Movie Nation

If you’re not deep into martial arts cinema, you might have walked by the various movies titled “Ip Man” on the DVD shelves and mistaken them for Chinese or Japanese sci-fi or fantasy.
But the legendary Ip Man (also spelled Yip Man) is no invention of screenwriters. He’s a famous figure in Chinese martial arts, guardian of several martial arts styles and the man who taught Bruce Lee his chops.
“The Grandmaster” is the latest version of his life to make it onto the screen, a regal, majestic and downright arty take on this teacher, champion and philosopher whose life spanned much of the twentieth century. Co-writer/director Wong Kar Wai (“Chungking Express,” “In the Mood For Love”) goes for stately in this slow-moving action epic, sometimes at the expense of coherence and always in preference to pacing.
Fortunately, he has his muse, the great Tony Leung (“In the Mood for Love,” “Hero”, “Red Cliff”) in the title role, a magnetic screen presence who suggests mystery, romance and humility with just a faint, cryptic smile. His stillness seems just right for a character who can lick any ten guys in the room, and knows it.
The story follows Ip Man through World War II, when much of China was under siege by the Japanese, but whose martial arts aristocracy was still fretting over the divisions between assorted “Northern” styles and Ip Man’s simple, lethal “Southern” style.
The grandmaster of the North (Wang Qingxiang) is about to pass his mantle on to a protege (Zhang Jin). But Ma San is a hothead, which makes Master Gong regret that he cannot pass the leadership to his daughter, played by the serene and stunningly beautiful Zhang Ziyi (“Memoirs of a Geisha,” “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”). Gong Er has mastered both the “64 hand” positions of her father’s Kung Fu, and the philosophy behind it.
Wong Kar Wai pays tribute to the martial arts of the past as Ip Man is tested by the other martial arts masters of the South before he must fight the best of the North in a friendly test of mastery.
There’s Sister Man, master of Bagua, and Master Yong of “Hung Gar” style. A little trash talk accompanies these tests.
“Your fireworks have fizzled,” Ip Man whispers as he puts on the Panama Hat he wears in between fights. He only needs three hand positions — spade, pin, sheath — to beat the best of the best.
Wong Kar Wai and his cinematographer — Philipe Le Sourd of “Seven Pounds” and “A Good Year”  — shoot wondrous brawls in rain and snow, a funeral procession by a frozen lake, a bloodless beat-down in an elaborate brothel. It’s a gorgeous looking film (shortened for American release), whatever its other virtues and failings. Slow motion chops and kicks, delicate choreography (by Yuen Woo-Ping), extreme closeups of a match being lit, a cigarette burning, a button, torn from a coat that is symbolic of the life China’s wars interrupted dress the film up but slow it down. Lovely colorized newsreel footage and sepia-toned scenes that dissolve into still photographs capture the flow of history.
The story, touching on World War II, skipping over the Chinese Civil War and glossing over Ip Man’s reasons for fleeing to Hong Kong just as the communists took over the country, is more ambitious than streamlined. We lose track of Ip Man,here and there, to follow Gong Er’s sad, romantic story.
But it’s still a majestic version of a life story that merits this sort of treatment, at least within the world of martial arts. And the ageless Leung and Ziyi bring this stately, static film thrillingly to life just often enough to give Ip Man and his legacy his due.

(Let’s sum up the summer movies and hand out those ‘Summer Oscars)

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence, some smoking, brief drug use and language
Cast: Tony Leung, Zhang Ziyi, Zhang Jin, Wang Qingxiang, Chang Chen
Credits: Directed by Wong Kar Wai, written by Wong Kar Wai, Xu Haofeng and Zou Jingzhi .  A Weinstein Co. release
Running time: 1:46

The decades-long glut of horror movies cannot help but numb the regular filmgoer — especially the horror film fan — to the shocks, effects and jolts that are standard issue in this weary genre.
Too many vampires, serial killers, zombies or alien beasties, too many shrieking, bleeding coeds or gutted jocks and eviscerated cops and the movies lose their sting.
Then a film like “You’re Next” comes along and reminds us that all you need to suck fans into your movie are people in jeopardy, pitiless killers and those one or two victims who fight back and win our sympathy, give us someone to root for. All you need to scare the willies out of us, to get that visceral hair-raising reaction, are masked killers and splashes of well-placed viscera.
The adult children of a wealthy couple (Barbara Crampton, Rob Moran) gather in their country house to help them celebrate a wedding anniversary. We barely have time to pick up on the friction over Crispian (A.J. Bowen), an academic dating a student (Sharni Vinson), something brother Drake (Joe Swanberg) disapproves of, and the disconnect between hipster brother Felix (Nicholas Tucci), his Goth girlfriend Zee (Wendy Glenn) and bubbly sister Aimee (Amy Seimetz), who is dating a filmmaker (horror filmmaker Ti West).
Then the crossbow bolts come crashing through the window, nobody’s cell phone works, and people in the house start dying at the hands of hooded, animal-masked intruders. Is it a random act, part of a spree (we’ve seen neighbors slaughtered in the opening scene) or some sort of Satanic ritual?
“You’re Next” reaches for laughs with its cheap scares and bizarre reactions to life-or-death situations. People volunteer to “go out there” where the killers are, and get in a car to fetch help, or go upstairs– alone — to check out a noise.
They shout “It’s OK, it’s OK” after some horrific bit of butchery, and “Maybe it’s over,” when the latest slice of slaughter has ended. The one or two hysterics in their ranks are the ones reacting with the proper sense of urgency.
“We’re all going to DIE!”
Killers who write “You’re Next”, in blood, on the wall behind a victim are not to be taken lightly.
But one or two of the family assume a defensive posture, arm themselves, cover windows and try to reason or fight their way out of this. The bad guys have their sheep or wolf masks, crossbows and machetes. Let’s find us some knives, and maybe a blender or meat tenderizer!
“You’re Next”, which co-stars a couple of filmmakers (Swanberg and West), was shelved for a couple of years. But not because it is damaged goods. The frights are passable, the foreshadowing (extreme close-ups of nails being pounded through boards, etc.) telling and the humor — sick as it is — quite funny.
Don’t worry about Crispian — “Crispian’s a tough guy.”
“No, he’s not. But thanks for that.”
So seriously, if you see just one slaughterhouse horror picture this year…

(Roger Moore interviews “You’re Next” star Sharni Vinson)

MPAA Rating:  R for strong bloody violence, language and some sexuality/nudity
Cast: Sharni Vinson, A.J. Bowen, Nicholas Tucci, Joe Swanberg, Ti West, Wendy Glenn
Credits: Directed by Adam Wingard, written by Simon Barrett.  A Lionsgate release
Running time: 1:36

The Cuban emigre saga earns a surprising love triangle treatment in Lucy Mulloy’s “Una noche,” a tale of the young and the desperate willing to risk their lives on rafts to get to America. From its earliest moments to its melodramatic finale, writer-director Mulloy manages to trip up our expectations even while telling a version of an oft-told tale.
Lila (Anailin de la Rua de La Torre) narrates our story, a teenager enduring an unhappy home life and the torments of Havana’s version of “mean girls.” A beauty in most cultures, she gets her picked on by the blondes who call her “hairy” because of her arms, armpits and eyebrows.
Her twin brother Elio (Javier Nunez Florian) is her defender and her champion. Don’t listen to “the plastic girls,” he lectures. But Lila admits in her narration that she is “more comfortable watching people than talking with them. Especially boys.”
And she has a competitor for Elio’s attention these days. A cook in one of the tourist hotels that are the lifeblood of Havana, Elio is in the thrall of Raul (Dariel Arrechaga), a handsome hustler who has decided that he cannot stand life in Cuba, where all he has to look forward to is sex and “sweating,” any longer. He’s determined to float away, and he’s decided that Elio will be his running mate.
Mulloy, making her feature directing debut,  reveals this odd love triangle from three different points of view. Lila may narrate, and Elio may have the access to raft building materials, but Raul’s tricks and chicanery in rounding up the requirements for that 90 mile float trip to Miami dominate the story. He uses women and men, begs “borrows” and steals and has a single-mindedness about this trip that borders on mania.
Filmed on location in Havana, “Una noche” shows an impoverished, young generation hassled by cops whose priority is making the city safe for tourists. And the tourists are not just interested in cigars and sand.
It’s a city where “the shops are empty, but if you know the right person” goods can be found — a well-equipped illicit pharmacy here, patchable inner tubes there, a junk dealer who insists a motor he’s selling works. If it doesn’t?
“Bring it back.”
“Una noche,” in Spanish with English subtitles, has a lovely, big budget sheen (Shlomo Godder was the cinematographer) and a cast that plays this as documentary real. At times, Mulloy lets the sordid side of her story take over. And the film becomes a bit of an eye-roller as the raft hits the water and that becomes the moment the Cubans decide to debate the relative merits of America — decent paying jobs — and Cuba — universal health care.
But for a story that seemingly covers a lot of very familiar ground, “Una noche” manages to startle and move us in ways we never see coming.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with explicit sex, one scene of graphic violence
Cast: Dariel Arrechaga, Anailin de la Rua de la Torre, Javier Nunez Florian
Credits: Written and directed by Lucy Mulloy. An IFC release.
Running time: 1:27

Long before he took on the gravitas of playing Jesus, actor Jim Caviezel was known for rarely cracking a smile. So his turn as a whimsical, hard-drinking duck hunter with a touch of the poet about him in “Savannah” would stand out if that was all it had to recommend it.
A picaresque/Faulkneresque tale of the Old South turning new in the years just after World War I, “Savannah” has Caviezel playing a colorful, larger than life local in that sleepy Low Country Georgia port town.
One of the things that makes you “larger than life” is the way other people tell colorful stories about you. And Ward Allen has that going for him.
“Did I ever tell you about how Ward Allen beat up them Russians?”
That’s a favorite of the old black man named Christmas (Chiwetel Ejiofor), Ward Allen’s boon companion and best friend. We meet him when Jack Cay (Bradley Whitford) shows up, in 1954, to move Christmas Moultrie, born a slave, out of the house he’s known all his life.
In flashbacks, we meet Ward Allen (Caviezel), see the incident that prompted a brawl over in Czarist Russia (it involves an inept barber and a mustache accident) and get a taste of the life that Allen and Moultrie lived in a Savannah when many were old enough to have memories of the war polite Southerners refer to as “The Late Unpleasantness.”
Allen was born rich, educated at Oxford, but someone who turned his back on a legal or literary career, “a man of letters who has returned to nature.” But he’s no Thoreau, he insists. Allen loves his guns and lives to duck hunt. He and Christmas ignore limits, seasons and game wardens as “market hunters,” shooting as fast they can reload to supply local restaurants with fresh mallard meat. More often than not, that lands them in court.
Ward Allen, in his shirtsleeves, duck waders and often as not two or three sheets to the wind, regales the court and the judge (Hal Holbrook) until the judge lets him off with probation.
“Liberty plucks justice by the nose!” Allen crows with each legal victory.
Then a local rich girl (Jaimie Alexander) decides that she won’t have the rich fop (Jack McBrayer of TV’s “30 Rock”)  her father (Sam Shepard) picked out for her.
“I am neither yours to dispense or withhold,” the feisty and independent Lucy declares. She sets her sights on “a real man,” Allen.
Almost despite himself, and ignoring the warnings of Christmas (“A woman ain’t an argument to be won.”), Allen courts and marries the fair Lucy. And that’s when the trouble starts, because he’s not giving up his booze or his ducks for family life.
“Never touch my guns,” he says, adding one more thing he won’t give up.
It’s a gorgeous-looking film, and director and co-writer Annette Heywood Carter evokes a marvelous sense of a time and place, that civil South that the movies insist existed before the Civil Rights South. Christmas only rarely feels the sting of racism, which Allen dismisses even if you suspect that what Christmas says is true. If Allen wasn’t his friend, life would be much more dangerous for an independent-minded black man in 1920s Georgia.
The dialogue is beautifully florid, and you can see why this cast was drawn to the project. But the generically-titled “Savannah” meanders like a river making its way through Low Country marshland, teetering toward the tragic in its later chapters and never quite achieving the whimsy it aims for in the early ones.
Ejiofor and Caviezel, playing real-life figures from that slice of Georgia history, are entirely too young in 1920s Georgia to have lived through the Civil War some 60 years before.
But “Savannah” gets by on touches of grace and spirited performances, especially by Caviezel. After being so serious for so very long, it’s great fun to see him take on a “genuine character” with all the boozing, brawling and shooting that entails.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for brief sexuality.
Cast: Jim Caviezel, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jaimie Alexander, Sam Shepard, Hal Holbrook, Bradley  Whitford
Credits: Directed by Annette Heywood-Carter, written by Kenneth Carter and Annette Heywood Carter.  A Ketchup Entertainment release
Running time: 1:46

It’s been so long since Nicolas Cage has starred in a straightforward thriller playing a realistic character that “The Frozen Ground” feels like a shock to the system — his, and ours.
Mr. Over-the-Top plays a state police detective struggling to build a case against a suspected serial killer in 1980s Alaska. This “based on actual events” case study hinges on the sexist blundering of the Anchorage Police Department, which had Robert Hansen (John Cusack) in custody, thanks to one victim (Vanessa Hudgens), tortured, chained up and facing death, who escaped. But they didn’t take the teen aged Cindy Paulson — a hooker — seriously.
“You can’t rape a prostitute, can you?” one cop sneers.
Detective Jack Halcombe’s boss (Kevin Dunn) thinks the missing young women, whose bodies start turning up, are “coincidences.” The district attorney (Kurt Fuller) is reluctant to bring a case.
But Halcombe (Cage) is sure he’s got his man. He is convinced by Cindy’s story and thinks he can keep her safe and get her to testify.
Halcombe finds a streetwise vice cop (Michael McGrady, in a stand-out performance) to show him the milieu of strip bars, pimps and hookers of “The Track,” Anchorage’s red light district. This is post-Pipeline Alaska, and New Zealand writer-director Scott Walker matches the sordid, dank look of The Track with the blue-grey skies of the back country, where bodies turn up as the frozen ground melts.
Interestingly, Walker keeps his crook and his quarry separated for much of the film, even though we know and Halcombe knows who the bad guy is. That changes the cat-and-mouse dynamic as we see Halcombe try to figure out the killer’s MO and build a solid case. Meanwhile, the bad guy, a hunter and bush pilot, knows they’re onto him and covers his tracks.
Ex-Disney “High School Musical” princess Hudgens does her best to smudge up and dress down to make a convincing teenage girl with an ugly past, not trusting anyone and especially any man she meets, but young and foolish enough to figure she can survive on her own. That’s a dicey proposition, as Hansen knows she’s the one person who can convict him.
Radha Mitchell ably plays Halcombe’s “change jobs” wife and rapper-turned-actor 50 Cent pops up as a pimp. Cusack is entering the character villain stage of his career and he’s realistically creepy here.
And Cage, without having to play a ghostly motorcyclist or hot rod driver from Hell or sorcerer or sci-fi hero or kinky cop, reminds us that he used to know subtlety. So even if “Frozen Ground” breaks little new ground in the serial killer thriller genre, there’s hope Cage will leave the ham behind before Alaska freezes over.

MPAA Rating: R for violent content, sexuality/nudity, language and drug use
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Vanessa Hudgens, John Cusack, Rahda Mitchell, 50 Cent, Kevin Dunn
Credits: Written and directed by Scott Walker. A Lionsgate release.  Running time: 1:45

His latest film “Passion” showcases many a DePalma trademark — overt sexual role playing, etc.

Rachel McAdams toys with her underling Noomi Rapace in a high-stakes game of corporate intrigue.

One of the most successful members of the generation of movie makers that included Coppola and Scorsese, Schraeder, Lucas and Spielberg, I’ve never gotten around to chatting with him.

Questions for Mr. DePalma? I’m looking for directions to take the interview in and I can always use the help. Post them as comments, and thanks.

Australia has never produced a cinematic “scream queen”, an actress who reigns over screen horror films the way Jamie Leigh Curtis did, back in her “Halloween” days. And Sydney native Sharni Vinson says “It’s about bloody time, then, isn’t it?”
Vinson, 30, as the all-things-horror website FEARnet assures us, is “the breakout star of ‘You’re Next'”, a superior “home invasion” horror film about an extended family in a remote vacation home, assaulted by murderous, masked intruders.
A film that was the object of a bidding war, that has made the rounds in film festivals and sat on the shelf a bit is finally coming out. “About bloody time” Vinson repeats, laughing. We asked her a few questions about how one survives a picked-off, one-by-one situation like the one presented in “You’re Next.”
What sort of life skills you should have in hand to improve your odds?
Vinson: My character comes from a family of survivalists. But after this movie, everybody, especially women, needs to take some sort of self-defense course. Martial arts, whatever. Everybody deserves to feel a degree of confidence that if your home was intruded on, you’d be able to stand up and protect yourself from a hideous situation.
And do it when you’re young!
What’s the best way to cope, quickly, with the of ‘This is REALLY happening’?
Vinson: You do that with confidence. Having trained a bit for a situation like this, you’ll get a huge adrenalin jolt rather than just shaking with fear. Competence creates confidence, so take those classes! The more you know, the better.
What are the first things you’d look for, finding yourself in a situation like this? Weapons, an escape route, a place to hide?
Vinson: Arm yourself. If you’re trying to fight somebody who has a weapon and you don’t, you’re already at a disadvantage. When it comes to figuring out a quick strategy, you have to think where the threat is coming from. The threat, in ‘You’re Next,’ is coming from outside the house, guys with crossbows. Don’t run outside! Lock the windows, the doors. Think before putting yourself in more danger. Assess!
Use reverse psychology. If this is plainly some sort of planned attack, you need to come up with a plan to fight back. Be smarter than they are.
What do you look for in an improvised weapon?
Vinson: When you see it, you’ll know. Anything can be a weapon. It can be heavy or sharp. Women wear rings with sharp edges, and stiletto heels get their name from how sharp the heel is. Even a meat tenderizer can be lethal!
What mistakes do you see people make in movies about this sort of situation that we should all avoid?
Vinson: I love horror movies, and logically, the most frustrating thing in them is that stupid move somebody makes that nobody in their right mind would make. The victim, say, gains the upper hand for just a moment, and fails to do enough damage to the killer to put them out of action. That’s why, in ‘You’re Next,’ if my character gets somebody down, she makes sure they STAY down. He ain’t NEVER coming back.

(Roger Moore reviews “You’re Next”)