Break On Through
Light My Fire
The End
Strange Days
People Are Strange
When The Music’s Over
The Unknown Soldier
Hyacinth House
LA Woman
Riders on the Storm
July 24, 2020
October 25, 2019
From the Archives: Nancy Drew
From the pre-Talking Movies archives.
Teenage amateur sleuth Nancy Drew (Emma Roberts) moves to California with her lawyer father Carson (Tate Donovan). She tries to fit in at school but quickly becomes entangled in an old mystery surrounding their rented LA house which was owned by a murdered starlet whose manager is Carson’s new boss.
Nancy Drew is a very old character. She was created in 1930 which makes her eight years older than Superman. And just like Superman she’s an impeccably polite do-gooder who’s considered difficult to pull off in a big budget live action movie in the present climate. By present climate we mean that while Superman has been made to appear sort of lame by recent interpretations of Batman, Nancy has to contend with TV’s tough teenage PI Veronica Mars. Batman is dark, brooding, dangerous and prone to violence. Superman never lies and acts like an overgrown boy scout. Nancy Drew also doesn’t lie, is as nice as pie, and has a very curious non-relationship with her absent boyfriend Ned who is introduced by her as “a really good friend from home” when he pops up here. Veronica Mars played her own father to pull off a spectacular con against the FBI, has a tempestuous on/off relationship with a confirmed bad boy, is vindictive as hell to people who cross her and never stops spewing one-liners and sarcastically narrating her life. See the problem here?
How do you depict Nancy after Veronica? IGNORE VERONICA! Director and co-writer Andrew Fleming has chosen to go for something termed ‘retro-modern’. Don’t even try to fathom what that means, I spent half an hour at it during the film and I think I broke something in my mind-box. Nancy and Carson dress and act like they’re in the 1950s while everyone around them is defiantly 00s. At times the school in LA Nancy moves to feels like it’s the one from Bratz. You suspect that Fleming is doing an awful reprise of The Brady Bunch Movie, setting Nancy up for humiliation after humiliation. Thankfully after a while this temporal confusion ceases to matter. The mystery surrounding the previous owner of the house, a tragic starlet, is actually pretty damn involving and Nancy is smart, dogged, and resourceful in solving it. There are also some very good jokes including two cameos when Nancy wanders onto a film set that are too good to ruin here.
It’s always a joy to see Rocky Horror star Barry Bostwick in anything while Tate Donovan is an effective if underused Carson Drew. Emma Roberts carries this film scarily well for a 16 year old but then her aunt is Julia Roberts. The last half-hour is very gripping, with menacing villains and very showy direction from Fleming, which raises the suspense brilliantly. Perfect fare for the Big Big Movie crowd but if you’re a teenager you should probably be watching Veronica Mars and Batman Begins.
3/5
January 9, 2019
Hopes: 2019
Glass
They called him Mister…
Glass, an unlikely sequel
to Unbreakable
Cold Pursuit
U.S. remake, but…
with same director, Neeson
in for Skarsgard. Hmm.
Happy Death Day 2U
Groundhog Day: Part II.
I know what you Screamed before.
Meta-mad sequel.
Where’d You Go, Bernadette
Cate Blanchett missing,
Daughter on her trail, thru time,
Very Linklater…
Pet Sematary
Stephen King remake.
Yes, sometimes dead is better,
but maybe not here.
Shazam!
Chuck: superhero.
Big: but with superpowers.
This could be great fun.
Under the Silver Lake
It Follows: P.I.
Sort of, Garfield the P.I.
Riley Keough the femme
Pokemon: Detective Pikachu
Ryan Reynolds is voice
Pikachu is the shamus
PG Deadpool fun?
The Turning
of the screw, that is.
Mackenzie Davis the lead,
can the ghosts be real?
John Wick: Parabellum
Keanu is back
On a horse while in a suit
Killers in pursuit
Ad Astra
James Gray does sci-fi,
Brad Pitt looks for dad in space,
Gets Conradian.
Flarksy
Rogen heart Theron;
High school crush, now head Canuck.
No problem. Wait, what?!
Ford v Ferrari
Mangold for long haul;
Le Mans! Ferrari must lose!
Thus spake Matt Damon
Hobbs and Shaw
The Rock and The Stath.
The director of John Wick.
This will be bonkers.
The Woman in the Window
Not the Fritz Lang one!
Amy Adams: Rear Window.
Joe Wright the new Hitch.
CR: Chris Large/FX
Gemini Man
Will Smith and Ang Lee,
Clive Owen and the great MEW,
cloned hitman puzzler.
Charlie’s Angels
K-Stew’s big comeback
French films have made her, um, hip?
Just don’t bite your lip…
The Day Shall Come
Anna Kendrick stars in-
Um, nobody knows a thing
Bar it’s Chris Morris
Jojo Rabbit
‘My friend Adolf H.’
is Taika Waititi-
this could get quite strange…
May 7, 2018
From the Archives: Street Kings
Another deep dive into the pre-Talking Movies archives reveals a neglected but dramatically rich highpoint in Keanu Reeve’s post-Matrix career.
The LA Tourist Board is almost certain to take out a contract on the life of David Ayer after seeing this film. The writer/director who gave us Harsh Times and Training Day adds another entry to his steadily growing resume of violent films depicting Los Angeles as Hell on Earth, populated entirely by vicious criminals and corrupt cops. Thankfully there is another element to this tale which makes it praiseworthy and that is the story and screenplay credit for James Ellroy, the celebrated novelist whose work provided the source material for 1997’s masterful LA Confidential. This film does not approach the sheer depth of character and artful plotting of that masterpiece. It does however complicate Ayer’s simplistic worldview.
Keanu Reeves is a loose cannon cop, “the tip on the spear” as his superior calls him, a blunt instrument who kills the worst criminals. The almost too clever opening sequence of the film sees a dishevelled boozing Reeves attempt to sell a machine gun from the back of his car to Korean gangsters who beat him up and steal said car after he unleashes a slew of racial epithets. Reeves tracks them to their house, retrieves a concealed gun and body armour from his car and blows the Korean villains away to save two teenage girls they had kidnapped. He then carefully stages the scene to make it look like they shot first, the “exigent circumstances” which allow him to act on his Dirty Harry impulses without legal consequences. But, just like the implacable Harry Callahan, Reeve’s Detective Tom Ludlow is also powered by a tremendous sense of justice as well as vengeance. When wrongly implicated in the murder of his former partner Reeves cannot let it go. He jeopardises the elaborate cover-up by his friends in the department in his single-minded search to find out who the cop-killers are by painstaking detective work before killing them for their crime. This part of the film is superb as Ludlow’s good qualities act as a tragic flaw hastening his own downfall.
A fine cast sees Chris Evans stand out as Detective Diskin, who helps Ludlow while being shocked by his tactics. Hugh Laurie is nicely sinister as the head of Internal Affairs but Forest Whitaker is quite awful as Ludlow’s boss – his dialogue is so many cop movie clichés strung together that it actually becomes unintentionally hilarious. Ultimately though this is Reeves’ film and this is one of his best roles. Ludlow’s unstoppable thirst for answers and vengeance, regardless of the consequences for himself, causes him to stumble into a much bigger conspiracy which reveals to him that his violent tendencies may have been exploited by smarter people… Sadly at this point labyrinthine noir gives way to a simplistic Hollywood ending. But despite its flaws this is grittiness well worth seeing.
3/5
July 7, 2016
The Neon Demon
Nicolas Winding Refn returns with another artful garish provocation that elicited boos at Cannes. He must be doing something right.
Fresh-faced teenager Jesse (Elle Fanning) arrives in LA with dreams of modelling. She impresses agency head Roberta (Christina Hendricks), even though her photos do not; so much for would-be boyfriend/photographer Dean (Karl Glusman) hitching his wagon to her rising star. Roberta pushes her towards legendary photographer Jack MacArthur (Des Harrington) who is immediately wowed by her innocent looks and shoots her. His instant interest is shared by make-up artist Ruby (Jena Malone), who introduces Jesse to her sharp-tongued model friends Gigi (Bella Heathcote) and Sarah (Abbey Lee). But when Alessandro Nivola’s designer is also entranced, leading to successive humiliations for Gigi and Sarah in favour of Jesse, their claws come out. And Jesse, after a trippy catwalk experience, finds herself isolated when events in the worst motel in Pasadena take a sinister turn courtesy of creepy manager Hank (Keanu Reeves).
Refn got a kicking for Only God Forgives that would’ve broken many directors, but, very impressively, The Neon Demon is made with supreme confidence, and with absolutely no apologies – even signed NWR as a statement of artistic singularity. Whereas Only God Forgives gestured towards total abstraction there is a semblance of story here, but, even though he collaborated with playwrights Mary Laws & Polly Stenham on dialogue, it’s in the ha’penny place to the visuals. And the visuals work because Refn knows Cliff Martinez can provide a synthesiser score of wide range that can interpret images: in particular Jesse’s catwalk encounter with a blue pyramid, water, and a red pyramid, which tips its hat to 2001’s Jupiter sequence, and seems to imply that Jesse has communed with the Platonic Ideal of beauty and is thereafter a different and blessed person.
Martinez’s score is quite haunting and beautiful in its ethereal approximation of the timbres of marimba and celeste, but it also embraces great Vangelis Blade Runner washes of synth, as well as juddering techno, contrapuntal melodies, and, for a climactic syncopated cue, almost wah-wah guitar effects. Reeves plays terrifically against type, and his enjoyment is mirrored by Refn mischievously cutting from his introduction to a huge white space where one character initiates another. The Rover cinematographer Natasha Braier observes the scantily-clad models with Kubrickian detachment, complementing a startling scene where Jesse appears faced with sexual assault but is treated as an objet d’art, not human but a personification of beauty. Early on, regarding lipstick names, Jesse is asked “Are you sex or are you food?” Refn seems to imply Jesse as embodiment of beauty can be anything, except a person.
This is more accessible than Only God Forgives, but there will still be walkouts, because this is unapologetically an NWR film: which means mesmeric pacing, semi-abstracted visuals, a foregrounding of music, and outré violence.
4/5
June 2, 2016
The Nice Guys
Shane Black’s third film as writer/director sees him back in familiar R-rated crime comedy territory after his unexpected Iron Man sojourn in PG-13 comic-book land.
Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) is the heavy you hire to rough up a creepy pot-dealer, or the PI who’s dogging your footsteps. The PI in question is Holland March (Ryan Gosling), ethically challenged since California introduced no-fault divorce; in that he now searches for missing husbands while their ashes are on display on their widow’s mantelpiece. But probably not ethically challenged enough to deserve what Amelia (Margaret Qualley) hires Healy to do to him. Soon after their set-to Healy is himself roughed up by two heavies (Beau Knapp and Keith David), and finds getting Holland back on Amelia’s trail a matter of some personal urgency. Holland’s 13 year old daughter Holly (Angourie Rice) helps the investigation into Amelia’s whereabouts and the related murder of porno performer Misty Mountains (Murielle Telio) actually get somewhere, but conspiracy and a Detroit hit-man lurk…
The Nice Guys may be the funniest film of 2016. Black is on top form when it comes to absurdist comic routines, there are a number of set-piece bickering arguments that would not be out of place in a Martin McDonagh script. The physicality of Crowe and Gosling quite obviously recalls Laurel & Hardy, with Gosling’s scream a particular joy, as well as his attempt to maintain his dignity in a piece of business involving awkward manoeuvres with a toilet door and a gun. This mines a similar cinematic seam to 2005’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, but replaces that film’s nods to Chandler with a tip of the hat to 1970s conspiracy thrillers; and a more amused in-camera acknowledgement of how things conveniently turn out for the best when everything looks like it’s going to hell thru our heroes’ bungling.
The juxtaposition of extreme violence and comic slapstick served up by Black and his Doc Savage co-writer Anthony Bagarozzi jars initially, but you quickly become comfortable with this imaginary 1970s universe; in which Tim Allen is gigging everywhere and pornos are omnipresent. Philippe Rousselot’s cinematography casts a 1970s haze over proceedings, to match the distrust of authority that dogs Holland and Healy as they deal with Justice Department officials Judith (Kim Basinger) and Tally (Yaya DaCosta). An unexpected carry-over from Iron Man 3 is Black’s use of younger characters to upbraid the leads. Rice gives a standout performance as the 1970s Veronica Mars driving her father around and tracking down leads, easily holding her own against Gosling and Crowe’s fine turns. Matt Bomer’s enigmatic character is a visual treat in the finale, but what you’ll remember most is the dialogue.
From a peerless Richard Nixon story, to a validation of profanity, and a refusal to give up on the possibility of romance that bends reality itself, this is delightful.
5/5
January 8, 2016
Bret Easton Ellis: Page to Screen
Bret Easton Ellis has written seven books, four have been filmed, and two of those have been set in Los Angeles. And yet they are by far the weakest of the Ellis adaptations… Here’s a teaser of my piece for HeadStuff on those adaptations.
“I stand back from the unfinished canvas. I realise that I would rather spend my money on drugs than on art supplies” – The Rules of Attraction (novel)
While Hollywood was premiering his debut, mangled to appeal to perceived Reaganised teenagers, Ellis published his sophomore novel The Rules of Attraction, in which the influence of Reaganism is present in the Freshmen wanting a weight room and vetoing Louis Farrakhan as a speaker. Camden College life in the 1985 Fall term is narrated in short vignettes by Sean Bateman, Paul Denton, Lauren Hynde, and some secondary characters. An unreliable picture emerges from their overlapping experiences at parties, cafeteria lunches, hook-ups, classes, and trips to town. Denton narrates a secret affair with Bateman, Bateman narrates a minor friendship with Denton, Bateman and Lauren hook up for a disastrous relationship which both record very differently, and Bateman’s secret admirer (who he thought was Lauren) kills herself when he sleeps with Lauren. STDs and abortions are the frequent price of the casual sex merry-go-round of Camden’s never-ending party, and Lauren pays in full. Ellis’ dialogue is a marvel, with one-liners aplenty in concisely captured conversations, while the trademark pop culture references (everybody is listening to Little Creatures) are married to more nuanced narration. Denton, the most self-aware and self-critical character, eschews auditioning for the Shepard play because his life already is one. Spielberg is memorably critiqued for being secular humanism not rigorous modernism, but mostly these intelligent characters play dumb because excess is what’s expected.
“What does that mean? Know me? Know me? Nobody knows anyone else. Ever. You will never, ever know me” – The Rules of Attraction (film)
Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary adapted and directed the novel, and Ellis dubbed the 2002 film “the one movie that captured my sensibility in a visual and cinematic language.” The rise of independent cinema meant Avary could cast James Van Der Beek as Bateman without bowdlerising the novel. The film is alternately shocking (it opens with the rape of Shannyn Sossamon’s Lauren), hilarious (Denton [Ian Somerhalder] and Dick [Russell Sams] perform an entirely improvised dance to ‘Faith’ in their underwear), and romantic (an extended split-screen sequence shows Bateman and Lauren finally meeting at their Saturday morning tutorial). Avary stylishly plays out the climactic ‘End of the World’ party from three viewpoints before winding back to the start of term, and situates Camden in a temporal twilight zone; with broadband internet but a 1980s soundtrack of The Cure and Erasure. Avary radically changes Lauren’s character, by throwing many of her traits onto loose roommate Lara (Jessica Biel). Lauren is now a virgin, waiting for Victor to return from Europe, whereas in the book she waited on Victor while sleeping with Franklyn. From being a mirror of Bateman, who sleeps with her friend while being in love with Lauren, she becomes a Madonna. There’s no longer an alienated road-trip with Sean ending with an abortion, just as Sean’s affair with Denton is reduced to one split-screen scene implicitly showing Denton’s fantasy. Avary’s changes make more violent and consequential Bateman’s successive breaks with Lauren and Denton, when she tells Bateman he will never know her, and he repeats her lines to Denton. Denton and Lauren’s snowy encounter after the ‘End of the World’ party, scored by Tomandandy with electronic eeriness, becomes a haunting summation: “Doesn’t matter anyway. Not to people like him. Not to people like us.” Lauren’s momentary self-condemnatory thought, unsaid in the novel, is spoken and brings things close to Gatsby’s “careless people … they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money.”
Click here to read the full piece on HeadStuff.org.
September 24, 2014
Maps to the Stars
David Cronenberg features his Cosmopolis star Robert Pattinson in another tale of the rich and shameless, this time skewering Hollywood.
Wide-eyed teenager Agatha (Mia Wasikowska) arrives off the bus in LA, and hires limo driver Jerome (Pattinson) to show her the former Weiss residence. Dr Stafford Weiss (John Cusack), a self-help guru, has been supplanted in the fame game by his monstrous son Benjie (Evan Bird), star of Bad Babysitter, who is managed by his mother Cristina (Olivia Williams), who takes her teenager’s drug use in stride. Stafford is treating faded actress Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), whose comeback rests not only on auditioning for director Damian (Gord Rand), agreeing to threesomes with producer Sterl (Jonathan Watton), and taking her mother Clarice’s part in a remake of mom’s cult classic, but also on ignoring ghostly Clarice (Sarah Gadon) denigrating her acting abilities. When Havana’s friend Carrie Fisher (Carrie Fisher!) recommends her Twitter pal Agatha as a PA, things get really weird…
Amazingly this is the first movie Cronenberg has ever shot in America, and he’s brought his regular crew with him south of the 49th parallel: cinematographer Peter Suschitzky, production designer Carol Spier, editor Ron Sanders, and composer Howard Shore. Everything is set for success, except the script. You feel Cronenberg might have been attracted to Maps to the Stars because it combined very dark Hollywood comedy with three sets of deranged sibling or parent relationships, and he did deranged siblings very well in Dead Ringers. But neither element really works. The disorienting boardroom grilling of Benji by nervous execs gives a hint why with its lack of establishing shots. Cronenberg, despite an eye-wateringly explicit threesome, is too icy a director to pull off lurid black comedy, and when he tackles incest here that iciness produces neither drama nor creeping horror.
Maps to the Stars features a lot of good actors, but not a lot of good parts, and feels unfocused despite such compensatory flourishes as the repeated reciting of Paul Eluard’s poem ‘Liberty’. Bird wrings some laughs from his foul-mouthed child star, while Moore tries to with a too obvious ‘shockingly callous’ reaction. Cronenberg, incidentally, is noticeably merciless in showing age has withered Moore and Cusack. Ultimately Hollywood satirises Cronenberg. Pattison’s glorified cameo has been misleadingly played up in trailers, for obvious reasons. A major character’s fiery death is head-explodingly inept, featuring CGI fire worse than The Blacklist’s shoddy standard, almost Asylum Studios bad; simply because it’ll do… And then there’s the bit with the dog. A person is brutally bludgeoned to death, but David (Scanners’ exploding head y’all) Cronenberg is too squeamish to show the Dulux dog get whacked.
Screenwriter Bruce Wagner intended this as a satire with deep dramatic elements; but it doesn’t really work as either, and poor Cronenberg ends up becoming as ridiculous as what he’s satirising in the process.
1.5/5
September 21, 2011
Drive
Ryan Gosling is an enigmatic part-time getaway driver who falls foul of LA gangsters in this misfiring existential thriller.
Drive is a film of two parts, the first part is rather good, and the second part is quite troubling. We’re introduced to Gosling’s unnamed driver in a great, great opening. Rumbling beats (that Fincher’s probably already bought the rights to) underscore a getaway of sublime skill and suavity. Those beats give way to a synthtastic 1980s homage soundtrack as the film slows to an enigmatic and brilliant crawl as it fleshes out Gosling’s life. Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston is Gosling’s mentor, a mechanic and film stunt co-ordinator crippled by men close to Ron Perlman’s savage Jewish mobster Nino, who now dreams of getting his protege to put his driving skills to more public use in stock-car. Albert Brooks is the ‘nice’ mobster who’ll fund their team. This move to normality is mirrored by Gosling’s growing friendship with neighbour Carey Mulligan, as he becomes a surrogate father to her young son.
This humanising of the taciturn Gosling is beautifully photographed and reminiscent of Fish Tank in its finding of pastoral in an urban landscape. Mulligan is an empathetic presence while Brooks excels at using his nice-guy persona to complicate our attitudes to his mobster. The introduction of the plot, rather than turning this film into 1978’s sublime The Driver, merely scuppers things. The Obstacle Carey’s husband returns from jail owing protection money so our hero decides to help him and a cameoing Christina Hendricks out on a low-risk heist, which goes disastrously wrong. Brooks’ in-camera mission statement, “I used to produce movies in the 80s. Action, arty stuff. The critics liked them, called them European. I thought they were shit”, then kicks in. Director Nicolas Winding Refn uses music, a car-crash, and surf rolling into a deserted beach at night to incredibly foreboding effect in staging one murder, but mostly his use of violence is both unnecessary and excessive.
Do you want to see a woman’s head get blown apart by a shotgun blast in slow motion, a man have his hand smashed repeatedly with a hammer, a man have a fork thrust in his eyeball to distract him while his assailant searches for a cleaver to plunge repeatedly into his neck and chest, a man have his arm slit open by a cut-throat razor, or a man have his head kicked in until he’s quite dead and then kicked some more until bone-dust rises up into the camera? Well if you don’t then you should leave half-way thru Drive. Gosling is charismatic in his Eastwoodian role, and you can see why he personally chose Refn as director, but this is less an existentialist thriller and more just humourless grindhouse masquerading as arthouse.
If you loved The Driver, you might like half of Drive…
2/5
July 25, 2011
A Better Life
Chris Weitz, whose last two directorial outings were the unbearably awful The Golden Compass and Twilight: New Moon, causes the earth to shift on its axis by following them up with an intelligent drama…
A Better Life could be uncharitably described as ‘The Bicycle Thieves, outsourced to Mexicans’ as the plot is driven by the increasingly desperate search by a father and son for a stolen vehicle vital to the father’s employment. Our hero Carlos (Demian Bechir) is a stolid gardener living illegally in America and working in Beverly Hills, but living far away from such luxuries. He sleeps on the couch while his brattish teenage son Luis (seriously, this kid is as annoying as Damian Wayne in recent Batman comics, and that’s some going) takes their house’s one bedroom. Carlos’ back-breaking labour is all for the sake of earning enough money to give a well-educated Luis a better life, and he seizes the chance to buy the truck of his boss Blasco Martinez (Quantum of Solace’s villainous general Joaquin Cosio). However, Carlos has become American enough to suffer from the maxim ‘no good deed goes unpunished’, and so begins a desperate search for the truck which is his livelihood, and which he cannot ask the police to trace…
Demian Bechir is a huge star in Mexico, unsurprising given that he looks like Ryan Reynolds in ten years’ time; if Reynolds came from below rather than above the American border. Bechir’s character-filled face wonderfully conveys indefatigable stoicism, endless compassion, and steely will. The villain is a subtle mixture of malicious guile and motiveless compassion, something which infuriates Jose Julian’s Luis, even as he convincingly comes to respect his father’s values which he previously despised. Their reconciliation is part of a fascinating examination of identity. Blasco wanted enough money to buy his own farm in Mexico, Carlos just wanted out of Mexico, but he’s quick to rebuke a sneering Luis that with a sombrero on him Luis is instantly another Gaucho, for all his assimilation.
The startling first shot of Luis’s school makes it look like a prison, an impression which the film pointedly does not dispel, as the system has given up hope on these cultural immigrants. The legally resident Latinos, like Luis, communicate solely in the language of gangsta rap, which leads to thinking and acting in ways with only two endpoints – jail or morgue. The stupidity of appropriating this culture and rejecting their own is exposed by the blind terror Luis displays when he has to venture into South Central, the source of the culture he’s adopted, where he sees a slogan daubed on a wall – ‘Too Many Mexicans. Not Enough Bullets’…
Weitz and originating producer Paul Junger Witt have crafted an affecting story of the people who live in the shadows of a sun-kissed world, and this is well worth seeing.
3.5/5
Talking Movies 