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Film Review: "Side Effects" Actually a Thrilling Thriller

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Tuesday, 12 February 2013 12:57; Written by Matt Oakes

With Side Effects, Steven Soderbergh (Ocean's Eleven) hasn't reinvented the thriller, he's just breathed life back into a fading genre. What begins as an ambiguous tale of a struggling romance morphs into a pulsing question mark whose greatest strengths lie within it's ability to create suspense and uncertainty.

Since the twists and turns are vital to your general enjoyment of the film, I want to carefully navigate to ensure that nothing here is too telling. All you really need to know is that the story opens with Rooney Mara (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) reuniting with her husband Channing Tatum (Magic Mike) and from there delves quickly and fervently into the world of psychiatry and prescription pills.

Filling out the cast we have Jude Law (Sherlock Holmes) playing a psychiatrist struggling with a puzzle of a patient. He has a great little character arc that is handled with subtle panache, pulling a muted transformation in the most understated of ways. His new client puts him in contact with a fellow colleague played by Catherine Zeta Jones (The Mask of Zorro) who has an unwritten history with Law's patient. Although we don't see Jones that often on screen anymore, she shows that she's still gotta talent within her 40-something sex appeal.

All four of the principal characters are putting their all in here and I'd expect nothing less under the lead of Soderbergh. He has a crisp, clear direction and a really deliberate framing. All of his shots are captured with concise precision. Nothing here feels left to chance as little bits of foreshadowing are dug intricately into the scenery for those watching with a careful eye.

Soderbergh has talked at length about how he felt Side Effects was the natural progression of the thriller which he asserts have died out in the past few decades. To a degree, he's right. As an audience, we're not accustom to the suspense builders than dominated the silver screen of the 80's and 90's and so something like Side Effects is a pleasant throwback.

In the same vein though, it fails to really transcend the trappings of the genre and provide anything groundbreaking. And while you can applaud it's level of self restraint, both within the acting and directing field, it just doesn't have the staying power of films that transcend their genres. While it truly is a completely competent and very well acted, nothing here feels new or remarkable. It's a great suspense thriller just not a genuinely great movie.

There's enough backstabbing, lies, betrayals and revelations to keep Side Effects taut and the audience on the edge of their seats. It's a rare thriller that manages to deliver on the thrills and much like the thrillers of the 80's and 90's it will keep you engaged for it's run-time but is unlikely to stay with you long after.

Film Review: "Warm Bodies" Only Lukewarm

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Monday, 11 February 2013 10:00; Written by Matt Oakes

Jonathan Levine's Warm Bodies is a semi-successful experiment in cross-dressing genres. It's an inventive blend that tries to be self-satirizing within a somewhat traditional rom-com formula. The result is a zom-rom-com that feels both too safe and too unorthodox to capture much of a franchise-building following.

In a world where evil depends on the amount of skin still on your bones, human Julie, played by Teresa Palmer (I Am Number Four), falls under the protection of zombie R, played by Nicholas Hoult (X-Men: First Class), and the two of them begin to develop a somehow not creepy but definitively necrophiliac relationship.

Since R is still pretty human looking, he's a good zombie while other skinless zombies, called "bonies", are human-eating id-machines. R's mission is to save Julie from the malevolent bonies while trying to re-assimilate the undead into the world of the living.

While Hoult's R may be dead, him and Palmer have real chemistry and are a much preferable on-screen couple to Twilightites Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson. Hoult manages to avoid the easy undead caricature and actually breathes life into this dead dude, a task Pattinson never could accomplish. Palmer likewise creates a female lead who is empowered and likeable, essentially the polar opposite of K Stew. Although the emotional narrative relies heavily on voice overs, the leads shoot enough ironic passion-laden glances to cut through the potential cheese factor that dominated the Twilight saga.

Something you're sure not to miss is the hefty load of allusions to Romeo and Juliet that Levine, who directed last year's under-appreciated 50/50, doesn't bother to bury. First up, take our heroes names, R and Julie, an obvious tip of the hat to the Bard's most famous ill-fated loved. Furthermore, our heroes are also each embedded within incompatible cultures that refuse to understand each other, however in this universe, R's people hunger for the flesh of Julie's people. A slight change up from the original. And for those who have yet to catch on to the R&J references at this point, a familiar looking balcony scene is sure to make the connection click. Filling out the cast we have

Filling out the cast we have Rob Corddry (Hot Tub Time Machine) getting the laughs going with some well-timed grunts and cusses while John Malkovich (RED) plays the generic, type-A, overbearingly aggressive father that we've seen a million times before.

One of the biggest things that Warm Bodies does to hurt itself is it's shameless sense of cheating itself. There are multiple moments where Levine breaks the rules that he has established for his universe in order to propel the narrative along. I call this shameless because these inconsistencies are never acknowledged and yet sit there like an awkward elephant in the room. If zombies can't talk, don't let them miraculously have a quick-paced conversation just to hurry up the plot. That's called cheating.

Additionally, the onscreen violence is noticeable lacking as Warm Bodies, which is still a zombie film, is almost entirely bereft of blood done in cheap CGI. While I get the desire to grab a PG-13 cut, the internal battle between satire and mass appeal feels a little disingenuous, even though I'll admit to understanding the tactic.

On that note, it's hard to pinpoint the target audience for this new genre entry, it's too bloodless to appeal to the main zombie camp and too mocking and wink-wink to capture the teeny boppin' twihards in withdrawal and while it's certainly better than Twilight, it's nowhere need the greatness of Zombieland.

In the end, Warm Bodies is kind of a mixed bags that isn't bad so much as forgettable. On one side of the spectrum, it goes out of it's way to poke fun at itself, never taking it's silly zombies-reanimating-via-the-power-of-love premise too seriously and yet it fails to take that satire full force and this leaves us with an end product that is too involved with trying to be too many things.

February '13 Digital Week II

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Friday, 08 February 2013 10:00; Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-rays of the Week

The Ballad of Narayama

(Criterion)

Shohei Imamura’s masterly 1983 film is the definitive version of the classic Japanese fable about a remote place where the elderly are shipped off to a nearby mountain to die when they reach age 70, but Keisuke Konoshita’s 1958 adaptation is a potent drama in its own right.

Brilliantly shot in expansive widescreen color on stunningly designed studio sets, Konoshita’s luscious visuals—especially the deep greens and oranges of his dream-like landscape—are artfully rendered on Criterion’s Blu-ray transfer, which (since there are no extras) is definitely this obscure release’s calling card.

Here Comes the Boom

(Sony)

Kevin James and MMA fighting sounds like a bad idea for a movie, and it is: he plays a teacher who enters the ring to raise money to save the music department—along the way he has an improbable romance with a gorgeous colleague.

James is game for such silliness and Henry Winkler and Salma Hayek are capable comic and romantic foils, but the movie’s insipidness is lowlighted by a Vegas food fight. The movie looks OK on Blu-ray; extras are a gag reel, deleted scenes, interviews and featurettes.

A Late Quartet

(Fox)

Yaron Zilberman’s drama about chamber music gets much right—his script makes the musical and personal interactions among a long-running quartet’s members believable—but bogs down in gratuitous subplots. (That’s not even mentioning the senior member’s Parkinson’s diagnosis forcing his retirement.)

Strained metaphors equate musicmaking with life’s messiness; it doesn’t help that Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener and Christopher Walken are at sea as master musicians. Mark Ivanir (the quartet’s fourth member) and Imogen Poots (Keener and Hoffman’s violinist daughter) partly compensate. The Blu-ray image is perfect; lone extra is a making-of featurette.

Peter Pan

(Disney)

One of Disney’s all-time animated classics arrives on hi-def: the 1953 adaptation of JM Barrie’s beloved children’s story, one of Walt’s own favorites, has been painstakingly restored for Blu-ray. The movie’s colors pop vividly, and there’s so much detail that many fans will feel like they’re watching it for the first time.

Extras include a 40-minute featurette, Disney’s Nine Old Men, about the children of Walt’s original animator collaborators; deleted scenes and songs; and other kid-friendly games.

Side by Side

(New Video)

As filmmaking moves on from celluloid to digital, director Chris Kenneally and producer Keanu Reeves interview dozens of creators about the pros and cons of both: from directors Martin Scorsese and David Fincher to cinematographers Vilmos Zsigmond and Vittorio Storaro.

Along with showing hundreds of movie clips from Casablanca and Manhattan to The Social Network and Che, Kenneally and Reeves develop a healthy respect for the new—and fast-changing—digital technology without losing the necessary fondness for film. On Blu-ray, both film and digital clips look amazing (the rest is talking-heads footage); extras include additional interviews.

A Star Is Born

(Warners)

Barbra Streisand’s egotistical 1976 vanity project was roundly—and justifiably—trashed by reviewers as the least of the three versions of A Star Is Born; her less-than-zero chemistry with romantic interest Kris Kristofferson is the least of its offenses. A ridiculous script, corny dialogue and forgettable songs (except for Oscar winner “Evergreen”) add up to a bloated 140 minutes.

On Blu-ray, the movie has an appropriate mid-‘70s grainy look; Streisand’s commentary—when she’s not quiet for long stretches—is amusing and informative, and there are 20 minutes of deleted scenes and wardrobe tests (with more Streisand commentary).

Yelling to the Sky

(MPI)

Zoe Kravitz, Lenny Kravitz and Lisa Bonet’s daughter, has a memorable screen presence as a teenager in an interracial family whose weak mother is at the mercy of a drunken and abusive husband.

Writer-director Victoria Mahoney avoids most melodramatic traps, and her actors—Zero Dark Thirty’s Jason Clarke as the father and Antonique Smith as Zoe’s older sister are nearly as good as Kravitz—provide sympathetic characterizations. The movie looks fine in hi-def; extras include Mahoney interviews.

DVDs of the Week

Above Suspicion 2

(Acorn)

This taut mystery from Lynda La Plante (Prime Suspect creator) follows two detectives—played with gruff charm by Ciaran Hinds and the underrated Kelly Reilly—tracking down a murder plot and international drug ring. The three-episode series sometimes bogs down in subplots that do little to advance the story and hinder the complicated relationship of the protagonists.

But Hinds and especially Reilly—whose final closeup is unforgettable—are so good that it remains a watchable, near-guilty pleasure. Extras are interviews with cast and La Plante.

Detropia

(Docurama)

This visually beautiful documentary masks a serious subject—the psychological and physical deterioration of once booming Detroit—with elegant photography that blurs the line between paean and elegy.

Directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s elegant film, necessary viewing for everyone from the 1% to the 99%-ers—and our elected officials, of course—eloquently documents those affected by the current 9and ongoing) economic downturn. Extras include 90 minutes of deleted and extended scenes.

The Dynamiter

(Film Movement)

In this modest but compelling study, the nuanced and winning William Patrick Ruffin plays a teenager balancing issues in his life—absent mom, criminal older brother, mentally slow younger brother—while trying to keep his head above water.

Director-cowriter Matthew Gordon and cowriter Brad Inglesby’s drama never wallows in sentimentality, showing this young man’s situation with brutal honesty. Extras are an on-set featurette and The Roundup, a short by Stefan C. Schaefer.

My Worst Nightmare

(Strand)

This paper-thin romantic comedy pits Isabelle Huppert and Benoît Poelvoorde in an obvious opposites-attract situation as a posh businesswoman and working-class lob who are thrown together when their teenage sons become friends.

Director Anne Fontaine—a usually incisive and intelligent filmmaker—is obviously slumming, so the fact that the movie lopes along agreeably is due to its two leads, who make this frustratingly scattershot comedy watchable even when the script scrapes the bottom of comedic barrel.

Paul Williams—Still Alive

(Virgil)

Stephen Kessler’s engaging documentary traces his obsession with songwriter Williams (ubiquitous presence on Carson, 70s game shows and variety specials), whom he thought died years ago.

When Kessler tracks him down, an uneasy trust develops, as Williams is shown trying to finesse his long-ago heyday with his current loving wife and current tour of clubs. Extras are five bonus songs in concert by Williams.

CDs of the Week

Barbra Streisand—Classical Barbra

(Sony Masterworks)

In 1976—when she made her vanity project A Star Is Born (see Blu-ray review above)—Barbra Streisand released her least commercial album: a full-throated classical set, with art songs in German, French and Italian sure to mystify many Top 40 record buyers. Re-released in superbly updated sound, Classical Barbra shows that, despite onscreen and musical missteps, she could still be a serious artist.

If her interpretations of these dozen lovely lieds, melodies and arias by the likes of Hugo Wolf, Gabriel Faure, Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert—the greatest songwriters of all time—don’t approach the sublime sounds of, say, Irmgard Seefried or Angelika Kirchschlager, they do display a sensitive vocal artist at her most accomplished. Most notable are two extra tracks, Schubert masterpieces sweetly sung by Barbra and accompanied on the piano by her collaborator—and conductor of the Columbia Symphony Orchestra on the orchestral songs—Claus Ogerman.

Benjamin Grosvenor—Rhapsody in Blue

(Decca)

British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor, barely out of his teens, plays with the authority and confidence of someone decades into his career. Although the main selling point is Gershwin’s glorious Rhapsody in Blue—which he performs with a welcome lightness and grace—there are also two meaty French works on the program.

Ravel’s G-major concerto dances along sizzlingly, and Saint-Saëns’ Second Concerto—which in lesser hands can sound messy—hits all the right notes from Grosvenor, conductor James Judd and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.

Documentary Roundup: Koch, How to Survive a Plague, The Central Park Five

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Thursday, 07 February 2013 10:00; Written by Kevin Filipski

Koch

Directed by Neil Barsky

Opened February 1, 2013

How to Survive a Plague

Directed by David France

In theaters and on demand; on DVD February 26, 2013

The Central Park Five

Directed by Ken Burns, David McMahon, and Sarah Burns

In theaters and on demand; on DVD April 23, 2013

Neil Barsky’s new documentary about the cantankerous former New York mayor (who perhaps not so ironically died the morning the film opened last Friday), Koch—pronounced “kotch,” not “coke,” unlike some crazy right-wing billionaires we know—is an indelible portrait of the man’s long career of public service.

While sympathetic to its chatty subject, it’s not a mere hagiography: Barsky brings up the corruption scandal that nearly sank his administration, his excruciatingly slow response to the burgeoning AIDS crisis in the early ‘80s and, the long-held rumor that he was a closeted homosexual. The intensely private Koch—as part of a lively interview that takes up a large chunk of the movie—barks, “It’s none of your fucking business!” in response.

Koch paints a vivid picture of New York City from the time Koch got into politics though his dozen years as mayor to his later years as commentator and lionized city icon. Koch first won the mayoral election in 1977, and through the choice archival footage married to interviews with friends and foes alike, we see how he remade his beloved city in his image: a no-nonsense, prickly, pugnacious survivor. When he lost the 1989 Democratic primary to David Dinkins, his standard line was “the people have spoken—let them suffer” in response to those who said they missed him.

There’s touching—and now prescient—footage of Koch visiting his own tombstone in a non-Jewish cemetery in Washington Heights in northern Manhattan. He wrote the epitaph himself: he wants to be remembered as serving his country in WWII, in Congress and as mayor of the greatest city in the world. As cinematic epitaphs go, Koch is satisfying.

A devastating piece of cinematic advocacy that rarely becomes strident, How to Survive a Plague powerfully documents how AIDS activists not only helped get the reality of the deadly epidemic into the sights of an inattentive government—both in large cities and in Washington—but also enabled themselves to live on despite the death sentence the disease gave them.

Director David France extensively—and adroitly—intercuts vintage footage with new interviews with the most valuable players in the fight by ACT UP (the most prominent AIDS victims’ group) over so many years of fighting both the disease and the government. France also analyzes the intergroup conflicts that arose and caused splintering at the worst possible time: the politics of this crisis goes beyond Presidents Reagan and Bush doing nothing because the victims were not constituents.

But, as the movie shows in a series of highly emotional interviews, there is a happy ending so far for many of those suffering from AIDS, as new drug combinations are successfully counteracting the disease. But hovering over everything are regret, sadness and rage that nothing was done early enough to save so many others’ lives.

To anyone living in New York City in 1989—I had moved there a few months earlier—The Central Park Five will dredge up unpleasant memories of the infamous “Central Park jogger” case, in which a group of rampaging teenagers nearly killed an innocent woman after beating and gang raping her.

A city-wide lynch-mob mentality had spread from the police to the media to the public—I was immediately convinced of their guilt, as were most other New Yorkers—so no one was surprised by their guilty verdicts. Of course, it turned out that the five teens weren’t guilty—a serial rapist-killer finally confessed to the crime years later, with his DNA positively linked to the victim—and they were belatedly exonerated after four had served out their terms and one was still doing time.

This collaboration of acclaimed documentarian Ken Burns, his daughter Sara Burns and her husband David McMahon looks closely at the evidence (or lack of it) that led to trumped-up charges and convictions in what was, after all, a high-profile case that would have been an municipal embarrassment if no one was caught and punished. More than two decades later, the five men—four were interviewed on camera, the other one only heard, not seen—are awaiting the outcome of their lawsuits against the city for misconduct by the police department (who coerced false confessions) and prosecutors (who ignored evidence exonerating them) over a miscarriage of justice.

The film makes clear that the five accused teens were certainly not angels—there was a lot of thuggish behavior in the park that night by dozens of kids, and they just happened to get caught. And even though their confessions contradicted one another, that didn’t stop them for being found guilty: bungled chronology and contrary physical evidence didn’t matter.

Too bad that no one from the police or prosecution agreed to be interviewed: the film at times seems one-sided for that reason. But its critique of complicit media and political leadership remains disturbing all these years later.

Koch

http://zeitgeistfilms.com

How to Survive a Plague

http://sundanceselects.com

The Central Park Five

http://sundanceselects.com

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