The plot description smacks of a teenage “Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”
The teens are Jaeden Martell, Keean Johnson and Alex Neustaedter. Shea Whigham is the cop who might be “on” to them.
Norwegian model/actress Kristene Froseth is the wild card in their midst.
A24 and Direct TV are distributing it, early Sept. Ror the latter, early Oct. in theaters for the latter, for “Low Tide,” but “coming soon” is intriguing enough.
Catholic exorcism tales have just one serious rival when it comes to “religious horror” movies — the snake handlers of Appalachia.
There’s built-in suspense, the medulla-based terror of the reptile, the tension of not knowing if a rattler will bite, the fear that prayer alone won’t save those bitten.
Who needs zombies, vampires or ghosts when you’ve got a venomous killer draped around the heroine or hero’s neck, a backwoods preacher reciting “They shall take up SERPENTS” from his Bible and a congregation roaring “AMEN” as all this is going on?
“Them That Follow” is “Winter’s Bone” with snake-handlers. It’s a quiet thriller that suggests that the form the violence takes in such remote communities may be different, but its sources can be identical.
Murderous meth trade or patriarchal “spirit touched” preaching, such rigid, hierarchical scenarios suck us in, leaving us as trapped and lost as the antagonists up on the screen we’re meant to identify with.
Mara, played by Alice Englert of “Ginger & Rosa” and “Beautiful Creatures” is our trapped heroine this time. She’s part of a dirt-poor mountaintop community, raised on snake handling, not really looking for a way out.
After all, her stern, charismatic daddy (Walton Goggins, in a role he was born to play) is the preacher. So it’s not like she has a say in the matter, or a choice.
This sect has the 20something Mara hemmed in on all sides. Driving “is not meant for your hands.” Contact with the outside world is circumscribed. We never see a TV or hear a radio. Women in the church gather for sewing and quilting bees while the men search the woods for fresh vipers.
And Daddy’s got her mate, her future, all lined up for her. Her “choice” in the matter seems pro forma.
“Who you choose, girl, chooses your whole life.”
It’s just that Garret (Lewis Pullman) is Daddy’s in-my-congregation idea of a mate. Mara has had eyes for Sister Slaughter’s boy, the atheist Augie (Thomas Mann).
And within minutes of meeting her on the screen, we see Mara and pal Dilly (Kaitlyn Dever) hitch into “town” where Mara has to shoplift a pregnancy test from the only store, the one run by Mrs. Slaughter, played by newly-minted Oscar winner Olivia Colman.
Writer-directors Britt Poulton and Dan Madison Savage immerse in this wintry, primitive world of quiet, camo, wood stoves, beat-up trucks, mud and damp and clothes hanging on a line behind every house.
There’s so little going on that the barn where the church meets — no altar, no pulpit, no pews — a simple neon cross decorating its outside — is the only game in town.
We’re not going to be surprised that there’s drinking going on.
Dilly’s a teenager looked after by the pastor and community since her mother fled, leaving her to live in a tiny, worn out travel trailer.
But Mara’s condition is not something she’s going to be able to hide, long. It’s not something you can “pray away” any more than you can a rattlesnake bite.
“Take away the awful stain of my transgressions…Let me be pure again!”
“Them That Follow” takes its religion seriously, seeing its practitioners as sincere but misguided, and also hounded by the state. The preacher’s conversations reveal the extent of that.
“Rattler got’em in the neck,” a congregant passes on to him. “Family prayed all night, but he couldn’t fight off the venom.”
And as the victim was a “minor,” the law is on them.
“They out for blood.”
The Southern character actor Goggins (TV’s “Vice Principals”) brings his supervillain’s charm and steely-eyed sense of purpose to Pastor Lemuel. Like many a Red State politician, he’s quick to sell their faith in “us against them” terms.
“They don’t understand it. They look down on it. Down on you! And you, and you!”
“Our struggle is against the Devil who put-em there…This mountain…is our shield!”
The script is better at setting up the contrasts between the dutiful preacher’s daughter and the flattering young non-believer, Augie, than at letting us see real attraction.
“We’re never going to make any sense,” she declares.
“Your daddy’s religion” is all that stands between them, he argues. But it’s her religion, too, all she knows about.
If his mother can’t lure him back to services for a refill in the Holy Spirit, what chance does Mara have?
“Thanks, Ma, but I’m pretty full up today. Any more’d be just plain greedy.”
Mann isn’t the most fiery of performers, and Englert keeps so much of Mara’s struggle internal that it’s hard to work up much empathy for their plight.
Colman is superb as the most faithful woman in that church, explaining what she gets out of it, enforcing its dogma on the women but letting compassion guide her. And comic Jim Gaffigan brings gravitas to her husband, almost as devoted but a man with limits.
But Goggins grounds this picture in reality and makes a compellingly seductive villain, if you can even call him that. He lets us see the dogmatic Lemuel, the fear-monger and the judge in him.
It’s a quietly chilling turn as a man who is absolved of all guilt and all blame. Snake bit you? You didn’t have “the spirit.” Poison takes over your body? Your faith isn’t strong enough.
He’s the best reason to see “Them That Follow,” because his version of Lemuel makes us understand why they follow.
MPAA Rating: R for some disturbing violence
Cast: Alice Englert, Kaitlyn Dever, Walton Goggins, Olivia Colman, Jim Gaffigan, Thomas Mann
Credits: Written and directed by Britt Poulton, Dan Madison Savage. A 1091 Media release.
Running time: 1:38
David Ayer is, according to The Hollywood Reporter, in talks to direct a WWII combat drama ‘El-Alamein’ for #Lionsgate.
The once low budget mostly horror and cheap thriller studio is staking a claim to combat pictures in the digital effects age.
That’s a niche with a high after market ceiling, as such movies enjoy long life on home video, streaming, cable and broadcast movie channels.
https://t.co/TKs19TGHk2 https://t.co/EImRGqcgvS https://twitter.com/THR/status/1159500079377584128?s=17
If one settles in for “Blinded by the Light” expecting it to be a giddy affair, hoping to be transported by the pre-1987 music of Bruce Springsteen, one is almost sure to be disappointed.
If so, it’s one’s own fault.
Because as much as one might have loved The Boss, the films of Gurinder Chadha or the expectation of an empowering message about racism and the liberation identifying with a great songwriter/spokesman for the down-and-out can be, as much as you might think that Chadha (“Bend it Like Beckham”) has been marching towards that day when she’d make a musical set among the Subcontinent Diaspora relocated to the U.K., those expectations are a tad too much.
Well, they were for this “one,” anyway.
Even though the picture’s cute and manages a few truly magical moments, the end result’s a bit of a slog — like the message-packed meanderings of Springsteen’s less popular deep cuts. It’s a “true events” comedy that wanders and gropes on past the point where it’s charming — an obese 113 minute comedy weighing on a 95 minute-wide chair.
Viveik Kalra is Javed, a Luton son of Pakistani immigrants in the 1987 U.K. of Margaret Thatcher and a rising “National Front” (neo-Nazis).
Yes, he’s spat upon by skinheads who don’t have the guts to shave their scalps. Yes, even the tweens in their neighborhood carry out cruel, racist pranks on the “Pakis.” His keep-your-head-down father (veteran character actor Kulvinder Ghir) rules Javed like he rules his house — as a dictator. He works, makes his wife, two daughters and Javed work, collects all the cash and kowtows to more successful Pakistani-Brits as if he’s living under the Raj.
“Start at the top and STAY there,” Dad counsels. More amusingly, he says, seek out Jewish classmates. “Do what the JEWS do!”
He is, his journal-keeping son narrates, “stuck in another century.” Dad has determined his boy will go to college, study economics and then submit to an arranged marriage.
Javed just wants to write. He has scribbled down poems for years, even writes lyrics for his “Synth is the FUTURE” neighbor and lifelong friend, Matt (Dean-Charles Chapman), who has the ’80s fashions and ’80s hair to be in his own synth-pop “Pet Shop Boys” era band.
Javed is in school with Goths, “Material Girls,” “Banaramaheads” and the like, struggling to “finally kiss a girl and get out of this dump,” but oppressed, suppressed and depressed by the racism of others and the tyranny of his downtrodden “You will NEVER be British” father.
A Sikh classmate (Aaron Phagura) he just met has the answer. It’s on two quaint devices called “compact cassettes,” containing the albums “Born in the U.S.A.” and “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” by Bruce Springsteen. Bruce, “Roops,” preaches to Javed, “is the direct line to all that’s true in this s—-y world!”
Chadha underscores this “direct line” by having Springsteen’s lyrics swirl around Javed as he loses himself to “Dancing in the Dark” through the headphones of his Sony Walkman.
Javed has found his champion. Dad just wants to know, “Is he JEWISH?”
That teacher that looks for what’s special in any given student is played here by Hayley Atwell. The Boss gives Javed the courage to show her his poems, the guts to try and get his Pakistani kid into Springsteen essay into the school newspaper.
Reciting or singing Bruce is how he tries to win the fair Eliza (Nell Williams).
A few characters note how “nobody listens to Springsteen any more” in 1987, a performer relegated to “my dad’s music” by the teased-hair kids dressing like Boy George and Madonna. Matt’s dad (the hilarious Rob Brydon) proves that point.
When Javed starts to serenade Eliza with his favorite Springsteen song of romantic longing, real-life Springsteen fan Brydon makes it a duet (I think the song was “Thunder Road,” maybe “Badlands,” feel free to correct me) and “Blinded by the Light” finally becomes the neo-musical it really wants to be.
Chadha recreates the ugliness of the era, the racism that marched hand-in-glove with Thatcherism, the engineered recessions that amounted to a war on the working class (Javed’s dad works for Vauxhall/GM, and is laid off) as well as the daytime pre-rave disco dances Muslim immigrant kids like Javed’s sister (Nikita Mehta) flocked to without their parents’ knowledge.
The pre-college “Sixth Form” college Javed attends is like a John Hughes movie with British accents –the cliques, the laughable fashions, the tyranny of synthetic “art rock.”
And the director revives the magic of prosthelytizing music that you love by sharing a single pair of headphones on a Sony Walkman, more romantic and certainly more hygienic than trying that with the earbuds of today.
You have to take the movie on its own terms, as a reality-based fable that wades through a sea of corn. I was willing to go along with it, and got downright choked up when it hit its peaks.
But Chadha ham-fists her way through one dance number (Bruce is even less easy to dance to than he is to sing along to, in most tunes) and seems most at home in the disco.
Our young lead doesn’t have the range that the mythos of the songs demand. He is insulted, threatened, humiliated and treated with dismissal or contempt. He persists and marches towards something like a living-my-dream triumph, but I found Kalra pretty much a two-note, maybe three note performer, far less moving that the tunes underscoring his actions.
The kid who “converts” Javed is seriously shortchanged in the screenplay.
Ghir paints a lovely picture of a patriarch stripped of the things that make him valuable as the head of the family, but not too proud to insist his wife pick and kids pick up the earning slack.
Atwell is the generic white teacher who shows the kid of color his value, and Brydon is as amusingly broad as he always is.
I so wanted to love “Blinded by the Light” (my least favorite Bruce song) with its messaging and music that maybe I wanted too much from it. And certainly there’s too much of it. But if you’ve got permission to use all those Springsteen songs, the impulse to edit it into something tighter is “gone on the wind.”
It’s still an often-lovely coda to a summer of mostly brand-name blockbusters, and busts.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic material and language including some ethnic slurs.
Cast: Viveik Kalra, Kulvinder Ghir, Nell Williams, Aaron Phagura , Rob Brydon and Hayley Atwell
Credits: Directed by Gurinder Chadha, script by Paul Mayeda Berges, Gurinder Chadha and Sarfraz Manzoor. A Warner Brothers/New Line release.
Running time: 1:57
CBS Films gets to cash in on the feverish anticipation for “IT: Chapter Two” with another “brand name” horror film, this one produced by Guillermo del Toro.
Based on an Alvin Schwartz novel — hey, we can’t ALL be named “Stephen King” — this one has a few recognizable names/faces. Gil Bellows and Dean Norris, Zoe Coletti is in “Skin” now in theaters, and “Wildlife” from a while back.
CBS Films did not screen this one for critics in advance, a common practice for mid-to-late August horror releases “dumped” in this slowest moviegoing month of the summer. Of course, CBS Films has shrunk so far from its original ambitions when launched a decade or so ago, they’ve probably forgotten HOW to preview movies for critics.’
So I will catch it, first showing, tonight, with the rest of horror fandom.
I had some doubts, interviewing him some years ago. But the demented garbage pouring out of his sewer hole these days has the tint of backwoods dolt about it.
The real “acting” must have been as a compassionate teacher of black kids in “Conrack,” and a war protesting paraplegic veteran in “Coming Home.” Considering the man’s Supervillain politics these days, I mean.
For truth in advertising, it’s hard to beat the title “Friedkin Uncut.”
This documentary about the great, not-forgotten but certainly under-heralded director of “The Exorcist,” “The French Connection,” “The Boys in the Band,” “Sorcerer,” “Bug” and “Killer Joe” is formless and right on the cusp of artless.
Its opening shot is of William Friedkin, who will turn 84 August 29, rolling up to his art-filled L.A. mansion in his Lexus.
For Pete’s sake.
He starts off rattling on about Hitler and Jesus, backpedaling to ensure nobody thinks he admires them both equally. “Good and evil,” he’s making a point about. Sort of.
And therein lies the triumph of the film. It is William Friedkin himself, a lovely old man of the cinema, a raconteur with a sort of Trumpian flare for hyperbole, rambling and not false, but somewhat inauthentic modesty. He’s a hoot.
So it doesn’t matter that this documentary appreciation spends silly amounts of time following Friedkin to French, Italian and Spanish film festivals, where he’s feted. It doesn’t matter that the documentary’s director is a little-credited actor (a “footman” in “The Grand Budapest Hotel”) turned first-time movie maker and comes off, at times, as wincingly out of his depth.
The film’s “star” and his work, his actors, his peers, his filmdom fans are all that matter. And they’re packed into this 107 minute biography and fan letter.
“Exorcist” star Ellen Burstyn breaks down why the film works, that “It starts on a very real level” and “step by step” moves to the horrific, which is why it scares the dickens out of people. Then she remembers how the great Max Von Sydow, whom Friedkin calls “the greatest actor in the world…at the time” kept blowing his line, “The power of Christ compels you!”
Maybe his atheism had something to do with that, they allow.
Friedkin relates the story of hiring Stacy Keach, and then letting himself get talked into replacing him with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and sometime actor Jason Miller.
And we’re off, with Francis Ford Coppola praising his directing contemporary telling stories “in the most direct possible way…He doesn’t philosophize about evil. He shows it.”
From action auteur Walter Hill (“48 Hours,” “Southern Comfort”) to horror master Dario Argento, Wes Anderson and Quentin Tarantino to Edgar Wright (“Hot Fuzz”), and Philip Kaufman (“The Right Stuff”), who went to high school in North Chicago with Friedkin, all are here to marvel over the movies and pay their respects.
The actors? Juno Temple and Matthew McConaughey (“Killer Joe”), Gina Gershon and Michael Shannon (“Bug”), Willem Dafoe and William Peterson (“To Live and Die in L.A.”) all talk about Friedkin’s “method,” treating actors like their characters, challenging them.
The fact that we don’t hear from Gene Hackman (“The French Connection” movies), Al Pacino (“Cruising”) or anybody from the many bombs that put his career in the shadows in the ’80s into the ’90s (“Deal of the Century,” “The Guardian,” “Blue Chips”) sticks out.
Maybe they were underwhelmed by the documentarian’s credits, too.
Technique? Friedkin likes to get what he wants in a single take. He’s always gone for “spontaneity” over “perfection,” he admits, pointing to “bad” shots that made it into his movies.
They shot the most famous chase in screen history, in “The French Connection,” on the fly in New York on a Sunday morning.
What’s that “spontaneity” do to actors?
“There’s no holding back, no charming your way through the scene,” Michael Shannon says.
“Rehearsal is for sissies. Rehearsal… is for dummies,” Friedkin declares.
“You just let it rip, from take one,” Matthew McConaughey offers.
Tarantino talks about how no filmmaker since can make the claim that the movie they’re making is too difficult, “challenging,” or “dangerous.” Not if it’s not as difficult as Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now,” as Werner Herzog’s “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” or as Friedkin’s jungle masterpiece, “Sorcerer.”
The best line from somebody not Friedkin in “Friedkin Uncut” comes from Coppola.
“Both ‘Sorcerer’ and ‘Apocalypse Now’ were made at a time when if you wanted to show something extraordinary you had to DO something extraordinary. And film it.”
Suck on that, Christopher Nolan.
And after Tarantino has talked up how one learns to stage and shoot a chase scene, on foot or in a car, by watching Friedkin, the master gets off a zinger.
“When it comes to chases, nobody can top Buster Keaton.”
The odd hilarious, profane declaration, leading a film festival audience as he sings “Singin’ in the Rain,” and too many shots of Friedkin getting coffee, “directing” his director and what not, the formlessness becomes a big part of the charm here.
A director who speaks of his “craft” and “professionalism” and pooh poohs “art,” a damned fine documentarian in his own right (Check out this interview/film he did with the great German master Fritz Lang on Youtube), you know William “Billy” Friedkin wouldn’t have it any other way.
MPAA Rating: unrated, screen violence, sexual situations, profanity
Cast: William Friedkin, Ellen Burstyn, Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, Juno Temple, Dario Argento, Willem Dafoe, Gina Gershon, Francis Ford Coppola, Walter Hill, and Matthew McConaughey
Written and directed by Francesco Zippel. An AMB Distribution/QUOAIT release.
Running time: 1:47
The brisk, violent opening act of “The Kitchen” sets us up for a two-hour wallow in the grit, grime and crime of 1970s New York.
The novelty alone, the building of a crime empire run by three women “married to the mob,” is a great hook. Casting the newly-serious Melissa McCarthy, trying to be serious Tiffany Haddish and on a career-roll Elisabeth Moss as the leads is another.
But as the picture sputters and stalls, losing its quick pace and brutal efficiency in the later acts, this comic book adaptation reveals the flaws in its execution, if not its very origins.
McCarthy, Haddish and Moss are married into the Hells Kitchen Irish mob which, by the late ’70s, wasn’t just on its last legs, it was on crutches. And the marriages? Well, they’re various degrees of “limping along,” too.
Ruby (Haddish) is married to gang leader Kevin (James Badge Dale), a bossy Neanderthal who calls the shots at home and on the street. His mob ties go back generations. His “Animal Kingdom” mother (Margot Martindale) lives with them.
Kathy (McCarthy) is a mother of two who learned long ago not to question Jimmy’s (Brian Darcy James) sudden departures, explained with nothing more than “I got a thing to take care of.”
And Claire (Moss) has it worst of all, childless and pummeled on a regular basis by her brute (Jeremy Bobb) of a husband.
The best mob pictures, films like “Donnie Brasco,” are the ones that give us the dirty little secret these violent “Godfather” fans don’t want to get out. They’re lazy, lying, lowlife cheats who don’t pay their bills, can’t form a coherent thought and are bullying idiots to boot. Their special gift is chutzpah, having the brass to demand respect, to make good on a few of their violent threats as they collect “protection money” and expect unquestioning loyalty even if it’s not how they treat others.
Maybe there’s a reason “The Kitchen” is coming out in this particular presidency.
Kevin, Jimmy and Rob are bottom-feeding numbskulls. It isn’t enough that they’re caught red-handed by the Feds as they knock over a liquor store. They’ve got to beat up F.B.I. agents (Common) until NYPD shows up and it’s game over.
Prison for them, but what for their unemployed wives? “You’ll be taken care of” new boss (Myk Watford) promises, then bellows again when they see how little they’re told to get by with. Ruby’s mob matriarch mother-in-law practically spits on them. And merely being free from beatings isn’t enough to keep Claire going.
But if the guys tossed in prison were dumbbells, what’s that say for the gang “Little Jackie” (Watford) is left to run? They can’t collect because they can’t be bothered to protect. And respect? Fuggedaboutit.
A desperate Kathy offers to “help” with the collecting. They’ll use reason, persuasion and improved customer service to win back the delis, shoe stores and other businesses in their corner of Lower Manhattan. They’ll put a couple of under-employed tough guys on the payroll. They’ll split the take with Little Jackie.
Showing the guys up isn’t going to make them many friends. But just when things turn uglier, the sociopathic ginger hit man Gabriel (Domhnall Gleeson) comes back to town, “protecting” Claire, who is tired of needing that.
Watching this abused woman “snap” is one of the guilty pleasures of “The Kitchen.” One abuser is taken care of, but Claire doesn’t want Gabriel to do that for her. She wants to learn from him. The sociopath, who is sweet on her, teaches Claire Hitman 101.
“You gotta slice open the abdomen and punch holes in both’a the lungs,” he demonstrates with a corpse in her tub. Claire learns how to get bodies to sink, where to dump them and at what times the river will take them out to sea.
Sick. But kind of funny.
Bill Camp shows up as a bigger, more menacing Italian mob boss who appreciates their efficiency and the idea of “looking out for your family.” There is nobody better at playing this sort of “I’m a reasonable man” but still murderous villain in the movies today.
But as the bodies pile up and their little empire grows, conflicts between the women kick in and “The Kitchen” becomes more meat-and-potatoes dull by the minute.
Metallic comic book dialogue, flat performances, thinly-developed empathy and underdeveloped morality pull the picture’s punches.
Only Moss stands out in the starring trio. Claire was at her breaking point, and falling in love with a hitman doesn’t fend off that psychotic break. Haddish, new to this sort of thing, basically plays one note throughout. As it’s not a funny note, Ruby starts to grate. She starts out mad, mouthy and ruthless and stays mad, mouthy and ruthless.
And McCarthy’s character is meant to be the one with the most dramatic arc, from a housewife and mother simply trying to feed her kids with the one job open to them in America’s “National Malaise,” to a woman every bit as hard as her pre-hardened compatriots. The script and her performance of it don’t carry enough pathos in Kathy to make this come off.
A two-scene cameo lets Annabella Sciorra, as the wife of Camp’s Italian mob boss, play more pathos, spine and heart than anything McCarthy or Haddish summon. She not only shows the stars up, but she hints at the movie this might have been.
The picture has an empowered subtext, and that is kept front and center even as the body count piles up. Having a woman writer-director (Andrea Berloff) certainly helped the film stay on message in that regard.
But Berloff, the screenwriter of “World Trade Center” and “Straight Outta Compton,” isn’t working so much outside her milieu as beyond her time frame. Putting pimps and hookers on the neon-lit streets is not all it takes to make a ’70s thriller.
The murders stop shocking at some point. Aside from a seedy bar or backroom scene or two, where’s the grit?
There were many moments when I wondered why a line wasn’t playing, even as I was noticing how pricey and perfect everybody’s hair, makeup and wardrobe were. Yes, they look like a million bucks. So make’em give you another take, one with some heat in it.
As the director of “Ocean’s 8” could tell you, obsessing on the characters’ appearance at the expense of drama and realism may make for a more distinctly feminine take on this well-worn genre. But it’s no substitute for tension, danger, for dramatic and sexual heat.
Berloff would have been better-served had she made Kathy’s “teachable moment” remark to her little girl her own guiding ethos.
“Pretty don’t matter. It’s just a tool women can use.”
MPAA Rating:R for violence, language throughout and some sexual content
Cast: Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish, Elisabeth Moss, Domhnall Gleeson, Bill Camp
Credits: Written and directed by Andrea Berloff, based on the comic book series. A New Line/Warner Brothers release.
Running time: 1:42
It helps to remember that Bruce Joel Rubin, the screenwriter who conjured up the original “Jacob’s Ladder” back in 1990, also wrote the blockbuster “Ghost.”
And Mr. Rubin, as he told me way back then, wrote these afterlife thrillers during his deep dive into “The Tibetan Book of the Dead,” with Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge” holding his interest, too.
Sure, we all remember the “vibrating man” effects — apparitions shaking into a blur, an effect used often in the decades since. But these were thought-provoking ghost stories in an era that produced those, tales of time and memory unhinged and an afterlife that offers either peace and closure or eternal damnation.
And yes, purgatory might mean you’re stuck on New York’s subway system for all eternity.
The new “Jacob’s Ladder” is significantly different from the original in many ways, but not in a couple of important ones.
Casting Michael Ealy, a leading man given to playing sensitive leads or haunted heavies, pays off. He is Jacob, an Iraq War vet confused by the unraveling reality of life back home in Atlanta, and Ealy’s an old pro at convincing us of shock, terror and hurt. His eyes scream “The horror, the horror” when the need arises.
And the tone of this David M. Rosenthal remake — he did Ealy’s “The Perfect Man” with Sanaa Lathan and Morris Chestnut — is spooky and spot on.
It works about as well as a remake that’s half an hour shorter than the original can work, which isn’t a ringing endorsement, I know. Still worth taking a look at.
Jacob Singer is an Atlanta trauma surgeon who works in the city Veterans Administration hospital. He was a combat trauma surgeon in Iraq, and that experience hangs over him, with memory overwhelming his present reality on occasion.
Jacob didn’t realize the patient he was about to lose in a field hospital in Iraq was his brother Isaac (Jesse Williams) until he spied his tattoo.
Now Jacob is running into demented vets on the street. They’re wearing combat jackets and hoodies, and their messages are all over the place.
“Your brother’s here…You’re brother’s in trouble. I can show you.”
And then there are the hooded ghouls who invade the house he shares with wife Sam (Nicole Beharie). Unmasking one is Jacob’s first clue that he’s not dealing with something of this world.
“Better keep your mouth shut” is what he’s told. By the house-breaker who vanishes into the trees.
Who to confide in? Sam? She’s busy with their baby who was born when he was overseas.
There’s Hoffman, the VA pharmacist (Guy Burnet). And there’s the psychotherapist (Michael Panes) helping Jacob deal with whatever level of post traumatic stress he’s suffering.
Will either have the answers when that one traumatized comrade of his brother’s (Joseph Sikora) leads him to his dead brother, hiding out in the bowels of The City Too Busy to Hate.
Isaac? You were dead!
Bringing the “dead” sibling home merely intensifies the hallucinations, the flashbacks — to their childhood together, to Jacob’s wedding day with Sam, to combat or field surgery in Iraq.
These flashbacks — machine fire, visions of choppers, the works — are so intense they can kill a man. Jacob’s not the only one having them. There’s this anti-psychotic drug,HDA, “The Ladder,” that was out, then pulled, that seems like a clue.
Rosenthal’s film, based on Jeff Buhler and Sarah Thorpe’s rewrite of the 1990 “Jacob’s Ladder,” grabs us with a gory rib-spreader surgical opening and then settles into the moody terrors that Jacob won’t speak about, so certain is he that all this supernatural stuff is really roiling around him.
Would a doctor REALLY believe clerical mistakes let him think his brother has been dead?
“I just want to know what’s going on!”
As in the original “Ladder,” the one person who might have answers that provide solace is named “Louis.” Then, that was Jacob’s chiropractor-protector and father-confessor, played by the great Danny Aiello.
Here Louis is a similarly calming presence, his psychotherapist. Character actor Michael Panes (he was Gore Vidal in “Infamous”) summons up the soothing tones of Louis’s profession to talk Jacob off his psychic ledge.
“We all see things,” he says, quoting Medieval theologian and philosopher Meister Eckhart to his fellow physician. “The only thing that burns in Hell is the part of yourself that refuses to let go.”
The first “Jacob’s Ladder” earned mixed notices upon release, and never quite achieved “cult” status. This version is no better in many ways, and altering its twist ending isn’t much of an improvement.
Honestly, it seems to muddle the whole wrestling with mortality and “what comes after” thing, aside from Louis’s little speech.
But there isn’t a bad performance in it, and those turns made me buy in just enough. It’s still a mixed bag, but for those in a “Ghost” frame of mind, it’s not bad.
MPAA Rating: R for language, some violence, sexuality and drug content
Cast: Michael Ealy, Jesse Williams, Nicole Beharie, Joseph Sikora, Karla Souza, Ninja N. Devoe
Credits: Directed by David M. Rosenthal, script by Jeff Buhler and Sarah Thorpe, based on the Bruce Joel Rubin script for the 1990 film. A Vertical Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:29
As I twiddle my thumbs, waiting for the embargo to clear for “The Kitchen,” allow me to share the fond hope that this, the latest 70s-80s music film to demand our attention, will be worth the wait.
A Pakistani Briton in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain discovers an American voice that speaks to his very soul, the longing, the aching loneliness, the frustration of, as Harlan Ellison so aptly put it, having “no mouth but I must scream.”
Sure, it’s titled after my least favorite Springsteen song. But this trailer has a sheen of sheer joy about it. Hope it’s better than “Yesterday” or “Rocketman,” but we’ll see.
Supporting players Rob Brydon and Hayley Atwell are the only “names” in the cast.
“Blinded by the Light” opens Aug. 16.
Movie Nation 