Filmmaker David Gordon Green has alternated between independent and studio fare with remarkable facility, but equally impressive has been the difference in styles and genres he has explored. Coming on the heels of 2011’s studio comedies Your Highness and The Sitter, his latest film marks a return to more ruminative waters. A loose adaptation of a recent Icelandic movie, the 1988-set Prince Avalanche stars Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch as a pair of bickering men painting highway road stripes through a desolate Texas countryside that’s been recently ravaged by fire. I recently attended a press day where I had a chance to sit down with Green, and chat about the film and some of his forthcoming projects. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.
Daily Archives: August 13, 2013
Europa Report
A buzzy American premiere at this summer’s Los Angeles Film Festival, director Sebastian Cordero’s low-boil, sci-fi thriller Europa Report has racked up rapturous reviews in large part because of the stark contrast in which it stands to most like-minded genre efforts. Undeniably, it is elegant, understated and wonderfully designed. Unfortunately, it’s also frustratingly hackneyed — a solidly cast, interesting budget concept absolutely wrecked by cross-cutting and needless voiceover.
Penned by Philip Gelatt, the film centers on a mission to Jupiter’s titular icy moon, to investigate the possibility of alien life within our solar system. Six astronauts from all over the globe (Sharlto Copley, Michael Nyqvist, Daniel Wu, Christian Camargo, Karolina Wydra and Anamaria Marinca) are selected for the mission, and after a forced correction on their landing leaves them 100-plus yards from their designed spot for settling, they soon experience a loss of communication with their Earth-bound handler (Embeth Davidtz), plus a shocking discovery more profound than they could have imagined.
Europa Report is anchored by its visuals; cinematographer Enrique Chediak helped design an innovative eight-camera system, wherein lenses are given fixed positions throughout the spaceship, which was created in concert with Oscar-winning production designer Eugenio Caballero. This makes for a unique low-budget experience — one that conveys both the wonderment and claustrophobia of outer space travel.
Director Cordero’s framing and editing choices are terrible, however — full of woeful miscalculations from almost the outset, where mixed direct-address monologues create more of a sense of confusion than audience identification. The story, a bit of speculative/alternative history a la Apollo 18 or Transformers: Dark of the Moon, is in and of itself fine, but the manner in which Europa Report ping-pongs back and forth between different time periods, settings and modes — pre-launch interviews from Earth, omniscient camera footage from the craft, Real World-style confessionals from the craft, press conferences from Earth, etcetera — becomes at first wearying and then just ire-provoking.
There are moments of wonder here — Bear McCreary’s pulsing music, and the austere artfulness of a character drifting off to death in the void of outer space — but Europa Report is a movie that is less than the sum of its parts. For low-fidelity science-fiction, try Moon instead. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Magnet Releasing, PG-13, 90 minutes)
Anton Yelchin, Dakota Johnson Join Cymbeline
Next up for writer-director Michael Almereyda’s modern-day adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline is Anton Yelchin and Dakota Johnson, who join the previously announced Ethan Hawke, Milla Jovovich and Ed Harris. Yelchin, of course, in addition to playing Pavel Chekov in the Star Trek films and delivering some fine work in the lovely, underappreciated Like Crazy, shared a memorable pool scene with Amanda Seyfried and Amber Heard in Alpha Dog; the daughter of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith, Johnson has had small roles in Goats, 21 Jump Street and The Five-Year Engagement.