Welcome to Marwen: Robert Zemeckis

To read this review, go to: https://www.theyoungfolks.com/film/128129/welcome-to-marwen-movie-review-an-embarrassing-disaster-all-around/.

Rating: 4/10

The Quake: John Andreas Andersen

To read this review, go to: https://www.theyoungfolks.com/review/127732/the-quake-movie-review-norways-new-disaster-film-barely-registers-on-the-richter-scale/.

Rating: 4/10

Season of the Witch: George A. Romero

The first thing you notice watching George A. Romero's Season of the Witch is how central the rapid-fire editing is. More than any of Romero's other films, the editing seems to be the central artistic crux of the film, disassociating the images into sharpened fragments that predict the climactic montages in Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). It's fascinating to watch and actually makes one look past the dime-store campiness of the props and sets (including a grimoire simply titled something like "Becoming a Witch: A Primer") as its hallucinatory dreaminess imbues everything with a veneer of deliberate artificiality. The problem here is that the interesting bits make up maybe a third of the film. The rest are soul-crushingly tedious scenes of people sitting around in bedrooms and livings rooms talking about this and that, having sex, and smoking pot. And trust me, none of that is as interesting as one would expect from an almost-exploitation film from the early 70s.

Rating: 4/10

Grass: Sang-soo Hong

To read this review, go to: http://www.unseenfilms.net/2018/10/nate-hood-takes-in-grass-2018-nyff-2018.html.

Rating: 4/10

Violence Voyager: Ujicha

To read this review, go to: http://www.unseenfilms.net/2018/07/nate-hood-wants-no-part-of-violence.html.

Rating: 4/10

Action Point: Tim Kirkby

Traditional stunt work, much like traditional special effects, is quickly becoming a thing of Hollywood’s past. Not that there isn’t a demand for stunt performers in modern American blockbusters, but the days of stunts uncluttered by computer animation, obnoxious editing, and shaky-cam hysterics seem bygone and forgotten. Now Melissa McCartney and Kevin James can hardly make a pratfall in a trailer without a CGI assist, nor can a fistfight between superheroes go uninterrupted without a camera zooming around them like a hyperactive Peregrine falcon. (I’ll always consider the Russo Brothers’ decision to mince the elevator fight scene in Captain America: Winter Soldier [2014] into a thousand micro-edited close-ups instead of a single static long-take one of the most tragic creative miscalculations of 2010s cinema.) All of this is what makes the stunt-work in Tim Kirkby’s Action Point so refreshing—when we see Johnny Knoxville fall two stories out of a tree, bounce off an aluminum ceiling, and smash into the ground next to a pissed off brown bear, we know it actually happened. Likewise when we watch him grab a porcupine by the tail, go flying off an alpine slide, or get trebucheted into the side of a barn, we know that we’re watching undoctored footage of America’s great idiot savant of practical stunt-work. The problem is that Action Point made the tragic mistake of trying to tell an actual story with actual characters and actual emotions, breaking apart the action scenes into islands scattered amidst a sea of boring, predictable tedium.

Knoxville plays D.C., the owner of the eponymous money pit theme park in some nondescript part of 70s California populated solely by teenagers and alcoholic layabouts. In the course of the film he reconnects with his estranged daughter Boogie (Eleanor Worthington Cox), fights off the encroachment of a rival theme park, sticks it to The Man trying to shut them down and buy them out, and learns to be a respectable father. Whatever. Every story beat is predictable, right down to D.C. and his brother Benny (fellow Jackass alumni Chris Pontius) getting super nervous and weirded out by the revelation that Boogie is a teenager with periods and a purse full of tampons. Action Point could have been a brilliant Jackass reunion. Consider this: Knoxville and his buddies spend 90 minutes fixing up a dilapidated theme park, devoting 5-10 minutes to sequences where they get into all kinds of hilarious hijinks trying to restore different attractions. And if properly handled the actual story could have been genuinely poignant: there’s an underlying wistfulness throughout, a kind of realization by Knoxville & Co. that it isn’t the early 2000s anymore and there isn’t really a place for their weaponized puerility in today’s culture. Action Point NEEDS to close down, and not because of buzzkill lawyers and nanny state politicians, but because Action Point is in itself an idea retarding the mental and emotional growth of its owners and customers. Instead we have this monumental disappointment. And the final insult? All the best stunts in the film were already shown in the trailer.

Rating: 4/10

Manhunt: John Woo

Watching MANHUNT (2017).

What's this? An opening where two characters talk wistfully about classic movies before an old school shoot-out?

Okay...I see you, John Woo. I see you.

— Nathanael Hood (@NateHood257) May 5, 2018

Who shot this film? It looks like it was done by a film student with a GoPro, a Steadcam, and a six-pack of Red Bull. The editing isn't much better, either.

— Nathanael Hood (@NateHood257) May 5, 2018

Ya know, for a corporate lawyer, this Du Qiu guy sure knows his way around a high speed jet-ski chase/mixed martial arts fight.

— Nathanael Hood (@NateHood257) May 5, 2018

Is it weird that I think the best part of this film was the nepotism? Angeles Woo was FANTASTIC.

— Nathanael Hood (@NateHood257) May 5, 2018

Rating: 4/10

Dead Women Walking: Hagar Ben-Asher

To read this review, go to: https://www.theyoungfolks.com/review/119670/tribeca-2018-movie-review-dead-women-walking/.

4/10

Ragtime: Miloš Forman

#NowWatching #RIPMilosForman pic.twitter.com/QPpOoDWP9B

— Nathanael Hood (@NateHood257) April 14, 2018

I can't believe it's taken me this long to watch this movie. E. L. Doctorow's novel is literally one of my favorite books of all time.

— Nathanael Hood (@NateHood257) April 14, 2018

This is probably a very mean thing to say, but Elizabeth McGovern is to this movie what Sofia Coppola was to THE GODFATHER THREE. Yeesh...

— Nathanael Hood (@NateHood257) April 15, 2018

And I know the scope of the novel is large, but this movie is too fragmented. For instance, they barely establish Younger Brother's obsession with Evelyn before BAM!! They're in a relationship.

— Nathanael Hood (@NateHood257) April 15, 2018

The film focuses too much on individual plot points as literal surface dramas, not as metaphorical parables set among the grand sweep of time. Doctorow made us believe we were getting fragmented glimpses of a greater narrative, that of America ascendant as a modern nation.

— Nathanael Hood (@NateHood257) April 15, 2018

Rating: 4/10

Mister Lonely: Harmony Korine

Hmm. It seems I have nothing to do tonight. I think I'll watch Harmony Korine's MISTER LONELY (2007).

— Nathanael Hood (@NateHood257) April 13, 2018

Please please please tell me the rest of this film is just Werner Herzog having priestly adventures.

— Nathanael Hood (@NateHood257) April 13, 2018

There's no way Korine DIDN'T create this parachuting nun subplot on the fly when Herzog told him he'd be in the film.

"What? Herzog agreed to this one too? Uh...uh...get me a plane in Africa, a priest's robe, and a bunch of nuns! It'll make sense in post, I promise! I think..."

— Nathanael Hood (@NateHood257) April 13, 2018

Okay, so, this movie doesn't really work. But moments like the one where the impersonators mourn the culling of the sick sheep are transcendent.

— Nathanael Hood (@NateHood257) April 13, 2018

I THINK I know what Korine was going for with the juxtaposition of the impersonators and the nuns: people living their eccentric truths through acts of blind faith, one group succeeding one group failing.

— Nathanael Hood (@NateHood257) April 13, 2018

But I dunno, the whole thing just fails to coalesce.

— Nathanael Hood (@NateHood257) April 13, 2018

Rating: 4/10

7 Guardians of the Tomb: Kimble Rendall

To read this review, go to: https://www.theyoungfolks.com/review/116990/7-guardians-of-the-tomb-movie-review-one-redeeming-moment-cant-save-this-misfire/.

4/10

Wild Bill: Walter Hill

To read this review, go to: https://www.rogerebert.com/balder-and-dash/clint-eastwoods-accidental-heroes.

4/10

Crazy Famous: Paul Jarrett

This piece was written and filed before the announcement of Audiences Everywhere's untimely demise. So I'm posting it here in its entirety.

Overview: A fame-seeking mental patient gets pulled into a clandestine plan to assassinate Osama Bin Laden…in 2017. Gravitas Ventures; 2017; Not Yet Rated; 78 minutes.

Smile for the Cameras: Paul Jarrett’s Crazy Famous opens with a scene of a mentally compromised young man stripping to his tighty-whities and gleefully trampolining over a fence into Camp David. It ends with a scene of the same mentally comprised young man gunning down a small army of Islamic terrorists in the woods alongside Dr. Phil in brownface. The first scene is played for laughs. The second is not. Great filmmaking can bridge the gap between outlandish tonal differences and hyper-violent absurdism. As I like to remind our readers, the Coen Brothers have spent their careers doing just that. But Crazy Famous lacks the necessary vision to make such films work. As such, Jarrett’s film stumbles about as confused and incoherent as the very mental patients it populates itself with.

This Ain’t the Salem State Hospital: At first Crazy Famous seems like an introspective character study of Bob Markus (Gregory Lay), a young man obsessed with becoming famous. Deliciously awkward scenes from his troubled youth reveal an oppressive upbringing by fame-crazed parents. His father tried to make him a sports star, his mother a child actor. He even had a disastrous stint as a competitive eater in high school. Somewhere along the way he figured out that fame and notoriety were the same thing, so he began a string of preposterous attention-grabbing stunts climaxing in the Camp David fiasco. After getting arrested, Bob’s shipped off to a mental institution where he falls in with an assorted gaggle of misfits and morons: Larry (Victor Cruz), a rage-junkie with a short temper, an eating disorder, and a laundry list of crippling neuroses like agoraphobia; “Dr. Phil” (David Neal Levin), a cheery fellow who believes he’s the eponymous television star and waddles around the psyche ward bestowing pop-psychology drivel; a suicidal young woman so inconsequential I’m not even sure she has a name who spouts off bizarre bon mots like a disaffected middle schooler going through her goth phase. (When she learns Bob’s name she replies “You’re a palindrome? Talk about karma.” Wait, what?); Mr. Smith (Richard Short), a nervous conspiracy theorist who believes the CIA is lying about Bin Laden’s death and personally knows his actual location. Spoiler alert: he’s right, he’s been institutionalized by other agents, and he organizes a break-out with the other inmates—except for the suicidal woman—so they can hunt Bin Laden down. Who of course now lives in a log cabin in…I’m gonna guess the Appalachian Mountains or the Adirondacks.

From there the film decays from character study to unfocused procession of comedic set-pieces and poorly executed action scenes. Mr Smith gets tortured by CIA agents, Larry gets a face-full of Dr. Phil penis as they try to climb into the hospital’s air ducts, the gang robs a gun store, Dr. Phil gets painted brown so he can infiltrate Bin Laden’s base, a car chase gets resolved when Mr. Smith discovers the car he’s squirreled away for his escape has a James Bond oil-slick button. These scenes don’t flow together, but even worse the more you think about them the less they make sense. If Mr. Smith wants to kill Bin Laden, why wouldn’t he tell the CIA where he actually is? Why does robbing a gun store for a small army’s worth of firearms not result in the National Guard getting called on them? And what on earth is Bin Laden doing in the Appalachian/Adirondacks? The film has little interest in these obvious questions; it’s more interested in how its characters respond to them. However—with the exception of Levin’s turn as Dr. Phil, a character who’s so obliviously stupid he’s actually enjoyable—none of the other characters are interesting enough for us to want to follow them. Bob starts the film as a fascinating, damaged human being but by the end he’s been pushed to the periphery in favor of Mission Impossible shenanigans.

Closing: The more one thinks about Crazy Famous, the more frustrated one becomes at it. What was it trying to do? Was it trying to be a commentary on America’s obsession with fame? Was it trying to be a silly road-trip movie featuring mental patients? Was it trying to be an irreverent spy thriller? Perhaps Jarrett was trying to do all these things at once. And in doing so it becomes none of them. All we’re left with is a strange, nonsensical plot and mental patient minstrelsy.

Grade: D

Brave New Jersey: Jody Lambert

In making a film about one of the most notorious mass panics in American history, one of the most important things to get right is the tone. Sure, it might seem silly now, but when Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds hit the airwaves on October 30, 1938, it scalded a frayed nerve that had tormented the American public for years: the fear of invasion. Fascists in Japan and Italy had already steamrolled their way through large swathes of Manchuria and Africa. Russia had been overtaken by a a brutal band of Communists. And a Bavarian madman named Adolf Hitler was casting a long, horrific shadow over the rest of Europe. It didn’t matter that the invaders they heard described on the radio were tripod-piloting, heat-ray welding Martians—they were the Foreign Enemy made manifest. And some rural communities, particularly those near the Martians’ supposed landing ground in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, experienced near cataclysmic panic. Here we see hints of the international paranoia that would define post-World War Two American culture: the anxieties of the Cold War; the fear of atomic annihilation. And yet in Jody Lambert’s Brave New Jersey, a film which claims to tell the true story of what happened in the isolated New Jersey community of Lullaby, the entire debacle is portrayed as an occasionally serious yet essentially light-hearted romp. It seeks to inspire, not indict; to entertain, not explain. It climaxes with a hodgepodge of residents charging blindly into a fog-filled meadow in slow-motion while uplifting music swells in the background, informing us that each of these men and women have committed themselves to bravely charge the unknown! To respond to uncertainty with confidence! To fear with courage!

It’s magnificently miscalculated. If the acting was just a little worse, the writing a little more hackneyed, the director a little less competent, Brave New Jersey could have been a so-bad-it’s-good classic. But there’s too much talent propelling this misfire forward. It arrives finally at mere mediocrity.

Consider all the cliched character archetypes introduced by the film to bounce off each other in the second and third acts. There’s the nebbish, nervous mayor Clark Hill (Tony Hale), a man who somehow got elected into office without the aid of any discernible charisma or spine. There’s the surly, disillusioned preacher Ray Rogers (Dan Bakkedahl) whose Dark Night of the Soul is broken by the “invasion,” spurring him to form the beginnings of a cult that views the Martians as God-sent messengers of peace. There’s Ann Davison (Grace Kaufman), a little girl thrust into the center of the madness after she’s locked up with the rest of the town’s children—including her Polish refugee cousin Ziggy (Harp Sandman)—when the panic first hits. And there are many others, none any more memorable, none any more significant. And when these characters start dropping F-bombs, the film’s aw-shucks veneer shatters so entirely we wonder why Lambert attempted such bland, Lifetime Original Movie pretensions in the first place.

Rating: 4/10

The Convent: Manoel de Oliveira

Thank goodness for small mercies. I was originally supposed to write a full 1,200 word article on Manoel de Oliveira's The Convent for a prominent site. But they changed their minds and told me not to bother. And honestly, I couldn't be happier. This was a dreadful, slow, boring, plodding film. Catherine Deneuve and John Malkovich go to an old Portuguese monastery and get tempted by a caretaker who's basically Mephistopheles. I know this because the film straight up tells us that's what he is. This movie was interminable--obnoxiously literary, it couldn't go three minutes without referencing some great work of literature, turning to the camera, and winking. Ghastly stuff.

4/10

Saturday the 14th: Howard R. Cohen

I went into Howard R. Cohen's Saturday the 14th looking for a campy, dumb parody of slasher movies. What I got was a campy, dumb, thoroughly boring parody of the Universal Monsters series. The story: a family moves into a house containing a book with the power to end the world, Count Dracula wants to get the book first, shenanigans ensue. There are many, many scenes of characters being idiotically oblivious to things behind their backs or in their peripheral vision. What are they? Silent film comedians? And what's with all the scenes with the pubescent teenage daughter stripped naked in the bathtub? There were a number of shots that were...uncomfortable to watch. That poor actress....

4/10

Love Torn in a Dream: Raúl Ruiz

If there's one film Raúl Ruiz's Love Torn in a Dream reminds me of, it's Robert Altman's A Wedding (1978). Both films see the various excesses of their respective directors cranked up to such absurd levels that they collapse in on themselves: A Wedding has something like two dozen primary characters all with their own storylines crammed into a gasping two hour run-time; Love Torn in a Dream takes its meta-narrative involving nine concurrent, overlapping storylines to such extremes that after a time we give up trying to figure out what's going on or what Ruiz is trying to say. At some point you can't help but feel that Ruiz is pulling the wool over our eyes and simply trying to prove how much more clever he is than us.

4/10

The Dark Tower: Nikolaj Arcel

Why bother making a Dark Tower movie if you're not going to bother making it about Stephen King's The Dark Tower series? Seriously! I don't understand the logic behind Nikolaj Arcel's new movie: it has the characters of The Dark Tower, the settings of The Dark Tower, and even some of the conflicts of The Dark Tower. And yet it's not The Dark Tower. It's practically a brand new story that has nothing to do with the beloved novels. It'd be one thing if the movie was in any way compelling, but other than the inspired casting of Matthew McConaughey as Walter o'Dim, there really isn't much about this film that's worth watching. The action scenes are dull, Roland is bizarrely uncompelling--I blame the fact that he gets maybe 30-40 minutes of screentime in the whole damn thing, and the portrayal of o'Dim is so off the mark that it's almost not him. I can't imagine o'Dim, or should I say Randall Flagg, ever being at the helm of a giant technological science center. On the other hand, I can totally buy him wearing an apron as he casually cooks chicken in the house of one of his soon-to-be victims.

4/10

Smart Woman: Gregory La Cava

To read this review, go to: http://theretroset.com/unscrewing-the-screwball-smart-woman-and-the-richest-girl-in-the-world/.

4/10

Killing Ground: Damien Power

To read this review, go to: https://www.theyoungfolks.com/review/107126/movie-review-killing-ground/.

4/10