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Evil Dead: Dare Ya Not to Look
4 April 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
In this wittily gory remake of the revered 1981 debut of Oz the Great and Powerful filmmaker Sam Raimi, five college-age friends go to the ol' cabin in the woods where the nerd of the group (Lou Taylor Pucci) commits a common camping mistake: reading aloud from a book of the dead. Cue an invisible demon that uses tree limbs to rape and thereby possess Mia (Jane Levy), who returns to the cabin eager to slice and dice her friends, as well as her brother (Shiloh Fernandez). In a virtuoso feature debut, Uruguayan-born writer-director Fede Alvarez and co-writer Rodo Sayagues honor the motifs of the original, from the camera rushing pell-mell through the woods to signal the demon's arrival, to the deployment of a chainsaw in the final showdown. But the plotting as a whole feels fresh, »
Tattoo Nation Does Service to the History of SoCal's Black and Gray Style
4 April 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
"Tattoos used to be a sign of rebellion; now they're just a sign that you went to the mall," says a smarmy reporter in a news clip that is woven into the documentary Tattoo Nation. That flippant dismissal is turned on its head as director Eric Schwartz tracks the origins and evolution of Black and Gray, the style of tattoo art born in Southern California when prison culture and Latino street culture pollinated one another. Illustrated over the course of 90 minutes is a multi-layered art form that, for those who get tattooed and those who wield the ink apparatus, is part spiritual statement, part artful expression, and far more than a mall-rat trend. Filled with interview footage of the OGs (Ed Hardy, Charlie Cartwright, Jack Rudy, Freddy Negrete) who forged the style that has bec »
James Gandolfini Nearly Saves Down the Shore
4 April 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
James Gandolfini is so strong an actor that he almost manages to make Sandra Jennings's contrived dialog believable in Down the Shore, but any moments of honesty are immediately drowned out by a blast of heartfelt tunes that assure you the scene you've been watching was significant. First-time director Harold Guskin has been known for years as an acting coach to the stars. Perhaps that's why he favors long close-ups of his actors emoting between long pauses in dialog. The saddest part of this movie that oh-so-wants you to know it is sad is that Jennings sets up a pretty interesting dynamic, then bails on telling a story. Depressed alcoholic Bailey (Gandolfini) is running a rusting old carnival on the Jersey Shore when cheerful and spontaneous Jacques (Edoardo Costa) shows up from »
No Place on Earth Follows Ukranian Jews Into the Caves that Shielded them From Nazis
4 April 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
Part The Diary of Anne Frank, part The Swiss Family Robinson, and part The Shawshank Redemption, No Place on Earth, about a Ukrainian Jewish family in WWII who hides from the Nazis by living in caves, has all the elements of a great story: an epic quest (survival), formidable obstacles (Nazis discovering each hiding place), and clever solutions to those obstacles (digging new exits, finding new caves). Unfortunately, the telling, by director Janet Tobias, is no match for the story. At the beginning, the film seems to be a documentary about a spelunker, Chris Nicola, who years later discovers the remains of one of the family's encampments and seeks survivors and relatives with little luck. But our luck is much better; without explanation, the family is sudden »
Brady Corbett Explains How A Nice Guy Became Simon Killer
4 April 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
"Can you speak up a little, man? I dove off a boat yesterday, and I now have an immense amount of water in my ear!" Brady Corbet, 24, is on the phone from the Republic of Panama, where he's filming a new movie opposite Benicio del Toro and Josh Hutcherson. When I suggest that he do a handstand against the wall, Corbet's exasperated laugh lets me know that he's heard that one too many times today. "Dude! We put a lit cigarette in my ear this morning. We've tried it all!"
From one continent and one bad phone connection away, Corbet instantly, and charmingly, dispels any notion that this young veteran actor is anything at all like the tightly wound title character he portrays in writer-director Antonio Campos's provocative new film, Simon Killer. Simon is a year o »
Lotus Eaters, Beautifully Photographed and Maddeningly Shallow
3 April 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
About a third of the way through this frustrating 80-minute film, English musician Johnny Flynn, portraying a charismatic drug addict, sings an acoustic version of The Magnetic Fields song "Papa Was a Rodeo" that's so plaintive and moving that it stops the show, so to speak, and also, regrettably, underscores the show's hollowness. Directed by newcomer Alexandra McGuinness, this beautifully photographed (by Gareth Munden) black-and-white film tracks a group of London-based trust-fund twentysomethings as they meet for coffee, go to parties, puke, flirt, and talk, a lot, about how bored they are. When tragedy strikes, the group doesn't know how to deal, so they head to a country manor to dance, drink, and betray each other sexually. Lotus Eaters, which McGuinness co-wrote with Bren »
On Eddie: The Sleepwalking Cannibal, Or How the Art World Is Fuled by Kill-or-be-killed Bloodlust
3 April 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
Carnage breeds creativity for Lars (Keep the Lights On's Thure Lindhardt), a former up-and-coming painter who finds himself back at the easel after relocating to teach at a remote, snowbound art school where he befriends a mute flesh-eater in Eddie: The Sleepwalking Cannibal. Eddie's (Dylan Scott Smith) nocturnal dining on animals and humans is the spark that reignites Lars's moribund career. Writer-director Boris Rodriguez's satire about artistic inspiration posits Eddie's carnivorous behavior as a catalyst for awakening the deep, dark urges lurking inside Lars, whose arrival in town is marked by his running over a deer and then (to end its misery, or so he says) bludgeoning it to death with a rock. Lars's new works earn money for the down-on-its-luck school, but the duo' »
The Story of Luke Could Use More Grit
3 April 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
A feel-good story about an autistic man's quest for independence, The Story of Luke is a charming little film in need of a bit more grit. After the grandmother who raised him dies, 25-year-old Luke (Lou Taylor Pucci) is sent to live with his aunt and uncle (Kristin Bauer van Straten and Cary Elwes). Luke is a high-functioning autistic who longs to find a real job so he can get his own place and, more important, ask a pretty receptionist (Sabryn Rock) out on a date. Peruvian-born writer-director Alonso Mayo, making his feature debut, has a flair for small, funny riffs, as when Luke's manic new boss (Seth Green) offers Luke a play-by-play commentary on a water-cooler mating dance between two co-workers. Luke would like to be liked, but he's not going to compromise his annoying, rul »
The Stranger Things People do When They Think They're Alone
2 April 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
Ever caught yourself watching a stranger who was oblivious to your eye, and become fixated for so long that the situation began to feel weird, almost intimate? The debut feature by Eleanor Burke and Ron Eyal produces just this effect. As she confronts the unseemly business of clearing out her recently deceased mother's cottage on the East Sussex coast, London journalist Oona strikes up a quiet friendship with Mani, the homeless man who has been squatting there. Bridget Collins and Adeel Akhtar, the leads, express more in their stark, make-up-free faces than in any line of dialogue—which is wisely kept sparse. Much of the film is a study of the peculiar things people do when they think they're alone. Mani absently examines an old radio. Oona plays with Legos, and does so beautiful »
Think The Walking Dead Has a Woman Problem? Here's the Source.
2 April 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
Four years ago, on assignment for The Comics Journal, I asked Robert Kirkman a tough question about his Walking Dead comic series, a question that now, after the TV adaptation's third season finale, is still resonant: Why are all the strong female characters either crazy or dead?
His response, from issue No. 289 of The Comics Journal: "I don't mean to sound sexist, but as far as women have come over the last 40 years, you don't really see a lot of women hunters. They're still in the minority in the military, and there's not a lot of female construction workers. I hope that's not taken the wrong way. I think women are as smart, resourceful, and capable in most things as any man could be … but they are generally physically weaker. That's scienc »
The Brass Teapot Cutesy Conceit is a Struggle
2 April 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
Even The Twilight Zone would have struggled with the cutesy conceit of The Brass Teapot, a greed-corrupts cautionary tale about a financially strapped married couple whose life is destroyed by a teapot that spews cash any time they hurt themselves or others. For broke John (Michael Angarano) and Alice (Juno Temple), the ancient kettle is the answer to their prayers, though the burns, broken limbs, and S&M whipping fun that accompany it soon give way to graver trouble, as the teapot shows greater interest in not just physical but emotional pain—a fact that John and Alice ignore even after being cautioned by a Chinese sage who knows the object's 2,000-year-old history. He's one of many stereotypes trotted out by director Ramaa Mosley's fable, which also serves up cari »
"Privacy is an Outdated Concept" in Andre Gregory: Before and After Dinner
2 April 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
"Privacy is an outdated concept," Wallace Shawn quips in Andre Gregory: Before and After Dinner. If he only knew! Shawn's comment comes after realizing he's being filmed, but it could serve as a rejoinder to this documentary itself, an often too-intimate portrait of theater director Andre Gregory by his wife, Cindy Kleine. While watching scenes as mundane as Gregory applying a Spider-Man bandage to his cut finger or being recognized by a cashier in a grocery store, you may wonder: Would this film exist in a pre-Kardashian universe? Rooted in restlessness, the doc cycles through a myriad of subjects with a desultory air. It's alternately a love letter from Kleine to Gregory about their May-December romance; a behind-the-scenes look at Gregory's production of Ibsen's The Master »
Bert Stern: Original Madman Follows the Photographer and the Many Women He Wished to Snog
2 April 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
Jean-Luc Godard is credited with calling the history of cinema "boys photographing girls," and Shannah Laumeister's documentary Bert Stern: Original Madman considers the life of one boy who photographed many, many girls in his decades-long career. The most famous was Marilyn Monroe, toward the end of her life, and Stern's description of himself as "just a kid who wanted to make out with her" is a recurring theme in his weary recollections of his own, much longer life: so many pretty girls that he wants to snog but settles for photographing instead. Granted, there was plenty of sex to be had while the girl-crazy Stern was a big shot in the mid-20th-century publishing world—advertising legend Jerry Della Femina declares Stern "the original mad man," providing the film with a »
Smyrna: Destruction of a Cosmopolitan City Fails to Honor a City's Rich Legacy
2 April 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
Istanbul was Constantinople, just as today's Aegean-coast metropolis of Izmir, Turkey, was once Old Smyrna—an ancient Greek settlement that would eventually be fortified by Alexander the Great before evolving into an affluent Ottoman cultural center. Ripe with several centuries of absorbing history, filmmaker Maria Ilioú's uninspired flake of talking-head Wikipedia cinema focuses on the forgotten Anatolian port city's post-World War I years. A pompous British writer and five historians, including the film's official consultant, Alexander Kitroeff, and some second- and third-generation Smyrniots, speak hyperbolically yet broadly about the fancy fabulousness of this forgotten melting pot—split into Greek, Armenian, Muslim, and Jewish quarters—and its wealthy Ameri »
Sexy Thale Foregoes Mystery for Didactic Disclosure and Slow-mo Murder
2 April 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
If you had to stumble upon an angry, vicious mythic creature, you could do worse than the sexy monster found in Thale by Elvis (Erlend Nervold) and Leo (Jon Sigve Skard), two guys who clean up after crime scenes. At their latest gig, the duo stumble upon Thale (Silje Reinåmo), a stunning woman in a secret basement who emerges out of a milky bathtub and who, it turns out, was kept captive for decades by a man who experimented on her while hiding her from mysterious pursuers. Audiotapes and a severed tail kept in a fridge prove clues to Thale's folkloric origins, though the mystery is soon altogether sapped by writer-director Aleksander Nordaas's decision to have Thale provide Elvis with psychic transmissions that bluntly lay out her backstory. Any initial, intriguing otherwo »
In Trance, The Crime (And Confusion) Are In The Mind
2 April 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
The payoff for solving puzzle films is a collaborative rush—in working out the filmmakers' jigsaws, viewers are invited into the moviemaking process. Look at the uber-combative message boards about Primer, or brave the theorizing of Room 237, the docu-analysis of The Shining. One sub-genre of puzzle films—the studio-backed head-scratcher—doesn't see additions all that frequently, as bottom-line minded execs surely view the multiplex as a respite from intellectual workouts, not another forum for them.
Nevertheless, the mounds of cash Inception raked in have mattered—recently we've had The Adjustment Bureau, Looper, and now Danny Boyle's Trance cooking our noodles al dente. Trance, which belongs alo »
The Company You Keep: Wheezy Rider
2 April 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
It's time, apparently, for the aging ghosts of '60s radicalism to once again take stock of their sins and compromises. In The Big Chill and Running on Empty, during the Reagan '80s, the then–middle-aged revolutionaries' to-do list involved holding down careers and worrying about their kids; now the noble fist-wavers are looking at Social Security and prescriptions of Levator. Once it gets its walkers moving, Robert Redford's The Company You Keep nearly plays like a green-granola-lefty counterpart to The Expendables, a Hollywood Elderhostel reunion crowded with septuagenarian icons looking back on the righteousness and failures of the Nixon–'Nam era with rheumy retirees' eyeballs.
The story, from Neil Gordon's novel about the contempora »
Simon Killer Aces The Oldest, Darkest Story
2 April 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
"The meek shall inherit the Earth," somebody said once—probably Truffaut, writing in Cahiers du Cinema. Two pictures into his thrilling career, writer-director Antonio Campos seems determined to show us that might not be anything to celebrate. Campos's feature debut, 2008's Afterschool, was essentially one part Blow-Up to three parts Rushmore-as-psychological-horror-flick. While it took us (okay, me) a few minutes to sync with his patient, clinical approach to story-building, Campos's control, of both frame and narrative, never felt less than total. The tale of a slight, awkward ninth-grader at an exclusive boarding school trying to square his vastly mediated experience of death and sex with brief exposures to the real, sticky things, Afterschool</i »
Five Amazing, Ridiculous Soap Opera Plots
2 April 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
Soap operas are more wondrous and ridiculous than you may realize, especially if you're under the misapprehension that soaps -- especially daytime ones -- revolve around nothing but steamy affairs, unplanned pregnancies, and Maury-style DNA tests. In fact, we thought the same, until we started watching General Hospital to catch James Franco's stint as serial killer/modern artist "Franco" (no, really). It was then that we discovered that soaps hold to no normal plot rules, have no respect for sticking to genre, and are, frankly, the craziest fucking things on television. Don't believe us? Here are the most absurd soap storylines of all time (so far). »
Shane Carruth Designed Upstream Color, Now You Put it Together
1 April 2013 9:00 PM, PDT
There's a thin line between what's truly mysterious and what's totally bogus. A movie that leaves you feeling unclear about what's happening isn't necessarily mysterious—it may just be inept. In other words, the problem may be it, not you.
Shane Carruth's second feature, Upstream Color, a dystopian romance in which two damaged people find their way to one another, is a little mysterious. The picture is beautifully shot by Carruth himself; its tonal palette shifts easily from crisp to soft, assessing the menace and color-wheel beauty of the natural world as well as the somewhat beige, though not necessarily safe, comforts of the city. And it's far from inept: Carruth also edited the film himself, creating a cracked-mirror narrative that gradually pie »
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