REVIEW: “The Photograph” (2020)

February 21, 2020 by Keith Garlington

Making a good movie doesn’t have to be difficult (as if I would know). Sometimes all you need are two convincing leads and a good script. Ok, obviously there’s more to it than that, but you get what I mean. A good story told through captivating, relatable performances can often carry a movie to unexpected heights. “The Photograph” is a prime example. Or at least that’s how I felt early into the film.

But I quickly came to see I couldn’t brush off Stella Meghie’s stellar direction. It’s her screenplay and ultimate trust in her leads than really shine. But at the same time, believing in the material and giving your performers space are often signs of a good director. So is patience in letting relationships develop naturally and capturing genuine humanity in a genre not always known for it. Writer-director Meghie shows all of these strengths which separates her film from the soupy fluff normally thrown out on Valentines Day.

“The Photograph” tells an intergenerational story that oscillates between two intimately connected timelines. In the present day Michael (Lakeith Stanfield) is an ambitious but unfulfilled writer for an New York based online magazine called The Republic. He arrives in Louisiana to interview Isaac (the ever terrific Rob Morgan) for an oil spill story he’s working on, but is instead captivated by a 30 year-old photo on Isaac’s mantle. It’s of a young woman, Christina Eames who Isaac shared a relationship with before she moved off to New York.

PHOTO: Universal Pictures

Back home, Michael discovers Christina was a successful photographer who just recently passed away. Feeling there is a story to be told, he reaches out to her estranged daughter Mae (Issa Rae) who is a curator at the Queens Art Museum. The two meet and instantly the proverbial sparks fly but not in the sappy, shallow sense. From their first meeting Meghie creates a truly palpable attraction built upon Rae and Stanfield’s simmering chemistry. I say ‘simmering’ because that’s the temperature Meghie is going for. She’s into giving us real people full of uncertainty and hesitations. So the low-key, slow romantic buildup makes sense.

A second narrative, shown through a series of flashbacks set in the 1980’s, tells Christina and Isaac’s story. Based in Louisiana, these scenes offer an invigorating Deep South contrast to New York City. Chante Adams is sublime as Christina, young and driven yet torn between her desire to pursue a dream and being with the man she deeply loves. Younger Isaac (played by Y’lan Noel) is a third generation crab fisherman who loves Christina with all his heart. He would do anything for her save uprooting from the only place he has ever known.

These older scenes are great companions to the current day stuff. And while both story strands have very different flavors, much of the storytelling technique is the same. We learn the most through simple conversations. Whether Mae and Michael are debating Drake versus Kendrick Lamar or talking about a recent ex who we never lay eyes on. Meghie let’s her characters tell their stories, not through contrived and stilted exposition but from their personal interactions. They determine what is important for us to know. And neither story is dependent upon trauma or betrayal to add depth. It’s all about delicate emotion and the human complexities that make us who we are.

PHOTO: Universal Pictures

As the dual love stories play out to Robert Glasper’s elegant jazz-influenced score, we can only wonder if the daughter is destined to follow the mother. The looks into Christina’s past with Isaac reveal her strength and grit but also pain and longing. With Mae vivacity comes with a not-so-thinly-veiled vulnerability while the charming Michael isn’t quite as confident as he would have Mae believe. In other words, nothing seems for certain.

Some surprisingly welcomed levity comes from Lil Rel Howery playing Michael’s domesticated brother Kyle. His mix of dialogue and improvisation is funny and (thankfully) more grounded than in some of his other movie appearances. Teyonah Parris is a great match as Kyle’s wife Asia. Both have relatively small roles but are good fits and come across as more than just throwaway comic relief.

There’s a throwback romantic quality in Meghie’s use of the gaze that calls back to Bogart and Bacall, Tracy and Hepburn, MacMurray and Stanwyck. The eye contact is meaningful and the warmth is genuine. It’s also nice to see a movie push back on the hackneyed formulas of a cliche-soaked genre. Sure it sprinkles in a few familiar ingredients (maybe too many), but “The Photograph” maintains its tenderness and sophistication by simply latching onto the one thing all great romances embrace – the human element.

VERDICT – 4 STARS

REVIEW: “The (Silent) War” (2020)

February 20, 2020 by Keith Garlington

In October of 1944, after German forces had been driven out of Southern France, “Operation Reconquest” was set to begin. It’s main objective was to send several thousand exiled Spanish Maquis resistance fighters to liberate border territory and spark an uprising against the Francisco Franco dictatorship. To prepare for the operation, guerrilla commandos crossed the border to sabotage key strategic targets.

“The (Silent) War” (or “Sordo” if you go by its Spanish title) is an unabashedly pulpy manhunt thriller that begins with one of those guerrilla missions that goes terribly wrong. A group of revolutionaries led by old friends Anselmo (Asier Etxeandia) and Vicente (Hugo Silva) rig a bridge with dynamite. But the rebels unwittingly detonate it, killing most of their lot and drawing the attention of a nearby Spanish army patrol. A wounded Vicente is captured while Anselmo, now deaf from the blast, escapes into the forest.

Photo: Netflix

The film comes from co-writer and director Alfonso Cortés-Cavanillas. It’s an adaptation of a Spanish graphic novel from David Muñoz and Rayco Pulido Rodríguez. The story begins as a harrowing wartime tale but it doesn’t take long for its graphic novel roots to seep through. Cortés-Cavanillas infuses his movie with an unmistakable Sergio Leone western vibe complete with horses, a long brown duster, and a lot of spitting. Top it off with scattered bursts of Tarantino-like graphic violence and you have an idea of what the movie is going for.

The story unfurls over a one-month period as Anselmo hides out in the mountains while a dogged Captain Bosch (Aitor Luna) stays hot on his trail. Fortunately for Anselmo, Bosch isn’t much of a strategist and his troops are a nondescript band of dimwits. This is one of the places where the script lets the film down. You have to ignore and overlook quite a bit of head-scratching incompetence. I’ll admit the buffoonery is kinda funny, but clearly not what the filmmakers intended.

Later Anselmo sneaks into a nearby village, the very one occupied by Bosch and his soldiers. There he seeks the help of Vicente’s wife Rosa (a very good Marian Alvarez) who joins us in thinking Anselmo is crazy for sticking around instead of heading for France. This also leads to a half-baked love angle that frankly feels yanked completely out of the blue.

It gets a little more cartoonish (and strangely that’s meant as a compliment) with the appearance of Soviet Lieutenant Darya Sergéevich Volkov (Olimpia Melinte). She’s the menacing cold-blooded sort with an eye-patch and a scar running from forehead to jaw just to emphasize that she’s REALLY bad news. She’s a dead-eye sniper who escaped Bolshevik Russia and now is a mercenary for the Spanish Army. Darya is actually quite fun with the exception of one brutally tasteless and off-putting scene.

Photo: Netflix

The movie really shines in the style department. The western aesthetic gives it a needed kick and leads to several fun, high-energy action scenes. And the cinematography from Adolpho Cañadas grabs your eye from the film’s earliest moments. His camera captures the particulars of both genre and setting in a thrilling and often visceral way. And I have to mention the fantastic sound design. The clever use of sound as well as silence adds a ton to the movie.

While several story beats make no sense whatsoever (I didn’t even mention the goofy coyote synergy stuff), “The (Silent) War” still has enough verve and genre appeal to make for an entertaining two hours. And the good performances, gritty (and sometimes brutal) action, and technical savvy make it fairly easy to overlook some of the sillier story stuff.

VERDICT – 3.5 STARS

5 Phenomenal Movie Train Scenes

February 19, 2020 by Keith Garlington

Trains. I mean who doesn’t like trains? Bullet trains, freight trains, model trains. How can you not like them? The movies have certainly had loads of fun with trains. For decades we’ve been give one great train scene after another. Today I’m looking at five of the very best to ever grace the big screen. Now obviously with so many to choose from (and there are TONS) I wouldn’t call this the definitive list. Still I have no problem calling these five movie train scenes absolutely phenomenal.

#5 – “The Fugitive” (1993)

It pained me to leave movies like “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, “Before Sunrise”, and “Spider-Man 2” off this list. That should tell you how much I love the explosive train derailment scene in the 1993 thriller “The Fugitive”. Wrongly accused Harrison Ford is trying to escape from a crashed prison bus laying across railroad tracks. A train barrels towards him and slams into the bus just as Ford flies out of the window. The train derailment that follows is absolutely stunning.

#4 – “Skyfall” (2012)

There is no way to document all of the incredible over-the-top action scenes that have become staples of the James Bond franchise. And it just so happens there is one which is a perfect fit for this list. “Skyfall” opens with one of the coolest train scenes in movie history. 007 uses feet, fists, bullets and even a huge excavator as he fights a mercenary on top of a speeding train. Through tunnels and over a bridge, right up to its big splash finish.

#3 – “Mission: Impossible” (1996)

Without a doubt the signature scene in Brian De Palma’s “Mission: Impossible”comes at the very end. You know the one I’m talking about. Tom Cruise’s IMF agent Ethan Hunt atop a speeding bullet train on the heels of the mole (I won’t spoil who) who framed him for killing his team. Oh, and to make it even more electric, the mole plans to escape on a helicopter that’s tailing the train. I’ll leave it there but look it up if you haven’t seen it.

#2 – “The General” (1926)

Exactly which train scene do you pick out of the many featured in Buster Keaton’s silent classic “The General”? I mulled over several of the film’s great scenes before ultimately settling on one of Keaton’s most iconic movie moments. Some have called it the most expensive shot in silent movie history. A Union Army train makes an ill-advised attempt to cross a burning wooden bridge but plunges into the river as the cavalry watches from the bank. The set piece was incredible then and still is today.

#1 – “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” (2007)

The train robbery in Andrew Dominik’s brilliant “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” is not only one of the best train sequences, but it’s one of my favorite scenes ever shot. The great cinematographer Roger Deakins is at his best in the buildup, capturing the dim glow from the bandits’ lanterns, the vibrations of the tracks, the headlight of the train penetrating the forest as it rounds a curve. And of course you get the robbery itself. Simply put, it is sublime filmmaking.

And those are my picks. There are so many great train scenes I hated to leave off. Now it’s your turn to help. Let me know what you think of my list and please share what would have made yours.

REVIEW: “Downhill” (2020)

February 18, 2020 by Keith Garlington

I wasn’t too sure about an English language remake of the superb 2014 Swedish domestic drama “Force Majeure”. I was even less convinced after seeing the trailer for “Downhill”, an Americanized version starring Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. I loved the original (from director/co-writer Ruben Östlund) for its subtle dark wit and dramatic gut punch. It’s careful balance of those two key elements made it the movie that it was.

Helmsmen Nat Faxon and Jim Rash co-direct and co-write (with Jesse Armstrong) “Downhill”, a follow-up to their terrific 2013 gem “The Way, Way Back”. Prior to that, the pair penned the Oscar-winning script for Alexander Payne’s “The Descendants”. Here their mix of comedy and drama is far more jagged. It’s in the dramatic moments that we see shades of what made “Force Majeure” effective. It’s the scenes of not-so-subtle comedy that knock the story off-track.

Photo Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

The movie follows Billie (Louis-Dreyfus) and her husband Pete (Ferrell) vacationing with their two sons at a ski resort high in the Austrian Alps. On their second day, as they sit on a deck for lunch, a controlled avalanche sends a cloud of powder barreling down the mountain and towards the restaurant. As it approaches many patrons scramble including Pete who grabs his phone and runs inside, leaving his wife and kids behind to get showered by snow.

As the cloud settles Pete returns to find his family unharmed but terribly shaken by the experience. He promptly orders lunch as if nothing happened, but his actions open a wound that slowly festers for the duration of the movie. Eventually pent-up frustrations boil to the surface and true selves are exposed, but not before potentially irreparable damage has been done to their relationships.

Östlund’s movie was essentially a existential tragedy about a seemingly sturdy marriage built on an emotional fault line. “Downhill” latches onto that idea but seems completely unsure of how far to go with it. Does it embrace the understated psychological bite of the original film or go with the more palatable studio approach? Faxon and Rash try to have it both ways and the results are frustratingly uneven. There are scenes where the tension between characters (either spoken or unspoken) is palpable and the emotions are raw and authentic. But then we’ll get a weird attempt at humor that lands with a tonal thud. This is epitomized in Miranda Otto’s bizarrely out of place free-loving concierge. The character seems plucked right out of a National Lampoon movie.

Much of it has to do with the casting. Louis-Dreyfus carries the movie and frankly we don’t get enough of her on the big screen. Her performance is always at the right temperature and she drives each the film’s most potent scenes. Most importantly she shrewdly manages the aforementioned balance between drama and humor. The script lets her down occasionally, but she’s easily the film’s biggest asset.

Photo Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

A badly miscast Will Ferrell doesn’t fare as well and his years of playing halfwits actually hurts his character. Ferrell is hardly subtle when it comes to comedy, a truth that was etched in my subconscious from the start. So even when he’s playing it serious I found myself waiting for a visual or verbal punchline. He’s just not that convincing. Even worse, he makes it hard to buy into Billie and Pete as an actually couple.

I can see people going into “Downhill” expecting a straight comedy strictly because of the two leads. These viewers are sure to leave disappointed. The movie’s most striking scenes are its most serious and they are driven by a fantastic Julia Louis-Dreyfus (please do more movies). She literally keeps the picture afloat. But even she can’t make the jarring attempts at comedy work or help the movie nail down any true sense of identity.

VERDICT – 2.5 STARS

REVIEW: “Fantasy Island” (2020)

February 17, 2020 by Keith Garlington

The original “Fantasy Island” spawned from two TV movies before becoming a full-fledged television series that ran on ABC from 1978 to 1984. It featured Ricardo Montalbán as an enigmatic fulfiller of fantasies for paying guests on a remote Pacific island. I never watched it much, but I distinctly remember how each show began. With Montalbán’s peppy sidekick Tattoo in a bell tower heralding the arrival of “The Plane, The Plane“. My parents then promptly sent me to bed.

The new big screen version (further proof that they will remake just about anything these days) is a much different affair. As the Blumhouse tag denotes, “Fantasy Island” 2020 guarantees some embrace of the horror genre. But much like it’s inspiration, the film version bounces all over the genre map. One minute we’re in a restaurant during a romantic dinner. The next we’re with a special forces unit carrying out a covert military operation near the Venezuelan border. One second it resembles a hedonistic party movie. Later I was waiting to hear “Previously on LOST“.

None of this is an especially bad idea on the surface and Blumhouse has a history of turning out successful horror movies from minuscule budgets (I’ve read this one was around $7 million). But “Fantasy Island” is a weird concoction. It is unquestionably ambitious and its director/co-writer Jeff Wadlow has some intriguing ideas. But the overall silliness and messy execution (especially in the final act) derails any chance at something remotely memorable.

Ricardo Montalbán is replaced by the less interesting, less charismatic Michael Peña (no fault of his, just an odd bit of casting). He plays Mr. Roarke, the overseer of the beautiful yet mysterious Fantasy Island. He is informed by his assistant (Parisa Fitz-Henley) that a plane of new guests has arrived. As special contest winners, each guest is flown to the island paradise with the promise that their most intimate fantasy will be granted. Do yourself a favor, don’t try to dig any deeper than that. Just a little thought and the whole thing comes unglued from the start.

Photo: Sony Pictures

So out of the plane comes the stock of lucky/unlucky participants. Melanie (Lucy Hale) fantasizes about paying back a bully. JD (Ryan Hanson) and Brax (Jimmy O. Yang) are douchey stepbros in search of the ultimate party. Gwen (Maggie Q) wants a second chance at marital bliss. Patrick (Austin Stowell) wants to be soldier like his late father.

It doesn’t help that all four fantasies are so tonally at odds. It’s even worse that they all play out like episodes from a cheap television serial, spotty performances and patches of woefully bad dialogue included. Again, you can see the gears turning in what could have been a potentially fun assemblage of intersecting fantasies, character revelations and other well-worn nonsense. But none of it (including its ten false endings) come together in a cohesive or satisfying way.

I can see this weird genre mashup gaining a minor following and actually making money (It’s projected to clear nearly double its production budget over its opening weekend). And perhaps it can work as a guilty pleasure or throwaway entertainment. But that’s about as far as you can stretch it. “Fantasy Island” does nothing to justify its existence. It’s just a blob of fairly interesting ideas pasted together and thrown out for consumption. And you can bet Blumhouse is already eyeing a sequel.

VERDICT – 2 STARS

First Glance: “The Green Knight”

February 14, 2020 by Keith Garlington

Chalk it up to me simply not paying attention, but I had no idea David Lowery had a new movie coming this year. He captured my attention on 2017 with his haunting and meditative drama “A Ghost Story” and followed it by working with Robert Redford in “The Old Man & the Gun”. Lowery’s latest “The Green Knight” sees him putting his own unique spin on Authurian medieval fantasy. I’m in.

“The Green Knight” sports a killer cast led by Dev Patel. He plays King Arthur’s impulsive and obstinate nephew Sir Gawain who sets off on a quest to challenge the mysterious Green Knight. The film also stars Joel Edgerton, Alicia Vikander, and Sean Harris among others. The first trailer features an eerie and slightly twisted vibe and shows off Lowery’s knack for visual storytelling.

“The Green Knight” is set for release on May 29th. Check out the trailer below and let me know if you’ll be seeing it or taking a pass.