This was the first day I didn’t go to any major premieres or events, and it was nice to be able to stroll in to today’s crop of screenings with a minimal amount of BS and line-waiting. Added bonus, pretty much everything I saw was pretty good (though the capper could've been better). I did 4 movies today, so let's break 'em down.
RICHARD LINKLATER: DREAM IS DESTINY, dirs. Louis Black and Karen Bernstein.
I have a weird relationship with Richard Linklater’s films, and for some reason, I hesitate to call myself an unabashed fan of the director. On one hand, he’s responsible for a number of incredible films, like DAZED AND CONFUSED, WAKING LIFE, A SCANNER DARKLY, TAPE, SUBURBIA, and, perhaps dearest of all to me, the BEFORE trilogy (sad story: as a kid, I gave a girl my copy of SUNRISE as a way of saying I liked her, and she kept it, never watched it, and, of course, never reciprocated my feelings). Then again, he’s one of those guys (like Altman or Woody) where his desire to constantly work has led to a number of films that were decidedly lesser than his best output, and, in the cases of FAST FOOD NATION, BAD NEWS BEARS, and THE NEWTON BOYS, were almost completely unremarkable and devoid of style. Also, several of the ones that are the most widely beloved, specifically SLACKER, SCHOOL OF ROCK, and BOYHOOD, (after the response to it here at SXSW, I now believe EVERYBODY WANTS SOME will probably be added to that list), have tended to keep me at a distance, which has excluded me from a lot of conversations about how much a genius Linklater is. And it’s no doubt that it was that film that led to this documentary, in which Louis Black (who, as we see, has known Linklater for decades) digs into his most recognized films and the process and technique of the director himself.
This was done for the AMERICAN MASTERS series on PBS, and it’s not exactly the most cinematic documentary in the world. This is clearly a loving blowjob to the director, his films, and what he meant to indie cinema, particularly in Austin, so you’re not going to be seeing his equivalent of O. Russell freaking out at Lily Tomlin or anything like that. As we go through his filmography, we see that that is fitting with the unjudging, laid-back tone of most of his movies, which are often more about reality and life than they are about anything spectacular or striking.
One thing that all the subjects, including Jack Black, Matthew McConaughey, Ethan Hawke, and Patricia Arquette, seem to agree on is the amount of time and effort he puts into all of his work. If the frequency of output wasn’t enough to give that away, the point’s driven home by an examination of his property, where he keeps years and years of journals, screenplays, and archives in buildings that he designed and built himself. His dad says he had a wide range of interests as a child, and sure enough, he comes off as a casual, nice-guy Texan who likes a whole hell of a lot of stuff. “I like archways,” he says as he passes through an isolated brick archway he put in his property. “When you create your own space, you tend to forgive your own mistakes.” His cast members all give examples of how he directs actors in a way that doesn’t feel like he’s giving direction. McConaughey, who says that in 23 years, he’s never heard Linklater say, “No,” recalls that he gave everyone on DAZED records that he thought their character would listen to, which would get the actors’ imaginations going in a way that felt personal rather than externally dictated. He seems like such an easygoing guy that it’s crazy when we see the behind-the-scenes shots of the crowded sets he’s worked on, including the extra-filled drunken party scene in DAZED and an easy-seeming tracking shot from EVERYBODY WANTS SOME.
The archival footage is where most of the film’s goodies are contained, as we see a whole bunch of Linklater and his pals doing SLACKER, tidbits of almost every year of BOYHOOD’s production, and even a bunch of stuff from the pre-production and production of EVERYBODY WANTS SOME. We get to see little snaps of auditions for DAZED, including Sasha Jenson, Rory Cochrane, and a wired-looking Ben Affleck. We see a cute interview with Ellar Coltrane from the first year of BOYHOOD where he’s asked “Where do you think you’ll be in 12 years?” and he seems dumbstruck by the question (before he, like in BOYHOOD, is bested by Lorelei Linklater, who says, “Doesn’t everyone want to know what everything will be like in 12 years?”). Maybe coolest of all, we see a bunch of stuff from WAKING LIFE pre-rotoscope, including a shot with a kid on wires that I absolutely assumed was done with animation.
Though this is great for TV, and for fans of Linklater, it’s a little too on-the-nose and reverent of its subject to be anything truly cinematic. Perhaps the most formally effective thing Black and Bernstein do is use several of Siskel & Ebert’s reviews of Linklater’s films to show his slide from critically beloved indie darling to problematic studio director on THE NEWTON BOYS; though that film probably deserved its lukewarm response, it kinda hurts to see Rog turn on Linklater after we just saw him raving about SLACKER and DAZED. But most of the film tends to gloss over the low points (his mid-BOYHOOD run of BAD NEWS BEARS, FAST FOOD NATION, A SCANNER DARKLY, and ME & ORSON WELLES, are rushed through in a brief montage, and there’s only a single shot from the magnificent SUBURBIA), and spend a ton of time talking about how well Linklater works with everyone to fully realize his vision (though a choice tidbit slips through the cracks: one collaborator on SLACKER says he was disappointed when Linklater, who emphasized the group effort during production, gladly took all the credit for its success when it broke through). Still, knowing how inspirational Linklater was to Gen-X indie breakouts like Kevin Smith, as well as a whole score of Austin-based filmmakers, and the immense gamble of making BOYHOOD over 12 years, he probably deserves a loving doc like this, and I’m sure those who love his work will think it does his career justice.
THE WAITING, dir. Kasra Farahani.
All I knew about this one was that Harry liked it and that James Caan was in it, and that was definitely the way to go into it. I assumed it was a sort of horror film, and the framing of the film would probably suggest that, but that’s almost a red herring; there’s more going on here than just scares, and one of the things I liked about this film was how actively it defies categorization while still functioning as an effective, potent nail-biter.
Logan Miller (SCOUTS GUIDE TO THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE) and Keir Gilchrist (IT FOLLOWS) play Ethan and Sean, two high-schoolers who decide to perform a sort of filmic experiment on Ethan’s neighbor, Harold Grainey. Sean, technically proficient and the owner of a whole mess of equipment, is the shy, geeky brains of the operation, with Ethan playing the enthusiastic maestro urging him to keep up. Their plan is to rig Grainey’s windows, doors, and electronics to crash and turn on and off to give the old man the impression his house is haunted as they film him with strategically placed cameras throughout the house. They can’t get any in the basement or garage, but on the one time of the week that he leaves his house, they manage to canvas the entire house with cameras and traps, and start fucking with him almost immediately (their justification being that he’s the neighborhood asshole and deserves what he’s getting). The thing is, he ain’t exactly acting how they expected. When they slam the door shut repeatedly, his response is to axe the door into splinters like, as Ethan says, “Shelly Duvall was on the other side,” and he stops leaving the house entirely. When they note his erratic behavior, and realizes that he spends an awful lot of time in the unseen basement, they start to get a little suspicious of their neighbor, and Ethan starts beefing up their efforts with the idea that their own misdeeds are potentially dwarfed by whatever demons this old guy’s got in his closet.
Like the next film I saw today, the film is essentially split into two halves: the first is pretty comical, as these two kids torture this old man and giggle in glee at the results, and the second half, where their paranoia starts amping things up as they realize how deep in over their heads they are. It takes a little while to get going, largely because the film takes its time in portraying Ethan and Sean as the total manipulative dickfaces they so obviously are, but once it gets going it starts zigging and zagging There’s an excellently executed framing device involving some sort of trial after the fact, but we never learn much beyond that some side characters have survived and that someone’s been arrested in relation to the project.
Miller and Gilchrist are pros, way better than they need to be for this film to work, and come off as way more nuanced and human than just the “misguided rebel” and “poor little rich kid” they could’ve easily been. But Caan, in a role that has less screentime but infinitely more impact, owns the film, and, in his mid-70s, still has the acidic edge of the guy that threw that guy’s camera on the pavement in THE GODFATHER or tore up Robert Prosky’s house in THIEF. We don’t know everything about Harold until the end, but Caan’s face manages to emotionally convey who this guy is and what he’s going through long before the actual facts rise to the surface. It’s been so long since I’ve seen Caan in such a fully realized performance where he’s giving it his all, and the biggest joy of this film is watching the layers get pulled back on who this guy is to reveal the complicated, tortured widow underneath.
This is a likable movie that I really enjoyed watching, though I’m not sure the attempts at deeper subtext are all too successful. Ethan is another one of those wannabe-filmmaker characters who wants to shoot absolutely interesting in the guise of capturing “the truth,” and it’s maybe a little too prophetic when he says that he’d do anything for “a million views on Youtube.” Conversely, though I do like the class conflict between Ethan, who is desperate to break through as something special, and Sean, who uses his advantageous financial position to fit in with the cool kids for once, it’s not laid thick enough to be truly effective. But the core of the film, which is these two monitoring the old man as they try and incept the idea that there’s a ghost in his house, and figuring out what exactly he suspects and what he’s keeping secret in that basement. This is the perfect movie to watch late at night sometime, and ideally with as little knowledge of what the movie is and where it goes as possible.
Added bonus: Dean Cameron of both SKI and SUMMER SCHOOL pops up in this as a lawyer, which, for me, is an instant smile-inducer. No, he does not creep on any babes or dance the lambada...onscreen, at least.
THE TRUST, dirs. Ben and Alex Brewer.
Like many of you, I like my Cage nice and crazy. Any level of crazy will do, whether it’s the flashes of nutso he lets out in MOONSTRUCK and JOE, the sustained weirdness of his turns in KICK-ASS and MATCHSTICK MEN, or the legendary, batshit insanity of VAMPIRE’S KISS or DEADFALL. Unfortunately, he does so much work these days (supposedly to pay off debts) that some of his films don’t require too much of him, or even when they do, not the bizarro “mega acting” that the internet loves to make memes out of.
So where does THE TRUST lie in all this? Well, somewhere in that middle section: we’re talkin’ crazy, but not “AHHHH NOT THE BEEEEEEES!!!!” crazy.
Cage and Elijah Wood play cops in suburban Las Vegas. Neither is exactly a straight arrow, though from what we see of their fellow boys-in-blue, neither is much of the department. When Cage puts together that a prisoner’s $100,000 bail paid in cash is probably evidence of a bigger cache of loot somewhere, he enlists Wood’s stoner detective to help him investigate, at first just for the sake of curiosity. Quickly, however, the two start planning an actual heist of the contents of the guy’s safe, regardless of their ineptitude, nervousness, and complete inexperience with safecracking.
The story is split pretty evenly between the lead-up tot he heist and the actual break-in and theft itself, which confines the story to one location for much of it. The opening 45 minutes play as a comedy, as both Wood and Cage’s characters show their oddball natures as they edge closer and closer towards the idea of becoming full-fledged thieves. The whole thing is funny, but it definitely has a consistent sense of danger to it. Cage isn’t playing a total whack-job, but he adds so many tics and little jokes to the character that we suspect he’s a few breadcrumbs short of a blooming onion. Wood is playing more of the straight arrow here, but from his opening scene, where we see him having passion-free sex with a prostitute, we see that he’s not the most steady gun in the west either. The heart of the film is this duo playing off each other, and the two pros have a great chemistry that goes a long way in justifying how these two cops break so bad in such short of a time. The heist itself goes into more drama/thriller territory, which tones down Wood’s character but turns Cage’s line deliveries into tension-breaking breaths of relief (“You know the drill,” he cackles to Wood right before they start drilling into a safe). Jerry Lewis also shows up as Cage’s dad, but gets only one little joke in before the film forgets about him. Still, it’s nice to see him in there; the entire Rat Pack (save for Peter Lawford) passed away over the course of my lifetime, so every moment I see of Jerry actually working or being funny feels like a great throwback to a time long before my own that seems to exist only in lore and nostalgia-tinged memory.
Now, I can’t pretend I keep up with all of Cage’s DTV work these days (though I did enjoy his Russian mob flick, RAGE), but I will say that this seems a cut above a lot of his recent output. Sure, the single location gives away the low budget, and aside from the two leads and Lewis the star wattage is fairly low, but it functions quite well as both a comedy and a thriller. There are multiple points where I was pretty sure I had a bead on where the story was going, and I turned out to be wrong almost every time (though one character who fucks up, as Vincent Vega said, “shoulda fuckin’ better known better.”) The relationship between the two cops is straddled perfectly between on-the-job enthusiasm and paranoid tension, and we empathize with both of them as they try and pull this ridiculous theft off. There’s any number of desert-set heist films out there, but these characters and the Vegas setting add a lot of novelty, and the Brewer Bros. show a knack for pacing and story structure.
Cage puts so much out there these days that it’s hard to differentiate the winners from the dogs, but if you see this at your local Redbox or on VOD (though a theatrical release would be nice), you should feel more than comfortable giving it an hour-half of your time, if only to see Cage use the expression “JK” on film.
CARNAGE PARK, dir. Mickey Keating.
I knew nothing about this movie going in, other than some rumblings that it was pretty good and that it was set in the late-70s, but unfortunately, I didn’t end up all too engaged with what was going on on the screen. There’s a sort of slasher-movie vibe the film is going for, but like the worst slashers, too much of the film consists of a thin (in terms of writing, not physically) character fumbling through the dark and evading a psychopath. It's technically well-made, with a couple of interesting touches, enough that I kind of wish the movie was a little richer in content.
Through an non-linear first act, we learn about a bank heist by two guys, Lenny and Scorpion Joe. In a scene no-way-coincidentally reminiscent of RESERVOIR DOGS, Lenny bleeds out in the backseat while Joe races away assuring him that he’ll be okay (though he doesn’t sing “say the goddamn words! You’re gonna be okay!!”). Joe escapes, and takes his female hostage in the trunk (another Tarantino nod?) through the desert en route to Mexico. They end up on the property of a bespectacled man (Pat Healy) with a military-grade sniper rifle and a major screw loose. From there, the hostage has to contend with both these crazies, and try and get out of the desert in one piece. Meanwhile, a local policeman (Alan Ruck) is following the bank robbers’ trail right up to Carnage Park…
A huge, huge factor in liking this film is how closely you empathize with Ashley Bell’s hostage, Vivian, the lead of the picture. Vivian establishes herself as a tough chick right off the bat, taking every opportunity to beat, harangue, and mock Lenny as she conjures up a path towards escape. However, other than a goofy expository scene where she fails to get a bank loan for her farm where she lives with her sick old daddy (not making this up, she’s even got a flowery sundress on), we don’t really know enough about her to care about whether she lives or dies, and frankly, there’s not a whole lot else going on. We only get some time with James Landry Hebert’s full-of-hisself Scorpion Joe and Healy’s crazed Wyatt, and most of the film is Bell wandering through the hills, lots, and abandoned buildings of Carnage Park looking for a way out. There are interesting asides made about Vietnam and draft dodgers at the outset, but aside from a vague implication that Wyatt’s crazed state is due to post-war PTSD, I don’t know why Keating decided to set this movie in 1978. It’s not like cell phones would’ve made that big of an impact on the story or anything.
The first act is actually really cool, as we piece together what happened and get little bits fleshed out going forward, but once the narrative settles in and starts flowing chronologically, there’s not much going on here except some decent cinematography and acting. It’s a very physical role for Bell, and she’s very good when trying to stay alert as she tries to figure a way out of her predicament. I wanted to applaud when Ruck’s intro came with a grandiose musical cue, and he’s also quite good (with his southern accent), though not nearly in it enough. Larry Fessenden also cameos as a nice guy, for once.
But ultimately, I found the film too slight and unremarkable to make an impression. There are better killer sniper films out there, like PHONE BOOTH, TWO-MINUTE WARNING, and (obviously) DIRTY HARRY, as well as better showcases for Healy’s not inconsiderable talent and range. Some midnight movies wake you up and some put you to sleep, and for me, this was one of the latter. Despite the teaser for it, I don’t need a CARNAGE PARK 2 at all.
