Author Archives: Jay

Third Person

960 Liam Neeson is a writer doing writerly things in Paris, estranged from his wife (Kim Basinger) after a family tragedy, and making up for lost time with his damaged young mistress (Olivia Wilde).

Mila Kunis is recently a NY hotel maid, the latest in a string of terrible jobs she can’t hold onto. Her lawyer (Maria Bello) is losing patience with her flimsy excuses for constantly missing court – should the custody battle she’s locked in with her ex (James Franco) be her first priority?

Adrien Brody is in Italy to track down designs he can knock-off when he runs into a beautiful woman in a bar (Moran Atias) with a sob story about stolen money and the smuggler who’s holding her daughter ransom.

Three couples, three cities, three stories, 1 movie, by the king of interwoven story lines himself, Paul Haggis. What do they have in common? Kids? Rocky relationships? Trust issues? Wonky coincidences? Unreliable narrators? A third-person weird triangle with an awkward “third person”? Or something a little more…literary? I found this flick on Netflix and wondered how such a monstrously recognizable cast had flown under the radar.

There are definitely small details scattered throughout Third Person that deliberately do not make sense, yet are major hinges to the plot. The stories are vaguely interconnected, but shouldn’t be. They should be divided by the rules of time and space which our universe obeys, but aren’t. It’s damn subtle though, ambitious in its reach. The kind of thing that’ll itch your brain, make you squint at the TV, make your constantly third-person-adrien-brody-and-moran-atias ask your partner “Okay, what?” Haggis’s gimmick overwhelms the movie, and the cracking chemistry between stars just isn’t enough to make up for it.

As frustrating as the film’s structure is, there’s also an underlying message that to me was even more disturbing. The men are all pricks and the women are all passive victims. In one vignette, a character actually says “Women have the gift of being able to deny any reality” but you know what, Paul Haggis? This woman is staring reality in the balls and calling it what it is: a waste of talented actors, pretentious without being smart, and a bit of a bore.

Born To Dance

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The ImagineNative Film Festival celebrates Canadian and international Indigenous filmmakers and artistic expressions. Tammy Davis is the film maker in question today. Of Maori descent, he identifies with Ngati Rangi and Atihaunui a Paparangi. The Maoris are the indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand. They have a rich mythology, a knack for horticulture, a strong sense of warrior culture, and yes, a generous history with the performing arts.

Fitting then that Davis makes his feature-length directorial debut with Born 12620_00_wide_key_jpg To Dance. The premise of Born To Dance is an overfamiliar coming of age tale. Tu is a young man born to dance. His disapproving father forbids it. Tu is perhaps a couple of years older than we’re used to in this role because instead of being threatened with military school, he’s threatened with the military, full stop. If Tu doesn’t get his act together during the summer post-high school graduation, the army awaits him. It occurs to me as I write this that Born To Dance might be Queen of Katwe in disguise, only replace the chess with hip hop, and the slums of Uganda for low-income housing in Auckland.

Where Born To Dance distinguishes itself, much like Queen of Katwe, is with its culture and setting. Tu is notably from the “wrong side of the tracks”, whether or not there are actual tracks in southern Auckland. Tu is played by first-time actor\championship dancer Tia-Taharoa Maipi, himself a young Maori man who danced his way out of a small town not unlike the character arc we see in the film. He helps give the film a flavour of authenticity. Compared to a well-off rival dance crew from the North Shore, Tu explains that “Dance is what they do; dance is who we are.”

In the expected dance-off at the end, where the two rival crews inevitably face 1233100_born-to-dance off, director Davis gives the performers time and space to really show off their talent. This is a dance movie after all, and the moves are there to prove it. Choreographed by the legendary Parris Goebel, Born To Dance is the real deal. The movie’s smaller budget means there aren’t a lot of wires or camera tricks at play, just real dancers doing their thing. P-Money provides a stellar soundtrack with tracks that embody kiwi culture.

Like most of you, I’m familiar with New Zealand film because of Taika Waititi’s insane comedies, and the fringey-funny horrors the country is known for. Born to Dance presents another side of what New Zealand has to offer, and I’d like to see more like it, only next time without the insufferably clichéd bits. Just sayin.

This post first appeared at Cinema Axis.

Trespass Against Us

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Colby Cutler (Brendan Gleeson) is the king of the travelers – he reigns over a small trailer enclave and the thieves who live there. They’re constantly suspected by the local police, who are usually right to suspect them. That doesn’t stop them from pulling stupid shit – they are bold and brave and not too smart. And they mostly get away with what they do, except that Colby’s got one son in prison and he seems ready to lose another to the system as well.

trespassagainstus2 Chad Cutler (Michael Fassbender) is not as pleased with his father’s way of life. He sends his kids to school, a luxury he was never afforded. But as long as he’s living among his father’s little gang (and his father’s enormous shadow), he’s stuck. Saving his own son from a similar fate would mean trespassing against his father and the clan, and they’re not about to let him go easily.

Michael Fassbender is excellent. We see him pulled in so many directions – husband, father, son – all seemingly opposing. And as an uneducated man, he is in fact most skilled at being a thief. What kind of life lies for him beyond that? Brendan Gleeson, on the other hand, manages to straddle the paternal with the more menacing. He’s also got a religious streak that seems to elevate him within the clan to Father status with a big F. It’s an awful lot of fun to see these two share screen time together, even if I could have used some subtitles to make sense of their strong accents and impermeable slang.

In his directorial debut, Adam Smith doesn’t rely much on plot. The tensions between father and son escalate but don’t necessarily drive the film forward, because the feeling of Chad’s being paralyzed for lack of options is pervasive. His father’s expectations feel heavy. The movie comes up a little light in terms of this drama, but the action is loaded with fun at full-tilt.

The Architect

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Drew (Parker Posey) and Colin (Eric McCormack) are a blissful suburban couple about to invest in a dream home together. The cracks, though, aren’t that hard to find: she’s an artist, he’s buttoned down. She’s impetuous, he’s a planner. She wants a baby, he’s avoiding sex.

So when they hire a kooky architect, Miles Moss (James Frain), he’s just the thing to wiggle between the cracks and push the couple apart. Colin is the_architect_still immediately suspicious of his impractical, ego-driven work. Drew, however, is flattered to be his muse and determined to be a “good client.” But as the two work more and more closely together building this dream home (whose dream is it?), Colin starts to be the third wheel in an awkward little triangle. And he’s footing the bill!

Posey and McCormack have terrific chemistry together – which, in the confines of this story means they have very little, but their awkwardness is funnily unbearable. Although billed as a comedy, The Architect doesn’t have much in the way of jokes, it relies mostly on the absurdity of the situation, which sometimes is a little much. Or, you know, a lot much. Because this movie honestly relies on a lot of clichés. Like, architect as tortured artist. The characters are not so much finely drawn as crayoned stick figures. James Frain has little to do in the way of acting because his scarves tell you he’s a pompous ass.

I kind of love Parker Posey and I wish there was more of her usual satire in this when instead we get some pretty lowball comedy, mostly digs at the narcissism of the middle class. I’d like to give it a little more credit and wonder if perhaps the architect is not just the guy who designs buildings, but also acts as a catalyst to their crumbling marriage – an architect of change, if you pardon how trite that sounds. But the movie didn’t give me enough evidence that they aspired to such heights. And the resolution is so easy that all you can do is shrug your shoulders – it’s hard to care what happens to a marriage when we never knew why they were together in the first place.

The Eyes of My Mother

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The horror is not what you’ll see on screen – it’s what you’ll see when you close your eyes in bed that night, if you’re able to close them at all.

I went into this film at the New Hampshire Film Festival having been warned by Anna at Film Grimoire – not warned against it, mind you, but warned that it screen-shot-2016-06-26-at-9-47-49-pm was…unusual, intense, disturbing. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to see it. You may know by now that Jay and horror don’t mix. But Sean was keen despite my own warnings, so we hunkered down in the same beautiful theatre where I barely survived watching The Witch last year and hoped for the best (ie, dry pants when all was said and done).

Anna felt that the less you knew about this film going in, the better, and I agree. But I do feel compelled to tell you that it is not a traditional horror film, by which I mean: I was completely fine, didn’t cover my face even once, but Sean, shaken and pale when we left the theatre, confessed to 0% when I asked how much he’d enjoyed the film. “Enjoy” is the wrong word.

It’s about a young girl living on a farm with her immigrant parents. She witnesses the brutal murder of her mother (at the hands of a super creepy serial killer played brilliantly by Will Brill) and in some ways the even more brutal response to the murder by her father. Basically, she’s warped. As a little girl with certain proclivities, this trauma pushes her over the deep end and she deals with it in ways that most of us only encounter in nightmares.

Shot in stark black and white, the cinematography can be disturbingly eyesmo2 beautiful for such a twisted movie. The monochrome may lessen the impact of the gore but it only serves to heighten the intensity of the atmosphere, creating a world I was never sure of, never trusted. So while there’s little in the way of jump-scare, there’s plenty of hair-raising all the same.

Do I recommend it? It’s interesting. It’s unique. It’s creepy as fuck. I found it bearable, but the suspense is unrelenting. I had to buy Sean a Fred Flintstone nightlight, so I guess your “enjoyment” of this film will depend a lot on your tolerance for depravity.

Command and Control

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We Assholes were in the lovely town of Portsmouth, New Hampshire over the weekend for a film festival, but little did we know we’d be joined by a 4th on Saturday – the king of the assholes himself, Donald Trump. Don’t worry, we managed not to catch fleas or throw pies, and we did see plenty of great movies.

Command and Control was one of them, a super scary documentary about that one time in 1980 when American almost launched a nuclear weapon ON ITSELF. Well, scratch that: no “almost” about it – the bomb was in fact compromised, and it just luckily failed to obliterate humanity. This whole thing happened before I was born, when my mother was just a pixie-haired 19 year old – roughly the same age, incidentally, as the men charged with preventing the doom of civilization

Even the best-case scenario, which the military obviously deems adequate, sounds terrifying: the Titan II, a big-ass missile carrying the biggest warhead on the books, was bunkered in an underground silo manned by teenagers not skilled or disciplined enough to get a better posting. And why are we surprised that shit went down?

It was end of shift when two little words heard over the radio would change everything -“Uh oh!” – not words you want to hear when a weapon of mass destruction is at stake. Some kid used a ratchet rather than a wrench, and an 8 pound socket was dropped. Picture, for a moment, what this giant missile really looked like: from the bottom, you couldn’t even see the warhead, which was at the top, 8 stories up. The boys, working somewhere in the middle, dropped a big hunk of metal which made 1 bad bounce, tearing a chunk into the side of the missile which immediately began spurting oil. Nobody really wanted to own up to this possibly extinction-level fuck-up, so a half hour went by before anyone with any authority knew what was going on. And this being a government operation, a further 8-10 hours went by before anything was done about it. So the bottom fuel compartment was emptying quickly, which meant the top part was about to collapse in on itself at any moment, likely causing a huge-ass explosion even not counting the fact that a MOTHER FUCKING WMD WAS SITTING ON TOP!

Since I’m writing this and you’re reading this, we didn’t get wiped off the face of the earth, but the thing that saved us was dumb luck. The bile will rise in your throat watching this, knowing how close we came. The lady behind me uttered “Oh Jesus” 17 times before I lost count. But Command and Control, based on Eric Shlosser’s book of the same name, tells about that ONE time in 1980 when everything almost went black. That one time. This documentary lets us know that in fact, there have been hundreds, maybe thousands of accidents involving nuclear missiles. Every single day that some dopey American doesn’t accidentally kill us all is a miracle, and that reliance on constant miracles doesn’t exactly sit well with me. People with an awful lot of medals on their uniforms refer to the nuclear program as a “seat of the pants operation”; then-secretary of defense Harold Brown says about safety “we probably didn’t worry about it enough.” Gulp.

Today, in 2016, the U.S. still has 7000 nuclear weapons just waiting for an accident to happen. And to make matters worse, they’re threatening to elect a buffoon named Donald to hover his dumb little fingers over the big red button. So here’s the thing: accidents happen all the time. Most are covered up. American nuclear weapons have taken American life. But the bigger the accident, the more loss of life. And if there’s a big accident, there’s a mushroom cloud and ten million dead instantly. Who’s going to tell Donald to stand down, that this is “friendly fire” and not a button-pushing incident? No one. That guy will be dead. His superiors will be dead. It’ll just be Donald and his excellent decision making between us and all-out global war. Oh sweet Jesus – if this film isn’t another in a long list of compelling reasons not to vote for this guy, I don’t know what is.

Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids

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I went to a Justin Timberlake concert once, sort of. I hadn’t meant to exactly, but he and Jay-Z were touring together for their Legends of Summer tour. 173784081-600x450 They had songs in common off their respective The 20\20 Experience and Magna Carta Holy Grail albums, so it felt like a good fit to co-headline a tour that ended up playing to more than half a million fans over 14 sold-out dates in just under a month. It was a great show in Toronto’s Rogers Centre (where the Blue Jays play). Sean treated me to luxurious floor seats and I can’t think of any other show where I felt so wrapped up with love, with 53 000 happy people surrounding me. JT and Jay-Z had great chemistry and impressive collaboration, and although I hadn’t intended to see Timberlake, I was glad that I did. With great back and forth and no one-upmanship, the two ended the show on an exceptionally high but sad note: Young Forever dedicated to the memory of Trayvon Martin.

As soon as The Legends of Summer tour wrapped up, Justin embarked on a 2-year tour in support of his album. This film, directed by Jonathan Demme, is the culmination of all that hard work – the final show, January 2nd 2015 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

With only brief introductions from the supporting members of his band and stage show, the movie launches into concert mode and stays there. There’s great camera work and Demme keeps the whole piece feeling energetic and gives you front-row access so you feel like not only are you there, you’ve got terrific seats. But apart from the brief before and after footage, there’s no real interviews or behind the scenes access. And since I’m only familiar with his radio hits, there are lots of songs that I find hard to get into. So if you’ve always wanted to see JT up close and personal without emptying Sean’s wallet, here’s your chance: it’s playing on Netflix, and it’s a great concert doc. But it’s no more and no less than that.

The Free World

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Mo (Boyd Holbrook) is recently released from prison where he served hard time for a crime he didn’t commit. Reintegration to the outside world is hard on him, and the local cops are even harder. His only friend is his boss at the animal shelter (Octavia Spencer), but she is at a loss to explain to him how this outside world has so few rules that a man can beat his dog to death without consequences.

thumbnail_24895 One night he finds a woman (Elisabeth Moss) in the shelter, covered in blood. It turns out the two have a lot in common; an abusive marriage can feel an awful lot lot like jail. To keep her safe, he risks his own freedom to hide her, but his crappy apartment makes for a terrible hideout, and the two have to go on the run to stay ahead of the law. And you know what? It’s a pretty sucky world out there.

There’s a lot of comparisons to be drawn from the movie – the shelter’s cages like prison cells for bad dogs; Moss a puppy frightened of her owner. And it’s painful to admit that the ‘free world’ isn’t what it’s cracked up to be, that prisoners may be more predictable than random citizens.

Jason Lew’s screenplay is interesting because it leaves much unsaid and really forces the viewer to question what’s important. But leaving us in the dark is a bit alienating, and we don’t always engage with the characters as we should. The acting’s not the problem here, but the direction might be. The Free World sometimes feels like two different movies – strongest in the quiet parts, and tonally uneven in the more actiony sequences. I really liked how the movie started out, I liked this portrait of a man not knowing his place outside of a prison cell, not knowing who he is outside of the system, and not really being allowed the room to breathe and discover. The Free World is cynical. More cynical than a wrongly convicted born-again-Muslim who sleeps best in the confines of a closet. It’s a toughie.

Peter And The Farm

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I saw 5 movies today at the New Hampshire Film Festival – Peter And The Farm was the first, and it’s the one I can’t stop thinking about. It isn’t a perfect film; the film makers are having a little too much fun experimenting with their fancy cameras, content to show you their prowess with focus/unfocus on a brightly lit night sky. But they get top marks for subject: A+++.

Peter Dunning, farmer, is the star of the documentary. He’s like no one you’ve ever met. He’s an artist who took up farming as way to sustain his art. But farming has overwhelmed his life. He fell in love with it, put it ahead of everything else, neglecting his art, his health, his numerous wives and children, who all have left him. Now it’s just him and the farm, a derelict little operation he has grown to loathe. And the memories that haunt him. And the alcohol that soothes him.

Rarely seen without a bottle of something in his hand, Peter is a legendary story-teller with a bottomless bag of tales to tell, grateful to finally have an audience again. He performs his farm work dutifully but grudgingly, the brutal realities of farm life a lonely cautionary tale. Sean and I agreed that Peter has a philosophical soul, and that that might just be his undoing. Alone on the land, he’s got nothing but quiet hours of drudgery for thinking, thinking, and more thinking. And most of his thoughts revolve around the pointlessness of existence in general, and his life’s work specifically. The only thing that gets him through the day is fantasizing about his suicide.

Peter is an endlessly fascinating character, but he’s a real, flesh and blood man with real demons. This is a documentary, and you can never forget that the stakes are real, and that the man selling you beets at the farmer’s market this Sunday might just be thinking of going home and putting a shotgun in his mouth. The honesty is beautiful but there’s a tormented soul on display, and that’s tougher to watch than the sheep gutting and the cow gynecology. Rural Vermont looks gorgeous but you get a very real sense that this one-time utopia has now turned into a prison and Peter, one way or another, is serving a life sentence.

Masterminds

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Not everyone loved Napoleon Dynamite, but you can’t deny that it was an unprecedented success. Its director, first-timer Jared Hess, hit it out of the park, the movie absorbed into popular culture. He’s been unwilling to accept that he may be a one-hit wonder (same goes for Napoleon star Jon Heder) – the two keep making films at a dwindling rate, each more lavishly terrible than the last.

Jared Hess’s latest failure is called Masterminds, and he convinced a long list of famous names to go down in flames along with him: Zach Galifianakis as la-et-mn-ca-sneaks-masterminds-kate-mckinnon-20150426.jpg the witless driver of an armoured money truck whose terrible relationship with fiancée Kate McKinnon makes it all too easy for him to fall for coworker Kristen Wiig who manipulates him into working with her confederate, Owen Wilson, who thinks a heist is in order. Galifianakis will do all of the work under the guise of love but will receive little to no reward if Wilson has anything to do with it – he’s got contract killer Jason Sudeikis after him and only the law (Leslie Jones) has any chance of intervening.

It’s “based on a true story” which means that someone once stole money somewhere and that’s excuse enough for this atrocity. With 3\4 of the Ghostbusters assembled, there’s no denying that this is a powerhouse cast, but the trouble is they’ve been given a crumpled up tissue of a story and no one knows in which direction to sneeze. I truthfully confessed to Sean that I zach only laughed once the entire movie – and it was post-credits, in the blooper reel, not even at a joke that got edited out, but at Zach Galifianakis accidentally hitting his head on a swing set (I console myself that it made Kate McKinnon laugh too, before she checked that he was okay). Only babies laugh at people getting bonked on the head, but I had been in a comedy desert for the past hour and a half and I was parched for laughter.

It’s just shameless and lowbrow and it almost makes you feel bad for the dumb criminals it’s styled after. I have a low tolerance for stupid slapstick and this movie didn’t have a single other trick up its sleeve. Some of the scenes literally feel like an SNL sketch gone on too long, and those are the good ones. I have zero forgiveness in my heart for a movie this bad, and I’ll be expecting some dark chocolate truffles and a bottle of Dom with a heartfelt card signed by all the cast by way of apology soon. But not soon enough.