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 his narrative feature film debut, Oranges and Sunshine, director Jim Loach chose to tackle a sprawling tale of warped governmental policy, spanning three decades and involving the forced deportation of British kids to Australia. Almost as shocking as its narrative — which tells the story of literally tens of thousands of children, and the terrible abuses they suffered after in many cases being told that their parents were dead — is the fact that it is hardly known in the United States, where tales of adolescent mistreatment and murder are typically seized upon with a white-hot tabloid fervor, grist for the mill of the 24-hour cable news channels. I had the chance recently to speak to Loach one-on-one, about his movie, his leading lady Emily Watson and, yes, his famous filmmaker father. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the interview.
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)
Comedy is unshakably in the blood of writer-director Trent Cooper, whose latest film, the rangy ensemble farce Father of Invention, centers on a disgraced infomercial wizard, Robert Axle (Kevin Spacey), who gets out of prison and tries to start putting his life back together. Robert shacks up with his semi-estranged daughter (Camilla Belle) and her roommates, and gets a job working at a retail superstore, but finds his ex-wife (Virginia Madsen) remarried, and various attempts to secure start-up financing for a new idea stymied at every turn. I recently had a chance to talk one-on-one with Cooper, about his new movie, his feelings of warmth and affinity for Larry the Cable Guy, the debt of gratitude he owes Samuel L. Jackson, and, well, first names. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the quick, fun read.
Climate change documentaries are seemingly a dime a dozen, but the briskly paced Eye of the Future sets its sights on innovative measures to reduce our global carbon footprint, and additionally filters its discussion points through those that will eventually be in a position to enact such potential solutions — smart kids of today.
Directed by Catherine Cunningham, this 45-minute curated non-fiction flick charts five children of UN ambassadors who are called to imagine a new, sustainable future for a global society. The “questing” format and structure of the movie invites the sort of fantastical, participatory imagination most frequently found in the under-10 set, but there are factoids and other information here that older audiences can learn from as well. For general audiences there are better places to start, but for those invested in environmental issues and seeking to better explain their feelings to youngsters, this is a worthwhile movie.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Eye of the Future comes to DVD on a region-free disc, presented in 1.78:1 widescreen. Special features consist of a collection of reflections from global leaders, plus a clutch of entrepreneurial ideas bundled together in a featurette entitled “Rework the World.” For more information visit distributor Cinema Libre’s website, or click here; to purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. Eye of the Future is also available across various digital platforms. B- (Movie) C+ (Disc)
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)
For my latest DVD/Blu-ray column, over at ShockYa, I take a look at documentaries about dust (yes, dust!), urban farms, and Julian Assange and WikiLeaks; Maria Bello and Michael Sheen’s well-meaning Beautiful Boy; as well as the inherent falseness of a movie about a fat kid who wears continually pajamas to high school. Oh, and I also shine a light on which straight-to-video Samuel L. Jackson movie works in an Office Space in-joke. Again, it’s all over at ShockYa, so click here for the full, fun read.
Having one of the defining events of your life adapted into a major motion picture while you’re still alive (and working on those same issues) is weird, discombobulating stuff. Such is the case, though, for Nottingham social worker Margaret Humphreys, whose work in uncovering the forced deportation of thousands of British children is the basis for the new film Oranges and Sunshine, starring Emily Watson and directed by Jim Loach. Almost single-handedly, Humphreys brought authorities to account and drew worldwide attention to an extraordinary (and extraordinarily recent) miscarriage of justice, in which disadvantaged children as young as four years old were told that their parents were dead, and then sent to children’s homes in Australia, where many suffered appalling abuse. I recently had the chance to speak with Humphreys one-on-one, and the conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa.
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)
The word “Riverdance” isn’t really used, but that’s what the documentary Jig puts under the microscope — the story of the 40th Irish Dancing World Championships, and specifically the leg-splaying competitions between certain youth subsets. To that end, there’s some absolutely fantastic talent on display in this ambling but only passably inquisitive nonfiction film, meaning that those inclined to like this sort of thing (those who might have a TiVo season pass for TLC’s Toddlers & Tiaras, say) will find in this plenty to like. General audiences, however, may feel a bit danced out.
Unfolding in the final months leading up to the aforementioned March,
2010, competition in Glasgow, Jig charts a number of highly
skilled young folk dancers — precious few of whom have any connection
to the rapid step-dancing genre’s link to Irish culture — and loosely
pairs off some of them who will eventually be competing against one
another. The film is comparable to but not quite as engaging as the
recent documentary Make Believe: The Battle To Become the World’s Best
Teen Magician. The subjects in Jig all put in and exhibit
an equal amount of hard work and dedication, but the latter movie has
significantly better guides, if you will, and a sharper focus. It
succeeds in eliciting information and perspectives from its young
would-be magicians, whereas most of Jig director Sue Bourne’s
interview chats, while perfectly amiable, are less revelatory.
They do less to connect the kids’ passion for dance to the different
ways it makes them feel, and how they see it eventually integrated into
their adult lives.
Watching excellence in almost any field, and
the pursuit of the same, can be a fortifying and rewarding experience.
And it’s certainly interesting to see the wide variety of personalities
(a group of Russians, an adopted Sri Lankan teen living in Holland)
drawn to this extremely difficult and competitive discipline, which
provides an unusual juxtaposition of grace and power in the stillness of
its dancers’ upper bodies and the machine-gun rhythms of their legs.
But Jig doesn’t spend a whole lot of time elucidating the
actual steps of Irish dance (perhaps by design, as one judge later
says it’s a highly subjective art form), and the movie unfurls as a haze
of practice and performance footage — again, frequently impressive —
with neither much contextual mooring nor ambition in staging. It’s just
kids dancing, and competing. Some eventually win, and some will lose —
as often happens in life
Housed in a complementary cardboard slipcover, Jig comes to Blu-ray presented in a superb 1080p transfer, and with a decent little clutch of supplemental bonus features. Director Bourne and eight-time world champion John Carey each provide feature-length audio commentary tracks. There are also bonus story segments, and a brief featurette on world-famous costume designer Gavin Doherty. Seventeen minutes of footage centers on the Dziak family from Chicago, and their six dancing kids — obviously an extra story strand that was discarded in editing. There’s also four minutes of footage from a movie-sponsored event to break the Guinness world’s record for most dancers doing the jig at the same time; it’s a piece of feel-good, successful boosterism (652 folks participate, of all ages and shapes), though I don’t know how I feel about the celebratory use of the word “jiggers” in the special shout-out of thanks. That’s a bit… unnerving. C+ (Movie) B+ (Disc)
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)
The art of reflexive cinematic disquisition — in which an area of putative inquiry and the very arc of the filmmaker’s own artistic quest are commingled, and presented alongside one another — is a tricky feat. It can make for heady entertainment when the pretzel makers are whipsmart (witness Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze’s Adaptation, for instance), and even give extra layers of sociological heft and insight to nonfiction films, as in works like Capturing the Friedmans and Catfish. For Pamela Yates’ Granito: How To Nail a Dictator, however, which premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, it just doesn’t work, alas. Instead, it serves as a leaden weight on the well-meaning material, dragging it down into the depths of an inelegant bore. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (International Film Circuit, unrated, 103 minutes)
A surprisingly well known cast (fronted by Nicholas D’Agosto, of the underrated Fired Up!) headlines Mardi Gras: Spring Break, a dispiriting slice of purported comedy that provides little more than a thinly stitched together parade of nudity, and denigrates the current trend of Hollywood capital infusion into the city of New Orleans. Nothing about this loud, unsubtle and roundly unfunny stinker merits much attention or discussion; it’s the sort of film that no cast member would bring up freely of their own volition in any interview. Hell, I believe even Carmen Electra (who cameos as herself), a woman for whom the sentiment is mostly foreign, probably feels some shame about her participation in this. Nevertheless, for the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Samuel Goldwyn, R, 88 minutes)
One assumes that handsome paydays for all and possibly some sort of foreign tax shelter were the reasons for the birthing of Trespass, a massively retarded home invasion thriller directed by Joel Schumacher and starring Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman that otherwise exhibits no particular reason for existing.
Cage plays Kyle Miller, an unfashionably bespectacled diamond dealer whose wall-safe password is “diamond.” He lives in a well-appointed home in a gated community, with his wife Sarah (Kidman) and teenage daughter, Avery (Liana Liberato). On the surface everything is good, but there are ripples of marital and familial discord. These mere pebbles in the pond are put in perspective, however, when a group of thugs (Ben Mendelsohn, Cam Gigandet, Jordana Spiro and Dash Mihok) gain entry to his house posing as cops. They demand that he give them diamonds and cash. He refuses, but when Avery — who has snuck out to a party — returns home, Kyle loses the upper hand, and finds he and his family locked in a struggle of wills with these brutish interlopers. As their focus and allegiance to one another begins to crack, can Kyle exploit these problems to save his family?
Writer Karl Gajdusek, whose screen credits include The Mechanic and Unknown, also has many playwriting credits to his name, which is rather baffling given the many narrative set-ups that come to no greater fruition within Trespass. There are a couple smart physical details (the would-be burglars have tape affixed to the pads of their fingers), but the film cycles through so many ridiculous stories and motivations pegged to the criminals’ intent as to court outright boredom. And the dialogue that Gajdusek gives them invariably sounds pedantic or awkward coming out of their mouths (“Every minute we stay past the first 20 minutes ups our risk of being caught by 10 percent!”), as if cobbled together from a bunch of different newspaper articles about similar domestic robberies.
The idea of madly inept and/or fucked up intruders could be plumbed to delicious, ironic and/or subversive effect, but Trespass is played bewilderingly straight, even with Cage’s tinny, warbled accent flickering in and out. The performances seem to exist on different emotional planes, giving the film an uneven feeling, but the most damning thing about the movie is the fact that it so consistently introduces little plot twists and turns that portend intriguing wrinkles which never arrive. The result engenders a cyclical response through the stages of grief — first confusion, then denial, and finally anger. Trespass is fascinating, all right, but for none of the wrong reasons. (Millennium Entertainment, R, 90 minutes)
Because the phrase “hillbilly cannibals” really whets one’s appetite, Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings is offering up a “cannibal cookbook”via its Facebook page, just in time for Halloween. You know, in case peeled grapes in a paper bag long ago lost their thrill for you.
Nell this ain’t, that’s for sure. Adapted by director Lucky McKee
from a novel he co-wrote with Jack Ketchum, The Woman tells the
story of an antisocial, outright feral female who’s lived in the wild as
an animal, and what happens when she’s captured and held by a rural
family, in a perverted attempt to foist “civilized” behavior upon her.
Walkouts supposedly overwhelmed the movie’s Sundance Film Festival
premiere presentation earlier this year, and it’s easy to understand
why, given the pattycake niceness of so many indie narratives,
especially in that venue. The Woman is at once grim and kind
of outlandish, but also extraordinarily well crafted — more than
enough to queasily pull an audience along, even somewhat against their
will.
Real estate lawyer Chris Cleek (Sean Bridgers) lives a very traditional and seemingly simple life with his wife Belle (Angela Bettis) and family, which also includes teenage daughter Peggy (Lauren Ashley Carter), pubescent son Brian (Zach Rand) and youngest daughter Darlin’ (Shyla Molhusen). One day he stumbles across a filthy, hunched over woman (Pollyanna McIntosh, above) bathing in a nearby creek; he later returns and captures her. Shackling her up in the family’s cellar, he presents her cultivation and betterment as a “family project.” Neither the woman (who communicates only in icy glares and pre-verbal grunts) chomping off a portion of Chris’ finger and certainly not the growing unease of his wife can dissuade him from this seemingly bizarre focus; no one else gets a vote in this very patriarchal hierarchy. Of course, bad things eventually happen.
In films like the striking May and Red, McKee has shown an unusual flair for summoning dread and horror from curious places and angles, and part of the sly genius of The Woman is that it is the exact opposite of gleefully deranged. Its concept may be peculiar and out-there, but McKee imbues it with a deep and disarming ordinariness, allowing depravity to kind of bleed into the picture on its own slow terms. This seems crazy, of course, but its snarling central subject aside, everyone else in The Woman is essentially acting as if they are in a family drama — which of course they are. Chris seems a punitive figure, but the full measure of his psychosis comes into focus slowly, like a Polaroid picture.
If there’s a strike against The Woman, it’s that its finale feels like a manifestation of Weezer’s “Undone (The Sweater Song).” Things unravel at such a quick, woolly clip, and its descent into gory comeuppance feels like something of a sop to genre audiences — more of a payoff for the investment of their time rather than something invested in character. Perhaps in the source material there is a deeper explication of the elicited themes that McKee and Ketchum are aiming to shine a spotlight on in twisted fashion, but these don’t convincingly pay off here, and are a huge disappointment relative to the rest of the movie. Still, this Woman is undeniably unforgettable, and in a world of measured entertainment that so often banks on an evocation of familiar feelings, that’s certainly saying something. For more information, visit www.TheWomanMovie.com. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, meanwhile, click here. (Bloody Disgusting Films, R, 103 minutes)
Professional jackass Johnny Knoxville and Patton Oswalt, widely regarded as one of the best and most transgressive stand-up comedians of the last decade, have signed on to co-star in The Catechism Cataclysm director Todd Rohal’s latest film, an outlandish yet poignant comedy about a pair of battling brothers who attempt to honor the memory of their ailing father by taking a troop of boys on a camping trip that goes wildly wrong.
The still untitled film from emerging comedic auteur Rohal is loosely based on his experiences growing up. Production began several weeks ago, during the last week of August, and Maura Tierney, The Daily Show correspondent Rob Riggle, and Patrice O’Neal are also on board for the ensemble comedy. Look for more on The Catechism Cataclysm, meanwhile, next week.
An energetic and curiously faithful remake of the 1984 film of the same name starring Kevin Bacon, writer-director Craig Brewer’s Footloose is a virtual cinematic poison pill to anyone irrevocably divorced from any trace memories of adolescent feeling, and further proof that in life but especially art feeling is stronger than thought. Transparently but for the most part effectively rousing, this modestly pitched movie breaks no new ground, but also evinces no ambition to do so. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Paramount, PG-13, 113 minutes)
Over at ShockYa, for my latest Blu-ray/DVD column, I take a gander at Tim Burton and Henry Selick’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, a bunch of horror flicks, a pair of documentaries on men that could scarcely be more different (New York Times society photographer Bill Cunningham and schlock-meister Herschell Gordon Lewis), and the film that inspired Austin Powers‘ machine-gun-breasted fembots. Again, it’s over at ShockYa, so for the full read, click here.
Eschewing the expectation that he perhaps stick to cranking out hand-wringing dramas of uptight manners, Atonement and Pride & Prejudice director Joe Wright veers in a surprising new direction with the revenge thriller Hanna, which courses with an unflagging, forward-leaning vigor. The engaging results, which feel like a bold, purposeful step toward modernity on his part, show he has a good instinct for melding the dynamics of a more conventional piece of pop action entertainment with something a bit offbeat and barbed.
The film opens in the snowy wilds of Finland, where 16-year-old Hanna Heller (Saoirse Ronan) has the strength, stamina, smarts and lethal combat skill set of a soldier twice her age, thanks to the intense training of her father Erik (Eric Bana), an ex-CIA agent. The reasons for their curious, extreme isolation come into focus when Hanna indicates her readiness to finally accept a long-planned quest of revenge against a seemingly ruthless government operative from Erik’s past, Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett). As Hanna tries to carry out her solo mission and then reunite with Erik, darker secrets about both her past and her father’s relationship with Marissa color the wild, life-and-death struggle for which she’s been preparing her entire life.
Hanna starts with a bang, like a thoroughbred horse out of the starting gate, and though on rare occasion it feels like it suffers from a case of slight stylistic overreach, a narrative significance and reasoning for this tack develops, and so Wright plugs into a punkish energy arguably not as convincingly attached to a female action protagonist since Run Lola Run. Since Hanna is constantly learning more about her past, too, the movie is gripping as a quasi-amnesiac thriller, a la The Bourne Identity. The little-girl-assassin underpinnings make the film sound vaguely like Kick-Ass, but Hanna‘s human contours make it more rooted in character, and reminiscent of something like The Professional, albeit with a few booster supplements.
Cinematographer Alwin Küchler luxurious widescreen framing, combined with frequently long takes, nicely showcases Sarah Greenwood’s fabulous production design. Wright and his collaborators also seed their work with various fairytale allusions. With her severe makeup, ruby-red lipstick and stalking demeanor, Marissa echoes a wicked witch, and Erik is an earthy woodcutter in the vein of Rapunzel’s father. Various settings are similarly informed by fairytale archetypes. An undeniably strong selling point of Hanna is also found in its bristling, innovative score from the Chemical Brothers, which alternately gurgles, throbs and pulsates, sounding at times like a Madhatter’s rave. It’s an exceptionally imaginative soundtrack that expands upon staid notions of film scoring.
Blanchett’s steeliness gives Hanna a welcome edge and depth, since one hypothesizes her inflexibility is rooted in some moral reasoning. Wright, meanwhile, obviously has a good rapport with his Atonement collaborator Ronan, and it is the latter’s preternatural maturity that powers this ride. She imbues her character with depth, and also handles the considerable physical demands with aplomb.
Housed in a standard plastic case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover, Hanna comes to Blu-ray presented in a stunning 1080p high-definition 2.40:1 widescreen transfer, and anchored by an English language DTS-HD master audio 5.1 track. (DVS 2.0, as well as Spanish and French DTS surround 5.1 tracks are also available.) In addition to BD-Live content and a digital copy, a nice slate of bonus features consist of four minutes of deleted scenes, an audio commentary track with Wright, a two-minute look at the movie’s expansive location filming, a six-minute look at Ed and Tom Rowlands’ approach to writing the score, a breakout featurette examining the film’s stunning “Camp G” escape sequence, and a 13-minute featurette with plenty of behind-the-scenes footage and fight training material showcasing Ronan’s work with stunt coordinator Jeff Imada. This is a great movie, and a right proper home video release that invites multiple viewings. To purchase the Blu-ray via Amazon, click here. A- (Movie) A- (Disc)
A big talent in a little package, singer and actress Mya has made her name in a variety of fields, from platinum albums to placing second on the ninth season of the hit show Dancing With the Stars. I recently had a chance to talk one-on-one to the 32-year-old multi-hyphenate, about the new-to-DVD romantic comedy The Heart Specialist, her thoughts on sex tapes (celebrity and otherwise), her view of changes to the music industry over the past decade, and what she’s doing with her free time. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.
In his new documentary Sarah Palin: You Betcha!, director Nick Broomfield indulges in some of his characteristically bumbling, nice-guy provocation, learning more about Palin’s background and hometown while engaging in what seemingly becomes an increasingly futile attempt to secure an interview with her. Fortunately, the British-born filmmaker isn’t as difficult to pin down as his most recent subject. I had a chance to speak to Broomfield one-on-one recently, and although the conversation occurred just days before Palin officially announced that she is not seeking the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, the light that he sheds on her upbringing and early political career via the nearly three months he spent in Wasilla, Alaska, during his film’s production is still eye-opening and quite illuminating as to her mettle. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.
For all their amazing feats, athletes, even those of ferocious competitiveness and incredible and finely honed individual skill, sometimes evince a lack of joy, perhaps because their profession is dictated to some degree by body shape and size, pedigree, or simply the fact that it was drummed into their head long ago that their self-worth was entirely tied to this game or that. For me, that’s why amateur sports — particularly something like college basketball, where rivalries often span generations — possess such a special allure. There’s an innately human joy in bearing witness to someone doing something they truly and deeply love, no matter the money, and also do it well — especially if they’re a youngster. And that joy is on ample display in Make Believe: The Battle to Become the World’s Best Teen Magician, a superlative new documentary that radiates an absolutely positive energy.
Of a piece with 2003’s Spellbound and 2007’s The Kong of King: A Fistful of Quarters (no surprise, since it’s executive produced by Seth Gordon, the man behind that hit documentary), Make Believe puts a death grip on one’s attention not because of any grand understanding about the allure of magic that it imparts, but because these are bright if somewhat differently focused kids with a depth of insight and a remarkable amount of self-awareness. Ergo, it’s rewarding to listen to them talk about their interest in magic, and how it makes them feel.
As with any number of other comfortable, more conventional teen narrative features, the dramatic arc here tracks a few months of practice leading up to the teen-classification finals of the prestigious World Magic Seminar in Las Vegas, sponsored and endorsed by various organizational bodies and world-famous magician Lance Burton. Of the five subjects on which the film focuses (one is actually a pair, from South Africa), there’s not a rotten apple in the bunch. Hiroki Hara, from a small village in Japan, has a strong affinity for nature, and utilizes rocks and leaves in his act. Seventeen-year-old rings expert and Magic Castle Junior Club member Krystyn Lambert, from Malibu, is one of those preternatural teens who seems to excel at everything. Chicago native Bill Koch, on a year’s sabbatical from college, manufactures many of his own props, including for a complex illusion involving mock iPods. The youngest interviewee, Derek McKee (above), may also be the most touchingly unguarded and eloquent — which is saying something, since all of the participants are quite candid, including a few bewildered siblings or adult caretakers.
The winner of the Best Documentary Prize at last year’s Los Angeles Film Festival, Make Believe could be more comprehensive and detailed with regards to its putative subject of inquiry, certainly. There’s really only one sort of behind-the-curtain tidbit, in which the ins and outs of “split fans” (also seen above) are explained, using a deck of cards. More about some of the certain tricks would have only increased an appreciation for the skill (and in particular finger dexterity) required to pull them off. Unspoken or more deeply explored, too, is the interesting fact that a good number (though not all) of the participants seem to come from broken or single parent homes. While understandably no kid would necessarily be keen to discuss the details of a messy home life, investigating this a bit, along with other surface similarities, would have provided a greater illumination of the type of personalities that find themselves drawn to magic.
Still, watching Make Believe, one’s heart sings, caught up as it is in the dreams and aspirations of these talented kids. It’s a reminder, too — removed from the harsh glare of peer judgment — that all the kids with the quirkier interests and hobbies in high school were probably the coolest, and stand a better chance today of making their own unique way in the world.
Housed in a plastic EcoTech Amaray case made from 100 percent recycled material that doesn’t sacrifice any sturdiness, Make Believe comes to DVD presented in 16×9 widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track. Its supplemental features are an interesting mixed bag. Character profiles give a bit more biography on the movie’s interviewees and subjects, but 90 seconds of material from Make Believe‘s Los Angeles Film Festival presentation (billed as a Q&A) is a yawn, and waste of space. Four minutes of extra interview material spotlighting Lance Burton and other professionals talking up their livelihood is revealing, again, insofar as the articulate nature of many of these gents.
There’s also a six-and-a-half-minute performance from Kyle Eschen, a sardonic youngster, and three-and-a-half minutes of deleted scenes stowed away as an Easter egg (toggle right after scrolling through all the other options on the extras menu), in which Neil Patrick Harris and a curious cat each make striking impressions. Far and away the best bonus feature, though, are the 10 magic tutorials the disc offers up, set to three different skill sets. To purchase the movie from its web site, click here. B+ (Movie) B- (Disc)
