 |
| Journey to the West |
Edgar Wright's The World's End is tired and unfunny. What starts too slowly as a male menopause movie proceeds to then try to inspire guffaws with a pub crawl and an alien invasion. Titters were not even elicited. This recycling of Wright's better film Shaun of the Dead made me glad I skipped Wright's Hot Fuzz, also with Simon Pegg.
My wife and I tried to watch the much lauded documentary, The Act of Killing, but gave up halfway through. Joshua Oppenheimer directs former Indonesian death squad members in the reenactment of their various atrocities, which occurred some forty years ago during the overthrow of Sukarno. I found the film captured the unusual jumble that is Indonesian culture, but also found it manipulative and repetitive. The thugs interviewed have a rascally charm, but I suppose some members of the SS did, too. Unsettling in the wrong way, The Act of Killing is intellectually and ethically deficient. As my wife put it, "I already know how to garrote people."
Jeff Nichols' Midnight Special is a slightly above average fantasy film enlivened by a touching performance by Michael Shannon. Typically typecast as monsters or thugs, Shannon gives a nuanced performance as a caring father whose son, imbued with 'special powers', is on the run from stock villains: in this case, government officials and religious fanatics. There is a predictable Spielbergian feel to the film's fantasy sequences, particularly when ET gets to go home at the climax. Nichols' script doesn't flesh out his supporting characters enough, so talented performers like Joel Edgerton, Bill Camp (so good in The Night of...), Adam Driver, and Kirsten Dunst are left with little to do. Sam Shepard sinks his teeth into the role of a cult leader, but disappears after the first twenty minutes. Ultimately, Midnight Special is a well made, but pointless retread.
A slightly better film is Adam Wingard's The Guest, an exploitation film that rises above the norm. Dan Stevens, most famous for batting his baby blues on Downton Abbey, is the titular character who embeds himself with a New Mexico family after convincing them that he was best buds with their dead son in Afghanistan. Things are not what they seem, of course, and the final act devolves into a routine shootout. However, Simon Barrett's script is better at fleshing out the secondary actors than most films of this ilk and Wingard's mise en scene looks lived in instead of generic. Stevens and Brendan Meyer, are quite effective, the woman playing the dead son's Mom less so. Like Midnight Special, this is essentially a retread: Teorema transposed to the American Southwest with kegs and guns. Wingard is able to invest his material with the sense of disquietude haunting American life in the 21st Century.
Joe Angio's Revenge of the Mekons is as cheeky and delightful as the band it documents. Wisely eschewing an album by album breakdown, Angio offers loving portraits of the personalities in this disparate and dissolute aggregation. It has the right mix of talking heads and live performances.
Mike Flanagan's Hush is a retool of Wait Until Dark in which the victim (female natch) is deaf and dumb. Flanagan's previous work as an editor is evident in the lean and economical construction of the film. The first third of Hush is meticulously constructed. However, the script's machinations quickly become repetitive and Flanagan lacks the brio for crossbow foo. Kate Siegel, who co-wrote the screenplay with Flanagan and eventually married him, is good as the resourceful victim as is John Gallagher as her psycho nemesis.
 |
| The Mekons |
No comments:
Post a Comment