movie review

Two-Minute Movie Review: Pay the Ghost

January 18, 2016 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

I’m a Nicolas Cage fan, no two ways about it. I know that if I’m watching a movie with Nic Cage in it, I’ll be at least mildly entertained. Consistency is a quality to be prized, depending on context; obviously, some things are consistently awful, like mayonnaise and root canals. Nic Cage is not like mayonnaise and root canals.

Pay the Ghost is a fun movie, imaginative and disturbing. It was based off of a novella by Tim Lebbon, whom I’ve never read before but deserves great respect for being a successful writer. The film has one great strength that makes it worth watching and one titanic weakness that almost made me turn it off. I’m glad I didn’t.

The strength is in the portrayal of how Mike (Nic Cage) and Kristen’s (Sarah Wayne Callies) son Charlie goes missing. You know what’s going to happen, but it doesn’t lessen the tension in the lead-up, the panic in the event, and the grief afterward. As a parent, it becomes very easy to identify with the loss of a child: every missing or kidnapped child becomes your own, if only for a moment. That part was very well done. Callies always seems to take thankless, unlikable roles, like the doctor in Prison Break and Lori in The Walking Dead: it’s not her performance that makes you dislike her, but the writing. This unlikability carries over in Pay the Ghost, where her character Kristen immediately blames Mike for losing the boy, and even later, in the aftermath, continues to hold him responsible.

And this is where the weakness comes in: a year later, after they’ve separated, both Mike and Kristen get intimations that Charlie is asking for their help, reaching out to them from some other place. Later, when Kristen approaches Mike with news of her occult visitations with Charlie, Mike immediately and pathetically accepts her as if nothing had happened in the intervening year. No acknowledgment of Kristen’s venomous words or behavior, and most importantly, no apology from Kristen. It threw me off, made me like both Mike and the movie a bit less.

The addition of a sexy German folklore professor played by Veronica Ferres and harried cop played by Lyriq Bent didn’t do a lot for the film’s plot or interest: both could have been fleshed out a little more. Stephen McHattie had a great little cameo as a blind homeless man (a sentence that both amuses and depresses in equal measure).

Overall, though, I enjoyed the movie and recommend it. 3.5 out of 5 stars.

Sicario: A Brief Review

January 6, 2016 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

I can’t remember when I saw the trailer for Sicario, but it definitely made me want to see the movie. The medieval brutality of Mexican drug gangs is particularly disturbing. Stories of Vlad Tepes and Tomás de Torquemada are horrific, but let’s face it: they happened centuries ago and the violence is dimmed over time. When it happens today, it’s somehow uniquely horrible (even though it’s not unique).

Unfortunately, this movie didn’t live up to the hype in any way, and I can’t recommend it as worth your time or money.

My main criticism of the film is in its protagonist (a role that inexplicably shifts to a different character in the last several minutes of the film, putting its lack of narrative focus on full display), played by Emily Blunt. I have no problem with Emily Blunt as an actress, but as the leader of a tactical team doing drug interdiction for the FBI, she lacked a great deal to be desired. Everybody wants strong, confident women roles in movies, but nobody wants to acknowledge the gigantic suspension of disbelief that’s required to maintain the polite fiction that a fit 5’7″, 100 lb woman can be at least as physically competent as a fit, 6’1″, 210 lb man. It’s ludicrous and did the film no favors.

That aside, what made things worse was that she was a complete incompetent in addition to being a moral coward. At no point did she make a decision during the film’s events that redounded positively to her character. When she wasn’t whining about not knowing what was going on, she was defying orders, pulling guns on her colleagues, and getting herself in more trouble than she could handle on her own. Not since Inspector Clouseau has a law enforcement officer been so bumblingly portrayed, though at least Peter Sellers was hysterically funny and managed to solve the case on his own. As a cipher, lacking personality or judgment, she failed to give the viewer the chance to identify with her even a little bit.

Josh Brolin and his flip-flops wasn’t as charming as he was supposed to be. Daniel Kaluuya had a horribly thankless role as the gay black friend/colleague who probably wasn’t gay. And Benicio Del Toro was tragically wasted, relegated to occasional grunting and mumbling (which isn’t unusual, but in this role, he did even fewer grunts and mumbles than normal).

The scenes with the corrupt cop did nothing to advance story or tension, and should have been left for a future Director’s Cut.

I know everybody works very hard in the movie business, and I don’t enjoy writing negative reviews, but I was not only disappointed in this film, but cheated out of a not-inconsiderable amount of money to see it. Avoid at all costs.

Two-Minute Movie Review: Bone Tomahawk

November 9, 2015 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

Bone Tomahawk is a low-budget movie ($1.8 million) that expertly weaves horror elements into a western setting. It starts off slow and ends with a great payoff, but what keep the slow parts from tedium are the great dialogue and characterization.

As it turns out, the cast took low salaries to make sure the film could get funded: Kurt Russell, Matthew Fox, Richard Jenkins, and Patrick Wilson head it up, and each actor fills his role to a T. Sean Young, David Arquette, and Sid Haig are given minor, even thankless roles, but they do a great job with them.

Chicory, played by Richard Jenkins, has the stand-out role, and his delivery keeps the clever repartee from descending into comedy. Matthew Fox runs a close second as a fastidious-but-murderous figure: he’s grown as a performer since Lost and takes full advantage of his tendency to seem, if not villainous, somewhat questionable of character.

There’s not a lot I can say about this film without giving the fun away: a lot of it comes from the surprise as well as the creepiness. There’s one scene near the end that was particularly gruesome; it’s the first time I can remember feeling nauseated during a film, which says something. Just go see it.

Four out of five stars.

Two-Minute Movie Review: Nightcrawler

September 7, 2015 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

Call it a black comedy, call it a searing indictment of local television news, Nightcrawler is a glorious train wreck of a movie you can’t look away from. Nothing’s wasted in Nightcrawler: there’s no fluff, there’s not one scene or moment out of place. It’s all about Louis Bloom, an extremely terrible person with an ambition to make money that is literally unstoppable.

There’s a dreadful inevitability to the film, which is both its greatest flaw and its real strength. You know where the story’s going. There are no surprises. Whenever there’s a choice to be made that an ethical person would find troubling, Louis jumps in with both feet and a creepy smile. There’s only one path for Louis, so as a viewer, you have to just sit back and marvel.

A man without a past to speak of, Louis is bizarrely opaque, despite that every scene has him in it. We know he’s motivated by money, we know he’s blissfully free of the slightest of moral qualms, but that’s it. He speaks in the blandest corporate-speak you’ve ever heard, full of hysterical cliche and non-sequitur, and occasionally dips into a disquieting kind of menace that you have to think about to make sure you heard correctly. Jake Gyllenhall does a near-perfect job of portraying him in all of his insectile charm.

Some movies live up to the hype, some don’t. Nightcrawler does. It’s not quite a five-star movie, but if you want to spend some quality time in front of a screen, you’ll have to go pretty far to find something better. Four stars out of five.

Two Minute Movie Review: The Conjuring

August 17, 2015 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

Overall, The Conjuring was an entertaining film with some genuine scares and a good cast. It had some significant weaknesses, however, that took the film from very good to just good.

The title suggested witchcraft, but the problem was that the undead witch didn’t actually, you know, conjure anything. So the title was somewhat misleading.

Ed Warren had a calm assurance at the beginning that suggested competence and experience in supernatural occurrences, and the actor did a great job of turning that into genuine alarm when things got dangerous. I don’t know why Lorraine Warren had to dress like a Victorian schoolmarm transplanted into 1971. Lili Taylor was inoffensive, even when possessed (that’s a problem). Ron Livingston was wasted, though he did as much as he could with a mostly thankless role.

There’s such a thing as being based too much on a true story, and that’s where the film fell down. We really didn’t need all five daughters as characters. They tended to blur together except for the really little one and the really big one. The subplot with the evil doll was an utter waste of time that detracted from the movie’s focus. It’s great that the Warrens have their own family and all, but we didn’t need to see their daughter in danger. It muddled things.

So the antagonist was a witch, right? Or was it a demon? Or a demon possessing the now-dead witch? Or a demon/witch amalgam? If it was just an undead witch, then why would an exorcism with a Catholic priest kick her out? I thought exorcism only worked on demons. What happened to the other ghosts: Rory and the maid? Did they get exorcised, too?

The daughter sliding around the living room floor elicited laughs more than terror.

It was mentioned that crucifixes annoy the demon, but apparently don’t stop it. And Ed Warren was able to exorcise the demon himself instead of needing a priest from the Vatican to do it. Does that mean anyone can perform an exorcism? I thought priests had an extra line to God because of their study, their faith, their sacrifices and training. In this film they don’t. Why have priests at all, then? The treatment of religion in the film was muddled, though it was an interesting departure to have the Warrens be, at least partially, people of faith.

I liked the movie, but not that much. 3 out of 5 stars.

Two Minute Movie Review: Wyrmwood

August 10, 2015 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

How many more zombie apocalypse movies do we need?

At least one more. Wyrmwood is it.

Spoilers abound. Read at your own peril.

It’s fun, it’s loud, it’s gory, it’s funny, it’s violent. The budget might be low, but you wouldn’t know it to watch the film. The cast does a great job with what they’ve been given, and even the more mediocre performances were leavened by great lines.

The movie is not without its flaws, but they’re easily overlooked. A big example is the roving experiment truck: if the zombie apocalypse just occurred, how did they get up and running so quickly?

Brooke was a frightening character from beginning to end: physically strong, mentally tough, clever. The filmmakers were smart, however, by not making her a woman who acts like a man to survive.

Barry did fine; if you’re looking for a lot of character depth in a zombie apocalypse film, you’re likely going to be disappointed. Still, he pulled off his role without flaw.

As is usually the case in films like this, the best, most interesting characters never survive; it’s how we are made to feel bad about their exit from the film. Benny was a worthy comedic character, though his delivery at times seemed a little flat. Frank elicited pathos just before his end, which worked.

The two most interesting concepts: zombies as petrol and Brooke’s ability to control zombies, were weird but somehow fit, probably because it’s Australia and we automatically assume that an Aussie film is going to have its own brand of strangeness.

Compare this movie to The Walking Dead, with its endless, heavy, humorless drumbeat of loss and despair and interpersonal conflict. I’d rather watch a zombie apocalypse show like Wyrmwood that doesn’t take itself quite as seriously and includes some fantastical elements.