"Accomplishments"
In theaters: Darren Aronofsky's After Hours, you might say, Caught Stealing doesn't go into the surreal spaces his films usually do. It's just a fun crime romp with watchable stars and frequent pointing out the fact that we're in 1998 through visual cues. But dang, just as you're enjoying the comedy or the romance, bam, something really dark happens to kill the giggle in your throat. Austin Butler is really great as the charming failed athlete whose life was ruined by a car crash, and now it's all happening again, but in slow motion and with eccentric gangsters in the mix. A strong character arc awaits, informed by the earlier trauma. Proximity to his punk-rock neighbor (Matt Smith) has put him - and his girlfriend Zoë Kravitz, and a really good cat, the real star of the film in my opinion - in the crosshairs and it's really rather frustrating to see a guy get harassed to this degree by thugs who might just get more answers if they ever let anyone finish a sentence. But that's part of the dread that Aronofsky wants to generate. It's a comedy about Giuliani's New York, so it comes with a certain measure of uneasiness.
At home: I've enjoyed Richard Osman's appearances on British light entertainment shows (Taskmaster and so on), but didn't realize he wrote The Thursday Murder Club series, but it explains the humor we see on screen in the film adaptation of the first book. The amateur crime-solving club is a fun bunch thanks, in part, to a pimped-out cast (Mirren! Brosnan! Kingsley! Imrie!) Miss Marpling around their rather fantastical retirement home (if there are high end places like this, can I apply? They leads are well supported by a ton of Doctor Who actors including David Tennant as a total heel, and it makes me wonder what came first - the Doctor Who references (police boxes, jelly babies) or the casting of people who have been involved in Who over the years. Could just be a coincidence, but there are also 007 references and Brosnan is RIGHT THERE. Lovely to see Naomi Ackie again, here as a brilliant, but underestimated police officer - she's having a great year - and Helen Mirren OF COURSE kills it. Dead. There's no getting away from the "television-ness" of this, of course. Visually, it looks like a cross between Downton Abbey and the Sandler/Aniston Murder Mystery films, and the sub-mystery's solution requires a bit too much coincidence. But it's like catching one of those Agatha Christie adaptation on Sunday afternoon TV back in the day, and I have no problem with movies filling that niche. If they make more, I'll be watching them.
Avengement is quite the dumb-sounding title, but who needs another movie called Vengeance or Revenge, right? It's the old saw (or axe) about a man (Scott Adkins) sold out by gangsters and after being forged into the fires of the prison system, escaping to take revenge. I guess he didn't appreciate his stay in Britain's toughest prison, nor the price that was on his head the whole time. They keep things fresher than otherwise by telling the story principally in flashbacks, revealing the depth of the revenge (and its reasons) at appropriate times. Further twists to the formula include Adkins essentially having been an innocent until the events of the film, and the main villain (I use that in the Cockney sense) being his own brother. The action beats are strong and frequently hyper-violent. So fun flick by the makers of Accident Man. If you liked that, you'll like this.
You don't mess with a man's flock, it's just not done. Bring Them Down
is a furiously suspenseful rural thriller, metaphorically about "lost
sheep", that does lose some of its motive power when the point of view
switches to the malefactors, but nevertheless yields strong drama. It is
not for tender hearts who can't take negative animal outcomes, however.
The worst of it is, this feud seems to have very little motivation
behind it, except for the resentment over something from the far past,
and second-hand resentment at that. And yet, it pushes the men in this
story too far, largely due to their inability to communicate or let
things go. If these sheep are lost, it's because they've been led astray
by ego, and not even necessarily their own, as we have some dreadfully
toxic fathers in the mix. Haven't felt this apprehensive in a while
about a film (I was reminded of Straw Dogs), even if it's dispelled
somewhat in the second half.
If the works of Bruegel used in Jem Cohen's Museum Hours sit at the intersection between documentary and aesthetics, so does the film. Shot like a series of paintings, it also documents Vienna in the same way, asking whether we can dismiss what we see as mundane or ordinary, or does it just need an artist's composition or a viewer's interpretation to become "art". There's no score, just ambient sound, and the conversations between the helpful museum security guard (Bobby Sommer) and the Canadian woman stranded in Austria for a time (Mary Margaret O'Hara, sister of Catherine) are naturalistic and largely improvised. Cohen has just dumped his actors in the real, unrehearsed world and let them play. I worked at an art gallery/museum for a few years and the tour guide scene was extremely relatable (bonus, it made me more interested in Bruegel's work), so I was definitely the audience for this meditative travelogue.
As a kid, all I had use for in Caddyshack was the puppet gofer, Loony Tunes (hey, it's a WB film) stuff. Not even Bill Murray trying to kill it. Just the puppet. As an adult... It's not all that different, honestly. The comedy is so BROAD that it makes me cringe, and there's not much of a plot to hang our hopes on. When we're with the caddies, scenes are interchangeable with those of some summer camp movie (given Murray's presence, let's call out Meatballs). When we're with the golf players, there are inklings of a sports movie brewing, but who do you really want to win? Ted Knight who makes a pretty good heel, or Rodney Dangerfield essentially doing his stand-up on a golf course and annoying everyone? I do like both, but giving us stakes we can care about comes late, by involving the pupil of Chevy Chase's half-baked zen master, but it's a little late. Murray is Elmer Fudd in a cartoon. There's some PG-13 nudity and a LOT of dumb slapstick. I know it's considered a comedy classic, but it really is all over the place (I'm sure there's a relevant golf metaphor for that, but I'm no expert).
The original Toxic Avenger (1984 flavor) of COURSE has offensive bits, but it's done on purpose TO comically offend, so I'm not too bothered. A wince, a groan, maybe, but also some outright laughs. It's all an exploitative Troma-tizing parody of both monster and superhero movies, full of gore and hyper-violent gags. When you don't have good actors (mostly stuntpeople and swimsuit models, I gather), you just ask them to ham it up and create a cartoonish reality, where the villains are so outrageously evil, you might as well be reading a Judge Dredd comic. I really enjoyed myself. It rat-rat-tats either action or humor, not a lull in sight. The romance is actually kind of sweet, and part of an underlying theme about body positivity (the villains are the ones most concerned with their appearance, the goodies not so much, and the film casts across a wide field).
From the World Cinema Project![Falkland Islands, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands] Made in 2014 with very old film stock so it looks like the very first images of certain subantarctic islands, End of Summer is really too tranquil. Was it a technical experiment? Or was the director trying to say something about the disappearing habitats? It's mostly just penguins and seals standing around in a kind of (barely) moving postcard.
[French Southern Territories] I much prefer Carnet des Terres australes (Southern Territories Notebook)... Chronicling a voyage to France's subantarctic islands, bring food, mail, and replacement personnel to remote outposts in wild, dramatic landscapes... Where the animal life doesn't know to be afraid of humans, and discussing some actual wildlife conservation successes... It managed to touch me both on the basis of the people AND the animals.
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