Movie Review: Sunset Song

Sunset Song

Directed by: Terence Davies.

Written by: Terence Davies based on the novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon.

Starring: Agyness Deyn (Chris Guthrie), Peter Mullan (John Guthrie), Kevin Guthrie (Ewan Tavendale), Hugh Ross (Inspector), Douglas Rankine (Long Rob), Ian Pirie (Chae Strachan), Niall Greig Fulton (John Brigson), Jim Sweeney (Preacher), Jack Greenlees (Will Guthrie), Julian Nest (Peter Semple), Trish Mullin (Mistress Melon).

The surfaces of Terence Davies’ movies – from his breakthrough Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) to his latest, Sunset Song, are always beautiful. His films are could be considered tragedies, in which his main characters are pulled down, and often destroyed – and yet, are ultimately about memory. His characters are frequently miserable, yet also frequently remembering times when they were more miserable – with a strange sense of nostalgia. At his best – like The House of Mirth (2000), his films can be quiet stunners. Yet, personally, I quite often feel distant from his movies – that beautiful surface keeping me arms lengths away from his characters. This is true of Sunset Song – which is lesser hands would almost be comic in its tour of abject misery from beginning to end, but in Davies’ hands mostly works – even though I don’t think the movie ever quite gets inside the head of its main character as it tries to do.

 

The film takes place in the years before – and in the late stages, during – WWI, in Scotland. Chris (Agyness Deyn) is a gifted student being raised by a brutish father (Peter Mullen) and a mother who has been beaten down by not only her father – who thinks nothing of raping her – but by society itself, who gives a woman like her no option except to continue to be raped by someone like her husband. Mullen has played this role before – often – although it must be said he’s frequently brilliant in it, so it makes some sense to cast him again (it also allows Davies to perhaps more thinly sketch him than normal – because Mullan is able to do so much without doing much of anything). Those are tough years working the same, small patch of land, and having almost as few options as her mother. Eventually, she will be alone on that land – and has a brief respite from the tragedy when she meets and falls in love with Ewan (Kevin Guthrie), an overly sensitive soul. You almost have to laugh when WWI breaks out – knowing full well what is coming next to the happy couple.

 

Deyn is a model turned actress – which is unsurprising, since she is undeniably gorgeous, and Davies camera certainly highlights that beauty. It is a quiet, understated performance that generally works – it’s in the less understated moments where she struggles – but lacks the depth that someone like Gillian Anderson brought to The House of Mirth or Rachel Weisz did in The Deep Blue Sea. Deyn lacks those depths – and the voiceover in the film, which talks of “two Chris’” warring with each other is basically trying to do the heavy lifting that Deyn’s performance cannot do. The movie clocks in at well over two hours, and for the most part, is rather languidly paced – which makes some of the things that happened in the third act, that feel rushed, harder to understand (Ewan’s sudden transformation – and then reverse transformation seems to happen in a blink of an eye).

 

Yet, despite my reservations on the film, I do have to admit that it did slowly win me over. It helps that Davies’ film is, as always, meticulously shot and crafted. The exteriors are shot in 65MM, and are as utterly beautiful as anything in a Terrence Malick film – a comparison that is unavoidable, given Davies’ beautiful shots of rustling wheat throughout the film. The use of music – another Davies’ specialty – is equally brilliant, and underlines the themes of memory, love and regret without beating you over the head with them.

 

In short, Sunset Song is perhaps the most beautiful film you will see this year – the Twitter account One Perfect Shot will more screenshots out of this film than any film since Hou’s The Assassin last fall. If the content cannot quite live up to the craft, perhaps that understandable – even forgivable.

Movie Review: Embrace of the Serpent

Embrace of the Serpent

Directed by: Ciro Guerra.

Written by: Ciro Guerra and Jacques Toulemonde Vidal based on the diary by Theodor Koch-Grunberg and Richard Evans Schultes.

Starring: Nilbio Torres (Young Karamakate), Jan Bijvoet (Theo), Antonio Bolivar (Old Karamakate), Brionne Davis (Evan), Yauenkü Migue (Manduca), Nicolás Cancino (Anizetto), Luigi Sciamanna (Priest Gaspar).

 

There is so much to like about Embrace of the Serpent, that you want to overlook the parts of its that try too hard – the parts that underline the themes of the movie, than circle back to underline them again. It’s a film that wears its influences on its sleeve, and perhaps would have been better served by referring to them just a little bit less often – or at least in less obvious ways. All of that is a shame because the black and white photography in the film is beautiful, and the dual narratives do an excellent job making everything clear without co-writer/director Ciro Guerra doing all the work for the audience himself.

 

The film is about dual journeys up the same river in Colombia, South America, approximately 40 years apart. In 1909 Theo (Jan Bijovoet) is dragged ashore by his assistant, Manduca (Tauensku Migue) to see Karamakate (Nilbio Torres) – the last member of his tribe, and perhaps the only man in the jungle who can save the European explorer’s life. Karamakate has some sort of white powder that he blows into Theo’s face as they journey up the river, looking for a mythical plant that can cure him – running into various people along the way. Decades later, Evan (Brionne Davis), an American studying psychedelic drugs, wants to find the same plant Theo was chasing, and once again gets Karamakate (now played by Antonio Bolivar) to guide him up the river. Karamakate claims to no longer know where he’s supposed to go – but does believe the two men are the same person.

 

Embrace of the Serpent’s main theme is about colonialism, obviously, and how the natives in South America were essentially bulled over by white settlers – who, in the case of this movie anyway, either had good intentions, or no clue of just how destructive their presence was going to be. Embrace of the Serpent makes this clear as the journeys mirror each other, and we see the effects of events in the first journey during the second. Most notable of these is the dual scenes at a Christian missionary – the first, where the white settlers are imposing a harsh version of Christianity on the “savage” natives – and later, when we see the although the natives have taken over, they’ve grown even more violent - or as Karamakate describes it – “the worst of both worlds”.

 

It’s in scenes like that where Embrace of the Serpent works best. Where it stumbles a little is when Guerra gives speeches to Karamakate, who basically just tells the audience what the themes of the movie are, and what it all means. These dialogue scenes are clumsy and unnecessary – and there’s more than one of them as well.

 

Watching the film, you’ll recognize the influences on Guerra and his style – from ethnographic documentaries to the collected works of Apichatpong Weerasethakul to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, and especially the works of Werner Herzog – his two river based masterpieces, Aguirre the Wrath of God and Fitzcaraldo, in particular. The film tries to reference these films and move on – but sometimes, the references are a little too on the nose (when a care breaks out a record players on the river, for instance, it’s a clumsy reference to Fitzcaraldo).

 

There is enough to like about Embrace of the Serpent to make it well worth seeing – any film with black and white photography this good is more than worth seeing (and it’s good enough that I now really regret missing it when it was in theaters). It’s a flawed film to be sure – but one that makes me interested to see what Guerra does next,

The Films of Todd Haynes: Poison (1991)

Poison (1991)

Directed by:  Todd Haynes.

Written by:  Todd Haynes inspired by the novels of Jean Genet.

Starring: Edith Meeks (Felicia Beacon), Millie White (Millie Sklar), Buck Smith (Gregory Lazar), Anne Giotta (Evelyn McAlpert), Lydia Lafleur (Sylvia Manning), Ian Nemser (Sean White), Rob LaBelle (Jay Wete), Evan Dunsky (Dr. MacArthur), Marina Lutz (Hazel Lamprecht), Barry Cassidy (Officer Rilt), Richard Anthony (Edward Comacho), Angela M. Schreiber (Florence Giddens), Justin Silverstein (Jake), Chris Singh (Chris), Edward Allen (Fred Beacon), Carlos Jimenez (Jose), Larry Maxwell (Dr. Graves), Susan Norman (Nancy Olsen),

Al Quagliata (Deputy Hansen), Scott Renderer (John Broom), James Lyons (Jack Bolton), John R. Lombardi (Rass), Tony Pemberton (Young Broom), Andrew Harpending (Young Bolton).

 

When Poison was released, it was one of the most controversial films of its time. The film was one of the first American films to tackle the AIDS epidemic, and also includes fairly graphic homosexual sex – enough that the film got the dreaded NC-17 Rating. That normally would cause a small stir – but what really upset people was the fact that a (small) part of the funding came from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) – meaning tax payers helped to foot the bill for the film, and many on the right were none too happy about it. The film was also highly acclaimed – and won prizes at Festivals around the world, including the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. It was the first feature of Todd Haynes – and it’s safe to say it put him – as well as the New Queer Cinema movement – on the map.

 

As always happens when a film generates controversy, over time that fades, and what we are left with is the movie itself – to be judged on its own, and quite apart from that controversy. The film is neither the abhorrent gay porn that its detractors made it out to be – but it’s also not quite the masterpiece that its defenders hold it up as. What it is though is a highly ambitious, and highly original film that showcases Haynes already experimenting with style – using the cinematic stylings of a previous era to comment on society today. It is an angry film in many ways – a young man’s film, who is unhappy with the way gays are treated by a society who treats them as outcasts, offering punishing them violently for their transgressions. It is an easy film to admire, but for me a hard film to love – it remains more of an intellectual exercise than what Haynes would go onto produce in later films. It is, however, a rather great debut film.

 

The film is actually three separate films, in three distinct styles, intercut with each other telling stories of people who have been outcast by society. Titled Hero, Horror and Homo, the three films look at an America afraid of anyone who is different – and that wants to stamp that difference out. Hero is done in mock-documentary style, telling the story of a 7-year-old boy who murdered his abusive father, and then – according to his mother – simply flew away. The film begins as a sort of Unsolved Mysteries episode, painting a portrait of idyllic America suburbia, and wondering how such a horrible thing could happen. As the film progresses however, Haynes shows the cracks in the façade of that perfect suburbia – exposing adultery, abuse and eventually murder. Ricky, the child, is far from perfect – but he’s a product of the society he is growing up in – that demands perfection from him, even though itself is far from perfect. Horror a 1950s B-sci fi movie parody, where Dr. Graves has isolated the body’s “sex drive”, and distilled it into a liquid form – when he accidentally ingests it, he becomes a leprous, sex murderer – with sores all over his face, who is stalked by a vengeful public, and the media turns the whole thing into a circus. An obvious allegory for the AIDS epidemic – with people afraid of sex, and demonizing the sick, Horror is perhaps too good of an homage to those films – the acting is purposefully wooden, which helps to create the right atmosphere of those films, but also dulls its impact. The third part is heavily inspired by the novels Jean Genet (and one assumes his one film – Un Chant d’amour from 1950, which I reviewed a few years ago), and tells the story of two male prison inmates in the 1930s. Broom is immediately attracted to the new inmate Bolton when he arrives, but cannot bring himself to admit it – there are flashbacks to their shared youth that they never mention to each other, at an all-boys school – where Broom watches as Bolton is abused. Unlike the first two protagonists, Broom seems to be okay with his outcast status – if society has rejected him, he has rejected it right back. This is also the segment that generated the most controversy – it contains rape, a scene of shocking, disgusting abuse that will remind some of Pasolini’s Salo, and (gasp) an erect penis.

 

On the technical side, Poison is excellent – and Haynes deftly recreates these three radically different styles, in one movie. The TV documentary looks very much like one – it’s almost grainy, home video like quality, with some (deliberately) amateurish reenactments throughout. The 1950s sci-fi film really does seem like a lost relic of that time – except for the fact that in those film, they would never spend so much time talking about sex – even if many of those films had a definite sexual underpinning (much like Far From Heaven, which was a brilliant homage to Douglas Sirk, while being more open about subjects Sirk never could touch. Finally, the soft focus of flashback scenes in the Genet sequence really do make things look idyllic – which is offset by the horrors that eventually invade those flashbacks. The prison is more gray, cold and dank than anything – much like Un Chant d’amour.

 

As much as I admire Poison however, I also feel it’s undeniably a notch (or two) below Haynes’ best work. At his best, Haynes perfectly blends style, content and message – and Poison feels a lot more like a blunt instrument than the scalpel he normally uses. It doesn’t help that by cutting back and forth between three stories, during just an 85 minute film, nothing really has a chance to build. I’m not sure the film would have worked better had it just been three shorts, no intercut, but perhaps it could have been – there doesn’t seem to be much intuitive editing going on, cutting from one scene to a parallel scene in the other shorts.

 

Problems aside however, Poison remains a very good film – and clearly a landmark one. Yes, the controversy the film inspired has pretty much faded from everyone’s memory today, but the film did break down some barriers. The sad thing is that now, 25 years later, while the film would not be anywhere near as shocking as it was in 1991, no one is making anything like it. Haynes has grown as a filmmaker since Poison – and that’s for the best. But there is something about Poison that still works. It may not be a great film – but it’s a unique one.

The Films of Todd Haynes: Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987)

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987)

Directed by: Todd Haynes.

Written by: Cynthia Schneider and Todd Haynes.

Starring: Merrill Gruver (Karen), Michael Edwards (Richard), Melissa Brown (Mother), Rob LaBelle (Dad / Mr. A&M), Nannie Doyle (Cherry Boone), Cynthia Schneider (Dionne Warwick), Larry Kole (Announcer).

 

You would be forgiven for thinking that Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story sounds like nothing more than pretentious student film. It is, after all, a biopic of Karen Carpenter, half of The Carpenters, who were a very successful, and very uncool band that was big in the 1960s and 1970s, where all the main characters are Barbie dolls. This may sound like something a smug student – or Robot Chicken – would make – a way to mock Karen Carpenter, her music and Barbie all at the same time. Yet, what is amazing about Todd Haynes film – which was, made when he was a student – is how seriously it takes it subject matter, how emotional the film actually is and how the form perfectly matches the subject matter. This film is no joke – it’s actually one of the best things Todd Haynes has ever made – and shows him in full control of his skills right from the start. You can see traces of everything he has done since in the film.

 

The film focuses mainly on Karen Carpenter and her battle with anorexia – the disease that would eventually take her life when she was just 32 years old. Because the film is about Carpenter’s insecurity with her own body, and the unrealistic expectations that she places on herself to look a certain way, the choice of using Barbie’s actually makes perfect sense – Barbie has, rightly, been criticized often throughout her lifespan for selling unrealistic body images to young girls – the same type of expectations Carpenter struggles with. Not content with simply using Barbie’s out of the box, Haynes actually manipulates the Barbie dolls, stripping away levels of plastic, and changing her body, as Carpenter’s disease progresses – making the Barbie look freakishly, scarily thin. The vocal work by Merrill Gruver is terrific – making Karen sympathetic, stubborn and tragically insecure.

 

It would be easy for Haynes to mock the music of the Carpenters – it is hopelessly square in many ways. But Haynes takes the music seriously, and uses it in ways that actually deepen the emotions of the film. The way Haynes uses songs like Rainy Days and Mondays, Top of the World and especially We’ve Only Just Begun is brilliant – showing a darker, more melancholy side of the music when put in context with the rest of the film. After seeing the film, you’ll likely never hear The Carpenters music the same ever again.

 

The film is legally banned – Haynes never cleared the music rights to The Carpenters songs when he made the film, leading Richard (Karen’s brother and bandmate) to successfully sue to have the film suppressed. It wasn’t just the use of the music – but also the way the movie portrays Richard – as a man who seeks to control Karen, and force her to continue working as she spirals downward, and her parents, as control freaks, who sought to keep Karen under their thumb for her entire life – even when she was a rich recording artist in her mid-20s, they wanted her to live at home. The film is still fairly easy to see however – VHS copies in the 1980s were available, and thousands were sold, and the film is on various sites – like YouTube – pretty much constantly (yes, you will find many broken links to the film, but it really will not take you very long to find it if you want). The worst thing about the film is that the quality of all the copies you will find is quite poor. No one is going to remaster a banned film, so we have to live with what we have.

 

The greatness of the film comes through despite the poor quality of the copies you will find. It is a Todd Haynes film through and through – a film that looks at celebrity – like Velvet Goldmine and I’m Not There – and societal expectations on women – like Far From Heaven or Carol. It is a film that looks to the past, but remains relevant to the present. It is meticulously crafted – or at least as meticulously crafted as a cheaply made student films with Barbie’s can be. It is a great film – the first of Haynes great career, and one that can stand alongside anything he has ever made. It may be a 45 minute film made with Barbie’s – but it’s brilliant.

The Films of Todd Haynes: An Introduction

Todd Haynes made his feature film debut 25 years ago, with Poison, which won the top Prize at Sundance, and opened to a lot of acclaim. Since then, he has carved out a unique career for himself – even if he doesn’t work as often as many of us would like. Including Poison, there have only been six features in his career (Poison, Safe, Velvet Goldmine, Far From Heaven, I’m Not There, Carol), to go along with a few shorts (Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, Dottie Gets Spanked) and one HBO Miniseries (Mildred Pierce). It’s these 9 films that I will be revisiting in the next little while to give an overview of Haynes career.

 

What is it about Haynes that makes him so special a filmmaker? Part of it, inarguably, is the formal control he exhibits in each film – the meticulous craft. You’d be hard pressed to find many better looking films than Far From Heaven or Carol for example. Part of it is the ambition he has shown often – not many would want to tackle a Bob Dylan biopic for example, and no one else would approach it like Haynes does, having several actors portray not just different eras Dylan, but different personas. Its part of his way with actors – it’s arguable that great actresses like Julianne Moore or Cate Blanchatt have never been better than they have been for Haynes, and his focus on woman’s stories is unfortunately unusual for a male director. Part of it is also Haynes, who is openly gay, and his depiction of gay and lesbian life in America’s recent past, as well as present. He provides both a macro and micro view of these issues – and shows gay life in many different facets. Hollywood films often view gay life as a series of torments from the outside world, turning gay characters into noble victims – often sexless noble victims, because they feel that showing gay sex on screen would make too many people uncomfortable. Haynes doesn’t do that.

 

Haynes has one of the strongest filmographies of any director out there – often, when I embark on a filmmaker project like this, there are at least a few films I don’t want to revisit, but must. That’s not the case with Haynes – who was an easy choice for this series, not just because his latest, Carol, is arguably his best film – but because I really wanted to revisit every one of Haynes’ films anyway (or, in the case of the short, Dottie Gets Spanked, see it for the first time. As always, I will do an initial ranking of Haynes work – from memory – than provide an update at the end – and these often change more than I would ever think they would. I should point out that this is the rare case where I actually really like everything by the director – although certainly some more than others.

 

1. I’m Not There (2007) – As a Dylan fan, I wondered if a feature could anything to the great documentaries – most notably D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back and Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home – but Haynes not only made the perfect Dylan biopic, but my favorite musical biopic ever. A masterpiece.
2. Carol (2015) – A subtle, brilliantly well made love story for the ages, with amazing performances by Cate Blanchatt and especially Rooney Mara. A beautiful, deeply felt film. Another masterpiece.
3. Far From Heaven (2002) – Haynes’ Douglas Sirk homage is actually better than just about any of the Sirk films I have seen. It does look at being gay in the 1950s, but interestingly looks at it from the more passive POV of the wife, who discovers her husband is gay. The film is brilliantly photographed and acted, and is perhaps another masterpiece.
4. Safe (1995) – Perhaps the film I am most excited to revisit – as its been sometime since I’ve seen it, and many think it’s Haynes’ best film. I don’t remember it that way, but perhaps another viewing will shoot this one way up.
5. Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) – Perhaps the most original film of Haynes’ career – a 45 minute Karen Carpenter biopic, where the characters are all Barbie dolls, that he manipulates to show her massive weightless do to anorexia. The film is officially “unavailable” – because it uses the Carpenters music without their permission (and given the portrait it paints, that won’t change) – and apparently Matel wasn’t thrilled about seeing their Barbie’s used this way – but it’s easy to find on YouTube, and other streaming sites.
6. Mildred Pierce (2011) – Haynes’ muted noir, that isn’t quite as melodramatic or violent as the Michael Curtiz original, but every bit as good. It’s a five hour miniseries, with great performances by Kate Winslet and Evan Rachel Wood – the reaction was respectful, but a little muted when it came out – but I quite loved it.
7. Velvet Goldmine (1998) – I wasn’t a huge fan when I first saw this – but it’s a film that has stayed with me, and I am more interested in the subject matter now than I was at the time. Out of all the films on the list, this is (along with Safe) my most anticipated re-watch.
8. Poison (1991) – I may have ranked this last, but I quite like Poison – even if I think it’s better in concept than execution.

 

But that’s how I see things before I watch anything by Haynes. Over the next 9 posts, I will go through the films he has directed, before wrapping things up, and re-ranking. I hope you’ll enjoy the series.

Movie Review: Green Room

Green Room

Directed by: Jeremy Saulnier.

Written by: Jeremy Saulnier.

Starring: Anton Yelchin (Pat), Patrick Stewart (Darcy), Joe Cole (Reece), Alia Shawkat (Sam), Callum Turner (Tiger), Imogen Poots (Amber), David W. Thompson (Tad), Mark Webber (Daniel), Macon Blair (Gabe), Eric Edelstein (Big Justin), Brent Werzner (Werm), Taylor Tunes (Emily), Kai Lennox (Clark), Samuel Summer (Jonathan), Mason Knight (Kyle), Colton Ruscheinsky (Alan).

 

Blue Ruin announced Jeremy Saulnier as a major new talent in American genre filmmaking – and his follow-up Green Room confirms it. Both films are among the bloodiest you will see, and yet neither film really dwells on the blood that is spilled. The violence, when it comes, is usually over fairly quickly – but leaves that mess behind for the characters to deal with. Although everyone in the films have a plan – nothing really goes exactly how they think it will. Things go wrong, mistakes are made, there are unintended and unforeseen consequences that the characters do not see coming. Both films also play with their genre, subtly twisting things without jabbing you in the chest, and pointing out how clever the movie is. Blue Ruin is a film that has grown in my mind since I saw it at TIFF in 2013 – and something similar is happening with Green Room in the days since I saw it. Both films work – amazingly well – as genre film exercises – but both films have more going on than it appears like on the surface.

 

In short, Green Room is about a punk band named The Ain’t Rights, on a small, cross country tour from their home in Washington D.C. – now all the way in Portland, Oregon. They’re on their last stop, and yet, they still have no money (they have everything they need to siphon gas to get from gig-to-gig). We’re introduced to them as they are being interviews for a small radio piece – about why they value the live experience over albums, and why they have no social media presence. In these early scenes, it’s hard what to make of the band – are they a group of pretentious, untalented, punks and criminals – or do you admire them for the purity of their vision (or, perhaps, both). The band needs money, and after a gig is cancelled, they end up at another one instead. They are warned that the crowd will be “right wing, well, actually ultra-left wing, but that’s the same thing” (aka, they’re being playing for racist skinheads) – but hey, a gig is a gig, and money is money. After deliberately antagonizing the crowd in their first song, and then, presumably, winning them back after they are ready to hit the road – when they end up walking in on something they should never have seen. Now, they’ve locked themselves in the backroom of this makeshift club, in the middle of nowhere, with a dead body, a huge skinhead, and a friend of the victim. Outside, the skinheads – led by Patrick Stewart’s Darcy, who owns the place, try and talk them out – which they are reluctant to do sensing, rightly, that if they leave they’ll be killed.

 

Green Room works wonderfully well as a surface level thriller – as Saulnier gradually ratchets up the tension from one scene to the next. The characters are stuck in an impossible situation – and yet the decisions they make actually make sense at the time they make them – even if the results of those decisions is often disastrous. The film plays with the audience brilliantly – setting up various moments that we think we know how they will pay off, and then not going the expected root. He did this in Blue Ruin as well (the best example being when Macon Blair’s character tries to perform a little surgery on himself – which goes really wrong). Here, he sets up some “hero” moments that never actually come to pass. Saulnier’s approach to violence is fascinating as well. This is as bloody a film as you will see this year – yet Saulnier spends more time on the aftermath of the violence rather than the violence itself. The violence comes fast and furious in the film, and then is over rather quickly. But Saulnier doesn’t let the audience off the hook – he makes you sit with the blood, the viscera and the bodies for quite some time afterwards. Green Room even has an undercurrent of very dark comedy – including a last line that will go as one of the best of the year.

 

But Green Room is deeper than its genre trappings initially seem to indicate. The movie taps into the rage that leads to so much violence in America. Yes, the bad guys in the movie are racist skinheads – yet they are not over-the-top with their hatred, and Saulnier and his actors certainly paint different levels of their commitment. Patrick Stewart has perhaps never been better than he is as Darcy – a man who runs the organization, but is more of a businessman than anything else. He’s tired, and just wants the mess cleaned up, so it doesn’t jeopardize his earning potential. Blue Ruin’s Macon Blair has a great role as a man who is tough to get a read on – how much he believes. Imogen Poots is excellent as well –someone who starts on one side – she is at the skinhead show willingly, but ends up aligned with the band out of necessity. Even the various members of the band show different levels of commitment to their own, perhaps outdated ideology. This isn’t a movie about character development – out of necessity, a movie set over the course of one night, in one location in an intense situation, doesn’t have room for that. But that doesn’t mean the characters are one dimensional – at all.

 

Green Room is one of the best films of the year so far – a brilliant genre exercise, with additional layers which make it fascinating to think over – and one assumes, revisit. Don’t miss this one.

Movie Review: Keanu

Keanu

Directed by: Peter Atencio.

Written by: Jordan Peele & Alex Rubens.

Starring: Jordan Peele (Rell Williams / Oil Dresden), Keegan-Michael Key (Clarence Goobril / Smoke Dresden), Tiffany Haddish (Hi-C), Method Man (Cheddar), Darrell Britt-Gibson (Trunk), Jason Mitchell (Bud), Jamar Malachi Neighbors (Stitches), Luis Guzmán (Bacon), Will Forte (Hulka), Nia Long (Hannah), Rob Huebel (Spencer).

 

Key & Peele was the best sketch comedy on TV during it brilliant five year run. That series boldly tackled very serious issues of race, right alongside some sketches that were just plain goofy fun. During its run, Key & Peele was daring – but it was also always hilarious, and gave a variety of roles and characters to its stars/creators – who also openly talked about what it was like to be a black actor in Hollywood – always have to audition for the role of “black friend”. While it was a shame that Key & Peele ended – it was probably for the best for them to get out of the show before it grew stale (something the latest season of the other great sketch comedy show, Inside Amy Schumer, is struggling with on this most recent season). But these two performers have such chemistry together, you knew they wouldn’t stay away from each other for long – which brings us to Keanu, the action/comedy movie starring the pair (and co-written by Peele). The movie is consistently funny for its 98 minute runtime – even if it never reaches the heights of their show. Strangely, even with feature length to play with, it feels like a lot of the sketches on Key & Peele were deeper and more insightful than the entirety of the film. None of this is to suggest that Keanu isn’t hilarious – or a waste of the talents of the two leading men. Yet, a little like Trainwreck written and starring Amy Schumer last year, it feels like the film plays everything a little too safe – and doesn’t upend the Hollywood formulas as much as you may think given their show.

 

The movie takes place in L.A. – and opens with a bloody shootout when a pair of Allentown assassins walk into a church, filled with Diaz gang, cutting drugs, and proceed to slaughter them all in an exaggerated, slow-motion gun battle that even John Woo would think was over-the-top (purposefully so). During the massacre, the most adorable kitten in the world takes off – eventually finding his way to the home of Rell (Peele) – a pot smoking, slacker depressed because his girlfriend has just broken up with him. The adorable cat brings him out of that depression – much to the relief of his cousin, Clarence (Key). Through a series of plot twists though the kitten, named Keanu by Rell, ends up in the hands of a drug dealer named Cheddar (Method Man) – and Rell and Clarence end up spending time with his crew over the weekend – adopting the persona of the Allentown assassins from the beginning.

 

The movie is at its best as Rell and Clarence try hard to fit in with the gang of drug dealers – adopting stereotypical drug dealer personas and vocal inflections they’ve learned from movies like New Jack City and others – which is miles away from who they really are (early in the film, they compare notes about growing up in New York and Detroit – arguing over who got beat up by bigger guys). Clarence is far more reluctant to get into his gang persona – dubbed Shark Tank – but it only takes him a minute or two before he seems incredibly comfortable in it – even going so far as to expound on the virtues of George Michael to the gang, or employ his corporate team building strategies on them (I loved the moment, late in the moment, where he marvels that they are working together).

 

It must be said that Keanu isn’t a particularly well paced or structured movie – there are gags that are funny, and then go on longer than they need to (like what starts out as a hilarious cameo by a comedic actress I want to see more of on the big screen again – but which flags as it winds down). Will Forte’s drug dealer is a little bit of a missed opportunity as well – as they never really push his character far enough, or seemingly have anything to say about cultural appropriation. And Nia Long is wasted as Key’s wife.

 

Yet, flaws aside, Keanu is consistently funny – not quite from beginning to end, but close enough. The pair have always been movie buffs (one of my favorite Key & Peele sketches has the pair of them shooting things in a movie theater, playing on quite a few stereotypes at once) – and while Keanu never quite reaches Hot Fuzz levels of parody of 1990s action movies, it does come really quite close. More importantly, Keanu proves that it pair of stars can escape from the shadow of the sketch comedy, and become real movie stars. I’m not sure they quite outshine the kitten in Keanu – but they come close. I do hope that next time out, they push everything farther – but until then, Keanu will do just fine.