The successful period thriller The Two Faces of January, set in gloriously bright Greek tourist destinations, may not have the shadowy look of a traditional film noir, but its story is fundamentally noirish. Viggo Mortenson and Kirsten Dunst play an affluent couple vacationing in Athens in the early 1960s. They meet a handsome young American expat (Oscar Isaacs from Inside Llewyn Davis) knocking around Greece. The husband quickly and accurately sizes up the younger man as a con man – “I wouldn’t trust him to mow my lawn”. The central noir element is that NO ONE is as innocent as they seem, and the three become interlocked in a situation that becomes increasingly desperate for all three, culminating in a thrilling manhunt.
It’s the first feature directed by Hossein Amini, who adapted the screenplay for the markedly intense Drive, and he does a fine job here with a film that becomes more and more tense each time more information about the characters is revealed.
The Two Faces of January is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.
Deenis O’Keefe and Ann Sheridan in WOMAN ON THE RUN
On Friday night, June 5, Turner Classic Movies is presenting one of my Overlooked Noir, in its wonderful film noir series Summer of Darkness. The character-driven thriller Woman on the Run (1950) is notable for its San Francisco locations, making it a veritable time capsule of the post-war City By The Bay.
The movie opens with a murder, and the one terrified witness goes underground. When the police coming looking for him, they are surprised to find his wife (Ann Sheridan) both ignorant of his whereabouts and unconcerned. While still living in the same apartment, the couple is estranged. And the wife has a Mouth On Her, much to the dismay of the detective (Robert Keith), who keeps walking into a torrent of sass.
But soon the wife starts hunting hubbie, along with the cops, a reporter (Dennis O’Keefe) and the killer. It’s a race to see who can find him first. One character is revealed to be more dangerous than was apparent, and the audience learns this before our heroine does.
One quirky nugget – when she visits his workplace, we learn that his job is making mannikins in the basement of a large department store.
Sheridan is great in this uncharacteristically insolent role. So are O’Keefe and Keith. But the real star of Woman on the Run is San Francisco itself, from the hilly neighborhoods to the bustling streets to the dank and foreboding waterfront. Oddly, the finale is at an amusement park which seems to be Playland At the Beach (but was actually filmed at the Santa Monica Pier). (Further trivia – that Laffing Sal is the one at Santa Monica, not the one at Playland which now resides at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.) The only movie that rivals Woman on Run for its depiction of San Francisco in the 1950s is The Lineup.
The story is a taut 77 minutes of mouthy Ann Sheridan, the life-or-death manhunt and stellar period San Francisco. Woman on the Run is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant Video (free with Amazon Prime).
Ann Sheridan (far left) sasses Robert Keith (far right) in WOMAN ON THE RUN
Niels Arestrup (A Prophet, War Horse) stars as the owner of French wine estate who places impossible expectations on his son, with lethal results. The poor son has gotten a degree in winemaking, has worked his ass off on his father’s estate for years and has even married well – but it’s just not enough for his old man. The father’s interactions with the son range from dismissive to deeply cruel.
The father’s best friend is his longtime estate manager, whose health is faltering. The son is the natural choice for a successor, but the owner openly prefers the son’s boyhood friend, the son of the manager. The first half of You Will Be My Son focuses on the estate owner’s nastiness toward his son, which smolders throughout the film. But then the relationship between the sons turns from old buddies to that of the usurper and the usurped. And, finally, things come down to the decades-long relationship between the two old men.
Deep into the movie, we learn something about the father that colors his view of his son. And then, there’s a startling development that makes for a thrilling and operatic ending.
The title of the harrowing thriller ’71refers to the tumultuous year 1971 in Northern Ireland’s Troubles. An ill-prepared unit of British soldiers gets their first taste of action in Belfast, and the rookie Private Gary Hook (Jack O’Connell) gets inadvertently left behind in hostile territory. Private Hook races around an unfamiliar and dangerous city at night. He is being hunted by his own regular troops, a shadowy and sketchy military intelligence unit, the regular IRA, the hotheaded Provisional IRA and Ulster paramilitaries – all with their own conflicting agendas. Any civilian who helps him will be at direct and lethal risk from the partisans.
In their feature debuts, director Jann Demange and cinematographer Tat Ratcliffe take us on a Wild Ride, with just a couple of chances for the audience to catch its collective breath. Importantly, the way Private Hook gets left behind amid the escalating chaos is very believable. Then there’s an exhilarating footrace through the alleys and over brick walls. Every encounter with another person is fraught with tension. Finally, there’s a long and thrilling climactic set piece in a Belfast apartment block.
O’Connell is in 90% of the shots and carries it off very well. All of the acting in ’71 is excellent. Corey McKinley is special as the toughest and most confident ten-year-old you’ll ever meet. Barry Keoghan takes the impassive stone face to a new level. And I always enjoy David Wilmot (so hilarious in The Guard).
I thank the casting and the direction for making it easy for us to tell all of these pale, ginger characters apart. To the credit of writer Gregory Burke, the beginning of the film economically sets up Private Hook as having the fitness and stamina to survive what befalls him throughout the night.
With all the different sides playing each other, the action (and the action is compelling) is set in an especially treacherous version of three-dimensional chess. Some of the double- and triple-crossing at the end is breathtaking. But what ’71 does best is putting the thrill in a thriller – keeping the audience on the edge of our seats for all 99 minutes.
The dark and violent Peruvian Guard Dog is set in 2001, five years after a controversial amnesty for the government-sponsored death squads active in the previous decades. Our protagonist is the vestige of those death squads, an ascetic hit man who still performs some residual executions. He is a Man On A Mission, and one serious dude. After his opening hit, he takes out the photo of his victim and burns out the image’s eyes with his cigarette.
Guard Dog is ultimately more of a mood piece than a thriller. The theme of personal corruption keeps re-emerging, with a grossly rotting apartment ceiling and even a moment of pus-draining. The most interesting aspect of the story is our anti-hero’s encounters with an unjaded young girl who is, in contrast to him, bubbling and full of life.
I saw Guard Dog’s US Premiere at Cinequest, and it plays the fest again March 4 at the California Theatre and March 6 at Camera 12.
Fairuza Balk, Ryan Merriman (rear) and Rick Ravanello in DOSE OF REALITY
To celebrate the beginning of Cinequest 2015, my weekly DVD/Stream is one of the hits of Cinequest 2013 – the American indie thriller Dose of Reality. Dose of Reality star Rick Ravanello also has the lead in Withdrawal, a short playing Cinequest 2015 in the BARCO Escape 1 Short Program on March 1, 7 and 8.
Dose of Reality packs wire-to-wire intensity and a surprise ending that no one will see coming. A woman is found in a bar’s restroom after closing time, apparently beaten and raped, but unable to remember by whom. Two bar employees are the only possible suspects. Both deny it, and the woman launches a series of searing mind games to determine her attacker.
Fairuza Balk (American History X, Almost Famous) commands the screen as the woman. Her character, starting from a place of utter victimization, becomes totally dominant over the men. The most interesting of the guys is played by veteran TV actor Rick Ravanello, (106 acting credits on IMDb). Ravanello’s eyes have an uncommon capacity to credibly take the character through dimness, cunning, tweaked impairment, guilt and terror.
It’s a plenty compelling movie for the first 75 minutes, but Dose of Reality is all about the Big Surprise at the end – which is a shocker on the scale of The Crying Game. Afterward, I was able to reflect back and identify at least four clues in the story, but every one of the 250 audience members at Dose of Reality’s Cinequest world premiere was rocked by the surprise on first viewing. Actor Ravanello recounts that when he first read the script, he got to the end and blurted “No Fucking Way!”. Writer-director Christopher Glatis has a real winner in Dose of Reality.
Dose of Reality is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming on Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, GooglePlay and some other VOD outlets.
The successful period thriller The Two Faces of January, set in gloriously bright Greek tourist destinations, may not have the shadowy look of a traditional film noir, but its story is fundamentally noirish. Viggo Mortenson and Kirsten Dunst play an affluent couple vacationing in Athens in the early 1960s. They meet a handsome young American expat (Oscar Isaacs from Inside Llewyn Davis) knocking around Greece. The husband quickly and accurately sizes up the younger man as a con man – “I wouldn’t trust him to mow my lawn”. The central noir element is that NO ONE is as innocent as they seem, and the three become interlocked in a situation that becomes increasingly desperate for all three, culminating in a thrilling manhunt.
It’s the first feature directed by Hossein Amini, who adapted the screenplay for the markedly intense Drive, and he does a fine job here with a film that becomes more and more tense each time more information about the characters is revealed.
The Two Faces of January is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.
In the marvelously entertaining Gone Girl, Ben Affleck plays Nick, a good-looking lug who can turn a phrase. At a party one night, he’s on his A game, and he snags the beautiful Amy (Rosamund Pike). She’s smarter, a good rung on the ladder more attractive than he is, has parents with some money and is a second-hand celebrity to boot. Not particularly gifted and certainly not a striver, he knows he’s the Lucky One. He has married above himself, but he doesn’t have a clue HOW MUCH above until she suddenly disappears.
Based on the enormously popular novel by Gillian Flynn (who also wrote the screenplay), Gone Girl is the mystery of what has happened to Amy and what is Nick’s role in the disappearance. Plot twists abound, but you won’t get any spoilers from The Movie Gourmet.
This is Rosamund Pike’s movie. Her appearance is so elegant – she looks like a crystal champagne flute with blonde hair – that pulling her out of Victorian period romances into this thriller is inspired. And Pike responds with the performance of her career. She’s just brilliant as she makes us realize that there’s something behind her eyes that we hadn’t anticipated, and then keeps us watching what she is thinking throughout the story.
Gone Girl is directed by the contemporary master David Fincher (Fight Club, Se7en, Zodiac,The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). Here, Fincher has successfully chosen to rely on Flynn’s page turner of a story and the compelling characters, so Gone Girl is the least flashy of his films, but one of the most accessible. I’ll say this for Fincher – I can’t remember a more perfectly cast movie.
Kim Dickens (Treme, Deadwood) is superb as the investigating detective – this time almost unrecognizable as a brunette. Tyler Perry is wonderfully fun as a crafty celebrity attorney. The unheralded Carrie Coon is excellent as Nick’s twin sister (I want to see more of her in the movies). Missi Pyle does such a good job as a despicable cable TV personality that I thought I was actually watching a despicable cable TV personality. And David Clennon and (especially) Lisa Banes positively gleam as Amy’s parents. (Carefully observe every behavior by the parents in this movie.)
Just like the thug in The Guard who forget whether he had been diagnosed in prison as a sociopath or a psychopath, I had the ask The Wife, who turned me on to this passage from Psychology Today. It’s useful to read this because, although you don’t realize it for forty-five minutes or so, Gone Girl is also a study of psychopathy.
Psychopaths … are unable to form emotional attachments or feel real empathy with others, although they often have disarming or even charming personalities. Psychopaths are very manipulative and can easily gain people’s trust. They learn to mimic emotions, despite their inability to actually feel them, and will appear normal to unsuspecting people. Psychopaths are often well educated and hold steady jobs. Some are so good at manipulation and mimicry that they have families and other long-term relationships without those around them ever suspecting their true nature.
When committing crimes, psychopaths carefully plan out every detail in advance and often have contingency plans in place. Unlike their sociopathic counterparts, psychopathic criminals are cool, calm, and meticulous. Their crimes, whether violent or non-violent, will be highly organized and generally offer few clues for authorities to pursue. Intelligent psychopaths make excellent white-collar criminals and “con artists” due to their calm and charismatic natures.
Gillian Flynn changed the story’s ending for the movie. The Wife, who is a big fan of the novel, didn’t mind. Gone Girl is recommended for both those who have and have not read the book. I understand that there’s more humor in the movie, as we occasionally laugh at the extremity of the behavior of one of the characters.
It all adds up into a remarkably fun movie and one that I was still mulling it over days later. Gone Girl was the best big Hollywood studio movie of 2014 (not counting releases from the prestige distribution arms of the major studios). It’s now available on DVD from Netflix and streaming on Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play, Xbox Video and Flixster.
My DVD/Stream of the Weeks is a fine first feature with a GREAT title for a contemporary noir thriller: Bad Turn Worse. It’s set in a nowheresville Texas cotton gin town. Three childhood friends have just graduated from high school, and two are looking to escape to college – Bobby (Jeremy Allen White) and Sue (MacKenzie Davis). Not sharing a speck of Bobby’s and Sue’s intellectual curiosity, Sue’s longtime boyfriend B.J. (Logan Huffman) doesn’t want them to go; B.J. is dreamy and testosterone-filled, but bone-headed and weak-willed, with a gift for making impulsive, destructive choices. Bobby is sweet on Sue, and she is starting to be repelled by B.J.’s immaturity and selfishness. Sure enough, B.J. does something which entangles them all in a lethal jam.
Pretty soon there’s a double cross within a double cross, with a love triangle overlay. Nobody can trust anybody else, and somebody is gonna have to die…
The young leads are good, but two veteran TV actors sparkle in supporting turns. Mark Pellegrino plays a ruthless and crazy-scary villain that no one should cross. Jon Gries (Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite) is hilariously deadpan as the corrupt Sheriff who tries to connect the dots for Bobby with metaphors – and Bobby’s dots just aren’t connecting.
Bad Turn Worse’s noir sensibility comes from 1) the amoral attitude that sometimes you gotta break the law and 2) the expectation that there can’t be a happy ending with all this treachery in play.
Bad Turn Worse is written by Dutch Southern and is the directorial debut of Simon and Zeke Hawkins. These guys have definitely proven that they can pull off a solid thriller. Bad Turn Worse is available streaming from Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.
Set your DVRs for Turner Classic Movies’ November 21 airing of Duel. In 1971, some Universal exec hired 25-year-old Steven Spielberg to make some TV movies, the first of which was Duel. This low budget suspense thriller foreshadowed Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark and the rest of Spielberg’s masterworks.
In the pre-cell phone era, Dennis Weaver plays a traveling salesman driving through an isolated desert mountain road when he becomes embroiled in road rage to the extreme – the driver of a tanker truck starts relentlessly hunting him down. This imposing 1955 Peterbilt 281 tanker truck becomes every bit the scary monster as the Great White Shark in Jaws.
At the time, Dennis Weaver was one of America’s most familiar faces from his oft comic supporting role in TV’s iconic Gunsmoke, and he had just become a star in his own right with McCloud. He is perfect here as an Everyman – right down to his Plymouth Valiant.
I don’t know whether TCM is airing the original 74-minute (TV) or the 90-minute (theatrical) cut, but both are just about perfect. When I saw this on TV in 1971, I wasn’t thinking about who the director was, I was just riveted to the story, terrified that Dennis Weaver wasn’t going to escape his fiendish nemesis.
