'The Jungle Book': Animation for a New Generation
It's a weird thing, to be old enough to feel nostalgia for one's own childhood. As the first wave of this millennial generation, and a child of the 90s, I am part of the last generation of people to have watched our movies on VHS cassette. One of those movies amongst a collection of other classic Disney animated films, is the 1967 version of, The Jungle Book.
Thirty-nine years ago a hand-drawn masterpiece debuted (the last animated film that Walt Disney personally oversaw before passing away), I find myself at the famed El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood, waiting for this new update to begin. As a critic amongst critic peers, sitting in a mostly family-and-kids packed screening, I put on my 3-D glasses, and after seeing the opening, iconic, Disney castle and logo fill the screen, we are all one theatre, pulled into a truly amazing, fully digitally animated world that is the Jungle Book for a new generation.
This year's remake of the same name, The Jungle Book brings to the screen the same heart-warming story as the 1967 version, but in dazzling and brilliantly rendered CGI animation (parents, don't fear that this new remake is following the trend of "darker" films – save that for 2018's Warner Brothers version of the remake, simply titled, Jungle Book). The marketing promotes that this film is brought to us "from the Studio that gave us Pirates of the Caribbean," which smartly reminds us that they know how to adapt rollercoaster ride-to-movie experience. Upon dissolving from the Disney logo, the camera glides and flies, twists and turns, over and under vines and tree branches in ride-like manner, as we follow digitally animated wolves and animals scaling the jungle, as well as our protagonist and our young man-cub.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4qgAaxB_pc
Mowgli, played by newcomer Neel Sethi, is the only human onscreen for the entirety of the movie (again, this film should technically be considered an animated film), and gives the sort of school-play performance. Our young Mowgli, swathed in the same red trunk undergarment, is surrounded by the familiar animal friends we all know and love as part of the Jungle Book-lore – and who are all cast perfectly. As Mowgli's protective panther Bagheera, who finds and watches over the young child, Ben Kingsley is strong and eloquent with his English dialect, narrating our way in to this new world. As the threatening and snarling tiger Shere Kahn, fellow Brit Idris Elba (Beasts of No Nation), whose voice you may recognize from the other Disney hit Zootopia, provides the voice of the villain whose distrust of the man-cub sets the story in motion, claiming the young boy is a threat to all of the animal kingdom, vowing to hunt him down to remove him – permanently – from the jungle.
When young Mowgli decides, for the betterment of his family and the rest of the jungle, to leave his wolf family behind, including his mother Raksha (Lupita Nyong'o, Star Wars: The Force Awakens) and father Akela (Giancarlo Esposito, Breaking Bad), he meets the rest of the iconic Jungle Book characters. Credit the film for understanding and playing to all of the characters (and actors) strengths, for the movie blossoms anew in fun in the second act when a lone Mowgli meets his bear pal Baloo, the ever-hilarious Bill Murray.
Murray as Baloo is a delight, and from this point forward, it felt as though the older-aged skewing audience took equal-to-more delight in seeing the lovable bear crack so casually wise as only Murray can. And yes, the iconic songs make the cut here, (Murray's splashy rendition of "The Bare Necessities" feels like it was performed by Disneyland's very own New Orleans Square jazz band) but in good restraint. The movie weaves the songs naturally into the story that's in place, meaning no show-stopping musical numbers here, but that serves the feeling of being a movie all the same. This extends to the other Jungle Book hit "I Wanna Be Like You," sung by the legendary Christopher Walken, as King Louie gets a massive wide-eyed character redesign akin to a slightly more friendly King Kong – slightly.
The Jungle Book is the latest Disney movie from their animated masterpiece canon to get a "live-action" remake (after Cinderella, and look for the recently announced Emily Blunt-starring Mary Poppins). It's a through and through adaptation, almost exact copy and paste of the hand-drawn version, and yet it still feels plumb new, every moment of it captivating and eliciting childlike wonder from all. Director Jon Favreau (Iron Man) whips up a new animated experience for a new generation of kids. Your kids' kids adaptation will most likely be the Virtual-Reality experience, but for now, the film impresses with its use of digital animation, along with the magic that made it so great – those simple, bare necessities.
105 minutes. Rated PG for some sequences of scary action and peril. Now playing everywhere.
'The Adderall Diaries' Is Too Dependent on Its Own Stilted Throes of Pain
"Hurt people hurt people," so the saying goes, and nowhere is that sentiment more deliberately chewed over than in the new memoir-turned-movie, The Adderall Diaries. Like its name sounds, The Adderall Diaries only amounts to be a scattered and disjointed series of high-strung story lines and emotions, not feeling so much individually distinguished as it does overly stuffed.
Based on the best-selling memoir by Stephen Elliott, meta celebrity James Franco plays the aforementioned author, a hotshot young New York novelist (who just happens to have the same cool guy look and swagger of a Franco type, right down to the trademark scruffy facial hair and leather jacket). Franco gets to indulge all of his persona's pleasures here, seeing our main character Stephen writing pages of prose (the film uses cuts of typed passages from the memoir to further blend book-to-movie adaptation) on his laptop in his swanky New York high-rise apartment, signing books at book signings and reading passages at book readings, and generally, living the good life.
With life seemingly worry-free, and needing to decide a next book project to pursue (much to the pressure from his manager, played by Cynthia Nixon), Stephen decides to attend a court hearing of a father (Christian Slater) accused of abusing his kids murdering his wife, making Stephen reflect on his own intensely traumatic and abused past, which is when his world come crashing down. Or, no – it's when he meets an attractive young writer in Lana Edmond (Amber Heard) who shares a similarly troubled childhood as an also-victim of abuse (and who also has dark and mysterious body tattoos as a result of it). Wait, no – it's when his father, Neil Elliott (Ed Harris), the man Stephen holds responsible for abusing and neglecting him, comes into town, does it all come crashing down. Not to put too fine a point on it, but there's a mish-mash of things going on here that all kind of start and stop in a herky-jerky way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qVMu-qnuNg
Perhaps in The Adderall Diaries' original memoir form, the many number of Stephen's side-stories might have woven together in a lighter, more graceful way, rather than feeling as equally competing against each other as they do here. To its credit, the film does attempt to stitch scenes together with a degree of dreamlike qualities and synthy-spaciousness to illicit this lyrical feeling, its sonic space similar to 2014's novel-to-movie, White Bird in a Blizzard. But the forced accumulation of all these things – including a bout of writer's block that relapses Elliott into taking adderall and pills again – feel's like a relentless downpour of self-pity and vanity.
The writing and directing effort here from Pamela Romanowsky (2012's The Color of Time) feels contrived, and so submissive to Franco's star power that it ultimately buckles under artificiality. For any, and certainly, for all of this to stick, Elliott the character needs to be a man we can truly know, and whose vulnerability can be felt and understood by all. Franco's leather jacket, bad boy with daddy issues character, doesn't so much create the character from the book as it does get absorbed into his own persona.
The Adderall Diaries posits spurts of a larger, more interesting idea – that being the connection of memory, and who we think we are and who we see others as from the recollection of past experiences. The movie's further exploration into broken pasts and the people trying to reconcile that with their present situations is something that should've offered a much more universal feeling of catharsis and understanding, rather than with a heavy helping of self-pitying and brooding. Interestingly, the real-life Stephen Elliott even felt the need to explain the differences between his actual life and writing after having seen The Adderall Diaries, which can only speak to the fact that sometimes, full justice might not be served in the pursuit of claiming "artistic liberties."
105 min. Rated R for language throughout, drug use, sexuality, and some aberrant and disturbing content. 'The Adderall Diaries' is currently available exclusively on DirecTV; It will be released theatrically and available on all other digital and cable VOD platforms starting Friday, April 15.
'I Saw the Light' From Hank Williams' Shadow
Audiences are about to see American music icon Hank Williams in a whole new light.
From director Marc Abraham (whose other feature film credit was 2008’s Greg Kinnear-starrer Flash of Genius) comes I Saw the Light, a Hank Williams biopic that brings the singer’s dark past of booze, infidelity, and generally being an all-around “sonuvabitch” to the big screen.
The main problem with the film, which feels like it slogs with a tired morose from start to finish, is that the story of Williams as a drunk isn’t a particularly interesting one–at least not when it isn’t balanced out with any other redeeming parts of his life as an inspired artist, and one so culturally important to rock and roll on the whole. In choosing to focus on the darker and more unknown parts of the troubled star’s life, we also get a heavy heaping of drunkenness and depression which, when assembled together in awkwardly edited fragments of the singer’s life, fail to make the case that his life was movie-worthy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Rp3yup-qe4
Based on the book Hank Williams: The Biography, the film stitches together an assortment of moments from Williams' life–an early marriage to Southern Belle Audrey Williams (Elizabeth Olsen), recording sessions here and there, the arrival of a new child, one or two other scenes of Williams actually performing in concert–along with Williams' indulgences in drugs, alcohol, and women. While Abraham may have wished to tell a more honest story of the man under the 10-gallon cowboy hat by crafting scenes that feature one, two, or three people, the economy of the movie just feels too small to hold interest in. Noticeably, most scenes take place in small recording studios, bedrooms, and other tight spaces, which only ultimately expose how empty the story is; when you notice that Williams is wearing the same pajama pants in three separate bedroom scenes, it's probably clear that there should have been more diversity in scenes, or moments of his life, rather than continuing to beat the movie's central focus of dealing with depravity like a dead horse.
As biopics go, and as another rock biopic to profile a legendary American icon country singer, I Saw the Light won’t be able to distance itself from the Johnny Cash movie Walk the Line, which continues to age and arguably stand as one of the finest biopics ever made. Where Cash's devil-may-care attitude was rebounded by his madly crazy love for one Ms. June Carter (with completely inspired performances from Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon), Williams is portrayed as a man troubled by his own demons and nothing more, which makes for an all-consuming character that comes off as just plain selfish.
Tom Hiddleston manages to give a graceful and connected performance, as the English actor embodies the tortured star in a collected manner with the twinkle in his eye for delinquency. However, something about the lean Brit never feels particularly, dare I say it, American, and with such a limiting script, we never feel like we learn much more about Williams than his more scandalous ways. Elizabeth Olsen is along for the ride as Williams' first wife, in what's a two-hander type role, until around the third act when she (and her overly twangy country drawl) fall into the background when her less than faithful husband finds courtship with two other women. What feels like a cliche device of Williams learning of a chronic back illness that slowly deteriorates his body and psyche, putters out to a less than satisfying ending to what was already a drag.
I Saw the Light fails to deliver what its title promises, as Williams fails to find enlightenment or meaning in a life of fast living. By the time the story caps at his youthful age of 29, we are only left to wonder what this story's fuller potential could have been if it didn't wish to live in the shadows the entire time.
2 hr 3 min. Rated R for some language and brief sexuality/nudity. Opens this Friday.
We've Been Here Before, in Modern Noir 'Too Late'
This review previously ran during the 2015 Los Angeles Film Festival
Having its World Premiere at the LACMA as part of this year's Los Angeles Film Festival, first time feature film director Dennis Hauck, along with a full cast that included lead actor John Hawkes, presented Too Late, a modern day LA-set noir on a grainy, lovely, 35mm print.
Hauck, who introduced the film with his shaggy hair and bearded scruff, looked every part the fictional companion to the film's lead Dick, Private Investigator Mel Sampson (Hawkes), with a stringy, greased mop similar to that of Sampson's solo-riding sleuth self.
Hauck's lax groovy-self is clue enough to serve as a reference point in for any audience to see how the director, who also wrote the script, free-wheeled his own sensibilities into this shoot-from-the-hip noir number, which unfortunately, only supplants limitations into it. While oozing with dutiful detective homage to the likes of Raymond Chandler stories and those smoke-filled pulp noir dime-store novels, tin-thin dialogue and storytelling stands as the dividing line between audiences' being dazzled or dismissive of this midnight flick.
If Tarantino-ringing words fill the entirety of what is spoken onscreen, than Too Late's non-linear storytelling cements it as a drive-in style flick that Pulp Fiction fans can readily wheel around to. However, there's a fine line between archetypal and artificial, and Hauck, with a story centered on the disappearance of a young stripper with a heart of gold, such as the one here named Dorothy (Crystal Reed) who disappears in this seedy Angeleno world filled with equal parts high-powered murderous men, such as dirty-handed crime boss Gordy (Robert Forster) and their always scantily-clad subservients, such as icy stripper Jill (Dichen Lachman), makes this a skirting stroll around the outside edges of what might have been an even juicier crime job, if it wished to be.
And yet, the string of surrounding interstitial characters (including Rider Strong as a comic drug dealer) only exist in relation to our main PI Sampson. Hawkes, a marvel in his character work and character-fleshing, slips into Hauck's sandbox to create a slippery yet cooly collected center of the film. Sampson dodges all of the offered and whizzing pieces that fly by, except there aren't really a ton of flying pieces here for him to really do so, forcing Hawkes to drum up his own inner-cool on his own, which fortunately is a task that his fine actor can do in spades. Hawkes entertains even further in a moment of the film's musical inspiration, as Sampson is urged to pick up an acoustic guitar in a closing nightclub and dilly up an impromptu cowboy-blues ballad, and at the end of a twenty minute long single-take spanning multiple mini-scenes and locations no less.
On this point: most impressive, or at least certainly most defining, is that Too Late is composed of five single-take scenes, assembled in clever order that coyly unearths more of its story with each new moment and scene. The groovy fluidity of craning and gliding cameras moves here and there, settling for a chunk of whip smart banter, and then gliding and tracking to the next composed arrangement and chunk of banter, and so-on and so forth, to give a sense of foreboding fate; as if each new in-scene movement only highlights the inevitability of what is to be revealed next, comic and tragic alike. It's absolutely some of the finest execution in this regard, and as a result, a sense of forward-leaning audience intrigue is felt and creates the needed sense of continually rolling anticipation in its smoky facade of chilled out present-ness.
Too Late is stylishly spun in this real Southern California LA world, on Hollywood Hills cliff-hanging homes, neon-lit strip clubs, and a third act drive-in theater with a ton of visual impress. Too Late has all the cool, dress-up and homage of those delicious noir movies we love so much, even if the biggest crime committed is that it's a little too guilty of knowing and showing it.
Too Late opens limited at the Sundance Sunset Cinemas in Los Angeles on 3/18 and in New York on 3/25, expanding across the country regionally throughout April.
'Eye in the Sky' Explores the Morality of Drone Strikes
Now playing in theaters is Eye in the Sky, an ensemble war movie that examines the morality of drone strikes in the Iraq war. Starring Helen Mirren, Aaron Paul, and the late Alan Rickman, Eye in the Sky provides a unique point of view about modern warfare–specifically, the effects that come from striking from afar when total safety cannot be guaranteed.
Eye in the Sky doesn't play as a dark and gritty war movie, as its focus is not on the boots on the ground stories typically seen in war movies, but rather, on the backdoor political strategies and negotiations that come when discussing airstrikes, bringing to mind the tense and impassioned boardroom discussions a la 12 Angry Men.
As Colonel Katherine Powell, Dame Helen Mirren asserts herself as a UK military leader leading a covert espionage mission, to spy on a terrorist cell’s meeting. As she observes and leads the mission from a British base (the use of remote-controlled cameras disguised as small insects allow them to observe the meeting), Powell communicates to a remote UK board room, filled with political heads and affiliate military members, including Lt. General Frank Benson, played by Alan Rickman who gives his signature calm, cool, and collected intelligence to the mission. When intel reveals bomb vests and explosives, the movie siphons to one question of morality: should a drone strike be ordered to neutralize the enemy, in the middle of a crowded village?
Making the decision harder is the untimely presence of a young local girl, selling bread within the blast zone area. Here, Mirren and Rickman hedge their military experience in advising to follow through with the mission, providing the rationale that in war, saving numerous lives oft comes with sacrifices.
Holding the large weight of the movie's morality is the man with his actual finger on the trigger; Aaron Paul plays Steve Watts, a drone pilot who becomes the sole person left to stand in the way of Powell's orders. Himself being at the center of Powell's own crosshairs leads to tense moments that make for a gripping finale. Director Gavin Hood weaves together a necessary war movie that skillfully navigates through all aspects of the new political landscape of modern warfare.
102 min. Rated R for some violent images and language.
Bumbling 'Barney Thomson' is a Devilish-Enough Time
The title character in the new black comedy Barney Thomson is a barber without a quirk, admitting as much in thick Scottish accent in the film's opening scenes that he "doesn't see the point" – which might be why his barber's chair is the only one empty in a crowded barber shop. The hapless hair-cutter's self-deprecating voice-over of being no-one special, mixed with shots of crime-scene photographs of dismembered body parts, sets the stage for what's to come – the story of an unlucky man finding himself at the center of a serial killer's spree, much like a clumsy cousin of Sweeney Todd.
The directorial debut of comic actor Robert Carlyle, Barney Thomson is a mostly fully amusing effort that goes for laughs by consistently pitting the hapless lad's bad fortune of having dead bodies befall before his feet with the misfortune of having a crime unit that just so happens to also be looking for a wanted murderer. The thick and impassioned Scottish accents complement the deft and lighthearted handling of the gruesome murders, but the way Carlyle sets the thing up makes Barney's sad sack nature and array of bewildered faces makes for a funny outing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=N08oMrX0UMs
Breathing life into this Glasgow-set world are a host of wonderful performances, including a rock-solid Ray Winstone as Investigator Holdall who's got it out for Barney, a surprisingly funny character in Detective Inspector June Robertson (Ashley Jensen), and a hilarious Emma Thompson, who, from the moment we see her hooping and hollering at a Grey Hound race, in marooned bee-hive hair and leopard coat, gives a gem of a hilarious performance, and winks at being somebody with a mysterious secret.
From beginning to end in all 96 minutes, Barney almost begs the audience to see him as a normal Joe of non-importance, and it's a box that almost confines Barney Thomson a bit too much. Like its main character, the movie is a mostly familiar bit of fun that could've pushed the boundaries a little more, though it speaks to the movie's tonal strengths that it gets genuine laughs and genuine gross-outs without any sort of real blood splattering, and instead, smartly written scripting. It has a good burst of first-act fun as we learn the set-up, but as it goes on – and with the exception of a fun second act twist – the movie slogs and pulls its dead weight much like Barney is resigned to do for the rest of the movie, and without much of a final hoorah for our sad sack hero.
Not Rated. 'Barney Thomson' is in theaters today.
'Knight of Cups': Escaping in a World Full of Escape
Christian Bale goes from playing one Dark Knight to another, a dark knight of a man weighed down by his own brooding and self-imposed burdens as he meanders and moseys through what one would surmise to be a personal journey of self-discovery, in Terrence Malick’s new film, Knight of Cups, opening limited in theaters today.
Knight of Cups is truly arthouse cinema. This is not a commercial movie, which means there’s a different sort of story unfurling here not typically seen or expected in mainstream movie-going – which, full disclosure, is also to say that there’s barely a whiff of a story here at all, and is rather a montage of aesthetically beautiful visuals and sequences. It’s certainly an example of fine film-making and craftsmanship, though perhaps to most audiences, it will be that, and nothing more.
The journey and story here, in this beautifully shot film (photographed by Academy Award-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, hot off of his historic third consecutive win for The Revenant) is one of existential crisis in this most modern of ages. What does it mean to live in a world of such available opulence and opportunity, and what does it mean when all of those things mean nothing in the face of un-satisfaction? How does one escape, when one's entire world is the offering of pleasures and escape?
Written (with no official script) and directed by Terrence Malick, Knight of Cups is able to pose these philosophic questions and stir these high-minded thoughts, as his more recent films (The Tree of Life) feel more like abstract compositions that allow audiences to project and infer meaning themselves. The film tells the story of a Hollywood screenwriter, Rick, (Christian Bale) who, sullen and silent, wanders and moseys and hangs his head through the streets of Los Angeles, all the while evoking something between despair and acceptance with breathy voice-over hovering above every moment. Despair and acceptance of what?, you may ask? We see that Rick’s father (Brian Dennehy) may have neglected, or failed to give something to his sons, the other son being a more manic LA type (Wes Bentley).
Rick floats through endless Hollywood Hills parties and nightclub raves like the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future combined, in a sort of fever dream reality. All this, in chaptered storytelling, gives some semblance of structure to the thing. The tarot card motifs and solar and lunar imagery abound here all serve to show that this knight is fated to seek this treasure, this answer, in a world full of distraction and vapidity. The mystique of the goddesses further serve his noble quest, and the film has incredible talent to play these roles. Cate Blanchett, Teresa Palmer, and Natalie Portman all pop up in chapters of Rick’s life, each revealing a part of his spiritual lacking in different ways. It’s a film constructed through the male gaze and understanding of life as he knows it, which will likely further split audience reactions.
Knight of Cups must be regarded for exactly what is is: a work of art. A work of art, in that it holds no commercial value and is rather the work of a singular artist commenting a singular vision and making a grand statement about the universe at large, even if it’s just his own statement (and even if this statement feels as empty and hollow as the world it's commenting on). Fans of Malick’s previous films will know this – others must be warned beforehand, lest they expect something resembling a comfortable narrative to watch.
It’s a tough thing to make aimless wandering exciting to watch, or even empathic, and Knight of Cups will deter people from enjoying it for that reason. It burns ever-slowly, as we the audience are merely along for the ride, moment-to-moment, in which everything exists in the ultra-present of modern day living. Ultimately, it all feels like this longing dream is too abstract to take any substantial meaning from. This knight will most likely continue to wander for the rest of his days, which makes Knight of Cups feel more like a ceaseless spinning of plates.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC-3rnv_b3o
Knight of Cups is rated R for some nudity, sexuality, and language. 1 hr 58 min. Playing at The Landmark and ArcLight Hollywood.
Wacky, Wonderful ‘Hail, Caesar!’ is the Coen Brothers’ Valentine to Classic Hollywood
Around the halfway mark of the Coen Brothers’ newest film, Hail, Caesar!, an audience member was heard voicing his thought that, this was the weirdest movie he had ever seen–and this reviewer wouldn’t say his evaluation was all that far off.
Yet it’s exactly this sort of “weird-ness” that defines any Coen Brothers’ movie, where colorful but mentally clouded characters are typically confronted with cosmically coincidental events, leading to a type of larger, dead-pan comedy, that’s dripping in drop-dead seriousness that forces them to question the meaning of life and their place in the universe.
The universe at large in Hail, Caesar! is the 1950s backlot of the fictional Capitol Pictures, an MGM-like Hollywood studio whose theatrical world offers such wonderfully wacky tangents as bumbling cowboy movie stars lassoing with their spaghetti, as well as looming scares of Communism and learning of the first Hydrogen bombs.
At the center of this world, the ringleader of the Circus, is Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a Hollywood fixer whose job it is to keep the studio’s stars in line, but whose own personal certainties are less assured. As if trying to quit a light smoking habit wasn’t the biggest hiccup in his day (the film covers a twenty-seven-hour day), Mannix learns of the kidnapping and ransom demand of the studio’s biggest star, Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), during the shooting of his lead role in the grandly epic big-picture event, titled, ‘Hail, Caesar!’
Mannix proceeds to bop around from one looney tuned character to the next, including the Dixie-whistling cowboy turned bumbling big screen star Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), twice-divorced movie star DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson), twin sister newspaper journalists Thora and Thessaly Thacker (Tilda Swinton), and tap-dancing Gene Kelly inspired Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum), who all amount to being an embarrassment of riches in Coen-land.
The Hollywood send-up may be much more divisive than the directors’ other films, and likely because it's packaged as a mainstream movie with the likes of George Clooney and Channing Tatum cartooning around as old-timey Hollywood movie stars. But the Coens’ only take the shell of old Hollywood and collapse the facade, exploring stories of kidnapping and hijinks, as well as much larger, universal themes of exploration and questioning, such as Politics, Religion, and other head-scratching questions akin to, What Does It All Mean? This search for meaning in a world so ridiculous, that it allows its audience to see the coded philosophic themes and lessons that its harebrained characters can’t, makes this another winning outing for the Coen’s.
The Coen’s continue to eschew conventions of narrative structure, allowing their incredible style to drive the film here. Audiences expecting a more classic kidnap comedy will most likely be disappointed by the odd tangential storylines, but should know that the minds of this machine are operating on a top-tier level of intelligence that makes a minute long scene, of Hobie Doyle fumbling the phonetics of a sophisticated line like, “Would that it were so simple,” give resonance to the entirety of the story–if only life were so simple.
Hail, Caesar! is now playing in theatres and is rated PG-13 for some suggestive content and smoking.
Review: 'Band of Robbers'
This review initially ran on June 19, 2015
Classic characters from perhaps the greatest literary work of American literature, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer have hit the big screen, in a re-imagining that takes their mischievously-intentioned, hero-of-the-story selves, keeps a driving plot about finding a mythic treasure, and leaves the rest behind – and to good-spirited, well-earned fun in the new film, Band of Robbers.
This timeless twosome, trouble-making in their never-ending pursuit of adventure and hero-seeking recognition and glory, are leveraged here as modern-day treasure seekers, that unite with their trusted merry men in hatching a plan of finding the first clue to the treasure, which first leads them to hold up a pawn shop in plastic grocery bag masks and the escort of "A Mexican." The fun that is had here is in feeling the familiarity of these good ol' boys that live so canonically in culture, and giving them the slick young people's comedic treatment, working off a fine-tuned script and the work of a stellar cast to make for a worthwhile, enjoyable time.
It should be stated early, there's not a whole lot that Robbers truly, truly, lifts from Mark Twain's classic novel or characters other than using the characters' likeliness and winning charms to drop them into this new culture mash-up. It's really just the story of a version of a Huck Finn (Kyle Gallner) and a Tom Sawyer (Adam Nee), where Huck is a recent prison release looking to make clean and Tom is a wily cop whose adventure-seeking ways leads to his character's charming but still law-skirting flirtations, and through this all, they still remain the best of friends, along with a band of other self-affirmed misfit pirate pals.
With nods and instances of looking to weigh itself within the framework of a more classically told story of timeless fashion (to which the film succeeds in operating in this dually opposing mindset), the film is broken up into chapters, black cards with white hand-written scrawl of chapter titles and subtitles that bookend each section of the film to add the intentional, necessary rooting of seriousness before thrusting into the shenanigan-laden episodes that follow.
There's a streak of folksy, whimsy appeal here, which, with the feeling of it being a home-grown indie effort of true charm, along with its premise of a tight-knit group of friends on a headstrong crime spree of a less-than-thought-out scheme, most closely resembles Wes Anderson's winning feature debut, Bottle Rocket (1996). The difference is that it's entirely obvious that everyone here is looking to make themselves into a goofball for a good time, and audiences should find themselves laughing at the number of laugh out loud jokes offered here. When Tom wrangles "the band" back together, after Huck's first day out of the clink (for an unspecified, non-violent crime) and reveals a plan to steal the fabled treasure of Injun Joe, right off the bat, his monologuing is met with raised eyebrows and wry confusions, setting up the level of competency of all involved. The pact is legitimized by – you guessed it – a blood oath (though they compromise in not spilling any actual blood, in this secret meeting at Tommy Barnes' poker table in his "man cave").
The faces and talents enlisted here are truly where the comedy shines. It has the taste of 21 Jump Street comic-firing and timing of every-line-a-joke (and mostly bulls eye's at that), uses some familiar faces and some not-so, in playing a winning hand. Kyle Gallner as Huck is a Jeremy Renner and Rick Grimes a la The Walking Dead, where Adam Nee is as much as stand-out in a role that he knows so well. The geek-beloved Matthew Gray Gubler as Joe Harper, along with Hannibal Burress as Ben Rogers add a deep bench to the effort, with Burress (and "Greg...Knife" nailing every one of his scenes). Melissa Benoist and Eric Christian Olsen also star as little-used Becky Thatcher, Tom's new partner on the day of the planned heist (mention heist) and Sid Sawyer, beloved detective who plays it maybe a bit too straight.
Stephen Lang as Injun Joe (don't worry, in case you forgot, "Injun Joe" was written by Twain as a half Native American, half white man) also adds a villain to fear after, with a gray wig and cowhide jacket with tassels. Though a discomforting laugh is had in light of today's events with ex-NAACP chapter leader Rachel Dolezal when Injun Joe says, "How is it racist to want to be more like another race?" Other than that, Robbers addresses racial tension ingrained in the original text by shifting to the plight of the Latino, as Huck finds a heartfelt cause in defending Jorge Jimenez (Daniel Edward Mora) after he gets the gardener involved in a heist that lands him on the brink of deportation.
Written and directed by brother filmmaking team Aaron and Adam Nee, Robbers went through many years of development (including an idea of it being a TV show) before finally having its world premiere at the LA Film Festival. One wonders what following that version of Huck, Tom, and company may have been like, and what many adventures they may have spun in and out of in sit-com fashion. But its final format of a ninety-five-minute feature film feels like the best use of its talent, sparing any over-indulgence in what could have flopped as a gimmick and succeeds as a send-up that breathes fresh life into an American classic.
Correction: This review was edited from a previous version that misstated the ethnicity of 'Injun Joe'.
Band of Robbers had its World Premiere on Saturday, June 13th, at the LA Film Festival. Info here.
Review: 'Lamb'
Despite its innocently named title, Lamb is difficult watching, perhaps even among the more uncomfortable movies I can ever remember seeing, as it struggles to tackle heavy subject matter that's considered more than politically incorrect.
Lamb is the story of David Lamb (Ross Partridge), a forty-seven-year-old divorcee with slicked-back hair but emotionally empty, apathetic to an ending marriage, father of failing health, and life in general in his deadbeat town. Lamb is approached by an eleven-year-old girl, Tommie (Oona Laurence), who Lamb sees and recognizes as a helpless soul, one who needs his help, and proposes a road trip that the two embark on.
While Lamb forces the viewer to confront discomforting, disturbing, social realities between adults and minors, the film feels mostly insufferable in how it can never justify the situation that puts these two people together to attempt to ask any questions except for how unwarranted and inappropriate the relationship is.
This is the complex area that the film never self-assuredly nails–is David Lamb correct in taking an eleven-year-old girl on the road, or is the entire act inappropriate and wrong? The fact that the movie attempts to walk both sides of the line, and seemingly wish to show a justified relationship between them makes the film too difficult a watch to get on board with.
Lamb is the product of being a novel written by Bonnie Nadzam, and being adapted here by Ross Partridge, who wrote the screenplay, directed, and stars as the titular character. Partridge's attempt at adapting, while courageous in its artistic leap, also feels like a miscalculation of what the movie should be about–or rather, who; Tommie should be our protagonist, but instead we see this film as a means of featuring the fulfilling of David Lamb.
Partridge's Lamb is emotionally unavailable, dealing with whatever difficulties he must take on, and sees a counterpart only in Tommie and her fractured family life. The fact that David sees her as a justified and mature person to satisfy his insecurities and emotional stunting only shows his character's own shortcomings and weaknesses. It's enough to raise interesting questions, but trust me, you'll cringe through it all.
Credit Lamb for not falling on its sword any more than it has by the performance and acting talent of, who should be considered the true lamb of this movie, Oona Laurence. Last seen in Southpaw as well as I Smile Back, Laurence is game and skilled enough to be a strong presence next to her much older captor and self-proclaimed guardian.
While Lamb should be in some part applauded for even attempting to tell such a risky, emotionally vulnerable story, the film still feels like an uncomfortable story that doesn't push boundaries as much as reinforce what makes a story like this wrong for a lot of reasons.
Lamb is now playing at select theaters and iTunes/VOD January 12, 2016.
Ryan's Top 10 Films of 2015
What we consider to be the best of this year represents a combination of the movies that had the greatest emotional impact on us, matched with movies that felt innovative or groundbreaking. Here are the films Ryan considers to be this year’s best:
10. Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief
The only other documentary on this list is awarded to another HBO-distributed film and made with even greater impress. What makes Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief even greater than the film itself is the fact that it even exists in the first place. Director Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) took the film to Sundance this year, unsure if it would even screen due to its controversial subject matter and the people in high positions it could expose– and worried they should have been. Gibney fearlessly peels back the curtain on the religion that is still largely considered a mystery and misunderstood. But beyond revealing the incredulous story behind religion and its founder, L. Ron Hubbard himself, Gibney goes on to show what deeper and darker moments that affect all associated with it in a shocking way. It's the one film that left me feeling amazed at what real-world injustices are happening behind closed doors.
9. Victoria
Victoria most likely won't be on a lot of readers' radars, which is unfortunate for this small Berlin-set movie. If only more audiences knew that this heist-film was shot in a single, uninterrupted take, then maybe people would have been drawn in. Beyond that, however, is a story that supersedes its camera trickery. Victoria, on one late night out, is herself drawn into an unfamiliar world of new friends when Berliners make her acquaintance, eventually befriending the girl who is in turn involved in a bank robbery. The single take never gives the audience a moment to relax, which makes the whole thing an even greater movie-watching experience. When the sun finally rises in this incredible movie, it leaves the watcher feeling amazed at what all just took place in one real, single night.
8. Room
I first heard about 'Room' when I saw the hardcover book a few years back on my mom's bedside dresser. I was familiar with what the story was, about a mother and son being held hostage in a backyard shed for many years, and was intrigued at what its eventual movie adaptation would portray it as. Director Lenny Abrahamson (Frank), along with the novel's author and screenwriter Emma Donoghue, bring an incredible vision to the big screen, focusing the story of these hostages not on the single aspect of harrowing survival, but rather the shared, singular connection between that of mother and son, played by pitch-perfect Brie Larson and young marvel Jacob Tremblay. Room succeeds as a moving love story by mining the most unique and visceral moments in the place both characters only call "Room," to show a reality that can only exist when love is at the center of it. Incredibly directed and acted, there are more than a few sequences that had me arrested in seeing these new worlds for the first time, making this one of the most successful novel-adaptations of this or any year.
7. Love
Gaspar Noe's (Enter the Void) latest film is certainly not for everyone. In fact, it's probably one of the most singularly divisive films of this or any year, due to its incredibly graphic subject matter. Love, the story of two young art-school students, one American and the other Parisian, is the story of heartbreak. Love alternates between past and future events to show every corner of what feels like one of the most authentic relationships captured on screen. Now, the hook here, of course, is that real-life sex scenes link these scenes together–non-staged, non-faked, real-life intercourse. Admittedly, knowing this before going into the movie, I thought that these scenes were only going to be included for the spectacle of it, but what I soon realized was that Love was in fact, a love-story. It was all held together by moving performances and storytelling, making the scenes feel less pornographic and more artfully composed and honest. This movie is for those that are fearless in finding out that all of these moments together make a story that is beautiful, heartbreaking, and boundary-pushing.
6. It Follows
Personally, I don't much prefer watching scary movies. I'll specify this by caveating, that I don't much prefer to watch this new brand of today's scary movies, which are all either entirely built on empty silence/loud-noise moments or of the tasteless torture porn variety. So leave it to It Follows to shake me out of my scary-movie snootiness, and scare me to the core, with it's incredible take on what makes scary movies scary: suspense. With its dry yet direct title, this throwback to 80s-style scary movies punches up suspense more than anything I saw this year, as uninterrupted long takes, seeing out-of-focus characters slowly walk into the foreground, and other great moments, make this simple set-up, about a curse passed on from teen to teen, one that had me breathless and amazed. This is what scary is supposed to feel like.
5. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
It seems like a new movie genre is forming entirely anew at the moment–that being the YA book-turned-movie, about high schoolers dealing with life-altering events. Where The Spectacular Now and The Fault in Our Stars both made their marks as being both of those things, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl did that and more this year. I loved everything about this movie, mostly because it had an undying energy, spirit, and vision, that made this story feel completely new to me. The Sundance movie offered more amazing camerawork and cutting to make this movie unique and different than so many of the same ilk. Do yourself a favor–make sure you catch this deserving movie at your next opportunity.
4. The Revenant
The most immersive and unbelievable movie of the year just needs to be seen to be believed.
3. Inside Out
Cracking the top three for me this year was what we've all come to expect from Pixar: that we should never be able to expect anything as good as Pixar has made until the next one comes out (Unfortunately, that doesn't quite hold true for The Good Dinosaur). As a film, Inside Out is perhaps the most far-out Pixar film in terms of concept alone. To create, from scratch, a movie about the mind of a human, is an unbelievable feat. To do it with such humor, introspection, thoughtfulness, and honesty is to push the cinematic envelope entirely. The journey here, voiced in part by Amy Poehler and Phyllis Smith as "Joy" and "Sadness" to a young girl, was one that made me feel like a kid again.
2. Ex Machina
Ex Machina shines for a number of reasons, of which I'm positive will be the reasons why the film will grow in popularity as a cult and fringe film. It's a sci-fi movie that ditches the cold, unpenetrable, feeling that excludes wider audiences, and it's because it chooses to focus on a more universal element than just science. It would seem that we are now at a point with our technology that filmmakers have begun to ask themselves the question, beyond what my reliance is on technology and artificially intelligent beings, what is my relationship with them on a human and loving scale? Her, the story about a man falling in love with an operating system, preceded Ex Machina in terms of making a movie about the new question this generation is starting to face and it does so with style, intelligence, and incredible foresight. Plus, the winning combination of Oscar Isaac, Domhnall Gleeson, and Alicia Vikander, make this the film to watch simply as the one that had all three of them in this film alone. All three absolutely shine, and the experience of understanding AI beings is made even more real, harrowing, and philosophically poignant than any other like it.
1. Anomalisa
My favorite film of the year is one I'm still in some big ways, puzzled by. Beyond the spectacular blockbuster film-making of the year that Star Wars and The Revenant had, beyond the intense human dramas such as Room and Sicario, my favorite film of the year is a stop-motion movie about a middle-aged customer service salesman. Anomalisa had me laughing, thinking, pondering, heartbroken, and philosophically perplexed, and wrapped in a package of inspired filmmaking. I shouldn't be too surprised, however, as I've grown to be something of a reluctant Charlie Kaufman fan (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)–who makes his mark by telling the stories of the lonely. It's here, however, in Anomalisa, that I found the most human connections of the year in terms of studied human behavior. It's one of the most peculiar films I've ever seen, and it speaks to where we are in this fragmented world more than ever before. It's something that isn't a typical number one pic, but hey–that's what anomalies are.
Honorable Mention
Cobain: Montage of Heck- What more is there to say about Kurt Cobain, almighty rock god and most credited for the birth of the grunge music scene in Seattle, Washington in MTV-era America? As evidenced by Cobain: Montage of Heck, there is an entire world left to say, as director Brett Morgen's HBO documentary showcases new, never-before-seen footage and music to not just fill in the gaps of Cobain's short-lived life, but to tell entirely new chapters of it. The reason that Cobain: Montage of Heck works so well is that this is the only documentary that has been made with the approval and help of the Cobain camp, which includes not only interviews with his mother, father, family members, and Courtney Love herself, but through which all of the new video and music has been provided, coloring in the entire picture of Cobain, the artist, musician, father, poet, and human being.
Review: 'The Big Short'
The economic collapse of the twenty-first century destroyed many family's futures and devastated markets across this country and many others–so why does a movie about just that feel like so much fun? Leave it to the director of Anchorman and Step Brothers to spin the real-life story behind Wall Street's deceptive and unethical trading that led to the global financial crisis into a comical and entertaining watch in the new movie The Big Short.
Based on the 2010 novel, “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine” by author Michael Lewis, director Adam McKay puts his spin on telling the real-life story of four guys who foresaw the growing housing bubble years before it burst, and who decided to risk it big by betting against (or, "shorting") those seemingly safe assets to stand up to big banking's greed.
The Big Short enlists a star-studded cast to play such fun, caricatured characters that make learning about banking terms fun, including Christian Bale as Michael Burry, the genius-level trader who first noticed the unsustainable trends. The film's partial narrator, Ryan Gosling, plays Jared Vennett, a young fiery trader who also bets against the housing crisis, and looks directly into the camera to explain real instances from time to time. Steve Carell plays Mark Baum, a high-strung trader whose early paranoia leads him to take the advice of Vennett and jump into shorting, and who also serves as the movie's most outright moral compass. Brad Pitt also co-stars as a somewhat reclusive trader Ben Rickert.
'The Big Short' is more of a Trojan Horse of a movie intent on explaining just what all exactly led to the financial meltdown–it’s informative and educational, putting Lehman Brothers in layman's terms, if you will.
The inevitable hurdle that a film like this must overcome in order to connect with the audience is to explain to the audience the banking terms and financial practices that led to the collapse in the easiest way possible. Part screwball comedy, The Big Short is more of a Trojan Horse of a movie intent on explaining just what all exactly led to the financial meltdown–it’s informative and educational, putting Lehman Brothers in layman's terms, if you will. The film breaks the fourth wall early and often and unashamedly, regularly pausing the narrative to define or explain some banking terminology or otherwise. This leads to unexpectedly funny moments like Selena Gomez (as herself) explaining to the audience what a credit default swap is.
Stylish and fun, The Big Short plays fast and loose throughout its 130-minute-long run time, necessary for the largely all-over-the-place structure of the story. But this same effect also can't help but rattle around the idea that, besides learning that Wall Street might have been up to shady dealings, that it exposes weak or nonexistent parts of the story that don't add on top of previous learnings.
The better and the worst part of the movie is that we already saw a financial mad-cap set up recently, and with enough pizzaz from Scorsese that it still casts its shadow over this one. In fact, a few instances recall The Wolf of Wall Street enough–the irresponsibility of alpha-dog traders, the talking directly into the camera bit, heck, even Margot Robbie doing so in a bath tub, that it can't help but be compared to the raucous Leo DiCaprio starrer.
For what it's worth, The Big Short is a solid, funny effort that wants to have its fun by peeling away each layer of the corrupt onion. But it also feels like it might just be peeling the same layer back over and over again, doing the same thing many times, which is pretty much like the traders of this movie.
The Big Short is now playing in theaters. Rated R for pervasive language and some sexuality/nudity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgqG3ITMv1Q
Review: 'Uncle Nick'
Depending on your taste for, or general apathy towards, raunchy, tasteless, lazily written and acted humor, Uncle Nick may or may not be your treat this holiday season.
Brian Posehn, known for his bald, nerdy, and overly-large presence in frequent sit-com and sketch comedy pop-ups, is singularly recognizable for his droll and monotonous man-child characters, one of which he lends here as the titular character in this somewhat amusing, mostly groan-worthy movie.
Uncle Nick attempts to ride both sides of the vulgarity fence, by being at one time so unabashedly offensive in its sex-ridden jokes, and yet performing these jokes with such little commitment (much like, Uncle Nick himself), that this hour and thirty-three minute long movie can't make a case for itself for being anything more than just a movie with comedians in it, rather than a funny movie.
Uncle Nick will fill your cup if you're looking for a lewd and lazy Christmas movie – and for ten cents a cup more, will happily join you in getting mindlessly wasted on it.
Credit part of the indifference in this review to the movie's all-too familiar setup that Uncle Nick shamelessly leans on, expecting the freshness of its main character to merit entertainment. While familiar movies of family screw-ups that earn redemption have been made before (the 1989 John Candy-starring and John Hughes-directed classic Uncle Buck comes to mind), the piece that makes their empty-headed antics so lovable is the earnest aloofness at the heart of it. Posehn as Nick, a sweaty and unapologetic alcoholic intent on criticizing younger brother Cody (Beau Ballinger) for both a lifetime of having it all and recent engagement to type-A fun-sucker Sophie (Paget Brewster), as well as set on hooking up with Sophie's daughter Valerie (Melia Renee), is mostly a creepy asshole who doesn't deflate the hypocrisy of others, but rather showboats his own selfish self off.
Tracking alongside the alcohol-fueled and irreverent humor that Uncle Nick sets out to make is the use of a real-life alcohol-fueled riot of American sports legend and. Setting the stage for the film is the real-life story, as told by Nick, of the infamous Ten Cent Beer Night, where, in 1974, the Cleveland Indians sold beer for a dime a cup at a Major League sports game, as many as you could buy or drink. The movie tracks with this story by telling the movie in chapters – "innings," as the movie shows, which parallels re-created black and white and slow mo'd footage of beer slamming baseball fans, a growing friction that ends on this single Christmas Eve night with the rising unrest of history's own beer-slamming drunkards. It's a device that adds an added level of interest
While Uncle Nick is boozy and brash and offers somewhat fun times, its mostly a jerky and un-jolly movie that will probably be shuffled to the bottom of the cue of your next movies to watch. Director Chris Kasick and writer Mike Demski might have fared better if putting more set pieces in the movie instead of just a list of insufferable characters showing different attitudes and one-liners, or at least in preceding with a little more caution before throwing all of the movie's laughs behind Posehn's unlikeable Uncle Nick. Whatever the case, Uncle Nick will fill your cup if you're looking for a lewd and lazy Christmas movie – and for ten cents a cup more, will happily join you in getting mindlessly wasted on it.
Uncle Nick is now playing at the Arena Cinema Hollywood.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G445k45KGr8
AFI Fest Review: 'James White'
One of the most incredibly acted films to play in the “American Independents” section of the festival was the altogether arresting James White, which also astonishingly counts as the first feature film from Josh Mond (Martha Marcy May Marlene, Producer). Told in month-long chapters during one New York winter, White is the story of a son (Christopher Abbott) whose estranged father’s death and mother’s (Cynthia Nixon) cancer diagnosis forces him to confront his personal demons through self-destructive and reckless behavior, which risks his own demise.
As the titular character and lead role, Abbott is given a wonderful opportunity to showcase his talent in a movie vehicle unlike any before (fans will remember Abbott as controversially leaving the HBO critical darling Girls, for reasons unclear), and that he does.
Abbott...gives an incredible performance not soon to be forgotten.
Abbott, whose unhinged and drunkenly erratic behaviors – evocative of a Streetcar-era Brando – match the reflective and quietly powerful moments as a heartbroken young son, gives an incredible performance not soon to be forgotten. Cynthia Nixon also stuns in delivering some of the best work of her career as a single mother battling cancer in its ugliest and heart-wrenching forms.
Josh Mond’s highly personal story (while not a direct autobiography, the story is lifted from very similar personal experiences) reveals in incredible fashion hardship and the human spirit, and should serve to boost the filmmaker and his actor’s profiles with even more recognition to come.
James White opens in LA on November 20th.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdw828U3KMY
Eli Roth and Keanu Reeves on 'Knock Knock'
The cult fanbase of horror director Eli Roth should be in for a surprising treat with the arrival of his latest film, Knock Knock, a new sexual thriller that exchanges the dismemberment of bodies for the thrilling aspects of what comes with a night of shared infidelity between a do-good family man and two sexy, if totally out-of-their-minds strangers, intent on putting the "fatal" in "fatal attraction." Cinemacy recently had the chance to attend the LA press conference for the film, where the film's stars– Roth and leading man Keanu Reeves–spoke about making the movie. We begin:
There's a point in Knock Knock when two intruders start trashing their victim's house, along with the many pieces of original art that is in it. How does that compare to dismembering bodies in your other movies?
Eli Roth: Well, I’m glad you picked up on that. My other films are certainly known for the visceral and the gore, and with this, we substituted the chopping off of Aaron’s (Burns) head, in The Green Inferno, for sawing off the heads of the statues. And in a crazy way, I found it more disturbing.
My mother’s an artist, and we grew up with her art all over the house, and it was very careful. You know, you don’t want to bump into a painting; you don’t want to scratch anything.
We found some amazing, amazing, artists in Chile to create this work. And I remember even when we were shooting it, with the girls, there was an element–you know, when you’re doing a kill scene in a movie, you really want to get it right, and make it look right–but when they were destroying the art… I mean, everyone was in character, and we went for it.
But, there is a feeling like, “Oh my god, we’re really destroying these objects." But then of course, they spray paint ‘Art does not exist,’ which is the very question–“what is art?” Is it the object that’s artistic, or the value you place on it? Because I know with my films, to one person they can be complete garbage, and to another person they’re a work of art. So, what is art?
Read our review of 'Knock Knock,' here.
Can you talk about the premise of this film? Is it a cautionary tale to not fool around?
ER: I would say that, for sure it’s a cautionary tale. But it’s also, in a way... when there’s problems in a relationship, if you don’t deal with it, it’s probably going to come out in your behavior one way or another. Seemingly, on the surface, Evan has a very happy life, but you can see there’s a little frustration. He’s not having sex, or he’s using the monster voice... it’s almost as if he never directly addresses the problems in the relationship. She gets really mad and he’s like, “sorry, sorry, sorry!” And then it’s Father’s Day, and they still leave him and it’s... the house is her artwork everywhere, and it’s all about her. And the catalogue, and even though he’s still there, he’s kind of just managing the house. So there are frustrations. You could almost make the argument the girls are created from this part of his id, that just wanted to destroy whatever life happened.
I would say that, for sure it’s a cautionary tale. But it’s also, in a way... when there’s problems in a relationship, if you don’t deal with it, it’s probably going to come out in your behavior one way or another.
Keanu, towards the end of the film, your character has an intense, desperate monologue, in which he justifies how these girls who showed up at his door were like “free pizza.” There was a lot of shouting in it. How many times did you have to deliver that?
Keanu Reeves: Yeah, it was a really exciting moment to do that scene. We shot it twice, because the first time, I guess I wasn’t up for the task. And then, because we got to play the scene, we got to learn something from that. And then I got back to the hotel, and I was crying. And I called Eli and I said, “Please, can we do the scene again?” And Eli was just like… there was a long pause on the phone. And being the great person and director that he is, (he says) “OK,” so we could shoot it again.
ER: I mean, he was hugging me while he was crying. It wasn’t on the phone.
(Laughter)
No, I mean, it was shooting nights, it was very difficult on all the cast. You know, we’re having lunch at 2:30 in the morning. And I just want to say what an honor it was to work with everyone, right down to Aaron, and (producer) Colleen (Camp), Lorenza (Izzo), Keanu (Reeves), Anna (Izzo), and Ignacia (Allamand).
They were such troopers, but, you know, there is a point where it hits six in the morning, and (Keanu) literally had no voice, and was out of gas. And we’re like, “this is your moment.” We’d say like, “this is your Oscar clip!” Like, this is that moment where he finally breaks and voices what the audience is thinking, like, “well how the fuck did this happen!” It’s total helplessness. And so I remember we came in fresh the next day and it was just beautiful to watch.
Do you like playing the victim?
KR: Oh the victim is fun in movies!
(Laughter)
Eli created a great situation of trust, and Lorenza and Anna, we had such love for the material, and we rehearsed in the house for like a week, and we really got to kind of know each other, and know our perspectives on the roles, and really what were the limits and where was the fun. Because the film, there’s a seduction, yes. But what does that look like? And then there’s also comedy, there’s thriller, and there are some really emotional scenes. And it was great to get the chance to work together, and to flesh the project out, and with such great material.
Eli, your previous movies have pushed the boundaries with how scary you can make something on a physically torturous level. How was it making a scary movie that took a more psychological approach?
ER: You know, it's interesting... I think that at this point in my career, there's no way I can divorce myself from horror. I can only transition, and make different types of movies, because I'm so strongly associated with it. So the hope is that people watch it as its own contained film, not necessarily as like the fifth chapter in some sort of long-form horror series.
To me, this really is a drama, it's a thriller, it's a sexual thriller. I think if you put it in the category of horror, it kind of gives the audience the wrong experience. And I'm not criticizing that, I completely understand why people would think that. I don't want people to think it's a horror movie with no blood. It really, truly does follow the conventions of that sort of thriller. But for me, it was fun to get into the psychology of those characters, to write them from the point of view that nobody's wrong, and everyone fully believes in what they're doing.
And that's always scary to me, when someone does something, because they so truly believe what they're doing, either that there's some larger cause for it, or they believe they're right, or they justify it in their own head. And that's what I think is interesting, and dangerous, and exciting. The idea that Keanu's character Evan, he knows it's wrong, but he's justified it in his own head, and the girls know what they're doing is wrong, but they've justified it in their own head. What happens when those two worlds meet?
Knock Knock is now playing in theaters.