Here’s a good warm up act for the big budget Tom Hanks film, “Captain Phillips,” about the hijacking and rescue of the crew of the Maersk Alabama. “A Hijacking” promises to be a more straightforward account of a hijacking — one without Seal Team 6 saving the day. A Danish ship is taken, and we see the drama play out on board and in the boardroom, where the owners negotiate. “A Hijacking” opens in late June.
Brit Marling, who played a cult leader claiming to be a prophetess from the future in “Sound of My Voice,” takes a look at the other side of the equation in “The East,” an audacious thriller about a cultish gang of anarchists who set out to punish those those poisoning the planet and the people on it.
Marling plays an ex-Federal agent and semi-devout Christian who wears crucifixes and listens to Christian radio, but who will have to hide all that when she accepts a job from a corporate espionage firm that wants her to infiltrate the group known as The East.
The East pulls off “jams,” stunts that directly punish those responsible for oil spills and the like. They videotape their handiwork and humiliate the corporate clients of her new employer. And that simply won’t do. Big business must be saved from these terrorists.
Clean-cut Jane must shed her button-down lifestyle, tell her live-in beau (Jason Ritter) that she’s “going to Dubai” for work, slip on some Birkenstocks and a backpack and take a walk on the counter-culture side. Jane becomes “Sarah,” impressionable member of the Occupy class.
The first fascinating thing about “The East” is Sarah’s pursuit of this group, hopping a freight train, taking abuse from railroad goons, dumpster-diving for dinner. It’s a world the movies don’t show us. Sarah has a new back story and a tough, committed persona that is catnip to the fringe dwellers of The East, when she finally makes contact.
The group itself seems a collection of “types” — rich activists who can afford the luxury of worrying about issues most of the world feels free to ignore. Then Sarah gets to know them — the hacker, the medic, “Doc,” (Toby Kebbell) who suffers from seizures, the leader (Alexander Skarsgard) and the combative, militant and oh-so-suspicious Izzy, played with a self-righteous rage by Ellen “Juno” Page.
“We are a wake up call,” Izzy intones on their viral videos. “An eye for an eye…We will show no mercy.”
Sarah reports back to the boss (a very mercenary Patricia Clarkson), passing judgment on their group hugs and cultish rituals that teach teamwork, togetherness and commitment to the cause.
“Self-righteousness always goes hand in hand with resistance movements,” she lectures her boss, exactly what that boss wants to hear.
But then she goes on their first “jam.” This is the heist picture part of “The East,” crashing a corporate Cape Cod cocktail party where members of Congress and Big Pharma (represented by Julia Ormond) rub-elbows, blithely unaware that the under-tested drug this company has been allowed to market is being served in their drinks.
Punishment fits the “crime” or not, Sarah is shocked by the immorality of this. But she connects with the group’s message, and its handsome, thoughtful leader. And her boss’s ruthless cynicism alarms her. That leads to inner conflict, guilt. She starts to wonder which side she’s on, and which she should be on.
“The East” beautifully captures the two worlds Sarah/Jane must navigate, a blend of modern high tech “off the grid” survival and old-fashioned hoboing on one side, and ruthless, self-interested corporate cogs in the machine on the other. Marling, criticised in her earliest films for having a passive persona, is nothing of the sort here. She plays guile with ease and gives Sarah an edge that the early scenes disguise.
It’s too much a movie of “types,” and loses track of story elements that would seem important enough to warrant further exploration. The whole Christian conservative law-and-order mantle feels like a fuzzy afterthought on Jane, forgotten far too soon.
But “The East” offers a lot to chew on and keeps the viewer on the same fence as Sarah, as bad things happen to bad people, and to “good” people — the dilettantes who see themselves as do-gooders but get just as down and dirty as those corporations they seek to punish.
MPAA Rating:PG-13 for thematic elements, violence, some disturbing images, sexual content and partial nudity
Cast: Brit Marling, Ellen Page, Alexander Skarsgard, Julia Ormond, Toby Kebbell
Credits: Directed by Zal Batmanglij, written by Batmanglij and Brit Marling. A Fox Searchlight release.
Running time: 1:55
Her dad wanted her to run to the store, but Collette let her little brother do it. That was back in 1973, Northern Ireland. And little Dylan never made it home alive, caught in the crossfire between warring factions in that region’s long war.
Twenty years later and Collette (Andrea Riseborough) still grieves, still seems like a hollow woman. The guilt is why she’s a reliable agent for the Irish Republican Army, still part of setting up foes for murder by bomb or bullet. But her haunted face tells you her heart’s not in it.
Or, at least, that’s what the British agent who goes by “Mac” (Clive Owen) sees. He drags her in, uses her own son as leverage, and sets out to turn her into a double agent.
“They’ll never know,” he purrs.
“They will.”
“Shadow Dancer” is about this “courtship.” The supposedly steely but actually fragile Collette is tempted, threatened and cajoled by Mac, who tries his darnedest to not fall for her vulnerability and those pretty, wounded eyes.
It’s an unhurried, somber thriller in the mold of Hitchcock’s “Notorious” with the protagonists, and the viewer, unsure of which of them can be trusted, uncertain of who is falling for whom.
Gillian Anderson is ably cagey as the secretive spy boss Mac reports to, a woman with “orders” and an agenda that may clash with his own.
David Wilmot, Domhnall Gleeson and Aiden Gillen ably play a trio of IRA folk Collette has to fool as her tips are interfering with operations leading up to an attempted assassination. Director James Marsh (“The King,” and the documentaries “Man on Wire” and “Project Nim” were his) ably builds suspense as we see the preparations the terrorists make for dealing with a suspected traitor. They’re asking questions in one room, but in the next one, an aide is spreading plastic sheeting on the floor so that there’ll be no blood stains if an execution is called for.
Owen and Riseborough play their characters awfully close to the vest, not investing in anything that would allow this story to take the romantic or melodramatic turns we expect. But truthfully, that hamstrings the movie. Screenwriter Tom Bradby, in adapting his own novel, robs the film of the higher stakes that would come into play if we felt more heat between the leads.
Riseborough (“Oblivion”,”Disconnect”) gives this woman such a sad poker face that it’s a stretch to say we feel for her plight, even though she’s been the victim of this violence all her life.
Thus, “Shadow Dancer” just dances around the plot points and big scenes that would have truly drawn us in.
MPAA Rating: R for language and some violent content
Cast: Andrea Riseborough, Clive Owen, Gillian Anderson,
Credits: Directed by James Marsh, written by Tom Bradby, based on his novel. A Magnolia release.
Running time: 1:41
I interviewed the star and director of the French-Canadian comedy “Starbuck,” which scored with audiences up there a couple of years back, and in film festivals and art film theaters (such as the Enzian) this year.
“Delivery Man” is the Hollywood remake, starring Vince Vaughn. Does it have the same funny, but with a lump in your throat feel?
This latest “Man of Steel” commercial gives us the other Oscar winning father figure, Jor El (Russell Crowe) lecturing his son on what will happen and what his role on Earth is to be. Is that part of the canon? Did he know his son would be another “Chosen One”? I kind of thought the kid figured that out for himself, being raised right by the Kents. Kind of spoils some of what happens knowing birth dad pre-ordained it all. “Man of Steel” opens June 14.
Natalie Portman wanted to make it. She had Michael Fassbender lined up to co-star and Lynn Ramsey set to direct.
Fassbender bowed out, replaced by Bradley Cooper, who also had to give up due to scheduling problems. Director Lynn Ramsey pulled out the day before shooting was to start. But they’re filming, and the Weinstein Co. has paired up with Relativity to see that “Jane Got a Gun” sees the cinematic light of day, if they get it finished.
Writer-director Todd Haynes will take on a 1950s period piece, “Carol,” by famed “Talented Mr.Ripley” novelist Patricia Highsmith. “Carol” is about two very different women (Cate Blanchett and Mia Wasikowska) in 1950s New York, a just-starting-out-on-her own department store clerk (Wasikowska) and a woman trapped in a loveless marriage.
Haynes has had good luck with period pieces, “Far From Heaven” being the most famous. The prolific Highsmith has had films made from her novels ever since Hitchcock fell in love with “Strangers on a Train.”
The casting is on the money, the director did “Downfall” and the screenwriter managed one of Johnny Depp’s rare failures, “The Libertine.”
eOne bought the rights to release the finished film “Diana,” about the last days/love affair of the princess so many mourned upon her passing. Naomi Watts stars in it, Oliver Hirshbiegel directed it.
Yes, Will Smith keeps setting the table for his son to take over “the family business,” and even by Hollywood standards, this can feel like he is “pimping him out,” as many commentators are noting. And yes, M. Night Shyamalan directed it. But he’s made good movies, and Jaden Smith hasn’t been bad in the couple of films he’s done. So we’ll reserve judgment on “After Earth,” even though its premise and digital critter effects aren’t exacting bowling any of us over pre-release. If it’s good, it will have a hard time making any box office headway in this crowded marketplace. “After Earth” opens Friday.
