Tag Archives: Paste Magazine

Muck

28 Mar
By Tom Meek (Paste Magazine)
March 26, 2015  |  10:20pm
<i>Muck</i>

Cannibalistic humanoids and butyraceous posteriors abound in Steve Wolsh’s slack horror mash-up that borrows much from Neil Marshall’s genuinely bone-chillingThe Descent. In 2005’s The Descent, blind albino cannibals who live in subterranean enclaves assail an all-female spelunking detachment. Here the C.H.U.D.s du jour hang out in a marsh on Cape Cod and have at it with a batch of comely coeds and their buff beaus who have holed up in a stately manse. The “what” and “why” never come into conversation—as the bodies begin to amass, the lithe twentysomethings don’t begin to consider how a tribe of primal alabaster “creepers” suddenly came to be in the middle of America’s most venerated vacation seaboard. Nothing, not even a good ol’ “What the fuck?”

Somewhere in the middle, I half expected a rewind to an experiment gone wrong or some form of contamination like The Hills Have Eyes, but it didn’t happen. Wolsh dives straight into the murk of carnage and undulating breasts and never comes up to catch his breath. As a result, the gonzo assault becomes an uneven straddle ofEvil Dead camp and rote splatter, leaving Muck to hobble along disjointedly like Jamie Lee Curtis’ battered heroine as she tries to escape Michael Myers in Halloween. Continue reading →

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Wild Tales

22 Feb

By Tom Meek in Paste Magazine
<i>Wild Tales</i>

Six seemingly disparate stories—ranging from the quirky to the macabre—unfold with plenty of punch and panache in Damián Szifrón’s Wild Tales, an old-school anthology film laced with biting social commentary about Argentinean class and how one’s sense of justice plays into where one’s lot has fallen in life. Equal partsAmazing Stories, Creepshow, O. Henry and Almodóvar (who both produced and brought the film to an international audience), Wild Tales was a big pleaser at Cannes, recently opened the 38th Annual Portland International Film Festival and may win a Best Foreign Language Film category at the 2015 Academy Awards, to name but a few accomplishments. Seems like people the world over are finding a lot to identify with.

The more-than-appropriate title (Relatos Salvajes in Spanish) might be a bit on the obvious side—and just in case you’re not getting Szifrón’s broad picture, the film’s opening credit sequence serves up image after image of sinister-looking beasts in their unwelcoming habitats, like a PowerPoint slideshow set against Gustavo Santaolalla’s lilting, slightly menacing score. The most wickedly outrageous vignette comes even before the opening credits roll: a music critic (Darío Grandinetti) on an airplane realizes the woman in the seat next to him (María Marull) is the ex-girlfriend of an aspiring musician he once panned. The six degrees of separation don’t end there, or even in that row, leading to a collective gasp among passengers as each person begins to understand their fated place on the plane. This short story, coupled with the credits, form a striking opening sequence, an appropriate preparation for the sometimes overt but nonetheless entertaining yarns to follow, in which Szifrón peruses human animalism in its many dire colors.  Continue reading →

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The Humbling

31 Jan

By Tom Meek in Paste Magazine
January 26, 2015  |  8:31pm
<i>The Humbling</i>

The translation of Phillip Roth’s words to the big screen has been a tricky feat for any filmmaker. You might recall the staid adaptation of The Human Stain (2003) or the bawdy spin on Goodbye Columbus (1969); many have argued that those leaps to a visual, more commercial, medium neutered the tone of Roth’s sexually torn, disenfranchised Jewish machismo. More affectingly and recent, the little-seenElegy (2008), adapted from Roth’s The Dying Animal, dug closer to the core of the author, and now The Humbling, which covers similar ground, launches another ambitious, if not quite righteous, go at the heralded American provocateur.

In the role of Roth’s alter-ego, Al Pacino plays Simon Axler, a well-regarded stage actor who struggles to remain relevant as he sails across the septuagenarian mark. Much of what Pacino has done on the silver screen over the past decade has tended towards warmed-over mush, which is cause for lament considering this is the icon of cinema who so indelibly barked out “Attica!” in Dog Day Afternoon and anchored Francis Ford Coppola’s timeless Godfather trilogy. (For the record, I’ll cite Jack and Jill and 88 Minutes and leave it at that.) The two endeavors in which Pacino has shone during that drought weren’t theatrical releases but the cable-produced biopics of Jack Kevorkian (You Don’t Know Jack) and Phil Spector, which is a fitting: Barry Levinson (Rain Man and The Natural) directed Pacino in Jack, and again steers him here.  Continue reading →

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Best Foreign Language Film of 2014

29 Dec

Leviathan

By Tom Meek
December 27, 2014  |  4:05pm

<i>Leviathan</i>

In the Bible, Job suffers endlessly. God lets Satan take his children, his wealth and physically afflict him with no end in sight. It’s a test of faith, and a parable (or that rationalizing opium of the masses that Marx was so down on) as to why God allows such inequitable ills to wreak havoc on the faithful good. A similar ordeal faces the unfortunate Kolya (Aleksey Serebryakov) in director Andrey Zvyagintsev’sLeviathan. Kolya becomes the target of the corrupt mayor (Roman Madyanov, brilliantly conjuring up shades of Bob Hoskins in The Long Good Friday and current Russian President Vladimir Putin) in a northwestern Russian province, near the Finnish border. The unscrupulous magistrate desires Kolya’s land because of its strategic locale, situated between the sea and a broad waterway—and he’s more than willing to bend his official rule to legally wrest the holding. Continue reading →

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subUrbia, then and now

27 Oct

The Rick-trospective: subUrbia

A salute to Richard Linklater’s body of work, one film at a time

By Tom Meek
The Rick-trospective: <i>subUrbia</i>

In honor of the November 7 release of Paste Movies Editor Michael Dunaway’s documentary 21 Years: Richard Linklater (in which Paste is the media partner), we’re going through the indie master’s entire oeuvre in order, film by amazing film.

Richard Linklater’s always been something of a modern day documentarian, dredging that banal everyday which is formed by technology and culture, and unearthing the explorative, self-reflecting fossils of the individual adrift in the societal sea. Linklater’s first few movies, Slacker and Dazed and Confused, were tales of youth and the young muddling about—full of ennui, little forward motion and unpromising future prospects. Granted, Before Sunrise hit theaters in 1995, but it’s subUrbia, released a year later, that’s the apt conclusion to what one might call Linklater’s Austin slacker trilogy.

subUrbia, however, was not penned by Linklater, but playwright, social satirist andLaw & Order regular, Eric Bogosian. Linklater’s transposition from Bogosian’s Woburn, Mass., roots and New Jersey set, to sleepy Burnfield, Texas, a neighborhood of Austin where five young people occupy the limbo after high school by loitering outside a convenience store, drinking and grousing about the ruts they’ve become stuck in, aligns seamlessly with where Dazed and Confused left off. As any of the five would have it, the American Dream that evades them has been hijacked by the Pakistani couple who own and operate the store as a stepping stone to higher education and a happy white-collar existence. Continue reading →

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Fury

14 Oct

By Tom Meek in Paste Magazine
<i>Fury</i>

War is hell, a tried and true axiom that gets personified to the nth degree in David Ayer’s World War II epic, Fury, about a tank crew who utter a book full of cliches and live out religious allegories while quoting the Gospel. Ayer, who wrote Training Day and directed such smash-mouth dramas as Harsh Times and End of Watch, has his nose deep in male bravado and testosterone bondsmanship. The scribe-turned-helmsman could probably learn a thing or two from Paul Schrader, who penned Taxi Driver but had mixed success transitioning to the director’s seat with the likes of American Gigolo, Cat People and Light Sleeper. Schrader however, was interested in character-driven stories, whereas Ayer seeks to drop vestiges of square-jawed manliness in chaotic hell often punctuated by hyper violence. Sam Peckinpah had it covered from both sides, and the fact that he did, and that many have attempted to emulate his style and resonance, and failed, only strengthens the testimony of his unbridled cinematic genius.

Right from the get-go, Ayer lets us know that this isn’t the clean, moral war captured on black and white back in the ’40s and ’50s, but something darker and more complex. Coming across a bomb-blasted field of American tank carcasses, an SS officer on a white horse checks the carnage to make sure there are no survivors. For something to be alive doesn’t seem possible, but springing from atop one steel beast is Brad Pitt, who quickly puts a knife blade through the officer’s occipital brow and then unsaddles the horse and allows it to go free—a metaphor for the freeing of white Europe by the grubby Americans?   Continue reading →

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The Equalizer

26 Sep

By Tom Meek Published in Paste Magazine
<i>The Equalizer</i>

 

Here’s a zany idea, take a moderately successful 1980s TV crime drama staring a British actor (Edward Woodward. the compelling condemned lieutenant in Breaker Morant) as a retired “C.I.A.” agent living in New York City who “fixes” peoples’ problems, drop in Denzel Washington and transpose the setting to Boston. The result would seem likely to be pretty weak tea that, without Washington, might be something heading for the vast realm of VOD obscurity without a theatrical release. And still, even with the Oscar-winning actor, is a payoff possible?

The good news for this iteration of The Equalizer, however, is that moody stylist Antoine Fuqua has the helm. He and Washington blew audiences’ minds back in 2001 with the bad cop fable Training Day. There, the synergy of their collaboration shone through brightly, and here, it goes a long way, too. The bad news, or not so good, is that the script is penned by Richard Wenk, a guy who’s made his jam by doing Expendables films and The Mechanic remake. It’s within his milieu, sure, but those testosterone-infused retreats were never going to make members of the Screenwriters Guild take pause during awards season. Continue reading →

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Tusk

23 Sep

By Tom Meek (Paste Magazine)
September 22, 2014  |  8:20pm

 

<i>Tusk</i>

The latest from Kevin Smith signals something of a return to form and a bit of a surprise. After all this was the man who felt so dejected by the film biz that he pretty much checked out after his mixed, “self-published” effort, Red State (2011), and retreated into various cultish, fan-adoring safe havens—podcasts and AMC’s tediousComic Book Men. Of course, Smith’s sloppy commercial outings preceding Red State—Cop Out and Zack and Miri Make a Porno—probably had something to do with it, too. That all said, the one thing about Smith that’s always been consistent beyond his whiny mewling, has been his snarky resilience—and that’s a good thing, because Tusk, despite being the WTF film event of the year, pays dividends for those with acquired tastes.

The film, a hefty slab of comedy atop a serial killer thread, alleges to be based on “actual events.” Those being that Smith got his hands on a posting by a lonely older seafarer in Canada who was offering free room and board for anyone willing to hang out and wear a walrus suit for a few hours a day. On-air, the quirky post got spun into a plot brainstorming session which in turn launched the social media campaign, #WalrusYes. The response not only birthed Tusk, but, purportedly, a whole True North trilogy to go with—or offset—Smith’s breezy Jersey assemblage (Clerks, Mallrats and Chasing Amy).  Continue reading →

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Last Days in Vietnam

8 Sep

By Tom Meek

published in Paste Magazine

 

<i>Last Days in Vietnam</i>

Beyond slavery (and Cvil Rights), the mistreatment of Native Americans and a woman’s right to vote, the Vietnam War might be the most ignominious stain on American history. Sure, the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, same-sex equality and wealth disparity might make that list, too, in time, but Vietnam—a.k.a. the living-room war—fervently consumed the American conscience for over a decade. It was something new, too. The two Great Wars had us justly battling tyranny, championing the oppressed and righting wrongs on the road to freedom. Korea was something else, something more complex, something that appeared to be in the same arena of righteous and yet, it was really a Cold War bellwether delineating the fractious ideological divide between democracy and communism. Tough lessons were learned from that war, but Vietnam, in an era of burgeoning liberalism, free love and racial integration in the wake of Ozzie and Harrietidealism—and further inflamed by the mandatory enlistment for the draft—touched off a cascade of social unrest and activism that caused the United States to reconsider its foreign policy, something that has rippled forward to the wars that confront the U.S. currently.   Continue reading →

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Dinosaur 13

16 Aug

By Tom Meek in Paste Magazine

 

<i>Dinosaur 13</i>

It’s hard, if not impossible, to believe that relic hunting really could be as thrilling, exciting or harrowing as depicted in the Raiders of the Lost Ark movies, after all, what is it that most paleontologist do but chisel and sweep away bits of stone from fossilized bone, right? And while that remains largely at the core of Todd Douglas Miller’s dino hunter doc, there’s a grisly eruption in the middle; a Brontosaurus big “What the Fuck” if you will, that shoots the somber dusting and digging off into a disturbing web of jurisdiction abuse, injustice and tangled land and property rights.

Back in 1990, the Black Hills Institute of Geographical Research in South Dakota, essentially a group of dino-loving paleontologists without Ph.Ds or academic grants, discovered the most complete and largest Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton to date. Priorly, only twelve had been found—lucky number 13! The find was purely accidental, a flat tire, heavy fog and further unfortunate tidings had the crew heading to town to get the SUV fixed but one, Susan Hendrickson, decided to remain and mill about the weather-worn ravines of the Dakota Black Hills. That’s when lightning struck.  Continue reading →

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