Tag Archives: Review

Trance

24 Apr

THE RUMPUS REVIEW OFTRANCE

BY 

April 24th, 2013

The dictionary defines memory as “the ability to recall.” For a computer, it’s an exact science when regurgitating programs, data, and facts, but for humans, that process can be ephemeral, flawed, and selective. It’s also an essential component of our existence, as our memories and emotional attachment to our pasts define who we are; it’s been argued that memories, along with the pillars of civilization, war and sex as a pleasure sport, are the defining cornerstones that separate mankind from the rest of the animal kingdom.

Human memories and their mercurial, inexact nature also make for high drama in life and story, most especially in film. What if you couldn’t remember your name, or you blacked out during the critical moment of a murder or robbery? What if, as in Rashomon, different players’ POVs of a series of events result in diametric outcomes, onuses, and liabilities? There’s immediate conflict and intrigue, but to make the payoff and to sell the feasibility of it throughout—and often through the eyes of an unreliable narrator—requires work, artistry, and agility. Take Lenny in Christopher Nolan’s mind-bending Memento, or Dr. Edwardes in Hitchcock’s Spellbound. One has short term memory loss, the other amnesia, and what they know in their impaired states of mind is all the audience knows. Their stories build one foggy bread crumb at a time with many false steps and sudden revelations along the way. Each new reveal, true or not, ripples through the audience’s understanding of what has transpired, halting, upending, and enriching it. In Memento, we yearn to know who killed Lenny’s wife, and in Spellbound, the world sits rapt to see if the virtuous Gregory Peck (well, his character, Dr. Edwardes) is actually capable of murder. The gradual reparation of the splintered memories takes the viewer teasingly close to the truth, and then, in the denouement, the final curve masterfully reshapes and cements everything that came before it.  Continue reading →

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Oblivion

20 Apr

‘Oblivion’: Where the clichés go when Earth dies

It’s some 70 years in the future and Earth is a wasteland, barren and plucked clean by nukes. Nukes mind you that weren’t unleashed on man by fellow man, but man nuking invading aliens who, during their incursion, blasted the moon in half, throwing off the tides and setting off tsunamis and earthquakes that accelerated Earth’s demise to a radioactive and near uninhabitable state. So the final vestige of mankind, which lives above the planet on an inverted-pyramid-shaped monolith/spaceship, waits as turbines on Earth siphon off seawater and convert it to stored energy so they can jet off to a distant moon where a new Eden awaits.

All that’s the “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” preamble before we get to Herr Cruise. And the movie, in case you were wondering, is all about Tom Cruise. As one of the only two people remaining on the surface of the planet, there’s plenty of Tom time. Cruise plays Jack Harper (not to be confused with Jack Reacher, Cruise’s last role), a one-man militia and maintenance crew who keeps the turbines chugging and, with the aid of a smattering of drones, keeps the remaining aliens, embedded in caves and subterranean mazes of ruined stadiums, at bay. Jack’s partner Victoria, (U.K. actress Andrea Riseborough) helms the control console and reports up to command while Jack dashes about in his ornithopter (stealing that term from “Dune” because it’s applicable – more on that later) and tends to the drones and turbines. Continue reading →

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To the Wonder

14 Apr

‘To the Wonder’: Malick makes us wonder a little too much

The title says it all, and questions permeate. What’s it all about? Is Ben Affleck that wooden? Has Terrence Malick finally hit the skids and lost his uncanny ability to evoke through hypnotic lilts?

Many might have said the same about Malick’s last film, “The Tree of Life,” which ended up on most critics’ top 10 lists and even Ebert’s final top 10 of all time. Perhaps since that film was a contemplation about life big and small and the intricate interweavings that ripple through time and the endless cycles of joy, misery and death we all experience, it had a profound impact on the famed film critic as the final frame rolled.

It’s no wonder too, as that film was imbued with self-discovery and revelation, a veritable experience with different conclusions. Ask anyone who saw it and took something from it and they’ll likely have different interpretations and insights than you, and you’d both be right.

Continue reading →

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42

13 Apr

’42′: Jackie Robinson wins again

The new-look Red Sox bring the excitement back to Fenway after two downer years that made the preceding seven years of World Series bliss seem like 84 years away. You all remember “The Curse,” right? Those 84 years may still seem like a long time to go without. But consider the plight of blacks in America: nearly 100 years of slavery and almost another 100 until Civil Rights, then endless cycles of documented racism and prejudice thereafter.

Recent historical movies such as “Lincoln” and “Mississippi Burning” take us back and make us feel both ashamed and proud of our pasts – ashamed that anything like slavery, segregation or inequality of rights based on color was ever possible, proud we were able to correct the injustices and move beyond. “42” follows that vein. We all know Jackie Robinson was the first black player in Major League Baseball, but how many know the story of how he got there? Continue reading →

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Trance

11 Apr

Sedated three-way tangles in Boyle’s Trance  Going Under

by Tom Meek

tranceMAG.jpg

Trance

Directed by Danny Boyle
Starring Vincent Cassel, James McAvoy, Rosario Dawson
Rated R

Danny Boyle’s always had a way of tethering tension onscreen, keeping the audience on the edge while holding back just enough. Think of the calm serenity among the crew aboard the spaceship in Sunshine as it voyages uncertainly toward the sun on a mission to save an ice-encased Earth, or the pot head Eden in The Beach who ultimately erupts into Lord of the Flies savagery, and even before James Franco’s adventure seeker in 127 Hours gets pinned under the cruelest of all boulders, there’s a forbidding pall that hangs over him even as he frolics with two nubile hikers in a remote canyon pool.

Trance comes out of the gate a bit meaner as a midday hold-up of a London auction house goes somewhat sideways and the coveted object of the heist, Goya’s “Witches in Air,” winds up missing. It turns out Simon (James McAvoy), one of the auctioneers, is in cahoots with the robbers, but because he took a gun butt to the head during the robbery, he can’t remember where the Goya’s stashed.  Continue reading →

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Before there was Darfur

29 Mar

Before there was Darfur

Around the world

By TOM MEEK  |  January 17, 2007

With the US bogged down in Iraq and anti-American sentiment sweeping the globe, it’s hard to find an affirmative story about our country’s place in the world. John Dau has one to tell. Ten years ago he was languishing in a refugee camp in Kenya; today he’s building a house, working on a college degree, and providing for the people he was formerly powerless to help. “This country has people who are kind, they like to help others,” says Dau of the US.

A graceful, 6’8” expatriate, Dau is the subject of God Grew Tired of Us, a documentary that chronicles the journey of several Sudanese “Lost Boys” brought to the US through relief agencies. The title of the film falls from Dau’s lips as he tries to rationalize the dire situations he and 27,000 other boys endured when civil war broke out in the Sudan during the ’80s. The Islamic north had made it a priority to target young males in the Christian south to cull off future fighters. As a result the boys banded together and fled, traveling more than 1000 miles to refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya. En route, disease, hunger, wild animals, and the enemy decimated their ranks. Dau, who had been forced to flee at the age of 13, was among 3000-plus Lost Boys chosen for resettlement in the US in 2000-’01.

Dau became the focus of the film by chance. “They list the names on a board, and when I was looking, I saw some journalist, people carrying cameras and I didn’t know anything to do with journalism before, so I thought that the government of United States might have sent these people.” The man with the camera was director Christopher Quinn. “He asked me if he could ask me a few questions, and I said, ‘Okay.’ I only thought it would be two or three, but I never got rid of him.”

The transition to a “better place” — he ended up in Syracuse, New York — was not without its pitfalls. At first, says Dau, “coming to America was like a honeymoon. Every day the helper came to our apartment to show us how to cook, to show us how to go to the grocery store.” But after three months, when he was required to start his first job, requests for aid back home started pouring in. “Many of the Lost Boys in Africa know that we are working, so they call us,” he says. “So here you are, you have money, and bills, and people in Africa. If you say no to them it is against our culture, so when you pay the bills it really pulls you down.”

Since then Dau, now 34 and married, has helped raise more than $180,000 for a health clinic in his homeland and in December was appointed director of the Sudan Project, which is raising funds to rebuild Southern Sudan. He also has a similarly titled book coming out and has applied for US citizenship. “When I was in Africa, I was there. Did I do anything?” says Dau passionately, “No. So it is better to be an American citizen and help people back there, and that is very important.”

Violence in Darfur is still severe, but for now there is peace between the north and south. Dau notes the situation’s tenuous nature and points to 2011, when the South Sudanese will vote to unify with the north or secede. “I will go back to campaign to secede. Be independent. That will cut off the problem,” he says. “Let’s live side by side as neighbors.”

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God Grew Tired of Us

29 Mar

God Grew Tired of Us

A devastating and uplifting documentary

By TOM MEEK  |  January 17, 2007

Back in the ’80s, long before Darfur became a word linked with genocide in the Western media, the Islamic north waged a bloody campaign against the Christian farmers and tribesmen in the south, targeting young males. Known as the Lost Boys, some 27,000 youths fled more than 1000 miles to a UN refugee camp in Kenya. Along the way, many fell victim to hunger, lions, and enemy attacks. Eventually some 3600 made their way to the US. Narrated by Nicole Kidman, this documentary from Christopher Dillon Quinn and Tommy Walker follows a clutch of Lost Boys relocated to Pittsburgh and Syracuse. Their journey is telling of their culture, as well as our own. After the initial helping hand, many struggle to pay back their debt. And there’s the duress of isolation and not knowing whether family members are alive. John Dau, the film’s main subject, is an affable soul, full of wisdom and hope. After so much devastation, his grace and perseverance is an uplifting example for all.

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Spring Breakers

22 Mar

‘Spring Breakers’: Harmony Korine’s Day-Glo road trip to hell

“Spring break forever” and “pretend it’s just like a video game” are just a few of the naive, saccharine-sweet platitudes that roll off the lips of a quartet of sexually budding coeds in Harmony Korine’s cautionary tale of innocence adulterated and gone grotesquely awry, “Spring Breakers.” By the end of the film, those flighty mantras expand and take on a prophetically deep meaning that their utterers and the audience could not have predicted or prepared for. It’s one of the many charms Korine imbues into the Day-Glo road trip to hell.

Much has been made of the film’s casting, which dips into the well of Disney and transforms girly icons Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens into wanton purveyors of hedonism. This is Justin Bieber’s ex and the wholesome lead of “High School Musical” running around in bikinis, snorting coke and kissing other girls. But what else would one expect from the scripter of the l’enfant terrible eye-opener “Kids” and his subsequent turns as director of such psalms of sociopathy as “Gummo,” “Julien Donkey-Boy” and “Trash Humpers”?  Continue reading →

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Sucker Punch

20 Mar

Review: Sucker Punch

Loud, sexy, and inane

By TOM MEEK  |  March 31, 2011

The words “loud, sexy, and inane” pretty much sum up the latest from Zack Snyder. The director of 300 and Watchmen has plenty of visual panache, but when it comes to storytelling, he’s a bombastic hack. Sucker Punch is the dark ballad of Babydoll (Emily Browning), a sulking waif committed to a mental institution by her nefarious stepfather after her sister is found dead. A lobotomy awaits, and to gain her freedom, or some semblance of justice, Babydoll drops into alternative planes of reality that involve a sweatshop bordello, where her dance skills rival those of Salome, and a fantasy landscape where she and several other scantily clad inmates battle Nazis, orcs, and dragons. The visuals, backed by a hip soundtrack, offer a ripe spectacle, but the trivial framework and insipid dialogue rupture the spell so often that no dance, no matter how titillating, can punch it up.

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Crash

20 Mar

Road kill

Paul Haggis gives America the Crash test
BY TOM MEEK

Crash

Written and directed by Paul Haggis. With Matt Dillon, Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle, Terrence Howard, Thandie Newton, Brendan Fraser, Ludacris, Larenz Tate, and Michael Pena. A Lions Gate Films release (107 minutes). At the Boston Common, the Fenway, the Fresh Pond, and the Circle/Chestnut Hill and in the suburbs.
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YOU THINK YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE, but it turns out you have no idea.

In Sidney Lumet’s unheralded 1990 police drama Q&A, Nick Nolte delivers a blistering portrait of hate as a racist cop who struts through a New York City precinct with Machiavellian bravado, roasting minorities with racial epithets. No one dares touch him, not the higher-ups or his peers. The film may be about dirty cops and corruption, but underneath it all, Lumet lets us know that tribalism is alive and well in the urban jungles of contemporary society.

In Crash, Matt Dillon plays a similar character roaming an equally stark landscape, yet writer/director Paul Haggis, who sailed to the top of Hollywood’s It list after penning Million Dollar Baby, isn’t concerned with departmental politics. Instead, he slices into the racism and the elitism that are rife in America today.

Continue reading →

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