thriller

UNCUT GEMS: neo-noir in a pressure cooker

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Adam Sandler in UNCUT GEMS

Adam Sandler and filmmaking brothers Benny and Josh Safdie serve up neo-noir in a pressure cooker in the relentlessly tense Uncut Gems.

Howard (Adam Sandler) is a Jewish jewelry dealer in New York City’s Diamond District, who makes his big bucks catering to NBA stars brought in by his associate (LaKeith Stanfield). He’s also a gambling addict. One of the consequences of gambling addiction is losing more than you can afford and owing money that you don’t have to very nasty people.

Kevin Garnett, LaKeith Stanfield and Adam Sandler in UNCUT GEMS

Howard has a lot – a wife and kids in a luxurious suburban house, a young mistress in a Manhattan apartment, a thriving business. But he’s always on the verge of losing it all because it’s not enough; his life is driven by the compulsion to make five figure exotic sports bets.

That means that he is constantly robbing Peter to pay Paul, shifting money, jewelry, schemes and bullshit around like a spinning plate act on The Ed Sullivan Show. Throughout Uncut Gems, the chaos elevates, as Howard bets on being bailed out by the Big Sale and the Big Bet. There’s a massive Ethiopian opal (a MacGuffin like the Maltese Falcon), a spine chilling auction and an even more gripping sports bet.

It’s clear that the inevitable will catch up with Howard – we just don’t know where it will fall on the continuum between having all of the bones in his hand broken and wearing cement shoes in the East River. Or whether his spiking blood pressure will send him out with a stroke or heart attack. Come to think of it, this probably isn’t the best movie choice for a cardiologist.

Adam Sandler in UNCUT GEMS

Here’s the challenge that the Safdies faced in writing this character and that Sandler faced in playing him. How do you make him just appealing enough to keep us engaged with his situation? This is a guy who, were we in the same family or community, we would dread his every approach (Here comes trouble).

This is an extraordinary, awards-worthy performance by Sandler; he inhabits a perpetually frenetic guy, fueled by his compulsions and by the resultant desperation.

Idina Menzel is superb as the wife who knows Howard best and assesses him the most accurately (and cruelly). Stanfield is very good, as are Julia Fox as the girlfriend and Eric Bogosian as a frustrated creditor. Former NBA star Kevin Garnett plays NBA star Kevin Garnett and holds his own with the professional actors.

The 2 hours and 15 minutes of Uncut Gems flies by (and you feel like you’ve been running the whole time). This is one of the Best Movies of 2019.

ROJO: bobbing in a sea of moral relativism

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ROJO. Courtesy of SFFILM.

Rojo is Argentine writer-director Benjamín Naishtat’s slow burn drama.  Rojo is set just before the 1970s coup that some characters expect – but no one is anticipating how long and bloody the coup will be.  Several vignettes are woven together into a tapestry of pre-coup moral malaise.

A prominent provincial lawyer Claudio (Darío Grandinetti) is invited to participate in a scam. There’s a scary encounter of lethal restaurant rage. It looks like Claudio, bobbing on a sea of moral relativism, may well remained unscathed, but the arrival of crack detective becomes a grave threat.

As Claudio weaves through his life, his society shows signs of crumbling. There’s a failed teen seduction, an emotional breakdown at a formal reception and a natural metaphor – a solar eclipse.

It’s funny when the audience finally connects the dots and understands who the character nicknamed “the Hippie” is. And Naishtat and Grandinetti get the most out of the scene where Claudio finally dons a toupee.

We know something that the characters don’t know – or at least fully grasp – how bloody the coup will be. Watch for the several references to desaparecido, a foreboding of the coup. Argentina’s coup was known for the desaparecidos – the disappeared – thousands of the regime’s political opponents went missing without a trace, having been executed by death squads. In Rojo, a very inconvenient madman dies and his body is hidden, there’s a disappearing act in a magic show, and a would-be boyfriend vanishes.

This is a moody, atmospheric film that works as a slow-burn thriller. I saw Rojo earlier this year at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM) and it opens this weekend in Bay Area theaters.

Stream of the Week: THE EAST – how do we punish corporate crime?

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Brit Marling in THE EAST

The East 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 to play entitled white male scumbags). But those are quibbles – The East is a very strong film.

The East is available on DVD from both Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon, Vudu, iTunes, GooglePlay and other VOD outlets.

Stream of the Week: HEADHUNTERS – from smoothly confident scoundrel to human piñata

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Aksel Hennie in HEADHUNTERS

For the second straight week, I’m recommending the marvelously entaertining Headhunters to kick off your summer. The smug Norwegian corporate headhunter named Roger Brown (don’t ask) explains his motivation at the very beginning of the movie: at 5 feet, 6 inches, his insecurity about keeping his six foot blond wife leads him to cut some corners. As ruthlessly successful as he is in business, he feels the need to also burgle the homes of his clients and steal art treasures. So the dark comedy thriller Headhunters (Hodejegerne) begins like a heist movie. But soon Roger becomes targeted by a client with serious commando skills, unlimited high tech gizmos, and a firm intention to make Roger dead.

Roger Brown is played brilliantly by Aksel Hennie, a huge star in Norway who looks like a cross between Christopher Walken and Peter Lorre. The laughs come from Roger’s comeuppance as he undergoes every conceivable humiliation while trying to survive. As a smoothly confident scoundrel, Roger is at first not that sympathetic, but Hennie turns him into a panicked and terrified Everyman when he becomes a human pinata.

HEADHUNTERS

Headhunters is based on a page-turner by the Scandinavian mystery writer Jo Nesbo. A Hollywood remake of Headhunters is somewhere in development.  In the meantime, stream Headhunters on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube or Google Play and have a fun time at the movies.

Stream of the Week: HEADHUNTERS – from smoothly confident scoundrel to human piñata

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Aksel Hennie in HEADHUNTERS

The smug Norwegian corporate headhunter named Roger Brown (don’t ask) explains his motivation at the very beginning of the movie: at 5 feet, 6 inches, his insecurity about keeping his six foot blond wife leads him to cut some corners. As ruthlessly successful as he is in business, he feels the need to also burgle the homes of his clients and steal art treasures. So the dark comedy thriller Headhunters (Hodejegerne) begins like a heist movie. But soon Roger becomes targeted by a client with serious commando skills, unlimited high tech gizmos, and a firm intention to make Roger dead.

Roger Brown is played brilliantly by Aksel Hennie, a huge star in Norway who looks like a cross between Christopher Walken and Peter Lorre. The laughs come from Roger’s comeuppance as he undergoes every conceivable humiliation while trying to survive. As a smoothly confident scoundrel, Roger is at first not that sympathetic, but Hennie turns him into a panicked and terrified Everyman when he becomes a human pinata.

HEADHUNTERS

Headhunters is based on a page-turner by the Scandinavian mystery writer Jo Nesbo. A Hollywood remake of Headhunters is somewhere in development.  In the meantime, stream Headhunters on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube or Google Play and have a fun time at the movies.

Stream of the Week: HUNTING LANDS – in this thriller, we watch the watcher

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Marshall Cook in HUNTING LANDS

In the slow burn thriller Hunting Lands, Frank (Marshall Cook) is living a solitary life as a subsistence hunter in a forest cabin, a long pickup drive outside his northern Michigan hometown. Frank is a guy with serious wilderness skills, loading his own ammo and field dressing the large mammals that he fells with a single shot. He witnesses a serious crime in the woods and is immediately driven to make things right – but not in the way we expect.

Frank has nobody to talk to, and we see him silently triage the situation and begin a hunt for the perpetrator. Silent observation comes naturally to a hunter, and we see him wordlessly patrolling the small towns in his pickup, as he tracks down his human prey. We see what Frank sees, and one of the most pivotal characters is only seen in long shot until the last 15 minutes or so.

HUNTING LANDS

HUNTING LANDS

Hunting Lands is the first feature from writer-director Zack Wilcox, a story-teller who is thankfully willing to let the audience connect the dots. Because Hunting Lands is only 83 minutes long, Wilcox can take his time watching Frank watch others. Even as Frank is still and quiet, the audience is gripped by what he is going to do next.

An original character, Frank seems unusually self-aware for a hermit. When he finally gets in a conversation, he turns out to be an articulate guy who understands and can explain why he has become a recluse.

Wilcox follows Billie Wilder’s screenwriting advice – “don’t hang around”; the ending is not even one second too long. And Wilcox knows that a little ambiguity about what happens afterwards can pack a punch.

Cinequest hosted the word premiere of Hunting Lands. You can stream it now on Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

HUNTING LANDS

Stream of the Week: UNA – two twisted people

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UNA
UNA

The psychological suspense movie Una revolves around two twisted people, one of whom has been damaged by trauma. Here’s what the audience can be confident really happened: at age 14, Una (Rooney Mara) was seduced by a much older man, Ray (Ben Mendelsohn); she became infatuated with Ray and they carried on a sexual relationship for three months until he was caught and imprisoned for four years. Upon leaving prison, he changed his name and started a new life. It’s now fifteen years after the original crime and Una has tracked him down.

We can tell that Una is obsessed with Ray. What we don’t know is whether Una is seeking vengeance or whether she is in love with him – or both. She’s so messed up that even she may not know.

Lolita was a novel with a famously unreliable narrator. Una presents us with TWO unreliable narrators. Almost every statement made by Ray COULD be true, but probably isn’t. He was in love with her, he came back for her, she was his only underage lover, he’s not “one of them”, he’s told his wife about his past – we just can’t know for sure. Ben Mendelsohn delivers a performance that tries to conceal whatever Ray is thinking and feeling but allows his desperation to leak out.

The excellent actor Riz Ahmed (Four Lions, The Reluctant Terrorist) is very good as Ray’s work buddy, who must deal with one totally unforeseeable surprise after another.

Una really relies on Rooney Mara to portray a wholly unpredictable character in every scene, and she succeeds in carrying the movie. Mara’s face is particularly well-suited when she plays a haunting and/or haunted character, and it serves her well here.

I originally saw Una at Cinequest.  You can stream it from Netflix Instant, Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

 

MINE 9: betting your life…every day

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MINE 9

The superb thriller Mine 9 opens with men at work in a dangerous workplace – a coal mine two miles under their hometown.  Something goes wrong, but the men, under the confident, expert direction of their Section Leader Zeke (Terry Serpico), demonstrate their training and quickly quell the emergency.  Once on the surface, Zeke thinks that methane levels have made the mine too dangerous; but his crew demand to return to the mine because they can’t afford the lost paychecks.  They are betting their lives for those paychecks.

To keep the crew – his friends and family members – as safe as possible, Zeke reluctantly leads them back underground.  Then a methane explosion traps them deep underground.  They must find a way out and soon – they only have a one-hour supply of oxygen and time is ticking away.  What happens next is a gripping page-turner.

Mine 9 is the second feature for writer-director Eddie Mensore.  A major reason it’s so successful is that Mensore has delivered remarkable verisimilitude;  he has created what we accept to be a specific claustrophobic workplace.  Mine 9 is both a mine safety exposé and a mining procedural.  I can’t think of another movie that shows the underground safety protocols and the use of real modern mining machinery.

Mine 9 is also an exploration of – and contemplation on – the inherent danger of coal mining.  These miners come from a local and family tradition of mining, so they accept dangers that the rest of us would not; if these men lived somewhere else, they would have safer jobs – but they haven’t seen any opportunity to move out of coal country.

And then there’s the economic imperative.  In Mine 9, the miners understand that the mine has become more dangerous than usual.  But the fear of missing even one paycheck outweighs what we would see as a crazy risk.

One of the crew, the 18-year-old son and nephew of the miners, is going underground for the first time, so the audience is able to see the work environment through his lens, without the more experienced miner’s earned sense of comfort.  He is quickly shown an undecipherable diagram of the mine and told, if anything goes wrong, go here.  Good luck with that.

All of the performances are very good, especially those of Terry Serpico as Zeke and Erin Elizabeth Burns as the on-site mine manager Teresa.  Movies often portray the non-college educated working class, especially in Appalachia, as ridiculous, dumbass rednecks or with some artificial nobility.  As written by Mensore and played by Serpico and Burns, Zeke and Teresa, both smart and inventive under pressure, also appreciate how the business environment has taken away their best options to protect the workers.

Mine 9′s soundtrack, which can be sampled here,  is filled with haunting Appalachian music that helps give the film a sense of place.  This is a culture that recognizes, even in its music  that death is always near.

Cinequest hosts the world premiere of Mine 9, the best thriller at this festival.  Stay through the end credits to meet some real coal miners.

LAST SUNRISE: racing into darkness

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LAST SUNRISE

In the gripping Chinese sci-fi thriller Last Sunrise, we’re in a super-hi tech future, powered almost totally by solar energy – which doesn’t look as blissful as it sounds.  As befits a dystopian story, there’s a disaster, and this one is just about the worst one conceivable – the death of our Sun.

Wang Sun (Zhang Jue) is very serious astronomy nerd with no apparent non-scientific interests.   He doesn’t really know Wu Chen (Zhang Yue), although she lives in a neighboring apartment, and it doesn’t appear that she’s ever thought about anything profound.  When the catastrophe happens, the two are forced on the road together in a race for their lives.

Last Sunrise is real science fiction about a plausible (and inevitable) future occurrence, and it’s about real ideas.  This isn’t just blowing stuff up in space, which too often passes for sci-fi today.

Losing the sun is pretty bad – it gets dark, the temperature is plunging and humans are running out of oxygen.  There may be refuges, but there’s little remaining battery power to fuel people’s escapes.  Of course, it doesn’t take long for social order to break down.  Last Sunrise becomes a ticking bomb thriller as the couple tries to find a refuge in time.

Of course, with no sun lighting the earth and moon, it is very dark and many more stars are visible.  The f/x of the starry skies in Last Sunrise are glorious.

The two leads are appealing,  especially Zhang Yue, whose Wu Chen is revealed more and more as film goes on.

The life-and-death thriller is leavened by witty comments on the consumerist, hyper connected culture (pre-disaster).  There are very funny ongoing references to instant noodles.  And Wang Sun, who is a bit of a hermit, doesn’t appreciate how devoted he is to his digital assistant ILSA (not Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, just ILSA).

This is the first feature, an impressive debut, for director and co-writer Wen Ren.  Cinequest hosts the North American premiere of Last Sunrise, the sci-fi highlight of the festival.

EVERY TIME I DIE: the dead return as the living

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EVERY TIME I DIE

What if murder victims didn’t return to haunt the living, but instead, INHABITED the living? That’s the premise of the supernatural thriller Every Time I Die.

Sam (Drew Fronteiro) is an EMT, emotionally damaged by a childhood tragedy. Sam is invited to tag along with two couples on a getaway weekend at a lakeside vacation home. Things get weird as we see that Sam is much more messed up than originally apparent. It also turns out that two of the five have a secret relationship. And…there’s a murder! And then things get even weirder.

Every Time I Die is the first narrative feature for director and co-writer Robi Michael and co-writer Gal Katzir. To their credit, Michael and Katzir refuse to spoon feed the audience, making us connect the dots.  Don’t expect to understand everything that’s going on through the first third of the film.  This is not a movie for those who need a linear, paint-by-the-numbers plot.  To add to the early murkiness, the two female leads are played by twin sisters; once we figure that out, we can try to keep them straight.

At the point where we figure out what happens when a character dies, Every Time I Die has us wondering who will be the next to die and who will be the next to be inhabited by the dead.  And, just when we think the movie is over, there’s an unexpected resolution.

Every Time I Die is essentially an ensemble piece, and the cast members – Fronteiro, Marc Menchaca (Ozark), Michelle Macedo, Melissa Macedo and Tyler Dash White – all of whom work often in television, are very good.

Cinequest will host the world premiere of Every Time I Die.