thriller

Shadow Dancer: a thriller where it pays to be paranoid

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SHADOW DANCER

The riveting thriller Shadow Dancer takes place during The Troubles in 1990s Belfast.  Thirtyish single mom Collette (Andrea Riseborough) is captured by British security while planting an IRA bomb in London.  Faced with the choice of a long imprisonment with her young son snatched off to foster care, Collette reluctantly agrees to return to Belfast and inform on her IRA unit. This would make for a tense ride in any case, but Collette belongs to a crew run by her two adult brothers, and all three live with their mother.

Everyone in the cell, including the three siblings, is paranoid out of necessity.  And paranoid is only a starting point in describing the IRA’s internal security chief, who soon figures out that there’s a mole in the unit, and begins a mercilessly ruthless investigation; before every interrogation, his assistant rolls out plastic sheeting on the floor – just in case an immediate execution is warranted.  To make matters even more nerve-wracking, Collette’s British handler Max (Clive Owen) suspects that his superiors are making Collette expendable to protect another intelligence asset.  And so we go along on Shadow Dancer’s wild ride, all the way to its noirish ending.

The heart of the film is Andrea Riseborough’s fine performance as Collette.  Surrounded by suspicious friends and foes alike,  she must be contained and ever watchful.  She cannot reveal that the tension is ripping her apart on the inside.

All of the performances are excellent, especially Brid Brennan as Collette’s severe mother, always putting on the kettle for one of her terrorist offspring.  David Wilmot is convincing as the IRA’s mole hunter, dead serious here after his comic turn in The Guard as the goon who couldn’t remember whether he was a psychopath or a sociopath.

Director James Marsh won an Oscar for his documentary Man on Wire.  Marsh also directed Project Nim (one of my Best Movies of 2011) and the based-on-fact British crime drama Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1980.

Here, Marsh demonstrates an excellent sense of pace.  Pay attention to the scenes at the beginning with Collette’s little brother and with the London Underground.  In contrast to many quick-cutting filmmakers, Marsh takes his time so dread settles in and the tension builds.  It results in a top-notch thriller.

Shadow Dancer is showing in some theaters now, but can be hard to find.  It is available streaming from Amazon, iTunes and Vudu.

Fast & Furious 6: exciting chases, silliness and two strong women

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Michelle Rodriguez in FAST & FURIOUS 6

Driven to an air-conditioned theater by a weekend heat wave, I surprised myself by seeing Fast & Furious 6 (just “Furious 6” in the title sequence).  Now you do not go to a franchise action thriller for strong characters, profound themes or plausible stories; instead you’re looking for fights and chases (and, in my case, air conditioning).  Fortunately, Fast & Furious 6 delivers the cool chase scenes, doesn’t take itself too seriously and offers a couple of strong female performances to boot.

In a smoldering performance, Michelle Rodriguez steals the movie whenever she’s on screen.  I was also delighted to see Gina Carano, whom I liked so much last year in Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire. Carano is a mixed martial arts star in real life, so she adds authenticity to an action picture. 

Then there’s the dialogue and the plot. One team member says, as Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson approaches unseen from behind, “Why do I smell baby oil?”.  That is the ONLY line in Fast & Furious 6 that I hadn’t heard in a movie before.  The movie’s climactic set piece is over 20 minutes of frantic action as an airplane is trying to take off, and I calculated that the runway needed to be at least 68 miles long.  But, because Furious 6 shows the good sense not to linger on anything for longer than a second or two, we don’t mind.

Some female viewers will gag at a male fantasy aspect of Fast & Furious 6.  It’s not a sexual, but a gender behavioral fantasy – the women characters always release the men from any emotional drama.  When a guy opts to leave his wife and their baby for a totally unnecessary suicide mission, she accedes, affirming that he’s gotta do what he’s gotta do.  When the hero finds and rescues his old girlfriend, his current girlfriend is a good sport and steps aside with no hard feelings.  It’s a Low Maintenance and No Drama world for the guys. This is the most implausible part of Fast & Furious 6.

Rodriguez: outstanding.  Chases and Carano: good.  Everything else: silly but harmless.

The East: how do we punish corporate crime?

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Brit Marling in THE EAST

{Note: I’m reposting this because The East’s wider release was delayed until this weekend – and it’s one of very few good new movies.)

The East, coming out on Friday, is a smart and gripping thriller that explores both our response to corporate criminality and the unfamiliar world of anarchist collectives. Brit Marling plays a brilliant up-and-comer in an industrial security firm who goes undercover to hunt down and infiltrate a band of eco-terrorists named The East.

The East seeks to brings deadly personal accountability to corporate leaders who injure people and the environment. These aren’t Hollywoodized corporate villains – all of the corporate crimes depicted in the movie have occurred in real life. Lesser filmmakers would have made The East into a revenge fantasy with a Robin Hood-like merry band of earnest kids – or a conventional espionage procedural, hunting down a gang of wild-eyed terrorists.

The East is so good because it explores our helplessness in the face of corporate malfeasance. The corporate targets deserve to be held accountable, and their crimes cry out for punishment. Yet the vigilante violence of The East is clearly unacceptable. No self-selected group of avengers – no matter how legitimate their grievance – should be able to inflict extra-legal violence. (If you don’t think so, just substitute white supremacist militia, fundamentalist Mormons or Chechen immigrants for the hippies in this movie.)

We view this dilemma through the perspective of Marling’s protagonist, whose own views evolve through the course of the story. Marling co-wrote the screenplay with director Zal Batmanglij. Marling and Batmanglij spent over three months in an anarchist collective, living a cash-free life off the grid; that experience has paid off with an unusual authenticity in the depiction of the anarchist lifestyle.

Marling and Batmanglij also co-wrote the indie The Sound of My Voice, and Marling wrote and starred in last year’s sci-fi hit Another Earth. Here, they have created a set of original characters and invented some really ingenious plot points, especially a very powerful initiation dinner and an astounding bit of tradecraft involving dental floss.

Besides Marling, Ellen Page is especially good as one of the eco-terrorists. Julia Ormond is brilliant in a tiny part as a business executive. There are other fine performances by Patricia Clarkson as Marling’s nasty boss and by Alexander Skarsgaard and Toby Kebell as anarchists.

There may be some holes in the plot, but The East is such a tautly crafted thriller, that we don’t have time to notice. There is one unfortunately corny scene between Ellen Page’s character and Jamey Sheridan’s (he’s become the Go To Guy for entitled white male scumbags). But those are quibbles – The East is a very strong film.

The East: how do we punish corporate crimes?

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Brit Marling in THE EAST

The East, coming out on Friday, is a smart and gripping thriller that explores both our response to corporate criminality and the unfamiliar world of anarchist collectives.  Brit Marling plays a brilliant up-and-comer in an industrial security firm who goes undercover to hunt down and infiltrate a band of eco-terrorists named The East.

The East seeks to brings deadly personal accountability to corporate leaders who injure people and the environment.  These aren’t Hollywoodized corporate villains –  all of the corporate crimes depicted in the movie have occurred in real life.  Lesser filmmakers would have made The East into a revenge fantasy with a Robin Hood-like merry band of earnest kids – or a conventional espionage procedural, hunting down a gang of wild-eyed terrorists.

The East is so good because it explores our helplessness in the face of corporate malfeasance.   The corporate targets deserve to be held accountable, and their crimes cry out for punishment.   Yet the vigilante violence of The East is clearly unacceptable.  No self-selected group of avengers – no matter how legitimate their grievance – should be able to inflict extra-legal violence.  (If you don’t think so, just substitute white supremacist militia, fundamentalist Mormons or Chechen immigrants for the hippies in this movie.)

We view this dilemma through the perspective of Marling’s protagonist, whose own views evolve through the course of the story.  Marling co-wrote the screenplay with director Zal Batmanglij.  Marling and Batmanglij spent over three months in an anarchist collective, living a cash-free life off the grid;  that experience has paid off with an unusual authenticity in the depiction of the anarchist lifestyle.

Marling and Batmanglij also co-wrote the indie The Sound of My Voice, and Marling wrote and starred in last year’s sci-fi hit Another Earth.  Here, they have created a set of original characters and invented some really ingenious plot points, especially a very powerful initiation dinner and an astounding bit of tradecraft involving dental floss.  

Besides Marling, Ellen Page is especially good as one of the eco-terrorists.  Julia Ormond is brilliant in a tiny part as a business executive.  There are other fine performances by Patricia Clarkson as Marling’s nasty boss and by Alexander Skarsgaard and Toby Kebell as anarchists.

There may be some holes in the plot, but The East is such a tautly crafted thriller, that we don’t have time to notice. There is one unfortunately corny scene between Ellen Page’s character and Jamey Sheridan’s (he’s become the Go To Guy for entitled white male scumbags). But those are quibbles – The East is a very strong film.

DVD/Stream of the Week: Side Effects

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Jude Law in SIDE EFFECTS

Side Effects is a psychological thriller that keeps thriller-lovers on the their toes by constantly changing its focus.  First one character is on the verge of falling apart, then another and then another.  Initially, we think that the story is about mental illness and prescription psych meds, but then it evolves into something else quite different.   The plot might have seemed implausible in the hands of a lesser director, but Steven Soderbergh pulls it off with panache.

Soderbergh got superb performances by his leads: Jude Law, Rooney Mara and Catherine Zeta-Jones.  Mara, so striking in The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, serves notice that she is a perfect fit for psychological dramas; she can turn  apparent fragility and unknowability into menace like few other film actresses.  And few actors can take a character from charming confidence to a desperate meltdown like Law does here.  Zeta-Jones shows that she play a frigid mistress of the universe who is passionate and needy underneath.  The supporting players are all perfectly cast.

The insistent music by Thomas Newman, while never obvious, is an integral part of the suspense.  Soderbergh, a master who has repeatedly elevated genre films, has another winner in Side Effects.

Side Effects is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Vudu,YouTube and GooglePlay.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist: a thriller with an intense star (but with Kate Hudson, too)

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THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST

Director Mira Nair (Mississippi Masala, Monsoon Wedding, The Namesake) brings the novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist to the screen.  A young Pakistani man flourishes at Princeton and on Wall Street, and he becomes an American Master of the Universe.  But then September 11 changes his world, as Americans reacting and overreacting to terror start treating him badly.  Suddenly, he no longer sees a fit with his American girlfriend, a flighty, overprivileged artist.  He returns to Pakistan to teach in a university, and becomes an intellectual leader for Pakistanis seeking to resist the West.  The movie becomes a thriller when the question arises, has he become a terrorist? 

The thriller works – if you haven’t read the novel, you don’t know whether the guy we’ve been rooting for is or is not a terrorist until the final minutes.  The best thing about the movie is the remarkably intense performance of British actor Riz Ahmed as the protagonist.  Ahmed is a compelling screen presence, and he clearly has impressive acting range when you contrast his hyper-alert role here with the dim terrorist he played in the hilarious terrorist parody Four Lions.  As one would expect, Liev Schreiber is also excellent as the guy who must determine whether Ahmed has become a terrorist. 

What didn’t work for me?  First there was the odd choice of Kate Hudson as the girlfriend.  The character is just too vapid to captivate a Wall Street whiz kid, and Hudson just doesn’t project the sensuality to make up the difference for a guy in his early 20s. 

The story also suggests that non-violent, democratic nationalism can have widespread appeal in Pakistan, and, while I would hope that Pakistanis embrace that path, I’m not sure that it’s a likely outcome. 

If you need a sermon on the blowback from our War on Terror,  then you can sit in the pew for The Reluctant Fundamentalist.  But, for an ambiguous thriller, Homeland is a better choice.

DVD of the Week: Flight

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Denzel Washington stars in this top rate thriller about an airline pilot who becomes a hero after saving his passengers in a miraculous crash landing, but then falls into legal jeopardy when alcohol is found in his blood.  The plane crash is thrilling, but the high stakes suspense in the final 90 minutes is about whether he can get his drinking under control.  (The trailer below overemphasizes the plane crash and paints Flight as an action movie, thereby qualifying it for my list of Most Misleading Trailers.)

What makes Flight singular is that the hero can take control of a crisis at 35,000 feet and rise to superhuman performance, but is completely out of control when he spots a mini bottle of Ketel One. 

And what a hero Denzel Washington makes!  The guy is among our very best actors, and here, his edginess and bluster mask the pilot’s achingly vulnerable loneliness and self-loathing.  And the charisma and confidence in Denzel’s screen presence makes him totally credible as an action hero.

Director Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future) delivers a plane crash scene for the ages, and he does an excellent job of keeping up the suspense.  Flight is pedal-to-the-metal intensity until the final ten minutes, when the ending didn’t quite work for me.  For me, only the ending kept Flight from being a Must See and one of the year’s best; however, The Wife and several of my friends did like the ending.

The English actress Kelly Reilly is really, really good as a trashy southern heroin addict whose life intersects with the pilot’s, and who must make the same choice between recovery and demise.  John Goodman is hilarious as a gonzo enabler right out of Hunter S. Thompson.  The rest of the cast shines, too, especially Don Cheadle, Bruce Greenwood and Tamara Tunie.

Flight is available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming from many VOD outlets.

Upstream Color: “enigmatic” is an understatement

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UPSTREAM COLOR

I have never been as ambivalent about a movie as I am about Upstream Color.  (More about that later.)

A character named Thief concocts a drug from corpulent worms, doses a woman and scams her out of her savings.  Another character, named Sampler, deworms her in a surgical tent at a pig farm.  This experience washes away her memory, and she happens into a relationship with a man, another loner trying to move on from a traumatic episode.  Along the way, we see vividly colorful shots of the human bloodstream and riparian ecology.  Sampler periodically reappears to solemnly observe the goings on and experiment with sound recordings, and he spends lots of time with the herd of pigs.

Yes, this is one trippy movie.  The worming and deworming scenes could fit in a sci-fi or horror movie.  The second half has the air of a romantic thriller.  The overall tone is of an art film or experimental film.  Upstream Color is written, directed, produced and co-edited by Shane Carruth, who also plays the male lead and composed the score.  Indeed, the cinematography and Carruth’s editing and music are strikingly unique and effective.

Even viewers who admire Upstream Color find it baffling.  What’s going on and what’s it all mean?  Halfway through, I put it all together:  Sampler represented the writer himself who was imagining – and trying on – different characters, plot elements and settings.   So I thought this was a brilliant film about the creative process.  But then Carruth himself set me straight.  At the screening Q & A, Carruth said that I was wrong about Sampler, that the film is about how people might relate if their identities are stripped away, and that Upstream Color is intended to be a coherent narrative.

So here’s my problem –  it’s not a coherent narrative – not even close.  If Sampler is merely an observer, how can he play a critical part in the plot by deworming the woman?  Why are the characters doing the same thing simultaneously at the pig farm and in the highrise? And what gives with the bearded guy and his wife (seemingly unrelated to the other plot threads)?  So I don’t think that Upstream Color is a success on the filmmaker’s own stated terms.  But my interpretation did work for me, and the music, visuals, editing, and lead actress Amy Seimetz combined to make the overall experiece worthwhile.

Amy Seimetz is excellent as this haunted and confused character.  (Seimetz is a director in her own right and is getting enough acting parts now to demonstrate that she has the chops of a potentially significant actress.  (BTW 25 years ago, Lindsay Crouse would have played this role.)

If you like your movies understandable, stay away from Upstream Color – you will hate it.  If you want a unique art film experience, go with it.

Barbara: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you

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As Joseph Heller wrote in Catch-22, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you”.   Barbara’s suspenseful story is set in Cold War East Germany, so everyone is indeed being watched by the Stasi and informed on by their closest associates.  Barbara is a doctor who has applied for an exit visa and has therefore been exiled to the hinterlands from a top Berlin hospital.   Harassed by the Stasi, she is ever aware of everyone’s motives.  She is played by Nina Hoss in a performance that is extraordinarily controlled, alert and suspicious.

Barbara herself is driven by two imperatives – to escape from East Germany and to provide expert and compassionate medical care.  The story is a series of moments, some seemingly random, which tie together as the story builds to the climax, when the doctor must bet her life on a decision.

Barbara was co-written and directed by Christian Petzold (he won the Berlin Film Festival’s Silver Bear for his work).  Given that’s it difficult to imagine how anyone else could have improved Barbara, I’ll be looking for Petzold’s next movie.

Cinequest: Dose of Reality

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The American thriller 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, coming from a place of utter victimization, becomes totally dominant over the men.  The most interesting of the guys is played by Rick Ravanello, a veteran TV actor with 77 acting credits on IMDb.  Ravanello’s eyes are uncommonly able to portray dimness, cunning, tweaked impairment, guilt and terror.

But, although it’s a compelling movie for the first 75 minutes, Dose of Reality is all about the Big Surprise – which is on the scale of The Crying Game.  Afterward, I was able to identify at least four clues in the story, but none of the 250 audience members at Dose of Reality’s Cinequest world premiere was unsurprised.  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 playing Cinequest again on March 5 and 9, and will release on DVD and VOD on March 26.