How do you make a movie about sound engineering creepy? Brian De Palma, Francis Ford Coppola, and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck have each succeeded in making aural surveillance and the act of listening suspenseful and exciting, and Peter Strickland looks to be following in their footsteps with Berberian Sound Studio, his second feature film. Regrettably, I missed the screening held at IFFBoston this year, but IFC has me- and everyone else- covered, as they’re going to release the Toby Jones horror vehicle next month. In the meantime, they’ve offered a trailer (the second one cut thus far) for our viewing consumption- have a look below. If Berberian Sound Studio spent…
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G-S-T Review…The Great Gatsby
High school students of today can breathe a sigh of relief: rather than bother reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s iconic literary portrait of the Roaring Twenties, The Great Gatsby, they can simply head to the multiplex to have all of its themes and meanings pounded into their skulls for two hours courtesy of Baz Luhrmann. On the surface, which happens to be the only layer his adaptation concerns itself with, Luhrmann has taken everything about Fitzgerald’s novel and distilled it down to its most fundamental truths, and transposed those truths onto film in the most recklessly over-the-top ways possible. Here, disdain for excess is conveyed with the utmost of excesses and…
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G-S-T Review…Aftershock
Good news for Americans traveling abroad: you no longer have anything to fear from suspicious, secretly vicious locals. Now you just have to watch out for cataclysmic natural disasters and falling debris, which conveniently bring out the bloodthirsty maniac and paranoid xenophobe in everybody. Basically, if traveling to another country seemed dangerous before, it’s even moreso now, but that’s only because Aftershock has no idea what kind of movie it wants to be, or even how to be it. Is it about Americans being menaced in a foreign land, or is it about how much mankind lives at the whim of shifting tectonic plates? Either way, it’s not particularly good, so it…
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Sweet Trailer…'Ender's Game'
There’s a lot to like about the first trailer for Ender’s Game, Gavin Hood’s adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s beloved, iconic, and utterly important science fiction novel; it’s big, it’s grand, and it looks to appropriately capture the gravity of the narrative’s scope. Maybe the most awe-inspiring note here isn’t in the footage itself, but from the story surrounding the project. It’s hard to believe that after years of being told that Card’s book- which focuses on gifted children being trained by the military to combat an alien menace- is unfilmable, audiences of both fans and the uninitiated alike are finally going to get to see his vision on the big…
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[IFFBoston Review]…Some Girl(s)
If you’re only cursorily familiar with the work of Neil LaBute, you may find Some Girl(s) a bit surprising. Of course, he can only claim credit for Some Girl(s) on the page; here it’s Daisy Von Scherler Mayer, not LaBute, serving as the production’s architect, working off of his screenplay and adapting his stage play for the camera. But Some Girl(s) thoroughly feels like a LaBute film, and cuts through middling fare like Lakeview Terrace and Nurse Betty, not to mention utter fiascoes like The Wicker Man, taking us all the way back to 1997’s In the Company of Men, 1998’s Your Friends & Neighbors, and 2003’s The Shape of…
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[IFFBoston Review]…Much Ado About Nothing
There are two distinct halves to Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing: one is a modern rendition of what’s arguably Shakespeare’s wittiest comedy, and the other is, well, a Joss Whedon film. Diehard fans of the Avengers director and all-around geek god will naturally flock to it, and for them, the joy of the project may well come down to the endless delight they experience at every single appearance made by members of Whedon’s regular stable of performers- Clark Gregg, Amy Acker, Alexis Denisof, Nathan Fillion, Fran Kranz, Sean Maher, and others still. It’s fanboy nirvana- Fred and Wesley verbally spar while Mal Reynolds and Agent Coulson yuck it up…
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G-S-T Review…Pain & Gain
What does Michael Bay unhinged look like on celluloid? That’s not a question most of us really need answered; eighteen years spent making glossy, lunkheaded action films, blockbusters based on toy lines, and useless horror remakes speak volumes on the subject of Bay’s auteurdom. But maybe the Transformers mastermind has been done an injustice. Maybe, beneath the frat boy wit and visual chaos of his cinema, Bay has kept his one Big Idea squirreled away for safekeeping, waiting for the right opportunity to unleash his unspoiled artistic vision on his audiences. Or maybe Pain & Gain is just an erroneous high water mark in bad taste filmmaking. Whatever the case may be,…
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G-S-T Review…The Angel's Share
Lest anyone form an early reaction to The Angel’s Share that unfairly paints the film as a riff on Alexander Payne’s Sideways, there are two characteristics present in the former that distinguish it from the latter: social drama and a heist caper. Put another way, Ken Loach’s twenty fifth picture (and also his latest production with screenwriter Paul Laverty) engages on a macro, political level instead of a micro, personal level while managing to disguise itself as frothy entertainment. For another comparison, let your mind wander back to 1997’s The Full Monty; that may offer a better idea of what The Angel’s Share has to offer in its mixture of legitimate…
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G-S-T Review…'42'
If Jackie Robinson’s fate had seen him turn out an unsung hero, 42 might be more worthy of protest. Taken at face value, it’s strictly inoffensive; it’s the tale of how Jackie Robinson broke the glass ceiling in baseball, diluted into a series of uplifting bullet points before coming to an abrupt and all-too-convenient close (because nobody wants to end a feel-good movie with reality). There’s a blueprint to this sort of cinema, and Brian Helgeland follows it doggedly in his third- technically fourth, if you count Payback*- directorial outing, hitting beat after crowd-pleasing, expected beat. Maybe that’s not a crime worthy of filmmaker jail, but it’s certainly not a guaranteed path…
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G-S-T Review…To The Wonder
To the Wonder‘s very existence serves as a topic of conversation unto itself, never mind the wholly singular experience of watching Terrence Malick’s cinema. Since when does this man have the gumption needed to make and release two films in as many years? A cursory glance over his working history should prepare even a novice viewer to wait for at least twice that amount of time in between Malick projects, and yet here we are with 2011’s The Tree of Life barely in our collective rear view and To the Wonder looming right in front of us (and two more films, which Malick apparently shot back-to-back, lurking in the shadows for potential…
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G-S-T Review…Evil Dead
There’s a caveat that needs to be applied to any review of Fede Alvarez’s remake of Evil Dead, Sam Raimi’s unassailable 1981 horror staple: the new version isn’t as good as the old. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be, because nobody should reasonably expect genre remakes to live up to or exceed the masterpieces that spawn them. The better news is that Alvarez actually has a great movie on his hands- perhaps one that’s not capable of creating the same lasting, resonating impact within its categorical boundaries as Raimi’s original movie did, but certainly one that brings the blood-soaked goods with the sort of unhinged, fearless…
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G-S-T Review…Gimme the Loot
Who knew a street-centered narrative could be so sweetly buoyant as Adam Leon’s Gimme the Loot? Modern storytelling tends to look only at one side of a life lived in the hood, wading through the mud to capture and romanticize the difficulties inherent to an existence where simply getting by day to day proves to be a Herculean feat. Gimme the Loot almost feels like a response to those cliches, except that Leon actively chooses not to follow the polar opposite tract by indulging in straight-up fantasy about the world his protagonists, Malcolm (Ty Hickson) and Sofia (Tashiana Washington), inhabit; he instead aims for balance, harmony between exuberance and struggle…
