IT’S A JUNGLE OUT THERE: Demolition and The Jungle Book

First, a word from our sponsors: I am now offering a new service: so much emphasis has been given lately to the importance of the opening of your screenplay, I now offer coverage for the first twenty pages at the cost of $20.00.  For those who don’t want to have full coverage on their screenplay at this time, but want to know how well their script is working with the opening pages, this is perfect for you.  I’ll help you not lose the reader on page one. 

 

Ever wonder what a reader for a contest or agency thinks when he reads your screenplay?  Check out my new e-book published on Amazon: Rantings and Ravings of a Screenplay Reader, including my series of essays, What I Learned Reading for Contests This Year, and my film reviews of 2013.  Only $2.99. http://ow.ly/xN31r

 

and check out my Script Consultation Services: http://ow.ly/HPxKE

Warning: SPOILERS

rev 1For the first third of the new drama Demolition, Jake Gyllenhaal plays Davis,  a man whose wife recently died in a traumatic car crash, one which he witnessed (he was in the passenger seat beside her).

After the accident, he starts acting, well, somewhat odd.  He doesn’t seem to show any emotion or even grieve in any way.  He returns to work earlier than expected.  He distances himself from a scholarship his father-in-law wants to create in his daughter’s name.

But most important, at least in terms of the story, after a candy machine refuses to give him his order, he starts writing to the customer service department of the manufacturer.  However, he doesn’t just air his grievance, he also spills his real feelings about his wife and what is happening to him. Read the rest of this entry »


GROWING UP IS HARD TO DO: Movie reviews of While We’re Young and Cupcakes by Howard Casner

First, a word from our sponsors. Ever wonder what a reader for a contest or agency thinks when he reads your screenplay? Check out my new e-book published on Amazon: Rantings and Ravings of a Screenplay Reader, including my series of essays, What I Learned Reading for Contests This Year, and my film reviews of 2013. Only $2.99. http://ow.ly/xN31r

 

and check out my Script Consultation Services: http://ow.ly/HPxKE

Warning: SPOILERS

while were young

There is much to like in writer/director Noah Baumbach’s musing on growing older, though not necessarily wiser, in his new film While We’re Young.

It’s almost never less than entertaining. And it’s a technically solid piece of work. Baumbach, as a director, feels fully in control of the how the movie looks. As a writer, the characters are often very well drawn and the dialog has a nice rhythmic feel to it, a sort of stylized realism of people from an intellectual background.

At the same time, I’m not sure the movie really comes together as a whole in a fully satisfactory manner. For me, the story itself seemed to flounder at times as it was trying to figure out just what is was supposed to be about.

Overall, my feelings were often those of puzzlement. Is While We’re Young a modern day version of All About Eve that constantly gets off subject, or is it a generation gap morality tale that Baumbach had difficulty finding a strong structure for and sorta, kinda tried to fit it into that of the great film by Joseph L. Mankiewicz? Read the rest of this entry »


THE DEVIL MADE HIM DO IT: Movie reviews of Horns and St. Vincent by Howard Casner

First, a word from our sponsors. Ever wonder what a reader for a contest or agency thinks when he reads your screenplay? Check out my new e-book published on Amazon: Rantings and Ravings of a Screenplay Reader, including my series of essays, What I Learned Reading for Contests This Year, and my film reviews of 2013. Only $2.99. http://ow.ly/xN31r

 

Warning: SPOILERS

hornsHorns, the new supernatural, fantasy, horror, neo-noir written by Keith Bunin and directed by Alexandre Aja, has a clever, if not neat, little concept.

A young man, Ig Perrish, universally hated in the small town he lives in (for good reason, in many ways, since he’s accused of killing his long time girlfriend Merrin), grows a pair of devil’s horns which causes everyone he meets to confess their deepest desires and even fulfill them, no matter how awful they may be, if the young man gives them permission.

And there are some clever scenes here and there as these normal on the outside, white picket fence, Sunday go to meeting citizens suddenly revel in their cravings to carry out their secret, if often perverse, yearnings.

But in the end, the movie never really comes together and gets bogged down in what may seem an extraneous through line concerning the rape and murder of said girlfriend.

I’m not sure why everyone felt the need to make the story a murder mystery. It’s that way in the novel by Joe Hill (son of Stephen King), so I can’t really blame Bunin and Aja. But this aspect of the story only seems to get in the way of what really works here, this look into the hearts of darkness of people you originally thought were just a few steps up from pod people. Read the rest of this entry »


MAN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN: Movie review of Birdman (or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

First, a word from our sponsors. Ever wonder what a reader for a contest or agency thinks when he reads your screenplay? Check out my new e-book published on Amazon: Rantings and Ravings of a Screenplay Reader, including my series of essays, What I Learned Reading for Contests This Year, and my film reviews of 2013. Only $2.99. http://ow.ly/xN31r

 

Warning: SPOILERS

birdmanMichael Keaton’s career has been what I would call somewhat unusual. He hit his stride early with the movie Beetlejuice and Clean and Sober and then was cast as Batman (and today is still many people’s favorite wing man). He looked like an actor on the rise.

Then after that? Well, I’m not sure how to describe it, but he seemed to do whatever he could to not go the way of fellow thespians like Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler, constantly required to star in the same kind of over the top, often obnoxious comedies that made fortunes at the box office (at least for a time) while trying to make more “meaningful” films on the side.

Instead, Keaton seemed to flee iconic roles and try to define himself as a more serious performer. But in the years since those early parts, it felt more like he was trying to find characters to play that would define him as an actor, rather than succeeding in actually reinventing himself.

The results generally fell into two categories: leads in such films as The Paper, Desperate Measures and Speechless, movies that either flopped or no one remembers; and supporting parts in such movies as Much Ado About Nothing, Jackie Brown and Out of Sight, where, for me, he never felt quite comfortable. Read the rest of this entry »


Movie Review of SHORT TERM 12, ADORE and POPULAIRE by Howard Casner

Short Term 12 is about a young female supervisor at a foster care facility.  It is a story that is sincere and heartfelt, but in the end, about the only thing it has going for it is its sincerity and heartfeltness.  It’s written and directed by Desin Cretton and I’m not sure that he has anything to offer yet, though it’s only his second feature film, so it’s too early a call yet.   But like so many recent films both written and directed by someone new or relatively new to the job, it’s unambitious, unoriginal and unimaginative, and technically bland and uninspired.  It’s more of the sort of social problem play that use to be de rigueur as movies of the week on network TV thirty years ago.  The acting is of the obvious sort with no real subtlety and everything’s telegraphed before it’s shared.  But when the characterizations are this flat (as flat as the direction), what else is to be expected?  It ends with an action by the lead that I think is supposed to make one respect her.  But for me, it was so irresponsible, over the top and troubling, I was praying she’d get fired before she did something really stupid the next time.

 

 

I can just hear director Anne Fontaine and screenwriter Christopher Hampton give their elevator pitch for Adore, their new Australian film about two mothers who have affairs with each other’s sons: MILFS who become GILFS.   That’s kind of basically it in a nutshell.

 

It’s certainly a well done movie.  One can’t complain about the technical aspects of any of it. There’s a lot of beautiful scenery to salivate over, and the backgrounds aren’t too bad either.  The acting is first rate, especially Naomi Watts, Robin Wright and Ben Mendelson as the adults; the young himbos, played by Xavier Samuel and James (Animal Kingdom) Frecheville, were more cast for their bodies than their abilities.

 

But when all is said and done the whole thing never really comes together in a satisfying whole.

 

It’s the sort of movie you can form fit into your favorite Rorschach test psychological theory.  Are they all going to bed together because the women really want to bed each other, the same for the boys, and this is the only way they can do it?  Or is it incest by proxy?     The whole thing is suppose to be tres, tres daring, I suppose.  But the movie takes itself so seriously, I certainly can’t.  And it’s been so long since I cared about who went to bed with whom, I just can’t get much indignation worked up.

 

If the film had been made in the 1940’s it would have starred Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins and had at least one big cat fight.  Now, everybody does their best to keep a stiff upper lip and be Masterpiece Theater civilized about it all.  I’m not sure it’s an improvement.  After all, if you remove the camp element, all you’re really left with is soap opera.

 

And to add insult to injury, it just takes forever to resolve itself.  It’s structurally clunky and just when you think it’s about to come to a close, it keeps on going for thirty minutes or more.

 

In the end, it’s a handsome film, as handsome as its two leading ladies.  But if all you’ve got going for you is shock element (and the element isn’t that shocking), then you really haven’t got a lot going for you.

 

 

There’s a scene in Francois Truffaut’s last film Confidentially Yours in which a secretary (Fanny Ardant) has to hire her replacement because her boss (Jean-Louis Trintignant) has rather unceremoniously fired her.  The first applicant can only type with one finger.  Ms. Ardant is ready to dismiss her outright until the applicant actually types—and types like a machine gun on St. Valentine’s Day.

 

I don’t know if the filmmakers of the new French rom com Populaire (director Regis Roinsard, writers Roinsard, Daniel Presley, Romain Compingt) took that movie as its inspiration, but since the story is about a woman dreaming of becoming that new symbol of female independence, a secretary, and one who can type with two fingers like a said machine gun on said holiday, it would be hard to convince me otherwise.

 

Populaire is a pastiche of 1950’s American sophisticated comedies (if it had been done in the U.S. way back then, it would have starred Cary Grant or Rock Hudson and Doris Day or Audrey Hpeburn).  It’s as light as a French soufflé and looks as sweet as puff pastry.  It has all the bright pop colors made popular by that rock and roll decade and more recently by the television show Mad Men and the film’s a delight to look at.   And it has its inside droll jokes as when the hero is asked not to smoke in his office by the heroine and he says only a law will stop him (like the U.S., it is now illegal to smoke in places of employment—unfortunately, I was the only one in the theater who laughed).

 

It also starts off rather well with young, perky Sandra Dee-like Deborah Francois as Rose Pamphyle (in what seems a change of pace roll from such serious ones as L’enfant and The Monk) coming to town to become a liberated woman.  But things go off the rail very quickly with the introduction of Romain Duras  (that incredibly handsome, perpetually sneering, hirsute leading man) as her new boss, Louis Echard.  He hires her not because she’s good at her job (in fact, the implication is that she is suppose to be a terrible secretary, though she never seems all that bad), but so he can enter her in a typing competition.

 

What is odd here is that though this is Rose’s story, it’s Louis who is driving it.  But Duras is not given a character to play.  It’s unclear why Echard is so desperate to have Rose become the world’s next speed typist champion.  We have no clue as to what his feelings toward relationships are generally.  Duras is left to create a character out of nothing; but unfortunately, he can’t come close, so the movie just meanders along without any real focus or forward momentum.  Without Echard having motivations for his actions or inner or outer conflicts that need to be resolved, there’s really nothing for the audience to grab onto.   It also doesn’t help that there’s little chemistry between the two leads (also the same problem as Truffaut’s Confidentially Yours).   And like Adore, just as you think the movie is over, it just keeps going and going and going.

 

There’s no reason something couldn’t have been made out of all the ingredients here.  But in the end, it has to be said that the soufflé fell and the pasty just wasn’t as sweet as it looked in the confectionaries’ window.