Fleshing out their unreleased 2007 short film Jay and Seth vs. The Apocalypse, multi-hyphenate Seth Rogen and co-producer Jay Baruchel delve into end times with the winning, unabashedly vulgar This Is the End, in which a bunch of comedic Hollywood actors, playing themselves, cope with panic and paranoia while Armageddon unfolds outside around them. Befitting the backslapping nature of its casting, there are inside jokes and side-winding conversational riffs aplenty, but Rogen and his cowriter-director, Evan Goldberg, honor the conceit in all its zonked-out glory, studding their movie with slapstick gore, eccentric supernaturalism, some skewering of disaster and horror movie conventions, and lots of smart digs at particularly masculine vanity and insecurity.
While a lot of the humor in This Is the End trades in baser instincts (there are drugs, projectile vomiting and even point-of-view footage from a decapitated head, and an array of phalluses also make appearances, including the largest glimpsed onscreen since Watchmen), all the irreverent bickering and lashing out leads to some terrifically funny bits. And the movie gets in enough shots at horror films and the recent glut of siege tales to partially qualify as genre parody. Mostly, though, This Is the End is a relationship picture, with an improbably sincere ribbon of fraternal feeling and uplift. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Sony, R, 106 minutes)
Monthly Archives: June 2013
Dances With Films: Tumor: It’s in the System
A recent Los Angeles premiere at the 16th annual Dances With Films, Tumor: It’s in the System joins a considerable slate of contemporary documentaries — inclusive of Peter Nicks’ raw, verité-style The Waiting Room — offering up a damning assessment of different elements of the American health care system. Here it’s a look at how potential alternative treatments (like divisive Gerson therapy) and even cures for cancer have been suppressed since the early 1900s — the implication being that some combination of the bureaucratic regulatory system and the rapacious self-interest of capitalism have combined to incentivize managed treatment of symptoms over the long-term health of the population.
Such material has the capacity to tip over into “black helicopter” territory fairly quickly, but co-directors Valerie McCaffrey and Cindy Pruitt, despite a fevered sense of advocacy that sometimes gets the better of their editorial plotting, do a generally good job of interweaving testimonials from an array of open-minded physicians and unusual survivors whose stories belie the myth that chemotherapy is the only — or indeed, even the best — way to combat cancer. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Become a Revolution Productions, unrated, 76 minutes)
Dances With Films: Kumpania
Hardcore fans of Dancing With the Stars may find ancillary enjoyment and reward in the nonfiction offering Kumpania, which just enjoyed a Los Angeles premiere at the 16th annual Dances With Films. A concise documentary look at flamenco dancing and music, director Katina Dunn’s movie is a subcultural curio invested with much depth of feeling. Those with a predetermined investment in its rhythms will want to get up and dance along. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Piece O’ Work Productions, unrated, 61 minutes)
Dances With Films: Emoticon ;)
The directorial debut of multi-hyphenate Livia De Paolis and a mid-week world premiere at the Dances with Films Festival, Emoticon 😉 (yep, smiley face included, technically) delves into early-onset mid-life uncertainty by way of a career-minded woman’s unexpected pregnancy, and the unlikely friendships she develops with the two teenage kids of her much older lover. Professionally mounted and attractively photographed, this independent production is a fresh, off-the-beaten-path conceit that gets mileage from its willingness to examine notions of non-nuclear family and changing identity.
The story centers around Elena (De Paolis), a 33-year-old PhD. candidate whose boyfriend, Walter (director Michael Cristofer, taking a turn on the other side of the camera), is a divorced father in his 60s. His two kids — teenagers four months apart adopted from separate birth mothers when they were babies, Mandy (Diane Guerrero) and Luke (Miles Chandler) — are at first wary of the presence of yet another new woman in their dad’s life, but when it seems like Elena will be sticking around they open up a bit and Elena wins them over. After having never wanted children previously, meanwhile, when Elena becomes pregnant, she weighs whether her attitude has changed.
Working from a script co-written with Sarah Nerboso, De Paolis proves herself to be a capable filmmaker and an interesting writer, at least from a theoretical perspective, as Emoticon avoids a lot of the pitfalls of vanity writer-director-actor projects, wherein supporting characters get shunted off to the sides. There’s an easy, unforced quality to in particular the adolescent performances here, and Emoticon connects early on for these very reasons. It’s rooted in character, and not concerned with the overly rigid dictates of a capital-N narrative.
Unfortunately, once Elena’s pregnancy is introduced, the film’s plotting starts to lean more heavily on artificial construction. There’s forced parallelism (a pregnancy scare involving Luke’s girlfriend), and when Elena suffers her own tragedy, both Walter and Elena’s mother (Sonia Braga) have to offer up inappropriate and/or tone-deaf responses, in order to baldly goose the dramatic stakes. This is kind of a shame, just because it feels like a punt — the trading in of a messier, more interesting reality for something less honestly derived from character, and more about unnatural catharsis.
Overall, Emoticon isn’t bad, but it also doesn’t reach down quite deep enough for something gritty and true. Its title — which on the surface seems like an odd fit — relates to Elena’s putative research into teens’ use of social media, and how it shapes their relationships, but De Paolis, who has a generally appealing on-screen presence, doesn’t dig deep enough into her character’s intellectual endeavors. When it’s kicking around on the fringe, Emoticon flirts with some interesting things to say about the shifting nature of identity and how it’s tethered to other groups, and even fertility. Too bad that the movie doesn’t bound off into the weeds, but instead stays too close to the familiar, carved garden path. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Circus Road Productions, unrated, 79 minutes)
Liane Balaban Talks Finding Joy, Sexual Knuckling, More
Liane Balaban made quite an impression as Dustin Hoffman’s sweetly sad, set-to-wed daughter in Last Chance Harvey, and will be recognizable to plenty of folks from her recurring role on the small screen’s Supernatural. In her latest film, however, Balaban gets to channel a wild, daffy femininity whose unhinged, slightly damaged siren call will strike a chord of familiarity in many a guy. Finding Joy finds disillusioned author Kyle (Josh Cooke) returning home and having to cope with various indignities tossed his way by his estranged father (Barry Bostwick) and new stepmother (Lainie Kazan). When he meets Balaban’s spunky bohemian title character, frustrated, comedically-inflected romance ensues. I recently had a chance to talk with the Canadian-born actress one-on-one, about Finding Joy, superstitions, her unisex menstruation website and more. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.
Free China: The Courage to Believe
It’s safe to say that Michael Perlman, the director of the new documentary Free China: The Courage to Believe, won’t be receiving the red carpet treatment any time soon in the glorious People’s Republic of China. (Hell, even simply attaching my name to anything other than a vicious attack review may bring about a mysterious denial-of-service incident on this site.) A damning nonfiction look at the human rights abuses of the world’s most populous country as filtered specifically through the oppression of Falun Gong practitioners and two enormously sympathetic, steel-spined subjects, Perlman’s film makes a case for the indomitability of the human spirit and the eventual futility of unreasonable autocratic will.
Free China is so interesting (and important, plus in an odd way reassuring) not merely because it exposes some of the specifics of China’s abysmal human rights record, but because it also ties this issue in with unfair and unjust labor practices. The stories — both individually and on a macro level — are a travesty, certainly, but if there’s a cold comfort to be found it’s in the long-game absurdity of the Chinese government’s attempts to build a Great Internet Firewall, whereby it can keep out all influences and voices around the world it deems inappropriate, and crash it at a moment’s notice to stifle any gathering storm of protest. This may work for a generation, maybe two. But human nature trends toward curiosity, and freedom. It’s a losing strategy in the long term, especially as international consensus pools in areas unattached to China’s opinions. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie and how to take up the banner of its social cause, meanwhile, click here to visit the film’s website. (World2Be Productions, unrated, 61 minutes)
Andrea Riseborough on Shadow Dancer, Her Music Past
She’s already played some famous women — Margaret Thatcher and Wallis Simpson among them, the latter in Madonna’s W.E. — but British-born actress Andrea Riseborough has remained, Stateside at least, something of an unknown. After stealing scenes from Tom Cruise in this spring’s Oblivion, however, that will remain difficult.
Her latest film is director James Marsh‘s Shadow Dancer, based upon Tom Bradby’s same-named novel. In it, Riseborough plays Collette McVeigh, a single mother in 1990s Belfast who, after getting nabbed in an aborted IRA bomb plot, is given a choice by a steely MI5 officer (Clive Owen): lose everything and go to prison for 25 years, or spy and provide information on her hardliner brothers and other IRA members. Recently, I had a chance to speak with Riseborough one-on-one, about her movie, her curious past in avant-garde music, what she enjoys about life in “terrifyingly Republican” Idaho, and what’s next professionally. The chat is excerpted over at Yahoo Movies, so click here for the fun read.
Now You See Me
Four separate magic performers come together, Avengers-style (“Magicians assemble!”), in Now You See Me, a jaunty, Ocean’s-style heist thriller with comedic overtones. Smart casting, agreeable performances and a fresh narrative backdrop power this facile, twisty treat, helmed by Louis Leterrier. If the Robin Hood-esque redistribution-of-wealth undertaking which its protagonists undertake remains a bit undersketched and opportunistic, it barely dents the momentum of this rolling, pleasure-delivering puzzlebox, starring Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Isla Fisher, Mark Ruffalo and Morgan Freeman, among others. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Summit, PG-13, 115 minutes)