Tag Archives: neil pond

Oct 27 2016
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Movie Reviews

Ghoulish Game

Dark portal to spirit world opens Ouija: Origin of Evil

Watch out! Elizabeth Reaser and Lulu Wilson star in 'Ouija: The Origin of Evil.'

Watch out! Elizabeth Reaser and Lulu Wilson star in ‘Ouija: The Origin of Evil.’

Ouija: Origin of Evil
Starring Elizabeth Reaser, Annalise Basso, Lulu Wilson & Henry Thomas
Directed by Mike Flanagan
PG-13
In theatres Oct. 21, 2016

When I was a kid, my older teenage cousin had a Ouija board. She mostly used it, at least it seemed to me—moving the plastic, teardrop-shaped “planchette,” the thing with three little legs and a see-through hole—over the letters to answer questions about her boyfriend, Slick.

There was nothing very otherworldly about it, and nothing very ominous; when Ouija didn’t give her the answers, she turned to another oracle, the Magic 8 Ball. I think there may have been some Tarot cards and incense in there somewhere, too. Anyway, she and Slick didn’t last very long.

In this movie, set in 1967, we first see the Ouija board game nested, innocently enough, within a stack of other popular games of the era, including Candyland, Sorry! and Monopoly. But in a movie subtitled “Origin of Evil,” how long do you think it takes before that ol’ black magic begins to stir?

Ouija: Origin of Evil is actually a prequel to Ouija, the 2014 movie about a group of teens who noodle around with a Ouija board and unlock the portal to a dark, dangerous spirit world. In the new Ouija, a widowed mom working as a fake spiritualist (Elizabeth Reaser) adds a new stunt—the Ouija board—to pep up her fake séance business. In doing so, she makes the same mistake, rolling out the welcome mat for a host of malevolent spirits to take over her home.

Film Title: Ouija: Origin of EvilAnd they’re particularly interested in her youngest daughter, Doris (Lulu Wilson), who begins speaking in strange voices, seeing things invisible to everyone else and writing in a foreign language. And all that’s before things start getting really weird, creepy and calamitous.

Mom thinks Doris is good for business, but her oldest daughter (Annalise Basso) is freaked. The headmaster priest at the girls’ Catholic school (Henry Thomas, all grown up from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial) is concerned. When he pulls up in front of the house to check things out, the background music mimics the iconic theme from The Exorcist.

Co-writer and director Mike Flanagan does a very nice job with the late ’60s vibe—the movie genuinely feels like something happening in the era of moon missions, late-night TV test patterns, macramé sweaters and big American-made cars. It also feels like something of the era, from the golden retro glow of its colors to the clever reel-change cues “burnt” into the corners of scenes, an homage to a time when its kind of fright-night scares were something you’d see at drive-ins and double-features—a pre-digital era when projectionists would need visual cues to stay on their toes.

Film Title: Ouija: Origin of EvilRed-eyed, hissing demons—check. Adorable tyke who undergoes terrifying body transformations and crawls on the walls and walks on the ceiling—yep. Slingshots and stitching needles, comin’ right at your nightmares—got ’em. If you’re looking for some straight-up, mainline Halloween haunted-house “gotchas,” this date-night ride has a slow start, but builds to a wild, crazy, screaming finish.

The performers are all good, especially the youngsters. Watch out for Lulu Wilson, who played Mikayla on TV’s The Millers; she reminds me of a young Reese Witherspoon. And Annalise Basso—terrific earlier this year as one of the kids in Captain Fantastic—shoulders more and more of the movie as it goes on, shifting her teen-sister role into a stronger, more significant lead as the plot progresses.

Can playing with a Ouija board open up the door to hell? It certainly does in the movies—and my cousin’s ex-boyfriend Slick might have thought so. And maybe that that’s why I’ve always been more of a Monopoly, Operation and Mousetrap guy myself.

—Neil Pond, Parade Magazine

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Oct 13 2016
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Movie Reviews

All Aboard

‘The Girl on the Train’ is dark, juicy fem-centric thriller

Film Title: The Girl on the Train

The Girl on the Train
Starring Emily Blunt, Haley Bennett & Rebecca Ferguson
Directed by Tate Taylor
R

“My husband used to tell me I have an overactive imagination,” says Rachel (Emily Blunt), watching the scenes of New York’s Hudson Valley go by as she stares out the window of the train she takes on her daily commute into the city.

Those scenes, that train and that “girl”—Rachel—drive the drama in the highly anticipated big-screen adaptation of British author Paula Hawkins’ 2015 thriller, which has sold some 11 million copies worldwide.

After her divorce, Rachel spiraled even deeper into her alcohol-soaked resentment—and it tortures her every day when the train passes her old house, now occupied by her former husband, Tom (Justin Theroux), his new wife and former mistress, Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), and their new baby daughter.

Haley Bennett

Haley Bennett

But it’s another house, and another set of occupants, that really intrigues Rachel. A beautiful young blonde woman (Haley Bennett) and her adoring husband (Luke Evans) seem to be so obviously, passionately, completely in love. Sipping on vodka as the train zips by, morning and night, Rachel fantasizes about them, and especially about her. “She’s what I lost,” she muses. “She’s everything I want to be.”

The young woman’s name is Megan, and she works as Anna and Tom’s nanny—and loathes it.

As Rachel’s bitterness about Tom and Anna grows, her voyeuristic beguilement with Megan intensifies when she sees her in the embrace of another man, triggering Rachel’s memories of her own husband’s unfaithfulness. One evening Rachel goes on a drunken tirade about Anna the “whore,” takes the train to her neighborhood, but then blacks out—and wakes up the next morning covered in mud and blood.

And Megan has disappeared—or worse. When Allison Janney steps in as a homicide detective, it becomes a murder case. (Did the screen suddenly pick up a stream of CSI: Westchester County or something?) Did Rachel do it? She honestly doesn’t remember. And as blurry as her memory is, she wants to find out the truth, as twisted as it might turn out to be.

Rebecca Ferguson

Rebecca Ferguson

Tate Taylor—who also directed The Help (2011), another drama with a powerful female ensemble—builds the mystery by toggling between Rachel, Megan and Anna and each of their stories, going backward and forward in time to pick up pieces of the fractured, fragmented puzzle.

The performances are all super-solid, especially from the three women playing the triad of females in various states of personal misery and psychological abuse; as the movie takes us deeper into their stories, we see how they all connect, interweave and eventually collide. It’s about secrets, lies, loneliness, love, infidelity, rage, motherhood, things that aren’t always as they seem, and layers and layers of buried hurt and loss that finally come frothing to the surface, spilling into the light. The shocking conclusion splashes out dark, red and juicy—a catharsis that taps a wellspring of pent-up emotions.

Emily Blunt is an extremely versatile actress who’s done musicals (Into the Woods), comedy (The Devil Wears Prada), sci-fi (Edge of Tomorrow, Looper), family flicks (The Muppets), fairy-tale fantasy (The Huntsman: Winter’s War) and action (Sicaro). Now she’s landed a role that will get her even more serious mainstream attention. For her, especially, this Train is just the ticket.

—Neil Pond, Parade Magazine

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Oct 06 2016
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Uncategorized

Welcome, Oddballs!

Tim Burton makes misfits feel at ease at ‘Miss Peregrine’s’

Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children
Starring Asa Butterfield, Eva Green, Ella Purnell & Samuel L. Jackson
Directed by Tim Burton
PG-13

The teenage years can be rough, making kids feel like outsiders, outcasts, oddballs. Wouldn’t it be awesome if there were a place young misfits could feel welcome, safe, protected, understood—and important?

And no, I’m not talking about the chess club.

In Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children, director Tim Burton creates just such a place—or, more specifically, brings it spectacularly to life from Ransom Riggs’ 2011 young adult novel, a sprawling tall tale of mystery, monsters, a young boy on a tick-tocking, time-looping quest to discover his past, and some very, very peculiar kids.

“Did you ever feel like nothing you do matters?” asks teenage Jake (Asa Butterfield) in the opening scene as a crab scuttles across a footprint on a Florida beach seconds before a wave washes it away. Soon enough Jake himself will be swept across the water on a journey to a magical place that previously existed only in his imagination, fueled by colorful bedtime stories of his beloved grandfather (Terence Stamp), where he’ll find out just how needed he can be.

Visiting a remote, mist-shrouded island off the coast of Wales with his father (Chris O’Dowd), Jake discovers a decrepit old mansion bombed to rubble by German air raids in World War II. But stumbling into a “time loop” leads him back to 1943, just before the raids—when Miss Peregrine, her home and all the “peculiar children” were in full swing.

MISS PEREGRINE'S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDRENThere’s lovely, lighter-than-air Emma (Ella Purnell), who must use steampunk-ish lead boots and rope tethers to keep her from floating away. Hot-handed Olive (Lauren McCrostie) can set things ablaze with a simple touch. Millard (Cameron King), an invisible boy, likes to run around naked—not that you’d notice. Tiny Bronwyn (Pixie Davies) has the strength of a brute. Whenever Hugh (Milo Parker) opens his mouth, bees that live in his stomach come swarming out. Sweet-looking Claire (Raffiella Chapman) has a nasty surprise underneath the blonde curls of her hair. Enoch (Finlay MacMillan) has a creepy power to animate inanimate objects—including the dead.

The faces of two “twin cousins” are always covered, in spooky white hoods with holes for their eyes and mouths—for a reason not revealed until close to the end of the movie.

MISS PEREGRINE'S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN

Eva Green plays Miss Peregrine.

And as the exotic, pipe-smoking Miss Peregrine, Eva Green (Bond girl Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale) superbly channels her character’s enchanted mission with steely British resolve and flinty maternal focus. She can also morph into a bird, a fleet, regal peregrine falcon. How cool is that?!

Samuel L. Jackson is the evil Mr. Barron—no actor mixes campy humor and genuine menace with such unsettling ease or malevolent charm. There’s Allison Janney and Judi Dench. There’s danger, derring-do, adventure, excitement, laughter, young love and a couple of gross-out creature-feature moments that might be too much for little eyes.

But mostly, there’s director Tim Burton’s thematic signature, everywhere. Burton has always had a thing for outsiders and outliers, misfits like Pee-Wee Herman, Sweeny Todd, Beetlejuice and Willy Wonka, and for classic Hollywood quirk. The topiaries in Miss Peregrine’s courtyard—an elephant, a dinosaur, a centaur—look like they could have been the whimsical snip-snip artistry of Edward Scissorhands. And one major scene is a huge nod—an homage, certainly—to the cheesy highlight of a specific 1960s movie (with stop-motion effects by the late special-effects guru Ray Harryhausen) that Burton has admitted is one of his all-time favorites.

Burton even slips into the action for a super-quick, gob-smacked cameo. Blink and you’ll miss him!

So outsiders, outcasts and oddballs everywhere, of all ages, let your freak flag fly—courtesy of Miss Peregrine, and Tim Burton!

—Neil Pond, Parade Magazine

 

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Sep 29 2016
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Movie Reviews

Ride ‘Em Cowboy

‘Magnificent Seven’ brings western past into focus with Hollywood present

Vincent D'Onofrio, Martin Sensmeier, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Ethan Hawke, Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt and Byung-hun Lee

Meet the new ‘Magnificent Seven’: Vincent D’Onofrio, Martin Sensmeier, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Ethan Hawke, Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt and Byung-hun Lee

The Magnificent Seven
Starring Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Peter Sarsgaard & Haley Bennett
Directed by Antoine Fuqua
PG-13

The western pretty much trotted into the sunset decades ago, but every once in a while something gallops out of Hollywood that reminds us just what a big deal cowboys used to be.

And the cowboy, as depicted and polished by Hollywood and pop culture, remains one of America’s most potent mythic figures—a rugged, rustic, stoic, individualistic, self-sacrificing hero, good with a gun and sometimes even better with women.

The Magnificent Seven gets a lot of its retro dust honestly. For starters, it’s a remake of a remake: The original Seven, in 1960, was an all-star Americanized version of a 1954 Japanese classic, Seven Samurai, in which a samurai warrior and six others band together to defend a village from marauding bandits.

Director Antoine Fuqua certainly knows how to make an action-packed project click into place, with clear-cut lines between good guys and bad guys, a lofty morality-lesson overlay and a dark undertow of bloody revenge.

Denzel Washington;Chris Pratt

Denzel Washington plays bounty hunter Sam Chisholm.

The star here is clearly Denzel Washington—his collaboration with Fuqua in Training Day brought him an Oscar, and the two also worked together in The Equalizer. He plays sure-shot bounty hunter Sam Chisholm, who comes to the aid of a small frontier town under the rule of ruthless robber baron Bartholomew Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard) and his murderous cutthroat bodyguards. Bogue has poisoned the water supply, set fire to the church, enslaved the local men to work in his gold mine and demanded that the residents either sell out, move out—or else.

Beseeched by a firebrand widow (Haley Bennett) whose husband was killed by Bogue’s thugs, Chisholm—whose very name evokes the title of a 1970 John Wayne western, Chisum—assembles a group to help reclaim the town.

The multinational, cross-cultural rainbow coalition looks awesome onscreen, but it feels more like an Old West Suicide Squad—or a colorful team of Avengers assembled by way of High Noon—much more than an organic group of renegades and rogues, despite all the grime, grit, dirt, sweat, stubble and scruff.

Chris Pratt

Chris Pratt

Chris Pratt is heavy-drinking, wisecracking Josh Faraday, whose skill with cards helps him in more ways than one. Ethan Hawke’s erudite former Confederate sharpshooter is haunted by ghosts of his wartime past. His Chinese partner (Byung-hun Lee) can do lethal wonders with any type of blade or firearm.

Manuel Garcia-Rulfo is a hunky Mexican outlaw whose vicious skillset makes him a valuable member of the seven. A young renegade Comanche (Martin Sensmeier) likes the gallant cause and wants to come aboard. Vincent D’Onofrio’s big, Bible-quoting mountain man is a holy terror—and an audience favorite.

Bullets fly, bodies fall, blood flows, hooves thunder, jokey banter gets bantered, dynamite goes ka-boom. There’s a particularly twisty twist at the end that you won’t see coming. You may catch—or imagine—wispy glimpses of the ghosts of Clint Eastwood, John Wayne and other western icons looming and lurking around the edges of some of the scenes.

With a winning combo of gunpowder and star power, The Magnificent Seven brings the cowboy past into focus with the Hollywood present. If you like your popcorn sprinkled with old-fashioned, good-guy gusto, it’s as rip-roaring a time that’s come along on horseback in years.

—Neil Pond, Parade Magazine

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Sep 23 2016
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Movie Reviews

Witchy Poo Park

Young documentarians return to haunted woods

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Blair Witch
Starring James Allen McCune & Callie Hernandez
Directed by Adam Wingard
R
In theaters Sept. 16, 2016

Witches have been around for centuries, and the Blair Witch—well, she’s been on the scene since 1999, when a modestly budgeted little flick called The Blair Witch Project became a spectacular $250 million worldwide hit and created an entire genre of “found footage” horror films in its wake.

“Found footage” movies came to follow a certain format: Someone documents something unsettling with a video camera then mysteriously vanishes, leaving their baffling “footage” behind for someone else to discover—and decipher. The footage can shape the entire movie, or—as in the original Blair Witch Project—be the movie.

_DSC0358.ARWIn this latest Blair Witch spawn, nearly 18 years later, another group of attractive young people ventures into the same haunted woods in Maryland that claimed the original movie’s victims. Apparently, they’ve seen the “footage,” if not the original film. James (James Allen McCune) is looking for clues to the disappearance of his big sister, who never came back from that fateful trip. He brings along three of his friends, one of whom (Callie Hernandez) is working on a student-documentary project for her college class—so she rigs everyone with every kind of recording gizmo conceivable.

The group picks up another pair, a rather odd young couple (Wes Robinson and Valorie Curry) who found the original footage and posted it online. They claim they can be their guides into the Black Hills Woods—a place steeped in legends of a 17th century witch lynching, a cursed town and modern serial-killer madness.

In addition to “traditional” hand-held cameras, everyone has mini-cams that clip to their ears. They also carry portable units that can be mounted on branches, heads or sticks, and there’s even a drone that lets them see what’s going on from high above.

Callie Hernandez

Callie Hernandez

The result is that everything gets recorded—and I mean everything. We see the group drinking in the bar the night before they leave, eating weenies around a campfire, crawling into their tents to sleep. We get to watch as one pees on a tree.

On the upside, all the cameras “explain” why, and how, we’re seeing what we see; this is this movie’s “found footage.”

And when the scares start to roll in and ramp up, all the different shots—the jumpy, jerky cuts between cameras, the glitches and bleeps as audio and video signals cut in and out—add to the sense of extreme disorientation, especially when things get all weird and time-warpy. But the gotchas aren’t anything novel, particularly frightful or ghastly, or anything you haven’t seen before; they just come via new gadgetry.

Important takeaways: Don’t get too attached to any of the characters. Beware, as always, of the “stick men,” the Blair Witch’s handmade calling cards. Don’t go wandering off at night by yourself. Take proper care of all puncture and slash wounds, lest something hideously creepy happen to them. Keep hands and fingers away from the whirring blades of drones lodged in the tops of tall trees. In eerie, deserted houses in the middle of haunted forests, for God’s sake, stay out of attics and basements. And never look directly at the Blair Witch: “No one’s ever seen her and lived to talk about it,” warns one character.

That may indeed be true. But after seeing how upset she particularly seems to be at this group of kids invading her ancient dark space with their arsenal of high-tech recording devices, I’m wondering if the grumpy ol’ gal just simply isn’t in the mood to be photographed and uploaded to Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or anything else. She doesn’t strike me as the social media type.

—Neil Pond, Parade Magazine

 

 

 

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Sep 22 2016
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Movie Reviews

Baby Mama

Romantic triangle sets up sturdy comedy in ‘Bridget Jones’s Baby’

Film Title: Bridget Jones's Baby

Bridget Jones’s Baby
Starring Renèe Zellwegger, Colin Firth & Patrick Dempsey
Directed by Sharon Maguire
Rated R
In theaters Sept. 16, 2016

“How in the hell did I end up here again?” Bridget Jones asks herself as she sits on the couch of her London flat watching the pitiful flicker of a birthday candle in a cupcake remind her that she’s celebrating yet another birthday—number 43—alone.

We might ask the same question: How did Renèe Zellwegger end up in the same place, in the same role, one she hasn’t played in 12 years (since Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason), as a character that she launched back in 2001 in a movie originally made from a Helen Felding novel kinda-sorta based on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice?

Zellwegger received an Oscar nomination for Bridget Jones’s Diary, a delightfully frothy British rom-com, in the title role that captured viewers’ hearts—a plucky, single, working-class lass struggling with her career, her weight, her love life and her tendencies to over-indulge in booze and cigarettes. She chronicled it all in her diary.

Film Title: Bridget Jones's Baby

Bridget and the two possible fathers of her baby: American matchmaking website mogul Jack Qwant (Patrick Dempsey) and British barrister Mark Darcy (Colin Firth)

Now, 15 years down the road, Bridget has moved up—and somewhat on. She’s a producer for a TV news show; she’s managed to corral her figure into something she’s proud to show off. She’s stopped smoking and cut down on the booze. These days she writes on a laptop. But she’s still single, and now more than ever she’s feeling the ticking of her biological clock.

“I’m beginning to think I’ve passed my sexual sell-by date,” she tells one of her co-workers. She refers to her ovaries as “the last barren husks in London.”

But that’s about to change, as you likely surmised by the title of the movie.

Yes, Bridget gets pregnant. But the big question is, who’s the daddy?

Is it her longtime—nearly lifelong—crush, London barrister Mark Darcy (Colin Firth)? Or is it the new American dating-website guru Jack Qwant (Patrick Dempsey)? As fate would have it, Bridget had “intimate encounters” with them both, just weeks apart. As the old saying goes, when it rains, it pours.

That romantic triangle sets up the sturdy structure of the movie’s comedy, and there are plenty of laughs as Bridget at first tries to keep both Darcy and Qwant in the dark about each other, then resigns herself to telling them both. Original Diary director Sharon Maguire also sets up some hilarious gaffes and snafus in Bridget’s workplace as her personal life begins to intrude—once again—on her career.

Emma Thompson is hilarious as Bridget's no-nonsense OG/GYN.

Emma Thompson is hilarious as Bridget’s no-nonsense OG/GYN.

It’s nice to have the original Diary gang—or most of them—back, including many of the supporting players (like Bridget’s parents and pals). Zellwegger and Firth pick up where they left off, just as their characters do, after more than a decade apart; the absence of Hugh Grant’s caddish Daniel Cleaver, Bridget’s other love from the previous two films, is explained early in the movie, with a dry twist of British wit. Dempsey slides right into his role like a sweet slice of blue-eyed American pie.

And Emma Thompson, who was also one of the screenwriters, shines as a bright comedic charm as Bridget’s no-nonsense OB/GYN. There’s a very cool cameo from Grammy-winning British singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran.

So how did Bridget end up here again? The important thing is the little bundle of joy she leaves with two hours later, and the laughter—and the surprises—along the way.

—Neil Pond, Parade Magazine

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Sep 15 2016
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Movie Reviews

Coming In Hot

‘Sully’ signals start of serious fall movie season

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Sully
Starring Tom Hanks & Aaron Eckhart
Directed by Clint Eastwood
PG-13
In theaters Sept. 9, 2016

“Brace for impact.”

Those three words are at the heart of this inspiring big-screen salute to Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, whose successful emergency landing of crippled US Airways Flight 1549 became known around the world in 2009 as the “Miracle on the Hudson.”

Sully makes the “impact” announcement when he realizes there’s no way for his plane—with two failed engines, both destroyed by a massive flock of Canadian geese—to make a conventional landing. The line is later brought up, for much more lighthearted effect, when Sullenberger and his flight crew make a TV appearance alongside late-night host David Letterman.

usp-07014rv2But “Brace for impact” also means for you, the viewer, to hang on and get ready to dig in: Summer is over and a more serious movie season has begun. Based on Sullenberger’s 2009 best-selling memoir Highest Duty, directed by Clint Eastwood and with Tom Hanks in the starring role, Sully gives off somber Oscar signals with its theme of an ordinary, matter-of-fact man simply doing his job—until something extraordinary comes along requiring him to rise up to meet its unprecedented challenge.

“Everything is unprecedented,” Sully notes later, “until it happens for the first time.”

US Airways 1549 was in the sky less than four minutes, and Eastwood’s film toggles back and forth between the incident itself, Sully’s nightmarish flashbacks, and the wrenching post-event investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which drilled and grilled Sully and co-pilot Jeff Skiles (an excellent Aaron Eckhart) on every detail. Was the plane really too damaged to to fly? Did Sully do everything he could to get back to the airport—any airport—instead of risking lives unnecessarily by landing on water? Pilots in computerized flight simulators, fed with data of the incident, indicate that it would have been possible to bring the plane back to LaGuardia, or into nearby Newark, or Teterboro…

“They’re playing Pac-Man!” an exasperated Skiles counters. “[We were] flying a plane full of human beings.”

Laura Linney plays Sullenberger's wife.

Laura Linney plays Sullenberger’s wife.

As the investigation drags on and Sully is hauled before the “court” for days and days, with his career and reputation on the line, the media feasts on his amazing feat—a water “crash” landing from which all 155 passengers and crew members were safely evacuated. And the Big Apple, in the financial dumps of the Great Recession and still reeling from the aftershocks of 9/11, anoints him a hero. A bar names a drink—a shot of Grey Goose with a splash of water—in his honor. Strangers give him hugs and kisses.

“It’s been a while since New York had news this good,” one character tells him, “especially with an airplane in it.”

“I don’t feel like a hero,” Sully says. “I’m just a man who was doing his job.”

usp-fp-0155-for-web-72-cropHanks, his hair dyed white, looks very much like the real-life pilot he’s portraying, a career aviator whose lifelong love of flight—as we see—dates back to boyhood and crop-dusting biplanes. “Never forget,” his first flight teacher tells young Sully in a lesson that certainly reverberated through the years, “no matter what happens, fly the airplane.”

Just a man doing his job, a guy flying a plane, a pilot controlling the stick. Brace for impact—Sully shows us just how important that one “ordinary” person can be, when ordinary circumstances sudden, unprecedentedly, become extraordinary.

—Neil Pond, Parade Magazine

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Sep 08 2016
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Movie Reviews

Rough Sailing

Sea of tears washes over ‘The Light Between Oceans’

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The Light Between Oceans
Starring Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander & Rachel Weisz
Directed by Derek Cianfrance
PG-13
In theaters Sept. 2

“With the ocean, anything is possible,” says Tom Sherbourne (Michael Fassbender), the stoic World War I veteran who takes a job on a remote lighthouse island 100 miles off the coast off Australia in director Derek Cianfrance’s adaptation of Tom Isabel’s 2012 romantic novel.

It sure seems like anything is possible in The Light Between Oceans, in which a sea of happiness and an ocean of tears wash over the characters before it’s over, all because of things brought in by the endless ebb and flow of the tide.

Blissfully alone on the barren island, Tom and his new young wife from the mainland, Isabel (Alicia Vikander), try to start a family. But two wrenching miscarriages leave Isabel an emotional wreck. Then one day, a small open boat washes ashore. In it is a dead young man—and a crying baby girl.

Tom dutifully prepares to telegraph the mainland to report the tragic incident, but Isabel begs him otherwise: She wants to keep the child and raise her as her own. “We haven’t done anything wrong!” she pleads. It’s a sign, a blessing, surely not just a coincidence, she says. Tom reluctantly relents, buries the corpse and pushes the empty dingy back out to sea.

Rachel Weisz

Rachel Weisz

The repercussions of Tom and Isabel’s morally questionable act ripple across the waves when they come home for a visit with their little “Lucy” and meet a grieving woman in the village (Rachel Weisz) whose husband and baby daughter were lost at sea…in a rowboat…at about the same time Tom and Isabel made their joyous discovery on the beach.

Uh-oh.

How this all comes together, and becomes even more complicated and crushing, is at the heaving melodramatic heart of the story, which goes beyond its soap-opera surface with some deeper, darker themes and things to ponder. Tom’s lighthouse is situated between the warm Indian Ocean and the colder Antarctic waters on an island called Janus Rock, named for the two-faced Roman god of transitions, passages, beginnings and endings. One of the faces of Janus looks to the past, the other looks to the future.

The movie suggests that, like the waters of the great oceans that cover the Earth, all things are connected—past, present and future; grief and happiness; war and peace; life, love, loss and death.

Cianfrance isn’t known for making lite-and-lively movies, as you’ll know if you saw Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond the Pines or Cagefighter. There are no real shining rays of sunshine in Oceans, either, but the photography is often sumptuous and sweeping, and Fassbender and Vikander do look cool in vintage 1920s garb. And there are some very strong performances, particularly from Vikander and Weisz, whose character enters late in the plot but becomes essential to the movie’s message about what can happen when righteous anger gives way to forgiveness.

Extreme camera close-ups show faces so tightly on the screen that you can almost taste the salt from their tears. Oh, wait—no, those tears will be your own. Bring a hankie or some tissues to The Light Between Oceans. You might even want a bucket or a mop. These seas can get pretty rough.

—Neil Pond, Parade Magazine

 

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Aug 25 2016
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Movie Reviews, Uncategorized

Lords of the Plains

Jeff Bridges pursues bank-robbing brothers in ‘Hell or High Water’

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Hell or High Water
Starring Chris Pine, Jeff Bridges & Ben Foster
Directed by David Mackenzie
R
Wide release Aug. 19

Two masked men bumble and fumble their way through an early-morning bank robbery in an otherwise sleepy Texas town. They’ve got guns and they mean business, but they’ve shown up before the bank is open, before there’s any money in the cash drawers and before anyone can unlock the safe.

“Y’all are new at this, I’m guessin’?” asks a hapless secretary, the only employee on the premises, suggesting they just turn around and leave before the situation escalates—or anyone gets hurt. “Right now, the only thing you’re guilty of is being stupid.”

“Stupid” isn’t the term, however, that comes to the mind of soon-to-retire Texas Ranger Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges), who sees something smarter developing in the string of heists spreading across the parched Texas midsection, always in the morning, always by a pair of men demanding bills of small denominations, and always hitting a small branch of the same bank, Texas Midland.

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Ben Foster & Chris Pine

That’s the terrific setup of Hell or High Water, in which two brothers, Toby (Chris Pine) and Tanner (Ben Foster), try to right wrongs of their past in a scheme that’s much more complex, and much more understandable, than it first seems. Pine, best known for playing Captain Kirk in the Star Trek movies, makes a powerful dramatic breakaway as a divorced dad desperate to hold onto the family farm for his kids. Foster, who’s had supporting roles in nearly 50 movies and TV shows, is galvanizing as his older sibling, an ex-con with rattlesnake-like anger-management issues stemming from childhood.

Playing Texas Ranger Hamilton, Bridges is in somewhat of his True Grit Rooster Cogburn mode, seasoned by a pinch of Tommy Lee Jones from No Country For Old Men. As he closes in on the robbers and their plan, the movie becomes as much about Hamilton’s working relationship with his Comanche-Mexican deputy partner, Alberto (Gil Birmingham, who played Billy Black in the Twilight franchise), and the affectionately racist joshing that’s bonded them over the years.

British-born director David Mackenzie has made more than a dozen films, but probably nothing you’ve seen on a big screen. Here he shows a keen grasp of 21st century America, especially the collision of the Old West and the new-world economy, gun culture, the devastating appetites of corporate greed and the painful, lasting scars of poverty. Cinematographer Giles Nuttgens, who sharpened his craft on BBC nature documentaries and independent fare, elevates the look of practically every frame to artistry.

“We’re like Comanches—raiding where we please, the whole of Texas. Lords of the plains!” gloats Tanner. A later encounter in an Oklahoma casino with a real-life, modern-day Comanche, however, casts an ominous pall over his proclamation.

If you think you know where Hell or High Water is headed, you may be wrong. Or at least you probably won’t be totally right—which is just about right for this outstanding movie, which puts the line between right and wrong underneath a scorching, unforgiving Texas sun then stretches it out on a lonesome, steaming highway, toward a blurred horizon, with no clear end in sight.

—Neil Pond, Parade Magazine

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Aug 22 2016
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Movie Reviews

High Notes

Meryl Streep Gives Moving Musical Performance in ‘Florence Foster Jenkins’

FLORENCE FOSTER JENKINS

Florence Foster Jenkins
Starring Meryl Streep, Hugh Grant & Simon Helberg
Directed by Stephen Frears
PG-13

“I’ve got the music in me,” proclaimed singer Kiki Dee in her pumping, thumping Top 20 hit of 1974. “I’ve got the music in me, I’ve got the music in me!”

Some three decades before Kiki Dee, another singer made a similar proclamation, when matronly New York City socialite Florence Foster Jenkins was filled with a lifelong, over-abundant love of music—but a serious lack of talent.

Director Stephen Frears, whose resume also includes The Queen, Philomena and Dangerous Liasons, brings Jenkins’ quirky story to the screen with humor as well as heart, never crossing over into camp or parody in a tale that certainly couldn’t gone there. Meryl Streep has proven she can indeed sing, and quite well—in Mamma Mia!, Into the Woods and Ricki and the Flash—which makes her enthusiastic off-key yelping, peeping and squawking as Florence all the more of a marvel.

After a big-screen, major-role absence of several years, it’s good to see Hugh Grant back. He’s terrific as Florence’s common-law husband, St Clair Bayfield, who loves her dearly and shields her from “mockers and scoffers” by bribing newspaper critics and making sure audiences at her concerts are packed with friends and supporters.

Simon Helberg

Simon Helberg

Simon Helberg (Howard Wolowitz on TV’s The Big Bang Theory) has a major role as Jenkins’ young piano accompanist, Cosme McMoon. At first incredulous at her ineptitude, McMoon later comes—as we do—to admire and respect Jenkins’ childlike innocence and the purity of her desire to share music with others in the “profound communion” of performance.

The movie takes its basic setup—a biopic of a pop-cultural footnote character—and fleshes it out in engrossing detail. We see the tremendous lengths to which Bayfield and others in Florence’s elite social circle go to protect—and enable—her. Florence’s vocal coach uses phrases like “You’ve never sounded better” and “There is no one quite like you” to avoid hurting her feelings and pointing out her clear shortcomings.

Bayfield’s long-term relationship with a mistress (Rebecca Ferguson) is strained by his equal devotion to Florence. “It’s complicated,” he tells McMoon. And indeed it is. We learn the heartbreaking reason Florence and Bayfield never married, never had children and never had a “real” marriage—and how Florence’s doomed first marriage, when she was 18, left her devastated and damaged, in more ways than one.

FLORENCE FOSTER JENKINSWe learn of the tragic medical condition—and its toxic treatments—that may have led to some, or many, of Florence’s oddball behaviors, phobias or even delusions.

But mostly we learn of a singer who loved to sing, who had a dream of doing it at Carnegie Hall, and about the unconventional love story at the center of it all.

“They may say I couldn’t sing, but no one can say I didn’t sing,” says Florence toward the end of the film, in a final, parting nod toward her naysayers who refused to see—or hear—the unbridled joy and happiness of her out-of-tune operatics.

“Bravo,” Bayfield replies with a bittersweet smile. And bravo, Meryl Streep, for a moving performance that reminds us that music, like any gift, is one meant to be shared, and that in 1944, Florence Foster Jenkins followed the music “in her.”

—Neil Pond, Parade Magazine

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