One of the demons is wearing what looks like a Darth Maul Halloween mask.
And the finale is both a tad too literal and a lot too long and drawn out.
But that doesn’t spoil what is, without a doubt, the spookiest and most entertaining horror flick since “Paranormal Activity.”
“Insidious” is a haunted house tale in the “Poltergeist” mold — a child in jeopardy, a mother (Rose Byrne) struggling to get her head around what may be happening, a father (Patrick Wilson) in denial.
One brother’s a school teacher who struggles to keep home and family together in hard economic times.
The other’s a brooding brute, home from the war, living with his long-estranged father.
Both grown men have daddy issues, issues hinted at in bitter, perfunctory conversations between the brute and his recovering alcoholic of a father.
“No more women for me,” the old man confesses.
“Must be hard to find a girl who can take a punch these days,” the son spits back.
There’s history here — hard fought, hard-bitten history. Dad, Paddy Conlon (Nick Nolte), is a man of principles, a former wreck looking for redemption. And his boys, Brendan the teacher (Joel Edgerton) and Tom (Tom Hardy) –two fighters once trained by Paddy – aren’t giving it.
“Warrior” is a straight genre picture, a fight movie of the old school. But it’s a mixed martial arts tale, and as such, it’s the best MMA movie ever. A bare-fisted sports thriller with lots of Hollywood melodrama, “Warrior” pits these two brothers on a collision course with destiny, in the ring.
Snippets of Ron Howard’s upcoming Formula 1 racing film “Rush,” about the James Hunt/Niki Lauda rivalry during the sport’s last Golden Age, had me hankering to re-watch the movie it will be compared to — John Frankenheimer’s 1966 SuperPanavision epic, “Grand Prix.”
It’s still the gold standard for racing movies, a film which was decades ahead of its time in terms of on-track realism. It’s only recently that Fox’s TV racing coverage, with miniature cameras everywhere, has caught up with what Frankenheimer and his team were able to pull off with huge, clunky film cameras way back in the day.
In those heady days after “The Messenger,” director Oren Moverman, Woody Harrelson and Ben Foster cooked up what seems — on paper– like a sure Oscar nomination for Harrelson. He’d star in a “Training Day” character study of a bad/good cop set against L.A.’s Rampart division police scandal.
But the movie that came from that idea is a bit all over the place — juggling many themes, many ideas, many layers of personal corruption leavened by a hint of righteousness. And you can’t get a bead on the character because Woody & Co. (James “L.A. Confidential” Ellroy co-wrote the script) are so ambivalent about him.
Before he was Mad Eye Moody, before he took Colin Farrell to the woodshed “In Bruges,” before “The Guard,” the great Irish actor Brendan Gleeson was the infamous Irish crook known as “The General.”
Director John Boorman cast Gleeson in the title role in this 1998 film, Gleeson’s big break, which is now on Netflix and well work a look.
Gleeson plays Martin Cahill, a notorious but also colorful Dublin thief and thug. Gleeson plays him with a playful swagger. The General was a fellow who planned and carried out robberies big and small –hitting a huge jewelry store, stealing a collection of famous paintings from a museum. He had a touch of the Robin Hood, or at least the lower class rebel about him.
They’re tearing down his subsidized housing complex? He defiantly stays on, refuses to leave, even after the building is destroyed and he has to move into a tent. He’s hounded, around the clock, by the cops who target him (Jon Voight leads them). He finds ingenious ways to slip under fences, invite a mob of friends over, putting them in matching sweatshirts and masks so the cops don’t know who to follow when they all leave the house.
Boorman makes great sport of Cahill’s ways of outsmarting the Gardai — the state police — driving all over creation until they run out of gas. Refilling his own tank and ditching them. The fellow comes as beloved, so adored that his adoring wife ( Maria Doyle Kennedy) gives him permission to carry on an affair with her younger sister (Angeline Ball).
But as with any Hollywood film of a famous criminal, there’s a lot of sanitizing going on. The violence of the cops is played up, and Cahill’s violence is downplayed — kidnapping, a bombing, etc.
The British food critic/chef and TV personality Nigel Slater’s memoir is the subject of “Toast,”an oddly under-motivated biographical account of a boys’ love of his culinarily hapless mother and his war with the woman who would replace her in his family after her death.
Nigel (Oscar Kennedy) grew up middle class in the Britain of the 1960s and 70s — Dad (Ken Stott) drove off to work in his Rover 3.5, and came home to an only child son he didn’t understand. And sickly stay-at-home mum (Victoria) was so hapless in the kitchen she couldn’t be bothered to open the cans of whatever canned meal she was cooking, a helplessness that the movie doesn’t deign to explain.
The odd, opportunistic and eccentric programming of Netflix streaming, the way the service lumps genres together and serves up possibilities, means that you’re always stumbling across something odd and old, or new and surprising — a movie you haven’t seen that you should have.
That’s a pretty neat trick for somebody who’s seen 500+ movies a year going back decades, like me.
I stumbled into “The Robber,” a German-Austrian thriller “inspired by a true story,” a prime piece of Euro-action worth remaking by Hollywood.
And “Martha Marcy May Marlene” and “Identity” and so many other films. He’s been around for years and years, and every now and then I’m flipping the dial and there he is in another film that I hadn’t realized he was in. “Winter’s Bone” changed his profile and MADE us notice.
The roles that made John Hawkes famous — in “Winter’s Bone,” and “Martha Marcy May Marlene” — had the rawboned Minnesotan showing off a frightening and fierce charisma. He was playing men you just knew were capable of violence.
So he wasn’t on director Ben Lewin’s short list for “The Sessions,” a biographical tale of a sympathetic, quirky quadriplegic poet and journalist who wrote about losing his virginity at 36, by hiring a sexual surrogate. But casting director Ronnie Yeskel insisted that Lewin take a look.
“I saw this creepy old guy who scares the wits out of you and thought, ‘What IS she thinking?'” Lewin recalls. “When I met him, it was quite clear, he isn’t creepy. In many ways, he’s much more like the real Mark O’Brien — witty, warm. You get past ‘Winter’s Bone,’ and his whole body of work makes you appreciate just what a chameleon he really is.”
Hawkes, whose career as a character actor only picked up as he hit 50 (he’s 53, now), connected with O’Brien, a San Francisco polio survivor who longed to find physical and emotional love “before my expiration date,” as he puts it in the film. And Lewin, a polio survivor himself, gambled on that connection.
“He’s a guy who lives in his head a lot of the time,” Hawkes says. “Actors do that, too. Creative people spend a lot of time ruminating. We’re a thoughtful, analytical bunch.”
Director and star wanted to avoid, as Lewin put it, “any ‘Cripple of the Week’ touches in the story.” Hawkes would read O’Brien’s writings to get “inside his head,” and Lewin would make sure that the man’s sense of humor — something the writer-director shares — shone through.
“John took getting this fellow right personally,” Lewin marvels “It went far beyond professionalism.”
The story of “The Sessions” is set in 1980s San Francisco. O’Brien writes poetry and essays and journalistic pieces for local publications. He does this from his bed, or the gurney he has to be pushed about in. Each night, he sleeps in an iron lung, which keeps him breathing. His heart and his body are telling him that he wants more out of life. He wants to experience love. After getting the go-ahead from his hipster-priest (William H. Macy), O’Brien contacts a sexual surrogate (Oscar winner Helen Hunt) who counsels and instructs him in all matters sexual.
It’s a film of clinical, awkward, romantic and quite frank sex scenes.
“You can’t get embarrassed,” Hawkes says. “A good story makes you forget about how raw the situation is.”
Lewin’s way of making his actors feel comfortable with those scenes was to make them uncomfortable. He kept them apart and didn’t let them rehearse the physical stuff.
“They didn’t know each other,” Lewin (“Paperback Romance”) says “They’d never worked together. And there was a kind of natural anxiety that both of them had about what this was going to be like. That mirrored the reality of the situation. So I kept them apart to take advantage of that electricity. That first scene, where she had to undress him, was tempting to rehearse. But it was so much more effective when she showed up without having any real idea of how it would be done.”
The result is one of the year’s most critically-acclaimed films, with Hawkes praised for his “full-bodied vocal and emotional characterization” of a character with a “frail corporal presence.” (The Hollywood Reporter).
Hollywood is sending Hawkes plenty of studio picture feelers these days. But even though he’ll never get rich working on the indie side of things, that’s where he likes it. “I’m paid with experiences, with the friendships I make.
The greatest pleasure of this job is learning about things you didn’t know much about, whether it’s longline fishing (“The Perfect Storm”), running a hardware store in the gold rush (“Deadwood”), scalping tickets at Wrigley Field (“Hardball”) or learning to play the drums (“A Slipping Down Life”).
“And working this way, every role is one you just HAVE to do, because every film that’s hard to find financing for, becomes your dream dream role.”
It’s “The Burning Bed” and “Hard Candy” time, time for some attractive young women to exact murderous revenge on men who may (or may not) have done them wrong.
“Girls Against Boys” opens Feb. 1.
After “Contraband,” a break-out hit of last January, the first month of the year seems to belong to Mark Wahlberg.
He is to January what Will Smith was to July 4, back in the 90s and early 2000s.
Wahlberg has “Broken City,” in which he’s a cop blackmailed into helping a creepy mayor (Russell Crowe) hunt down his wife’s paramour, opening next week.
And “Pain & Gain,” a buddy action comedy in April.
Got questions to ask Wahlberg? Always looking for fresh angles. Comment below.
