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weekendwarriorblog · 4 years ago

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The Weekend Warrior Home Edition 8/14/20 – SPUTNIK, THE SILENCING, FREELAND, SPREE, THE BAY OF SILENCE

Another week, another batch of movies to get through in hopes there’s one or two worth writing about… and then writing about all of them anyway. (Sigh). I hope there are people reading this, at least. If so, go to the bottom of this column and drop me a line!

Before I get to this week’s movies, I want to give a special congratulatory shout-out to the wonderful Melanie Addington, because this is the final week of the 17th annual Oxford Film Festival. I have to say as someone who regularly covers a couple other bigger festivals, she’s done such an amazing job pivoting to the virtual world, to the point where what usually is a five-day very localized festival turned into a nationwide digital festival that’s been stretched out for 16 weeks! Those bigger festivals like SXSW and Tribeca could take a lesson from Oxford, because what usually are two highly-anticipated festivals every year became a whole lot of nothing thanks to COVID. It’s like they gave up, rolled over and just died. Oxford, meanwhile, has done Zoom QnAs with a lot of the filmmakers and casts from its films to help maintain the community feeling that makes the festival such a great destination for those in-the-know. (I haven’t even gotten into the amazing drive-in screenings or the year-round On Demand program they’ve been having over the past couple months.)

Anyway, OFF ends this week with the world-premiere of a movie that was supposed to open at SXSW, Mario Furlani and Kate McLean’s debut feature FREELAND, starring Krisha Fairchild from Trey Shults’ movie, Krisha. Freeland is a similarly strong indie r drama, this one starring Ms. Fairchild as Davi, a black market marijuana farmer in Humboldt County, Norther California, who sees her way of life changing when she’s forced to go legal after California legalizes marijuana. Instead, these changes might run her out of business. It’s a beautifully-shot (Furlani is also the cinematographer) character drama that spotlights Fairchild giving another memorable performance, surrounded by an equally excellent cast that includes Lily Gladstone from Certain Women. I hope a good distributor like IFC or Magnolia will scoop this up for release, as I think it’s an interesting look into the pot business from a unique perspective. I also think it could do VERY well at the Indie Spirits. You can watch Freeland for a couple more days (at least) with a QnA with cast and crew on Thursday night right here.

Also, check out the Eventive site for the final week line-up which includes a TON of shorts. (Be mindful, that some of the content, specifically The Offline Playlist, will only be watchable if you’re in Mississippi.)

Also starting this week on Thursday is the 5th Annual Dallas-based Women Texas Film Festival (aka WTxFF), also going virtual this year, which I don’t really know that much about, but it’s run by my friend, Justina Walford, and she generally knows her shit when it comes to movies. Its mission pledge is right there in the title, but all the movies in the festival have a woman in at least one creative role. You can check out the full list of movies playing here, although they are geoblocked to Texas unfortunately. The festival’s series of panels and QnAs, though, can be watched anywhere in the United States, and those should be good.

Let’s get to the regular releases….

This week’s “Featured Flick” is Russian filmmaker Egor Abramenko’s SPUTNIK (IFC Midnight), a sci-fi thriller taking place in 1983 after an incident the Russian spaceship Orbit-4 that leaves one of the cosmonauts in detention after the death of his commander. Oksana Akinshina (who was in The Bourne Supremacy) plays Tatyana Klimova, a psychologist sent to study the surviving cosmonaut, Konstantin Veshnyakov (Pyotr Fyodorov), and she learns that he brought back something with him from space.

I was a little worried about this movie, only because the opening reminded me so much of my experience watching the original Russian film Solaris so many years ago. Its quizzical opening in space leads to Akinshina’s character being introduced in a way that’s so slow and talkie that I worried about what I should expect from the movie as a whole. Thankfully, about 20 minutes in, we meet the creature that’s seemingly come down from space inside the cosmonaut, and it immediately changes the very nature of the film.

I don’t want to spoil too much about why the movie gets so interesting, because it’s not non-stop creature kills, although the movie does get quite exciting every time this creature emerges, particularly when it’s being fed various Russian convicts. Even so, the film always remains fairly cerebral about the creature’s origins and its relationship to the cosmonaut, who abandoned a child before his fateful space accident. Adding to the grey area about whether Tatyana should ally herself with Konstantin is her supervising officer, played by Fedor Bondarchuk, who clearly wants to use the creature as a weapon, knowing that both Konstantin and his “other” only trusts Tatyana, so they all need her.

Needless to say, the creature design is absolutely fantastic, and the comparisons this movie is going to get to Alien are quite apt, because the creature is on par with the xenomorph. I only wish I could see it better since it only comes out in the dark, and watching a movie that plays with light like this one does is just not conducive to watching on a laptop. (In fact, if you’re in a position to see Sputnik in a theater, even a drive-in, and you’re not averse to subtitles, I’d recommend going that route.)

Sputnik might fool you at first into expecting something in the vein of the original Solaris. In fact, it’s more in line with The Invisible Man, a creature feature that explores one man’s inner demons through the lens of science fiction. This probably would have been a better Venom movie than the one we actually got.

Jamie Lannister himself, Nicolaj Costar-Waldau stars in THE SILENCING (Saban Films) the English language debut of Belgian filmmaker Robin Pront (The Ardennes), a dark action-thriller set in the rural area of Echo Falls where a serial killer is hunting and killing young women and girls.

Robin Pront’s The Silencing is usually the type of movie I’d enjoy, if only I haven’t seen the exact same movie so many times before. I wasn’t sure whether it’s Costar-Waldau’s alcoholic hunter Rayburn Swanson, whose daughter disappeared years earlier, or it was cause of Annabelle Wallis, the town’s sheriff, Alice Gustafson, whose troubled brother Brooks (Hero Fiennes Tiffin) is caught up enough in the towns drug issues to act as the movie’s second-act red herring. Throw in the Native American aspect of the movie, and you’re right back at Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River, which was just a much better version of this movie all around.

Adding to the lack of originality is the fact that there are now so many television shows about serial killers, which is a shame since Pront’s previous film showed so much promise but also suffered from similar issues. Costar-Waldau gives a credible performance, maybe slightly better than Wallis, but we’ve seen this movie so many times before that even trying to throw in a twist or two goes awry since no one ever commits. The major plot twist about halfway in has an opportunity to change everything but instead, it’s negated mere minutes later.

Slow and grim, The Silencing suffers from being an overused genre that’s been done so much better before. It’s already been playing on DirecTV but will be in select theaters, On Demand and Digital this Friday.

Next up is the thriller THE BAY OF SILENCE (Vertical Entertainment), starring Claes Bang from The Square as Will, whose girlfriend and baby momma Rosalind (Olga Kurylenko) vanishes with their twin daughters and baby son, and her father Milton (Brian Cox) seems to know more than he’s telling. The film is written and produced by British actor Caroline Goodall (who has a small role in this one), adapted from Lisa St. Aubin de Teran's 1986 novel and directed by Dutch filmmaker Paula van der Oest, who has made some decent films like Black Butterflies and the Oscar-nominated Zus & Zo.

We meet Will and Ros as they’re having a romantic moment in the titular bay in Luguria, Italy, and after a few odd occurrences, Ros vanishes with her twin girls and the baby boy they had together. It doesn’t take long for Will to find her, but she seems to have gone insane, and Will needs to find out what happened.

Honestly, it’s not worth getting too deep into this movie’s plot, not so much due to spoilers, but more because there are just so many WTF moments that happen out of the blue, and then the next moment they’re forgotten. For whatever reason, the movie just doesn’t allow any of the tension or mystery to build, and even the most horrificly grim plot turn is handled so matter-of-factly.

There’s no question that van der Oest is a fine filmmaker, something you can tell from the general look of the movie, but the pacing and tons is generally all over the place as nothing happens and then a LOT happens. Bang’s decent performance is countered by a lot of overacting from Kulryenko, and while Cox plays a much bigger role in the story than you might expect, his scenes do very little to elevate the film’s plodding tone.

The Bay of Silence is a highly uneven and bland thriller that tries to offer a twist a minute with very of them ever really connecting, instead feeling grim and tedious and like a lot of wasted potential. Oddly, it feels more original than The Silencing above but just doesn’t come together even as well.

Where do I even begin with Eugene Kotlyarenko’s SPREE (RLJE Films) except that it stars Stranger Thing’s Joe Keery as Kurt Kunkle “of Kunkle’s World,” a social media vlog where he tries to get viewer’s attention and likes. He finally decides to go on a killing spree (get it?) while picking up passengers in his car ride service Spree (see?), until he encounters a stand-up comic (Sasheer Zamata) who fights back.

Listen, I understand fine why a movie like Spree might get made, since it’s meant to be relevant to the youngsters, who are much like Kurt, totally obsessed with their own social media and getting attention. The idea of some kid becoming a serial killer just to draw more attention to himself is not exactly incredible. I found Kurt so annoying that I didn’t think I would ever be able to have any empathy for him, and I was right.

We basically watch Kurt driving around and killing various people, most of them pretty horrible, granted, but Keery comes off more like a bargain-basement Christian Bale in American Psycho. Zamata is generally the best part of the movie, which is why the last third starts to get past some of the movie’s earlier problems to become more about an actual influencer showing Kurt how it’s done. (Zamata’s “SNL” castmate Kyle Mooney can’t really do much to make their scenes together funnier, since it’s just another sleazeball hitting on her.)

David Arquette also has a few funny scenes as Kurt’s father, but what’s probably gonna throw a lot of people off and make or break the movie is that so much of it is made to look like it was filmed on a smartphone, complete with running commentary from the viewers that you’re supposed to read, and presumably enjoy? Me, I just found it annoying.

Spree is gonna be one of those love-it-or-hate-it movies depending on which side of the age gap you’re on. To me, it just seemed way too obvious and not something I could possibly recommend to anyone over 19.

Okay… Documentary time!

I really wanted to like Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss’ BOYS STATE (A24/Apple TV+), which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and received Special Jury Prize at SXSW Film Festival, but it’s a pollical doc that deals with a subject that just didn’t interest me very much. It follows a thousand teen boys from Texas who come together to form a government from the ground up, and that’s the problem right there. The fact this is all about guys. I just couldn’t get interested enough to watch the whole thing since it seemed obvious how it would turn out. Boys State was supposed to open in select cities last month but instead, it will be on Apple TV+ Friday after getting a few drive-in preview screenings, cause that’s just the way things are going these days.

Willa Kammerer’s Starting at Zero: Reimagining Education in America (Saul Zaentz Charitable Foundation/Abramorama), which will open in Virtual Cinema Friday after a Virtual Premiere tonight. It seems very timely, as it deals with investing in high-quality early child education. Just as timely is Muta’Ali Muhammad’s Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn (HBO Documentary Films), which premieres on HBO tonight, looking at the events around the 1989 murder of teenager Yusuf Hawkins by a group of white men in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Erik Nelson’s doc Apocalypse ’45 (Discovery/Abramorama), which will be in theaters this Friday and on Discovery over Labor Day weekend, is about the end of World War II, using never-before-seen footage with narration by 24 men who were there for it.

Quiver Distribution has two movies out this Friday, both which could probably be seen as young adult movies – not really a genre I like very much, so your mileage may vary?

ENDLESS from director Scott Speer (Midnight Sun) is a romantic drama starring Alexandra Shipp (X-Men: Apocalypse) as graphic novelist Riley, whose boyfriend, Nick Hamilton’s Chris gets stranded in limbo after he’s killed in a car crash. Taking the blame for his death on herself, Riley struggles to find ways to reconnect with Chris in the afterlife.

I wasn’t sure if this movie would be for me, since I’m not a very big fan of young adult movies generally. So many of them have hard-to-believe high-concept premises involving two lovelorn teens – Midnight Sun being a good example. Unlike so many of these movies, Endless isn’t based on a popular book, and I was a little worried about Speer’s skills as a director and whether he could avoid turning this into a very obvious teen version of Ghost. There’s a little bit of that but on a whole, the movie isn’t a complete waste of time. For instance, Shipp is decent in this sort of dramatic role, probably better than Hamilton, and it avoids getting too weepy thanks to DeRon Horton’s animated Jordan, who befriends Chris in limbo and quickly becomes the movie’s frequent saving grace.

Otherwise, the movie feels like any other soppy teen romantic drama, being very predicable with way too much overacting, particularly from Fammke Janssen as Chris’ Mom. Even though the relationship between Shipp and Hamilton works fine, unless you’re on board with the whole concept of the latter spending the entire film as a spirit, you’re going to have a hard time fully enjoying the movie.

In Bobby Roth’s PEARL, Larsen Thompson plays the title character, a 15-year-old piano prodigy whose mother Helen (Sarah Carter from The Flash) is murdered by her stepfather (Nestor Carbonell). She’s sent to live with Jack Wolf (Anthony LaPaglia), an unemployed film director, who used to be one of her mother’s ex-lovers, who also might be Pearl’s father. I know! Let’s spend an entire movie going back and forth trying to figure it out, okay?

I don’t have a ton to say about this movie, but if for some reason, you want to watch it just cause you’re a fan of Carter from The Flash, you should know that she appears in the movie via a series of black and white flashbacks to show her relationship with Jack, but those might be the best part of a very bad movie.

Thompson just isn’t a very solid actor to carry this, and Roth must have pulled a lot of favors to get this movie made ‘cause it wasn’t financed based on the script. Her relationship with LaPaglia just seems kinda creepy. Things just gets worse and worse, especially when Pearl goes to school and the other girls act like they’re in prison. There’s also Barbara Williams as Pearl’s alcoholic grandmother – the fun just never begins, does it?

At its worst, Pearl comes across like a Lifetime movie – not the first time I’ve used this statement this year and probably not the last. It’s just very dull and not a very good movie; LaPaglia is way too good an actor who deserves better than this.

Also on VOD this week is Kevin Tran’s Dark End of the Street (Gravitas Ventures), an indie horror movie involving a community in the suburbs plagued by someone who is killing the residents’ pets. This wasn’t a terrible movie but I had a hard time getting past the general premise about killing pets, so it was hard to get into what Tran tried to do in terms of putting a twist on a tried-and-true horror genre. Maybe I’ll give this another try after finishing this column.

Also, Ben Galland’s action-comedy Gripped: Climbing the Killer Pillar (1091) follows Rose (Megan Kesley), a L.A. gym climber who falls for rugged outdoorsman Bret (Kaiwi Lyman) as they embark on a trip to climb the “Killer Pillar” in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, only to get caught on a cliff edge.

The Metrograph’s Live Screening Series is continuing with a great line-up over the rest of August with the Satoshi Kon Retrospective continuing with Millennium Actress playing until midnight tonight, plus Masaaki Yuasa & Koji Morimoto’s popular 2004 film Mind Game starting Wednesday night at 8pm. Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day (2001) will screen on Friday at 8pm, and then Monday, Jenna Bliss’ animated The People’s Detox (2018) will join the screening library. To become a digital member, it’s only $5 a month or $50 for a year, which is a great deal for the amount of movies you see.

Film at Lincoln Center’s Virtual Cinema will stream Paulo Rocha’s 1963 film Change of Life starting Friday while Film Forum will stream Weiner Holzemer’s doc Martin Margiella: In His Own Words about the fashion designer, as well as Bert Stern’s Jazz on a Summer’s Day which is a 1959 documentary about the fashion photographer filming the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival with the likes of Louis Armstrong, Hoagy Carmichael, Mahalia Jackson, Thelonious Monk and many more.

Apparently, Netflix has a new movie out on Friday called Project Power, starring Jamie Foxx and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but I received ABSOLUTELY NADA about it from Netflix, so this is all you get. Watch out, Netflix, there are a lot of streaming options out there now!

Speaking of drive-ins (which I was WAY up there), on Wednesday, you can catch the latest in Amazon Studios “A Night at the Drive In” series. “Movies to Make You Open Your Eyes,” which will screen Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and Jordan Peele’s Get Out.

Next week, more movies not in theaters!

By the way, if you read this week’s column and have bothered to read this far down, feel free to drop me some thoughts at Edward dot Douglas at Gmail dot Com or drop me a note or tweet on Twitter. I love hearing from readers … honest!

#TheWeekendWarrior #Movies #Reviews #OxfordFilmFestival #Sputnik #Spree #vodun #TheSilencing #TheBayOfSilence #BoysState #Pearl #Endless

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