Short Takes

25 Apr

Reviewed: “The Shrouds,” “Pangolin: Kulu’s Journey” and “The Wedding Banquet”

‘The Shrouds’ (2024)

Master of the macabre David Cronenberg has always been one to explore the impacts and unintended consequences of near-future technology on humans – and often, in humans. Take “Videodrome” (1983), in which the advent of cable TV and pop-up public access stations served as a crucible for snuff videos, or “Existenz” (1999), in which a game designer trying to evade assassins melds physically with her game and the Internet. In “The Shrouds,” Cronenberg, still wrestling with the grief of losing his wife to cancer in 2017, deals with connecting the living to the departed through a Chinese-manufactured sheet with high-tech capabilities that allows the bereaved to log in through an app and look in on their loved ones as they decay away into eternity. It’s creepy and cool stuff that has some far-reaching implications, such as China perhaps leveraging the shrouds as a surveillance network. As an arguable stand-in for Cronenberg, the handsomely gaunt Vincent Cassel plays Karsh, who has also lost his wife Becca (Diane Kruger) to cancer and subsequently founded GraveTech, an Internet-connected series of cyber sarcophagus plots around the globe. Instead of headstones, there are tech towers that, with the right passcode or eye scan, allow one to pop up images of the dead or dial up memories. Karsh’s life is complicated: He dates, but prefers more illicit sexual liaisons involving Becca’s sister Terry (also played by Kruger) and Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), the blind wife of a prospective client (Vieslav Krystyan). Then there’s Terry’s ex-husband Maury (Guy Pearce), who does much of the coding for GraveTech. Karsh’s nighttime imaginings of Becca missing an arm or a breast are far more lurid and grim than anything gazed upon electronically in the crypt. There’s also the mystery of small nodes that have grown on some of the deceased: Are they bone tissue residue, spy-network plants or something else related to the medical treatments they received at end of life? Unfortunately, many plot threads are left dangling, but they are a minor annoyance offset by the riveting psychosexual dance between the principal cast. Cassel holds the film together, but it’s Kruger and Holt who drive it – especially Kruger as Terry, who regards Karsh with contempt until an unexpected encounter, when his offhand conspiracy theorizing turns out to be her sexual trigger.

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Short Takes

12 Apr

Reviewed: ‘Secret Mall Apartment,’ ‘Drop’ and ‘A Working Man’

‘Secret Mall Apartment’ (2024)

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Reviewed: ‘Secret Mall Apartment,’ ‘Warfare,’ ‘The Amateur’ and ‘Drop’ in theaters

By Tom Meek and Oscar Goff

Thursday, April 10, 2025

‘Secret Mall Apartment’ (2024)

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Jeremy Workman’s documentary recounts the antics of eight Rhode Island artists who in 2003 covertly built and lived in a hidden 750-square-foot apartment within the Providence Place Mall. To build the secret enclosure within a dead space in the massive mall, the team had to smuggle in cinder blocks and furniture. The apartment remained undetected for more than four years. The focal point of the film is Michael Townsend, a Rhode Island School of Design instructor, installation artist and something of a merry pied piper who sees the world as his canvas. Earlier Townsend projects include a creepy-cool community of mannequins in a post-apocalyptic setting under an overpass and along an industrial canal, as well as a 9/11 memorial depicting the faces of the fallen. The mall apartment, by default, was something more whimsical, and those involved videotaped the progress on grainy lo-res camcorders. Some of the banter about sacrifice for art and commercialism amid a retail center provokes, coming most to an edge when Townsend and his then wife, Adriana Valdez, one of the eight, get into a jocular tiff about life goals and values – she wants to build a real house in the world. The apartment, replicated on a soundstage for the documentary, makes a nice backdrop for the talking-head testimonials of Townsend and others, but it borders on the cheesy when Townsend acts out moments from the past. The apartment became second-tier national news when exposed; when asked then if he’d been curating a piece of art or living in the mall out of necessity, Townsend gleefully says, essentially, “life is art and art is life.” The son of military parents, Townsend makes for an intriguing character study in real time, archival footage and cheeky reenactment. 

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Short Takes

30 Mar

Reviewed: ‘Warfare’ and ‘The Annihilation of Fish’ 

‘Warfare’ (2025)

The brutality of war gets put on trial in the latest from director Alex Garland (“Men,” “Ex Machina”) working alongside Ray Mendoza, a 16-year Navy Seal and military consultant on movies such “The Outpost” (2019) and “Mile 22” (2018) who takes on more creative responsibilities here as co-director and co-writer. Mendoza worked in his former capacity on Garland’s last project, “Civil War” (2024), which eerily depicted a divided United States in the near dystopian future as a president tries to cling to a third term. Here, the two toss fiction aside for a reenactment of a 2006 Navy Seal surveillance mission in Ramadi, Iraq, that goes horribly off script when local jihadists ID the team and strategize an all-out assault on the platoon. It’s “Black Hawk Down” (2001) by way of “Assault on Precinct 13” (1976). As billed in the opening credits, the narrative is stitched together from the memories of those who endured the ever-surging siege – including Mendoza. As in “Black Hawk,” the filmmakers embed you with the team as it takes fire from unseen assailants on adjacent roofs or as IEDs explode, disorient and maim. (A content warning for grim scenes are a given.) The sound editing and subjective POVs are adroitly effective and the ensemble gives gritty goes from top to bottom, led by Will Poulter (also onscreen in an entirely different role in “Death of a Unicorn,” reviewed below) as a shellshocked squad leader; D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai (“Reservation Dogs”) as Mendoza; and Charles Melton, so good in “May December” (2023), as the leader of the support squad called in for the evac. As the credits roll, you’ll see the real-life Seals alongside their thespian counterparts, though some real-life faces are blurred out. This perplexed me until I went to the press notes, which cited privacy, consent (not all were reached during the filmmaking process) and security concerns (both personal and because some are still in the service).

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Short Takes

21 Mar

Reviewed: ‘Black Bag,’ ‘Magazine Dreams,’ and ‘The Alto Knights’

‘Black Bag’ (2025)

The latest from prolific filmmaker Stephen Soderbergh (“Ocean’s Eleven,” “Traffic”) is a sharp, thoughtful spy thriller in the neighborhood of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” (2011), if updated for these high-tech times and tossed on a treadmill. There’s plenty of cloak and dagger, but the story’s center is the relationships between husbands, wives and lovers, be they deviously duplicitous, of high fealty or otherwise. “Black Bag” comes in at about 90 minutes, matching the paranormal psycho-thriller “Presence” released this year by Soderbergh. Who drops two utterly different films within weeks of each other? Both were written by “Jurassic Park” (1993) scribe David Koepp, who outdoes himself here, and both were shot in limited locations, though “Black Bag” has a bigger, world-hopping feel to it. The London-set work and contrasting light-dark framings brought together warmly by a deep, bass-driven jazz score impress in craftsmanship and seamless ease. At the epicenter of the smoldering espionage are British operatives George (Michael Fassbender) and his wife Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). George has been alerted to a mole at the agency and tasked to find them – and given just a week to do so. On the list of five possible double dealers: his wife. Hanging in the balance is a nuclear meltdown and the potential death of 20,000 people, but that’s just a side issue to what interests Soderbergh and Koepp. We begin with George inviting the suspects to his and Kathryn’s posh London flat for a lovely lamb roast. Every guest is a professional liar, but did I mention the gravy’s laced with a truth serum? The other attendees are grizzled party-boy Freddie (Tom Burke), his latest office fling and X factor Clarissa (Marisa Abela), the hunky yet generic Col. Stokes (Regé-Jean Page of “Bridgerton”) and the agency’s resident psych, Zoe (Naomie Harris), who, because of a departmental mandate, has regular sessions with everyone at the table. She’s also having a fling with the colonel. As the serum kicks in and courses come and go, infidelities are confessed. The meal culminates with a knife pinning one diner’s hand to the table. George sifts through the fallout as he finds Kathryn plans to travel and a movie ticket stub for two in the wastebasket of her boudoir. When inquired as to the destination of her trip, “black bag” is Kathryn’s response; the info can’t be divulged, with no exceptions for spouses. The chemistry between Fassbender and Blanchett is intellectually and erotically electric, and George and Kathryn have a fashion sense to die for. The casting overall is a coup, though Pierce Brosnan, still dapper as ever as an agency higher-up, feels stirred in as an afterthought. The casting and lean, well-honed and MacGuffin-driven script by Koepp make the film work, as well as the tightness of the final product as pulled together by Soderbergh, who edits and shoots as well.

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Filmmaker Carson Lund has love of the game and knows how to pitch an expert ‘Eephus’

21 Mar

Keith Poulson, Ari Brisbon and David Pridemore in “Eephus.”

Opening day is near. There’s Cracker Jack excitement in the air and a legitimate hope that the Red Sox will return to postseason form. For lovers of the game and team enthusiasts (primed to get their hearts broken) who can’t wait, catch “Eephus,” a nostalgic slow-roller of a film with “Field of Dreams” (1989) undertones. Though it doesn’t play like one, it’s a rookie effort – the directorial debut of Carson Lund, a longtime cinematographer with roots in New England and ties to the hometown team and America’s game.

The Nashua, New Hampshire, native attended Emerson College and had a stint taking tickets and helping out at the Harvard Film Archive (where his film had a sneak peek last month; it’s now at the Somerville Theatre). His cinematic moorings put him in good company with Robert Eggers, a fellow filmmaker from the Granite State (“The Witch,” “Nosferatu”) and, from the halls of Emerson, the Daniels, who rocked the 2023 Oscars with “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”

Lund has been shooting commercials and making independent films for the past 10 years in Los Angeles, where he and Tyler Taormina have formed the Omnes Films collaborative to help finance and launch independent projects. Lund served as director of photography on Taormina’s two critically acclaimed lo-fi features, “Ham on Rye” (2020) and “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” (2024). On “Eephus,” Taormina serves as one of several producers.

Lund said that while growing up, he played baseball around all of New England. “I consider Boston my home city. I went to Red Sox games when I was young, and it cemented my love of the game.” When he moved to L.A., he joined an adult recreational league that became the inspiration for “Eephus.” The project took nearly 10 years to get to the plate.

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Short Takes

14 Mar

Reviewed: ‘Eephus,’ ‘Chaos: The Manson Murders,’ ‘Mickey 17,’ ‘Delicious’ and ‘Silent Zone’

‘Eephus’ (2024)

If you need a baseball fix before the Red Sox’s opening day, this drolly nostalgic work by first-time feature filmmaker Carson Lund may be just the thing. In it, a bunch of old-time ballers play one last game at a park in the autumnally speckled hills of Central Massachusetts (Douglas, to be exact) before the lot is torn up and a school built. The time is somewhere in the early to mid-1990s, when the Curse of the Bambino was still a thing, but besides 1970s Sox hurler Bill “The Spaceman” Lee appearing in a small part, there’s no mention of the hometown team or MLB at all – these are just local dudes with day jobs playing for Adler’s Paint on some team called the River Dogs. It’s unclear if they ever play other teams, are in a league or just play each other. The ragtag and grizzled lot are cut with character as deep as the wrinkles on their mismatched uniforms. Many have paunches, and others casually sip beer and offer laconic barbs as they warm up for a sleepy match that begins with the sun high in the sky and concludes with the aid of headlights as a cold October evening rolls in. It’s a long, lazy marathon that Lund builds as a dryer, tamped down version of Richard Linklater’s “Everybody Wants Some!” (2016) with the same level of respect and love for the game that John Sayles imbued in his unheralded “Eight Men Out” (1988). Adding local flavor is legendary documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman as the voice of the radio broadcast announcer. The title refers to a super slow, arcing pitch that came into being in the 1940s and makes a knuckleball look like blazing heat. It’s rare but gets an every-now-and-then use due to its ability to daunt and confound batters – try it a second time, and it’s to the moon. For lovers of the game, this nostalgic slow roll is right down the strike zone. (Speaking of the Red Sox and the Curse of the Bambino, I have been part of a season ticket holder group since that game was played out in Douglas, but I almost missed seeing the Sox reverse the curse, something you can read all about in my “The Season That Almost Wasn’t” published in Slippery Rock University’s lit mag SLAB in 2007. You’ll likely get paywalled, but here’s a publicly viewable version posted last year on Substack.)

‘Chaos: The Manson Murders’ (2025)

Keeping with legendary Cambridge-based documentary filmmakers, the latest from Errol Morris (“The Thin Blue Line,” “American Dharma”) tackles the unshakable enigma of Charles Manson, his cult and the grisly Tate-LaBianca murders they committed. Fifty-plus years later, the inconceivable acts of Manson and his “family” loom like they happened yesterday. Morris’ rewind is kind of chaotic despite being organized into neat chapters, throwing a lot out there without resolving things as the filmmaker normally does. The Beach Boys, Doris Day, a Kennedy assassination, the CIA and LSD experimentation all make their way in, and the film’s peppered with frequent segues to Manson songs played off his one record – believe it or not, the diabolical manipulator was not a bad singer-songwriter; the Beach Boys even recorded one of his tunes, which, in a way, led to the Tate murders. It’s all based on a similarly titled 2020 book by Tom O’Neill, who claims the race war theory put forth by lead prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi was fabricated for courtroom theatrics so Bugliosi could get rich off writing “Helter Skelter.” This feels a tad like conspiracy theory. More interesting is the archival footage of Manson, creepy and charismatic, and the chilling confessionals from his followers who did the killings, though most informative and credible are former prosecutor Stephen Kay, who worked alongside Bugliosi, and Bobby Beausoleil, a songwriter who joined Manson’s cult and is still in jail for carrying out an earlier murder at Manson’s behest. (His testimony is delivered from telephone interviews. It should be noted that he’s up for parole this year, so there’s that.) Morris and O’Neill put a lot out there, but the most compelling part of the film is the maniacal puppet master, his cold, aloof rantings, hold on his subjects and ability to skirt the law and authorities even when he was a known sociopath and likely high risk to the public. The film makes one want to go back and rewatch Quentin Tarantino’s rescript of history, “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” (2019) to cross reference fact and fiction. No matter, Manson, his minions, their crimes and courtroom antics remain a fresh and lurid annal of American history.

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Short Takes

28 Feb

Reviewed: ‘The Monkey’ and ‘Elevation’ in theaters and streaming now

‘The Monkey’ (2025)

Osgood Perkins, a dead ringer for dad Anthony Perkins (“Psycho”), continues the family tradition from the other side of the lens with this spin on horror master Stephen King’s 1980 short story. The not-so-slow burn is set in Casco, Maine, where we open with Capt. Petey Shelborn (Adam Scott) walking into a pawn shop covered in blood to fix his windup mechanical monkey. After a flamethrower, a speargun and a rat enter the scene, we learn that the monkey is not a toy, a point hammered home regularly by those possessing it. It is something evil, if not death itself. Its victims of ghoulish, cartoonish circumstance are random – only the person winding up the monkey is safe. When the monkey plays its drum, anyone nearby is at risk. Petey’s twin sons Hal and Bill (both Christian Convery) later discover the monkey in a closet in their unhappy home; their dad is now a deadbeat, as their mom, Lois (Tatiana Maslany), tells us. A few cranks of the monkey’s key by the curious kids and mayhem ensues among mom, babysitter Annie Wilkes (Danica Dreyer) and Uncle Chip (Perkins), who moved in to care for the boys with his swinger wife, Aunt Ida (Sarah Levy). The twins behead the mechanical monkey, throw it in the trash and down a well, but it always returned. Flash forward 25 years, and Hal (now played by Theo James) works at a supermarket and visits his own son Petey (Colin O’Brien) once a year out of fear of cursing him. Hal, the film’s occasional narrator, tells us that he and his brother don’t get along. Bill is now totally unhinged and wants to bond with the windup wingding of disaster, with Petey and Hal looped in to his demented scheme as much of Casco gets sent to the great beyond in bloody ways. Part of the fun is Theo James’s yin-and-yang roles as the buttoned-up, protective and paranoid Hal and the delusional Bill, who sports a pseudo-mullet and “damn it all to hell” gusto. Elijah Wood (“Lord of the Rings”) pops in for a dark turn as dim-witted Ted, employed by Bill to retrieve the monkey. Levy’s Aunt Ida is unforgettable for all the wrong reasons, with an unsettling sexual aura and a plotline that’s a creepshow instant classic.

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Short Takes

20 Feb

Reviewed: ‘Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy,’ ‘Sly Lives!’ and ‘Captain America: Brave New World’

‘Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy’ (2025)

Not sure this fourth flick was necessary, but I’m happy it exists. Renée Zellweger’s goofball heroine has always been a lovable hot mess of miscues and tribulations, and is again here. Of course the series being so British – dry and droll, with cheeky nods and winks – only deepens the buttoned-up hijinks. In the last chapter (“Bridget Jones’s Baby”), Hugh Grant’s Daniel Cleaver, one of the two gents who vied for Bridget’s love in the 2001 original, is presumed dead; in this nearly 10-year follow-up, Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), the guy who won her heart and had two children with her, really is dead. (Something about a humanitarian aide mission gone awry in the Sudan.) As a single mom, Bridget can’t boil a pot of water and has zero romantic prospects, though her friends push her to Tinder and other romantic meetup venues. “Labia adhesion is a thing,” one friend tells her when Bridget admits to not having sex in more than four years. Relief comes in the form of a handsome 29-year-old bloke named Roxster McDuff (Leo Woodall, “The White Lotus”), who rescues Bridget (she was 43 when she had her son in the last installment) and her children (a younger daughter in the mix now) from being treed in a park. Bridget does slowly get her groove back and returns to her old gig as a TV producer. How the happily ever after or never not pans out, I won’t say. Returning players include Emma Thompson as Bridget’s old ob-gyn who extols the virtues of a rife sex life and Jim Broadbent and Gemma Jones in a requisite cameo as Bridget’s parents. Strangely enough, Firth and Grant show up too, though I won’t spoil how. Also in the mix is the always excellent Chiwetel Ejiofor (“12 Years a Slave”) as Bridget’s son’s music teacher. Just who “the boy” is, is a bit unclear; is it Bridget’s son, William (Casper Knopf), the hunky Roxster or maybe even Hugh Grant, who starred in a movie called “About a Boy” in 2002? The answer doesn’t much matter, as it’s Bridget’s world and we‘re just happy to spend a few madcap moments in it. 

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Short Takes

15 Feb

Reviewed “The Order,” “Love Hurts” and “The Gorge”

‘The Order’ (2025)

Relatively new to streaming and taking a recent dip in rental price, this crime drama from Justin Kurzel (“Nitram”) dials back the clock to the 1980s Pacific Northwest, where the rise of white supremacist hate groups was a thing. The gritty take-’em-down thrills start as burned-out FBI agent Terry Husk (Jude Law) settles into the remotes of Idaho to decompress after a heart attack and years of wrangling with the mafia in NYC. But Husk is a gruff, suspicious sort who won’t let it go after he walks into a missing-person case that the local police don’t want too much exposure on – they know the terrain and are widely deferential to the well-armed Aryan Nation groups in the area that believe the time has come for the white man to take back his soiled lands. That missing soul was part of the sect of the title, a militant group led by Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult, looking even more boyish than usual, if that was even possible), an extremist ideologue and master planner. Bob and “The Order” are behind the missing (because he talked too much), a series of brazen bank and armored car heists (all staged deftly) and the murder of Colorado Jewish talk radio personality Alan Berg (Marc Maron) for sparring on-air with antisemitic callers. Much of this, based on Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt’s “The Silent Brotherhood,” is factual (Berg’s on-air battles and demise was portrayed with riveting aplomb by Eric Bogosian in Oliver Stone’s 1988 “Talk Radio”), through Law’s agent is a fictionalized insert – and a highly effective one. In the mix are Tye Sheridan (“Ready Player One,” “The Card Counter”) as the lone officer in the sheriff’s department willing to step in and help Husk chase down leads, and Jurnee Smollett (“True Blood”) as Husk’s fellow FBI agent and a voice of reason. The film doesn’t work without Law, who’s nearly unrecognizable as the disheveled, on-the-edge sort – his usual British charm and disarming accent are nowhere to be found. His Husk is more junkyard cur than fine-fleeced Westminster purebred, and not too far off from Don Johnson’s hot wreck of a cop in John Frankenheimer’s “Dead Bang” (1989), who also tangled with militant supremacists in the Pac-Northwest. It’s a transformative turn that should have been recognized by the Academy, but Law’s gritty go, and the film, somehow dropped off the radar; here’s your chance to get it on yours.

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Short Takes

9 Feb

Reviewed “Presence,” “I’m Still Here” and “You’re Cordially Invited”

‘You’re Cordially Invited’ (2025)

A pat comedy with few surprises and several gags that don’t quite land makes it over the hump – just barely – on the likability and natural chemistry of Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon. They play Jim and Margot, charged with coordinating and executing the weddings of their daughter and sister, respectively. Los Angeles-based Margot is a bit distant from her Atlanta clan but dutifully books the revered Palmetto House, a quaint island inn on a Georgia bay that the family has always gathered at. Jim, who married there – but a single parent since his wife got sick and died years ago – books his daughter’s wedding for the same day. Whoops: Old-school pen and paper and a sudden heart attack are to blame for a booking gaffe at an inn not really equipped for two large parties. After some push and shove, all agree to make a go of it, but infringements, jealousy and sabotage turn the happy nuptials into something of “The Wedding Crashers” (2005) by way of “The War of the Roses” (1989). Jim is also having a hard time letting go of his daughter, Jenni (a fiery Geraldine Viswanathan, “Drive Away Dolls”), while Margot wrestles with the down-home narrow-mindedness of her extended family around her sis’ choice of husband, a Chippendale dancer. A rogue alligator, “Islands in the Stream” duets, Nick Jonas and Peyton Manning all make their way into the jumble with varying effect. Comedians Rory Scovel and Leanne Morgan are effective in small parts as part of Margot’s “chaos monkey” inner circle, and Jack McBrayer works as the befuddled innkeeper. The strength of the film, written and directed by Nicholas Stoller (“Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” “Get Him to the Greek”), is the rom-com power pairing of Farrell and Witherspoon, who seem like they could do this all day long and we’d be only happy to tag along.

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