All posts by hangmantitan

Staff Picks

Netflix Picks #3

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John: In Bruges is the debut effort of far-too-unknown writer and director Martin McDonagh. Starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, this is the kind of film that makes you feel guilty about bursting out into gut-wrenching laughter. Farrell plays the young, impatient thrill-seeker and Gleeson portrays the classic oldie who only wants to take in the beautiful architecture of Bruges, Belgium, where the whole film takes place. This might seem like a familiar dynamic, but there’s a twist: they’re a pair of assassins-in-hiding after a job gone wrong.

The brilliance to the film really starts with its basic premise. Bruges, one of the most aesthetically beautiful and quaint little towns in the entire world, has become the hideout and eventual battleground of the hitmen and, ultimately, the mob boss they work for. There’s a vague element of mystique, as well, an almost dream-like quality to the film that fits so well because of how easily Bruges might compare to one’s idea of heaven. I suppose it’s possible that is what allows the layer of absurdity the film also possesses to work as well as it does. At no point does it feel like some of the more ridiculous occurrences are too much, or that they do anything but add to the awesomeness of the film. It is a true shame that Mr. McDonagh has, as of yet, only made two films (the second being 2012’s Seven Psychopaths). The Oscar-nominated writing, fun performances and harsh themes all make the film immensely enjoyable for anyone with even a slight taste for the darker comedy. If that’s you, then In Bruges is fun as hell.

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Academy Awards, Featured

Ex Machina (2015)

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There’s this dude Nathan. He’s one of the few dudes onscreen in Ex Machina, the directorial debut of 28 Days Later and Sunshine scribe Alex Garland. Nathan is a walking paradox, even in the most perfunctory surface-level characterization of him as a hard-drinking frat boy who also happens to be a veritable technological genius. Caleb, his temporary intern of sorts, at one point compares him to Mozart — likely the first time a Mozart figure has ever spent so much time on abs and forearms. This straightforward incongruity in Nathan would only work with the right actor in his shoes, and Oscar Isaac is the right actor. A force in Inside Llewyn Davis and A Most Violent Year, Isaac is utterly convincing throughout Ex Machina. Nathan drains bottles of beer and vodka, yells at his maid, passes out drunk, wakes up to lift weights and beat his punching bag, and soon starts in on the beer and vodka again — and yet he’s always the smartest guy in the room by a longshot.

That somewhat superficial contradiction (or, for the purposes of a review of a film about artificial intelligence: that skin-deep, cosmetic, inorganic contradiction) is only the beginning of Nathan. Isaac is joined by Domhnall Gleeson as Caleb, the timid young coder brought to Nathan’s underground tech lair as ostensible winner of a contest to take part in a secret experiment (Isaac and Gleeson are also both in The Force Awakens later this year, which is doubly exciting after seeing Ex Machina). Together they deliberate Ava, Nathan’s advanced A.I. that not only walks exactly like a human and talks exactly like a human but thinks exactly like a human, too. What that means, exactly, is exactly what Ex Machina probes. Maybe. Spoilers follow.

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Director Series: John Carpenter

Halloween (1978)

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Halloween might be the most imitated, riffed-upon, winked-at American horror film in history. To say nothing of multiple novels and comic book series starring the serial killer Michael Myers, the film franchise itself now stands at ten installments, of which — you guessed it! — nine are pretty much crap. Judging by the box office landscape of the next few years, it won’t be long before Halloween 11: We Can Out-Sequel Saw hits a theater near you. But outside of the canon there are hundreds of Halloweens, from subtle copies to straight-up rip-offs, especially with the original being the film that most credit as the start of the slasher genre (“what about Hitchcock?!”).

One case-in-point is It Follows, one of the most recent nods to John Carpenter’s first true horror flick (although we sought out the elements of horror in his feature debut Assault on Precinct 13). The similarities are numerous and unmistakable, from the suburban setting to the shot of the classroom to the sense that this thing is stalking only the protagonist with everyone else standing in as collateral damage. That Michael Myers is a thing or an it — certainly not a him — is made clear by his psychiatrist Sam Loomis, and the idea of the human form as a vessel for something more sinister is also at the heart of It Follows. The music by Disasterpeace, too, is just one more obvious piece of evidence of the influence of Halloween in movies like It Follows; go listen to “Playpen” and try not to picture a flickering jack-o’-lantern against a black backdrop.

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TV Review

True Detective 1.1 – “The Long Bright Dark”

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This review appeared shortly after the initial premiere of True Detective in early 2014 — slight edits have been made since the original posting.

Touch darkness, says the promotional poster for HBO’s latest series True Detective, and darkness touches you back. A tagline like this is all too generic these days, paired with a moody title card or a black-and-white shot of the strong-willed protagonist of a new film or television series. True Detective’s ad campaign has all of that — but one thing to take away from the pilot episode, which aired Sunday night in the US, is that the weighty tagline is rightfully deserved. Spoilers follow for the first episode “The Long Bright Dark”.

Conceived as an anthology series (more on that in a bit), True Detective’s first season stars Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as newly-paired State Police Detectives in backwater Louisiana. The year is 1995, and the detectives are still operating in an awkward alliance as they begin an investigation into a gruesome murder. The victim’s name is Dora Lange, and it’s already clear that her case is a driving element of this season — and yet the vast majority of “The Long Bright Dark” is spent with McConaughey and Harrelson, and it’s also clear that this is a show that will focus on the character above the plot. The tension in the partnership is nothing revelatory for a cop show: McConaughey’s Rust Cohle is the unconventional but brilliant loner, Harrelson’s Martin Hart is the by-the-numbers family man looking to succeed in his position. These parts are acted perfectly, though, and McConaughey especially deserves to ride high on the wave of critical praise he’s received for recent roles such as this.

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News

Film & TV News: April 20

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News

  • Plot details for Star Wars: Rogue One reveal that the rumored Death Star connection is in fact at the center of the 2016 spinoff. This means the events will take place between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, which is simultaneously exciting and worrying.
  • Tribeca Film Festival continues this week, closing on April 26th. Western-themed highlights of this year’s festival include William Monahan’s Mojave and the Michael Fassbender frontier flick Slow West.
  • John Michael McDonagh’s follow-up to last year’s excellent Cavalry, a New Mexico-set black comedy called War on Everyone, began filming this week. Check out the first image over at Empire.

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TV Review

The Red Road 2.3 – “Intruders”

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At the end of last week’s episode of The Red Road, titled “Graves“, a supporting character from the first season shuffled off his mortal coil in a somewhat predictable fashion. He speaks in absolutes and says the things a fictional character in a fictional story says before electing to leave the world. There’s a cool shot of Jean getting into her car and backing out of the driveway that’s soon wasted by an inserted shot of the guy raising a gun to his head, and had the gunshot gone off in the background of that car shot it might have been a bit easier to swallow. But as “Graves” ended the whole episode felt a bit tired, and that sequence in particular felt a bit like a writer’s room getting rid of a character they had no idea what to do with.

In “Intruders” that death takes on a bit more meaning, as does the concept of a grave. But the episode offered little in the way of real intensity or development, continuing what’s becoming a disappointing trend in Red Road‘s second season. Kopus is still on lockdown, Junior is still roaming the wilderness and shooting squirrels, and Harold is still just strutting around being boring. Here’s to hoping that there’s something lurking behind this veneer of relative tedium that we just can’t see yet, because otherwise “Intruders” is a letdown at the halfway point of season two.

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Film Review

Skokie: Invaded But Not Conquered (2013)

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I spent an hour and a half on an online chat module last night with a Verizon guy named Sandeep, desperately trying to restore some suspiciously evaporated TV channels to my service. We did the typical dance around the issue for some time before actually starting in on solving it, and the overly-formal customer service lingo that obviously came off of a laminated index card really only extended the process. Our conversation ended as follows:

Sandeep: You are a valued customer.

Me: Thank you.

Sandeep: I sincerely hope your sirvice [sic] is now satisfactory.

Me: Thank you.

Sandeep: Do you have any further questions?

Me: Have you seen the new Star Wars trailer?

The other reason this took so long was that most of my attention was on Skokie: Invaded But Not Conquered, the documentary airing on one of the channels that didn’t decide to spontaneously vanish. I’m ashamed to say I really had never heard of the fanatic Frank Collin or the “Skokie Affair”, despite any knowledge of American neo-Nazi groups and other various followers of the American Nazi Party’s George Lincoln Rockwell. Collin was partly that — a follower of Rockwell’s — and partly an attention-seeking egomaniac with a knack for societal parasitism. In Skokie, Illinois, he found what he perceived to be the ideal host.

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TV Review

Daredevil – Season 1

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If anyone has shown a dedication to the long game in big-budget storytelling lately, it’s Marvel. The latest addition to the ever-expanding Cinematic Universe is the Netflix series Daredevil, chronicling the early days of lawyer Matt Murdock and his crimefighting alter-ego. In many ways Daredevil is the best thing to happen to the MCU in a long time. Not only is it far superior to Marvel’s other television ventures Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Agent Carter, but it often packs more of a punch — physically and emotionally — than the majority of the MCU films. The lack of cable television limitations or MPAA ratings means the show can be as dark as it needs to be. Most importantly, though, Daredevil shies away from the typical overblown grandiosity of many MCU ventures and opts instead for a very human drama.

It’s still a hero vs. villain thing we’re dealing with here, of course, but Daredevil is at its strongest when it plays away from that (striking the super– prefix from both hero and villain). Murdock gets his ass handed to him on a regular basis, Wilson Fisk is diabolical and yet relatable, and the street-level politics of the show are far more interesting than the end-of-the-universe Avengers stories. This is true of the comics, too, and as with live-action Daredevil it took a while to get the character right. There are a whole host of comic book influences for the Netflix series — primarily the Frank Miller tales The Man Without Fear and Born Again —which we’ll dive into now. Ye be warned: spoilers abound.

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Director Series: John Carpenter

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

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There’s a building on a quiet alley in a rundown part of the city that’s almost abandoned, draped in shadow and disrepair. Inside the building is a collection of individuals from vastly different walks of life. There is a supervising lieutenant freshly assigned to the job. There is a grief-stricken father in the throes of shock after discovering his murdered daughter. There are two dainty secretaries wearing sweaters (one orange, one yellow). There are three hardened criminals, one of whom is sick with a possible virus. Each of the people inside the building is an individual with an individual story. Outside is different. Outside is a creeping evil, a legion of hunters that is nonetheless a single faceless and motiveless mass, no individual stories to be found. The hunt is all.

…sounds like a horror movie, right? Like the kind John Carpenter might make? Even beyond Carpenter, this is not at all an unfamiliar formula for fright-fests — strangers unite against mysterious evil — serving as the entire premise of movies like Cube and Saw. The idea that something lurking out there will inevitably attack each stranger regardless of their differences is an inherently scary notion. And even though Assault on Precinct 13 isn’t necessarily a horror movie, it’s at its most effective when it operates like one.

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TV Review

Better Call Saul 1.10 – “Marco”

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It’s been a week since the conclusion of the first season of Better Call Saul. “Pimento“, far and away the best single episode of the season (although I loved “Hero“), made sure Jimmy’s world was flipped upside down as we headed into the finale hour. Relationships that once meant the world to our morally-challenged lawyer are now seen in a different light, and people Jimmy once thought to be the scum of the earth are suddenly something else entirely.

It’s fitting, then, that “Marco” gives a name and a history to Jimmy’s one-time best friend Marco. In “Hero” we saw a glimpse of Slippin’ Jimmy’s adeptness in the short con game, and if he’s The Sting‘s Johnny Hooker then Marco is his Luther Coleman. After the events of “Pimento” Jimmy returned to his old stomping grounds and found Marco exactly where he left him, asleep at a bar in the middle of the afternoon, scraping by on a crappy job and a handful of half-assed scams.

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