The writer director announced his comeback with “First Reformed” in 2017.
Now, the man who directed “Cat People” and “Light Sleeper” and “Afliction” and scripted “Taxi Driver” has Oscar Isaac to star in this gambling/vengeance drama.
Paul Schrader has a Willem Dafoe picture “Nine Men from Now” in the works as well.
From Variety
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Nothing much happens in “Light from Light,” an East Tennessee character study bathed in mourning cloaked in quiet.
The lead characters meet because she’s an amateur ghost hunter, with lifelong intuitions, and he’s a grieving widower who wonders if his late wife is haunting the house she grew up in. But it’s not really about that. It still makes an interesting jumping-off point for a search for closure and new beginnings, none of which play out in conventional ways.
We hear Sheila’s story in a community radio interview. It started in childhood when “these dreams I had turned out to be prophetic” she says. Sheila, played by Marin Ireland (“Homeland,” “Hell or High Water”), is soft-spoken and unassuming. That makes her seem more credible.
What did she do with this “gift?”
“I had questions. Just questions.”
These days, she supports herself and her teen son (Josh Wiggins) running a rent-a-car counter at the Knoxville airport. But a priest (David Cale) heard the interview, and he approaches her. There’s a local man she might be able to help.
Jim Gaffigan plays Richard, a fish hatchery worker who would seem depressed even if he hadn’t added “haunted” to his demeanor. He’s wondering if these senses that someone’s been taking hold of his arm are the spirit of his late wife Susanne.
The question everybody around Sheila asks, and has to answer him or herself, is “Do you believe in ghosts?” Sheila’s lack of commitment to her own answer, and avoidance of the hard-sell are her best selling points. Sure, she’ll help — check out the remote old house where Susanne grew up when it’s good and dark.
What’ll this cost?
“I don’t charge. It just makes this more complicated.”
She just needs some sort of informal insurance waiver, because who knows what might happen? And she’ll need to rustle up some gear, and some help.
Sheila may be looking to give Richard some closure, but she’s plainly looking for a little herself. She’s no longer with “her group” of ghostbusters. She has to sit in on a paid seminar to get access the temperature probes and CCTV cameras for a night of ghost hunting.
Owen (Wiggins) and Lucy (Atheena Frizzell) are helping Sheila in her ghost hunt, and might be an item, prom dates even. But she’s about to head off to college, and he’s so ethical he asks “What’s the point?”
He’s following mom’s softly sold advice — “Don’t fall in love with sombody just because they treat you nice.”
Lucy and Owen’s mutual teenage concern is attraction, but he’s facing a circumscribed future, one he hasn’t worked out yet.
East Tennessee filmmaker Paul Harrill (“Something, Anything”) builds his film on soft-spoken conversations, quietly-voiced disagreements and — almost as an afterthought, suspense.
Are they actually going to encounter the supernatural?
Sheila’s methodical routine hangs on exploring the silence of the house by flashlight, and that’s as effective a scene-setter for ghostly encounters as anything the horror movie universe serves up, pretty much on a weekly basis.
“Is anyone here? If you’d like to communicate, let yourself be known.”
So polite.
Ireland’s understated performance, semi-skeptical, faintly credulous and luminescent with empathy, anchors “Light from Light.” It’s acting that teaches us not to expect too much, especially anything conventional.
It doesn’t take much for something to feel “extraordinary” under these conditions.
Gaffigan is mainly a reactor here, a hurting but thoughtful man who picks up a book after stocking a stream with trout.
No one so much as attempts an East Tennessee drawl, which I know well. Perhaps that “Winter’s Bone” touch would have made the ghost believing and ghost sensing subtexts quaint, Southern superstitions. But snippets of scenery aside, nothing grounds a movie in a place like accents.
“Light from Light” still feels like film firmly footed in reality, so much so that the few truly suspenseful moments seem almost epic in scope when they couldn’t be more intimate. It’s an exercise in tone and performance that rewards the viewer in ways you can’t quite articulate, but sense nevertheless.
Cast: Marin Ireland, Jim Gaffigan, Josh Wiggins, Atheena Frizzell.
Credits: Written and directed by Paul Harrill. A Grasshopper Film release.
Running time: 1:24
Remember that scene in “World War Z” where the zombies take on ant collectivist behavior and overwhelm the walls of Erezt Israel?
There’s such a moment in “Assimilate,” a C-grade thriller about “pod people” who are zombies in all but name. As the movie itself isn’t worth your trouble, let me save you the trouble and say that what I’m talking about is the unique way of upending the payoff in that remote farmhouse surrounded by zombies scenerio from “Night of the Living Dead,” and that it happens at the 55 minute mark.
It’s a lulu, and anybody planning their own zombie project should check it out and steal it. Because few are going to even bother Netflixing “Assimilate,” which again, isn’t a zombie movie.
We see the ants before the opening credits have ended. They’re swarming, sugar ant-sized critters getting on fruit and vegetables in the gardens of tiny Multon, Missouri.
That’s where two high school buds, Zach and Randy (Joel Courtney and Callum Worthy) live, a place they are desperate to escape. They document why on their new spy-cam Youtube series, “Welcome to Oblivion.”
It’s a place “too boring for crime,” but with these hidden lapel cameras, which the dorks turn up their lapels for (giving away the game) to score their “scoops,” they plan “to show the people of Multon the way they really are.”
They’ve barely started stirring up trouble when weird shrieks in the night and neighbors with strange bites start turning up. The bites magically heal, but those bitten take on the catatonic, humorless stare of pod people.
As the two gather video, they try to interest the deputy sheriff (Cam Gigandet) and the cute girl Zach (Or is it Randy?) fancies, Kayla (Andi Matichak).
One buys in, the other doesn’t. And as the shrieks spread, the conspiracy of local silence grows. Don’t fight it, “Assimilate” is the message of that silence.
Horror movies succeed or fail in a lot of ways, but the real Achilles heel of too many of them is in front of the camera. The actors don’t commit, don’t get across terror, panic, paranoia or rage.
That’s an issue here. As their family and friends are “replaced,” as new versions are spawned in the usual sci–fi/horror ways, frights are hard to come by, either on the screen or in the viewing of what’s on the screen. No character freaks out.
That would be the proper human reaction to witnessing something this horrific and extraordinary.
A little “Blair Witch” hand-held camera here, a manic chase by a nude replacement version of this or that member of the cast — probably the only “commitment” we sense in the performances — is all that livens up this seriously humdrum flick.
The dialogue is out of the “Lines you always hear in horror movies” book.
“What the hell WAS that?” “Either the entire town’s gone crazy, or WE have!” “You’re not my mom!”
None of it adds up to much. But if stream-it-you-must, feel free to jump ahead to that 55 minute mark. That’s a clever enough conceit to turn up in a better movie than “Assimilate.”
MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, some nudity
Cast: Joel Courtney, Calum Worthy, Andi Matichak and Cam Gigandet
Credits: Directed by John Murlowski, script by John Murlowski and Steven Palmer Peterson. A Gravitas Ventures release.
Running time: 1:33
Lin Manuel Miranda is producing, making this Rita Moreno doc happen. Long overdue.
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Mixed reviews came in for the lovely re-edit of this movie, which was marred by Harvey Weinstein in a recut, and then abandoned as his #MeToo troubles exploded.
But here’s an Interesting history of the rescue edit that saved “The Current War” via The Hollywood Reporter.
It’s not exactly fair, releasing a thriller with the title “Bloody Marie” right around Halloween. But hey, anything to trick the horror crowd into reading subtitles, right?
“Bloody Marie” is a Dutch character study, a fraught if not entirely taut melodramatic thriller about an alcoholic in a death spiral, drinking away her days and nights in Amerstadam’s red light district.
Marie (German actress Susanne Wolff) is a graphic artist who gained fame from the graphic novel “Porn for the Blind.”
Now, she dances by herself in bars, fends off the rare fan that recognizes her, mouths off at bars and drinks and drinks and drinks among the whores, pimps and druggies of Europe’s most notorious (Almost) Anything Goes District.
How bad is her drinking? The Asian immigrant who runs her local liquor store quietly suggests, “You should stop drinking,” and cuts her off. That staggers Marie. Actually, she was already staggering. But she’s enraged enough to stick her finger down her throat so she can “vomit all over your store” (in Dutch, with English subtitles).
Marie sits at her drawing board, in her ancient but comfy flat in that same red light district, and stares at the blank page. Or she ruminates and draws an idea that might capture something that happened that day, but which is going nowhere, in a narrative sense.
She has writer’s block.
But that’s not necessarily why she drinks. She lost her mother, recently. And even though she is overwhelmed with guilt about that, the guilt is over how drunk she was when her mother died. She was already lost in a bottle. It’s only gotten worse. Much worse.
Hearing “Your mother has forgiven you” from a fan is cold comfort, and no comfort at all.
Maybe, we think, she’ll realize she’s hit bottom with the whole liquor store debacle. Begging her publisher for an advance because she’s broke should do the trick. Or maybe that epiphany will come when, drunk and desperate for another drink, she trades her fancy red shoes for a bottle she sees a pimp carrying. It’s a rainy night and she’s blocks from home.
Addicts don’t plan ahead.
But she does not take stock. She takes a ladder from the courtyard and drunkenly climbs to the roof on the dark, dank night, shouting at the city, and later prising open the window of her next door neighbor to get her hands on some money. And that’s when her boozy exploits start to have consequences.
Wolff takes Marie from bleary-eyed bigmouth, ranting about toxic “masculinity” to toxic males in bars, to despair to desperately fighting to survive.
The guy she stole the money from? He was the pimp, Dagomir (Dragos Bucor) who traded for her shoes. She figures out, a little late, the downside to being hip enough to live in the red light district. Legalized or not — unsavory and deadly sex trade practices happen, and are kept out of sight.
The chaotic violence, when co-writers/director Guido van Driel and Lennert Hillege dish it out, is frenetic — a drunk’s weaving and teetering hand-held camer chase, sudden turns towards the brutal, an assault that seems to come out of nowhere — to a drunk.
We, on the other hand, have been expecting it — fearing it and fearing for her. Whatever randomness the script serves up, fleshing out Marie’s back story but never explaining her, leaving big gaps in her motivation and in the motivation of those who menace her, the picture keeps us on edge. She’s that much of a trainwreck.
What we don’t expect is a coda, after all that mayhem, that touches the heart and takes your breath away.
MPAA Rating: unrated, bloody violence, alcohol abuse, adult situations, profanity
Cast: Susanne Wolff, Dragos Bucur, Alexia Lestiboudois
Credits: Written and directed by Lennert Hillege and Guido van Driel. An Uncork’d Release.
Running time: 1:27
The Korean director who first gained global fame with his wry creature feature “The Host” reconsiders that host-parasite relationship with his latest, “Parasite.”
Bong Joon Ho has a created a dark satire of haves and enterprising have-nots, a film that begins as a delightful “Big Con” comedy and probes deeper and turns more politically pointed — and more violent — the further it goes along.
Most cleverly, this skewering of global inequality and class warfare, at least as it pertains to his home peninsula, leaves unanswered the big question of an era when wealth has been callously and mercilessly redistributed upward to a rapacious few.
That question is, “Who will be first against the wall when the revolution comes?”
Bong’s muse, the hulking comic Song Kang-ho, plays the unemployed and broke patriarch of a family of four on the bottom rung of Seoul society — literally. They live in a smelly basement apartment where they’ve lost cell service, and on the evening we meet them, their free source of wi-fi — a neighbor — has just password-protected his router.
With his wife, Chung-sook (Jang Hye-jin) and two enterprising college age kids, Ki-jung (Park So-dam) ) and Ki-woo (Choi Woo-sik), father Ki-taek folds pizza delivery boxes, the lone hustle they have that pays in this economy. And Youtube tutorials or not, they can’t even do that right.
How will they cling to this dump, where the toilet sits up on an interior ledge next to the window drunken bums pee on every night? Everybody wonders what Ki-taek’s “plan” is. Dad is big on “What’s your plan?”
A windfall that he hasn’t planned for is their lifeline, it turns out. Ki-woo’s buddy, headed off to study abroad, recommends him as replacement for the rich teen girl he’s been tutoring. Sister Ki-jung forges Ki-woo some ace credentials as “Kevin,” which win over the girl (Jung Ji-so) and her frazzled, pampered mother (Jo Yeo-jeong).
Her father (Lee Sun-kyun)? He may get a clue. Will it be in time?
And all a “Parasite” needs, we see, if that first foot in the door. “Kevin” is quick to recommend “a friend of a cousin” who studied in Illinois as an art tutor to the ADHD artist child in the house. “Jessica” is the name Ki-jung goes by. Sizing the kid and his mother’s worries up, she improvises “art therapist” into her resume as well.
This scrawled, dark corner in all of little Da-song’s drawings? That’s “the schizophrenia zone,” she says, freaking Mom out. That ability to lie on the fly is a family gift, and it’s what puts all four of the Kims in the employ of the Parks, by hook or by crook.
This 2019 Cannes Palme d’Or winner has fake tutors straight out of Shakespeare (“The Taming of the Shrew”). But I’d be surprised if Bong Joon ho didn’t see 2018’s Japanese Cannes Film Festival entry “Shoplifters,” and wasn’t inspired to whip up a funnier and more ambitious take on an underworld of low-rent grifters struggling to survive in the Golden Age of Income Inequality.
But here, there’s sympathy and even a modicum respect for their “marks.” In an economy where jobs are scarce and survival precarious, the Kims are grateful to have the jobs they finagle (and lie and cheat) their way into.
Ki-jung seems to be the most ruthless and cunning one, taking after her pitiless mother. Ki-jung is the one who surmises that the family driver can be unseated, and lets her folks know (in Korean, with English subtitles) “I set my trap in the Benz,” the family limo, a trap that will get that driver canned.
All these amusing machinations are just the table-setting for the confrontations to come. It turns out, the Kims aren’t the only ones desperate enough to prey on people like the Parks. And as they hustle them and deal with petty humiliations and bourgeois snobbery, they start to wonder, and make us wonder, just who is the host and who is the real parasite here?
Song Kang-ho has an oafish soulfulness that his director has tapped into, in film after film. He can let us feel pity for a character and laugh at him (a little) at the same time.
The laughs don’t dry up as things take a bloodier turn, but rather devolve into class warfare giggles. We know we should be shrinking from the mayhem, not chuckling. And yet, as in a horror movie where we figure “They have it coming,” we can’t help ourselves.
There’s something of a Great Leap Forward in Bong Joon Ho’s ambitions and skill at realizing them here, something that his failed Netflix satire “Ojkja” and the over-reaching sci-fi “Snowpiercer” couldn’t manage.
With “Parasite” he transcends genre even as he sharpens his social satire skills, delivering a movie that will resonate from Seoul to Syracuse, Helsinki to Hong Kong, one of the great films of 2019.
MPAA Rating: R for language, some violence and sexual content
Cast: Song Kang-ho, Park So-dam, Jo Yeo-Jeong, Lee Sun-kyun, Choi Woo-sik, Jang Hye-jin, Lee Jeong-eun, Jung Ji-so
Credits: Written and directed by Bong Joon Ho, co-written by Han Jin Won. A Neon release.
Running time: 2:12
Justin Lee, the new King of the B Movies, is back on the screen for his sixth movie in the past two years, a Western wearing the weary title, “Badland.”
The writer-director of “The Reckoning,” “Big Legend” and “Any Bullet Will Do” has lined up his most impressive cast yet — Oscar winner Mira Sorvino, 2020 Oscar honoree Wes Studi, screen legend Bruce Dern, and veteran players such as Tony “Candyman” Todd, Amanda Wyss, James Russo and Jeff Fahey.
And yet the prolific Lee still has room for the hulking country music baritone Trace Adkins in a key role. And for his leading man, Lee is still leaning on his muse, a competent but colorless actor, Kevin Makely, whose chief virtues are that he looks a bit like Bradley Cooper, and he’s always available.
The result is the usual limp, long-winded lope through genre conventions, saddled to a leading man lacking the spark to make it compelling.
“Badland” follows the portentously-named Mathias Breecher (Makely), a Pinkerton detective turned into bounty hunter, prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner by a Reconstruction Era senator (Tony Todd) for purposes of rounding up ex-Confederate war criminals.
In a series of episodes given chapter headings — “Chapter One: The General,” etc. — Makely’s loner with a two six-shooters, a six day beard, a duster and a saddlebag full of warrants, hunts down men who carried out massacres in the Civil War.
Adkins, all presence and rumble (as opposed to acting skill) and sporting an eyepatch, is The General, intoning in a Foghorn Leghorn drawl, “May ah inquire as to whether or not you are a VETERAN, suh?”
He confesses that he has “cut the thoats of many a private,” before Breecher mentions his need for “an oak tree big enough to hold a man of your stature.”
The murderous good ol’boy barely has time to finish his drink and mutter “Damn those Yankees, damn them AND their ideals,” when Breecher has gunned down the general and his entire gang.
And so the movie goes, Breecher hunting down “The Sheriff” (Fahey) or whoever, facing down armed gangs protecting his suspect, leaving bodies crumpled in the dust wherever he goes.
I think my favorite chapter might be “The Cooke’s.” Yes, the chapter title has a typo in it. When you’re cranking them out as fast as Lee, niceties like grammar and editing get shortchanged.
It’s not the cutting of the film that is the issue here, although everything shuffles along at an invalid’s pace, and at least some of that is due to pedestrian post production. No, the biggest flaws in Lee’s projects are the lack of fresh passes at the script, workshopping, story-editing. Judicious trimming would cut down on the eye-rolling dialogue, for starters.
Here’s an example. Breecher has shown up to confront “Captain Cooke,” played by Bruce Dern in yet another bed-bound performance. He’s a sickly old man, and rather than make the murderous bastard face justice, Breecher decides to just wait for him to die. Maybe he’s sweet on Cooke’s daughter (Sorvino).
“It is my job to watch men like you take their last breath,” Breecher intones. Good line. And then Lee has Makely ruin it with an anti-climax.
“This is the burden I must carry in this life.”
Groan.
Fahey is, as could be expected, the most impressive villain in the lot. Even his character is woefully underdeveloped, his crimes only cursorily mentioned. But he is silky smooth in his Sleepy Time Down South drawl.
“Sleep evaaaaades me,” he purrs, “for mah mind runs RAMpant with thoughts of the past!”
There are anachronism in the speech, and the private police force Pinkertons, post Civil War, were involved in tracking desperados who robbed trains (The James/Younger Gang) on behalf of the railroad companies, and trying to smother the newly-born labor movement in the crib on behalf of the Robber Barons. They never did anything so righteous as chase down war criminals.
But the shoot-outs are at least 1950s TV level sharp. The production values are solid. There’s more grit and grime than in earlier Justin Lee Westerns, even if he goes overboard with the buzzing flies sound effect.
We know it stank back then, hoss. We can SEE the smell.
And “Badland” was filmed on the same “studio ranch” that has been home to TV’s “Westworld.”
But until Lee finds himself a story editor and a more literate, genre-savvy group of readers to workshop his screenplays, until he figures out that hitching his wagon to a star who is more “available” than charismatic, these films are never going to hide their malnourished, rushed origins.
Quick and dirty, in other words.
Cast: Kevin Makely, Mira Sorvino, Jeff Fahey, Tony Todd, Wes Studi, Trace Adkins, James Russo and Bruce Dern.
Credits: Written and directed by Justin Lee. A Cinedigm release.
Running time: 1:42
Benny staggers off the plane and makes his way to the parking lot.
“Welcome to Iceland,” a friendly cabbie says. Need a lift? Where do you want to go?
“Where do people go?”
What’s that?
“When they fly in…”
Hungover or in shock, dazed and/or confused, Benny seems lost. Something, or someone, has him under a “Spell.”
Here’s a darkly comic odyssey that abandons “comic” at some point, and reaches for “soul searching.” That turn away from funny almost stops “Spell” in its tracks, but the film is carried by one of the quirkier heroes the cinema has given us in a while.
Before we see Benny disembarking, we’ve seen what came before, a “morning after” to never forget. A woman we learn is his fiancée (Jackie Tohn) awakens amid discarded underwear and empties, staggers outside and drops into the pool.
Now, shaken and disoriented, this cartoonist/illustrator has boarded a plane for a trip he’d vowed to make with Jess, not packing, not even owning anything warm.
And here we are, a tourist above the Arctic Circle, hitting the museums, the restrooms, the streets and bars.
He’s also licking many things along the way. He’ll pause for an instant, maybe try to walk away from a public restroom faucet, or a penis sculpture in a museum. But he has to turn back around and stick his tongue on it.
Benny, played by Barak Hardley, who also scripted “Spell” and once starred in the TV series “Junketeers” (won’t hold THAT against him), has OCD — obsessive compulsive disorder. He is thousands of miles from home, with no luggage, his dead fiancée’s engagement ring as a talisman and one last pill in his prescription bottle. The OCD is about to get a lot worse.
Let’s SELF medicate! A night out at the bars of Reykjavik is how he meets Inga (Birna Rún Eiríksdóttir) and her pals, how he hears about this legendary old coot tour-guide, Steindór, who leads off-the-beaten-path explorations of Iceland.
It’s also how he ends up in a drunken dare as Inga offers to show him some of her tattoos if he gets one in a shop they stagger past. Game on!
“Spell” is broken into chapter headings, pieces of lore about this legendary sorcerer whose museum Benny visited. Getting the tattoo is chapter-headed as “The Stave,” which is a Rune-like stick-symbol, which it turns out, represents the sorcerer. Benny is following the path of Loftur the Sorceror after getting the dude’s “Stave” inked onto his chest.
His guide down this path? That would be that old coot Steindór (Magnús Jónsson).
Whatever the mystery of “Spell” is, this is the heart of the movie — cranky Steindór leading OCD cartoonist Benny on a tour “up north.”
Steindór can’t even bother to muffle his muttering at Benny’s oblivious reaction to the wonders all around him.
“Stupid Americans.”
He resists Benny’s urge to get a selfie at every scenic spot, an OCD trait shared by most of us cell-phone owners.
“Why would you want to spoil a beautiful (waterfall) photo by putting your big fat head in front of it?”
Well, then “take a picture of me on top of THIS!”
“No. Not everything is to be climbed…mocked.”
Steindór is a philosopher whose musings are wasted on the bearded dork in mourning.
“What good is it to stand up to a glacier? It will go where it pleases.”
Something else is going on here, and not the “Benny starts to heal” thing we might expect from the story set-up. Something mysterious and dangerous and out of his control takes over the third act of “Spell.”
The quirky journey of self-discovery that the film seems to embrace, the convenient and conventional “Innocent Abroad” plot, becomes the very thing “Spell” shuns as it grasps for something deeper.
That’s an overreach, I think, as the film — as mentioned earlier — shudders to a halt here. “Spell” is better as dark comedy than as dark night of the soul.
But Hardley has conjured up an interesting twist to this “journey of healing” narrative, abandoning laughs for metaphysical pathos.
And as an actor, he seems perfectly-suited to playing a dorky unsophisticate at war with his mind and his memories, but still taking the hero’s journey to get the answers he needs to carry on.
MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, substance abuse, nudity and profanity
Cast:Barak Hardley, Jackie Tohn, Magnús Jónsson, Birna Rún Eiríksdóttir
Credits: Directed by Brendan Walter, screenplay by Barak Hardley. . A Dark Star Pictures release.
Running time: 1:26
