Shared Darkness

A pleasing throwback to an era in which ideas powered movies more than special effects, sci-fi action thriller In Time makes literal the scramble of underclass day-to-day existence, telling a story wherein everyone ages only to 25, and thereafter survives or perishes by trading on one year of allotted time, which is the currency of the world, and marked by a green countdown clock on their arm. Providing a steady flow of lively entertainment due in large part to the brain-tickling nature of its central conceit, the movie benefits from a superb below-the-line team that gives it a certain stylishness and nice production value, even though budgetary constraints obviously influence some set-ups. In Time only runs into trouble when attempting to service some of the
more whiz-bang elements of its fight-the-powers-that-be plot, instead of taking a honest swing at something more subversive or transgressive. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (20th Century Fox, PG-13, 109 minutes)

Based on the debut tome of gonzo novelist Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary is sort of the filmic equivalent of an unexpected blast of jazz — an amusing slice of tropical noir beholden to little more than its own snappy rhythms. The movie is loosely built around a land-grab plot, but generally three parts soused character study to every one part awakened protagonist ambition, instead just perfectly happy to surf along on the strength of its enjoyably cracked characterizations and rich dialogue.

The story follows Paul Kemp (Johnny Depp), an unhinged functional alcoholic and itinerant journalist who travels from New York City to Puerto Rico to write for a rundown local newspaper that even his new editor, Lotterman (Richard Jenkins), admits is a shell of a publication, and likely to soon shutter. Making friends with a pair of coworkers that could be characterized as Drunk and Drunker (Michael Rispoli and Giovanni Ribisi, respectively), Paul soon crosses paths with Sanderson (Aaron Eckhart), a shady businessman who regards the island’s natural beauty as “God’s idea of money.” Sanderson pitches Paul a sort of “advertorial” deal to drum up phony public support for a massive property development scheme. Paul considers it, but complicating the newly felt pangs of this ethical dilemma is his growing infatuation with Chenault (Amber Heard), Sanderson’s scorching hot but hard-to-read fiancé. Are her flirtations true, or part of some set-up? And does Paul even care?

There’s a pungent aroma that comes off of The Rum Diary, capturing as it does this particular late-Eisenhower era of journalism, with cigarettes in the newsroom and flasks in every jacket pocket. It’s no surprise that the movie is also eminently quotable (“You have a tongue like an accusatory giblet!” rants Paul when he trips on an especially strong drug with a colleague), given that it represents the first film behind the camera in almost two decades from Withnail and I and How To Get Ahead in Advertising writer-director Bruce Robinson, who knows outrageousness well. If you miss the woozy, drunken charm of Depp’s turn in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, before its sequels became bloated special effects reels, this shot of Rum — hardly essential but still a lot of fun — will bring back pleasant memories. (Film District, R, 120 minutes)

It’s a shame more people won’t have the opportunity to see Martha Marcy May Marlene, the superb feature directorial debut of writer-director Sean Durkin, completely cold and not impacted by any marketing impressions. For no matter how good a job the crack publicity staff at Fox Searchlight does in highlighting its ethereal and eerie qualities (and the movie’s poster is very good at that), there’s a special add-on value to letting this film just kind of slowly wash over you, so unfussy and assured are its modes of expression.

In a star-making turn, Elizabeth Olsen portrays Martha (the other names come into play), a young woman who flees from a Catskills Mountains cult and its charismatic leader, Patrick (John Hawkes, fantastic), seeking refuge with her estranged older sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and brother-in-law Ted (Hugh Dancy) at their Connecticut summer home. Beset with paranoia and delusions, Martha refuses to open up about where she’s been the past couple years, though intercut segments fill the audience in on her time at the commune. Several instances of acting out make things awkward, and sisterly tensions eventually reach a boiling point, as Lucy and Ted have plans to start a family and feel they can’t do so while also tending to Martha.

Durkin’s film is characterized by spare production design and a muted color palette that echoes its lead’s emotional detachment. Martha is best when it stays away from more conventional domestic/familial conflict (a slightly overwritten blow-up regarding adult responsibility feels slipped in from the after-school special version of this same story), and instead slowly unfurls its back story, with tantalizing hints of Martha’s trauma and her and Lucy’s troubled shared past. The directing is superb, and Olsen’s performance a star-making turn; this is a gripping debut, with one of the eeriest, most ambiguous endings of the past couple years. See it with a friend — coffee and conversation is sure to follow. (Fox Searchight, R, 101 minutes)

The striking Like Crazy is saddled with an unfortunately innocuous name — the sort given to movies about teenagers ending in some sort of a dance competition — but that’s not terribly surprising since the film is about, well, a pair of perfectly and imperfectly matched young lovers dealing with pangs of separation and the gnawing, cold reality that the hot-burning flame of their relationship may not be a forever-type thing.

The Grand Jury Prize winner at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the movie centers on Jacob (Anton Yelchin) and Anna (Felicity Jones, in a breakthrough performance), who meet in Los Angeles at college and tumble into a romance. When the latter faces an expiring student visa set to pull her back home to England, it tosses a monkey wrench in their would-be summer of love. As is often the case in matters libidinal, Jacob and Anna throw caution to the wind. She stays, but then later, after slipping back to the U.K. for a cousin’s wedding, is barred from re-entry. Long-distance complications ensue, spanning a couple years.

Tender and bittersweet, Like Crazy is constructed in ways that invite an audience to impress upon the film its own memories and nostalgic feelings for that heady, hormonal surge of youthful attraction — meaning evocative framing choices, plenty of delicate, lingering close-ups, and, of course, montages. But there are nuances aplenty and the storytelling sensibility on display here by director Drake Doremus is finely tuned, and a big uptick from his previous outings, Spooner and Douchebag.

Yelchin and especially Jones, meanwhile, give sensitive and smart tightrope performances, and have a natural chemistry with one another that makes them a pleasure to watch. Like Crazy‘s ending is a perhaps willfully ambiguous thing, but also kind of nice insofar as it allows the movie to be a closed-loop romance for those seeking uplift, and a melancholic rumination from adulthood for those who are so sure they know better. (Paramount Vantage, PG-13, 89 minutes)

Not to suggest that the two are in any way equivalent, but wading through Afghanistan and Iraq war documentaries, whose prevalence and grip on the psyche of the fragile American indie filmmaker is evident at festivals across the nation, is often its own kind of special hell, because sub-par storytelling technique is so often brought to bear upon legitimately heartrending stories. The deserving winner of both jury documentary and cinematography awards in the World Cinema category at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Hell and Back Again belies those notions that a nonfiction effort on the subject can’t be artistically minded, and also can’t somehow be as moving as (or even more so than) a scripted dramatic interpretation.

Photojournalist and filmmaker Danfung Dennis served as an embed with the U.S. Marines’ Echo Company 2nd Battalion in Southern Afghanistan in 2009. Footage from this time — visceral, smartly captured, on-the-ground reportage — is interspersed with homefront turbulence once 25-year-old Sergeant Nathan Harris (above left) returns to North Carolina, where he confronts the physical and emotional difficulties of re-adjusting to civilian life with his occasionally overwhelmed wife, Ashley. The result is a powerful subjective experience, in which an audience is given rich and at times uncomfortable transport into the wounded body and mind of a typical American soldier.

The number of journalistic embeds in America’s last two wars has guaranteed that we don’t need to wait on Ridley or Tony Scott to convincingly get a taste of that Middle Eastern sand in our mouths. But so many of these documentaries seem informed by a certain videogame sensibility, in which both militaristic engagement and flipside mundanity are peddled for tension and tension alone. Dennis’ war tapes at first feel like unedited B-reel, but one slowly starts to recognize and come around to the brilliance of their physical and psychological framing, which eschews wildly swung hand-held camerawork and instead focuses largely on the sorts of tasks that even low-level grunts have to concern themselves with — reaching out, through a haze of uncertainty and cultural disconnect, and trying to win the hearts and minds of Afghan citizens.

Dennis also smartly comes at Harris as a subject somewhat elliptically, opting for naturalistic interplay between Nathan and Ashley — and others, including doctors and friends — instead of more direct question-and-answer interview segments. This gives Hell and Back Again a unique, earned intimacy; nothing about its dramatic connections are cheap, or overly manipulated. Masterfully edited in concert with Fiona Otway, the movie overlays shots and sound in a manner that truly means something, and affords glimpses into the fractured thinking of combat veterans. A dozen soldiers or more can talk about the feeling of wishing they were back in Iraq or Afghanistan, but when Dennis shows Harris gazing wistfully at a Call of Duty 4 sales case in Wal-Mart, and intercuts this and game-play footage with audio and other embed material from an Afghanistan raid, it powerfully illustrates the fundamental changes in brain activity and mental health that war generates. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information about the movie, meanwhile, click here. (Docurama, unrated, 88 minutes)

Eminent plastic surgeon Dr. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas), ever since his wife was horribly burned in a car crash, has been interested in creating a synthetic skin with which he could have saved her. After years of boundary-pushing research he finally cultivates an inflammable epidermis, and sets out to test it on a human guinea pig. Assisted by his longtime, live-in housekeeper Marilia (Marisa Paredes), Ledgard painstakingly performs dozens if not hundreds of skin grafts on a mysterious woman (Elena Anaya), who’s clothed in tight tan body stockings and kept locked away in his Toledo mansion, not unlike Rapunzel. When Marilia’s estranged, fugitive son Zeca (Roberto Alamo) talks his way into Ledgard’s house, it sets in motion a chain of lethal events, which is then interspersed with material from six years earlier, shedding further light on the full nature of Ledgard’s personal tragedy with his wife and daughter.

The Skin I Live In is a movie at once artful and demented, the sort of blend one can’t imagine a lot of filmmakers attempting, let alone pulling off as engagingly as director Pedro Almodóvar does. Loosely based on a novella by Thierry Jonquet, Almodóvar and Banderas’ first teaming since Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is a little puzzle-box gem of clinically constructed perversity. Some might describe it as tonally schizophrenic or less than the sum of its calculated parts, perhaps feeling a bit tricked by being lured into a psychological horror film whose full-blown depravity takes a while to develop, like a Polaroid.

That criticism, however, doesn’t give due credit to Almodóvar’s orchestration. The filmmaker delivers twists but then toys with audience expectations, and more fully plumbs the psychology of said twists, in often uncomfortable ways, by taking them to warped, quasi-logical extremes. Many of the film’s commingled major themes are familiar — betrayal, loneliness, secrecy, vengeance, sexual identity and compulsion — but they are offset by Alberto Iglesias’ wonderful score, exquisite sets, and characteristically lush production design and costumes, all of which counterbalance the darkness of the material. The result is a Skin one can’t quite imagine anyone other than Almodóvar feeling quite as at ease in. (Sony Pictures Classics, R, 117 minutes)

A winning vocal performance by Antonio Banderas — a zesty, winking turn that jibes with the persona he has chosen to embrace especially for American audiences, that of an exotic, comedically accented “other” — anchors the swashbuckling animated family adventure Puss in Boots, a peppy, character-rooted romp that thankfully abandons some of the more frenzied and forced in-joke references of the Shrek series, which first introduced its main character.

Stylistically, Puss in Boots embraces some of Tex Avery’s manic sensibilities (a character leaving a shadow cut-out of himself when crashing through a barrier, for instance), and is cheekily self-aware without being postmodern; various chase sequences are superlative examples of action animation, meanwhile, goosed up even further by the movie’s stereoscopic 3-D presentation. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Paramount/DreamWorks, PG, 90 minutes)

For the first six months of the year, renowned Spanish chef Ferran Adria closes his tiny restaurant elBulli, overlooking Catalonia’s Costa Brava Bay, and works with his culinary team to prepare for the next season. (Or did — the amazing restaurant has now shuttered permanently, set to re-open in 2014 as only a culinary center and institute.) El Bulli: Cooking in Progress, a rather elegantly simplistic and hands-off exploration of food as avant-garde art, spotlights this unusual process, and cooks up all sorts of elemental yearnings in the tastebuds of viewers. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Alive Minda Cinema/Kino Lorber, unrated, 108 minutes)

Oranges and Sunshine is re-affirming evidence that not every remarkable true story a remarkable film makes. Based on the book Empty Cradles by British social worker Margaret Humphreys, the movie tells the story of its crusading subject, who worked to uncover one of the most shocking government-sanctioned scandals of modern times — the forced deportation of many thousands of children from the United Kingdom to Australia.

Both overall and scene-to-scene, though, the film exudes a just-fine feeling of dutiful emotional string-pulling, and nothing more. It commits no great and cringe-worthy offenses, but neither does it ever really get its hooks into an audience, and make them in a lasting way truly feel either the shock or heartbroken compassion its story should elicit. Mostly, though, Oranges and Sunshine is a “message movie” told in staid, blocky fashion, as if already edited down, content-wise, for a Hallmark-style TV presentation, and the lowest-common-denominator audience that medium occasionally implies. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics, R, 105 minutes)

A documentary snapshot of the blurry, ever-evolving intersection of the relationship between technology and human bonds and grander societal development, Connected is wonderfully emblematic of the ways that intelligent artists can use the medium of film to explore issues and ask questions in a manner that encourages and bolsters a pleasantly unsettled life of exploration and outreach in the minds and hearts of viewers. Self-touted as “an autobiography about love, death and technology,” Tiffany Shlain‘s film is a deeply felt personal travelogue in the vein of Tom Shadyac’s similarly questioning I Am, in which the director set out (broadly speaking) to make sense of his feelings of emptiness in a material world. Part treatise, part psalm, part uncertain investigation, it elucidates and illuminates, imparting facts but never once a sense of holier-than-thou snootiness. Plain and simple, Connected connects, on multiple levels.



The founder of the Webby Awards, Shlain initially embarked upon the film as a more direct exploration of the effects of technology on our daily lives. Just as production was underway, however, she discovered both that she was pregnant with her second child, and that her father and would-be collaborator, surgeon and author Leonard Shlain, was diagnosed with brain cancer, and given only nine months to live. Undeterred, Shlain soldiered on, and incorporated elements of these unfolding events into her narrative, which, among other things, posits that both the advent of the alphabet during humankind’s development and increased literacy over-stimulated the left (more methodical, and traditionally male-associated) hemisphere of the human brain, and that the Internet has a tremendous capacity to synthesize the two hemispheres.

Connected benefits tremendously from Stefan Nadelman’s animation, which gives the film a spry liveliness, as well as the fact that Shlain (along with her credited co-writers) obviously took tremendous care in crafting the movie’s narration, which gives some credit to Peter Coyote but mostly leans on Shlain herself. In stitching together archival images from all sorts of eras and cultures with open-hearted monologues of a more personally-inflected nature, Connected deftly illustrates macro concepts in living, breathing and specifically private ways, and therefore the dependent nature of humankind — on both one another, and the world we inhabit.

Sometimes it alights upon a topic without quite enough set-up (the plight of the honeybees, for instance, already the subject of two other documentaries this year), and other times it misses chances to seemingly better highlight and underscore the often damaging manner in which societal and political problems are dealt with in isolation of one another. The film’s overriding aesthetic is one of hopefulness, though, and while so many other movies or books or speakers portend doom as it relates to technological advance and connection, Shlain’s film makes a fairly convincing case for the net positive effect of a world’s activated central nervous system. It sounds ridiculously simplistic to say, or perhaps faint praise, but at its core Connected is a very human film. It has a soul, and bristles with a hunger and intellectual vigor lacking in all but a small percentage of modern American films. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the movie itself visit the film’s official website, as well as its same-named Facebook page, where there are ongoing discussions about the many issues and ideas raised in the movie. For an interview with Shlain, meanwhile, click here. (Paladin/Moxie Institute, PG, 82 minutes)

A heartfelt and well acted tale of sports underdog uplift, and a marginal recommendation for those interested in its subject matter, The Mighty Macs tells the true story of a driven women’s basketball coach who in the early 1970s turned tiny Immaculata College into a three-time national champion. Achingly familiar in its plotting, and evincing little ambition to stretch beyond its comfortably prescribed parameters of feel-good fortification, the film mainly serves as a nice showcase for Carla Gugino, as well as a piece of Title IX boosterism to remind viewers that sports aren’t some exclusive, birthright domain of just men. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Freestyle Releasing, G, 99 minutes)

Michael Shannon is a talented guy, and has smartly leveraged his Revolutionary Road Oscar nomination into the sort of paycheck-villain roles (battling Superman in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, for instance) that will enable to him to keep making interesting indie projects, so it’s hard to get too bent out of shape over something like the Ohio-set psychological drama Take Shelter, a mannered, interesting failure about a father who might be losing his mind.

Sand-mining crew chief Curtis LaForche and his wife Samantha (Jessica Chastain, making a push for 2011 ubiquitous “It Girl” status) have a modest but good life, even though their six-year-old daughter Hannah needs a cochlear implant. Plagued by violent dreams and visions which presage a coming storm, Curtis becomes convinced he must overhaul and restore the family’s underground shelter, casting into further doubt their already tenuous financial situation. To reveal more unnecessarily undercuts the movie’s slow-burn style, but it suffices to say that domestic arguments ensue and Curtis himself struggles with his actions, unsure whether or not he’s losing his grip on sanity.

Shannon and writer-director Jeff Nichols previously collaborated on 2008’s Shotgun Stories, and obviously have a rapport and mutual affection for one another which results in a film that never feels uncertain about its intentions, however coy and soft-peddled it is. The better, if manifestly less restrained, film in which to watch Shannon lose his mind, though, is 2007’s Bug, co-starring Ashley Judd. Despite Shannon’s Herculean efforts, Take Shelter is, put bluntly, not a movie that earns its two-hour running time.

Caught between trading in symbolism and narrative revelation, Nichols never finds a way to lift Hannah to the status of anything other than a dramatic marker, a pawn in Curtis’ plight. More problematically, though, about an hour in Nichols abandons the eerie manifestations of storms both real and imagined, which robs Take Shelter of the chance of accumulating a more pronounced sense of doom. When the last, proudly ambiguous note is struck, one leaves convinced only that there exists a greater exploitation of this same concept yet to be made, one with sharper contrasts and more starkly defined stakes. (Sony Pictures Classics, R, 120 minutes)

If one could entirely banish certain ideas for scenes from the minds of all screenwriters, then surely on the top 10 list for such cinematic excommunication would be press conference confessionals, which at some point must have seemed really bold and original but by now almost without fail come across as lazy and pat — an entirely synthetic way to give an audience the feeling of a character-awakening conclusion without any of the heavy lifting that accompanies honest reflection. Such is the dispiriting end point for Father of Invention, a weird and fitfully fresh comedy with a name-heavy cast that almost methodically fumbles away a viewer’s engagement, leaving them instead with thoughts of what could have been.

Robert Axle (Kevin Spacey) is an ego-driven infomercial guru who made his fortune fabricating mash-up inventions that maximized “the atomic and molecular potential” of purchasers (think a pepper spray-camera hybrid, so that one could snap photos of their attacker). A class action lawsuit related to one of his products landed him in jail, though, and when he gets out eight years later his wife Lorraine (Virginia Madsen) is remarried to Jerry (Craig Robinson). Robert lands a retail job working at a wholesale discount store under the high-strung Troy Coangelo (Johnny Knoxville) and his semi-estranged daughter Claire (Camilla Belle), now 22, grants him a place to live, but Robert almost immediately butts heads with one of her roommates, lesbian gym teacher Phoebe (Heather Graham). Robert’s big dream is get back into business, however, so he starts hitting the pavement and trying to come up with partners and financial backers for a new idea. Will a return to some of his old habits, however, land him back in trouble?

Spacey is custom-built for a guy like Axle — half heart, and half ambitious huckster — and he anchors Father of Invention with aplomb. The other performances don’t always feel like they’re from the same movie, though, even though decent joke-writing gives the actors piecemeal opportunities to shine. Director Trent Cooper cycles through lots of set-ups (somewhat refreshingly, the movie isn’t afraid to haul in a new character or setting for a joke), but after a while the narrative just seems manic and unfocused. There are so many elements to serve — from father/daughter reconciliation and Jerry and Lorraine’s pending bankruptcy to an eventual thawing and flirtation between Robert and Phoebe and even the parental divorce of Claire’s other roommate — that Father of Invention takes on the quality of a high school term paper thrown together at the last minute, all unconnected facts and half-baked assertions.

Does the movie desire to be a wacky ensemble comedy? Does it want to be a comedic-leaning tale of familial redemption? Or is it more expressly about Robert’s professional journey? The filmmakers can’t decide, ultimately, so a viewer mostly stops caring. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Anchor Bay, PG-13, 93 minutes)