Tag: Matthew Modine

THE ROBERT ALTMAN FILES: SHORT CUTS (1993)

by Patrick Crain, posted in Film Review

Robert Altman’s Short Cuts is a mosaic of people who are perpetually faced with bad decisions and who constantly take the wrong path. So, basically it’s about you and me. A spiderweb crack of broken souls stitched together by geography, relationships, and happenstance, Altman takes his well-traveled formula of regular folks just doing regular folks things and applies them to the disconnected, minimalist tales of Raymond Carver, lyricist of the Pacific Northwestern middle class.

The intertwining tales of twenty-two main characters as they navigate a 48 hour stretch in Los Angeles, Short Cuts is the quintessential Robert Altman film and reflects just what a beautiful match his cinematic vision was with Carver’s literary one. And, remarkably, it’s not a straight adaptation at all. Where Carver’s characters existed in their own vacuums that were ripe with meaning in the nine stories that make up the bones of Altman’s film, the common thread afforded to the characters in Altman’s universe is one of miserable parental neglect and colossal personal failure, two themes later played in a similar key in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, itself an operatic ode to casual SoCal connectivity.

Altman also relocates Carver’s rainy and soggy world to Los Angeles of 1993 as it is just on the precipice of technological progress that will forever change the landscape of human interaction. There is no interconnectivity due to the internet but cell phones make an appearance in Short Cuts,though they are of the Zach Morris variety and look more like blunt instruments than tools of communication. In the world of Altman, people are linked together by television programs and natural disasters, both major and minor. In Carver, the only thing connecting the characters is the book binding and the author’s name at the top of each page.

Some of the stories Altman and co-screenwriter Frank Barhydt utilize for the film survive in a form resembling completion. “So Much Water So Close to Home,” the story that makes up the action involving Fred Ward, Huey Lewis, Buck Henry, and Annie Archer, is more or less intact. Other stories are stripped for parts; “Vitamins,” an epic tale about a man who carries on with his wife’s co-worker, only faintly exists in the club confrontation between Chris Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Darnell Williams.

In this world, people meet randomly at concerts, bump into each other in parking lots, and otherwise drift in and out of clustered orbits due to their professions. Class is separated by a phone line as sisters gab with each other amid the chaos of their spouses leaving for work, one a doctor and the other a motorcycle cop. Race is bisected by hospital rooms, with two different kids’ lives hanging in the balance, one is black and one is white; both are victims of the dumbest luck imaginable. People invade each other’s space and engage in transference of energy, creating and destroying as they go oftentimes so absorbed in themselves that they’re oblivious to the wreckage they leave behind.

In Short Cuts, the children are either over-coddled or dysfunctionally adrift. Parents hold dark, wounded secrets and keep their offspring distant by design lest they have to reckon with the damage their choices have caused. Jack Lemmon’s estranged father is one of his most painfully realized characters of his entire career. When he wanders into the film at the halfway mark, he’s treated as if he is a stranger who has been lost for thirty years. We soon learn that he’s been living in Riverside which, despite being about an hour’s drive from his son’s house, might as well be on the other side of the world. When Annie Ross’s adult daughter shows up at the club in which Ross works, the owner is stunned to learn she even exists even though she lives with Ross nearby.

Pursuits are futile. The fish, the symbol of an event that creates a schism between a fisherman and his wife, goes up in smoke before it can be eaten. The cake, the center of the film’s nastiest (and cruelly hilarious) passages and a representation of the last vestige of a grieving mother’s dead son, ends up in the goddamn trash before she can even see it. Death is dealt with in a stark, unsentimental way. These things happen and this is what it looks like. A woman who is raped and killed creates a moral and practical quandary for a group of fishermen but it emotionally waylays another character. A deadly attack on a young girl, generated from emasculated sexual insecurity, is misidentified as an earthquake accident. Things shake up, people fall down, but everyone seems to survive and move forward.

I realize that the descriptions above make Short Cuts sound like a depressing slog or a funeral dirge but nothing could be further from the truth. Altman’s precision-oriented focus on character causes every single line of dialogue (often, in true Altman fashion, overlapping with other lines of dialogue) has a breath of life and even when they go wrong, the characters’ actions seem as familiar as muscle memory. Unless you’re an uptight, humorless bore, human foibles are only no fun when they’re yours but they’re highly entertaining when they’re being displayed by someone else. Short Cuts is literally like people-watching a cross section of American society without any of the voyeuristic guilt. And with the film’s impossibly perfect cast giving some of the best performances of their individual careers (Tom Waits has entered the chat), the film should be seen as downright irresistible to anyone interested in the craft of giving an understated performance lacking in all pretense.

Like California Split, the Los Angeles landscape is almost gone its own character, steeped in the functional ordinariness from the pavement-up instead of the Hollywood sign-down. And, just as the previous year’s The Player existed on the edge of change, Short Cuts is a snapshot of an America in rapid flux. Those cell phones will get smaller, our worlds will grow and shrink simultaneously and, parking lot photo huts, the location of the film’s best gags and once as ubiquitous and recognizable as the red roof of a PIzza Hut, will soon be replaced with drive-up ATM’s.

Stylistically graceful, threading the stories of randomness and chance with clever match cuts and seamless transitions, the canvas may be as busy as any Altman film but it’s never not a clear view of humanity at its most mediocre while attempting to be just good enough. A celebration of remarkable ordinariness that uncannily matches Raymond Carver’s triumphs in minimalism, if not for Nashville, Short Cuts would be Robert Altman’s crowning achievement.

(C) Copyright 2021, Patrick Crain

THE ROBERT ALTMAN FILES: STREAMERS (1983)

by Patrick Crain, posted in Film Review

After the critical success of his cinematic adaptation of Ed Graczyk‘s Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, Robert Altman set his sights Streamers, the last in playwright David Rabe’s trilogy of pieces surrounding the Vietnam war. Self-financed and shot on the quick in Dallas, Streamers almost means to be the y-chromosome mirror of the distaff 5 & Dime, jumping right into the center of a drab Army barrack in 1965 that doubles as a Petri dish of different corners of masculinity, either real, imagined, or put on. Like 5 & Dime, the tensions between the characters in Streamers are mostly sexual, though a strong dose of racial politics is thrown into the pot, causing it to be more explosive, even if it results in a less engaging and satisfying film.

To be sure, mirroring is crucial throughout Altman’s filmography but it becomes incredibly important during his 80’s period where he was able to get layers and dimensions in limited settings by raising the dramatic stakes and casting his characters off one another. This often leads the characters to either look at themselves in the past or, more importantly, see themselves as they really are in the present. This was driven home quite literally with a mirror prop in 5 & Dime but it’s just as prevalent here as Streamers is about a group of trapped men as they await their deployment to Vietnam. Billy (Matthew Modine) and Roger (David Alan Grier) are pals who bounce off of each other quite well but their friendship is stressed just by the fact that one is black and one is white. Across the room bunks Richie (Michael Lichtenstein), an openly gay soldier who senses a certain uncertainty in Billy, who reacts to Richie’s provocations in ways that causes the audience to sense the uncertainty, as well. Added to this mix is the combustible Carlyle (Michael Wright), three months into his service and already on the brink of a psychotic collapse, and the perpetually soused Cokes (George Dzundza) and Rooney (Guy Boyd), commanding officers damaged by so much carnage seen in World War II, Korea, and now Vietnam, that all they can do is stay drunk and wait for death to take away the pain.

Despite Rabe being a downmarket Harold Pinter when it came to making opaque observations, and a certain archness to some of the performances in the film, there is a great deal that works in Streamers. In choosing the material, Altman certainly was able to save a few bucks due to its appropriately stripped-down and uncluttered set (this was probably the easiest paycheck production designer Wolf Kroeger ever earned) which adds to the heavy pall of ennui and almost maddening claustrophobia. Additionally, cinematographer Pierre Mingot’s fluid camera refuses to be nailed down in the third row and, instead, floats alongside the bunks and up their metal railings mostly acting as an observer of listeners rather than an optical mechanism, revealing more about the characters than if they were center-framed delivering a monologue.

And as barren and solitary a set that it is, the barrack functions as both pinball machine and narrow hallway of time. Much of the dynamism occurs when Carlyle saunters into the room and bounces off each and every character as if they were bumpers, all the while Cokes and Rooney are always perched at the end of the barrack, segregated further, representing the destiny of each and every one of these men that will survive the dehumanizing machine of war.

The majority of the performances, too, are aces and spot on. Modine and Grier display an uncomfortable rapport that is much different than the unease felt whenever either are dealing with the absolutely excellent Lichtenstein. Each character’s baggage gets tossed on top of the other until the whole thing collapses when the weight of Carlyle is added. A swaggering mix of rage, sadness, menace, and down-low vulnerability, his character is the wild card who drags the ugly truth out of all of the other characters. But as played by Michael Wright, the character becomes the most boorish and stage-bound; a dynamic performance full of rage and emotion but played to the back row and lacking in the subtleties befitting a screen performance. As it sits, he’s definitely the focus of attention whenever he’s on the screen but the audience ends up spending too much time watching him chew his way through whatever scenery there is. This, by the way, is not on Wright, who would go on to do amazing work on Oz, but, instead, it’s on Altman who had a responsibility to calibrate his actors to match the size and scope of the material. Though tackling the material for the big screen can’t be seen as anything but brave in 1983, it appears that, with Wright, Altman caught a fish too big for the boat in which he was sailing.

Earlier, the word “trapped” was used to describe the situation of the men and it is used both figuratively and literally as Streamers is best approached as a a work about men who are trapped. They are trapped in the service, trapped in a war, trapped in their own minds, trapped in bodies that are failing, trapped in bodies that are responding in ways that upset them, or trapped in a socioeconomic nightmare not of their making. For all the talk and introspection, when the credits roll, the men will have made choices and will be trapped even further. Same as it ever was.

(C) Copyright 2021, Patrick Crain

Nick Willing’s Altar

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

◦ There’s a few spooky touches in Altar and a handful of well orchestrated scenes that are fun but for the most part this is a murky, depressing slog through the well travelled “American family moves into a creaky old British manor that is clearly haunted’ sub-genre that I’m sure by now any seasoned horror fan can tick off the narrative beats of in their sleep. Matthew Modine and Olivia Williams are an artist couple who take up residence in a country house with a sordid past that comes back to claim their souls and their sanity, starting with Modine’s husband who gradually begins to act very very strange. Now, there’s two scenes that are genuinely great: their daughter (Antonia Clarke), who seems to be the only one in the family with any sense in her head, is spectacularly haunted by a female ghost that crawls into her bed one night, sits beside her and looks her *right* in the eyes. Most horror films would use gruesome prosthetics, moonlit contact lenses and fake blood for this but the film chooses to view this spirit through a sort of ‘fragmented mirror kaleidoscope prism’ veil that is like shifting broken glass come to life and I thought it was just so cool. There’s another terrific scene where Modine and Williams mesmerically unearth a sort of ritualistic mural depicting sacrifice beneath their home that is just wonderfully edited and set to a piece of the score that stuck with me and is a sequence of true power and dynamism. That’s all the film musters that grabbed me though, and I was frustrated by the fact that Williams’s as the wife and mother consistently and flagrantly made shitty decisions to the point where I was yelling at her through the screen. At least Modine had an excuse because he was already under the influences of dark spirits. Only the daughter acted with rationality, logic and seemed to want to get out of there and, ironically, no one listens to her. This is a good time waster and it does shine in those two instances I described unfortunately it doesn’t do too much of anything else we haven’t seen before.

-Nate Hill

PSYCHO IN THE WATER BY KENT HILL

by Kent Hill, posted in Interviews

Rolfe Kanefsky is back at it again, impressing the hell outta me by doing so much on a budget. This time there’s no possessed paintings that help plug you in to the terror. No dear readers….if there is a pool in your backyard…YOU…COULD…BE….NEXT!

In this engrossing hybrid, Kanefsky takes elements of FEAR (1996), PACIFIC HEIGHTS and Hitchcock’s PSYCHO and fuses them into this impressive debt of one, Tanner Zagarino. Yes, Zagarino. Readers out there familiar with the SHADOWCHASER movies will thrill to learn Tanner is the son of the man, the legend, Frank Zagarino. And, let me tell you, I can’t wait to see this young fella progress. He goes from Prince Charming to Norman Bates in the batting of an eyelash, and there are moments when Tanner’s character is at his silently starring at you from distance best. Those are the same menacing eyes I see in his father watching SHADOWCHASER and it was a shiver up my spine kinda time.

The strong female lead of the movie, Jessica Morris, is so dependable and I love her work under Kanefsky’s direction. It was a thrill at last to catch up with Sarah French, who gets to be that all-important first victim. The cast is rounded out with solid performances, and Rolfe is good at building tension and anticipation of the moment; the reason I feel he is a luminous presence and original voice in this genre he seems to command.

Pool Boy Nightmare is a sexy suspense thriller about Gale (Jessica Morris, Art of the Dead) a divorced woman and her 18 year old daughter, Becca (Ellie-Darcey Alden, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2) who have just moved into a new home that comes with a beautiful pool in the back yard. Gale hires Adam (Tanner Zagarino, son of action star Frank Zagarino, in his film debut), a local pool boy who used to work for the previous owner, Rhonda (Sarah French, Automation) who died in a “freak drowning” accident. Turns out that Adam has a thing for older women and has a fling with Gale. Knowing she made a mistake, Gale ends the affair quickly but Adam is a very determined young man. He starts dating Becca, Gale’s daughter, to make Gale jealous. As the twisted love triangle heats up, danger also mounts since Adam will do just about anything to get the woman he wants! As Jackie, Becca’s best friend (Cynthia Aileen Strahan, Art of the Dead) and Gale’s ex-husband, Tony (Clark Moore, Stumptown) soon discover, Adam is not only obsessed but very dangerous! In the end, nobody is safe from this POOL BOY NIGHTMARE!

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT:

Although Rolfe Kanefsky has been writing and directing movies for over thirty years in multiple genres, this is the first time he has both written and directed a Lifetime thriller with POOL BOY NIGHTMARE. Rolfe has worked in the Lifetime world for years, having authored the productions of “WATCH YOUR BACK” aka “KILLER PHOTO” starring AnnaLynne McCord, “DEADLY SORORITY” with Greer Grammar and Moira Kelly, as well as “STALKED BY MY PATIENT”, “DEADLY VOWS” and “THE WRONG BABYSITTER” starring Daphne Zuniga.

Being a big fan of classic television thrillers from the ’70s and ’80s, Rolfe saw this as an opportunity to embrace the feel that Steven Spielberg created with his first television movies like “DUEL” and “SOMETHING EVIL” as well as Dan Curtis’ classics “THE NIGHT STRANGLER”, “TRILOGY OF TERROR” and “DEAD OF NIGHT”.

“I wanted to make something sexy and suspenseful that still fit in the Lifetime mode but created some visual tension and a little more style that is currently found in today’s television thrillers. Although we didn’t have a lot of time or money, I was determined to shoot this as a real theatrical movie. Getting my DP, Michale Su, who has shot my last two flicks, “ART OF THE DEAD” and “BUS PARTY TO HELL” was a great help and we pulled off some great moments of tension and action. I was also able to pull together a great cast. I wrote the script with Jessica Morris is mind to play Gale. Having recently worked with her in ART OF THE DEAD and her track record with these kind of thrillers, she was perfect and glorious in this role. I was also able to get Cynthia Aileen Strahan and Sarah French into the cast. They were also recently in my ART OF THE DEAD flick and fantastic as always. I was excited to discover two overall newcomers. Ellie-Darcey Alden sent in an audition tape which impressed me. When she came in for a callback, I was even more impressed to find out that she was British, having done a flawless American accent. Ellie had a small part in one of the Harry Potter movies when she was very young. I knew she and Jessica, playing mother and daughter, would really capture the dramatic moments of the piece and their scenes together are some of the highlights, elevating the acting that is usually found in these kind of movies.”

“And then there’s the “pool boy” himself. In his first acting job ever, Tanner Zagarino landed the role of Adam, the dangerously sexy villain. The funny thing about this casting is that I immediately recognized Tanner’s last name, Zagarino because years ago, I had worked with an actor named Frank Zagarino who made a lot of B action and sci-fi films back in the day. I had written an action thriller script called “SHATTERED LIES” that starred Frank Zagarino and his wife, Elizabeth Giordano. They also produced the film and happen to be the father and mother of Tanner. I think Tanner was like 3 or 4 years old at the time. So, cut to 17 years later and I’m directing their son in his first motion picture. It’s a small world.”

Now I present my chats with wonderful and beautiful Sarah French, and the talented breakout Tanner Zagarino….

TANNER ZAGARINO

SARAH FRENCH

POOL BOY NIGHTMARE premieres on The Lifetime Channel on Labor Day, Monday, September 7th at 8:00 pm as part of their “End Of The Summer Marathon”. It plays again later that night and the following Sunday, September 13th at 7:00 pm and throughout the month. Check your local listings for showtimes and airings. Visit MyLifetime.

Sicario 2: Day Of The Soldado

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I have to be brutally honest about this, but Sicario 2: Day Of The Soldado is nowhere close to a worthy sequel, let alone a good film. After mulling it over a bit since I saw it a few weeks ago, it just feels hollow, superficial and weak in all the places the first one was provocative, mythic and haunting. My main gripe is that it has nothing really to say; the first was deep, dark and dense, with a thoughtful screenplay by Taylor Sheridan brought to life by Denis Villeneuve’s concise, nerve wracking direction, it challenged today’s political climate and casted dark shadows on the anthropological coordinates of present day North and Central America. This one feels like a lurid death trap of violence without weight, thin characterization and a weirdly conceived narrative that misses all the beats and ends up nowhere. Benicio Del Toro and Josh Brolin return as antihero assassin Alejandro and cavalier special ops spook Matt, this time trying to start a big ol’ cartel war by kidnapping the daughter (Isabela Moner) of one boss to frame the another, thereby letting the animals wipe each other out and stop the new trend of these cartels smuggling in Muslim terrorists onto American soil so they can blow up innocent families in shopping malls, which we see here in unnecessarily sickening, gratuitous fashion. This is all sanctioned in clandestine by the stony US secretary of defence (Matthew Modine) and overseen by Brolin’s icy handler (Catherine Keener has fun with the dialogue), and naturally it all goes tits up before too long. When Alejandro and the cartel’s kid find themselves on their own following an ambush, there’s an opportunity for developing his character farther and seeing some kind of redemption, which at first seems like it may happen until Sheridan shuts it down hard and veers the story off into some other stuff that drags and just puts Del Toro’s arc in the doldrums. Brolin finally has a crisis of conscience, but it’s too little too late when we get there. Also, the whole terrorist angle just does not work, and feels totally shoehorned in. The first film, although ultimately fictional, felt like it could indeed be playing out for real somewhere out there, everything was drawn from things we’ve known to be authentic. But cartels moving jihadists across the border for attacks on American cities? Come on now, I could practically feel the influence over Sheridan’s shoulder to work that in somehow. I did enjoy the cinematography by Dariusz Wolski and score by Hildur Guonodóttir, taking over from the late Johann Johansson, but since she’s worked with him on projects in the past, the feeling in the music remains just as austere and menacing. This is just all over the place though, completely lacking the darkly pristine focus and portentous drive of the first. At the end it feels like a big blast of nothing, and if anything it just made me appreciate the first one more.

-Nate Hill

Pacific Heights

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Pacific Heights is one of those 90’s ‘yuppie thrillers’, in the best possible way. See stuff like Malice with Nicole Kidman or Disclosure with Demi Moore for reference and a jumping point for research into this time capsule of a sub genre. Heights is a wicked little domestic thriller, and the penultimate ‘tenant from hell’ film (barring Danny Devito’s Duplex, which wouldn’t be released for another decade or so). Matthew Modine and Melanie Griffith are the proud owners of a gorgeous San Francisco urban estate here, proud of their purchase, poised to dive into renovation and on the market for a tenant. It just so happens that affable, seemingly nice guy Michael Keaton is on the market for tenancy, and a few other nefarious things while he’s at it. This isn’t quite a psycho thriller though, it’s more like the moment he’s moved in, their lives turn into a waking nightmare full of noise issues, unauthorized self renovations, scams, thefts and all sorts of scumbag shit. The hilarious thing is, he somehow does all of this just inside the boundaries of the law so that Modine and Griffith are pretty much powerless to kick him out or take action. How do you deal with a scheming cockroach like that? Well you’ll see, but it’s great entertainment, and one of Keaton’s best villain roles because of how stoic and vague he is, it’s like this is all business to him and he’s just showing up at his 9 to 5 job that happens to be robbing landlords blind. Hans Zimmer does some of his best unconventional work here too, with a restless, jangly opening theme that introduces hilly San Fran and suggests the impending havoc Keaton is about to wreak on this poor young couple. A forgotten gem.

-Nate Hill

“I can’t do that.” A review of Sicario: Day of the Soldado – by Josh Hains

by Josh Hains, posted in Film Review

In my review for Sicario, I noted that I had some difficulty shaking the movie so to speak, because seeing it in theatres had been such an impactful, resonant experience for me. I ended that review by saying, “It is assuredly an openly nihilistic (in the best way possible), unflinching examination of the thin grey line that separates wolves from sheep, and hunters from the hunted, with one hell of a bloodthirsty, tortured man in Alejandro dragging us blindly into a realm where darkness reaches out to darkness with battered hands and consumes its soul. And ours.”, and I think that ruling also applies to its sequel, Sicario: Day of the Soldado, which plays a lot less like your average movie sequel, and much more like the intended standalone spin-off that was being advertised.

A group of suicide bombers walk into a crowded Kansas City grocery store and murder 15 innocent people, including a mother and her young child, during the most disturbing and frightening sequence in either Sicario movie that lets you know immediately, this will be a significantly darker venture than what came before. The American government suspects that Mexican cartels are now illegally transporting Islamic territory across the border (sound like anyone we know?) and in reaction to this suspicion Secretary of Defense James Riley (Matthew Modine) gives CIA operative Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) carte blanche to combat the increasing threat of these ruthless cartels. So of course Matt calls up his “big dog”, Alejandro Gillick (Benicio Del Toro), to help him wage a war between the major cartels, which includes killing a high level lawyer for one of the cartels, and the kidnapping of Isabela Reyes (Isabela Moner), the daughter of one of the cartel kingpins. In time, things go south fast when the President issues an order to the CIA to abandon the mission and erase all proof of American involvement in the false flag operation including Isabela, pushing Alejandro into brutal protector mode having bonded with her, pitting him against Graver and his team.

By now you have likely heard that for some, the absence of Sicario director Denis Villeneuve, the late composer Johann Johannsson, cinematographer Roger Deakins, and the Kate Macer character portrayed by Emily Blunt, is deeply felt throughout the entire running time of the movie. While Roger Deakins may not be the name behind the camera, Dariusz Wolksi does a remarkable job emulating the style and palette of Deakins’s work on the first movie, while also projecting a grittier, grimier image that adds to the low-key realism of the film, and the score by Hildur Guðnadóttir does a fine job of emulating Johannsson’s magnificent, dread inducing score of Sicario. Filling in for Villeneuve, Stefano Sollima successfully replicates the same style, atmosphere, and tone of the first movie, in a way that allows us to feel like we are back in that same world, but experiencing it through a different set of eyes.

There is no doubt in my mind that both Kate Macer, and Reggie Wayne (Daniel Kaluuya), could have been incorporated into Soldado in a multitude of ways if the script had gone in a partially different direction, much to the appeasement of those who were unable to see past their absence (more specifically, Kate’s absence), citing it as a major downfall of the movie. The question I have for those same naysayers is, how? How do you make her return feel natural and organically constructed, and not forced and unnatural?

Having seen the direction Soldado (which means “soldier” when loosely translated from Spanish) travels in without Kate (and Reggie), there is no denying that Soldado would have been a vastly different movie altogether had the character been brought back. Perhaps in the script for the impending third Sicario movie there is an opportunity to bring her back. Perhaps she experiences a personal loss or attempt on her life by the hands of the cartel, compelling her to become a Sicario like Alejandro. Maybe she joins Matt Graver’s task force because Alejandro was right, and nothing made sense to her American ears, she doubted everything they did, but in the end understood why it happened. Maybe she has no place in that movie either. Who knows? What I do know is, in my eyes her affiliation with Alejandro and Matt came to a close before Sicario ended, just as Alejandro told her the last lines of the movie: “You should move to a small town, somewhere the rule of law still exists. You will not survive here. You are not a wolf, and this is a land of wolves now.” Sure, I would have enjoyed her presence in this standalone spin-off, I do not doubt that Blunt would have knocked out yet another terrific performance, and Soldado would have been better for it, but I’m perfectly okay without her being there.

I disagree with the notion that the violence of Soldado is in any way, exploitive, or over the top, or unnecessarily ugly, which differing opinions suggesting that the movie only contains this violence because the filmmakers weren’t smart enough to convoy anything else, and not because it needed to be there. Obviously the violence is in service of the plot, and it occurs naturally so. In Sicario, the task force operated within a particular set of rules of engagement, including not firing unless fired upon, which we saw come into effect during the notorious border scene. Here in Soldado, carte blanche allows them to kill freely, so when they swiftly execute a truckload of gang members as efficiently as they did those border crossing cartel members, without having to be fired upon, it inherently creates an ugly aura to the violence, perfectly befitting of the new rule free, carte blanche perspective of this horrific crime infested world established in Sicario.

As one would expect from the next Sicario movie, the performances across the board are once again top notch. While actors like Jeffrey Donovan (reprising his role from the first movie), Matthew Modine, and Catherine Keener add gravitas and depth to their supporting roles with subtle nuances in their physicality, and grounded, authentic delivery of dialogue, it’s the principal trio who will take the most credit for truly knocking it out of the park. Anyone underwhelmed by Isabela Moner in Transformers: The Last Knight (which I haven’t seen, yet) will be pleased as punch to see her impress with a performance that elevates what could have been another in a long line of shallow kidnapping victim performances. Josh Brolin still so effortlessly manages to tow the thin line of playing someone with an intimidating record and a hefty amount of authority, who can be coldly serious, calculated, and unflinchingly, efficiently brutal if need be, while also projecting a relaxed “Chill out bro, let’s go catch some waves,” kind of attitude that allows Matt Graver apt exist within the Sicario world as a multi-dimensional character, and not merely a one-sided archetype.

I hold particular fondness for the way in which Taylor Sheridan writes Alejandro, and the subtle way Del Toro has portrayed him across both films, and has stolen every scene he’s been in. He cuts through any given scene (and both movies in their entirety) like a hot knife through butter, a true scene stealer but in a quiet and controlled manner. One might be inclined to incorrectly categorize the performances as minimalist, with so few lines because he convinced both Villeneuve and Sollima to allow him to remove lines so he may play in silence more often, adding to the allure and mystery of the Sicario while his powerful performance, quite often nothing more than the look in his eyes and/or the expression upon his face, helps us see the living layers within the man. The softness we first saw from him in Sicario, that showed care in how Kate was feeling after the attack on her, comes through all the more in tender scenes between him and Isabela, and during a delightful scene with a deaf man.

Make no mistake, the cold ferocity is still boiling like molten lava within him, it’s just that we are privileged to see more of the man who used to wear that skin long before the land of wolves tuned him into one.

Fluke

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

On paper, or at least on poster, Fluke looks like a benign kid’s flick in the tradition of Beethoven or Babe, as a big fluffy Red Labrador gazes down adorably from the blockbuster shelf. Well, I rented this way back when I must have been like ten, and I can tell you it ain’t no children’s movie. There’s a sadness and deep thoughtfulness to the story that will sail over youngster’s heads, leaving them with just the scenes of talking dogs to keep them occupied. Based on a poignant novel by James Herbert, this is one of the oddest and most depressing family films out there, but it’s also unique and brave enough to go where it does, reaching beyond the sappy to try and become something more complex. Matthew Modine plays a successful businessman who is killed in a foolish car accident one night, leaving behind his wife (Nancy Travis) and son (Max Pomeranc). The film gets spiritual as we seen him reincarnated as that very same mutt from the DVD cover, a curious creature called Fluke. Born into frustrating circumstances, he finds himself pulled into one situation after the other, including bonding with an old woman who passes away, living in a junkyard for some time and making friends with a troupe of homeless urban canines, including tough St. Bernard Rumbo (Samuel L. Jackson), mongrel Sylvester (Ron Perlman) and wiseguy pup Boss (the late Jon Polito). Eventually though, he remembers he was once a man, and sets off to find the family he left behind, feeling alienated in his animal form. It’s a terribly sad film, one that’ll gouge your heart right out, if you can take that sort of thing. It’s also daring and complicated when it wants to be. Fluke feels all the more isolated when he does find his family, as his wife has become close with his old business buddy (Eric Stoltz), and he has nothing but his bark to communicate, a crushing interaction to see. This is one of a kind, and in no way should be in the kid’s section of any video store or iTunes manifest, it’s just too out there and thematically challenging, but that’s in a way where it’s strength as a story lies. Should be viewed as an existential, spiritually inclined drama about what it means to really live, in whatever form you’ve been given, and how someone can ruminate on the choices they’ve made through new eyes.

-Nate Hill

Netflix’s Stranger Things: A Review by Nate Hill 

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Netflix’s Stranger Things snuck up and floored me. You’d think that a long form mystery series concocted from the DNA of Amblin/ET/Goonies and retro, gooey Stephen King horror would have made a significant blip on my radar months in advance, but nope. That almost made watching it even more special; this wasnt something I’d spent oodles of time hyping up and thinking about (which often leads to expectations being dashed). It came out of the blue and knocked me sideways six ways to Sunday. I came home one night with the notion to check out the pilot before I went to bed. I fell deeply in love within the first ten minutes, and slashed my curfew to bits as I devoured about half the season in one go, hitting stop only because I would have been depressed to wake up the following morning and have no more to watch. I took the next day off work to finish up the remaining episodes, after which I sat there in a gaping stupor. I’ve since rewatced it all again. Yes, it’s that good. It’s not just the nostalgia bursting at the seams that suckered me in. This is is a show with a meticulous pace where you feel every beat naturally, some of the most fleshed out characters of recent times that you actually really CARE about, and a wondrous story relating to fear of the unknown, the bonds of friendships both new and old, redemption in the face of ages old trauma and grief, a reverence to all things creepy & crawly, an understanding of the importance fear holds in both our entertainment and collective psyches and above all, a sense of adventure. As soon as the retro opening credits flared up, I knew I was in for something special. They’re a flurry of neon letters that assemble in fashion and font achingly similar to King’s books, set to an ominous synth rhapsody that echoes everything from Refn to Sinoia Cave’s Beyond The Black Rainbow. Immediately we are transported to a setting drawn forth from the past and the nightmares of many other artists before it’s time, which is not to say it’s at all derivitive or lazy. That’s the issue with deliberatly nostalgic stuff: it can come across as forced or cheap novelty trying to play to our sentimental sides. This one uses it naturally and never feels like a gimmick for one second. What’s amazing is that despite the fact that nearly every element of story it uses has been done before multiple times throughout the years, it all somehow feels completely new, and never once leans on the crutch of inspiration any harder than it has to, which in this day and age deserves a goddamn medal. The story opens up in small town Hawkins, Indiana, sometime in the mid 80’s. Just outside of town, trouble brews deep within a mysterious CIA sanctioned research laboratory. A dangerous portal is opened, something from another dimension gets out, a girl with telepathic abilities named Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) escapes into the town, and young Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) disappears without a trace from his home. All this happens in the first half hour, kicking off a well timed wind chime of inciting incidents to get the tale underway. The town is thrown into a panic as Will’s mother Joyce (Winona Ryder) frantically searches for him. The forlorn, sad sack police chief Hopper (David Harbour, beyond excellent in so many ways) tries to reign in the growing mania, but the situation only gets worse. Will’s sister Nancy (Natalia Dyer) witnesses another disappearance, and Eleven finds herself hiding out with Will’s endearing gang of buddies (Finn Wolfhard, Caleb Mclaughlin and Gaten Matarazzo), who valiantly launch a quest to ensure his safe return from the netherworld. Meanwhile, the laboratory’s sinister, silver haired head Doctor Brenner (a chilling Matthew Modine) is an amoral prick who will stop at nothing to get Eleven back and continue his godawful experiments. It’s a hell of a lot crammed into eight hours, but not a second is wasted, not a scene or a line of dialogue misplaced. Everything glides smoothly and the whole thing is so joyously watchable that I had trouble even thinking about picking up my phone or reaching for the iPad (I’m easily distracted). There’s teen drama, heartbreaking tragedy, first love, palpable danger without being too gory or messed up, and damn if the Spielberg/King flavour isn’t just delactable. The monster is a gooey, walking Venus fly trap that instills real fear in the opening moments of the pilot. The ideas explored are presented in ways that would make both the X Files and Twilight Zone jealous. My favourite performance has to be Brown as Eleven. Of all the child roles hers is the most difficult to land and she’s a revelation. Seeing the world outside the facility with new eyes, falling for Wolfhard, protecting her newfound friends, it’s all handled impeccably and I think we can expect great things from this young actress. David Harbour has consistently shown versatility in anything he does, and when one looks at his role here contrasted against work in, say, A Walk Among The Tombstones, it’s uncanny. His arc goes from sheepish to badass to tragic and he positively soars. Modine channels the very essence of King style villains, over pronouncing every syllable with poised venom on the tongue and cloaked malice oozing from every pore. Ryder works herself up into a frenzy that any mother must feel in the situation, and it’s just great to see her in a central role in anything these days. The kids provide heart and levity, proving wise beyond their years to the point of Calvin & Hobbes esque insight, yet still maintaining their innocence in the face of peril. Not only does the soundtrack showcase a whole whack of 80’s treasures (that Joy Division tho♡), the score itself by Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein is a love letter to everything from Tangerine Dream to Cliff Martinez, evoking the setting beautifully and bringing forth atmosphere in scene after scene after scene. Stranger Things lovingly blows a trumpet of times past, wears it’s influences proudly and unobtrusively on its sleeve and brilliantly blazes it’s own trail. There are monsters out there, both human and otherwise. Never give up hope, not matter how bleak the prognosis. There’s still some wonder and unknown to be discovered in this world of ours (and beyond). Redemption is only a few daring acts around the bend. Kindness goes a long way, as does trust. Friends don’t lie. These are but a few things you’ll discover if you give this one a shot, which I hope you will. Bring on Season 2, man.