Movie Review: Maggie

Maggie
Directed by: Henry Hobson.
Written by: John Scott 3.
Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger (Wade), Abigail Breslin (Maggie), Joely Richardson (Caroline), Laura Cayouette (Linda), Amy Brassette (Lauretta), Denise Williamson (Barbara), J.D. Evermore (Holt), Raeden Greer (Allie), Aiden Flowers (Bobby), Taylor Murphy (Candace).
Arnold Schwarzenegger is a better actor that he gets credit for. Sure, he may not have the greatest range in the world

– but in his wheelhouse there are few actors in movie history better at what he does than him. There is also a little bit of range in his performances, which are trickier than many think. Playing Conan the Barbarian or The Terminator may seem easy – but playing roles like that have led to awful performances from other actors. Arnold has always been charming and likable – he looks like He-Man, but he’s still relatable and funny. He came along at the perfect moment for an actor like him to become an action star – and I’ve always preferred him to the like of Stallone and others. He has made (more) than his fair share of crap, but rarely do I think Arnold is the problem in one of his movies.

His latest, Maggie, probably seems like a little bit of a stunt – both for Arnold and the movie itself. This isn’t a big budgeted action movie – but a small, character driven movie. Yes, it’s a zombie movie, but like many zombie movies its more interested in using as zombies as a metaphor for something else rather than being full of straight up zombie killing action. The whole movie hinges on whether or not Arnold, who we have seen killed literally thousands of people during his action career, can bring himself to kill one person – his daughter – before she puts not only his life, but the lives of many others, in jeopardy.

The movie takes place as the zombie outbreak is slowly being gotten under control. No, there is no cure – if you’re bit, you’re going to turn into a zombie, and you will die, but humans have done a good job at quarantining the victims, and protecting the uninfected. The twist here is simple – it takes 8 weeks or so for someone bitten to turn. In what is probably not the brightest decision in human history – but a humane one – they let the infected spend that time with their families. When the time is up, they are to be turned back over to quarantine – where they will handle it, they say humanely, but no one is buying it. Arnold plays Wade, a mid-Western farmer (and no, I don’t think they explain the accent), who teenage daughter, Maggie (Abigail Breslin), ran off a while ago – and he’s finally able to track her down and bring her home. But yes, she has been bitten, and will turn. Wade sends his younger children, from his second wife Caroline (Joely Richardson) away while Maggie comes home to protect them. Caroline stays behind – she married Wade after he became a widower, and loves Caroline. The local doctor tells Wade that it would be kinder to end Maggie’s life instead of sending her to quarantine. The local Sheriff is sympathetic – his deputy, not so much – but has a town to look after. They will be keeping tabs on Maggie.

Schwarzenegger and Breslin are both excellent in the movie. Arnold spends his time walking around not unlike a zombie himself – he is sad and depressed about what is happening to Maggie. He’s her father – he promised his late wife he would look after her daughter, and now look what has happened. He knows, deep down, that when Maggie turns he will have to kill her. Turning her back over to the authorities would be cruel – not killing her would be dangerous, as he finds out the hard way when he encounters two zombies – a father and a small child – whose mother couldn’t turn them in, or kill them, herself. He just doesn’t think he can do it. Caroline tries to talk him into it – there’s even a scene where it looks like she may take matter into her own hands. For her part, Breslin may be even better. She’s essentially terminally ill – knows she is going to die, and has to make peace with it. She talk to some of her old friends – including one who is also infected. Breslin handles her role with sensitivity and compassion – she moved me more in her quiet performance than someone like Shailene Woodley (who was good, but in a bad movie) in The Fault in Our Stars. She doesn’t try to overtly elicit audience sympathy – which is why she gets it.

The problem with the movie isn’t these two performances then – it’s that the whole movie is kind of one note. Death hangs over every scene, and it’s so suffocating that all the life in the movie drains out of it. Director Henry Hobson and screenwriter John Scott 3 have a good idea at its core, but don’t really have anywhere to go with once it’s been established. They repeat themselves, the movie moves at a snail’s pace, and not a whole lot happens. We wait for the finale – where we know someone will have to make a decision – because the entire middle part of the movie seems to be just killing time until we can make it there. I kept waiting for at least one happy scene in the movie – but when it arrives (a visit to Maggie’s mother’s garden), it’s played with the same morose tone as the rest of the movie. It’s deadening.

Maggie is an interesting take on the zombie movie – which in many ways is overexposed right now with The Walking Dead. But at least it’s not another George A. Romero clone (which, let’s face, Walking Dead is, even if it’s a good one), nor is it another comedy, poking fun at the genre. It’s a film that legitimately tries to do something completely different with the genre. I admire it for that. I didn’t much like it though.

Movie Review: Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief
Directed by: Alex Gibney.
Written by: Alex Gibney based on the book by Lawrence Wright.

When it comes to religion, I am an atheist – but not one of those asshole atheists who want the whole world not to believe as well. My basic stance is this – you let me believe or not believe in anything I want to, and I’ll do the same for you. That extends to every religion – including Scientology. If you want to believe in Xenu and Thetans and all the rest, then go right ahead, I don’t care. Every religion would seem more than a little strange to people who have never heard the story before (think about for a second, and if you had no idea of the Christ story, would you believe it, if you heard for the first time as an adult – the same can be said for all religions, really). Where my tolerance ends for other people’s religions however is when they start to abuse their power, and hurt people. Alex Gibney’s documentary, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, makes a persuasive case that Scientology is actually doing just that. They are abusing their tax exempt status, pressuring its members to give them more and more and more money, while paying its clergy next to nothing, and uses threats and intimidation to keep its members captive. The film uses testimony from many former members who recount their stories – many of them horrible – of how they were mistreated, how their children were mistreated, and how the religion tears families apart by forcing them to “disconnect” with what they consider to be “suppressive people” – even if that means your own family. It also assets that Scientology will do just about anything to silence and discredit their critics. In the wake of the film’s debut at Sundance, the Church came out swinging towards director Alex Gibney, the film itself, and the movie critics who reviewed the movie – saying among other things that the movie is biased because no one from the Church was interviewed, even though, of course, when asked by Gibney they refused.

Gibney has a skill for documentaries like these. Over the years, he has made Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) about the famously crooked energy company. Casino Jack and the United States of Money (2010) about Jack Abramoff, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Elliot Spitzer (2010), about the former Governor brought down by a prostitution scandal, Mea Maxima Culpa (2012) about clergy molestation in the Catholic Church, and We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks (2013), about Julian Assange and his organization. (He has also, by the way, directed way more films – he is insanely prolific, but these are the ones that more closely resemble Going Clear). As in those films, I don’t think gets at a lot of “new” information here – the film is based on the book of the same name by Lawrence Wright (which I have not read), and piggybacks on a lot of what was in there, and other articles by Wright and others. If you’ve followed along with this story, you probably know a lot of this – but Gibney turns into one entertaining, enlightening, lively documentary.
 

The film stars, as anything with Scientology must, with its founder L. Ron Hubbard. Through a few videos of the few public interviews Hubbard gave, along with the diaries of his ex-wife, and the testimony of some ex-members who actually knew Hubbard, the film paints him as a troubled, perhaps mentally ill, and certainly paranoid man who turned some of things he had been playing at in sci-fi novels into the basis of a religion with his Dianetics books. Although the Church has a longstanding feud with psychology, many of its tenants sound very much like it – and the movie asserts that much of what Hubbard did was a way of trying to help himself and his own problems. Hubbard was charismatic enough to draw some other people along with him. He made a ton of money, and didn’t want to give any of it to the government, which started the long standing feud with the IRS – that only ended in the early 1990s, years after Hubbard died, when essentially the IRS gave up – tired of fighting the war, and the lawsuits. I wouldn’t say that the movie offers a sympathetic portrait of Hubbard – but it does go easier on what it sees as troubled man than it goes on the people who took over for him – notably David Miscavige – who has run the Church since Hubbard died. From the testimony of some of the men who worked alongside him for years, what comes across about him is how ruthless he can be. He got to be the head of the Church because of it, and has stayed there for decades because he’s willing to do what it takes.

The film is full of one damning interview after another. Paul Haggis, whose story made up much of Wright’s work, is probably in the movie the most. Between him, and the other former members, they lay out the different levels of Scientology – how you have to pay to keep moving up, how its only gradually revealed to you what the tenants of the religion are (when Haggis finally read about Xenu, he thought that perhaps it was an insanity test – meaning if you believed it, they threw you out). They talk about the infamous auditing process – and how information gleaned in those sessions may well be what keeps members in the Church. At one point, someone refers to John Travolta, one of Scientology’s biggest names, as a captive of the Church. The theory goes, if he leaves, than everything they know about him becomes public – and he doesn’t want that. If the movie’s most damning portrait is of Miscavige, than its second most damning must be of Tom Cruise, who in footage from Scientology events and interviews, comes off far worse than he ever has before.

The Church of Scientology denies almost everything in the movie, of course. They paint the people who spoke to Gibney – and Wright before him – as liars, criminals and perverts. They will refute specifics – like the search for Tom Cruise’s post-Nicole Kidman girlfriend – but don’t seem to dispute many of the more general things the movie is saying about the religions standard operating procedure. Those, they just don’t talk about.

Overall, Going Clear is an entertaining, fascinating documentary. Gibney may make a lot of films, but he knows what he is doing here, and while much of the film is talking heads and archival footage, he does do some interesting visual flourishes. What’s missing from the film though is, I think, a more human side of things. Gibney comes out swinging in Going Clear – he’s making an expose of Scientology and its sins, and he’s going to pack as much of those into the film as he possibly can. If you’ve seen Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012), his masterpiece that was loosely based on Scientology, you will see a lot in this film that seems familiar, because Anderson already dramatized it. What Anderson also did though was have sympathy for the people in The Cause (what he called it in the movie), and made it clear why people were attracted to it in the first place, and why they stayed for years. Going Clear doesn’t really do that. After watching the film, I feel I know a lot more about what the Church of Scientology has done over the years, but I still know very little about the religion itself – why people come to it, and why they stay. Any film – documentary or otherwise – has its limitations of course, and the narrower scope of Going Clear is necessary. But how much more interesting would the film be if I didn’t feel it was first and foremost a hit piece? Perhaps a hit piece on a organization who deserves it – but a hit piece just the same.

10 Best Canadian Films of All Time

Two weeks back, TIFF announced the results of their most recent survey of the Greatest Canadian Films of All Time – something they do every 10 years, give or take. For the first time since the survey started in the 1980s, Claude Jutra’s Mon Oncle Antoine did not win – that went to Zacharis Kunuk’s Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner for 2001 – which shouldn’t be all that surprising, considering it placed 5^th in 2004, just three years after it came out. Apparently, the race was close, but Atanarjuat won it. Is it the greatest Canadian film of all time? Not to me, but it’s pretty damn close, so why complain?

Their list was as follows:

1. Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (Zacharis Kunuk, 2001)
2. Mon Oncle Antoine (Claude Jutra, 1971)
3. The Sweet Hereafter (Atom Egoyan, 1997)
4. Leolo (Jean-Claude Lauzon, 1992)
5. Jesus of Montreal (Denys Arcand, 1989)
6. Goin’ Down the Road (Don Shebib, 1970)
7. Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1988)
8. C.R.A.Z.Y. (Jean Marc-Valle, 2005)
9. My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, 2007)
10 (tie). Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, 2012)
10 (tie). Les Ordres (Michel Brault, 1974)

When the list came out, I started thinking about what my top 10 list of all time Canadian films would look like. I almost immediately knew that if I was going to make one up, I’d have to limit myself to one film per director – if not, I could easily have 6 Cronenbergs, 2 Egoyans, and only have two spots left. And what would be in the fun in that. I think one can argue that perhaps the reason why Cronenberg – Canada’s best known, and best director, ranked all the way down at number 6 is because he has so many films that could qualify, and there seems to be no real consensus as to what his best is. Browsing through the ballots, there was obviously a lot of votes for Dead Ringers, but there were also a lot of votes for Videodrome and Crash, and scattered support for Eastern Promises, Naked Lunch, eXistenZ, Spider, Shivers, Scanners, The Brood – even a couple of lone votes for M. Butterfly and Rabid. A few, possibly confused, individuals voted for Cronenberg’s American films – The Dead Zone, The Fly and A History of Violence. My guess is that if you were to ask this same group who the best Canadian director of all time was, Cronenberg would win. But that’s just a guess. In case anyone is interested, I do have a ranked list on Letterboxd of the Best Canadian films of all time, where I don’t limited myself to one film per director (and actually, only three Cronenberg’s made the top 10 – although he makes up a third of the top 21 films). http://letterboxd.com/davevanh/list/my-35-favorite-canadian-films/

Cronenberg is hardly alone in having multiple films split his vote. While almost everyone who voted for a Kunuk, Jutra, Lauzon or Shebib film voted for Atanarjuat, Mon Oncle Antoine, Leolo and Goin’ Down the Road respectively – Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter came third, but also found a lot of support for Calendar (one of the few films of his I have missed), Exotica, Family Viewing and The Adjuster. Denys Arcand’s Jesus of Montreal came 5^th – but his The Decline of the American Empire and The Barbarian Invasions got lots of votes as well. Sarah Polley has only directed 3 films – but while Stories We Tell came in at number 10, she also got a lot of votes for Away From Her. Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg made the top 10, but lots of people loved The Heart of the World, The Saddest Music in the World, Careful and Archangel as well. Canadian cinema remains a nice market even within Canada (and especially outside of Quebec) – so it’s not surprising that the same directors show up on everyone’s lists – they’re the only ones getting things made.

After making my list, I have to say, I think the TIFF survey did an excellent job. 6 of my top 10 are on it – and 2 others are by directors who made the list, but for different films. After some honorable mentions, I’ll get to my top 10 – which I ranked to make things more fun.

Honorable Mentions: C.R.A.Z.Y. (Jean Marc-Valle, 2005) is a funny, touching and heartfelt movie about being a gay teenager in 1970s Quebec (ask me another day, and I may put Vallee’s wonderful Café de Flore for 2011 here instead). The Dirties (Matt Johnson, 2013) was a funny and disturbing DIY movie about a school shooting. Ginger Snaps (John Fawcett) is one of the only truly original werewolf movies – which brilliantly, and hilariously, likens turning into a werewolf with teenage girl puberty. Goin’ Down the Road (Don Shebib, 1970) is undeniably one of the most important Canadian films in history – and has a brilliant documentary like feel to the story of two men who come from Out East to the Big City, and find it just as miserable. Goon (Michael Dowse, 2011) is perhaps not a great movie – but it’s a great hockey movie which is FAR rarer. Hard Core Logo (Bruce McDonald, 1996) has rightfully become a cult hit – it perfectly captures the messiness of punk rock and self-destruction (although sometimes, I think McDonald’s under seen Pontypool – a zombie movie with no zombies - is even better). Last Night (Don McKellar, 1998) is a very Canadian movie about the end of the world. Mansfield Park (Patricia Rozema, 1999) is as good a Jane Austen adaptation as more celebrated ones by Ang Lee or Joe Wright. Mommy (Xavier Dolan, 2014) is the wunderkind’s best film so far, and I doubt that it will be too much longer before he’s made a film good enough to be in the top 10. Splice (Vincenzo Natali, 2009) may not been as original as his Cube, but makes up for it by being batshit fucking insane – which is what I want from a Canadian movie like this. Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (Francois Girard, 1994) is a musician’s biopic, but one with none of the usual trappings and clichés that mar even the best the genre have to offer.

10. 21-87 (Arthur Lipsett, 1963)

The montage films of Arthur Lipsett are fascinating to watch – his first film, Very Nice Very Nice – was Oscar nominated, and remains probably his best known film, and the consensus pick for his best. I, however, was much more impressed with his follow-up film – 21-87, made in 1963. Lipsett uses a mixture of found footage and footage he himself shot, and made a pessimistic, almost dystopian, view of society – where machines were taking over, and soon we would all be reduced to a number, not a name. It’s a sad portrait of our culture, and one that has only become more relevant in the 50 years since he made the film and today. The film was a key influence on George Lucas – especially for THX 1138 (although there is a reference to the title in the original Star Wars movie as well). Sadly for Lipsett, he didn’t last long at the NFB, where he made the film – his bosses didn’t like, and didn’t get his films, and so by the end of the 1960s he was off on his own – and slowly slide into mental illness. But this short film – only 8 minutes long – deserves a spot on this list.

9. The Barbarian Invasions (Denys Arcand, 2003)

Jesus of Montreal is a more daring film, and The Decline of the American Empire is out and out funnier, but Arcand’s Oscar winning The Barbarian Invasions is still my favorite of his work. The films takes place 17 years after The Decline of the American Empire, and revisits the same characters – and their now adult children. Remy (Remy Girard), the leftist, womanizing history professor of the original film, is dying – and although he has done his best to alienate those around him, they all come back as he faces death. This may seem sentimental or unrealistic – and to a certain extent it is, as everyone from his adult son, who has embraced everything he rejected, to his ex-wife, who he cheated on constantly, to former lovers come back to send him off. Yet Arcand isn’t only being sentimental here – he has some points to make. The older generation was idealistic – the younger generation isn’t – and the older generation may complain about how the world is going to hell, but Arcand makes clear that they are as responsible for that as anyone else, and if the kids are screwed up, well just look at who they had for parents? (The younger generation has Remy’s overachieving side and Marie Josee Croze’s heroin addict as flip sides to the same coin – and interestingly, they become characters perhaps more complex than anyone else). The film touches on issues like 9/11, the overburdened Canadian healthcare system and others as well. But through it all, Arcand remains his funny, whip-smart self. 

8. Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (Zacharis Kunuk, 2001)
The newly minted “Best Canadian Film of All time” really is a masterful film – and unlike anything you have ever seen before, or likely will ever see again. Running nearly three hours long, the film takes place in an small Inuit community – the time period could be now, or 1,000 years ago, it doesn’t much matter. It is a film that both shows the Inuit culture in a way that it has never been seen before, and tells a story of passion, jealously and murder. The film is both very specific to its culture, and yet universal. It’s also not a boring film – not in the least – or some dull history lesson. The film is moving, and at times exciting – the three hour runtime moved by very fast for me. Kunuk has, unfortunately, not really been able to follow-up the film with much success – The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (2006) is fascinating, but feels much longer than Atanajurat, despite being an hour shorter. No, I do not think this is the best Canadian film of all time (obviously) – but it is one of the only films I can think – from anywhere in the world – that I would describe as truly one of a kind.

7. Enemy (Denis Villeneuve, 2013)

I could have easily have put Polytechnique here – Villeneuve’s gut-wrenching, black & white film about the massacre in 1989, or Incendies, his Oscar-nominated film about a legacy violence passed down from generation to generation (hell, ask me another day, and perhaps I would). But for now, I’ll go with Villeneuve’s most recent film – Enemy – an adaption of the Jose Saramago novel, The Double, about a history professor who discovers his exact double (both played by Jake Gyllenhaal in an excellent performance). The movie is 90 minutes long, and neatly twists itself at the 30 and 60 minute marks, taking the film in a new direction each time. Villeneuve’s film is a surreal nightmare – evoking Cronenberg – and making both Toronto and Mississauga seemed darker and greyer than ever before. The film is really about Gyllenhaal’s relationship to the women in life – brilliantly played by Isabella Rossellini as his other, Melanie Laurent as a new girlfriend, and best of all Sarah Gadon as his pregnant wife. The shock of a finale is ingenious – because it works first as per shock value, and then as something deeper. Villeneuve is a talented filmmaker – and Canada may well lose him forever to Hollywood (he has already directed the wonderful thriller Prisoners there – has completed another Hollywood film (which will premiere at Cannes this month), and has two more on the go (including a Blade Runner sequel). But if this is it for him in Canadian film – he’s left his mark.

6. Leolo (Jean-Claude Lauzon, 1992)

The fact that Jean-Claude Lauzon died far too young – in a plane crash at the age of 43 having just completed two films – is a tragedy, because Leolo is one of the most inventive films I have ever seen, and I wish I could have seen more by him. It is a tale inspired by Lauzon’s own childhood in Montreal – and centers on an introverted 12 year old from an insane family – and not a lovably eccentric insane family like most movies of this sort, but genuinely crazy. Not that Leolo isn’t himself a little crazy – he believes that his real father was an Italian farmer who masturbated into some freshly picked tomatoes, and the semen eventually impregnated his mother when she fell in them in the market in Montreal. Oh, and he’s devising an intricate machine of pulleys to murder his grandfather – who is a horny old bastard anyway. It’s one of those films that defy description, and must be seen to be believed. If you haven’t seen it, then do so. Now.

5. My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, 2007)

There has never been a filmmaker like Guy Maddin before, and there will likely never been a filmmaker like him again. His films are inspired by cinemas’ past – particularly melodramatic silent films – but while his films often take that form, it doesn’t begin to describe them. His greatest film is My Winnipeg (although you could vote for any number of his films, and be right – and I hear his latest, which premiered at Sundance is one of his best) is his ode to his hometown of Winnipeg. Maddin both seems to love and loathe Winnipeg, and gives us a “documentary” about his town, and everything that happened in its history – none of it, and all of it being true. Maddin attributes the movie’s unique take on Winnipeg as laziness – he was hired to make a documentary about his old hometown, and decided not to do any research, and just do the whole thing from memory. In its way, it gives a more interesting insight into the city because it isn’t researched – and is about how it feels like live there. Basically though, it’s much more about Maddin than about Winnipeg. That’s why, to me, it’s the most fascinating film Maddin has made so far.

4. Mon Oncle Antoine (Claude Jutra, 1971)

In small town Quebec, in the 1950s, a young teenage boy learns a lot about life and death, and loses his innocence, all over one Christmas Eve. He lives in the kind of small town where most of the men work at the asbestos mine, and the entire town will congregate at the local general store – which has everything one could need to buy. The store is run by his uncle Antoine – who is also the local undertaker – and the boy works there, alongside a girl around his same age, from an abusive background. Claude Jutra’s beautiful movie is shot with documentary like realism in the early scenes – as the film plays as a coming of age film. The final act of the movie takes on a darker tone though – as the boy is confronted with a series of uncomfortable truths on a long, cold, snowy sleigh ride to pick up and return a dead body with his uncle. The film works wonderfully as a coming of age/loss of innocence story – but there’s more here than that, as the movie also functions as an allegory for Quebec from the time the film takes place (the 1950s) to when it was made (1970s) that makes it a deeper experience. Jutra never hit these heights again – but in Mon Oncle Antoine he made a perfect film.

3. Away From Her (Sarah Polley, 2007)

Sarah Polley’s directorial debut Away From Her is a subtle heartbreaker of a film. The great Julie Christie stars as a woman who is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and eventually has to go into a nursing home. Her husband, the great Gordon Pinsent has to deal with the fact that he has been left alone – the woman he has loved all these years is still there, and yet gone – she even finds a new love interest, and doesn’t realize that she is already married. Pinsent is hurt, and tries, in vain, to try and get her back. But this isn’t The Notebook – but something deeper and truer to life. Polley shoots the film is bright whites – it takes place during the winter, and there is white snow everywhere, the sun is shining, the fluorescent lights of the nursing home non-ceasing. There is nowhere to hide. Polley does a remarkable job adapting Alice Munro’s short story – something that is hard to do, because Munro’s genius is often about what happens outside the story – that is not written, but felt. Polley has directed two other films since Away From Her – Take This Waltz, a wonderful, underrated examination of infidelity and divorce, and Stories We Tell, a personal documentary about Polley’s past (that easily could have been here instead of this one). Alongside Xavier Dolan, she is probably the brightest hope of Canada’s future cinema, especially since Vallee and Villeneuve seem determined to go Hollywood (not that I blame them). This is a subtle, heartbreaking masterpiece.

2. The Sweet Hereafter (Atom Egoyan, 1997)

Over the lifetime of this blog – started in 2009 – I have been hard on Atom Egoyan as he makes one disappointment after another (Chloe, Devil’s Knot, The Captive). But I’m hard on him because during the 1990s – and into the 2000s (I will still stand up for films like Ararat, Where the Truth Lies and Adoration), he seemed poised to perhaps one day rival Cronenberg as the greatest Canadian director in history. That hasn’t happened – but Egoyan has made at least three truly great films (Exotica and Felicia’s Journey are the others) – but The Sweet Hereafter really does tower over the rest. The film is subtle and heartbreaking and shot in the winter, with snow covering everything (much like the previous two films on this list come to think of it). It tells the story of a tragic school bus accident that takes the lives of 14 children, and its aftermath. Ian Holm delivers a remarkable performance as a lawyer who comes to town and hopes to sign up the parents for a class action lawsuit. But he isn’t a slime ball or a crusading hero – The Sweet Hereafter is too complex for that – but a sad man, dealing with loss of his own. The film is not about assigning blame, but is really about grief, and how nothing will ever make everything whole again. Adapting the book by Russell Banks, Egoyan has crafted a masterpiece. I want this Egoyan back – not the one who made Devil’s Knot.

1. Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1988)

I’ve been working on this piece for a couple of days now, and I have gone back and forth and back and forth multiple times as to what David Cronenberg film should be #1. I could easily have put Crash (1996) here – and its disturbing portrait of a sexual car crash fetish, which acts, in its way, as the culmination of Cronenberg’s career up to that point. Or I could Videodrome here, with its genre leanings mixed with media messages, and gory special effects. What about Naked Lunch – a brilliant blending of the sensibilities of Cronenberg and William S. Burroughs, to come up with something wholly unique. Spider is a wonderful examination of a schizophrenic mind that came out the time as the feel good version – A Beautiful Mind. eXistenZ was a virtual reality film the same year as The Matrix – and Cronenberg’s film was smarter. Eastern Promises was an exciting, brilliant acted and directed Russian mob movie. The more I think about it, the more I love Cosmopolis – the Wall Street giant as emotional vampire film from a few years ago. Even Cronenberg’s less successful stuff – like the early Shivers, Rabid and The Brood, or later A Dangerous Method or Maps to the Stars are fascinating to watch. Luckily The Dead Zone, The Fly and A History of Violence are technically American films, or that would have made things even more complicated. So finally, what was it that made me land on Dead Ringers as his best (Canadian) film? Part of it is the technical mastery on display in the film – it may be easier now to have one actor play two characters and interact with each other, but it was much harder in 1988 – and Cronenberg pulls it off brilliantly. Not only that, but the whole movie is coldly, almost surgically, directed, making an exploitation like premise come across as something much more serious – and tragic. Part of it is the performances by Jeremy Irons – who makes the two Mantle twins completely different characters, even as they are wholly dependent on each other. But it’s really the final scene that makes me vote for this one, finally, over Crash. Both films have a tragic conclusion in their way – Crash with a marriage only temporarily “saved” as the characters continue to careen towards their deaths. But Dead Ringers final shot is haunting, tragic, sad, inevitable and just plain brilliant. Ask me another day, and perhaps Crash gets my vote (in fact, when I initially wrote this up, it did) – but for now, I’ll stick with Dead Ringers.

Movie Review: Ex Machina

Ex Machina
Directed by: Alex Garland.
Written by: Alex Garland.
Starring: Domhnall Gleeson (Caleb), Alicia Vikander (Ava), Oscar Isaac (Nathan), Sonoya Mizuno (Kyoko).

I saw Ex Machina the same weekend as Avengers: Age of Ultron – another film that deals with the morality of creating Artificial Intelligence, and its implications. Because Age of Ultron costs hundreds of millions of dollars though it doesn’t actually have time to deal with most of the questions it raises – instead it touches on them, and then moves on to another scene where lots of things get blown up. Ex Machina basically spends its running time in something that Ultron glosses over in an instant. And it’s far more thrilling, intelligent and exciting because of it. This is a movie of ideas – all set in one location, with only four characters. And it’s one of the best movies of the year.

The film stars Domhnall Gleeson as Caleb – a programmer with a Google-like company known as Blue Book. He wins some sort of contest which gives him a chance to spend a week with the reclusive genius who founded Blue Book – Nathan (Oscar Issac) as his estate in the middle of nowhere. He arrives, and after signing a non-disclosure agreement, and being told how everything works – especially his keycard, which only gives him access to certain parts of Nathan’s house (which he says isn’t a house at all – but a “research facility” – which is why it has no windows and is in the middle of nowhere) – Nathan reveals to Caleb why he is there. Nathan thinks he has perfected Artificial Intelligence – in the form of Ava (Alicia Vikander) – a “female robot”. Caleb is there to give her a “Turing” test – basically to see if she really does awareness of who she is, and what she feels, or whether she’s simply imitating it. The only other person at the research facility other than the three principles is Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno), Nathan’s silent, Japanese maid, who doesn’t speak or understand English.

In broad strokes, Ex Machina touches on a lot of different genres in its sci-fi setup. Nathan is clearly a Dr. Frankenstein like creator – a hubristic genius who creates something that he cannot control and may in fact become his downfall. There is a film noir element in the way Ava and Caleb slowly develop feelings for each other – and then plot to gain their freedom from her “abusive” male authority figure (Nathan again). We know where this movie is headed from early in the proceedings – and yet that doesn’t hurt the narrative as it often does, because writer-director Alex Garland provides more than enough surprises on a character level, not necessarily a plot one, as the movie goes along and he deepens and twists things around.

The movie seems simple in its construction – it’s basically a series of two-handers between either Caleb and Ava or Caleb and Nathan, along with scenes of Caleb by himself discovering the secrets Nathan has buried. The movie is split into “chapters” for each of the daily sessions that Caleb and Ava share together. These are followed by debriefing sessions between Caleb and Nathan, as Nathan really wants to get Caleb’s opinion on Ava. The scenes are opposite sides of the same coin – with each passing day, Caleb and Ava get closer and closer, while Caleb and Nathan getting further apart. Caleb shows up at the lab idolizing Nathan, but the more he gets to know him, the less he likes him. What he, and we, do not know is to what an extent it’s all an act? Is Ava manipulating him? Is Nathan? Are both of them?

Ex Machina has gotten both praise and criticism for the way it portrays gender in the film. After all, this is a film with two women who are wholly dependent on the men in their lives for everything. Yet, to me, this is a movie that directly confronts that issue. Nathan may be a genius, but he is clearly an immature man stuck in a frat boy mindset in how he views women – and how he views Caleb for that matter. It’s there in the way he says “dude” and “bro” a lot, or how he’s pumping iron, and getting black out drunk every night. He may well have a point when he says that yes, he did need to give Ava sexuality for her to be passably human, since all humans – and all living things – have a sexual aspect to their nature. But as time goes on, it seems more and more likely that Nathan is just trying to create his own version of the “perfect woman” – beautiful, smart, sexy and completely under his own control. While Nathan is clearly a misogynist, Caleb is perhaps a little guilty of his own brand, kinder, gentler brand of sexism – as he cannot help but see Ava as dependent on him. He isn’t as outright nasty as Nathan is, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine him talking about what “nice guy” he is, and bemoaning the fact that women don’t want him.

The performances in the movie help a great deal. Gleeson is in many ways playing a similar role as he played in last year’s Frank – he’s the audience surrogate we need to help get us into this world. The movie, and the actor, gives him slightly more depth than most of these surrogates however. Issac once again shows why he is one of the most impressive actors around right now. He has an easy charm about him in the movie that gradually takes on a darker, crueler edge as the film progresses. The immensely talented Vikander is given a very hard role in Ava to play – and nails it. She has to be both somewhat artificial, but still show subtle signs of emotion.

This is Garland’s debut film as a director. He’s been an accomplished screenwriter for a whole – most notably for Danny Boyle films like 28 Days Later and Sunshine (another Boyle film, The Beach, was based on Garland’s novel), as well as the excellent, under seen adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go for Mark Romanek. Garland’s film is better than any of those – a coldly intelligent sci-fi film with hints of Kubrick in it. The film’s excellent use of special effects actually enhances the story rather than replaces it. The ending of the film plays out much like you expect it to – but is colder than I thought possible. Basically, Ex Machina is the type of sci-fi film I love. One that has ideas at its core, not special effects or action sequences.

Movie Review: Avengers: Age of Ultron

Avengers: Age of Ultron
Directed by: Joss Whedon.
Written by: Joss Whedon based on the comic book by Stan Lee & Jack Kirby.
Starring: Robert Downey Jr. (Tony Stark / Iron Man), Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Mark Ruffalo (Bruce Banner / Hulk), Chris Evans (Steve Rogers / Captain America), Scarlett Johansson (Natasha Romanoff / Black Widow), Jeremy Renner (Clint Barton / Hawkeye), James Spader (Ultron), Samuel L. Jackson (Nick Fury), Don Cheadle (James Rhodes / War Machine), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Pietro Maximoff / Quicksilver), Elizabeth Olsen (Wanda Maximoff / Scarlet Witch), Paul Bettany (Jarvis / Vision), Cobie Smulders (Maria Hill), Anthony Mackie (Sam Wilson / The Falcon), Hayley Atwell (Peggy Carter), Idris Elba (Heimdall), Stellan Skarsgård (Erik Selvig), Linda Cardellini (Laura Barton), Claudia Kim (Dr. Helen Cho), Thomas Kretschmann (Strucker), Andy Serkis (Ulysses Klaue), Julie Delpy (Madame B).

Avengers: Age of Ultron is good enough to make me wish it was just a little bit better. It continues to deepen the characters in the movie, and bring them into conflict with other – something that started with the end of the first Avengers movie, and continue through the next set of films – particularly Captain America: The Winter Soldier (still my favorite Marvel movie) and Iron Man 3 (Thor: The Dark World, not so much). It gives a little more humanity to previously undeveloped characters like Hawkeye, Bruce Banner/The Hulk and Black Widow. It doesn’t paint the characters as all heroic – but flawed in different ways. And it offers a direct rebuke to the DC world, in which superheroes don’t seem to care about the havoc the wreak, the innocent lives lost, etc. by placing that directly at the forefront of the action sequences. The film is also whip smart, and amusing, and finds fun ways to explain even mundane, exposition like things that are needed. Oh, and it has one of the best villains of any of the Marvel movies – although, some of the things the movie expects to believe about Ultron don’t make sense). And yet, I walked out of Avengers: Age of Ultron wanting a little more. This is because every time the movie seemed to be headed in an interesting direction, the film grinds to a halt so we can have yet another extended action sequence. Yes, the action sequences (mainly) work – they are well handled and exciting. But they are much like every other action sequence in every other Marvel movie. I wanted more of the stuff that made Age of Ultron different from those previous movies, and less of the stuff that feels exactly the same.

The movie opens with our heroes smashing the remnants of Hydra – the evil group who we had learned had infiltrated SHIELD and, basically everything else. They want Loki’s scepter – and more importantly the stone in it – back. After a long action sequence in a forest base – where we are introduced to two new people with special powers with a grudge against Tony Stark – the twins Pietro and Wanda Maximoff aka Quicksilver and Scarlett Witch (Aaron Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen) – they do in fact get what they want. Once they get the stone back to Stark’s lab, Tony realizes its immense power – and thinks he can use it to create A.I. that can protect the entire world from external threats. He and Banner do in fact build that – without telling anyone else – and the result is Ultron (voiced by James Spader). It doesn’t take Ultron very long to come up with a much better way than Stark’s to protect the world – essentially by destroying humanity. For some reasons, this all powerful A.I. decides to take the form of robot – and he continues to clone himself. Suddenly, the job the Avengers thought was done needs to be done all over again. And no one is really happy about it – the team manages to work together, even as it’s clear they are falling apart.

Yes, to a certain extent, the plot of Age of Ultron hits all the same ridiculous notes as the other Marvel movies. There is an all-powerful stone that everyone spends the whole movie obsessing over, and a villain who has a grand scheme to destroy the whole world. We know heading in that the stone is basically a Macguffin, as they’ve been since the beginning of the Marvel movies, just a way to take a storytelling shortcut. And we know that Ultron will not, in fact, destroy the world – if for no other reason than because Marvel has announced release dates for a whole lot more movies over the next decade. These are the types of things you just need to except when watching these movies. If nothing else, when they go on and on about the stones gives us all a chance to go the bathroom, which given the way these movies have ballooned in their running time over the years.

But it’s everything around the basic plot that makes Age of Ultron quite a good superhero movie. I like the way Whedon is pitting Captain America and Iron Man against each other. This is part of what made Captain America: The Winter Soldier so interesting. I think many people – like myself – thought of Captain America was a rather square character – a remnant of the past without much relevance to the present. To Marvel’s credit, they realize this, and having increasingly addressed this – Captain America still represents the “best” of the American character – and how Americans like to see themselves, but in the movies it’s clear that he has increasingly become out of step with the contemporary world – as America has moved on from his idealism. For Stark’s part, his character has got increasingly dark over the series of movies – Iron Man 3’s best parts were him dealing with his PTSD after New York, and finding his way to move on. Here, he’s just further down that same road – and it has led to his hubris overtaking his reason, which is what gives rise to Ultron in the first place – who is essentially an even darker version of Stark. These two will apparently be even more in conflict in the next Captain America movie – Civil War – and I look forward to that.

There are lots of other things in the movie that work – but not quite as well as they should have. The blossoming romance between Bruce Banner and Black Widow, the characters of Quicksilver and Scarlett Witch, Hawkeye’s secret life, which seems like a direct response to all the people who have mocked the guy with a bow and arrow teaming up with these other people with much stronger powers. The dream sequences, in which Scarlett Witch gives each of the Avengers a nightmare of their worst fears. A lot of Whedon-esque snappy dialogue. A climax in which, for the first time I can recall, the superheroes care more about civilians that avenging personal grudges. James Spader’s malicious line readings, and the dangers of playing God with A.I.

All of these things work – to a degree. But all needed more time to develop. Every time I thought we were heading in an interesting direction, the movie grinds to a halt so we can get another action sequence. To be fair, the action sequences are all quite good – the best one may well be a fight between Iron Man and a rampaging Hulk. The sequence is also relevant to the larger story – because it has to setup Banner’s actions at the end of the movie, and his fear of losing control and hurting innocent people. It’s an expertly crafted sequence – and exciting. It’s also far too long, and has the feel of trying to settle those long standing arguments comic book fans have (“who would win in a fight between Iron Man and Hulk? – show you work”). Considering the movie didn’t have time to develop many of the characters more – Scarlett Witch joins the list of virtually every other female character in the MCU as not being enough to do – or even make Thor’s whole trip to a cave and back into a coherent part of the story and on and on and on, perhaps we could have done with a little less of Hulk Smash.

 
Apparently Whedon’s first cut of the movie ran close to three and half hours, and the final one comes in at two hours and twenty minutes. What’s missing in that extra hour is probably not action that Marvel spent millions creating, but little stuff like plot, character and thematic development. This is one of the only times in recent memory where I’m actually looking forward to a longer cut on DVD, as I have a feeling that a lot of stuff I would have liked wound up on the cutting room floor. I still find it

Movie Review: Gangs of Wasseypur

Gangs of Wasseypur
Directed by: Anurag Kashyap.
Written by: Akhilesh Jaiswal & Anurag Kashyap & Sachin K. Ladia & Zeishan Quadri.
Starring: Manoj Bajpayee (Sardar Khan), Richa Chadda (Nagma Khatoon), Nawazuddin Siddiqui (Faizal Khan), Tigmanshu Dhulia (Ramadhir Singh), Jameel Khan (Asgar Khan), Piyush Mishra (Nasir Ahmed), Jaideep Ahlawat (Shahid Khan), Huma Qureshi (Mohsina), Zeishan Quadri (Definite), Reema Sen (Durga), Pankaj Tripathy (Sultan Quereshi), Vipin Sharma (Ehsaan Qureshi), Satyakam Anand (J.P. Singh), Aditya Kumar (Perpendicular), Rajkummar Rao (Shamshad), Vineet Singh (Danish Khan), Sankalp Acharekar (Tangent), Mukesh Chhabra (Nawab Khan), Anurita Jha (Shama Parveen), Harish Khanna (Yadav ji), Murari Kumar (Guddu), Vijesh Rajan (Butcher).

Mixing together the styles of Francis Ford Coppola, Sergio Leone, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and in the climax John Woo, the Indian film Gangs of Wasseypur is an epic gangster movie in every sense of the word. The film starts in 1940 and ends in 2009, and follows multiple generations in a blood soaked, seemingly never-ending feud over two part, and a total runtime of 5 hours and 14 minutes. Yes, that is long, but in an age where people binge entire seasons of TV shows over a weekend, perhaps not too long to find an audience – although it’s understandable why the film took three years to find its way to North American screens. The film movies at a rapid pace throughout – and is full of violence and bloodshed. It’s also not a traditional Bollywood film – in fact, it’s first sequence seems to suggest that director Anurag Kashyag wants to lay waste to those clichés, as we see the type of scene we associate with Bollywood, only to have the camera pull back and reveal that the scene is only on TV, and soon the entire scene turns into a bloody shootout, with one group trying to slaughter another for reasons that are not clear at the time. Kashyag does use some Bollywood influences to be sure in the film – like Scorsese, Kashyap likes to set much of his movie to pop music, which includes Bollywood music, and some exceptionally violent Indian hip hop music (read the subtitles during these songs – they make a lot of what’s over here seem tame), and has characters who are obsessed with Bollywood – which according to one character leads to their downfall (“Every fucker has a movie playing in their head”). Kashyap wants to change the way people see Indian cinema – and in this brutal, bloody masterwork, he succeeds.

The first part of the epic concentrates on Sardar Kahn (Manoj Bajpayee), whose mother dies in childbirth, and his father Shahid (Jaideep Ahlawat) is first expelled from his town for stealing by the Qureshis, a powerful family who runs it, and is then murdered at the behest of his boss Ramadhir Singh (Tigmanshu Dhulia), when he fears Shahid, who he has hired as muscle, is too ambitious. All of this in the 1940s, where first the British rule, and then, after Independence, the Indian upper class takes over. Sardar, now raised by his father’s friend, Nasir (Piyush Mishra), who acts as the movie’s much needed narrator, is heartbroken by his father’s murder – and shaves his head, vowing to only grow his hair back when he has gotten his revenge – both on the Qureshis and on Singh – who work together. Sardar becomes a ruthless, powerful gangster in Wasseypur – in the Northern part of India - a torn in the side of Singh, who has become a powerful politician. On the home front, Sardar is a different man – and falls for not one, but two powerful women. First is Nagma (Richa Chadda), and next is Durga (Reema Sen) – and has five sons between the two women. He first abandons Nagma, turning his sons from that marriage against him, and then abandons Durga and returns to Nagma, doing the same thing to his son there. The two women both love and hate the man – which is the same for his sons. The second half concentrates on Sardar’s son Faizal (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), a pothead with little business sense, but a nasty streak in him as big as his father’s. We’ve now made our way to the 1980s and beyond – and Faizal continues the feud his grandfather started and passed down from one generation to the next. Like his father, he falls in love with a strong woman, Moshina (Huma Qureshi). The second half of the film is far more violent than the first – setting the tone with one of the bloodiest beheadings I can recall seeing (although it’s in shadow, so it’s not too stomach churning), as the pattern of murder and retribution is played out over and over again. The film ends with the bloodiest gun battle a hospital has seen since John Woo’s Hard Boiled (1992).

Gangs of Wasseypur is inarguably inspired more by American gangster films than by Bollywood films. There are several scenes that are direct homages to The Godfather – a murder at a gas station that will remind many of Sonny’s brutal murder, a sequence stalking a potential murder victim through a market will remind others of the great sequence in The Godfather Part II where Vito does the same thing, and a character telling his wife “Never ask me about my business” – like he’s Michael Corleone. Surprisingly, that character is not Faizel, who is clearly modelled on Al Pacino’s Michael – a man who hates his father’s business, and wants no part in it, although he can find no way out, and is destroyed, morally anyway, by it.

The movie is littered with other references to previous gangster films. Viewers will notice a little Scorsese, in the way music and narration, and the way it shows, step by step, how the gangs get away with their scams, some Leone in the operatic style of many moments, some deaths recall the bloody end of DePalma’s Scarface, etc. There are more here. I am realizing now that I criticized the other movie I saw this weekend – Ryan Gosling’s Lost River – from too much homage, and am praising Gangs of Wasseypur for the same thing. The difference between the two is obvious though – Gosling doesn’t do anything with his influences, he just regurgitates them back onto the screen. Kashyap uses them as simply a starting point – a way to pay tribute, before moving onto something more. For Lost River, the references are the end point – here they are the starting point.

Yes, Gangs of Wasseypur is long. Even watching one part – at two hours and 40 minutes – would considered long by many, let alone both half clocking in at over five hours. But the film never seems overlong – and is never less than superbly entertaining. The film covers 70 years, but it breezes by entire decades at times, and goes off on amusing tangents whenever the inspiration strikes Kashyap. Yes, he probably could have made the film shorter – the second part in particular does tend to repeat itself, perhaps a time or two too many, and there are some characters (like the amusingly named Perpendicular) that serve little to no dramatic purpose in the film. Yet, these disgressions and tangents (and yes, there is even a character in the film named Tangent, so I think Kashyap knows precisely what he is doing) add flavor to the proceedings. We are not just trapped in this isolated world – but something larger.

Gangs of Wasseypur is likely to become a cult hit. It will be a film people discover over time and fall in love with. It hasn’t made much money in North America so far – and heading to Fandor shortly after being released, which is where I saw it. But it’s worth the time to invest in this deliriously entertaining gangster epic – part Hollywood, part Bollywood, and all wonderful. Trust me, you’ll get more out of this film than half a season of House of Cards – which runs the same length.

Movie Review: Lost River

Lost River
Directed by: Ryan Gosling.
Written by: Ryan Gosling.
Starring: Christina Hendricks (Billy), Iain De Caestecker (Bones), Saoirse Ronan (Rat), Matt Smith (Bully), Ben Mendelsohn (Dave), Eva Mendes (Cat), Reda Kateb (Cab Driver), Barbara Steele (Grandma), Landyn Stewart (Franky), Rob Zabrecky (MC).

In his directorial debut, Ryan Gosling wears his influences on his sleeve. A little bit of Nicolas Winding Refn, who directed one of Gosling’s best performances (Drive) and one of his worst (Only God Forgives) a lot of David Lynch, perhaps a little David Gordon Green and a host of others (including The Tree of Life, Eyes Without a Face, the output of Gaspar Noe) that Gosling takes a little impersonation from. To give Gosling credit, he shows some real talent behind the camera – he gets the mood of the film right, and he has some very striking visuals throughout. But what Gosling doesn’t really have here is a story – or something meaningful to say. The film is basically just a sum of his impersonations, which Gosling has yet to refine and find his own voice. This makes Gosling like a lot of first time filmmakers – in that he tries to accomplish a lot, and ends up accomplishing nothing. He may well get there one day – but it’s not with Lost River.

The film takes place in a desolate, American wasteland – a town that has been killed by unemployment, where most of the people have been given little choice but to pack up and move away. Billy (Christina Hendricks), is a single mother – and she doesn’t want to do that. But she has a bank loan – one she feels she should not have qualified for, but the new guy at the bank, Dave (Ben Mendelsohn), doesn’t really care. He’s the bank’s “fixer” – they move him from branch to branch, firing employees, and trying to get as much money out of the toxic loans as he can, before moving on. He doesn’t offer Billy any breaks on her loan – but he does offer her a job. Not at the bank – but at the makeshift “club” he has founded. He says he opens one like it in every city he goes to. Billy walks into the club the first time – through a door shaped like a demonic mouth – and doesn’t know what to expect, and neither does the audience. The club isn’t really a strip club, or a sex club, but something far more perverse than that – and represents another way the rich exploit the poor. The star is Cat (Eva Mendes) – who runs a surprisingly bloody show onstage, and is rather sweet off of it. It is overseen by a man (Rob Zabrecky) who has seen Joel Grey is Cabaret a few too many times.

The other thread of the story involves Billy’s teenage son Bones (Iain De Caestecker), who tries to make a little extra money stripping the abandoned houses of their copper wire, and selling it. This puts him on the wrong side of Bully (Matt Smith), who rides around in his convertible, driven by his henchmen Face, and speaking into a loudspeaker announcing to everyone that the copper wire is his – and since seemingly no one is around except for Bones and his family, he’s speaking directly to him. There is one other family actually – as Bones makes moves towards a tentative romance with Rat (Saoirse Ronan), who lives with her grandmother (Barbara Steele). Rat, of course, owns a rat – but don’t get too attached.

Lost River is a strange film from beginning to end. Gosling seems to want to make a demented, surreal fairy tale here – which is something I’ve always argued Drive was, and what Lynch’s wonderful Wild at Heart (1990) certainly was. He gets the mood and tone mostly right – the world certainly feels just apart from our world, and both Billy and Bones have to enter even more fantastical places – for Billy, the club, for Bones, a city that was flooded when they built a dam a few years prior. The performances help to establish the mood –even if most of them are fairly one note. Best of the lot is the always reliable Mendelsohn, who becomes increasingly demented as the movie goes along, and has a memorable dance sequence near the end of the film.

What Gosling doesn’t give us though is a reason to care about any of this. His characters are flat and one note – mostly either morose or insane, and although the actors do what they can, they cannot breathe life into them. The storytelling is confused – particularly near the end, as the various storylines come to a head simultaneously, but in a confusing fashion that left me confounded more than moved. For much of the movie, I was left with the feeling that Gosling was just piling one damn thing on top of each other.

There are isolated moments in Lost River that work – that Mendelsohn dance sequence, the first time Billy enters the surreal nightmare of the club, the haunting image of streetlights that barely stick above the water in the drowned town, etc. But the film is just a collection of these moments in search of a story – in search of a reason for us to care about any of it. I didn’t – and so for me, Lost River failed. Gosling may well make a great film as a director someday – he just needs to figure out what he wants to say first.