I Tawt I Taw A Puddy Twat.

BUNNYMAN will kill you with cuteness. Literally kill you.

In the middle of Nowhere, America, six abysmal actors on a road trip are stalked and killed by a guy wearing a cute bunny suit. Good.

Full marks to filmmaker Carl Lindbergh for writing, producing, directing and editing this cult slasher film, but NO marks for the finished product, which exhibits all the grace and wit of a baboon lighting its farts on fire.

I can see what Lindbergh is going for – a TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE earthiness, a cheap look and feel that might somehow convey “reality,” the way TEXAS CHAINSAW did. And I commend him for the ambitious and thankless task of fulfilling all the main moviemaking roles himself, but he just does not have the talent to pull off a compelling film, as his dialogue is atrocious, and his directorial skills abominable (demonstrated especially in the execrable performances of his cast of twats); round that out with lazy editing and the film becomes unwatchable.

Movie opens with vidcam footage of a woman in a bra and shorts, bloodied and fleeing, being brutally knifed (well, brutally or humorously – you won’t be able to tell with this low level of filmmaking). The reveal of the killer comes much later, when a guy in a bunny outfit drags a girl from the back of his truck, chains her to a tree and rips her in half with his truck. (Bunnyman is played by Joshua Lang, Matthew Stiller and Lindbergh himself at times.)

Just like game knows game – bunny knows bunny.

Cue the six dipshits. In a sedan. Deserted mountain highway. Led by Cheryl Texiera as Rachel and Matthew Albrecht (who looks annoyingly like a thin Chris Penn), their decision to overtake a truck with tinted windows (we would discover later it is Bunnyman driving) sets the plot in motion, as the truck comes after them in a DUEL frenzy. All they had to do was drive faster than the lumbering truck. Nope. Let’s stop and apologize. Writer Lindbergh displays his utter lack of storytelling skill by making the kids do exactly what no one on Earth would do in their situations. While watching any thriller, we always ask ourselves what WE would do, and the more that the people in the movie behave like normal humans, i.e. not like “movie characters,” the more relatable the movie is, hence the better the movie is. But these kids are written like idiots, for the illogical plot to progress. They are called upon to display complex frantic emotions, and can only manage baboons lighting their farts on fire.

Their reactions upon abandoning their car, or finding one of their clique dead, or meeting a hillbilly stranger… all just slap-your-forehead imbecilic. They walk down a path marked by upside-down crosses, and Rachel sees mesh bags hanging from trees, filled with human bones and skulls… she freaks and wants to turn back, but Chris Penn reassures her: “I’m sure there’s an explanation…” Yeh, the explanation is that the people who hung these bags are PSYCHOS, you twat! What terrible acting! What terrible plotting! What terrible dialogue! And when they meet the person at the end of the path, he looks like a psychopath and acts like one, yet Rachel brings up, “I don’t know if you know this, but there’s bags of bones down the way a little…” Is she retarded? He’s obviously the one who put them there! And when he replies with, “So?” – they should have just RUN; instead, they continue to antagonize him and demand to use his phone—by the way, what kind of twenty-somethings don’t have one phone between six of them?!

Where is Bunnyman in all this? Who knows?

The kids meet two strangers in a car, Melissa and Jacob (Lucia Sullivan and Joseph Darden) who refuse to give them a ride – for the most inane of reasons – but suggest a deserted cabin nearby, which the kids head towards, because – plot. Turns out it’s Bunnyman’s place. Of course, because – screenwriting. Bunnyman has a feral guy on a chain like a pet (because – TEXAS CHAINSAW), and he proceeds to chainsaw one of the kids, nail-gun one of the girls, and cook and eat them, with Melissa cozying up to him.

There’s no budget for explicit gore makeup, so there are lots of diversionary shots – you know, where you see blood spraying on a wall, or on a face, rather than the wound itself that is spraying the blood.

Don’t Lose Yer Head, Doc…

Then, in a film laden with non-talent and bad decisions, Lindbergh makes his biggest mistake – he removes Bunnyman’s headpiece! At cannibal dinner, with Feral Guy and Melissa, Bunnyman clumsily cuts his meat and puts pieces under his headpiece up into his mouth. It’s kinda cute and funny – but Melissa is having none of it, and shrikes at him to “take off that fucking mask“ – and he grunts resistance (proving that he’s pretty feral himself), but eventually relents, and removes it – to reveal a ferociously-scarred head. But he shouldn’t have removed the mask. That bunny outfit was the only redeeming factor that the director had going for his shitfest movie, and Bunnyman should have remained an enigma; removing the headpiece removed the last vestige of mystique and fun that set this film apart.

I was shocked to hear Beethoven’s Symphony No.7 in A Major as large portions of the soundtrack (I guess with no budget, public domain becomes your source.) It classes up BUNNYMAN in ways that BUNNYMAN cannot be classed up, so it’s extremely incongruous.

Last scene is irretrievably silly, “We’re safer outside the van than inside” (yes, where the killer can kill us more easily), “He’ll just run us off the road again” (because you can’t outrun a rickety truck with a powerful 4WD 8-cylinder Ram?) “We have to make a stand” (not if he can’t catch your fucking truck, you twat!)… Better to lay Rachel on the street and pretend to be dead, whereupon Bunnyman carries her into his truck, and she stabs him in the neck. Then Rachel and Penn drive off in the slower vehicle – Bunnyman’s truck – leaving the presumably injured Bunnyman near their faster vehicle, should he feel the need to recover and pursue them. First graders commend the excellent screenwriting.

Final shot: Bunnyman walking off into the sunset. What the–??!!

END

Rebel With A Cause.

Chronicling the true story of an American religious convert in Sudan, MACHINE GUN PREACHER stars Gerard Butler as Sam Childers, a Pennsylvania ex-con who found his calling rescuing kidnapped children from militant terrorist mobs in Africa. It’s an incredible tale, commendable, inspiring, honorable, humane and laudable…

… and by “laudable” I mean “Lord-able”…

And that’s where this real life tale turns slightly sour. Because Sam Childers is doing the greatest of things (rescuing children) for the stupidest of reasons (God). His heart and ammo are in the right place, but his brain is in holy hell. Why couldn’t he do this because he knows it’s the right thing to do? Why does “God” have to lecherously smarm Its way into Childers’s motivation? Did God really have to tell Sam Childers that torturing and raping kids is wrong? He couldn’t figure that out for himself?

Still, this happens to be a case where religion has worked in a positive way – through someone who doesn’t want to turn the other cheek but fight for his right to party. Childers might be a misogynistic, illiterate born-again thug, but he is truly a good-hearted person, and a cut above the average born-againer, because he actually did something tangible and beneficial for the human race.

Once the movie sidles past the tiresome Jesus freak introductions (Childers exiting jail, finding his stripper wife born-again (Michelle Monaghan), hitting bad boy rock bottom, attending church with her and becoming smitten with the plight of African children), MACHINE GUN PREACHER settles into an enjoyable toughguy groove. Childers travels to Sudan and Uganda, battling alongside like-minded warriors rescuing children kidnapped by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Having committed all manner of brutal violence, including murder, Childers is not averse to redirecting that unsavory element of his personality towards those who deserve it. His street background enables him to be as hard on African guerillas as they are on the populace they terrorize, wielding guns and grenades with as much ferocity as they do.

On his short return trips home from Africa, Childers gets up to preach brimstone at his wife’s church, “God doesn’t want sheep; he wants wolves with teeth to fight the evil that’s out there!” He rages against banks who refuse to lend him money to rebuild a community in Sudan; he sells his business (to his wife’s chagrin) to buy a new truck for Sudan. She implores, “Don’t turn your back on God!” – “He turned his back on me! Did he save those kids? *I* gotta save those kids!” At last – personal responsibility! Was there ever any reason then, to bring up God, that middle man who keeps giving us the middle finger?

Michael Shannon is Donnie, Childers’s best friend, who takes care of Childers’s family while Childers is overseas. Like any well-trained military man who experiences the inhuman horrors of war and cannot return home for the PTSD that war instills, Childers loses patience with Donnie’s and his family’s petty mindset. After killing two child snipers who have killed two of his men, Childers cannot think how to hold a conversation with Donnie on the phone back home, who naively says, “I’d love to get over there” as if Sudan was a resort; after having to select only a few kids to rescue on a small truck and having to leave some behind – only to find them slaughtered upon his return – Childers has no patience for his daughter whining for a limo to the prom…

If he’s doing it for God, then ironically, Childers begins to realize the calamitous psychological toll of playing God: not everyone can be saved every time. Called upon to make merciless decisions like separating the weakest and sickest, leaving behind children too numerous to pile onto a pickup truck, shooting children trained/brainwashed to kill him; every decision a double-edged sword, every action a stab through his conscience.

Quite realistically portrayed, with seemingly very little Hollywood license inserted by writer Jason Keller (MIRROR MIRROR) and director Marc Foster (QUANTUM OF SOLACE), with a powerful, empathetic performance by Butler (aside from the religious conversion scenes, which seem forced and superfluous). And a stunning turn by young African boy Junior Magale, who has only one speech at a crucial moment, that steals the movie.

The outro titles are chilling: “Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army continue their reign of terror in Northern Uganda and Southern Sudan. Amnesty International estimates that Kony and the LRA are responsible for over 400,000 murders and 40,000 child abductions. These children are tortured, raped, sold into sex slavery and forced to take part in ritualized killing by LRA commanders. To this day Sam Childers fights for the children of Southern Sudan and Northern Uganda.”

Whether he’s doing it because it’s right or because God tells him to is moot in the end – because he’s doing it. Which is more than can be said for you or I. Real footage of Childers closes the movie, and he makes this judicious point another way, “If someone abducted your child, and if I said to you, I can bring your child home, does it matter how I bring them home?”

Preach loudly, and carry a big gun, my son.

END

One Lasting Thing.

The title taken from his infamous stage patter when he would reveal yet another innovation in a device we thought was already tapped out with cool, STEVE JOBS: ONE LAST THING documents the incredible life of innovator, entrepreneur and Apple founder Steven Paul Jobs (1955-2011), showing the good, the bad and the techno.

Mainly from other people’s points of view, ONE LAST THING is a puff piece/eulogy, with a little Bad Guy thrown in. Jobs himself is featured only minimally in a couple of interviews. I tend to forgive master achievers their bad points though, so I really am at a loss as to whether documentarians Sarah Hunt and Mimi O’Connor are trying to be fair by showing Steve’s egomaniacal side, or simply painting a picture of an unapologetic tyrant. But show me a great man who isn’t a tyrant and I’ll show you a failure.

Steve Jobs changed the very face of the communications world; as one talking head calculates, Jobs was probably even greater than Edison in his achievements, affecting four major strands of human advancement, whereas Edison only affected three.

…and you’ll never have to be smart again…

Outlining his rise to power, founding his computer company Apple with gentle soul Steve “Woz” Wozniak (who breaks down remembering the good times with Steve), following his out-of-the-box achievements with the company (in a world where “computers” were the size of refrigerators with those reel tapes and flashing lights, Jobs envisioned “personalizing” them to what we take for granted now), his eventual ousting from his own company by ex-Pepsi marketer John Sculley (brought onboard in good faith, betraying Jobs’s trust); his dabbling in the next big computer company NeXT (with Ross Perot putting in his 150 million’s worth), and eventually resuming his driver’s seat at Apple, which saw it become wildly successful again; lastly, there are his sad days of succumbing to cancer.

A marketer extraordinaire, Jobs was obsessed with “the overall experience of technology, and bringing that together with a personal experience.” It seems like such an OBVIOUS thing to say now, but there was once a time on this Earth when all those technologies we take for granted now did not exist. When Black Eyed Peas rapper Will i am was first approached to advertise iPads he asked, “What’s an iPad?”

There are interesting snippets of Jobs and Gates sharing the stage for interviews. Many forget that Bill Gates’s all-consuming Microsoft company was interwoven into Apple’s history; side by side these two ruthless marketing geniuses bucked and weaved around each other’s parries and keystrokes. They were partners for a long time; the earliest Apple computers had Microsoft parts. And when Jobs regained his seat on Apple, it was Gates who financially pulled him out of the bankruptcy maelstrom. And was booed for it by Jobs fanatics.

One of the talking heads claims, “Steve ultimately betrayed everyone.” I believe that. But I don’t see the point in the statement. Operating at the highest level of finance – when you’re one of the richest men in the world before you’re 30 – you’re going to be forced to make unpopular decisions. It’s not a popularity contest, it’s a business. The pointless film JOBS (2013, starring Ashton Kutcher) focuses on some of these decisions, but loses focus when it comes to portraying Jobs consistently: at first he’s so much of an artist, he is ostracized from his own company for losing it so much money, then when they ask him back, he’s so much of a businessman he doesn’t want to return because the company’s losing money!

Jobs was worth 100 million when he was 23 years old. By mid-1982, he was one of the richest men in the world. By the time he died in October 2011 at age 56, he was worth over 200 billion.

Oh, and one last thing: When he was young, he looked like Ashton Kutcher.

END

Somewhere over the pain flow.

Jonah Hill as the Wizard of Oz!

Over the course of the unfunny road comedy, THE SITTER, where Hill finds himself babysitting three of the most annoying kids in the world, he reveals to each of them their true inner desires that are causing them to improperly channel their energies into being three of the most annoying kids in the world.

Of course, that’s not the true quasi-poignant theme to this scattered, poorly-directed mess of stunted action and unrealistic characters, centering around reluctant babysitter Noah Griffith (Hill). There’s a drug dealer (Sam Rockwell), gangstas (Method Man and Samira Wiley), Noah’s mum (Jessica Hecht) trying to get MILF-love, and Noah not getting any reciprocation from the blonde he is blowing (Ari Graynor; she played Caitlyn on THE SOPRANOS), while a hot high school acquaintance inexplicably falls for Noah (Kylie Bunbury)… Of course, since the kids are in almost every scene, that whole reconciliation with their inner demons might be the theme. I can’t tell because of the scattered, poorly-directed mess of stunted action and unrealistic characters.

Landry Bender is the little girl who believes that being a celebrity is the apex of existence, so splotches on her mother’s makeup to emulate the Snookys and the Hiltons – like every Snooky and Hilton, she needs A BRAIN.

Adopted Mexican Kevin Hernandez plays the unloved third-wheel kid whose perceived alienation drives him to set off homemade bombs in public places. He’s yearning to feel a part of the white family that adopted him – he needs A HEART.

And when Noah sees young Max Records gazing longingly at two guys touching each others’ hair in a train, he realizes Max’s pentup frustration is that he’s gay and too young to know – like the Cowardly Lion, Max needs THE BALLS. In his face.

Now I’ve just compressed the badly-written script (Brian Gatewood, Alessandro Tanaka) into a cohesive thematic arc. It comes off nowhere nearly as neat when the film is being watched. It’s a confused, knock-down, car-chase, run-scream-dance escapade that fails on nearly every level. Maybe the director of the execrable YOUR HIGHNESS (2011) had something to do with that – David Gordon Green. Then how did Green ever manage the very funny PINEAPPLE EXPRESS (2008)? He needs another visit to the Wizard of Drugs.

Without a good script, Jonah Hill is not one of those comedians that can just turn on the fat guy charm and save a movie. He has the talent to work a well-written comedy, like SUPERBAD or GET HIM TO THE GREEK. But with THE SITTER, he’s not in Kansas any more, Toto.

END

Money Is Time Is Life.

Time is money. Time is life. Time is everything IN TIME; a prescient concept underlying an enjoyable actioner that seems urgently plausible because we’re actually living it now.

Justin Timberlake stars as Will Salas in this ingenious thought experiment by writer-director Andrew Niccol (LORD OF WAR), where people are genetically engineered to live until 25, whereupon they live only one more year – unless they “get more time.” But now it’s earned, as currency, transferred to them via a digital countdown clock on their forearms.

Once we accept this concept – which is very close to reality (we are almost at the point of implanting chips under the skin that will monitor our bank accounts and such) – the drama unfolds: a hunted man bequeaths Will one century. And all Van Damme Timecop breaks loose…

“Timekeepers” – cops who monitor illegal exchanges of time – headed by Raymond (Cillian Murphy), pursue Will as he tries to figure what to do with the extra time. He crosses borders (from his poor time zone to a rich zone) until he ends up on the run with a billionaire-timer’s daughter, and his purpose becomes clear.

IN TIME starts with one of those great one-liners that frames the movie’s theme: Will narrates, “I don’t have time.”

Of course, in theory, by adding time indefinitely, people can live forever. But as the hunted man explains to Will, “Everyone can’t live forever. Where would we put them? Why do you think taxes and prices go up? Cost of living keeps rising to make sure people keep dying. How else could there be men with a million years while most live day to day? The truth is, there’s more than enough. No one has to die before their time… For a few to be immortal, many must die.” After Will discovers the man has given him the century and “timed out” (died), he sees the man’s message scrawled on the window, “Don’t waste my time.”

Olivia Wilde is Will’s mother (since everyone stops aging at 25, this has got to be one of the most beautiful cast movies ever). She gives Will 1/2 hour for his birthday that morning (no mention is made about the process – it’s enough to see people touch wrists and for one person’s clock to count down while the other’s gains time), then pays off a loan that night in town. But the bus home will cost her 2 hours, and she only has 1hr 30mins left! And the walk is 2 hours long! She makes a run for it. Her life literally depends on meeting her son, for him to give back some of the hours he earned at work that day. It’s a thrilling, tragic sequence, and makes us realize that this might be the one way to ensure that chicks get ready on time!

Toll booths to the upper class time zone cost 1 month, 2 months, etc., a high status car costs 59 years plus tax, a “voluntary donation” to a poker game costs a century; back in Will’s zone, a cup of coffee is a few minutes, and of course, there’s the 99 Second Store.

Ultimately, IN TIME is another story about class warfare, along the lines of ROBIN HOOD (redistribution of wealth), H.G. Wells’s THE TIME MACHINE (the two classes, Eloi and Morlocks), going all the way back to METROPOLIS (the suffering working class and the privileged upper class).

Timberlake makes a cool, relatable action hero, while his love interest makes a hot inflatable Real Doll – Amanda Seyfried is porcelain-skinned ultra-upper class Sylvia, who ends up on the run with Will, her father Phillipe (Vincent Kartheiser) a time-billionaire. Will breaks into Phillipe’s time-vault and steals the time capsules for the ghettos.

They eventually accrue a Ten Years Reward on their heads.

…and you can pose your Real Doll in any position, with dirty little skirts or guns or…

We’re conditioned/engineered to believe that by 18, we should be out earning a living. Then we’re living paycheck to paycheck for… how long? Are you still living between stabs of money? If we don’t make it to the next paycheck – we starve, become homeless, sick, die. If we can’t pay our bills, government fines, taxes, we are squeezed out of the system. We starve, become homeless, sick, die. It’s happening now. In this movie, cash has been replaced by time.It won’t be long before this imaginary substance called time is used as barter– but hang on! It IS being used: credit cards. We’ve exchanged those pesky pieces of paper currency with imaginary credit. It’s just called credit. Might as well call it anything: credit, finances… time left to live. If we run out of this currency on our pieces of plastic, our time left on this Earth becomes limited. How soon before our pieces of plastic are implanted in our forearms, keeping track of our finances, our credit… our time?

Yes, people have to die. The problem is that you send your most fit, your most virile and most sexually potent to die in wars; meanwhile, you try to keep those aged and useless, those crippled and non-contributing people alive as much as possible. Even those contributing great things to the human species or genome pool are living long past their Use By date. What kind of upside-down idiot society is this? When you meet with a debilitating accident, all your friends on your level of subsistence are the first to offer their help, their money, their time to you, while the corporations who could easily take care of you and a million others without the slightest dent to their profits look the other way and shout Fuck You. What kind of world is this? What kind of species are we?

No matter the patina of “government” or “social construct,” the few will always benefit at the expense of the many, even though there has always been enough to go around. It has been proven there are enough resources in the world to feed it many times over, with no one going hungry or homeless. But are you going to relinquish YOUR money to get that done? When the next guy is not relinquishing his? A sociological bog of complication will not allow this equable situation, even though it can be achieved at ANY TIME if everyone was indeed altruistic.

But it can’t and won’t happen – because if everyone was taken care of… Where would we put them all?

END

Too mysterious for its own smart.

SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS is director Guy Ritchie’s brash, bombastic, brainy and body-shaved sequel to his 2009 SHERLOCK HOLMES. Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) takes on Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris) in a battle as much to do with wits as hits. Along with friend, confidant and eternally disgruntled crimefighting partner Dr. Watson (Jude Law), Holmes must stop an assassination at a peace conference, to avoid the world tipping into chaos (which implies the leaders of the world have anything to do with causing peace, which is exactly their opposite  function – they exist to shatter any existing peace and create interminable conflict for politics and profit – but we’ll let this movie have it’s indoctrinated stance).

The story (written by Michele and Kieran Mulroney) seems hard to follow at first, but we realize that much of it is misdirection and verbosity. We are not regarded as nitwits, so there is much to hear in quick asides and fastidious jokes; SHADOWS is a rich tapestry in a world where every wide-release movie has turned into formulaic mush due to studio constraints and short-attention-span viewers.

Robert Downey Jr. is once again hedonistically body-shaved for the role of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s persnickety detective. (Maybe his hair has all been shucked off because suits of iron can be very chafing.) The way the filmmakers set up Jude Law’s contrariness is a wonder: here are two men who we know are the best of bromancers, yet do not have one kind sentence for each other in the first two acts, Watson lamenting with every breath that he would rather be somewhere else.

Poor Rachel McAdams (as Holmes’ love interest Irene Adler) gets it early (don’t know why they tempted us with her luscious beauty if they were just going to rip it away from us). Holmes takes her death with almost nonchalant grief, for there is someone else with cheekbones just as saucy around the corner who will share this adventure with him – the gypsy flame Madame Simza (Noomi Rapace).

Stephen Fry is Holmes’ free-spirited brother Mycroft; stunning Kelly Reilly is Watson’s wife, Mary. And Paul Anderson is that trope we know and love so well – the villain’s right hand man who keeps tracking the hero and never killing him, because. Just because.

Ritchie expands on the devices he used in the last movie; the breakdown of fight sequences before they happen, crash-cutting trails of clues; artfully piecing together daunting sequences that never lose their threads. It’s an amazing piece of filmmaking, with excellent production values that drops us bodily into the world of 1890.

Listen for the theme from TWO MULES FOR SISTER SARA as Holmes tries to keep up with horses while riding a mule. (Like Indiana Jones, horses are his snakes.)

It’s hard to keep up with the plot in A GAME OF SHADOWS, especially with Downey enunciating like a verbose poetry slammer; for the most part, looking and listening carefully is a rewarding experience – but sometimes we just want a shiny suit of armor to blow stuff up with a salty metal quip.

END

Having a threesome with the Invisible Man…

A Lecherous Method.

Ah yes, the hunt for puss. Isn’t that why we’re all here? To hunt or be hunted?

Director David Cronenberg turns what could be a grand journey into the minds of two extraordinary psychoanalysts (Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud) into angling at puss. Ironically, that’s what the grand journey of these two minds arrived at – that psychological trauma in adulthood can be traced back to sexual noxae in childhood. Now if Cronenberg and writer Christopher Hampton (from his play The Talking Cure, from the book by John Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method) were focusing on just this “prurient” aspect of Jung’s and Freud’s studies, that would still be a compelling tale of how their theories were originally dismissed and ultimately revered as the cornerstones of psychoanalysis, but no. Movie is a lurid DAYS OF OUR LIVES episode, focusing on Jung taking a patient as a lover, while his wife keeps getting pregnant to keep the family together. How trivial.

Cronenberg secures two of the greatest current male leads to make his movie not suck (Michael Fassbender as Jung, and Viggo Mortensen as Freud, looking like Rade Sherbedgia on quaaludes), yet what might have been a sober probing (no pun intended) into the field of psychoanalysis and the methods of its star players becomes a sniggering, insular beating off (and this time, pun intended).

No matter that these great men had dalliances – their contributions to the discipline of psychoanalysis is immeasurable, so the movie is therefore slightly disrespectful for taking one event and conflating it into the device that motivates them. It would be like making a biopic of John F. Kennedy and making his motivation Marilyn Monroe. And like most of Cronenberg’s films, there is little context of who these world-renowned men are and their place in society; they exist solely to braindance with each other, postulating theories on patients, their own dreams and why David Cronenberg is so sexually repressed.

Keira Knightley is Jung’s patient Sabina, who enters his care as a gibbering spaz and leaves a few years later as a society woman, in between, taking Jung as a dominant lover who whips her while she’s tied down naked. (The only complaint I have with these sequences is that Cronenberg opted to show Knightley topless – for flat-chested women, is that really a boon, or a deal breaker? And if there’s nothing worth seeing, why pretend that there IS, through the duplicity of the padded bra?) It’s a brave role for Knightley, stuttering painfully and going out on a limb to appear ugly, although we must take into account that she is aware – before filming ever started – that it leads to her redemption as a hottie. (I’m sure a lot of men will find that warrior’s jaw alluring but I can’t get past that ironing board chest.)

Vincent Cassel is libertine Otto Gross, who tells Jung, “Repress nothing!” (That’s apt, coming from the guy who screwed every ballerina in BLACK SWAN.) He is also a practitioner of psychoanalysis, mainly by removing the ‘psycho’ and ‘lysis’ and focusing on the ‘anal’.

Of course, in this movie about psychoses, every character reveals just a little bit of their own: Jung cannot perform sexual indiscretions without his own guilt overcoming him, even though we would imagine him above guilt, being an analyst; Freud sees weakness in his colleague Jung, so represses his opinions; Sabina replaces her father’s abuse with that of Jung as a father-figure, making him abuse her; Jung’s wife Emma (Sarah Gadon) thinks that birthing a boy-child after two girls will keep Jung from straying, “Now will you come back to us?”; and Otto Gross, well, I just wanna party with that guy.

END

Pwnage.

Two couples whose sons were involved in a school fight meet to discuss how to deal with their sons. And fight.

Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly are Penelope and Michael Longstreet, whose son lost two teeth being hit with a stick by the son of Nancy and Alan Cowan (Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz). Film opens with Penelope at her computer, surrounded by the others, writing a statement about the incident. There is disagreement over the phrase “armed with a stick,” which is resolved quickly to “carrying a stick,” but we immediately sense the façade of amity that every character has thrown up around themselves to get past this uncomfortable meeting with strangers.

The beauty is in watching the erosion of that façade.

Director Roman Polanski (THE PIANIST) turns Yasmina Reza‘s French play, LE DIEU DU CARNAGE, into a quirky little thought experiment. “Thought experiment” because, though this situation has been lived by countless parents over the millennia, Reza decides to keep the two sets of parents in the same room until entropy is attained. (Entropy: not just a thermodynamic steady state, a German doctrine of inevitable social decline and degeneration.) Because if you draw anything out long enough – friendship, marriage, treaty, contract – it will disintegrate due to humans being human.

The four actors give excellent performances in this well-directed dramedy, constantly reminding themselves they are more sophisticated than savages and that they should not descend to incivility. Yet we can see where all roads are leading, as they alternately blame, bond, accede guilt, ally, bully, vent, belittle, taunt, accuse, and ultimately resolve nothing.

Reilly seems slightly miscast (a talented actor whom we’ve grown accustomed to seeing as a screwball), yet he holds his own against these Actor’s Actor heavyweights. His Michael is self-admittedly a gruff guy who is faking civility, and would probably not even care about his son’s incident if it were not for his wife Penelope forcing the drama.

Waltz (in the few English roles we’ve seen him in), as always, the most studied, sober and deepest in the skin of his lawyer Alan, allowing himself a breeziness that shows us he is also not too concerned about the universe collapsing on what were once simply boys-will-be-boys actions. Though he would much rather be someplace else, almost seeming callous about the fates of the two boys, he still manages to sporadically exude that snakecharm ominousness that defined him in INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. When Penelope mentions his son “deliberately” hitting her son, his smile is toxic, “Why do you have to slip in the word ‘deliberately’? What kind of lesson are you trying to teach me?”

Winslet is at turns a gracious guest and drunken alleycat. Like the rest of the cast, her Nancy is trying in vain to be upper class and almost succeeding. Vomiting over Penelope’s art books doesn’t help, her “proper” demeanor further deteriorating under alcohol.

Foster’s Penelope has staked the most emotion in this issue, an almost fanatical desire to see justice meted out. Towards the end, her reactions are extreme; it seems like director Polanski, though he must have filmed enough varied takes, used the takes that were not the most appropriate reactions for the scene. But then, all the characters seem to get in on the inappropriate reactions, calling each names, insulting each others’ sons, emasculating, denigrating, crying, histrionics; madness which we feel would prompt any sane guests to leave, not with polite or fake excuses, but with an unceremonious “Let’s-go-honey” race to the door. Yet they all remain in the same room without fisticuffs ensuing! Is this the measure of civility? Slander without bloodshed?

CARNAGE is a snide satire on this politically correct era of coddling. In a simpler time, one schoolboy losing two teeth to another was considered part of growing up. Now First World countries seem to think children are delicate crystal angels. This statement was made – sarcastically as hell – on the SOUTH PARK episode “Sarcastiball,” where all gruffness, incivility and energy were leached out of school football games so that kids wouldn’t get hurt. Only in First World countries would anything as small as two missing teeth be turned into a national incident; where people are sooooo sensitive about injuring other people yet hypocritically want to go to war at the drop of a muslim.

Alan tells Penelope: “I believe in the god of carnage. The god whose rule’s been unchallenged since time immemorial.” Sounds less like a case of belief in a god, more like a case of humans being human.

END

Mare Intranquilitatis.

APOLLO 18 is the first true space-horror movie since ALIEN (1979).

In this minimalist thriller, two American astronauts in 1972 are sent on a secret mission to the Moon in Apollo 18 – to stop the USSR doing something-something-who-cares-McGuffin – and find they are not alone.

For the youngsters, Apollo17 was the last real manned mission to the Moon. (That’s unless you believe the Moon Landings were at a studio in Burbank. You idiot.)  This “leaked footage” is “the reason why NASA never went back to the Moon.”

Astronauts Ben Anderson (Warren Christie) and Nate Walker (Lloyd Owen) land on the Moon in what seems to be real lunar module footage, brilliantly staged by director Gonzalo López-Gallego and cinematographer José David Montero, an authentic 1970’s Kodachrome tinge to the filmstock. Timur Bekmambetov produces this classic haunted house tale: two actors, one location. For all we know, we are watching actual NASA footage, as over 95% of the visuals are from mounted fisheye cams inside the capsule, helmet cams and hand-cams. There seems to be not one shot that could have originated from a movie camera. An excellent piece of filmmaking, all bad angles, truncated frames and stressed filmstock.

Ben and Nate exit their lunar module to do the something-something McGuffin. They find a cracked Russian cosmonaut helmet – and then find the cosmonaut that belonged to it! Tension is ratcheted to unbearable proportions as Ben follows sand footprints into a dark cave, the only light coming from intermittent flashes made by his camera, the whine of its motor recharging the only noise accompanying his stressed breathing. And we wait for what is surely to come – a camera flash that will reveal more than just cave rocks…

The abandoned Russian capsule is located. “Who or what did this?” Something gets into Nate’s atmosphere suit! The mystery is overwhelming, the “monsters” unseen, as the astronauts must go about their daily protocol to survive not only the Moon’s unforgiving environment, but also the breach in their suits and the unidentified entity at large in their capsule.

APOLLO 18 is so realistically composed that any horror tropes would seem completely out of place: no roaring humanoid aliens carrying Earth women, no redneck hillbilly axe-murderers, no mutated proto-humans or space zombies – not even an “alien” from ALIEN! Rather, one crack in a glare shield, one rip in an atmosphere suit means deadly consequences. The enemy is the environment itself. This is not ARMAGEDDON or STAR TREK where movie sparks fly out of consoles to signify malfunction. When computers malfunction here, they just – Don’t Work. APOLLO 18, though it is “found footage,” rises above the morass (CLOVERFIELD, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY and the granddaddy of found footage, THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT) with tension derived not from big monsters or supernatural magic, but from a fantastic real-world factoid.

The factoid: during the Apollo missions, 340 pounds of rock were brought back from the Moon…

The last ten minutes of APOLLO 18 are drenched in astro-sweat and space-gurgle, as Ben struggles to read the markings on the dashboard of the Russian module, through his tears of fear and desperation, mumbling unheard promises to his wife and child that he would see them again, as NASA calls for his quarantine and abandonment, ordering his orbiting crewmate to leave for Earth without him. But Ben will not be denied passage home, having discovered the reason why the Russians never returned, and why the United States want him to also never return, igniting the Russian module into orbit… the blackness beckons, as he screams aloft in a crash course with the orbiter… and the inside of his capsule rises to life…

END

A planet where apes evolved from James Franco?

PLANET OF THE APES (1968) was about a man trying to find himself in an Apes’ world; RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES is about an ape trying to find himself in a Man’s world. Dispensing with all the Tim Burton monkey business, RISE is a sober and epic thriller on how the Apes came to wear such stylish pantsuits.

Boldly flinging feces in the face of canon, writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver have crafted a new beginning for the Ape Who Said No. Cast your mind back to CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (1972), where Ricardo Montalban exposits the backstory on how apes were kept as pets by humans, after a virus wiped out dogs and cats; and how those pets devolved to slaves, until they revolted. Director Rupert Wyatt says No.

In this new telling, an ape treated with a genetic drug gains startling intelligence and releases that drug to his fellow apes, engineering an ape-volution by way of Big Pharm.

Will Rodman (James Franco) discovers a potential cure for Alzheimer’s disease called ALZ-112 (just had to have a ‘Z’ in it for action movie cred!) and tests it on chimps. His star chimp Bright Eyes soon becomes smarter than the American Bible Belt and probably half of both coasts (which isn’t hard to do), but is tragically killed, leaving behind a newborn, Caesar, who inherits his mother’s smarts and whose IQ rockets exponentially due to being Andy Serkis in a motion capture suit.

After his research is defunded, Will desperately uses ALZ on his fading father (John Lithgow, stuck too long on that show about aliens trying to figure how Earth works; great to see him in this welcome, heartfelt film performance), whose Alzheimer’s disappears! Two short years later, a tragic turn, as Lithgow once again starts acting like an alien trying to figure how Earth works. The ALZ fails in humans – but works gangbusters on chimps who have never seen 3RD ROCK FROM THE SUN.

Frieda Pinto is the veterinarian love interest. After being the biological mind of the movie for about five seconds, she is given nothing more to do except have flawless skin and kiss James Franco a lot (I guess that’s some peoples’ idea of a dream job).

Better than the latter four original PLANET OF THE APES movies, RISE is a fitting reboot, crafted with grandiosity, sincerity, inspiring soundtrack, and simply magnificent acting – from the apes!

The simians are complete CGI characters, yet with humans behind those pixels, in motion capture suits; technology hand-in-glove with emotion. Karin Konoval is Maurice the orangutan, Terry Notary is alpha chimp Rocket, Christopher Gordon is test chimp Koba and Richard Ridings is Buck the gorilla.

And Andy Serkis (THE TWO TOWERS, KING KONG 2005) is hirsute Olivier in a jugular performance as Caesar; his evocative eyes conveying pathos, wonder, befuddlement, contentment. As his life delves deeper into drama, his facial features assume more nuance; from introspective dissatisfaction to sinister agenda, and most disturbing of all – intelligence. And with intelligence comes desire. The desire to know his origins – and destiny. No longer content as the rudderless, leashed “pet,” his disdain for his position in life bleeds off his features. Not only is he sure that another destiny awaits, but from his mien, we are sure that he will handle it, whatever it is.

Caesar’s devotion to Will’s father leads him to attack the neighbors, whereupon he is court-ordered to an ape shelter. Thus, in exile, in a screeching madhouse – a madhouse! – where might is right, must Caesar shuck off his human upbringing and find his calling, to assume the mantle of his namesake.

The shelter is supervised by Bryan Cox. His son Dodge (Tom Felton) feeds the apes, cleans the cages – and bullies them maliciously. (Could we expect anything less from Draco Malfoy?) His cruelty, coupled with the instinctual hierarchic cruelty of the resident chimps, tips Caesar into animal. When Will visits and sadly tells Caesar, “No, we’re not going home now,” we can see the hurt and abandonment on Caesar’s face. And that is the moment the planet of apes begins its rise…

Caesar lifts a penknife from an intern, not to use in killing, but as a tool! Picking the lock of his cage, taking his cues from HOGAN’S HEROES, he comes and goes as he pleases, first freeing the gorilla, to have an Adam Baldwin bodyguard. (The scene where Caesar reveals to alpha Rocket how Buck the gorilla is now his foot soldier, is all the more brilliant because it is played wordlessly, with only facial expressions and body language!) Finally, Caesar steals Will’s ALZ canisters and releases the gas unto the apes. RISE tells us that apes were not kept as pets or librarians or hairdressers; rather, from this caged shelter did the Apes get off their hairy anuses to conquer mankind.

Recall Montalban’s tale of a virus; yes, there’s a virus in RISE, but it’s not killing cats and dogs – it’s affecting humans. And it’s spreading – if the classic airline-trajectories-on-a-world-map method is telling us anything.

On a historic day, there came an ape who spoke a word which had been spoken to him time without number by humans. He said: “No.”
–Cornelius, on video, BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (1973).

When Caesar utters that first word, it is as frightfully spine-tingling as the ram’s horn heralding the first glimpse of gorillas on horseback in PLANET OF THE APES. Caesar fiercely holds Dodge’s cattle-prod hand in check and Dodge cries out, “Get your stinking paw off me, you damn dirty ape!” Then, in thunderheads, comes Caesar’s retort – a guttural, bestial snarl, a tectonic vocal tremor – “NO!”… An emasculation of godhood that Draco has no spell against; the gorilla looks on, astounded, lips moving in unbidden soundless sympathy, trying to unconsciously emulate His Master’s Voice; in the far-flung future, a cage is being readied for Chuck Heston…

Action movie protocol takes over, in a battle between apes and men on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, a metaphor for “crossing over” from downtrodden to masters. And of course, they’re heading from south to north, as in “rising.”

Chimps clamber over cars, police blockade, gorilla against a charging horse, orangutans swinging underneath the bridge to flank their human assailants, cops in chopper (the same guard who had “too much iron in the blood” with Magneto!), gorillas pushing a bus on its side against a barrage of gunfire – and the Tom Cruise Stunt Award goes to Buck the gorilla for leaping into a hovering helicopter in slomo while bullets pummel his hide. (Is there a more terrifying sight – besides Tom Cruise coming at you with his body-shaved chest?)

Amidst the chaos, yet there is a touching camaraderie in the way all the apes look to Caesar as their leader. And a bittersweet ache in Caesar’s last parting with Will – waitaminute! So this “planet where apes evolved from men” was all James Franco’s fault? Today, the Redwoods, tomorrow… Moses! (There is a tiny clue on the future “Taylor” as we see a newspaper headline, “Lost in Space?”)…

…Amongst the mighty Redwoods, the apes congregate behind Caesar, all paying obeisance to him, still crouching on their knuckles. He turns and looks at them – and they all stand…

And the final question remains: When the future Taylor crash-lands that pointy rocket in that desert sea, who will be there to overact as much as Charlton Heston?

END