6/28/15: Livin’ the Life

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based on a book, caper films, Charlie Tahan, cheating husbands, cinema, Clea Lewis, crime film, Daniel Schechter, dark comedies, double-crosses, Elmore Leonard, Eric Alan Edwards, film reviews, films, heist films, held for ransom, husband-wife relationship, Isla Fisher, Jennifer Aniston, John Hawkes, Kevin Corrigan, kidnapped wife, kidnapping, Life of Crime, literary adaptation, Mark Boone Junior, Mickey Dawson, mistress, Movies, partners in crime, ransoms, Supporting Characters, The Newton Brothers, The Switch, Tim Robbins, Will Forte, writer-director-editor, Yasiin Bey

A couple of criminals who don’t quite trust each other…a wealthy husband who doesn’t exactly want his kidnapped wife back…a kidnapped wife who doesn’t really want to go home…a Nazi-obsessed associate who’s not completely sane…a love-struck friend who’s almost an idiot…a conniving mistress who’s everything but an idiot…1970s Detroit…sounds like quite the predicament, eh? In the wrong hands, this many disparate elements and plot threads would be an easy recipe for disaster: good thing that all of the above was the handiwork of one Elmore Leonard, the patron saint of quirky crime fiction for over 50 years.

With a battalion of classics under his belt, Leonard’s novels have been a go-to for filmmakers for some time: indeed, one need only look at the tremendous box-office success of adaptations like Get Shorty (1995), Jackie Brown (1997) and Out of Sight (1998) to see what a perfect fit Leonard’s hardboiled, if tongue-in-cheek, prose and instantly memorable characters are for the silver screen. The latest Leonard adaptation, based on his 1978 novel The Switch, is writer-director Daniel Schechter’s Life of Crime (2013). Thanks to a pitch-perfect cast, a great script, exceptional production values and one of those patented twisty-turny Leonard plots, Life of Crime sits comfortably next to the aforementioned classics, proving that good writing never goes out of style.

Louis (John Hawkes) and Ordell (Yassin Bey, formerly known as Mos Def), a couple of small-time crooks plying their trade on the streets of late-’70s Detroit, think they’ve stumbled upon the perfect crime: they’re going to kidnap Mickey Dawson (Jennifer Aniston), the trophy wife of notorious drunk/golfer/real estate baron Frank Dawson (Tim Robbins) and hold her for a $1 million ransom. With the assistance of their Nazi-obsessed associate, Richard (Sons of Anarchy’s Mark Boone Junior), the pair pull off the kidnapping without a hitch, spiriting their captive away to Richard’s “safe house.”

The problem, of course, is that Frank is a real asshole: he’s currently canoodling with his mistress, Melanie (Isla Fisher), in the Bahamas, and could really give two shits about his wife’s situation. Even worse, he’s actually planning to divorce Mickey and marry Melanie: as such, Frank and Melanie decide to call Louis and Ordell’s “bluff” and refuse to pay for Mickey’s safe return. This, obviously, isn’t quite what they had in mind: after all, what use is a kidnappee if no one wants to pay for said person?

As Louis and Ordell try to figure a way out of their situation, complications arise exponentially. Creepy Richard develops an unhealthy interest in Mickey (he’s particularly fond of peeping on her via numerous hidden holes throughout his house), Frank and Mickey’s family friend, Marshall (Will Forte), is secretly in love with Mickey, blundering his way into the sticky situation and Melanie is working some angles on her own, constantly keeping an eye on the ultimate prize of lifelong financial security. To top it all off, Louis finds himself developing feelings for Mickey, who proves herself to be made of much steelier stuff than all of them put together. Will Louis and Ordell get their “just rewards?” Will Frank get the comeuppance that he so richly deserves? Will poor, pathetic Marshall ever get a clue? As our hardy group of oddballs knows, living a life of crime may not be easy but it sure as hell ain’t dull!

There are a lot of moving pieces to this particular game and, to Schechter’s immense credit, he manages to make the whole thing look rather easy. Working from his own script (he also edited the movie), Schechter proves a steady hand with not only the acting and dialogue (paramount to any Elmore Leonard adaptation) but also the film’s numerous setpieces: the opening scene where Ordell runs over a thug with his van, the kidnapping and Richard’s SWAT team stand-off are all top-notch action scenes, executed with a maximum of efficiency and a minimum of flashy nonsense. One of the film’s best moments is the fist-pumping scene where Marshall escapes from Richard, set to the tune of “Don’t Pull Your Love”: it’s a brilliantly executed, fun and endlessly thrilling scene, recalling nothing so much as the giddy heights of Tarantino’s trash-culture aesthetic.

Production-wise, the film looks and sounds fantastic: cinematographer Eric Alan Edwards gives everything a crisp, colorful burnish and the ’70s-era mis-en-scene is effortless, as far from gimmicky as a period piece can get. The score, courtesy of the Newton Brothers (who also did the score for Oculus (2013)) is equally great, accentuating the action scenes while keeping us right in the funky, swaggering heart of the 1978 Motor City.

As good as everything looks and sounds, however, the acting is what really vaults this particular production over the top. To put it bluntly: there isn’t a bad apple in the whole batch. Hawkes and Bey are absolutely fantastic as the untrustworthy partners, so symbiotic in their performances that they come across as a well-oiled, decades-in-the-making cinematic team. Aniston is extraordinary as the kidnapped wife, finding not only the vulnerability but the inherent strength of her character: the scene where she pokes a lit cigarette into Richard’s peeping eye isn’t just an awesome moment (which it certainly is) but it’s a perfect representation of Mickey’s growth as a character. Robbins and Fisher are equally great as the slimy philanderers, with Fisher bringing a miniature universe of subtle tics, quirks and facial expressions to her performance: it’s a role that could have been utterly thankless but, in Fisher’s hands, becomes something much more interesting.

On the supporting side, Boone Junior is a revelation as the kooky supremacist, finding the perfect balance between empty-headed animalism and a slightly sympathetic doofus: it’s nothing whatsoever like his role in Sons of Anarchy and makes me wish more filmmakers utilized him in better roles. Forte is typically great as the simpering, slightly confused friend who holds an unrequited torch for Mickey, showing that he slips into dramatic roles with the same ease that he does comedic ones. And, of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that one of my all-time favorite actors, Kevin Corrigan, even gets a bit part as a put-upon police detective: he may not get much screentime but he hits an absolute home-run with what he gets.

All in all, I was massively impressed with Schechter’s version of this particular Leonard story: not only does he hit all the right beats and tones (the film is actually much more serious than it at first seems, winding up in the same general tonal area as Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, rather than Sonnenfeld’s Get Shorty) but he really makes the material his own, no small feat when we’re talking about Leonard. When the film wants to make you laugh, it has no problem doing so: the interactions between Ordell, Louis and Richard are absolutely priceless, culminating in the fantastic scene where Mickey finally gets a wide-eyed look at Richard’s assorted Nazi paraphernalia, to which Louis deadpans, “What’s the matter: don’t you like history?” When the film wants to thrill you and keep you on the edge of your seat, it has no problem doing that, either: the actual kidnapping scene is one of the best I’ve seen in recent years.

As a filmmaker, Schechter has been on my radar ever since his low-key, clever treatise on film editors, Supporting Characters (2012), first crossed my path some years ago. At that time, the writer-director-editor definitely seemed like someone to keep an eye on: his latest film only confirms my original belief. Here’s to hoping that Daniel Schechter finally earns a spot at the Hollywood “big kids table”: in an age where multiplex action films are big, loud and dumb, Schechter’s brand of subtle, smart thrills sounds like the perfect antidote. At the very least, someone needs to get him funds for another Leonard adaptation: when the iron is this hot, you damn well better keep striking.

10/11/14 (Part One): Getting the Cold Shoulder From Mother Nature

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31 Days of Halloween, Alaska, Arctic setting, auteur theory, cinema, co-writers, Connie Britton, environmental-themed horror, environmentalism, favorite films, Film auteurs, film reviews, films, global warming, horror, horror film, horror films, indie films, isolation, James Le Gros, Jamie Harrold, Joanne Shenandoah, John Carpenter, Kevin Corrigan, Larry Fessenden, Movies, oil riggers, Pato Hoffmann, Robert Leaver, Ron Perlman, The Last Winter, The Thing, writer-director-producer-actor, Zach Gilford

There’s something about the desolate wasteland of an Arctic landscape that just makes for a good horror story. Lovecraft knew it…Carpenter knew it…hell, Jack London knew it, if you think about it. The combination of harsh living conditions, relentless weather, isolation and vast, untouched frontier is the perfect setting for putting humanity under the microscope and seeing what squirms around. The infinite, stark surroundings could hide anything from ancient, alien civilizations to rampaging monsters to serial killers or it could just be the perfect location to allow festering paranoia, jealousy, anger and fear to bubble to the surface and turn humans, ourselves, into our own kind of monster.

Over the years, a handful of films have used the unforgiving Arctic climes as incubators for their particular brand of terror, most notably John Carpenter’s The Thing (1980), which is sort of the grand-daddy for this little sub-genre, which is fitting considering that Howard Hawks’ The Thing From Another World (1951) is the great-grand-daddy of frigid fright films. Filmmakers have used the cold wastelands as homes for cannibals, aliens, mutated creatures, ghosts…even Frankenstein’s monster took up residency there, for a while. When done right, I don’t think that there’s anything quite as frightening as a cold-bound horror film unless it’s a space-bound one: chalk it up to the isolation factor or the notion that either location seems to feature a lot of “rocks” that we haven’t looked under, leading to plenty of unknown squirmy things just waiting to pop out and say hi.

Veteran writer-producer-actor-director and all-around Renaissance man Larry Fessenden has had quite the career. As an actor, he’s one of those quirky characters that you might not recognize by name but you’ll definitely recognize by sight: he’s been in everything from mainstream films like Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead (1999) to indie films like Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers (2005) to genre films like Session 9 (2001). He’s produced outstanding movies like I Sell the Dead (2008), The House of the Devil (2009)and Stake Land (2010) and has directed and written six full length films, thus far, as well as a slew of shorts, videos and a segment in the “Fear Itself” TV series. Over the years, I’ve found Fessenden to be one of the most uncompromising, talented and just flat-out cool voices in independent cinema, the kind of filmmaker like Ben Wheatley or Nicholas Winding Refn who sells me on a film by name alone. To paraphrase that old Field of Dreams (1989) chestnut: if Fessenden films it, I’ll be there. His entry in the frozen-wasteland sweepstakes, 2006’s The Last Winter, stands as another high point in an already exceptional filmography: it’s not quite The Thing but it’s one mighty impressive film, nonetheless, and easily one of my favorites.

The Last Winter begins by informing us that North Industries will begin to drill for oil in a previously untapped part of Alaska, due to the loosening of environmental restrictions. To that end, Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman) shows up at North’s drilling camp in order to check on their progress. Despite having an expert team, including Abby (Connie Britton), Motor (Kevin Corrigan), Maxwell (Zach Gilford), Lee (Pato Hoffmann) and Dawn (Joanne Shenandoah), the drilling site has hit a bit of a snag: conditions in the area aren’t cold enough to drill and support their heavy equipment, thanks to unseasonably warmth weather. Environmental impact expert James Hoffman (James Le Gros) and his assistant, Elliot (Jamie Harrold), want Ed and his team to put the brakes on their operation but there are deadlines involved and lots of money to be made, so Ed doesn’t pay the “hippie” much attention.

The situation goes from bad to worse, however, when Maxwell begins to act strange: he fancies that he hears strange sounds out in the freezing wasteland and seems to be able to see ghostly visions that might or might not be herds of phantom elk stampeding through the landscape. He goes out one night to investigate an isolated test well and doesn’t return: the rest of the group frantically hunt for Maxwell but turn up empty-handed. When Maxwell comes wandering back into camp sometime later, however, relief turns into more worry: the young man is different now, more distant and decidedly more strange. He begins to tell everyone that they’re grave-robbers, stealing the “dead bodies” of animals and plants that have been dead for millions of years. At some point, he warns them, the oil will get tired of being taken advantage of. At some point, it won’t passively wait to be taken from the ground: it will rise up, on its own, and come to pass horrible judgment on the masses of humanity for their environmental crimes.

The rest of the group, including the decidedly green Hoffman, think that Maxwell must have a screw loose. When unexpected things keep happening at the camp site, however, the team is faced with a truly terrifying prospect: perhaps Maxwell is right and Mother Earth really is rising up to take revenge on her human parasites. As the frozen wasteland and whatever it hides begins to claim more victims, paranoia and fear run rampant through the camp. Will any of the team make it back to civilization or will the stunningly beautiful and harsh frozen landscape become their final resting place?

One of the many criticisms that are often hurled at horror films is their relative lack of relevance to our daily lives: a mask-wearing psycho may mean something to us in a figurative sense but it doesn’t mean a whole lot on a personal sense, unless one happens to actually live in Haddonfield or Springwood. Fessenden’s film corrects this complaint by actually being about something: both overtly and covertly, The Last Winter is a treatise on the effects of global warming on this big globe of ours. The issue, of course, is a divisive one, having morphed from a scientific concern into a political one thanks to the best efforts of lobbyists and activists on both sides. Fessenden is not interesting in the political ramifications of the issue, however, unless in the most general way (“tree-huggers vs average Joes”). On the contrary, he tackles the issue as a purely scientific fact: Hoffman tests the temperatures, they’re warmer than they used to be, the ice is obviously thinner than it was and it’s affecting how they can transport their equipment. That’s pretty much it. In a way, The Last Winter isn’t so much a cautionary tale (“If we don’t stop now, this will be our fate”) as it is a resolved one (“It’s already too late, so let’s see what happens next”).

Along with this more involved storyline, Fessenden and co-writer Robert Leaver have come up with a pretty solid little script, full of some nice characterizations and snappy dialogue. Carpenter’s The Thing taught us that the ensemble cast is key in something like this and Fessenden stacks his deck pretty high: Perlman, Le Gros, Britton and Corrigan are all exceptional character actors and each of them brings their A-games to the film. Perlman, in particular, is in great form: I don’t think that I’ve ever seen a bad performance from the guy, to be honest, but there’s something about the character of Ed that lets Perlman flex a few different acting muscles this time around. Ed tows the company line, sure, but he’s not a sleazy, uber-villain like Paul Reiser’s Carter Burke from Aliens (1986): he genuinely cares about his crew although he’s got his own set of orders to follow. There’s also a nice romantic triangle established between Ed, James and Abby which allows for a little more intimate emotions than we normally get from the genre great.

Craftwise, The Last Winter is a pretty stunning production: the cinematography is flawless and handily establishes just how minuscule and insignificant these humans are against their stark, white landscape. While this isn’t really an effects-heavy film, it manages to pull off its setpieces with suitable aplomb: the climatic encounter features a pretty interesting creature design which, although nothing compared to Bottin’s landmark effects work from The Thing, is still miles above similar-budgeted genre fare. The score and sound design help play an integral part in the production, amping up tension at every corner and the film’s editing (courtesy of Fessenden) is unfussy and suits the material to a tee. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention the ending, which manages to reference another environmental “horror” film, Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (1977), and provides a suitably powerful, if appropriately vague, conclusion to the narrative.

I first saw The Last Winter when it was originally released and fell in love with it almost immediately. Indeed, it nearly serves as a textbook for my personal notions of how to make a successful horror film: find a nicely evocative location, populate your film with some interesting, three-dimensional characters, keep the tension high and don’t treat your audience like morons. Fessenden has managed to make a career out of following these simple rules, which will always give him a special place in my heart. If you love frozen horror films, environmentally themed genre movies or just enjoy a good movie, in general, The Last Winter should fit the bill nicely. As humans, we may argue and disagree with just everything our fellow humans say and do but we should all be able to recognize quality when we see it. Under any set of guidelines, The Last Winter is quality entertainment, indeed.

 

10/4/14 (Part Two): You Know…That One Guy

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31 Days of Halloween, Ariel Gade, Barry Bostwick, Blast Vegas, cinema, Eric Price, film reviews, films, high school trauma, horror-comedies, ice cream cone, insane asylums, Jack Perez, Janie Haddad, Karen Black, Kevin Corrigan, Leo Fitzpatrick, Lucy Davis, Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, mental breakdown, Movies, revenge, Ryan A. Levin, Sheriff Walt, small town life, Some Guy Who Kills People

Sometimes, my initial assumptions about a film can be way off base. Take Jack Perez’s Some Guy Who Kills People (2011), for example. Based on the title, the presence of always-funny character actor Kevin Corrigan and Perez’s previous films like Monster Island (2004), Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus (2009) and Blast Vegas (2013), I was expecting the film to be a goofy horror-comedy, maybe something along the lines of Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010) or the like. Instead, Some Guy…ended up being a fairly serious film with occasional surreal touches and played out sort of like a non-rape-oriented version of Clint Eastwood’s Sudden Impact (1983) with a male protagonist. In other words, I was way off base.

Right off the bat, we meet our protagonist, Ken Boyd (Kevin Corrigan). Ken is pretty much the definition of a schlub: he works at an ice cream parlor (part of his job entails wearing a ridiculous ice cream cone costume); only has one friend, co-worker, Irv (Leo Fitzpatrick); still lives at home with his mother (Karen Black), even though he’s in his mid-30s and has spent time in an insane asylum thanks to a mental breakdown and suicide attempt. He’s also plagued by recurring nightmares where he’s tied to a chair, tortured by a group of guys and doused in gasoline. Life, for Ken, is pretty much a continuous bummer.

One day, while working a birthday party in his ice cream cone get-up, Ken happens to run into one of the abusers from his nightmare. Ken fantasizes about putting a hatchet through the guy’s face and whatta ya know…the guy later turns up dead with a hatchet in his face. Seems a little suspicious but the town’s finest law enforcement officials are on the case: Sheriff Walt (Barry Bostwick), who’s also dating Ken’s mom, and Dept. Ernie (Eric Price), who’s so dumb that he makes Barney Fife look like a MENSA candidate.

In the meantime, Ken runs into the daughter that he never knew he had, 11-year-old whiz-kid Amy (Ariel Gade). Amy wants to get to know her dad, so he decides to (temporarily) move in with him. She also encourages Ken to break out of his shell and date Stephanie (Lucy Davis), the nice young woman who he previously met at the dead man’s birthday party. The bodies of Ken’s enemies continue to pile up around him, however, and it’s getting harder and harder for the Sheriff to keep making excuses. When Amy sneaks a peak at her dad’s coveted sketchbook, she sees some pretty dark drawings, including several that seem to prefigure the actual murders. Is Ken behind the murders, seeking to avenge unknown trauma from his high school years, or is there another, more sinister explanation?

In many ways, the underlying theme of Perez’s Some Guy Who Kills People can best be summed up by Sheriff Walt’s declaration that, “If thinking about killing a bunch of pricks made us guilty, we’d all be locked away for life.” He’s absolutely right: regardless of the specifics, I’m more than willing to wager that each and every one of us have wished grievous bodily injury to someone else, even if only from the safe constraints of our own imaginations. Humans thrive on wish-fulfillment: it gives us something to look forward to, even if our imagined goals are impossible, socially unacceptable or just plain stupid. Some Guys…works this angle to good effect, setting up a situation in which we witness bad people getting their comeuppance, similar to something like Bobcat Goldthwait’s God Bless America (2011). Perez is nowhere near the filmmaker that Goldthwait is, however, and Some Guy…ends up being a much slighter, more inconsequential effort.

While there’s nothing about the film that really stands out, there’s also nothing about it that really screams “amateur hour,” either, although the film’s look can often be rather nondescript and I found child actor Ariel Gade to be rather annoying for much of the film. Corrigan is predictably good, however, even if he’s a much more restrained presence than he usually is and Bostwick’s performance really grew on me, even though his initial scenes were way too broad and silly: by the film’s conclusion, Bostwick has become sort of a Matlock/Columbo hybrid and he’s kind of great: Eric Price, however, is a complete non-entity as the dumb-as-dishwater deputy. British actress Davis, so great in the UK version of The Office and Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004), practically steals the show as the nice girl who’s sweet on a very damaged guy, although Karen Black is disappointing in a role that hits the sour zone between loony and checked-out.

Ultimately, Some Guy Who Kills People is a good, but not great, effort. The film moves quickly and is never particularly painful to watch, although it often feels a bit hackneyed and overly familiar. Fans of Kevin Corrigan (seriously: who doesn’t think this guy is one of the most under-rated actors in the biz?) should find this fun, although it definitely ranks as one of his lesser efforts. Nonetheless, there’s enough good stuff here to make Some Guy…a pretty decent way to kill 90 minutes.