Film

The ongoing collaboration between musician/writer Nick Cave and director John Hillcoat spans 14 years. While Hillcoat has made a lot of short films and music videos (including The Bad Seeds’ “Babe I’m on Fire”) his features mostly rely on Cave’s soundtracks and screenwriting. Hillcoat likes humans caked in dirt and bloody sacrificial filmmaking while Cave eschews his angst driven messy rock to fall back on more somber moments allowing haunting melodies, droning violins and piano riffs to enhance our viewing pleasure.
Ghosts… of the Civil Dead (1988)
Produced 14 years ago, this violently poetic Australian flick is about a maximum security lockdown in the middle of nowhere. Both the prisoners and the guards are slowly and deliberately brutalized, manipulated and provoked into violence. Slowly carving out the theme of isolation, Cave also starred in and co-wrote the screenplay with onetime Bad Seed member Hugo Race. All the performances are gut-wrenching, and the soundtrack is a menacing landscape of eerie clanks and minimalistic music accompanied by grunts, hammers, wind noise and bells. Ghosts… is available on DVD in Europe, but has not yet been released in the United States.

Michael Shannon’s catalog of ethically and psychologically complicated characters, continues to amaze. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his scene stealing role in Revolutionary Road and has shown up in countless, but definitive, supporting roles and small cameos in off-the-map indies as well as blockbusters like Pearl Harbor and Bad Boys II. Here is a list of my all time favorite roles and mandatory viewing for anyone who wants to see a great actor carving out a niche.
Bug (2006)
Director William Friedkin saw Shannon on the British stage in the same role and cast him in the film version opposite Ashley Judd. Hollywood wanted a bigger name, but Friedkin knew he had the perfect fit with Shannon who seamlessly moved from stage to the sound stage in this tricky little flick that is all about psychological terror and paranoia. Shannon captivates as a mentally ill veteran who believes he’s been infested with parasites. Sadly Bug was promoted as a horror flick and lost scads of potential audience members.

The Bourne Legacy opened this week with Jeremy Renner taking over the reins from Matt Damon as rogue super spy, David Bourne. Renner caught our eye with his mesmerizing performances in The Hurt Locker and The Town, both of which got him nominated for Oscars. But he has plenty of lesser-known titles to his credit. If you’re like me, you knew some of these movies before going into The Hurt Locker. Others not so much, but they’re worth a look if you like Renner, whose ability to simultaneously blend into a cast while delivering stand out performances is a rare trait. And, when Renner turns it up, watch out.

Just like its hero Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell), Total Recall has a ton of problems. Quaid has a boring rut of a life and wants a change…some action. The film has that in spades, the problem is the lack of substance.
The film’s main flaw lies in the filmmakers’ public proclamation that this not a remake. Rather, claims director Len Wiseman, it’s a more faithful interpretation of sci-fi author Philip K. Dick’s short story, We Can Remember It for You Wholesale.
There is just one problem with that claim, namely that Dick, who is now deceased, was around to help write the original screenplay.

1) When Verhoeven was still Dutch and still good:
The Fourth Man,
This crazy, surreal, very cool movie is about life, death and sex. Jeroen Krabbé plays a man who has visions of impending danger and begins an affair with a mysterious woman, (Renée Soutendijk) who may lead him to his doom.
Soldier of Orange
Offering the first glimpse of a young Rutger Hauer, this is an excellent film about the horrors of war. A character-driven story about Germans invading the Netherlands and a group of six university friends caught up in the events that follow. Also starring Jeroen Krabbé.

The first time I saw the trailer for The Watch (then called Neighborhood Watch) was two days after George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin. All you could really do is wince at the timing and feel sorry for everyone involved in the project. As the months progressed, the trailers focused more on the alien invasion plot line as opposed to the neighborhood watch aspects. It looked like maybe the film could avoid the negative comparisons it was receiving at the beginning of its marketing run.
As of press time, The Watch had flopped pretty horribly, making only $13 million in its opening weekend on a $68 million dollar budget. Some speculate that the movie bombed because of the neighborhood watch subject matter, which I don’t buy since the Aurora massacre had absolutely no negative effects on The Dark Knight Rises record breaking box office totals. I think The Watch is tanking because critical reviews are poor, word of mouth is nonexistent and everyone is still spending their movie budget on Batman. But it’s unfair to judge films on what they aren’t, so let’s look at what it is.

Hatfields & McCoys
Kevin Costner and Bill Paxton as dueling rednecks over five hours? Sounds like an acceptable way to spend a weekend to me. I’m sure the History Channel rushed this out to stores so they could make room for 12 more hours of American Pickers on their programming block—not that I’m complaining. Seriously though, this mini-series has Powers Boothe (Rapid Fire), Tom Berenger (Platoon) and a script by Ted Mann (Deadwood), so the pedigree is more than stellar enough to warrant a gigantic chunk of your life.

To Rome With Love is set in the Eternal City and has distinctive, eternally Woody Allen qualities. From the neurotic leading characters to the cinematography, which captures the beauty of the city, it’s plain to see this film has Allen engrained throughout. To Rome With Love comprises various vignettes that never intersect, but rather dance around each other with the shared themes of love, infidelity and celebrity. While at first it seems as if no reoccurring, singular theme unites the vignettes, as Allen did with anthology films such as New York, I Love You and Paris, je t’aime, as the movie progresses the cohesion becomes more apparent.
Again Allen is interested in the theme of love and sub-themes of longing and infidelity. In this case, we meet Jack (Jesse Eisenberg), a budding architect living in Rome with his girlfriend Sally (Greta Gerwig). When Sally’s friend Monica (Ellen Page), an out-of-work actress, comes to visit after having broken up with her most recent victim, er… boyfriend, Sally fears Jack will fall hopelessly in love with Monica as every other man has.