Some Really Great Indie Films
"6 Balloons"
starring: Abbi Jacobson, Dave Franco, Charlotte and Madeline Carel, Jane Kaczmarek, Dawan Owens, Tim Matheson, Jen Tullock, Maya Erskine
written and directed by: Marja-Lewis Ryan
Addiction is shitty, not just for the person going through it, but also for every single person in their life. Addiction has a wide circumference of effect. It is especially hard to love an addict. This is an incredible film that really shows the pain and suffering of addiction, as the filmmaker, Ryan, dissects the relationship between brother and sister, Seth and Katie (Dave Franco and Abbi Jacobson). Seth claims he's trying to get clean, but the withdrawal is hard and Katie, who seems to enjoy being needed and rescuing her brother, enables, as it is made clear that it is equally as difficult sever ties with an addict when you love them.
There are definitely scenes that are very difficult to watch and I couldn't help thinking of one of my exes through it all, as she suffered with addiction before we met.
We meet Katie (Abbi Jacobson of “Broad City”) as she prepares for a surprise birthday party for her boyfriend. She goes to buy balloons with her mother (Jane Kaczmarek) and her father (Tim Matheson) and friends show up early to set things up. But her brother Seth (Dave Franco) and Seth’s 4-year-old daughter appear to be missing. Seth isn’t answering his phone, and a look crosses Katie’s face that tells us she knows what that means. When she gets to his apartment to bring him and Ella to the party, she sees that he hasn’t been opening his mail. As she says, “that happened last time.” Seth is a heroin addict. Seth has relapsed.
The fact that there's a 4 year old, sweet little girl involved in all this makes it even harder to watch, but it also makes it a reality. Think about all those videos you may have seen with addicts passing out in cars or at stores and their kids are right there, witnessing all of it. As sad as it is, it's happening every day. Addiction does not happen in a sweet little vacuum, and I like that this indie film was not afraid to show that. I can think of another movie that I really enjoyed back in the day (re: When a Man Loves a Woman) that exposed the same truth.
He agrees to go to detox. Katie will drive him to the clinic and he’ll get clean … again. Katie can go pick up the cake she told her friends and family she was getting, and bring her niece to the party too. Of course, this doesn’t go as planned. The first clinic won’t take his health insurance, and a 10-day detox costs $5,000. And then Seth’s body/addiction starts revolting against him.
As the party that Katie planned goes on without her, Ryan plays self-help audio over the arc of Katie and Seth, almost like chapter breaks. The self-help audio uses the analogy of a sinking boat, and it feels manipulative and on-the-nose at first, but really works in the final act of her film. It’s incredibly powerful stuff.
The self-help audio was the only thing that I could have done without, but as the film approached its finally act, that tied everything together nicely with the self-help audio.
This is absolutely one film to watch.
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"Night Owls"
starring: Adam Pally, Rosa Salazar, Rob Huebel, Tony Hale, Peter Krause
written by: Seth Goldsmith and Charles Hood
directed by: Charles Hood
Here is another film that is quite formulaic, makes it well known from the very beginning, and then does not deviate from that formula throughout. And it works pretty well. Like most rom-coms, except this one has a bit of a twist, I guess.
The gift of this filmmaker and screenwriter can be found in the rhythmic conversation the two people have throughout their time together. They clearly do not like each other after the sexual encounter. Regret sinks in. But then, Kevin realizes Madeline has some deeper things going on and that she is wounded person, and he is as well; and that perhaps they can help heal each other. Aside from the conversation, this is a new kind of slapstick/screwball comedy and both actors are up for the task.
Screwballs feature cranky, nerdy men whose dignity is ripped away by wisecracking Dames of Mayhem, but somehow the nerds start to like it. "Night Owls" has this sensibility running underneath it, the script understands it, and Hood knows how to film it. Actors Adam Pally and Rosa Salazar, who carry the entire film, are not just game for this kind of material, they feel born to it. Their dynamic sparks all over the place. They don't just have romantic chemistry, they have that much rarer kind: the chemistry of conversation.
The film works as a whole, and perhaps because of the parts/pieces. It has many funny moments and keeps your attach the whole time, even though some of the transitions comes across as clunky and like the movie could naturally end, yet Kevin keeps coming back for more (obviously because he starts to like Madeline and wants her company, if not only because he himself does not want to be alone).
I could even see this story performed on a stage, as most of it takes place in one location and the story is really dialogue driven, which would translate onto the stage really well.
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"Before I Wake"
starring: Kate Bosworth, Thomas Jane, Jacob Tremblay, Annabeth Gish, Topher Bousquet, Dash Mihok, Jay Karnes, Lance E. Nichols, Kyla Deaver, Hunter Wenzel
written and directed by: Mike Flanagan
Writer/director Mike Flanagan is certainly making a name for himself as this generation's horror go-to filmmaker, especially perhaps in Netflix's eyes, as he's done a few projects for them now (including this one, that sat on the shelf since 2015) with the Stephen King-based "Gerald's Game" (which was apparently his dream project), the incredible "Hush" film (see it, if you have not), and now he's working on a horror series- "The Haunting of Hill House." He's also made other horror films, prior to his connection with Netflix (re: Oculus and Oujia). Through all his work, you can clearly see the Stephen King influence, as he wears it on his sleeve and does not make apologies for it (nor should he).
The ending comes together nicely, wrapping things together with an emotional bow and definitely makes you think.
I honestly was not expecting much from this film, but it really surprised me.
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"Una"
starring: Rooney Mara, Ruby Stokes, Ben Mendelsohn, Tara Fitzgerald, Riz Ahmed
written by: David Harrower (based on his play "Blackbird")
directed by: Benedict Andrews
This is one of those "Holy shit!" "I'm uncomfortable" type of films, in the same vein as Nabakov's "Lolita" (perhaps especially not just the book, but the Jeremy Irons/Dominique Swain film version in the late '90s that I absolutely loved and watched over and over).
It’s a harrowing tale, adapted from playwright David Harrower’s much lauded play Blackbird, about Ray (Mendelsohn), a man who seduced his 13-year-old neighbor 15 years prior, went to prison for four years, and then vanished under a new name, in a new town, with a new life, wife, and daughter, far away from his reprehensible past. Mara is Una, his pedophiliac prey, all grown up now, but still living in her mother’s house, in a bedroom that hasn’t changed since Ray first told her “I love you.” One day she comes across a photo of predator Ray – now called Peter and working in middle management at a small corporation – and decides to confront him, thus giving voice to the long unspoken darknesses that have been suppurating inside her shattered psyche. Una is broken, damaged, incomplete, and a reckoning is due and will be duly paid.
I'm convinced that Rooney Mara is heading for a great, long career, which started out slow but seemed to really hit its mark with "The Social Network" (even though she played the slighted, bitchy girlfriend that basically started the Facebook empire from breaking up with Mark Z.). I wanted "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" to be way better and grittier, but unfortunately it had huge expectations to live up to (with a foreign film version already done, and well), because the trilogy was an incredible read. It's hard to translate and interpret such well written material on condense it into a Hollywood film.
For more evidence of Rooney's acting skills:
Ain't Them Bodies Saints
Side Effects
Her
Carol
Lion
Mara is exceptional as a woman trapped in the past and confounded by the present. We first see her on the dance floor at a nightclub, where she engages in grotesquely anonymous rough sex in the bathroom, a foreshadowing of more treacherous liaisons to come. Wearing a preternaturally calm, sometimes dazed expression throughout, Mara brilliantly embodies both helpless victim and potential powder keg. She’s completely compelling, a wounded child-woman that just might bite back, finally.
Having been staged as a play first and foremost, and perhaps because the first-time director was a theatre director before this allows him to really showcase not just his talents as a director (really focusing the camera on the two characters throughout the confrontational moments), but also really making the words a singular character as well. This was such an incredible film for capturing the emotional scars of Una. It really has an affect on you, as a viewer, especially in the age of the #MeToo movement and the exposing of truths and seeking justice for wrongs done, perhaps not financially (because no amount of money can erase the pain inflicted), but justice in that the abuser will not and cannot hide from the facts any longer. The abuser must live with the damage inflicted just as much as the abused and that's what is made evidently clear with this story.
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"Trash Fire"
starring: Adrian Grenier, Angela Trimbur, Fionnula Flanagan, AnnaLynne McCord, Sally Kirkland, Matthew Gray Gubler, Ezra Buzzington, Molly McCook
written and directed by: Richard Bates Jr.
This is one of those films that you don't really know what you're going to get when it starts. It's trying to be one of those dark black-comedies, but the lead character is just so damn unlikeable from the very beginning that you just don't care about him at all, which makes watching the rest hard to do, because the outcome doesn't really matter to you, other than you don't really root for him or want him to get what he obviously does not deserve (re: the girlfriend). This is definitely a character miles away from Grenier's character on "Entourage" so I can give him props for attempting to distance himself from that douchebag role that went on far longer than it should have.
From that character-illuminating introduction, the pic segues to an even more confrontational dinner date between Owen and his long-suffering g.f., Isabel (Angela Trimbur), who has finally had enough of his crap and informs them their relationship is over. But after Owen experiences one of his semi-regular seizures later that night and collapses outside their apartment, Isabel nurses him back to health.
At its core (heart), the film is about Owen reconciling with his scarred sister, Pearl. He won't leave the house until he gets her forgiveness, whether he deserves it or not. He cannot move on in his life without it.
Unfortunately, I don't think the filmmaker knew what genre of film he was trying to make as it goes in many different directions. Is it about religion? Family? Is it a horror film? There's too many questions and no real answers.
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"While We're Young"
starring: Naomi Watts, Ben Stiller, Adam Driver, Amanda Seyfried, Maria Dizzia, Adam Horovitz, Matthew Maher, Peter Yarrow, Dree Hemingway, Matthew Shear
written and directed by: Noah Baumbach
Noah Baumbach is written and directed some of my favorite (indie) films, starting all the way back in 1995 with "Kicking and Screaming" (which was sort of his version of "Reality Bites" with more philosophy).
The Squid and the Whale (focusing on members of a family all at a crossroads with each other and individually)
Margot at the Wedding
Greenberg (mid-life crisis)
Frances Ha (one of my favorite films- dealing with friendship and post-grad life)
And then, While We're Young, here, which merges some of his best film concepts (twentysomething lifestyle and ennui with the mid-life crises of a married couple experiencing their own ennui).
Ben Stiller (who was in "Greenberg" as well) is back as Josh (a documentarian stuck in a rut of filmmaker's writer's block) and his wife, Cornelia (Noami Watts), who is unfortunately underused as the older version of Baumbach's idea of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl/Woman. She doesn't really seem to serve much of a purpose other than as Josh's cheerleader on his road to self-discovery. Josh, himself, is invigorated as the couple develops an unlikely friendship with a twentysomethings, Jamie and Darby (Driver and Seyfried, respectively). Something is fishy from the start of their friendship, either that or I'm just cynical, having seen so many films.
Josh has blown the better part of a decade trying to finish his current nonfiction endeavor, a six-hour opus vaguely about “power in America,” while trapped under the shadow of Cornelia’s much-lauded father-in-law, Leslie (Grodin, always a welcome presence). To Josh, the newfound hipster couple’s appropriation of everything that his generation had previously disposed is endearing; when Jamie tries to rev Josh up using Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger,” Josh points out, “I remember when this song was just considered bad.” As friends their own age (Dizzia and former Beastie Boy Horovitz) find themselves consumed by domestic responsibilities, Josh and Cornelia are eager to fill that social void with walking, talking reminders of their own waning potential.
Baumbach is great at observations through his characters' eyes and with Josh (and Cornelia) there's plenty of room for reflections about the bittersweet burden of growing up and being stuck in middle age through their observations of the differing millennials' tendency to transform yesterday's nostalgia into today's hipster kitsch.
Like I said though, Watts (and Seyfried) are underused, perhaps under the lens of a masochistic point of view. It would be an interesting and completely different film written and directed by a woman and focusing on the two women characters.
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"Lavender"
starring: Abbie Cornish, Peyton Kennedy, Dermot Mulroney, Justin Long, Diego Klattenhoff, Lola Flanery, Sarah Abbott
written by: Colin Frizzell and Ed Gass-Donnelly
directed by: Ed Gass-Donnelly
There's something bold and daring about a filmmaker revealing the climax almost immediately at the beginning of the film and that's just what Ed Gass-Donnelly does with this ethereal, chilling ghost-story type of film. There's a farmhouse crime scene. There's a car accident, too.
The film has a sharp style to it, as the deep, dark secrets slowly reveal themselves to Abbie Cornish's character of trauma from her childhood that she is trying to piece back together, through the haze and aftermath of the accident she was involved in.
That process begins once Jane (Cornish) — a photographer who snaps old, abandoned homes because they feel to her like “epitaphs” of their former residents — stumbles upon a rickety abode, and can’t seem to shake its inexplicable pull. When she wrecks her vehicle in order to avoid hitting an enigmatic girl in the middle of the street, and awakens with amnesia partly attributable to a prior youthful brain injury, her recollection process begins, leading her to discover that her pre-foster care upbringing was cut short by some sort of notorious tragedy.
There's a bit of predictability in how things come to light as well as the end result, and not just because it was revealed to us at the beginning.
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"The Humbling"
starring: Al Pacino, Greta Gerwig, Dianne Wiest, Nina Arianda, Charles Grodin, Mary Louise Wilson, Dan Hedaya, Billy Porter, Li Jun Li, Kyra Sedgwick, Lance Roberts
written by: Buck Henry and Michael Zebede
directed by: Barry Levinson
This one was hard to watch, hard to follow, just difficult all around. It seems to exist thanks in large part to the success of "Birdman." It is a bizarre adaptation of a Philip Roth novel-
Probing Roth’s standard end-of-life disquiet with narrative unreliability courtesy of its senile antihero, a stage actor named Simon Axler (Al Pacino). It’s hard not to take the petite Axler, so frail and doleful, as a bluntly autobiographical creation—a suspicion further leavened by the fact that Pacino optioned Roth’s book long before Levinson came aboard. Axler struggles not just with his own career’s ossification, but the theater’s dwindling prestige at large, allowing for cutaway gags of the kids-these-days variety when the septuagenarian star pours his heart out in front of a listless, iPhone-shackled audience. After face-planting off the stage’s edge, Axler is interred at a mental hospital where he reflects, almost too readily, on the lonely ebb of his talents—but not without first asking the paramedic throttling him to the ER if his moans of pain were believable enough.
This role includes all pieces of what Al Pacino has been known for and good at, as an actor, for years- outbursts of constipated truth-telling, world-weariness impossibly crammed into the day’s every pedestrian moment, and beyond-glazed-over eyes.
For Pacino, The Humbling’s upshot may well be the chance to play a character for whom these idiosyncrasies are, for once, appropriate. Retired, doddering around his Connecticut McMansion, he strikes up a kinship with Pegeene (Greta Gerwig), the thirtysomething lesbian daughter of some old theater friends. Soon the two are sleeping together on the regular, with Pegeene commenting: “I guess this ends my 16-year mistake.” The taboo of Axler sleeping with his friends’ daughter is addressed, but the all-too-visible age difference between Pacino and Gerwig is not—and when the script, written by Buck Henry and Michal Zebede, tries mining Pegeene’s heterosexual “past” for cheap laughs, it’s downright painful. The screenplay gives Pegeene a proper, thorough examination, but the scant glimpses of her internal logic bespeak Roth’s anti-facility for writing women moreso than anything Gerwig manages bringing to the table—and that’s both a shame and a waste.
I love Greta Gerwig (and I haven't even seen Ladybird yet?!!?) and I'm not sure she was the appropriate chose for this bizarre role.
starring: Abbi Jacobson, Dave Franco, Charlotte and Madeline Carel, Jane Kaczmarek, Dawan Owens, Tim Matheson, Jen Tullock, Maya Erskine
written and directed by: Marja-Lewis Ryan
Addiction is shitty, not just for the person going through it, but also for every single person in their life. Addiction has a wide circumference of effect. It is especially hard to love an addict. This is an incredible film that really shows the pain and suffering of addiction, as the filmmaker, Ryan, dissects the relationship between brother and sister, Seth and Katie (Dave Franco and Abbi Jacobson). Seth claims he's trying to get clean, but the withdrawal is hard and Katie, who seems to enjoy being needed and rescuing her brother, enables, as it is made clear that it is equally as difficult sever ties with an addict when you love them.
There are definitely scenes that are very difficult to watch and I couldn't help thinking of one of my exes through it all, as she suffered with addiction before we met.
We meet Katie (Abbi Jacobson of “Broad City”) as she prepares for a surprise birthday party for her boyfriend. She goes to buy balloons with her mother (Jane Kaczmarek) and her father (Tim Matheson) and friends show up early to set things up. But her brother Seth (Dave Franco) and Seth’s 4-year-old daughter appear to be missing. Seth isn’t answering his phone, and a look crosses Katie’s face that tells us she knows what that means. When she gets to his apartment to bring him and Ella to the party, she sees that he hasn’t been opening his mail. As she says, “that happened last time.” Seth is a heroin addict. Seth has relapsed.
The fact that there's a 4 year old, sweet little girl involved in all this makes it even harder to watch, but it also makes it a reality. Think about all those videos you may have seen with addicts passing out in cars or at stores and their kids are right there, witnessing all of it. As sad as it is, it's happening every day. Addiction does not happen in a sweet little vacuum, and I like that this indie film was not afraid to show that. I can think of another movie that I really enjoyed back in the day (re: When a Man Loves a Woman) that exposed the same truth.
He agrees to go to detox. Katie will drive him to the clinic and he’ll get clean … again. Katie can go pick up the cake she told her friends and family she was getting, and bring her niece to the party too. Of course, this doesn’t go as planned. The first clinic won’t take his health insurance, and a 10-day detox costs $5,000. And then Seth’s body/addiction starts revolting against him.
As the party that Katie planned goes on without her, Ryan plays self-help audio over the arc of Katie and Seth, almost like chapter breaks. The self-help audio uses the analogy of a sinking boat, and it feels manipulative and on-the-nose at first, but really works in the final act of her film. It’s incredibly powerful stuff.
The self-help audio was the only thing that I could have done without, but as the film approached its finally act, that tied everything together nicely with the self-help audio.
This is absolutely one film to watch.
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"Night Owls"
starring: Adam Pally, Rosa Salazar, Rob Huebel, Tony Hale, Peter Krause
written by: Seth Goldsmith and Charles Hood
directed by: Charles Hood
Here is another film that is quite formulaic, makes it well known from the very beginning, and then does not deviate from that formula throughout. And it works pretty well. Like most rom-coms, except this one has a bit of a twist, I guess.
1. Two wasted people, Kevin (Adam Pally) and Madeline (Rosa Salazar), meet in a bar and stumble to her house to have drunken sex.
2. The morning after, Kevin finds out, horrified, that the house is not Madeline's house at all, but the house of his boss (and mentor), a revered and very married football coach at the local college. Kevin realizes that he has inadvertently broken into his boss' house and had sex in his boss' marital bed.
3. Meanwhile, upstairs, Madeline swallows a bottle of pills and nearly overdoses.
4. Kevin, in a panic, calls the Assistant Coach who orders Kevin not to call 911 (to avoid scandal for the football program) and tells Kevin not to the let the girl—who has supposedly been stalking the coach and threatening to go to the press about the affair—leave until Assistant Coach can get there by morning to do some damage control.
5. Kevin obeys. Hence: he and Madeline must spend the next 12 hours in that house.
2. The morning after, Kevin finds out, horrified, that the house is not Madeline's house at all, but the house of his boss (and mentor), a revered and very married football coach at the local college. Kevin realizes that he has inadvertently broken into his boss' house and had sex in his boss' marital bed.
3. Meanwhile, upstairs, Madeline swallows a bottle of pills and nearly overdoses.
4. Kevin, in a panic, calls the Assistant Coach who orders Kevin not to call 911 (to avoid scandal for the football program) and tells Kevin not to the let the girl—who has supposedly been stalking the coach and threatening to go to the press about the affair—leave until Assistant Coach can get there by morning to do some damage control.
5. Kevin obeys. Hence: he and Madeline must spend the next 12 hours in that house.
12 hours follow, in which the two fight like cats and dogs, play darts, eat food, fight again, but maybe also ... start to like each other.
The gift of this filmmaker and screenwriter can be found in the rhythmic conversation the two people have throughout their time together. They clearly do not like each other after the sexual encounter. Regret sinks in. But then, Kevin realizes Madeline has some deeper things going on and that she is wounded person, and he is as well; and that perhaps they can help heal each other. Aside from the conversation, this is a new kind of slapstick/screwball comedy and both actors are up for the task.
Screwballs feature cranky, nerdy men whose dignity is ripped away by wisecracking Dames of Mayhem, but somehow the nerds start to like it. "Night Owls" has this sensibility running underneath it, the script understands it, and Hood knows how to film it. Actors Adam Pally and Rosa Salazar, who carry the entire film, are not just game for this kind of material, they feel born to it. Their dynamic sparks all over the place. They don't just have romantic chemistry, they have that much rarer kind: the chemistry of conversation.
The film works as a whole, and perhaps because of the parts/pieces. It has many funny moments and keeps your attach the whole time, even though some of the transitions comes across as clunky and like the movie could naturally end, yet Kevin keeps coming back for more (obviously because he starts to like Madeline and wants her company, if not only because he himself does not want to be alone).
I could even see this story performed on a stage, as most of it takes place in one location and the story is really dialogue driven, which would translate onto the stage really well.
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"Before I Wake"
starring: Kate Bosworth, Thomas Jane, Jacob Tremblay, Annabeth Gish, Topher Bousquet, Dash Mihok, Jay Karnes, Lance E. Nichols, Kyla Deaver, Hunter Wenzel
written and directed by: Mike Flanagan
Writer/director Mike Flanagan is certainly making a name for himself as this generation's horror go-to filmmaker, especially perhaps in Netflix's eyes, as he's done a few projects for them now (including this one, that sat on the shelf since 2015) with the Stephen King-based "Gerald's Game" (which was apparently his dream project), the incredible "Hush" film (see it, if you have not), and now he's working on a horror series- "The Haunting of Hill House." He's also made other horror films, prior to his connection with Netflix (re: Oculus and Oujia). Through all his work, you can clearly see the Stephen King influence, as he wears it on his sleeve and does not make apologies for it (nor should he).
This unfolds a lot like a King short story with its focus on grief and lessons about being careful what you wish for. Clearly inspired by the author, “Before I Wake” is evidence of a young horror voice working through ideas that one would have called promising three years ago—a promise Flanagan has already fulfilled for most. He’s a filmmaker interested in human emotions and reactions more than he is things that go bump in the night.
The opening scene is a great prologue: A man (Dash Mihok) nervously watches a boy sleeping. The man pulls a gun on the child, clearly terrified. What would make a man almost kill a young boy? He can’t do it, and we cut to the boy being adopted by Mark and Jessie Hobson (Thomas Jane & Kate Bosworth), a couple who we learn has not long ago lost their own son in a tragic drowning. The boy is named Cody (Jacob Tremblay), and he’s, well, special.
After Cody has gone to sleep one night, Mark and Jessie see brightly colored butterflies around their living room. Mark goes to capture one, only to have it disappear as Cody wakes. Yes, Cody can manifest his dreams. Rather than turn this into a pure boogeyman tale, Flanagan channels the grief of parents who have lost a child through his concept when Cody “manifests” Mark and Jessie’s dead son. What if someone could give you one more chance to see, touch, and even hear someone you’ve lost? Of course, it comes with a hitch—kids have nightmares too, and Cody’s are of a monstrous creation he calls “The Canker Man.”
This is not a jump-scare type of horror movie, which I've really come to appreciate about Stephen King while I've been reading all of his works/novels. He is more interested in the psychological terror inflicted upon people. (And sometimes that's what the film adaptations get really wrong or completely miss the mark on). Flanagan weaves in the emotional themes very well, especially with how he chooses to reveal the origin of "The Canker Man." He also does a great job getting the best out of Kate Bosworth, who's been around Hollywood for awhile now and is perhaps underrated as an actress, as she really pulls out all the stops conveying grief, anxiety, fear, and hope from this mother.The ending comes together nicely, wrapping things together with an emotional bow and definitely makes you think.
I honestly was not expecting much from this film, but it really surprised me.
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"Una"
starring: Rooney Mara, Ruby Stokes, Ben Mendelsohn, Tara Fitzgerald, Riz Ahmed
written by: David Harrower (based on his play "Blackbird")
directed by: Benedict Andrews
This is one of those "Holy shit!" "I'm uncomfortable" type of films, in the same vein as Nabakov's "Lolita" (perhaps especially not just the book, but the Jeremy Irons/Dominique Swain film version in the late '90s that I absolutely loved and watched over and over).
It’s a harrowing tale, adapted from playwright David Harrower’s much lauded play Blackbird, about Ray (Mendelsohn), a man who seduced his 13-year-old neighbor 15 years prior, went to prison for four years, and then vanished under a new name, in a new town, with a new life, wife, and daughter, far away from his reprehensible past. Mara is Una, his pedophiliac prey, all grown up now, but still living in her mother’s house, in a bedroom that hasn’t changed since Ray first told her “I love you.” One day she comes across a photo of predator Ray – now called Peter and working in middle management at a small corporation – and decides to confront him, thus giving voice to the long unspoken darknesses that have been suppurating inside her shattered psyche. Una is broken, damaged, incomplete, and a reckoning is due and will be duly paid.
I'm convinced that Rooney Mara is heading for a great, long career, which started out slow but seemed to really hit its mark with "The Social Network" (even though she played the slighted, bitchy girlfriend that basically started the Facebook empire from breaking up with Mark Z.). I wanted "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" to be way better and grittier, but unfortunately it had huge expectations to live up to (with a foreign film version already done, and well), because the trilogy was an incredible read. It's hard to translate and interpret such well written material on condense it into a Hollywood film.
For more evidence of Rooney's acting skills:
Ain't Them Bodies Saints
Side Effects
Her
Carol
Lion
Mara is exceptional as a woman trapped in the past and confounded by the present. We first see her on the dance floor at a nightclub, where she engages in grotesquely anonymous rough sex in the bathroom, a foreshadowing of more treacherous liaisons to come. Wearing a preternaturally calm, sometimes dazed expression throughout, Mara brilliantly embodies both helpless victim and potential powder keg. She’s completely compelling, a wounded child-woman that just might bite back, finally.
Having been staged as a play first and foremost, and perhaps because the first-time director was a theatre director before this allows him to really showcase not just his talents as a director (really focusing the camera on the two characters throughout the confrontational moments), but also really making the words a singular character as well. This was such an incredible film for capturing the emotional scars of Una. It really has an affect on you, as a viewer, especially in the age of the #MeToo movement and the exposing of truths and seeking justice for wrongs done, perhaps not financially (because no amount of money can erase the pain inflicted), but justice in that the abuser will not and cannot hide from the facts any longer. The abuser must live with the damage inflicted just as much as the abused and that's what is made evidently clear with this story.
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"Trash Fire"
starring: Adrian Grenier, Angela Trimbur, Fionnula Flanagan, AnnaLynne McCord, Sally Kirkland, Matthew Gray Gubler, Ezra Buzzington, Molly McCook
written and directed by: Richard Bates Jr.
This is one of those films that you don't really know what you're going to get when it starts. It's trying to be one of those dark black-comedies, but the lead character is just so damn unlikeable from the very beginning that you just don't care about him at all, which makes watching the rest hard to do, because the outcome doesn't really matter to you, other than you don't really root for him or want him to get what he obviously does not deserve (re: the girlfriend). This is definitely a character miles away from Grenier's character on "Entourage" so I can give him props for attempting to distance himself from that douchebag role that went on far longer than it should have.
From that character-illuminating introduction, the pic segues to an even more confrontational dinner date between Owen and his long-suffering g.f., Isabel (Angela Trimbur), who has finally had enough of his crap and informs them their relationship is over. But after Owen experiences one of his semi-regular seizures later that night and collapses outside their apartment, Isabel nurses him back to health.
Isabel discovers she’s pregnant. After Owen bluntly tells her to have an abortion, they somehow reconcile and Isabel lays down a few ground rules before they become a family. Top of the list: She wants to meet his sister and grandmother, who he has been out of touch with for years despite the fact they’re the only family he has left.
Ignoring Owen’s warnings that they’re even worse people than he is, Isabel gets her way and the couple make a long commute to a remote small town where Owen’s puritanical grandmother (Fionnula Flanagan) keeps his physically and emotionally scarred sister, Pearl (AnnaLynne McCord), locked away in her bedroom. Or maybe the younger woman has retreated there by choice, as Isabel quickly discovers Owen’s grandmother is the embodiment of holier-than-thou religious hypocrisy.
At its core (heart), the film is about Owen reconciling with his scarred sister, Pearl. He won't leave the house until he gets her forgiveness, whether he deserves it or not. He cannot move on in his life without it.
Unfortunately, I don't think the filmmaker knew what genre of film he was trying to make as it goes in many different directions. Is it about religion? Family? Is it a horror film? There's too many questions and no real answers.
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"While We're Young"
starring: Naomi Watts, Ben Stiller, Adam Driver, Amanda Seyfried, Maria Dizzia, Adam Horovitz, Matthew Maher, Peter Yarrow, Dree Hemingway, Matthew Shear
written and directed by: Noah Baumbach
Noah Baumbach is written and directed some of my favorite (indie) films, starting all the way back in 1995 with "Kicking and Screaming" (which was sort of his version of "Reality Bites" with more philosophy).
The Squid and the Whale (focusing on members of a family all at a crossroads with each other and individually)
Margot at the Wedding
Greenberg (mid-life crisis)
Frances Ha (one of my favorite films- dealing with friendship and post-grad life)
And then, While We're Young, here, which merges some of his best film concepts (twentysomething lifestyle and ennui with the mid-life crises of a married couple experiencing their own ennui).
Ben Stiller (who was in "Greenberg" as well) is back as Josh (a documentarian stuck in a rut of filmmaker's writer's block) and his wife, Cornelia (Noami Watts), who is unfortunately underused as the older version of Baumbach's idea of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl/Woman. She doesn't really seem to serve much of a purpose other than as Josh's cheerleader on his road to self-discovery. Josh, himself, is invigorated as the couple develops an unlikely friendship with a twentysomethings, Jamie and Darby (Driver and Seyfried, respectively). Something is fishy from the start of their friendship, either that or I'm just cynical, having seen so many films.
Josh has blown the better part of a decade trying to finish his current nonfiction endeavor, a six-hour opus vaguely about “power in America,” while trapped under the shadow of Cornelia’s much-lauded father-in-law, Leslie (Grodin, always a welcome presence). To Josh, the newfound hipster couple’s appropriation of everything that his generation had previously disposed is endearing; when Jamie tries to rev Josh up using Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger,” Josh points out, “I remember when this song was just considered bad.” As friends their own age (Dizzia and former Beastie Boy Horovitz) find themselves consumed by domestic responsibilities, Josh and Cornelia are eager to fill that social void with walking, talking reminders of their own waning potential.
Baumbach is great at observations through his characters' eyes and with Josh (and Cornelia) there's plenty of room for reflections about the bittersweet burden of growing up and being stuck in middle age through their observations of the differing millennials' tendency to transform yesterday's nostalgia into today's hipster kitsch.
Like I said though, Watts (and Seyfried) are underused, perhaps under the lens of a masochistic point of view. It would be an interesting and completely different film written and directed by a woman and focusing on the two women characters.
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"Lavender"
starring: Abbie Cornish, Peyton Kennedy, Dermot Mulroney, Justin Long, Diego Klattenhoff, Lola Flanery, Sarah Abbott
written by: Colin Frizzell and Ed Gass-Donnelly
directed by: Ed Gass-Donnelly
There's something bold and daring about a filmmaker revealing the climax almost immediately at the beginning of the film and that's just what Ed Gass-Donnelly does with this ethereal, chilling ghost-story type of film. There's a farmhouse crime scene. There's a car accident, too.
The film has a sharp style to it, as the deep, dark secrets slowly reveal themselves to Abbie Cornish's character of trauma from her childhood that she is trying to piece back together, through the haze and aftermath of the accident she was involved in.
That process begins once Jane (Cornish) — a photographer who snaps old, abandoned homes because they feel to her like “epitaphs” of their former residents — stumbles upon a rickety abode, and can’t seem to shake its inexplicable pull. When she wrecks her vehicle in order to avoid hitting an enigmatic girl in the middle of the street, and awakens with amnesia partly attributable to a prior youthful brain injury, her recollection process begins, leading her to discover that her pre-foster care upbringing was cut short by some sort of notorious tragedy.
Jane’s “fuzzy” mental state puts a further strain on her marriage to grouchy Alan (Diego Klattenhoff) and her relationship with daughter Alice (Lola Flanery), and is treated by psychologist Liam (Justin Long), who counsels that her condition might “really stimulate some repressed memories.” That it does, and in initially beguiling form, as Jane is soon receiving wrapped packages full of mystifying items (keys, razors, ballerina figurines), as well as spying a young girl who delivers hushed warnings before running away. A
fter Jane learns that she actually owns the house from her photograph — and that her uncle Patrick (Dermot Mulroney) has been caring for it for the past 25 years — she follows Liam’s advice and takes a visit to the old homestead, along the way making a pit stop at a local fair where she gets lost in the type of disorienting, claustrophobic maze (here made of hay) that’s been a horror staple since Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.”
There's a bit of predictability in how things come to light as well as the end result, and not just because it was revealed to us at the beginning.
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"The Humbling"
starring: Al Pacino, Greta Gerwig, Dianne Wiest, Nina Arianda, Charles Grodin, Mary Louise Wilson, Dan Hedaya, Billy Porter, Li Jun Li, Kyra Sedgwick, Lance Roberts
written by: Buck Henry and Michael Zebede
directed by: Barry Levinson
This one was hard to watch, hard to follow, just difficult all around. It seems to exist thanks in large part to the success of "Birdman." It is a bizarre adaptation of a Philip Roth novel-
Probing Roth’s standard end-of-life disquiet with narrative unreliability courtesy of its senile antihero, a stage actor named Simon Axler (Al Pacino). It’s hard not to take the petite Axler, so frail and doleful, as a bluntly autobiographical creation—a suspicion further leavened by the fact that Pacino optioned Roth’s book long before Levinson came aboard. Axler struggles not just with his own career’s ossification, but the theater’s dwindling prestige at large, allowing for cutaway gags of the kids-these-days variety when the septuagenarian star pours his heart out in front of a listless, iPhone-shackled audience. After face-planting off the stage’s edge, Axler is interred at a mental hospital where he reflects, almost too readily, on the lonely ebb of his talents—but not without first asking the paramedic throttling him to the ER if his moans of pain were believable enough.
This role includes all pieces of what Al Pacino has been known for and good at, as an actor, for years- outbursts of constipated truth-telling, world-weariness impossibly crammed into the day’s every pedestrian moment, and beyond-glazed-over eyes.
For Pacino, The Humbling’s upshot may well be the chance to play a character for whom these idiosyncrasies are, for once, appropriate. Retired, doddering around his Connecticut McMansion, he strikes up a kinship with Pegeene (Greta Gerwig), the thirtysomething lesbian daughter of some old theater friends. Soon the two are sleeping together on the regular, with Pegeene commenting: “I guess this ends my 16-year mistake.” The taboo of Axler sleeping with his friends’ daughter is addressed, but the all-too-visible age difference between Pacino and Gerwig is not—and when the script, written by Buck Henry and Michal Zebede, tries mining Pegeene’s heterosexual “past” for cheap laughs, it’s downright painful. The screenplay gives Pegeene a proper, thorough examination, but the scant glimpses of her internal logic bespeak Roth’s anti-facility for writing women moreso than anything Gerwig manages bringing to the table—and that’s both a shame and a waste.
I love Greta Gerwig (and I haven't even seen Ladybird yet?!!?) and I'm not sure she was the appropriate chose for this bizarre role.
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