Tag Archives: Paste Magazine

Child of God

4 Aug

By Tom Meek
Published in Paste Magazine, August 1, 2014
<i>Child of God</i>

James Franco’s infatuation with the literati and his desire to be among the ranks continues with this adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy’s 1973 novel (his third) about a mentally handicapped malcontent who loses the family farm and evolves into something more feral and arguably evil. Best known for his Spiderman roles and Oscar-nominated turn in 127 Hours, Franco has just a small part in the film and steps behind the lens to helm the effort. It’s not the actor’s first time in the director’s chair; last year he tackled William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and he’s working on a biopic of Charles Bukowski. (Purportedly, Franco wants to attempt an adaptation of Faulkner’s seemingly unadaptable The Sound and the Fury.)

Franco himself got the literary-to-screen treatment earlier this year when a collection of his short stories about growing up in the California ’burbs was crafted into the movie Palo Alto by Gia Coppola. Franco also had a role in that film, directed and starred in The Broken Tower, a biopic about the poet Harry Crane, and also played the renowned beat poet Allen Ginsberg in Jeffery Friedman and Rob Epstein’s tepid docudrama, Howl.   Continue reading →

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And So It Goes

26 Jul 


By Tom Meek


July 24, 2014










<i>And So It Goes</i>






 


Rob Reiner, a.k.a. “Meathead” and creative force behind such quirky classics, This is Spinal Tap, When Harry Met Sally and The Princess Bride, gets back to his roots with this bag of mixed nuts about an embittered widower hit with some life-altering events that threaten to melt his icy heart and make him feel again. It’s a clichéd premise no doubt, but thankfully Reiner and cast play up the comedic angle and make what could have been a flat, Lifetime weepy something springy and possessed of an intermittent joy.


Set in the coddled community of Fairfield Connecticut, realtor Oren Little (Michael Douglas) is trying to get over the loss of his wife and sell his palatial estate (for a cool 8 mill), but because of a professional slump and the personal setbacks, he slums it in a four-unit rooming house on the Long Island Sound and grouses about his neighbors with three-olive rancor. The script written by Mark Andrus who pennedAs Good as it Gets (you’ve gotta love these inspired titles) employs some pretty frilly shenanigans—and not all of them stick. Take the fact Oren’s son (Scott Shepherd) is a recovering addict and heading to jail for insider trading. It’s never explained how he got from shooting up to shorting shares, but so it goes. He’s also got a ten-year-old daughter, Sarah (Sterling Jerins), who needs a custodian as mom’s whereabouts are unknown. When asked to take on Sarah, Oren pushes back, declaring he was a lousy dad. That’s the kind of prick we’re dealing with, at least initially.   Continue reading →

				
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Underwater Dreams

	
		13
		Jul
	

	

	

		




By Tom Meek


July 12, 2014




 


<i>Underwater Dreams</i>




Mary Mazzio’s brief but touching pic about five Latin high school boys from an impoverished, landlocked town in Arizona who enter a NASA/Navy sponsored underwater robotics competition, taking on titans like MIT with Exxon sponsorship behind them, percolates with keen social insight that otherwise might have gotten lost in a rote, can-do underdog story. The two high school teachers who sought the opportunity decided to compete on the collegiate level because the disappointment of finishing far back would be mollified by the daunting impressiveness of the field. Had this been a Hollywood “based on” adaptation or a Hallmark fantasy, the Davey vs. Goliath drama would seem trumped up, maudlin and implausible, but as a straight-up documentary with talking heads from both sides of the engineering contest (the Arizona five and the vast MIT squad), it’s head-on, unadulterated and far more affecting than anything that could have been hatched in a studio lab.  Continue reading →

				
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La Bare

	
		29
		Jun
	

	

	

		




By Tom Meek


June 26, 2014




<i>La Bare</i>




La Bare, the male strip club that inspired Magic Mike, is the focus of Joe Manganiello’s breezy new documentary, which is fitting as Manganiello played “Big Dick Richie” in Steven Soderberg’s quirky 2010 spin on the biz. It’s also Manganiello’s first time behind the lens, and while the film is confidently shot and full of pomp and piss, it hardly gets underneath the well-oiled surface.


The legendary Dallas hotspot of the title has long roots reaching back into the ’70s. You can think of it as the Club 54 for ogling beefcakes—the gold standard of its time—and then, as the owner tells it, after 9/11, the business dried up and the establishment languished. Manganiello doesn’t dig so much into the extenuating circumstances or why the notorious American tragedy had such an impact—he’s more focused on the now and the wow and quickly jumps to happier times after an Eastern European emigre named Alex comes in and reboots the club by cleaning it up and bringing in a Las Vegas choreographer.   Continue reading →

				
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Palo Alto

	
		10
		May
	

	

	

		




By Tom Meek






<i>Palo Alto</i>




Bored kids of privilege looking for thrills, validation and love. You’ve seen it done funny and twisted before in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and more recently driven by ennui in Sophia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, which felt like a modern day retelling of her Marie Antoinette—after all, aren’t cake and celebrity bling the same thing? So it’s fitting too that the latest entry into the teen anxiety crisis genre is the debut of Sophia’s niece, Gia Coppola, who gives a shout out to auntie, by panning over a poster of Sophia’s debut film, The Virgin Suicides hanging on the wall of one of her darlings.


The “all in the family” ties run deep. The film’s based on a collection of short stories written by James Franco, who also plays the amiable girls soccer coach Mr. B. and it stars Emma Roberts (Eric’s daughter, Julia’s niece) and Jack Kilmer (son of Val, who crops up in an outrageous cameo).




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Whitewash

	
		7
		May
	

	

	

		




By Tom Meek






<i>Whitewash</i>




Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais’ nuanced character study may run on many different cylinders, but all are tuned to the same end; a modern day, “accidental” Crime and Punishment where the protagonist struggles heavily in the wake of a rash action and its indelible consequences, which begin to consume him. There’s really not much in terms of plot, but what there is unfurls in compelling, nonlinear strokes that a more straight-forward approach might otherwise render pedantic or tedious. Hoss-Desmarais also has Thomas Haden Church in his deck of cards, and since much is asked of the film’s lead, having a capable actor imbued with on-tap quirk and soul, layers the effort immeasurably.


Whitewash begins with a bang, literally as Bruce (Church), driving a Sno-Cat snowplow down a snow-encrusted street in a Quebec burg during near-whiteout conditions, mows down a lone shadowy figure. Whether the accident is truly accidental or not is unclear and remains so in the aftermath and “what to do next” stage. Bruce is despondent initially but shifts into calculating cover-up mode as he wraps up the body, puts it in the Sno-Cat and drives the vehicle deep into the woods.




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13 Sins

	
		19
		Apr
	

	

	

		




By Tom Meek


April 19, 2014




Published in Pate Magazine


<i>13 Sins</i>




“The devil made me do it,” might be an apt response for some of the mayhem and mischief that goes on in 13 Sins, but greed and desperation are more to the point. The film, directed by Daniel Stamm and based on the Thai film, 13 Games of Death, rides a one-trick-pony for all it’s worth. It might not be original, or superbly cut together, but it does pay dividends as it the scale of sociopathic doings becomes ever more satanic.


After a baroque opener that has an elder gentleman in a suit and tie launch into a four-letter-word fit at a podium only to perform impromptu digit surgery on a beloved one once he’s arguably calmed down, we meet Elliot (Mark Webber) who’s having the day from hell. His mentally impaired brother (Devon Graye) needs expensive meds, he’s expecting a child with his fiancée (Rutina Wesley), and with all the downward financial pressure, he gets tossed from his job by a patronizing ass of a boss, and we haven’t even gotten to his drunk, racist dad (Tom Bower) who needs to move in with them, and drops a few N-bombs on his African-American daughter-in-law-to-be just to let everyone know exactly what he’s thinking.


So it’s fortuitous, or ominous, when Elliot gets a call from a random avuncular soul who tells him, that if he kills the annoying fly buzzing about in his car, he’ll get a thousand dollars. At first, Elliot looks around to see if he’s been punked, but then complies. Boom, the money lights up in his account. (Smart phones are such great plot accelerator for rote horror films) and then he’s told, that if he then eats the squashed bug he’ll get three thousand more.
















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Better Living Through Chemistry

	
		15
		Mar
	

	

	

		
<i>Better Living Through Chemistry</i> Review




A pharmacologist who pilfers from his own stash doesn’t make for much of a story. It’s over-the-counter, flat, hypocritical and none-too-interesting. Love & Other Drugs tried to walk that (similar) line by throwing in a satirical skewering of the pharmaceutical biz with a heavy dose of amour while Better Living Through Chemistry tacks into it with a whacky rom-com skew, and as with the launch of any new panacea, the results are mixed, and some even concerning. The diagnosis of which leads directly to the writing/directing team of Geoff Moore and David Posamentier, who treat their cinematic go as an alchemy experiment, crushing in aBody Heat-styled femme fatale element along with pill-popping madness, dysfunctional youth mania and alpha female hen-pecking all blended together under a quirky Wes Anderson-like sheen.  Continue reading →

				
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300: Rise of an Empire

	
		9
		Mar
	

	

	

		
<i>300: Rise of an Empire</i>




Probably the greatest thing about Zach Snyder’s 300 besides hearing Leonidas (Gerard Butler, with his CGI enhanced six-pack abs) vociferously proclaim, “This … is … Sparta!” and kick one of Xerxes’s emissaries down a bottomless well, was the hip, infectious trailer of half-naked Spartan warriors assailing the vast Persian army to the manic techno beat of Nine Inch Nails’s “Just as You Imagined.” The movie itself was overload, more of the same, slowed by plot, reason and redundancy. Plus it’s history, so it’s not like you’re going to have a “I didn’t see that coming” moment, even with Frank Miller’s graphic novel, Xerxes, driving the game.  Continue reading →

				
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Tim’s Vermeer

	
		3
		Feb
	

	

	

		







<i>Tim's Vermeer</i>






During a casual conversation with pals Penn and Teller (yes, the performance comedy team that performs droll acts of sleight-of-hand), Tim Jenison tossed out the idea that the great 17th century painter, Johannes Vermeer, might have generated his masterworks via a controlled methodology—which could conceivably be replicated—and not sheer artistic eye and a deft free hand. Given the movie’s being, that conversation obviously budded into a dare and/or a personal obsession.


Jenison, a quiet, pontificating soul and inventor by trade who made his nut in video software, possesses a bulldog tenacity and keen acumen. He’s the kind of guy who sees a problem and goes off and tinkers until he can remedy it with a working solution. His theory, that Vermeer used a process called “camera obscura” (the projection of a lighted image through a hole in a box or a room to create a smaller inverted rendering on the opposing surface outside the container) as an on canvas guide (think of tracing in its most complex form) for his creations is piquant and intriguing in its infantile illumination. The centuries old technique, now largely a schoolroom experiment, became the foundation for the modern camera and moving pictures. Vermeer, if he employed it, didn’t have any well-oiled machinery or electricity, just light and a hole.  Continue reading →

				
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