Source Code is a gripping thriller, and I admired both its intelligence and its heart. The key is a breakthrough screenplay by Ben Ripley. The scifi premise is that supersoldier Jake Gyllenhaal can inhabit the brain of a terrorism victim for the same 8 minutes – over and over again. Each time, he has 8 minutes to seek more clues. Can he build the clues into a solution and prevent the terrorist atrocity? Gyllenhaal is excellent. So is Vera Farmiga as his handler and Michelle Monaghan as a girl you could fall in love with in 8 minutes. Jeffrey Wright chews the scenery with his homage to Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove. Director Duncan Jones solidly brings Ripley’s screenplay home.
It’s on my list of Best Movies of 2011. Source Code is available on DVDD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu and Xbox Video.
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.
In the Australian thriller Swerve, a Good Samaritan drifter gets caught up in a deadly entanglement involving a briefcase full of drug money, some very dangerous guys and a sexy woman of uncertain loyalty. The movie gets its title from some key moments when vehicles swerve and move the plot along. There’s a lot of convincing action (there not even any dialogue for the first seven minutes and two fatalities), but writer-director Craig Lahiff is a better director than a writer. If you’ve seen a femme fatale and some action thrillers, nothing in the plot will surprise you. Unfortunately, the wife with wandering thighs is played by Emma Booth, who is unable to elevate the Bad Girl to Kathleen Turner/Lana Turner territory.
The best thing about Swerve is that hulking Jason Clarke (Animal Kingdom, Zero Dark Thirty, Lawless) is really good at playing menace and indestructibility, and here he adds a mad glint in his eyes. Plus there some pleasingly absurd touches with marching bands randomly wandering into otherwise tense scenes. Bottom line: Swerve is one hour forty minutes of unsurprising and predictable action peppered with one fun performance.
Swerve is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes and Vudu.
Expressly Hitchcockian in style, Grand Piano is a wannabe thriller that unfortunately falls short. Elijah Wood plays a superstar concert pianist who has spent five years in seclusion after melting down from stage fright. As he sits at the piano for his big comeback concert, he receives a threat: if he misplays even one note, either he or his wife will be immediately killed. Already a bundle of nerves, he must navigate his way through the performance while trying to find his tormentor.
What Grand Piano has going for it is Elijah Wood. Who else would you cast for wide-eyed terror (or wide-eyed anything for that matter)? But the plot is just too contrived to engage us. So the manipulative suspense is there, but, ultimately, not the thrills.
The Chinese thriller Parallel Mazetries to be Psycho with parallel universes thrown in. Unhappily, it is a shoddy and incoherent film. Here’s how you could end up with Parallel Maze: show an eighth grader Upstream Color, hand him a digital camera along with 200 bucks and tell him, “Make THAT”.
Ed Wood is alive, and he is Chinese. Parallel Maze employs – from time to time and for seemingly no reason – every conceivable film effect: shaky cam, jump cuts, split screen even animation. It’s all just kinda thrown up there. And in the Psycho like shower scene, you can tell right away which character is the slasher, which fatally dilutes the impact.
It’s clear that the filmmakers are movie lovers – besides a movie-within-the-movie and the explicit homage to Psycho, there are references to movies from Love Story to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The parallel threads of the story’s structure and the movie references were a promising start, but the low production values and random filmmaking techniques are just too distracting.
I saw Parallel Maze at its world premiere at Cinequest.
The gripping and thought-provoking Palestinian drama Omar, which opens tomorrow, is a fundamentally a love story that drives an action thriller. It seems to be about a college-age Palestinian guy named Omar and his two buddies. They live in a West Bank Arab community that is repressed by apparently omniscient and omnipotent Israeli security forces. It’s an environment where one bad choice can spiral one’s life completely out of control – and one that is toxic with betrayals.
There are thrills aplenty when the Israeli security teams are chasing our hero. We’ve never seen more riveting chase scenes through the alleys and rooftops of West Bank cities. Shot in Nazareth and Nablus, Omar gives us a novel look at these Arab communities and the Israeli security wall.
But it is basically a love story, albeit a heartbreaking one, because most of the plot is motivated by Omar’s love for his sweetheart Nadia. The first action by the three young guys stems from politics, testosterone and the foolhardiness of youth. But everything that happens after is because of Omar’s yearning for Nadia. We also see the chaste Palestinian courtship rituals; the kids are burning with passion for each other as they exchange letters and discreet glances.
Omar is not for everyone. For one thing, it doesn’t try to be even-handed about the Israeli Occupation – everything is seen through the Palestinian lens. It’s realistic – one Israeli character in particular is humanized and it’s easy for the audience to disapprove of the boneheaded behavior by the young Palestinians. But if you aren’t open to that Palestinian perspective, you’re not going to like this movie. And the ending is unusually jarring – my fellow audience members sat in shocked silence for a few seconds.
Omar won a jury prize at Cannes and is nominated for this year’s Best Foreign Language Oscar.
Writer-director Alain Giraudie uses the milieu of gay cruising to set his thriller, Stranger by the Lake (L’inconnu du lac), launched with great notoriety at Cannes. A young man frequents a secluded beach to hook up with other gays. He spots a dreamy newcomer, but he just can’t seem to meet the new guy. After a few frustrating days, he witnesses a murder by drowning – and the murderer is the guy that he’s hot for. The next day, the murderer comes on to him and our hero can’t resist…until his new boy toy suggests that they go for a swim.
Stranger by the Lake is notorious because of lots of genitals-in-your-face male nudity and LOTS of explicit gay sex acts. At least some of the sex is actual (not just simulated) sex. I saw Stranger by the Lake in an audience that must have been 80% gay male, and there were lots of knowing chuckles at the cruising behaviors (along with gasps at an episode of decidedly unsafe sex).
Stranger by the Lake does work as a thriller, and a limited US release is underway; in the San Francisco Bay Area, it’s currently playing in just two theaters – the Clay and the Shattuck. It is unrated, but would certainly qualify for a NC-17.
In the pulsating thriller Prisoners, two girls go missing, and one of their dads (Hugh Jackman) goes vigilante as the lead detective (Jake Gyllenhaal) struggles to solve the case. Both men are driven and desperate, and they clash as they each race against the clock to find the girls, resulting in unrelenting tension for 2-and-a-half hours.
The tension comes from standard suspense devices (characters peering into basements and entering boarded-up rooms and dark hallways, prowlers slipping though a sleeping household, etc.), but there isn’t a hokey moment in Prisoners. That’s a tribute to director Denis Villenueve, who directed Incendies (my top movie of 2011). Plus, an intricately plotted story from Aaron Guzikowski adds a dimension to Prisoners and elevates it from a conventional thriller. As Gyllenhaal’s cop proceeds through the whodunit, he encounters what we assume are dead-end leads and red herrings. But everything – and I mean EVERYTHING – ties together at the end. I sure didn’t see it coming.
The one aspect of Prisoners that didn’t work for me is that Jackman is dialed up all the way from the get go, and there’s little if any modulation in his performance. I guess that may be the point of the character – he’s a tightly wound guy BEFORE his daughter appears to be abducted – and then he goes full-out maniac for over two hours.
Gyllenhaal is solid in the other lead role. Terrence Howard is superb as the other dad, a guy who wants his daughter back just as much, but is more passive, rational and empathetic (and consequently more interesting to me). Viola Davis, Maria Bello and Melissa Leo turn in their expected fine performances. And Paul Dano (perhaps his generation’s Christopher Walken or James Spader) is excellent in another of his weirdo roles.
Prisoners is available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox video.
Writer-director Alain Giraudie uses the milieu of gay cruising to set his thriller, Stranger by the Lake (L’inconnu du lac), launched with great notoriety at Cannes. A young man frequents a secluded beach to hook up with other gays. He spots a dreamy newcomer, but he just can’t seem to meet the new guy. After a few frustrating days, he witnesses a murder by drowning – and the murderer is the guy that he’s hot for. The next day, the murderer comes on to him and our hero can’t resist…until his new boy toy suggests that they go for a swim.
Stranger by the Lake is notorious because of lots of genitals-in-your-face male nudity and LOTS of explicit gay sex acts. At least some of the sex is actual (not just simulated) sex. I saw Stranger by the Lake in an audience that must have been 80% gay male, and there were lots of knowing chuckles at the cruising behaviors (along with gasps at an episode of decidedly unsafe sex).
Stranger by the Lake does work as a thriller, and it will get a limited US release beginning January 24, 2014, (and certainly rated NC-17).
The gripping visually spectacular Gravity is less a sci-fi film than it is a basic Man Against Nature (mostly Woman Against Nature) survival tale set in space. A catastrophe strikes a space station, and it’s in doubt whether the two survivors (Sandra Bullock and George Clooney) will be able to make it back to Earth or be forever lost in space.
The skeleton of the story may be simple, but Gravity is an exceptional experience because writer-director Alfonso Cuarón, in a triumph of special effects, captures both the messy nuts and bolts of space travel and the potential lethality of the space environment. I’ve seen my share of space movies, but I’ve never experienced a better sense of the terrifying dark and silent vastness of space. A human in space is suspended in an infinity in which, without a man-made propulsion device, he/she can only helplessly drift. Space is not so much hostile to humans as it is indifferent to our tiny existences.
The technical marvels of manned space missions have dulled us to the reality that space-walking astronauts are just one broken tether or one lost grip from floating away and becoming lifeless space lint. Cuarón brings his audience into that reality, and keeps our tension acute during Ms. Bullock’s Wild Ride.
The Mexico City-born Cuarón will certainly receive an Academy Award nomination for directing. Now Cuarón is an amazingly gifted filmmaker – he also wrote and directed Children of Men, my #2 movie of 2006 and Y Tu Mama Tambien, my #1 movie of 2002. Along the way, he also directed one of the best Harry Potter movies – Harry Potter & The Prisoner of Azbakan (the one with the Dementors, Sirius Black and the werewolf).
There are essentially only two characters on the screen, and Cuarón benefits from two instantly sympathetic movie stars, Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. Clooney, of course, can do anything on the screen, and he nails the less complex role of a The Right Stuff style space jock. (In a wonderful nod to Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff, Ed Harris voices the earth-based NASA control chief.)
I’m generally not a huge fan of Bullock but acknowledge her ability to sometimes excel in comedy (The Heat) and to bring something extra to action (Speed). But I’ve gotta say that she’s never been better than she is in Gravity. Here she plays the Everyman role of a person with ordinary skills thrust into overwhelming peril – the kind of cinematic part that made icons out of James Stewart and Tom Hanks. There isn’t a false moment in Bullock’s performance, and she keeps us rooting for her on whole wild ride.
Gravity currently has an unbelievably high 96 Metacritic rating because critics are rightly acknowledging Cuarón’s achievements in directing and special effects. Gravity is without flaws, and it’s damn entertaining, but I’m not going to rate it as the year’s best; I think that some indies and foreign films are more emotionally compelling and have more textured stories. But Gravity is definitely the best Hollywood film of the year so far.
Source Code is a gripping thriller, and I admired both its intelligence and its heart. The key is a breakthrough screenplay by Ben Ripley. The scifi premise is that supersoldier Jake Gyllenhaal can inhabit the brain of a terrorism victim for the same 8 minutes – over and over again. Each time, he has 8 minutes to seek more clues. Can he build the clues into a solution and prevent the terrorist atrocity? Gyllenhaal is excellent. So is Vera Farmiga as his handler and Michelle Monaghan as a girl you could fall in love with in 8 minutes. Jeffrey Wright chews the scenery with his homage to Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove. Director Duncan Jones solidly brings Ripley’s screenplay home.
