Category: Film Review

I don’t get too hung up on poetic license and the reshaping of history when it comes to glossy and well-meaning Hollywood biographical tales, so in that regard, I enjoyed last year’s Oscar nominated drama Hidden Figures from director Theodore Melfi (St. Vincent). This is the compelling story of three African-American women who led the scientific charge of helping to get John Glenn into outer space. But I don’t understand why Taraji P. Henson wasn’t the one to the acting nomination out of the main trio which included her, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monae. Not that anyone was bad, but I thought Henson’s arc and character was easily the most affecting and effective. Melfi, who co-wrote the script with Allison Schroeder, took liberties with the facts and that’s his prerogative as a filmmaker; he crafted an engaging film about important subject matter, and injected warmth, humor, and some solid social critique. Kevin Costner can do no wrong, Cullen Moss gets some nice close-ups (The Heroes of Arvine Place POWER!), cinematographer Mandy Walker (Shattered Glass, Australia) gave the film some solid visual polish, Hans Zimmer’s score shoots for the stars with appropriate bombast, and the inherent “goodness” of the story is felt at all times. A massive theatrical success to the tune of $230 million world-wide on a $25 million budget (that’s REAL $$$ right there), Hidden Figures is now available on Blu-ray, and will likely entertain audiences for many years to come. 

It took me a few viewings to totally appreciate Hal Ashby’s barely released 1986 film 8 Million Ways To Die, which was the eclectic and troubled helmer’s unique spin on the crime film, and would serve as his final major motion picture. This was the first attempt to cinematically adapt the Matt Scudder detective character from author Lawrence Block (A Walk Among the Tombstones), with a gritty screenplay coming from future auteur Oliver Stone (JFK, Natural Born Killers) and R. Lance Hill (Road House, Out for Justice, The Evil that Men Do), who was credited under the pseudonym David Lee Henry, with uncredited rewrites courtesy of Robert Towne (Chinatown, Days of Thunder, Ask the Dust). Starring  a gruff and sweaty Jeff Bridges, Rosanna Arquette in one of her best and sexiest performances, and an extra-volatile Andy Garcia in one of his first leading roles and in total scene stealing mode, the movie died a very fast box office death, and was met with savage reviews from critics. But over time, it has become a bit more appreciated, most certainly by Ashby fans, but also as an example of the slick and dangerous neo-noir movie world that doesn’t very often get a chance to be seen in quite this fashion on screen. There’s a booze-soaked quality to this film that feels vivid in nearly every moment.

8 Million Ways To Die has a scattershot narrative involving cops, scum-bags, drug dealers, prostitutes, murders, and liquor, that’s both pulpy and energetic and certainly coherent, and yet still feels compromised in some instances (Ashby had final cut taken away from him by the producers). But there’s still something fascinating going on within the narrative and with certain aesthetic choices made by Ashby and his team. Stephen H. Burum’s sinewy and seedy cinematography stressed an alternatively shadowy and sometimes neon-inflected color palette, while the excellent music from James Newton Howard kept an appropriately shifty and dangerous sonic ambiance; the opening helicopter shot with Howard’s sleazy music blaring is 80’s-perfect. And considering that Ashby was reportedly fired from the movie before it was finished, that might explain why the film feels so choppy in spots, as he wasn’t allowed to collaborate on the final editorial process. It’s an odd yet entertaining film, with some cool moments, but exists as a curious “What if?” on Ashby’s legendary filmography. Another interesting tidbit is the involvement of the production/distribution entity Producers Sales Organization; check out their story and credits on Wikipedia for some extra-fun reading.

For a long time, 8 Million Ways To Die was a hard film to track down. It was never given an American DVD release, but was released by Second Sight in the UK on that format. Now, thanks to Kino Lorber, Ashby’s swan song has been given the Blu-ray treatment, and the results from a picture and audio standpoint are excellent, showcasing deep blacks and rich colors all throughout, with a very clean transfer which retains Burum and Ashby’s intended 1.85:1 aspect ratio. Howard’s spectacular musical score, especially that sax-heavy opening, sounds luscious to the ear, a further reminder of that composer’s stellar gifts with musical accompaniment. Special features include interviews with Garcia, Arquette, Block, Alexandra Paul, a trailer gallery, and an informative and entertaining audio commentary with Howard S. Berger and Nathaniel Thompson. This film certainly had a helluva production, with various rewrites occurring much to the annoyance of key creatives and Ashby battling it out with producers over his unconventional filmmaking approach, and despite all of this, I really think it’s a lot of fun, and if it’s not everything it might’ve been under less hellish circumstances, it serves as a unique final offering from Ashby, who rarely repeated himself and was clearly interested in exploring various genres during his amazing career.

The thoroughly unnerving and slow-burn psychological drama Christine will almost certainly send a shiver down your spine, especially if you have no clue about the real events that inspired this deeply unsettling motion picture, which was directed with a continued sense of cinematic implacability by the sharp and extremely talented filmmaker Antonio Campos (Afterschool, Simon Killer). Rebecca Hall, appearing in nearly every scene, delivered nothing short of a tour de force performance as Florida newscaster Christine Chubbuck, an awkward woman in a very outward profession, who never quite fit into the station family that surrounded her on a daily basis. The exacting cinematography by Joe Anderson is matched by Sofia Subercaseaux’s patient editing , while the creepy and ominous musical score by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans is shrewdly deployed in key moments, with the final sequence containing one of the more disturbing bits of on-screen violence that I’ve seen in a while. Not because it’s excessively gory, but rather, how personal and upsetting it all is. Campos is a fiercely talented filmmaker who is clearly choosy with his projects; I hope we see much more from him in the future. And make no mistake – Hall was totally robbed of an Oscar nomination, but I’d imagine the too-low-profile that this film received kept it out of last year’s awards race. Regardless, Christine is available on Netflix streaming and on DVD and is an expert piece of storytelling that never does anything you truly expect in any given moment, which has to be one of the ultimate compliments one could pay any particular film. Oh, and EXTREME Tracy Letts POWER.

This is a shamelessly entertaining film with lots of heart and a tone that bounces all over the place. Gregory Hoblit’s underrated 2000 genre-bender Frequency was a modest hit with critics and audiences at the time of its release, and while it’s hardly a great movie, it’s so much fun to watch, and it stands up on repeated viewings. This movie is so many things: A father-son drama, a sci-fi time travel piece, a serial killer thriller, a domestic drama, an action potboiler – screenwriter and future studio chief Toby Emmerich devised a true “kitchen-sink” film with a heady, complicated narrative that’s happy to fold back on itself repeatedly. Dennis Quaid was perfectly cast as the father impossibly communicating with his grown son, played by Jim Caviezel, years later via an old ham radio and some interesting celestial disturbances courtesy of a very active Aurora Borealis. And as in most time-travel narratives, the more you do to disturb the space-time continuum, the more likely it’ll be that things will have changed all around you, thus setting the butterfly effect in motion. This is a restless piece of work, a film that has tons on its active mind, and I can’t think of too many other efforts that resemble it in intent and execution. It certainly feels light years away from the types of films that are currently getting the greenlight at the studio level.

Hoblit, a dependable director who cut his teeth on various TV shows before making the leap to features with the excellent Primal Fear, has had a solid career as a helmer of underrated mid-budgeted thrillers (Fallen, Hart’s War, and Fracture are some other credits), and with Frequency, he took a project that had spent years in development under various other filmmakers and turned it into a film with a great sense of visual style, and wasn’t afraid to embrace the inherent silliness of its idea, and directed with a steely conviction that turned the entire piece into a slice of earnest entertainment. It’s certainly contrived to within an inch of its life but it’s no less enjoyable, and it’s admirable the way Frequency keeps piling it on all the way to its cornily effective finale, which will leave a lump in your throat unless you’re a true cynic. A big reason for this is the fantastic chemistry between Quaid and Caviezel, who despite not really looking like they come from the same family, exhibited a natural warmth and rapport with each other that went along way to making the film work as well as it does. For some reason, Frequency feels like a strange companion piece to Field of Dreams, and while that film is infinitely superior overall, I can’t help but feel that they share some of the same honest-at-the-core traits that always keep me coming back for more.