GREEN ROOM: blood and suspense

Imogen Poots in GREEN ROOM
Imogen Poots in GREEN ROOM

The bloody thriller Green Room is a fresh and satisfying, well, bloody thriller. A vagabond rock band (Anton Yelchin, Alia Shawkat and a couple of others) finds themselves playing a gig at a remote white nationalist compound in the woodsy Northwest. Inadvertently, they witness a murder and the chief skinhead (Patrick Stewart!) needs to eliminate all the witnesses. The band members and a local girl (Imogen Poots) are trapped in a room with just one way out, as the skinheads send in waves of machete- and shotgun-wielding thugs and vicious pit bulls. Who will survive and how?

Director Jeremy Saulnier proves again that he’s the rising master of the genre movie.  Saulnier’s writing and directorial debut was 2014’s Blue Ruin, an entirely fresh take on the revenge thriller. An audience favorite on the festival circuit in 2013, Blue Ruin didn’t get a theatrical release, and I would have missed it entirely but for a suggestion from my friend Jose.   In Blue Ruin, Saulnier was responsible for the wholly original lead character and the intense pace of the film, along with the meticulously economical storytelling; the exposition never relies on even one extra word of dialogue.  Blue Ruin is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Netflix Instant, Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, Google Play, YouTube and Xbox Video.

In his superb leading performance in Blue Ruin, Macon Blair was believable both as a damaged down-and-outer and as a man-on-a-mission.  In Green Room, Blair plays Gabe, the put-upon middle manager  of Patrick Stewart’s  compound.  Blair is just so interesting an actor.  Here, he brings an unusual humanity  to his role as a henchman.

The actor who drives the story, however, is Imogen Poots.  Her character is very practical – realistic enough to see that the situation is hopeless.  At first, she is numbed by the murder of her friend.  But when she finally decides that she is going to survive – watch out!  Since 2012, Poots has becoming a preferred indie leading lady with Greetings from Tim Buckley, A Late Quartet , The Look of Love, A Country Called Home, Green Room and her most complex role so far in the upcoming Frank & Lola.   Here in Green Room, she’s a force of nature.

Once again, Saulnier delivers a very fresh and original genre movie.  The total effect is very intense and very violent.   If you’re okay with some gory violence, then Green Room is a thrill ride worth taking.

Cinequest: Hunting Elephants

Hunting ElephantsAlong with The Grand Seduction, the Israeli caper comedy Hunting Elephants has been the audience favorite at Cinequest. Apparently, Israelis see just as little generosity, fair-mindedness and decency in their bankers as we do in ours. When a particularly smarmy banker goes too far, a victimized family unleashes a team of septuagenarians led by a 12-year-old to make things right. The old guys are veterans of Irgun, the Zionist terrorists (or freedom fighters, depending on your perspective) who forced an end to the British Mandate in Palestine, so they’re a particularly tough set of characters (even ravaged as they are by age). To their – and his – discomfort, they are teamed with an effete and pretentious scoundrel from the British stage (Patrick Stewart).

The genius of Hunting Elephants is that it combines the comic potential of a coming of age story, a geezer liberalization tale, a gang-that-couldn’t-shoot-straight saga and a fish-out-of-water (the Patrick Stewart character) farce. Mixed with the poignancy of the boy and the old men grasping for some dignity, the result is satisfying crowd pleaser.