Jurassic World

12 Jun

Jurassic World is bigger and badder than its predecessors, but we really miss the original cast

Jurassic Work

By

YOUTUBE

It’s been nearly 15 years since the last Jurassic Park installment, and a lot has changed in the world: 9/11 rocked and divided our nation as the War on Terror took root, smartphones replaced cumbersome cellphones, and GMOs have become talking points at cocktail parties. What’s all this have to do with the revival of the dino-park movie franchise based on the slim yet innovative novel by Michael Crichton and initially helmed by Stephen Spielberg?

The answer is everything. Like the problem of a bigger, meaner and more thrilling wow (read: dangerous) that confronts the conglomerate structure behind Jurassic World, the filmmakers spinning out Jurassic World are saddled with the burden of outdoing what came before. The good news is that the quality of special FX has come light-years.

Today, people caught in the middle of a dino herd don’t look like they’re being shot against a screen and pasted into a jerkily moving computer rendering; they’re now seamlessly in there with the “real” possibility of being trampled or squashed or snatched up by the genetically engineered Indominus Rex, the new badass on the block, cooked up in a lab by a bunch of avaricious DNA jockeys to scare the shit out of money-paying vacationers seeking an adrenaline rush just to know they’re alive.

At the park on a lush tropical island off the coast of Costa Rica, at any time, there are some 20,000 people being run through the vast array of exhibits and rides and fleeced for cash with the rapier efficiency of a Disney or Sea World. Money is a driving force at Jurassic World, and in the birthing lab, there too looms a myriad of hidden agendas and covert, need-to-know data points — like who’s DNA went into good ole Indominus — that breeds malcontent and dubious action.

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Results

5 Jun

‘Results’: After he’s shown how to shape up, it turns out shape is unhealthy love triangle

By Tom Meek
Thursday, June 4, 2015

https://player.vimeo.com/video/129493381

Sometimes having everything makes you empty. Such is the paradox explored in Andrew Bujalski’s “Results,” part fable, part human experiment in desire, fears and means, and perhaps the most offbeat love triangle to grace the screen since Joe Swanberg’s brew-mance “Drinking Buddies.” It’s an apt comparison too, with Swanberg a stalwart of the mumblecore filmmaking movement and Bujalski long considered its godfather with such lo-fi (and low-audio) efforts as “Funny Ha Ha” and “Computer Chess.” With “Results,” however, Boston-born and Harvard-educated Bujalski goes upscale with some A-minus-list actors and a bigger budget – although what that figure is seems to be a secret to all but Bujalski and the NSA.

060515i ResultsBujalski’s first film cost just $30,000 to make (it grossed about $75,000) and starred no-name actors; here he’s blessed with the reliable Guy Pearce, Cobie Smulders (Agent Maria Hill in the “Avengers” movie and “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” television series) and character actor Kevin Corrigan (“Superbad” and “Goodfellas”) who steps to the fore and delivers a knockout performance. “Results” is based on the well-being fad, in which everyone wants to get physically and emotionally fit and fortified. Danny (Corrigan) newly and painfully out of a marriage he didn’t want to exit, transplants to Austin. He’s doughy, rich and angry. He also wants to be able to take a punch, so he signs up for a personal trainer at Power for Life, a boutique health spa run by Trevor (a gaunt and toned Pearce) who pushes the philosophy that wellness is more than physical beauty, even though his crew of crack coaches look like magazine cover specimens. The upbeat but aggressive Kat (Smulders) gets the assign and spends time at Danny’s palatial spread trying to get him lean and buff, but he drags her down into his routine of single-malt scotch and weed. Turns out she’s a bit depressed and angry too. If there’s a deadbeat client, Kat’s more than happy to switch over to into loan collector mode, and boy can she run – look out Lola, she’s on your tail.   Continue reading →

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Entourage

5 Jun

By Tom Meek

<i>Entourage</i>

When it comes to wrapping it up, TV shows tend to go out in one of three ways: the dour blaze of glory (The Sopranos, Breaking Bad), sheer hyperbole, a.k.a. jumping the shark (hello Happy Days), or the slow fade to syndication and nostalgic recall of the early years when the writing was tight and the characters sizzled with vivid crispness. For the latter, if the residual market thrives and enough of the show’s talent is milling around, there’s also that shot for a second life up on the big screen. It worked somewhat for Sex and the City and now the lads from Entourage are getting their chance.

The good news is that the whole cast is back and under direction of series creator Doug Ellin. The result is a facelift of sorts from where the HBO series slacked off in 2011. To stretch out the situational hijinks to a feature-length product, Hollywood “it” boy Vince Chase (Adrian Grenier) has hit a mid-career malaise and wants to do something different besides being just another pretty face. Like Clooney, Costner and Eastwood before, he decides to direct. In transition, too, are Vince’s former agent, Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven) now a studio exec, and pudgy bud Turtle (Jerry Ferrara), who has dropped most of the extra pounds and founded a boutique line of tequila. Former pizza slinger Eric (Kevin Connolly), too, has stepped it up, taking the reins as the producer of Vince’s film project, called Hyde (as in Dr. Jekyll and set in a zombie-apocalypse future), and is also expecting with Sloan (Emmanuelle Chriqui), though they’re estranged. The only one who hasn’t had a life-altering realization is Johnny Drama (Kevin Dillon) still fussing over food and living in baby brother Vince’s big shadow.  Continue reading →

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Archie’s Betty

1 Jun

‘Archie’s Betty’ takes Cambridge critic Peary on expedition to real Riverdale

By Tom Meek

Perhaps you think you know Archie, but even if you’re a passionate fan of the comic-book kid who became a national sensation in the ’50s and ’60s, you might not know the true roots of the fictional town of Riverdale and its high school, where Archie Andrews and his lot cooled their heels. There was real flesh and blood behind the goofball redhead, his offbeat buddy Jughead (the original slacker), the reluctant object of desire Veronica, her good girl offset, Betty – shyly harboring a thing for Archie – and the knucklehead nemesis Reggie. The identity of the town of Riverdale, the actual school façade and the personalities that inspired the teens are unearthed in “Archie’s Betty,” the new documentary film from Cambridge filmmaker, film scholar and critic Gerald Peary.

052915i Local Focus Archie's BettyThe film marks Peary’s second feature documentary. His first foray, “For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism,” took nearly nine years to make; “Archie’s Betty” took less than half that, and both were crafted on a shoestring budget, of which Peary sighs, “That’s almost 14 years of filmmaking without a salary.”

Peary grew up the son of Jewish immigrants in rural West Virginia and felt largely disassociated from the community, but took solace in the discovery of Archie and his posse. In 1988, inspired by a printed letter that hinted that Archie had roots in Massachusetts, Peary was commissioned by The Boston Globe and traced the roots of Riverdale to Haverhill, where Archie creator Bob Montana had attended high school (he died in 1975). The new ripple in Peary’s docu, which gets its New England premiere Saturday at the Institute of Contemporary Art, is placing a face on the personas behind each member of the Riverdale gang – especially Betty.  Continue reading →

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Slow West

1 Jun

‘Slow West’: Seeking love across America, and bringing violence along for the ride

By Tom Meek

Here’s something: a Western in which a young Scot is guided by an Irishman through the inhospitable American frontier of the late 1800s. That landscape in “Slow West” is breathtaking to behold, mountainous, verdant, fertile and feral, but none of it is truly American – the film was shot in New Zealand in the same wondrous mountains where Peter Jackson staged much of the “Lord of the Rings” films.

052815i Slow WestThe writer/director, John Maclean, played in a retro-alternative band and is Scots himself, so there’s that with the how and why. He also happened to make a pair of short films with the versatile actor Michael Fassbender, whose broad CV includes sci-fi (“Prometheus” and two “X-Men” films) and collaborations with Quentin Tarantino and Steve McQueen (they’ve hooked up three times, including “Twelve Years a Slave”), so enticing the Irish thespian to take up the role of an enigmatic drifter in the mold of Clint Eastwood’s “Man With No Name” for his feature debut must have been a simple dialup of favors among friends.

The re-partnering pays dividends, but for all the grandiose high stakes and murderous guns that loom at every turn, “Slow West” moves more like a dream than your prototypical western, broken and filled with misty motifs that drift by and never fully weave together. The slow quest west get driven by the misguided passion of one Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smit-McPhee, the young boy in “The Road”), a wayward lad imperiled in a foreign land, unaware and lovelorn for a lass from his homeland (Caden Pistorius) who fled to America (from Scotland) to escape a bloody and unfortunate mishap. Luckily for Jay he is happened upon by Fassbender’s Silas Selleck, more than pretty good with a gun and whose services can be had for a reasonable fee. The great peril in their mission isn’t so much that Jay won’t find his love, but the ruthless bounty hunters seeking the hefty fee on the lass’ head and knowing Jay is the only possessor of the few clues as to where she might be.  Continue reading →

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Aloft

23 May
Paste Magazine May 19, 2015
<i>Aloft</i>

Much of what transpires in Aloft washes over you like a hypnotic dream, with peril and anguish looming at the corners, ever ready to flood the delicate drama at the core of director Claudia Llosa’s film. It’s more a sensual experience than a narrative, and while the dystopian prophecy boasts a concrete plot—or two—Llosa has loftier ambitions. Think The Tree of Life or Life of Pi, but Llosa’s film never quite spreads its wings.

Set somewhere in a slightly alternative reality, in the near future, in a place that’s rooted very much in the here and now, Aloft centers on a French journalist (Melanie Laurent) who’s making a documentary about a reclusive female faith healer living in a remote compound on a frozen arctic lake. She connects with a troubled falconer (Cillian Murphy) with ties to the much sought one, who can harness the power of nature to cure terminal illnesses. Given that such skills in a traditional office park might result in long lines and traffic headaches, the tough-to-reach outpost somewhat makes sense—though, if it’s such a bitch to get to, might not the dying and the needy expire long before arriving at the doorstep of salvation?

In a separate spindle, some 20 years earlier, a single mother (an alluring Jennifer Connelly sporting a rat tail) toils on a pig farm raising two boys. The youngest is sick and without much prospect, while the older, through reckless abandon, constantly puts his feeble younger sibling at risk (joyriding in a pickup truck on thin ice). Connelly’s Nana, desperate, turns to a New Age-y sect, where the head, considered a drunkard and a charlatan by nonbelievers, is rumored to remedy those whose doctors have closed the book on. Continue reading →

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Black Souls

22 May

‘Black Souls’: This dark mob family drama doesn’t go where you expect, unless it’s Italy

By Tom Meek
Thursday, May 21, 2015

The three brothers in “Black Souls” lead very different lives: Luciano (Fabrizio Ferracane) runs the family goat farm in a remote village in the Italian foothills while Luigi (Marco Leonardi) and Rocco (Peppino Mazzotta) run mob operations in Milan. Luciano wants nothing to do with the new initiative and works tirelessly to steer his son, Leo (Giuseppe Fumo) away from it too. But Leo, who does a little strong-arming on the side himself,  has his sights set on Milan and beyond.

052115i Black SoulsSmall doings carry big ramifications, and quickly Luigi and Rocco, looking to buy influence – 30 keys of coke will do that – and expand, find themselves in the middle of a potential turf war with Leo square in the middle as the agitator between Luigi’s cosmopolitan go-for-broke flair and Rocco’s staid, more conservative approach. It’s easy to see why Leo gravitates toward Luigi’s playboy as opposed to Rocco, who married, has a daughter and, at the root of it all, shares the same conservative sensibilities as Luciano.

As director Francesco Munzi’s weave has it, all parties wind up back at the old family farm, where past meets present and generational sensibilities collide as dark dealings loom at the corners. Much of what transpires feel leaden and reminiscent of “The Godfather” scenes on Italian soil: quiet and purposeful, and steeped in tradition and the unwritten code of the underworld.

There are several junctures where “Black Souls,” for all its somber drive, appears to move in predictable and clichéd directions, but Munzi and his writers – working from Gioacchino Criaco’s novel – smartly never quite go there. The developments add up to something new, unexpected and ominous, though not fully sating. Much of Munzi’s vision hangs on his four principals and on cinematographer Viadan Radovic. Most is asked of Ferracane, whose Luciano becomes the tortured Job of the mountain.

In large, he and the cast all deliver. But Munzi hangs on the emotional residue of a scene far too long, so much so that the magic he and his actors have conjured up begins to settle, and the poignant flourish suddenly becomes stale. There’s no denying Munzi’s hypnotic poetry and simmering macho cadence, but for all its bleakness, “Black Souls” could have been a gangbuster with a touch more soul.

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Fury Road

15 May

George Miller Triumphantly Brings Back Mad Max In ‘Fury Road’

The jump in "Mad Max: Fury Road." (Courtesy)

Ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunck, back in 1985, the “Mad Max” trilogy unceremoniously sputtered to an anticlimactic halt rather than going out on a furious, nitro-boosted blast. That tepid finale, “Beyond Thunderdome,” would become the post-apocalyptic Outback series’ weak link, an unsatisfactory follow up to its crowning production. That film, “The Road Warrior” (1981), not only elevated Mel Gibson to bankable star status in Hollywood, it seamlessly spun together an odd olio of diverse genres without faltering into camp and boasted some of the greatest real-action car stunts recorded on film. What director George Miller and Gibson revved up was an instant cult classic, a box office smash (it covered its budget in the U.S. in one week) and a can-do mashup from Down Under that would become a model that many would try to copy, but few could emulate. With “Mad Max: Fury Road,”(released May 15) the series is back on track, and boldly so. It took decades to get here, but it’s well worth the wait, something well oiled in lineage and ready to sear into the minds of a new generation of thrill-injected converts.

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Avengers: Age of Ultron

30 Apr

‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’: Jam-packed amusement park ride moves too fast to feel

Marvel’s “Avengers: Age of Ultron” is a a big noisy actioner that storms into theaters this week to kick off the blockbuster season. It’s perfect summer fare: not too deep, with plenty of action and a dash of sexy; destined to make a killing at the box office and the merchandising table. But as far as owning the opening kick, “Ultron” is a bit late to the party – the equally noisy “Furious Seven” has been cleaning up for the past three weeks, and it’s a far more genuine and heartfelt affair even if stripped of the sentimental nostalgia built around tragically deceased star Paul Walker.

043015i Avengers- Age of Ultron“Ultron” begins with a wham-bam as Captain America (Chris Evans), Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) and the whole Avenger cadre battle camouflage-veiled troops in a forest somewhere near what most recall as Transylvania. There’s a castle to storm and an “infinity stone” (six to rule the universe) to nab, but not without some resistance from an evil syndicate known as Hydra (something far less interesting and formidable than Spectre from the Bond series) in the form of a pair of embittered twins – the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) and Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) – who cause the motley crew of righteousness some lingering headaches.

The siege and bloody ebb and flow is all done with nimble, dizzying CGI effects. It’s like an amusement park ride: You can’t just focus on one thing, and if you do, the whole backdrop will have changed by the time you elect to pull back. Much of the plot is like that too. Just when you think you’re making sense of who or what Ultron is, Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) lets on he’s got a wife and kids out in the cornfields of the midwest or the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Bruce Banner/Hulk start having life-partnering talks.

Johansson, already a star attraction with her fetching form firmly packed into snug-fitting black lycra, knocks it out of the park in this go-round with a husky, sultry coo while flirting with Banner. She’s one of the film’s few gems, along with that infinity stone that gets embedded into a synthetic uber-being played by staid and somber Paul Bettany, but that’s a whole ’nother plot thread that crops up and fades in the rear view, only to crop up again like so many things in this fate-of-mankind tempest where skilled thespians are reduced to such cerebral throwaways as “let’s do this” and tired maxims about being united as a team and righteousness. The deepest-reaching dialogue comes from Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark (Iron Man sans the iron), enumerating on a colleague’s comment about a long day, tagging it “Eugene O’Neill long.” It’s one of the few witty ah-has that sticks.   Continue reading →

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The 13th Annual Independent Film Festival Boston

30 Apr

‘Gather Round’ For The 13th Annual Independent Film Festival Boston

The Look of Silence movie review (2015) | Roger Ebert

For its 13th annual incarnation, the Independent Film Festival Boston (IFFB) rides in on April showers and the banner theme of “Gather Round” to kick off the weeklong fest (April 22-April 29) of films, events and parties.

The tagline’s meant to underscore not only the concept of old fashion storytelling around the communal fire pit, but also the sense of community among filmmakers and filmgoers alike and the cross pollination of the two. Something the festival has had great success with in the past, bringing in such distinguished guests as Academy Award-winning actor Ben Kingsley and groundbreaking documentarian Albert Maysles. Local boy Casey Affleck has lent to the fest’s cred too, serving as its creative adviser and the popular indie actress Lili Taylor, starring in the new TV series “American Crime,” sits on the advisory board.

The festival has become something of Sundance East, with lines from the Somerville Theatre in Davis Square stemming around the block as eager moviegoers chase that elusive last ticket or hope to snag that prized center seating. But with sellout after sellout, the festival is still changing and growing.

“We want to be more,” says executive director Brian Tamm, “we want to do more with the city of Somerville and the arts community. We want to be more of resource and community for filmmakers here in Boston and Massachusetts. We also want to expand more into Boston.”

Tamm cites the UMass Boston “Works in Progress” program and award given to a promising documentary not yet completed. There are also select screenings, he says, at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, but Davis Square is the de facto hub of the fest with other regular screenings augmented at the Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square.

That’s the future, for now IFFB has proven its mettle; for 13 years IFFB has operated on a wholly volunteer structure, but things have started to change. With the departure of longtime program director Adam Roffman (who remains on as a board member) last year, Tamm took on the newly created executive director role and longtime festival organizer, Nancy Campbell took over the reigns as program director. Part of the reason for the new structure, now capping its second festival, was to give prospective sponsors a conventional front door to gain traction with easily versus the “kibbutz” style, as Tamm jokingly calls the old “by committee” structure, that may have caused confusion with past potential investors and other backing organizations.   Continue reading →

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