Tag: films

28 Days

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review


I’ve always had a thing for 28 Days. So often in Hollywood there are films that try tackle real issues, but not all of them feel like they’ve achieved anything, or even portrayed said issues in a realistic, compassionate way. This one shines a probing, nonjudgmental spotlight onto alcoholism, in all it’s subtleties and absurd truths, like few other films have. Many films portray alcoholism like a raging mania that turns you rabid and irrational, and while that certainly can be the case, I like how here they show what a semi-functioning addict looks like, as opposed to your atypical abusive archetype. It’s also just more pleasant fare too. Despite being a story about great struggle and personal woe, there’s lightheartedness to it that’s welcome in such stressful territory. Sandra Bullock, that luminous brunette, is pretty much instantly likeable in anything, a beautiful, effortless, natural born movie star, giving any film an instant advantage simply by having her headline. Here she plays Gwen, a NYC newspaper columnist who, along with her Brit boyfriend (Dominic West), has a fairly serious problem with the booze. After spectacularly ruining her poor sister’s (Elizabeth Perkins) and recklessly crashing a stolen limousine, the thin line between functionality and outright self destruction is crossed, and it becomes time to seek help. Court ordered into rehab, Gwen ships off to an upstate clinic to sleep off the hangover, but the real progress comes from first admitting she has a problem at all. Like any film about rehab, the facility is home to many quaint, quirky people for her to meet, bond and squabble with, fellow addicts on the road to whatever recovery means to them. Steve Buscemi underplays a sly turn as the program founder and lead social worker, Viggo Mortensen is sorta kinda a love interest, but also not really, in an ambiguously written supporting role, and there’s solid work from Alan Tudyuk, Marieanne Jean-Baptiste, Azura Skye and Margo Martindale too. Parallel to her treatment we see hazy flashbacks to Gwen being raised by her severely alcoholic mother (Diane Ladd), and get a glimpse of how the hectic, sprawling life of someone who drinks just seems like the mundane to them, internally until they decide to swallow that proverbial red pill, step outside the routine and examine their choices. It’s a great little film with an organic, realistic arc for Bullock that she inhabits with grace, humility and humour.

-Nate Hill

Kill The Irishman

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review


I’m not too sure just how much of Kill The Irishman is based in actual truth, but if even half of what we see on screen did happen, that is some pretty impressive shit. The film focuses on the life of Danny Greene (a bulked, sturdy Ray Stevenson), who was an Irish American mobster working out of Cleveland back in the 70’s, a guy who seems to have caused quite a stir of chaos amongst organized crime back then. Getting a leg up from the longshoreman’s union, Danny quickly rose to power alongside several other key figures including numbers man John Nardi (Vincent D’Onofrio), enforcer Joe Manditski (Val Kilmer) and nasty kingpin Shondor Birns (Christopher Walken). It seems it all went south pretty quick though, because before he knew it he was at odds with Birns, and dodging multiple brash assassination attempts coming at him from all directions. What’s remarkable about Danny’s story is his sterling resilience: something like over a dozen attempts were made on his life and the darn mick just kept on going, even taunting the underworld between car bomb blasts and raucous shoot outs. Of course, such a life alienates him from his wife (Linda Cardellini) and puts him in perpetual crosshairs, but Stevenson plays it casually cavalier, a gentleman gangster who really cares not for the danger he’s wading into, and treads lightly amongst the mess, making me wonder if the real Greene had such an attitude and the sheer luck to back it up. Walken is quiet and dangerous in a somewhat underplayed role, but he is entertaining doing anything, so it’s all good. The cast is enormous, and includes the like of Vinnie Jones as a bruiser of an Irish street soldier, Robert Davi in an explosive third act cameo as a lethal specialist brought in to neutralize Danny, and your usual kennel of Italian American character actors like Mike Starr, Bob Gunton, Tony Lo Bianco, Steve Schirippa, Paul Sorvino and others. It’s loud, fast paced and ever so slightly tongue in cheek. As a crime drama it works great, could have been slightly longer, but Stevenson keeps things moving briskly with his affable, hyperactive performance and it goes with out saying that the rest of them provide excellent supporting work. 

-Nate Hill

The Void 

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review


The best horror film of the year so far has arrived in the form of The Void, a genuinely spooky, deliriously gruesome 80’s throwback that gets tone, pacing and atmosphere right on the money, hitting that sweet spot that not all homages can fully grasp. It’s this year’s It Follows, I’ll put it that way. Balls out ballistic, atmospherically eerie and gorier than a chainsaw mud wrestling competition for spastics, it starts somewhat reigned in and then amps up to feverish nightmare fuel once it gets going, and boy does it ever get going. When emulating classics from distant eras, it’s important that these films find their own specific flavour and unique groove, as well as cleverly wearing influences on their sleeve. There’s an obvious adoration for John Carpenter’s The Thing running through it like an undercurrent, but the filmmakers find their own otherworldly pulse, and the fabulously icky body horror is subservient to an overarching plot involving forces from another dimension beyond ours, which a few lunatics are foolishly trying to contact. That happens later on though, once that special ripcord within the horror genre is pulled, the one that separates an uneasy opening act, a calm before the storm and the craziness to follow as soon as that first inciting attack occurs. The premise? Solid and simple: a small town cop (Aaron Poole) brings a blood soaked drifter to a nearly shut down county hospital run by a weary skeleton crew. No sooner has he arrived, bad shit starts happening. Some of the night staff go madly insane and start lobbing their own body parts off, while white cloaked cult weirdos gather outside to prevent anyone from leaving the building. A gruff, shotgun toting badass (Daniel Feathers) breaks in and pretty much violently threatens anything that moves. Corpses come alive and transform into glistening, pulsating piles of aborted pizza pocket waste, and to use the time honoured slogan, ‘all hell’ quite literally breaks loose. The head doctor (veteran character actor Kenneth Welsh, aka Windom Earle, is devilishly scary) clearly knows more than he lets on, and the new bodies pile up on the rotting older ones as dark forces gather for some kind of… birth. The actual how’s and whys of the story are left appropriately vague, as is tradition in hectic 80’s creature features with a supernatural twist. The term ‘void’ is never mentioned by anyone, rather hinted at by glimpses of a dreamy, austere parallel dimension that calls to mind everything from Altered States to Beyond The Black Rainbow to The Cell. A buddy of mine referred to the film as “Carpenter Fanboy Porn”, and while that’s definitely one angle you can look at it from, there’s more than just that, if you widen your gaze. It’s clearly a love letter to the man and his work, but it has its own thing going on as well, and feels at once as fresh as the titles it looks up to must have when they came out, and as lovingly nostalgic as a throwback piece should. The filmmakers have deliberately left it open for a sequel as well. Bring on the franchise, I say, the genre can really use stuff like this to fill the Void. 

-Nate Hill

Eye See You 

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review


You know those films that you just seem to get fixated on and love for no particular reason, like they’re not even that good, you just… really like them? That’s Eye See You for me (known as D-Tox to all you folks across the pond), a heavy handed snowbound horror vehicle for a sedated Sylvester Stallone. It’s silly to the max, thoroughly implausible and perforated with cliches, but for whatever reason I just can’t get over the damn thing. Now, I admittedly have an affinity for the Agatha Christie style murder mysteries, especially ones set in the snow (cue fond memories of Hateful 8 and The Thing), and this one piles on a blizzard of red herrings, multiple shady characters, extremely graphic violence and paranoid unease. Maybe it’s that cast, a platoon of tough guy characters actors backing Sly up in one serious roster of a supporting cast. Old Rocky plays a big city FBI agent who is trying to find a jarringly vicious serial killer that targets law enforcement and has that classic obsession with his pursuer. After his girlfriend (Dina Meyer) falls victim to this beast, Sly unravels and following a suicide attempt, is sent up north by his mentor (Charles S. Dutton) for a little R&R,

and both R’s in that stand for rehab in a special remote facility designed just for cops with issues to work out. The place is run by Krusty Kris Kristofferson, and home to so many recognizable faces one has to give the casting director a tip of the fedora. A disgraced Mountie (Robert Prosky), emotionally fragile ex SWAT commander (Sean Patrick Flanery),

former Scotland Yard (Christopher Fulford), hostile ex narc (Jeffrey Wright with some pretty Harvey Dent facial scars), an insufferable macho asshole (Robert Patrick), ex military (Tom Berenger) who serves as caretaker, sympathetic therapist (Polly Walker) and a seriously creepy Stephen Lang. That’s a whole lot of suspicious characters to pick a killer from, because (you guessed it) the meanie has followed Sly out to the mountains and is posing as a member of their group. It’s a guessing game right up until one severely bloody climax, with ex cops dropping dead all over the place along the way, and Stallone looking more hollow and dishevelled as each body turns up. He’s not in action mode here at all, hell, he’s not even in sorta kinda Cop Land action mode, he’s a broken man trying to heal who’s forced back into shit kicking, and it puts a visible strain on him that the actor handles surprisingly adeptly. The rest do their job terrifically, with Flanery standing out in the scant but affecting screen time he’s given, and Patrick blustering through every scene until you’re just praying for the killer to target him next. There’s downsides galore, mind you, this isn’t well thought out territory, it’s gory genre nirvana and not much else. There’s a level of predictability that could have been avoided by making the identity of the killer a bit less… obvious, for lack of a non spoiling term, but oh well. It’s also just overblown lurid potboiler madness, but what else do you expect from this type of thing? I get exactly what I want out of it: a nice helping of ultra-violent intrigue to tune into on a cozy night, and not much more. In fact, I think I feel a revisit happening this week.

-Nate Hill

B Movie Glory: The Code

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review


The Code, or Thick As Thieves as it’s known on DVD in some regions, is pretty much just Morgan Freeman and Antonio Banderas strutting their way through a B-grade, R-rated Ocean’s Eleven. It’s second tier stuff, but it has one hell of a cast and enough serpentine twists and betrayals to keep the viewer interested. Freeman plays a slick master burglar, recruiting Banderas’ younger thief to pull off one of those ‘impossible’ heists that requires all kinds of over elaborate planning and stylish execution. This is all in order to pay an outstanding debt to the Russian mob in the form of dangerous Rade Serbedzija, aka Boris the Blade, aka Boris the Bullet Dodger, who has a few surprising secrets of his own. All of them are also hounded by a classically dogged detective (Robert Forster, intensely excellent) and his rookie partner, who of all people is played by Tom Hardy in a role so small and random I’d love to hear the tale behind his casting. There’s also an obligatory love interest for Antonio, played by leggy Radha Mitchell. Now, it’s all mostly as pedestrian as it sounds, except for a few garnishing touches that elevate it just enough that it sticks in your memory. The master thief. The Ahab-esque cop. The vicious Eastern European gangster. The love triangle. Backstabbing. These are all ancient archetypes that have been done quite literally to death, and they’re all present and accounted for here, but there’s a few moments that genuinely surprise and break feee of that somewhat. Revelations involving the Russian who isn’t what he appears to be, a third act twist that feels welcome, and snares of dialogue that snap our attention amidst the cliches. For what it is, it does its job well enough, and a few times shows actual inspiration. Not bad at all. 

-Nate Hill

Tim Burton’s Planet Of The Apes

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review


I’m going to catch some heat for this, but I’ve found Tim Burton’s Planet Of The Apes to be a far better film than any of the three recent versions. I can’t explain it, but there’s something so otherworldly and exotic about the production design, makeup and effects, a true storyteller’s touch used, resulting in a piece with elements of fantasy and world building brought lushly to the forefront, whereas the newer films just felt somewhat clinical and sterile, going through minimalist motions without any real sense of wonder applied. Oh and another thing: real, tactile makeup on actual human actors, which will win against motion capture/cgi any day. There’s also an old world, medieval feel to this planet, as the ‘humans being subservient to apes’ dynamic has already been in full swing for generations, as opposed to a lengthy origin story that takes up most of the newer trilogy. No build up here, just Marky Mark getting marooned on a distant world dominated by simians, fighting his way through their ranks, sort of falling in love with one (Helena Bonham Carter as a monkey=kinky) and attempting to find a way back to earth. There’s various apes of all shapes and sizes at war, the most memorable of which is a sleek, snarling Tim Roth as Thade, a volatile warlord who despises humans. Michael Clarke Duncan towers over everyone as Attar, his cohort and fellow soldier, and seeing already be-jowelled Paul Giamatti as a cumbersome orangutan is priceless. The human faction is led by weathered Kris Kristofferson and his daughter (Estella Warren, quite possibly the most beautiful girl on the planet), leading the dregs of humanity as they exist in hiding and fight for their lives. No expense was spared in filling every frame of this planet with lived-in splendour and atmospheric decoration, from suits of armour and architecture to the overgrown thickets of mountainous vegetation that grow on this world. As for the apes themselves, it’s terrific how real they feel. It’s the same thing that happened with Lord Of The Rings vs. The Hobbit, and the switch from practical Orc effects to the overblown cgi madness of the goblins in the later films. The human eye is inherently adept at deciphering what is real and what is not, and the effects of the later Ape films with Andy Serkis just felt lifeless and orchestrated, whereas here the makeup prosthetics are organic, authentic and wonderful to look at. Don’t even get me started on the ending either, it’s completely brilliant and will leaving you in cold isolation as the credits roll, a perfect gut punch to a film that could have easily turned sappy in the eleventh hour. So that’s my two cents. Bring on the backlash. 

-Nate Hill

B Movie Glory: Mojave Moon

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review


Before Angelina Jolie blew up front and centre, she got her start in some wild and wacky b movies and genre stuff, the weirdest of which has to be Mojave Moon. It’s one of those low rent flicks where not much of anything happens, the characters meander in and out of a non-story and almost everyone is completely nuts. ‘B movie dramedy’ I suppose would be the specific sub-genre. The ‘story’, as it were, follows drifter Al (Danny Aiello), who meets pretty young Ellie (Jolie) in a diner and hitches a ride out to the desert for seemingly no reason at all. As Ellie takes a shine to him, he begins to fall for her mother (Anne Archer). Only problem is, her mom has a boyfriend played by Michael Biehn who is quite possibly one of the weirdest characters I’ve ever seen in a film. Volatile, berserkly unstable and constantly in near hysteria mode, it’s an odd performance that off-sets the quirky tone straight into the twilight zone. That seems to be the idea here though, the dreamy desert climate having a strange effect on these folks, causing all kinds of outrageous behaviour and scenarios. The town offers a rogue’s gallery of characters including Michael Berryman, Alfred Molina, Jack Noseworthy, Peter Macnicol, John Getz, Michael Massee and others, all of whom don’t really do much other than show up, act weird for a bit and then wander off again. I like this type of film though, purposeless other than to languish about with characters who don’t want much, their arcs sputtering in a flatline of small town doldrums and behaviour that only makes sense to them. It’s not for everyone, which is why no one really gives credit to this stuff, but it’s enjoyable once in a while, when you’re in as strange a mood as the residents of this one horse sideshow of a town. 

-Nate Hill

B Movie Glory: The Last Drop

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review


Before The Monuments Men, there was a dopey little WWII art heist flick called The Last Drop. Alright, it’s a tenuous connection but they’re centred around the same idea: what better time for a heist than the fog of war? Well, chaos is indeed the name of the game with this scrappy, obviously low budget barrel of fun, both in terms of setting and the film itself. The cast is the main draw, as is always the case with B movies.. without a few names, some veteran charisma, pieces like this would just be bereft of any value. Well they got Michael Madsen, because every movie needs a Michael Madsen, getting more screen-time than usual here as an American military honcho on the hunt for some priceless works of art that have gone missing from Berlin. It’s pretty much just a European wartime Rat Race, with various factions scrambling to find the loot and not get killed along the way. A platoon of Brits blunders across Holland, led by Sean Pertwee and including Tommy ‘Chibs’ Flanagan, Nick Moran, Rafe Spall, Alexander Skarsgard and more. A volatile German double agent (intense Karel Roden) pursues them all. Oh yeah, and Billy Zane calmly and deliberately poses for the camera as a Yankee operative with a fetish for wistful wartime romance, being as weird as Zane ever was. It all doesn’t make a ton of sense or add up to anything much at all, but it’s B movie bliss, and honestly I’d willingly watch this cast install drywall for ninety minutes, so one can’t complain about a silly little war flick that’s a bit rough around the edges. Good times. 

-Nate Hill

The Pang Brother’s ReCycle

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review


What do you get if you take a mixing bowl and toss in The Cell, The Grudge, some Stephen King, Alice In Wonderland, The Lovely Bones and a not-too-subtle anti abortion message? You get ReCycle, a visually unbelievable, absolutely terrifying, boundlessly imaginative Chinese horror fantasy that no one saw, got overlooked to the max, and occupies an eternal spot in my DVD collection. Novelist Tsui (The Eye’s Anjelica Lee) is suffering from writer’s block following two bestsellers, expected by her publisher to churn out another one posthaste. Plagued at first by paranormal visions in her apartment, she’s suddenly thrown headlong into the otherworldly dimension of ReCycle, a place that can turn from beautiful to hellish and back again within minutes. Picture a surreal, abstract realm where everything that’s ever lost, forgotten or abandoned ends up, thrown together in a gorgeous but threatening dream world with various levels, planes and passages, seemingly endless and never predictable. The dead also reside here, as she soon learns, some of which don’t take kindly to intruders and can be pretty volatile. Forced to flee from one area of the realm to others and beyond, she’s joined by the spirit of a lost little girl, and put through one hell of time trying to find her way out. Included are dilapidated, haunted amusement parks, fields and mountains that extend for millions of miles, eerie forests where the ghosts of hanged prisoners leer out at them, vast crumbling cities, acres of forgotten children’s toys and in the film’s most wtf sequence, a giant gooey room filled with aborted fetuses that spring to life and slime anyone within reach. That’s right, the filmmakers aren’t really subtle with their pro-life sentiment, especially near the end, but as long as you can get past that, the rest is all incredible. The sheer scope of the film commands attention though, and anyone who daydreams or lets their imagination run wild will get an absolute kick out of it. It’s kind of like the world’s weirdest video game in cinematic form, structured like a play-through but given all the disorienting unease of your worst nightmare. 

-Nate Hill

Ernest Dickinson’s Bones

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review


Who would have thought that a horror flick starring Snoop Dogg would actually be a winner? Bones isn’t a milestone in the genre or anything, but it sure is better than the self promoting vanity piece that I expected going in. Usually when rappers or musicians headline their own films they turn out to be spectacular failures (50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Trying and Dee Snider’s Strangeland come to mind), but this one comes off as a legitimate, entertaining horror effort. Snoop plays Jimmy Bones, a lucrative 70’s street hustler who is betrayed and slaughtered by his partners in crime, his own sweetheart Pearl (Pam Grier is never not cool) and one sleazebag of a cop (Michael T. Weiss, excellent). Decades later he returns, undead, in the form of a smooth talking supernatural street demon, out to exact bloody ghetto revenge on his old acquaintances and clean up his former inner city neighbourhood, which is actually just Vancouver in disguise, I mean what city in any movie ever isn’t just Vancouver? Loosely threaded with the story of a few kids who plan to turn his old gothic mansion into a silly hip hop nightclub, things rev into full gore gear when he shows up back in town to stir shit around and collect heads, and I mean that literally. Snoop is wicked fun, wisely dropping any rap gags or meta smirk, showing up in full jive talking boogeyman mode, meaning business and bringing along the dark, angry charisma to back it up. Director Ernest Dickinson helmed a few Tales From The Crypt outings and therefore knows his way around this very specific and distilled niche of horror. Shades of the 80’s are prescient with incredibly gooey, gag inducing effects that would make Freddy Krueger jealous, and one gets an almost Crow vibe from the story structure, via the paranormal revenge motif and baroque, Poe-esque fire and brimstone aesthetic. It’s silly for sure, but far far more grounded and committed than you’d expect this type of thing to be on paper. More of a head on its shoulders than Tales From The Hood anyway, and yes that’s a real thing. I must make additional mention of the prosthetic effects though; not since certain Elm Street outings, early Cronenberg or stuff like The Sentinel have I seen the level of deformed, hellish grossology onscreen than is present in some scenes here, they should be really proud of what they’ve done. 

 -Nate Hill