Labute was the king of toxic masculinity takes back in the day. Here, he’s got a “Double Indemnity/Body Heat” thing going on with Kruger calling the shots, Hank Azaria as the husband and Ray Nicholson as the hapless pawn lured to commit murder.
I’m just spitballing that plot, but that usually the way these things play out. Labute should make it twisty and interesting.
Quiver has this Aug. 26 release.
Properly paranoid and just trippy enough to be triggering, Addison Heimann’s “Hypochondriac” takes us into one tortured life and the troubled past that led to it.
A prologue sets up the trauma to follow. Young Will, whom his manic, prattling Puerto Rican mother (Marlene Forte) calls “Lindo” (pretty boy) creates what he figures will be a happy Halloween memory in a wolf costume. But the sounds of shattered glass signals another of his mother’s episodes.
If “Pack a bag, we’re LEAVING” isn’t answered quickly enough, she’ll fly off the handle. “You’re in COLLUSION with him!” And that leads, on one memorable night, to her hands wrapped around his neck, coming so close to strangling Will to death that he has to wear a turtleneck to Little League practice.
Eighteen years later, Will (Zach Villa) outwardly seems over and done with that traumatic childhood. He’s a happy potter, dancing his clays to the kiln for baking, in a relationship and high on life. And occasionally mushrooms.
But a colleague’s panic attack shows Will’s other skill, one hard won in his difficult childhood. He knows how to talk people out of their weeping, fetal crouch.
And Mother’s Day is coming, which means his other half Luke (Devon Graye) wants them to visit his mother. Whatever Luke doesn’t know about Will’s past, his “my mother’s been dead most of my life” hints he might not be up for that. But sure, it’s a brunch date it is.
Will hasn’t told Luke much, which makes the paranoid text messages from “Mom” and hallucinations he starts to have other things he can’t broach with his new love. Mom is as manic as ever.
“You must become a private INVESTIGATOR,” she insists, at one point.
But dizzy spells, headaches, arm injuries and the like while working around a white hot kiln? It’s time to see a doctor.
Writer-director Heimann’s debut feature does well at keeping Will’s uncertainty about what ails him in doubt. Could this be all in his head? “Just stress,” his frat-bro doctor insists. But, all these symptoms…what about ALS, schizophrenia?
“Duuuude,” frat-bro doc advises, “don’t GOOGLE.”
But as visions of wolves and his nutty mother persist and self-harm becomes a real concern, if Will isn’t googling, at least he’s getting second and third opinions. So are we.
“Hypochondriac” makes a broad spectrum of the medical profession a running gag. Every doctor, specialist and shrink has the same sassy Pomeranian poster on the wall, the wone with “Be bright like glitter and bubbly like champagne!”
That contrasts with the many manifestations of Will’s mother’s illness — nonsensical packages, insane voice mails, threats, pleas. His disinterested, nonchalant father (Chris Doubek) even cracks a faint smile when he suggests the son is turning out just like the kid’s mother.
It doesn’t come together nearly as neatly as you’d like. But “Hypochondriac” manages a few chills and some eyes-averting gore thanks to Will’s memories of what happened and how close he is to repeating the awful past he grew up in.
Rating: unrated, graphic violence, explicit sex, profanity
Cast: Zach Villa, Devon Graye, Marlene Forte, Yumarie Morales and Chris Doubek.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Addison Heimann. An XYZ release.
Running time: 1:37
Mia Goth played Pearl in “X,” and she figured her back story had another movie in her.
Ti West agreed. A24 has this, you say? Of course.
My favorite memory of Paul Sorvino was of him, sitting in the audience, blubbering like the proudest parent who ever walked the Earth, when his daughter Mira Sorvino won an Oscar for playing a foul-mouthed hooker in a Woody Allen comedy.
Maybe that moment isn’t aging as well as it might have, all things considered. But Mira and I both started bawling when I brought it up in an interview a couple of years later. You know how it goes. SHE starts crying at the question and the memory, and I start crying. Pavlovian.
But for all the funnymen and Made Men this Italian American icon played over the decades, the clip below has to be my standout on screen moment for him.
It’s a dazzling impersonation of a politically-wired, money-grubbing hypocrite, a distinctly American “type” still with us, still separating rubes from their money, still steering our politics straight into a toxic pit. Sorvino? He brought it, gloves off, smirk hiding the sinister glower, the Full Falwell.
Whatever its qualifies, you have to figure this late season addition to the superhero lineup is a question mark that comes after fans lined up for “Spider Man,” and showed a lot of signs of fan fatigue with “Doctor Strange” and “Thor.”
Yeah, the excuses they used were finding faults in these two name director Marvel outings. Trying to show that they’ve become discriminating after years of making most every comic book movie an adored blockbuster. And even those two films made bank.
But with streaming services and TV and cinemas flooded with this shlock, maybe we’re seeing signs that overexposure has set in.
This October, Dwayne Johnson will be the exceptionally fit guinea pig in testing that theory.
Rebecca Hall’s reinvention as the queen of “smart horror” continues, more or less apace, with “Resurrection,” a paranoid and metaphorical thriller so cryptic that it borders on obscurant.
So this Andrew Semans film has that, a chilly tone built from slick production design and an increasingly under threat/unhinged Hall in common with “The Night House,” her most recent dip in the genre pool.
Hall plays Margaret, a highly-competent mid-level exec at a bio tech/pharmaceutical firm who could be the poster woman for “Lean In.” A single mom, unsentimentally involved with a married subordinate (Michael Esper), she may not give off “life advice” vibes to us, but she’s who intern Gwyn (Angela Wong Carbone) goes to for career and romantic guidance. Margaret sizes up Gwyn’s description of a plainly-manipulative lover in an instant.
“You should find someone who makes you feel good.
The 40 year-old Margaret schedules assignations with her lover and family time in her tony two story designer flat for bonding and “hovering” over her ready-for-college daughter Abbie (Grace Kaufman).
But things start to unravel with a tooth, wholly extracted, that Abbie finds tucked in her things.
It isn’t just Abbie’s bike accident, which Margaret is slow to respond to because she was having a nooner with her married man, that makes Mom “even more suffocating than usual.” She’s spied a stranger from her past (Tim Roth) lurking around the edges of their world — in a store, a park, on a street. Abbie doesn’t recognize the threat. No one but Margaret does.
“Who’s going to protect you?”
What follows is a swirl of paranoid reactions, over-reactions and confrontations as Margaret tries to prepare for dealing with this David Moore she knew in her teens, and frantically attempts to alert others to what she believes he’s capable of.
Semans’ script suggests guilt, blame and next-level psychological mind-games in the connection between his heroine and her perceived nemesis. As in other films that go down this path, there’s uncertainty about what’s actually happening to Margaret and what’s just in her head.
Roth serves up an understated sort of “Gaslight” level of sinister here as Moore protests she’s mistaken him for someone else, then backhandedly reveals that lie when he starts his decades-old manipulations, demanding “a kindness” from this woman he once toyed with like a puppeteer.
That’s how she sees him, anyway.
Hall gives us Six Degrees of Separation from her Sanity in Margaret’s unraveling, a performance that conveys impotent rage, grief, guilt and paranoia without bluntly explaining what transpired way back when, and what’s going on now. Unless, of course, the deranged version of events that she “confesses” to her intern can be taken at face value.
I could have used a more blatant laying out of the cards in what might be a Roe vs. Wade thriller, or something more overtly traumatic and horrific. Semans leans on “cryptic” too hard, even as his killer cast ensures this “Resurrection” will have its riveting, harrowing moments no matter how much symbolic and obscure the filmmaker tries to be.
Rating: unrated, violence, sexual content, profanity
Cast: Rebecca Hall, Grace Kaufman, Michael Esper, Angela Wong Carbone and Tim Roth.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Andrew Semans. An IFC/Shudder release.
Running time: 1:43
They aren’t the leads, but Brett Cullen and Lesley Ann Warren pretty much carry “It Snows all the Time,” an old-fashion, solid but stolid look at the blow dementia deals a blow to an Omaha family.
Back when Warren, who first gained fame as Cinderella in a 1960s TV production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Cinderella,” and Cullen (of TV’s “Falcon Crest” and more recently, “The Black List”) were starting out, “Snows” would’ve been labeled a “Disease of the Week” movie — the sort of well-cast, informative and if you were lucky moving production the TV networks used to roll out 40 times a year.
Today, we’re too enlightened to use that label. But “Snows” still makes a terrific “explainer,” showing us the signs — which most of his family doesn’t pick up on, or slip into denial over — that patriarch Paul has developed dementia at 58.
The story is seen through the eyes of his Big City son Jesse (Eric Hover, who based the story on his own family), who comes home to Omaha after a long absence to notice Dad is “different.”
He’s wanders off mid conversation and seems distracted pretty much every waking moment. What’s worse, he worked up over the wrong football teams on the tube.
“He likes them now,” is all Jesse’s slacker younger brother (Sterling Knight), who dropped out of college and lives at home, says.
“I keep waiting for him to snap out of it,” their mother (Warren) says. Not that she’s under any illusions. Brother Artie is to self-involved to notice. Their older brother Tony (director and co-writer Jay Gannione) may have noticed, but as he and his wife are expecting a baby and he’s a bit fond of the phrase “It’s in God’s hands,” he’s shrugged it off.
But Jesse sees the yard that’s gone to seed, the confused way his father reacts to long-familiar intersections while driving and the general absent-mindedness that seems to have taken over.
Not that Jesse, who gets an earful of “You’re NEVER here” from his siblings, leaps to the right conclusion. Not at first. At least he’s in town to help his mother talk Dad into a follow-up visit with a specialist, try to help Dad fix his 1940s Ford pickup and arm-twist the clueless Artie to help him tidy up the yard.
Paul? He’s having an impossible time just focusing his eyes in the right direction or remembering what he’s supposed to be doing. But an old blessing his long-dead father used to say before meals? That he has no trouble recalling.
Cullen anchors “It Snows all the Time” in a rock-solid reality. He’s deep into character, with eyes, gestures and a kind of antic impatience that can be symptomatic of dementia. If you keep moving, maybe it’ll all come back to you, or maybe nobody else will notice what you can’t quite put your finger on.
Warren walks an interesting line between dread and denial. Whatever their sons haven’t figured out, she’s not been willing to come right out and say, and certainly not say to Jesse on the phone.
Nothing here is totally new in the way the screen treats dementia. And the sidebars — Jesse confronted by the girl he left behind (Taryn Manning), his lovelife in LA (“a model”), brother Artie’s ever-irritating laziness and refusal to see the crisis right in front of him that he should be pitching in with — are as played-out as the new baby meets the old-before-his-time grandpa, wandering in the fog.
But Cullen and Warren give this drama a gravitas and poignance that transcends the trite formula “It Snows all the Time” never strays from.
Rating: unrated, some profanity, adult themes
Cast: Eric Hover, Brett Cullen, Lesley Ann Warren, Jay Giannone, Sterling Knight, John Beasley, Tatyana Ali and Taryn Manning.
Credits: Directed by Jay Giannone, scripted by Jay Giannone and Eric Watson. A Gravitas Ventures release.
Running time: 1:30
It’s not hard to scare the willies out of folks with a shark. There may be nothing in the prehistoric part of our brain that tells us to run from zombies, vampires or werewolves. But sharks? We’re wired to be wary of them, and Spielberg just reminded us of that.
Which is why the reactions to most of the Aussies in “The Reef: Stalked” to the great white that is either eating them or bearing down on them for another dinner course are so Actor’s Studio “off.”
As James Lipton might have said, “Sharks are scary. SHOW us that you know this!”
Nope. The ladies on a casual snorkeling/spear-fishing outing to a reef off the coast casually paddle back pretty much as casually as they paddled out.
The most experienced of this quartet, Nic and Jodie (Teressa Liane, Ann Truong) blithely decide to kayak over to a reef island “to get started” on cooking the fish they’ve speared. That leaves “You’re not prepared for this” Annie (Saskia Archer) to relate the fact that she just saw a fin to diving buddy Lisa (Kate Lister).
The “most sharks are timid” lecture falls on deaf ears. Do sharks even have ears? Because that’s when the attacks start.
Writer-director Andrew Traucki’s sequel to his 2010 film “The Reef” has some excellent shark attack footage and manages a couple of passably suspenseful “Jaws” like moments of waiting for the worst to happen.
The best acting moment is a Aboriginal mother frantically summoning first one child, then another, ashore, swimming just off that reef island. She gives us helpless panic, wrenching agony at watching at attack in the offing and then the water turning red.
But nobody else in this picture gives us anything remotely as fearful or real. There’s no panic or even much of a determined, “We’ve got to paddle like hell” to get to shore urgency.
It’s as if that casual dropping of Aussie surfer slang for sharks, “The Man in the Gray Suit,” lulled the four snorkelers to sleep.
La-di-dah, maybe we should do something. Oh bother, our friend just got chomped. Well, let’s see if I/we can save her, or maybe, you know, outthink the insensate beast that’s “hunting us.”
Traucki makes one character a veteran diver traumatized by the fact her sister was murdered by an abusive boyfriend, who drowned her in a tub. But…she “ran off to work a dive boat in Greece” after that murder, and then did a little Eat, Pray Love traveling.
“Water” scares her? Well, I guess it comes and goes. A lot.
Nic is quick to judge couch-potato Annie with “This isn’t you, you can’t do this,” but it’s not like she’s proven good at handling this sort of imminent danger and threat herself.
The best movies like this do a much better job of selling the building terror, the fear of a gruesome injury or death by being eaten alive– drowning in the process. As much responsibility as the writer and director share (they’re one and the same here) in making that primal fear connect with the viewer, it’s the actors who determine whether or not the viewer buys in, empathizes and puts herself or himself in their swim fins, scared half to death.
You don’t have to be Mandy Moore in “47 Meters Down” or Blake Lively in “The Shallows” to be good at mimicking that normal human terror and panic. “Open Water” had a no name cast and yet was shockingly effective at getting across the realization that “We’re dinner if we don’t do everything we can think of, and in a life-or-death hurry.”
Some good shark attack sequences and a simple “Fin!” and “It’s COMING for US” plot doesn’t work because virtually no one at no moment in “The Reef: Stalked” acts as if there’s a bloody shark about to make them the main course.
Rating: unrated, violence, profanity
Cast: Teressa Liane, Ann Truong, Saskia Archer, Kate Lister
Credits: Scripted and directed by Andrew Traucki. An RLJE Entertaintment/Shudder release.
Running time: 1:31
The post Chadwick Bozeman era begins.
Netflix has something that promises to generate a “Stranger Things” level buzz.
Aug. 5.
