The Rental (2020): Despite Sheila Vand, Alison Brie, Dan
Stevens and Jeremy Allen White being no core cast to sneeze at, Dave Franco’s
film about two couples going on a weekend vacation and crashing against most of
them being pretty shitty people as well as someone really, really not liking
them doesn’t do a lot for me. In part, it’s the too slow pacing of Franco’s and
Joe Swanberg’s script, spending too much time on characters that simply aren’t
terribly interesting, until it finally gets up to very rote thriller tropes
realized competently but without verve.
The whole thriller/horror part certainly isn’t helped by the film never
getting around to telling the audience why we’re supposed to care for these
characters under threat anyway, so their fates aren’t exactly keeping one’s eyes
open.
The Wave (2019): Gille Klabin’s semi-trippy film about a
corporate lawyer on his way to become a total piece of human crap played by
Justin Long learning a valuable – and rather final – lesson about the universe
(apparently, it wants balance, maaaan) after not saying no to drugs, is
surprisingly bland for a film containing a giant drug trip, time jumps and the
stuff of “lost in the city” movies. The film’s surrealism simply doesn’t hit,
the drug visions and shifts having a blandly banal air to them rather akin to
the banality of its protagonist’s style of evil, really not breathing an air of
the actual surreal as much as one of the try-hard surreal.
Not helping is the banality (yep, that word again) of the film’s philosophy,
the sort of thing a film would need considerably more charm to sell than this
one shows.
The Cleaning Lady (2018): Ending on another film that leaves
me nonplussed, Jon Knautz’s horror movie about a woman with a “love addiction”
problem making the classic movie mistake of befriending a member of the lower
classes (it’s feeling rather Victorian around here) and landing in the hands of
a violent psychopath doesn’t just annoy me with its implied politics. It makes
the much bigger mistake of not being good enough as a thriller and a horror
movie to not let me overlook its politics. Sure, it adds some mildly crass
violence to at least give its villainess more of a background but not
really even attempts to sell her as an actual human being instead of a
caricature of suffering turned evil.
When it comes to the shock and the suspense, the film’s just okay, with a
couple of scenes that don’t quite work or simply lack the imagination for any of
this to have much of an impact.
Showing posts with label dan stevens. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dan stevens. Show all posts
Saturday, August 22, 2020
Friday, February 21, 2020
Past Misdeeds: The Guest (2014)
This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t
ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this
section.
The Peterson family – mother Laura (Sheila Kelley), father Spencer (Leland Orser), nearly of age daughter (who’d be of age for nearly three years in my country, and legally drinking beer for nearly five) Anna (Maika Monroe) and teenage son Luke (Brendan Meyer) – are still grieving for the death of their eldest son in combat in one of America’s recent wars. One day, a stranger calling himself David (Dan Stevens) shows up at their door, introducing himself as a war buddy of the son come to pay his respects and give them a final message of love from him.
David might feel just a little bit off, but he’s also charming, attractive, attentive and seems honestly interested in each family member and their respective problems, calming the mother, buddying up to the father, half-charming the more sceptical Anna, and helping Luke out with his bully problems. Quickly, a short stay for a night or two turns into an unspoken and indefinite agreement about his staying on as a live-in family friend. However, further developments might just reveal that David’s more than he pretends to be, and perhaps even a danger to everyone he comes into contact with, in particular those people towards whom he has good intentions.
After my general dislike for You’re Next and my honest puzzlement about the critical cheering – at least in horror circles – Adam Wingard’s film got where less smug movies suffered a polite shrug, I did not expect anything much to my tastes going into his next film The Guest. What I got, however, is a truly excellent film that not just avoids nearly everything I found problematic or pretty damn annoying about its predecessor but turns it around and into an asset.
So Wingard still demonstrates an encyclopaedic knowledge of genre film history, but where demonstrating it felt like a pointless, and rather smug, gesture to me in You’re Next (So you’ve seen a lot of movies? So have I. So what?), The Guest seems to be all about actually learning from the movies that came before and then applying that knowledge to improve the film at hand and turn it into a more effective piece and telling its story better. Thus making an understanding of early John Carpenter, the same neon 80s aesthetic that dominated Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive, and all those thrillers about mentally ill people worming themselves into bourgeois families, a natural part of the film’s language.
While Wingard keeps being interested in a subversion of genre expectations, his approach here goes far beyond “ironic” quotes or making a handful of obvious changes to the formula that play better with an contemporary audience, leaving The Guest not as a film about older movies (or even a critique of them) but a thing standing on its own that organically uses those techniques and effects that will best serve its purpose to tell a story of its own. A story I have consciously been quite vague about here because I don’t want to rob anyone of the experience of just watching this particular film for the first time without much more than the expectations you’ll have about a genre film with its particular set-up. Now, fortunately, this does not mean The Guest is a film that’s all about one big plot twist, but only that all its little twists and turns are perfectly worth experiencing on one’s own for the first time. All too often, a film having plot twists means it will make grand, dramatic gestures about developments that have little logical or thematic connection to what came before in a story, whereas here, these things all feel like natural developments and are perfectly in the flow of what came before.
It’s this flow, an organic feel, that impresses me particularly about The Guest, a feeling that each single element in plot, design, direction and acting truly feeds into the film as a whole, leaving one with the feeling of having watched something of perfect inner logic, with no single element that could disabuse one of that notion hogging the spotlight for a second too long. So this is a film with a wonderful cast – Monroe, Stevens and Meyer are particular high points – tight direction, often very inventive camera work and editing, as well as a script that is much cleverer than it pretends to be, where again all these single elements just feed into the movie as a whole. It is quite difficult to single out any one of these elements as particularly remarkable, not because of their quality or lack of such but because the film is so much of one piece, looking at the single parts it is made off seems to be completely beside the point, unless you have an academic interest in talking about film.
Of course, in theory, that’s how all films are supposed to work. However films where things come together quite this way and that still make it look easy and natural, without artifice exactly thanks to their high degree of artistry (which is by nature artificiality) aren’t exactly a dime a dozen. Again, the early John Carpenter comes to my mind the most, and that’s really how The Guest feels to me: a movie so great it deserves comparison to the best.
The Peterson family – mother Laura (Sheila Kelley), father Spencer (Leland Orser), nearly of age daughter (who’d be of age for nearly three years in my country, and legally drinking beer for nearly five) Anna (Maika Monroe) and teenage son Luke (Brendan Meyer) – are still grieving for the death of their eldest son in combat in one of America’s recent wars. One day, a stranger calling himself David (Dan Stevens) shows up at their door, introducing himself as a war buddy of the son come to pay his respects and give them a final message of love from him.
David might feel just a little bit off, but he’s also charming, attractive, attentive and seems honestly interested in each family member and their respective problems, calming the mother, buddying up to the father, half-charming the more sceptical Anna, and helping Luke out with his bully problems. Quickly, a short stay for a night or two turns into an unspoken and indefinite agreement about his staying on as a live-in family friend. However, further developments might just reveal that David’s more than he pretends to be, and perhaps even a danger to everyone he comes into contact with, in particular those people towards whom he has good intentions.
After my general dislike for You’re Next and my honest puzzlement about the critical cheering – at least in horror circles – Adam Wingard’s film got where less smug movies suffered a polite shrug, I did not expect anything much to my tastes going into his next film The Guest. What I got, however, is a truly excellent film that not just avoids nearly everything I found problematic or pretty damn annoying about its predecessor but turns it around and into an asset.
So Wingard still demonstrates an encyclopaedic knowledge of genre film history, but where demonstrating it felt like a pointless, and rather smug, gesture to me in You’re Next (So you’ve seen a lot of movies? So have I. So what?), The Guest seems to be all about actually learning from the movies that came before and then applying that knowledge to improve the film at hand and turn it into a more effective piece and telling its story better. Thus making an understanding of early John Carpenter, the same neon 80s aesthetic that dominated Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive, and all those thrillers about mentally ill people worming themselves into bourgeois families, a natural part of the film’s language.
While Wingard keeps being interested in a subversion of genre expectations, his approach here goes far beyond “ironic” quotes or making a handful of obvious changes to the formula that play better with an contemporary audience, leaving The Guest not as a film about older movies (or even a critique of them) but a thing standing on its own that organically uses those techniques and effects that will best serve its purpose to tell a story of its own. A story I have consciously been quite vague about here because I don’t want to rob anyone of the experience of just watching this particular film for the first time without much more than the expectations you’ll have about a genre film with its particular set-up. Now, fortunately, this does not mean The Guest is a film that’s all about one big plot twist, but only that all its little twists and turns are perfectly worth experiencing on one’s own for the first time. All too often, a film having plot twists means it will make grand, dramatic gestures about developments that have little logical or thematic connection to what came before in a story, whereas here, these things all feel like natural developments and are perfectly in the flow of what came before.
It’s this flow, an organic feel, that impresses me particularly about The Guest, a feeling that each single element in plot, design, direction and acting truly feeds into the film as a whole, leaving one with the feeling of having watched something of perfect inner logic, with no single element that could disabuse one of that notion hogging the spotlight for a second too long. So this is a film with a wonderful cast – Monroe, Stevens and Meyer are particular high points – tight direction, often very inventive camera work and editing, as well as a script that is much cleverer than it pretends to be, where again all these single elements just feed into the movie as a whole. It is quite difficult to single out any one of these elements as particularly remarkable, not because of their quality or lack of such but because the film is so much of one piece, looking at the single parts it is made off seems to be completely beside the point, unless you have an academic interest in talking about film.
Of course, in theory, that’s how all films are supposed to work. However films where things come together quite this way and that still make it look easy and natural, without artifice exactly thanks to their high degree of artistry (which is by nature artificiality) aren’t exactly a dime a dozen. Again, the early John Carpenter comes to my mind the most, and that’s really how The Guest feels to me: a movie so great it deserves comparison to the best.
Saturday, February 16, 2019
Three Films Make A Post: World War III Begins on Your Toy Shelf
Venom (2018): Well-liked at least by the better nerd critics
and surprisingly successful, I’m the odd man out who just loathed this thing by
Ruben Fleischer. But then, I had no time for the director’s Zombieland
either and feel that the two films share the same problems: scripts that never
develop any kind of dramatic pull; a lead character who is a whiny self-centred
little shit (Tom Hardy of course doing his whiny little shit with an
accent) who never learns anything from his mistakes; jokes that never hit
for me and supposedly dramatic scenes that make me snigger sarcastically. Add to
Venom’s problems Riz Ahmed’s generically boring and unfunny villain and
action scenes that are in the lower third of contemporary superhero spectacle,
and you really find my puzzled about what I’m supposed to like here? Okay, the
film does have more to do for its non-powered female lead than typical
and has the good taste to cast Michelle Williams, but that’s all I found to
enjoy here. It’s still better than Deadpool, mind you.
Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween (2018): And the bad mood cinema continues with Sony’s attempt to make the first movie again, but cheaper and worse. So the script is a worse budget version of the first one with less interesting ideas, fewer fun set pieces, and no clever bits at all; Jack Black’s worse; the rest of the cast is so unmemorable, they make the decent one of the first movie look brilliant by comparison; the moral is more treacly; the PG horror more PG and less horrific; and Ari Sandel’s direction shows about as much personality as (please imagine me looking around my apartment for the thing in it with the least personality) a door knob.
Apostle (2018): Compared to the other two films in this entry, Gareth Evans’s worst film, a Netflix production about a man (Dan Stevens) with a laudanum habit going undercover on a cult-owned island to rescue his kidnapped sister and encountering worse things than just cultists, is sheer brilliance. Well, actually, it isn’t, really, but at least it is a film with certain ambitions that more often than not demonstrates actual interest in the art of filmmaking. The acting is generally strong (with Stevens, who is often relegated to clear-cut guys with little personality but can do quite a bit more when he’s allowed to, a fine stand-out), the script provides an interestingly skewed tale of guilt, redemption and responsibility, the cult and what it does turns out to be rather made for the lover of Weird Fiction, and Evans creates a fine mood of dread and paranoia. The film’s big problem is its sluggish pace, with too many scenes reiterating things the audience has already understood, slowing things to a crawl for no good reason on more than one occasion.
It’s still a worthwhile film, mind you, but shave at least twenty minutes of its 130 minute running time, and you might have a great one.
Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween (2018): And the bad mood cinema continues with Sony’s attempt to make the first movie again, but cheaper and worse. So the script is a worse budget version of the first one with less interesting ideas, fewer fun set pieces, and no clever bits at all; Jack Black’s worse; the rest of the cast is so unmemorable, they make the decent one of the first movie look brilliant by comparison; the moral is more treacly; the PG horror more PG and less horrific; and Ari Sandel’s direction shows about as much personality as (please imagine me looking around my apartment for the thing in it with the least personality) a door knob.
Apostle (2018): Compared to the other two films in this entry, Gareth Evans’s worst film, a Netflix production about a man (Dan Stevens) with a laudanum habit going undercover on a cult-owned island to rescue his kidnapped sister and encountering worse things than just cultists, is sheer brilliance. Well, actually, it isn’t, really, but at least it is a film with certain ambitions that more often than not demonstrates actual interest in the art of filmmaking. The acting is generally strong (with Stevens, who is often relegated to clear-cut guys with little personality but can do quite a bit more when he’s allowed to, a fine stand-out), the script provides an interestingly skewed tale of guilt, redemption and responsibility, the cult and what it does turns out to be rather made for the lover of Weird Fiction, and Evans creates a fine mood of dread and paranoia. The film’s big problem is its sluggish pace, with too many scenes reiterating things the audience has already understood, slowing things to a crawl for no good reason on more than one occasion.
It’s still a worthwhile film, mind you, but shave at least twenty minutes of its 130 minute running time, and you might have a great one.
Sunday, December 3, 2017
Colossal (2016)
Warning: I’m not going to spoil everything about the film, but some spoilage
is inevitable in this case!
Writer Gloria (Anne Hathaway) has hit rock bottom in New York, suffering from an alcohol problem, a feeling of alienation, a bad relationship to a tool (Dan Stevens) and an aimlessness that is rather difficult not to confuse with self-destructiveness.
When she’s losing her job too, she moves back into the empty house in the small town where she grew up, which is sure to help with her depression. There, she reconnects with some of the guys – Gloria’s clearly not a woman with much time for other women – who never left, especially Oscar (Jason Sudeikis), now the owner of the local drinking dive.
All seems set for a very typical romantic comedy plot but things take a rather different turn when a giant monster appears in Seoul for a bit of city smashing. After some time, Gloria realizes something bizarre: the monster only appears when she is at the local playground at a very specific time in the morning, and it seems to mirror whatever she does there.
I am honestly confused by the very mixed reception Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal receives, because for me this is one of the best, most touching and most clever films of the last ten years – and that’s not just because there are giant monsters in it, though that certainly never hurt a film in my appreciation. Rather, I admire the way Vigalondo starts from this extremely typical romantic comedy set-up (including the casting of Anne Hathaway who becomes pretty damn impressive once the film stops pretending to be a romantic comedy) and goes in a very different direction.
In this context, the darkness the film reveals in a certain character works for me on many levels: there’s the simple shock thanks to Vigalondo’s execution of the twist, even mirroring the moments of denial Gloria goes through, the critique on the romantic comedy way of looking at characters, where everything potentially dark in a person is at best treated as a minor quirk, and the sense of betrayal of trust and violation that comes with all this for Gloria. The film also manages to not go too far in this regard; there might have been a temptation to go full on Texas Chainsaw Massacre on the audience, but the amount of violence we get to see is perfectly measured to be just as effective and feels deeply disquieting in its context.
I also love how the fantastical and the quotidian intersect in the film, both containing an element of the horrific (Gloria’s monstrous projection really does kill people, after all) but both also grounded in the world as we know it. This isn’t a pure case of the fantastical as metaphor either, in fact, metaphor and the (fictionally) real mix in a way that can’t just be solved like an equation. That’s apparently not the sort of the solution the film is interested in. Instead, Vigalondo uses the fantastical as a way not just to get Gloria into trouble but also to get her out of it. The fantastical becomes a way towards empowerment once Gloria starts taking a degree of responsibility bordering on the heroic. Which, obviously, is very much a feminist turn on core values of the superhero narrative where with great power has to come…well, you know.
Yet the film is at the same time as it talks about rather serious elements of the (shittiest side of) the female experience and a half-metaphorical way to cope with it also just oh so very fun. I love the monster sequences, specifically because they are small-scale and personal, seen on television and heard through stompy monster effects put on scenes of Hathaway on a playground, suggesting another way for some giant monster movies to go.
Sometimes, you just gotta love a movie, and that’s how it is with Colossal and me.
Writer Gloria (Anne Hathaway) has hit rock bottom in New York, suffering from an alcohol problem, a feeling of alienation, a bad relationship to a tool (Dan Stevens) and an aimlessness that is rather difficult not to confuse with self-destructiveness.
When she’s losing her job too, she moves back into the empty house in the small town where she grew up, which is sure to help with her depression. There, she reconnects with some of the guys – Gloria’s clearly not a woman with much time for other women – who never left, especially Oscar (Jason Sudeikis), now the owner of the local drinking dive.
All seems set for a very typical romantic comedy plot but things take a rather different turn when a giant monster appears in Seoul for a bit of city smashing. After some time, Gloria realizes something bizarre: the monster only appears when she is at the local playground at a very specific time in the morning, and it seems to mirror whatever she does there.
I am honestly confused by the very mixed reception Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal receives, because for me this is one of the best, most touching and most clever films of the last ten years – and that’s not just because there are giant monsters in it, though that certainly never hurt a film in my appreciation. Rather, I admire the way Vigalondo starts from this extremely typical romantic comedy set-up (including the casting of Anne Hathaway who becomes pretty damn impressive once the film stops pretending to be a romantic comedy) and goes in a very different direction.
In this context, the darkness the film reveals in a certain character works for me on many levels: there’s the simple shock thanks to Vigalondo’s execution of the twist, even mirroring the moments of denial Gloria goes through, the critique on the romantic comedy way of looking at characters, where everything potentially dark in a person is at best treated as a minor quirk, and the sense of betrayal of trust and violation that comes with all this for Gloria. The film also manages to not go too far in this regard; there might have been a temptation to go full on Texas Chainsaw Massacre on the audience, but the amount of violence we get to see is perfectly measured to be just as effective and feels deeply disquieting in its context.
I also love how the fantastical and the quotidian intersect in the film, both containing an element of the horrific (Gloria’s monstrous projection really does kill people, after all) but both also grounded in the world as we know it. This isn’t a pure case of the fantastical as metaphor either, in fact, metaphor and the (fictionally) real mix in a way that can’t just be solved like an equation. That’s apparently not the sort of the solution the film is interested in. Instead, Vigalondo uses the fantastical as a way not just to get Gloria into trouble but also to get her out of it. The fantastical becomes a way towards empowerment once Gloria starts taking a degree of responsibility bordering on the heroic. Which, obviously, is very much a feminist turn on core values of the superhero narrative where with great power has to come…well, you know.
Yet the film is at the same time as it talks about rather serious elements of the (shittiest side of) the female experience and a half-metaphorical way to cope with it also just oh so very fun. I love the monster sequences, specifically because they are small-scale and personal, seen on television and heard through stompy monster effects put on scenes of Hathaway on a playground, suggesting another way for some giant monster movies to go.
Sometimes, you just gotta love a movie, and that’s how it is with Colossal and me.
Friday, January 30, 2015
On ExB: The Guest (2014)
Given how little I enjoyed Adam Wingard’s You’re Next, I didn’t expect anything from his next movie.
What I got was a film I have a hard time not calling a masterpiece, so please follow this handy link to my gushing about it over at the venerable Exploder Button.
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