is a movie, and movies should have things like plots and character motivations. Instead, you get a lot of blood, a lot of pain and savagery. 2.5 out of 5 stars.