From The Parallax Review Vaults: 10 to Midnight (1983)

The following review originally was written for The Parallax Review, a film review site of which I was the co-founder and managing editor. I have decided to collect the writings I did for The Parallax Review and preserve them here. I will be posting a few of these older pieces every week. My review of 10 to Midnight was for the “Cannon Corner” column of The Parallax Review.

by Matt Wedge, Managing Editor

From 1979-1993, the Cannon Group — headed by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus — released a string of surprisingly successful low-budget films. They made stars of Chuck Norris and Jean-Claude Van Damme, they lured bigger stars like Sylvester Stallone and Charles Bronson into their company, and they glommed onto huge franchise properties like Masters of the Universe, Superman, and Spider-Man. Despite the financial success of the films, the company almost always ran at a loss, and Cannon’s insistence on the lowest possible budget yielded bizarre but uniquely charming films. The goal of Cannon Corner is to pay homage to these films.

It’s incredibly hard to overestimate the effect of Dirty Harry on the police procedural. Forty years after its release, we still have films about cops quaking with righteous fury over a judicial system that they see as protecting vicious criminals. But in the ten to fifteen years after its release, outright knockoffs were even more commonplace. Most of these films were laughable exercises in glorifying police brutality. They became less about a cop trying to bring a crafty criminal to justice with one hand tied behind his back and more about angry, burned out cops at war with cartoonishly over-the-top criminals. These films usually lacked the moral ambiguities of Eastwood’s masterpiece. That’s why it’s so surprising to see a movie like 10 to Midnight.

Obviously, I have an affection for Cannon films. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t bother taking part in this column. But their attempts to cash in on popular genres and knockoffs of bigger budgeted fare led to far more misses than hits. You can understand why I expected a film that plugged Charles Bronson into a Dirty Harry-esque scenario would be nothing more than Paul Kersey from the Death Wish films with a badge. But 10 to Midnight defies expectations, delivering a solid procedural with surprising twists and grounded, believable characters.

Warren (Gene Davis) is a handsome guy who is often described by the women he encounters as “creepy.” It is easy to understand why they feel that way. Attempting to flirt, he comes on too strong, often staring for too long and standing too close. Pushed past the breaking point by a girl he has a crush on at his office, Warren sets up an “airtight” alibi, follows her and her boyfriend to the woods, strips off his clothes and murders them both, slasher-style, with a butterfly knife.

On the case is Lieutenant Leo Kessler (Bronson), a veteran detective who has given everything to his job. Saddled with McAnn (Andrew Stevens), an officious new partner, Leo finds himself taking the case too personally when he realizes that the victim is the daughter of a former neighbor.

Almost immediately, Leo and McAnn swoop in on Warren as their prime suspect. The only problem is his alibi and a lack of physical evidence. But when Warren becomes fixated on Laurie (Lisa Eilbacher), Leo’s nursing student daughter, Leo takes the drastic step of planting evidence to frame Warren for a murder that he actually committed. That’s when the cat and mouse game between cop and murderer really begins.

The film gets off to a rough start. There’s a stagey scene of Leo talking with a reporter where he lays out his basic philosophy of “whatever it takes” to get his man. This is quickly followed up by the initial murders, clumsily staged by veteran director J. Lee Thompson. But once the procedural aspects begin, the film reveals some unexpected strengths.

The relationship between Leo and McAnn is refreshingly low-key. Most films would have McAnn behave like a bumbling idiot while Leo yelled insults at him. But McAnn is portrayed as a solid detective who Leo gently pushes to always improve at his job. While the strained relationship between Leo and Laurie is caused by the stereotypical “he was too busy with his job to be a father” syndrome, Bronson and Eilbacher never play it too over-the-top, keeping their regrets and resentment simmering just below the surface. Even the romance that blossoms between Laurie and McAnn feels less perfunctory and more organic than we usually get from this genre.

In addition to the good performances by Bronson and Eilbacher, the rest of the cast delivers solid work. Stevens somehow makes the blandly written McAnn come across as a nice, decent guy instead of a stick in the mud. Davis hits just the right note of paranoid eeriness with flashes of believable anger. Add in the always steady Wilford Brimley and Geoffrey Lewis and you have a talented cast that elevates the occasionally stale dialogue.

It isn’t until a ridiculous climax that the film really stumbles. For most of the running time, Warren is portrayed as a clever criminal who is just a little off. He’s always in enough control of his emotions to be methodical about the way he carries out his crimes. Unfortunately, the script eventually turns him into a full-blown maniac who runs down streets, naked, waving his knife at a potential victim. I understand Thompson’s desire to offer up a “big” ending, but it flies in the face of the rest of the films’ quiet approach and plausibility.

Thankfully, the silly ending didn’t diminish my enjoyment of the rest of the film. Good work by the cast, a decent story, and likable characters help smooth over most of the rough patches and give us one of Bronson’s better films from the ’80s. It’s no masterpiece, but it exceeds its modest goals and emerges as a thoroughly satisfying morsel of entertainment.

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From The Parallax Review Vaults: Animal Kingdom (2010)

The following review originally was written for The Parallax Review, a film review site of which I was the co-founder and managing editor. I have decided to collect the writings I did for The Parallax Review and preserve them here. I will be posting a few of these older pieces every week. My review of Animal Kingdom was for the “In Theatres” section of The Parallax Review.

by Matt Wedge, Managing Editor

Animal Kingdom is an Australian film that operates as a highly effective look at a dysfunctional family slowly destroying itself. The fact that the family is comprised of armed robbers, drug dealers, and psychopathic murderers is almost beside the point. This family, even if they strictly obeyed the law, never stood a chance of surviving in the dark world presented.

At the center of the story is Josh (James Frecheville), a seventeen-year-old who is orphaned after the death of his mother by heroin overdose. Josh’s grandmother Janine (Jacki Weaver) takes him in. Janine is mother to three brothers who are all involved in various criminal enterprises. Pope (Ben Mendelsohn) is the oldest brother, an armed robber who specializes in violent bank holdups with his friend and partner-in-crime Barry (Joel Edgerton). Craig (Sullivan Stapleton) is a drug dealer who has the bad habit of sampling his merchandise. Youngest brother Darren (Luke Ford) mostly sits back and waits for Barry or Pope to tell him what to do. When Josh enters their world, the brothers (with the exception of Craig) are keeping a low profile. A special squad has been set up in the Melbourne police department to take down violent armed robbers. The problem is, the special squad is just as violent as the criminals. When the police murder Barry in cold blood, Pope takes it as a declaration of war and Josh is sucked into his plans for revenge.

Writer-director David Michôd keeps a firm handle on the disparate personalities and nightmarish world that the film portrays. He maintains a tone of constant dread, using short bursts of brutal violence and unnerving performances to reinforce the sense of doom that hangs over all of the characters. He makes it clear that this is a nihilistic world where the police are trigger-happy thugs, the criminals are mentally unstable, and the only way to survive is to kill or be killed. The only point at which Michôd fails is in the presentation of Josh.

As played by Frecheville, Josh is a blank slate. He spends most of the film in a passive state, never getting angry or frightened. He takes as a routine fact that his family is comprised of violent criminals. He has a loyal girlfriend he professes to love, but he stares at her as though she were nothing more than a spot on the wall. Perhaps this portrayal is not Frecheville’s fault. As written, Josh is an enigma. He does and says things that refuse to follow any kind of logic. He makes half-hearted attempts to extract himself from the criminal life of his family, but never is particularly disappointed when those attempts fail. When it is finally revealed that he has a plan for survival, it’s almost too late to care because he has remained such an impenetrable character throughout the bulk of the film.

While Josh is a black hole when it comes to audience interest, the film provides two of the most frightening screen villains to come along in recent years. Pope starts out as a haunted man, hiding out from the police and feeling left behind by his more successful brothers. He initially seems like a pitiable character. But when his true murderous nature comes to light, there seems to be no end to the darkness in his soul. As played by Mendelsohn, he is an awkward sociopath who demands loyalty and usually gets it through the fear he instills in others. He’s a sickening creature whose depravity knows no limits. On the other side of the coin is Janine. With her overuse of makeup, she initially comes across as a caricature of a middle-aged woman trying in vain to hold on to her looks. But when her family becomes vulnerable, she drops her comic persona and exposes herself as a frighteningly pragmatic woman, capable of defending the casual sacrifice of individual family members for the good of the others. With each action she takes in the third act, she resembles a cold-blooded killer far more than the affectionate matriarch at which she plays.

If it had a more understandable character at its center than Josh, Animal Kingdom would be a great film. As it exists, it’s merely a good one. It’s a powerful look at the corrosive effects drugs, violent crime, and mental illness can have on an already fragile family. Unfortunately, Josh is too aloof to be interesting or sympathetic and the audience is not given another character to root for. The result is a film of harsh power that not only lacks any entertainment value, but also is also exceedingly unpleasant.

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From The Parallax Review Vaults: The Beguiled (1971)

The following review originally was written for The Parallax Review, a film review site of which I was the co-founder and managing editor. I have decided to collect the writings I did for The Parallax Review and preserve them here. I will be posting a few of these older pieces every week. My review of The Beguiled was for the “On Cable” section of The Parallax Review.

by Matt Wedge, Managing Editor

Now Playing on Encore Westerns, Retroplex

From 1968-1980, legendary director Don Siegel averaged one film per year. When you look at even the busiest of current studio directors, that’s a pace that no one seems up to matching. That so many of those films were quite good speaks volumes about Siegel’s no-frills style of filmmaking. In 1971, he made two very different films with Clint Eastwood: Dirty Harry and The Beguiled. For both director and star, Dirty Harry was a film in their comfort zone. But The Beguiled may go down as the oddest vehicle either of them took on.

An increasingly goofy slice of Southern Gothic storytelling, the film tells the tale of Cpl. John McBurney (Eastwood), a Union soldier in the American Civil War. Shot in the leg, and bleeding profusely, he is discovered by Amy (Pamelyn Ferdin), a southern girl living at an all-girls’ school in an unnamed Confederate state. Amy helps McBurney to get away from a road and hides him next to a tree as Confederate soldiers ride past. In the first of several extremely uncomfortable moments the film offers up, McBurney gives the twelve-year-old Amy a long kiss to keep her from signaling the soldiers to his presence.

Immediately smitten, Amy helps McBurney back to her school, a large plantation house on an overgrown patch of land. The school is run by Martha (Geraldine Page), a high-strung woman who always seems to be five seconds from blowing up into a psychotic rage. Martha takes McBurney in to fix his leg and help build his strength up to a point where she can, in good conscience from saving his life, turn him over to the Confederate soldiers taking Union soldiers to a nearby prison.

The school is populated by six students, at least two of whom protest giving aid to an enemy soldier. But Edwina (Elizabeth Hartman), the sole teacher at the school, immediately takes a romantic interest in McBurney that is as much a result of her inexperience with men as it is love. Carol (Jo Ann Harris), one of the older students, also takes an interest in McBurney that has much more to do with carnal desires than any kind of romance. And then there’s Martha, whose brittle exterior and tightly-wound emotional state is initially thought to be a result of protecting the girls from the war. As the film goes on and the ever-strengthening McBurney starts using a silver tongue to stoke the flames of Edwina’s romantic longings and Carol’s sexual desires, Martha reveals herself to be a wounded, sexually confused character who has very personal reasons for not turning McBurney over to the Confederate troops when she has the chance.

Siegel seems to want The Beguiled to be a feminist morality tale. There is no doubt that McBurney is a sexual predator, one who gets what he wants by sweet-talking inexperienced young women and girls with promises of love, while feigning lust for Martha that flatters her and keeps him in her good graces. But at the same time that he’s willing to paint McBurney as the bad guy (despite casting Eastwood in the role), Siegel turns the women that we’re supposed to sympathize with into one-dimensional stereotypes. Martha is the sexually frustrated older woman. Edwina is the inexperienced woman who falls in love too easily. Carol is a lusty nymphomaniac. The women never grow beyond these roles, failing to become anything more than plot points. By making McBurney the more fully formed character and giving him just enough sympathetic moments to question his apparently salacious motives, Siegel muddies any feminist point he might be trying to make.

At the same time, Siegel offers up lip service to the evils of war. Through flashbacks, he shows McBurney cold-bloodedly killing on the battlefield and burning crops as part of the Union march through the South. Many times it’s mentioned that all of the girls’ fathers are assumed to be dead in battle. And encounters with supposedly friendly Confederate troops are moments fraught with tension for Martha as she never knows when a group of soldiers are going to strong-arm their way into the school and take the girls by force. Despite the shallow treatment these moments are given, for their clarity of purpose, they are still more effective than Siegel’s confused take on the battle of the sexes.

Despite the up-and-down nature of the narrative, Siegel does draw out some impressive performances (especially from Eastwood and Page). Even more impressively, he offers up a tone of barely repressed madness through the character of Martha and an incredibly horrifying scene of home surgery that quickly becomes a piece of Grand Guignol-style black comedy.

As a glimpse at the insanity that a war visits upon civilians, The Beguiled is a loopy but effective film. If the sexual politics that Siegel focuses so much attention on hadn’t been so muddled, it could have been a great cult film. As it is, it’s mainly a curiosity piece for fans of its director and star — an odd failure with some great moments.

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From The Parallax Review Vaults / The Movie Defender : Silent Hill (2006)

The following review originally was written for The Parallax Review, a film review site of which I was the co-founder and managing editor. I have decided to collect the writings I did for The Parallax Review and preserve them here. I will be posting a few of these older pieces every week. My review of Silent Hill was for the “Movie Defender” column of The Parallax Review.

by Matt Wedge, Managing Editor

If you’ve ever stumbled across a notorious critical and commercial bomb on cable and thought, Hey, this isn’t so bad, this is the column for you. Each month, we’ll examine a new failed film that’s worth a second look.

I had a nice conversation with seven or eight people coming down on the escalator after we all saw Silent Hill. They wanted me to explain it to them. I said I didn’t have a clue. — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

A few of the images are startling, but as Radha Mitchell (a good actress) wanders through a ghost town, searching for her lost daughter as though she was touring an abandoned movie set, Silent Hill is mostly paralyzing in its vagueness. — Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

From first frame to last, not a second of the film has a grip on reality. Structured around a series of blackouts and gross-outs, it is one long free fall through icky surrealism and underlighted nightmares. It takes us to the sort of world where hell is round the corner, secret doors abound and faux-blond policewomen outfit themselves in skin-tight leather. — Nathan Lee, New York Times

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that all movies based on video games suck.

Sorry, I don’t mean to paraphrase, but I have the feeling that if most film critics had their way, that last bit would have been added to the Declaration of Independence. Of course, snarkiness aside, I will admit that most films based on video games do indeed, reek of a quick money grab with no thought given to artistic or even entertainment value. Unfortunately, this pigeonholing of an entire genre can lead to good films being unfairly thought of as the cinematic equivalent of something you find on the sidewalk when the spring thaw melts away several months worth of snow.

Silent Hill actually did decent business when factoring in the worldwide numbers, so it technically doesn’t meet all of the requirements of a traditional Movie Defender write up, but it did take a whipping from the critics, currently sitting at a 29% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. At the same time, its IMDB user rating is a respectable 6.5. Obviously, this wouldn’t be the first time that a film is embraced by the public while being trashed by the critical community. And, as I’ve often pointed out, in most of those cases, the critics are right (yes, I realize this makes me sound like a snob, but I can live with it). But Silent Hill is one of those rare cases where the general moviegoing public is right and critics missed the boat.

Rose (Radha Mitchell) and Christopher (Sean Bean) are parents to an adopted daughter named Sharon (Jodelle Ferland). Sharon has the bad habit of sleepwalking and crying out, “Silent Hill!” in hysterical fits during these sleepwalking episodes. Determined to get to the bottom of the apparent psychological trauma that causes her daughter’s problems, Rose does some research to find that Silent Hill is a deserted town in West Virginia. It seems it was a coal-mining community that suffered a terrible tragedy when a fire started in the mines underneath the town, killing many of the residents. Knowing nothing about Sharon’s life before the adoption, Rose guesses that she must have some connection to the town and decides to take her there as a form of therapy. She does this over Christopher’s wishes, leaving without telling him.

Admittedly, so far, so cheesy. The plot setup plays like clichés from any number of bad horror films and Rose comes off as a terrible mother attempting some form of shock therapy for her daughter instead of getting her professional help. But then director Christophe Gans and writer Roger Avary start piling on the weird and outright freakish imagery and twists.

A motorcycle cop named Cybil (Laurie Holden) tries to pull Rose over. When Rose floors it for the offramp to Silent Hill, Cybil gives chase and finds herself trapped in the abandoned town with Rose, both of them searching for the suddenly missing Sharon. As they drift through the deserted town, ash falling from the sky, apparently from the coal fires that still burn underground, they encounter any number of terrifying and grotesque creatures and deformed people that attack through such varied means as spitting acid and tearing people’s skin from their bodies. In the midst of this cavalcade of horrors, they find a religious cult living in the town that call people they don’t understand witches and that may be the key to understanding the mystery of Sharon’s connection to Silent Hill.

Once the plot of the film kicks into high gear, I was surprised at how much the film had snuck up on me. The dialogue may be stiff and unnatural, but the pacing and imagery lend themselves to a surprising amount of suspense that Gans brilliantly exploits. By basically unmooring the film from any semblance of reality, Gans is able to steer audience expectations away from the routine mainstream movie world to an insane land where horrible things happen to well-meaning people. That twist in itself wouldn’t be so unusual, but Gans shows a complete lack of sympathy for the audience by never allowing the camera to turn away as these terrible things happen. The resulting horror the audience feels is made that much more powerful.

If there is a glaring problem with the film (beyond Avary’s stilted dialogue), it’s in a subplot that finds Christopher searching for Rose and Sharon. Cutting to his search every fifteen minutes or so, it feels as though Gans is following the orders of producers who want every penny of the money that they spent on casting Sean Bean to translate into extra screen time. I have nothing against Sean Bean and find him to be a solid, reliable actor, but Christopher’s subplot is unneeded. The only purpose it serves is to show more clearly that Rose and Sharon are in some sort of alternate dimension, since his explorations of Silent Hill show a markedly different town — one still deserted, but not filtered through falling ash and cut off from the outside world. But even that nugget of information feels like over-explanation. At just over two hours, the film does feel a bit long. Cutting most of this subplot would have tightened up the running time and increased the tension in the main plot.

But really, that is a minor complaint when it comes to a horror film that actually horrifies. I haven’t played the game upon which Silent Hill is based, so I don’t know how many of the truly freaky, scary creatures and plot twists have been made up by the Gans and Avary, and what was carried over from the game. I do know that they made my skin crawl, which is the mark of a good filmmaker, especially when it comes to upsetting a jaded horror fan like myself. By the time that the film’s climax becomes a bloody, gory, over-the-top exercise in grand guignol that I imagine is what The Crucible would look like if directed by Clive Barker, my jaw was hanging open in shock at the audacity of what Gans pulled off.

I don’t wish to mislead anyone, Silent Hill is not a perfect movie. There’s the problems I had with the Christopher subplot and the dialogue. But there’s also the fact that Gans is never able to completely cover up the film’s video game origins. The plot moves forward as a series of tasks that must be overcome and mysteries that have to be unraveled with conveniently placed clues.

But the sense of suffocating horror and malevolence that invades every frame is a stunning achievement. I’m willing to overlook some flaws to feel something resembling the type of fear I used to have when watching horror movies as a child. Essentially, that’s what Silent Hill boils down to. It’s the type of extreme vision you expected from those horror films you were never allowed to watch as a child. You can argue with the plot, but you can’t argue with the nerves it touches.

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From The Parallax Review Vault: Piranha 3D (2010)

The following review originally was written for The Parallax Review, a film review site of which I was the co-founder and managing editor. I have decided to collect the writings I did for The Parallax Review and preserve them here. I will be posting a few of these older pieces every week. My review of Piranha 3D was for the “In Theatres” section of The Parallax Review.

by Matt Wedge, Managing Editor

Joe Dante’s 1978 version of Piranha was a sly spoof of Jaws that featured well-conceived leads and carried with it warnings about the price of overly developing natural wonders into artificial tourist traps. This remake — the second after a 1995 TV-movie version — has no concerns with offering up a thoughtful subtext or interesting characters for the audience; all it wants to be is dumb, bloody fun. Director Alexandre Aja delivers on the dumb and bloody, but forgets all about the fun.

Lake Victoria, Arizona is a hotspot for college kids on spring break. As mass hedonism descends on the lake, an earthquake opens a cavern that connects the surface lake with an underground lake, out of which prehistoric piranha swarm. Quicker than you can say fish food, local sheriff Julie Forester (Elisabeth Shue) has more than drunken frat boys and Wild Wild Girls smut-peddler Derrick Jones (Jerry O’Connell) to worry about. The swarm of piranha makes their way to the local party marina where they proceed to feast on numerous barely clothed (and unclothed) coeds.

And that’s pretty much all there is to the movie.

I’m not trying to be a snarky film critic with that last comment; that is literally all there is to this movie. The first act is as dull a twenty minutes I’ve seen in a movie in a long time. Aja spends the bare minimum of time introducing the main characters and setting up what the piranha are and what they will do. A nominal protagonist is offered in teenager Jake (a suitably bland Steven R. McQueen), Julie’s son, but he does so many stupid things when we meet him that it’s impossible to care about him. In fact, it’s pretty much impossible to care about any character in this film since they’re not even characters. They can’t even be called caricatures; they are merely vessels for spewing exposition and to be eaten by the swimming digital beasties.

I realize all of that doesn’t matter. What matters is the carnage inflicted by said beasties. Aja does deliver with a stunning 25-minute sequence that features more blood, gore, and bodies being torn apart than the opening of Saving Private Ryan. But even this protracted bit of insanity fails to live up to the fun promised in the premise. Aside from the occasional bit of humor that comes with seeing a particularly hateful character (plot vessel) get his comeuppance, these scenes aren’t particularly entertaining. In fact, they’re rather grim. I can’t believe this was the tone that Aja was going for.

Even worse than offering up no character to care about or fumbling the tone when it comes to the carnage, Aja wastes a decent cast. Not only is Elisabeth Shue on hand to cash a paycheck, but also such varied (and usually reliable) actors like Adam Scott, Ving Rhames, Christopher Lloyd, and Richard Dreyfuss (in a cameo that spoofs his character of Matt Hooper from Jaws) pop up to wallow in the gutter for a few moments.

This seems like such a difficult premise to get wrong. Killer fish plus scantily clad coeds plus eclectic cast should equal a fun exploitation movie. Instead Aja fumbles the tone, the script by Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg is barely more than a loose collection of scenes, and the digital piranha look cartoonishly bad. Save yourself the money and rent Joe Dante’s original instead, you’ll be glad you did.

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From The Parallax Review Vaults: Opportunity Knocks (1990)

The following review originally was written for The Parallax Review, a film review site of which I was the co-founder and managing editor. I have decided to collect the writings I did for The Parallax Review and preserve them here. I will be posting a few of these older pieces every week. My review of Opportunity Knocks was for the “On Cable” section of The Parallax Review.

by Matt Wedge, Managing Editor

Now Playing on Cinemax

For an innocuous vehicle to capitalize on Dana Carvey’s popularity during his Saturday Night Live heyday, there’s something slightly distasteful about Opportunity Knocks. This lack of taste has nothing to do with Carvey, but with using his talents for mimicry and improvisation to tell a story about a con man seeking to rip off a wealthy Chicago businessman by getting his daughter to fall in love with him. Comedies about con artists work best when the person being conned is someone who deserves to be ripped off (The Sting). Here, I just found the premise so off-putting, it was hard to appreciate the minimal amount of actual comedic entertainment on display.

Eddie (Carvey) is a talented con man running small-time scams with his partner, Lou (Todd Graff). Lou is a screw-up who keeps them in debt to Sal (veteran hard-ass character actor James Tolkan), a local crime kingpin who hides his illegal activities behind his legitimate demolition company. When Eddie gets angry at Pinkie (Mike Bacarella), one of Sal’s goons, he steals what he thinks is Pinkie’s car to vandalize it. When he realizes the car actually belongs to Sal, he quickly abandons it. In a funny (one of the film’s only funny moments) time-lapse sequence, the car is stripped and vandalized over the course of one night. By the time Sal finds the car, it is nothing more than a shell of its former self. Even worse, Sal had $60,000 locked in the trunk that is now missing. Sal quickly learns that it was Eddie and Lou who took the car and puts a price on their heads. Eddie and Lou split up, and Eddie takes refuge in the suburban house of an out-of-town businessman.

Through the movie magic of mistaken identity, Milt (Robert Loggia) and Mona (Doris Belack), the parents of the owner of the house, confuse Eddie for their son’s house sitter, his best friend from Harvard. Before long, Eddie is formulating a plan to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from the successful Milt that involves going to work for him and romancing his daughter, Annie (Julia Campbell). That said plan involves Carvey making lots of funny voices and working in a George Bush (H.W., not W.) impression is a given.

The film wants to be a combination of a fish-out-of-water story combined with a traditional con game. But the fish-out-of-water story quickly grows thin when Eddies makes the transition from streetwise crook to master of the boardroom in record time. Even worse, the con game is too transparent to be interesting and becomes increasingly unpleasant as Milt, Mona, and Annie reveal themselves to be truly nice people. That Eddie finds himself having a crisis of conscience as he grows to love Annie and respect Milt, is supposed to show growth in his character. But what does it say about him when he still goes through with the con? Granted, the script by Mitchel Katlin and Nat Bernstein set up circumstances to have Eddie only go through with the con when Sal tracks him down and threatens to kill Lou. But the attempt to make Eddie likable by using his gifts as a con artist to slither out from under Sal’s thumb and try to make things right with Milt and Annie only come across as shallow and underhanded. By the time the requisite happy ending rolls around for Eddie in his reconnection with Annie, I was slightly sick to my stomach.

Obviously, a film like Opportunity Knocks is not meant to be taken seriously. The story doesn’t hold up to even casual scrutiny, and Milt and Annie react to Eddie’s antics in ways that no actual person would. But the film is so devoid of laughs, I found myself focusing on the leaky story and the awful psychological trickery that Eddie employs on characters that don’t deserve such callous treatment.

If there is a positive to be taken away from the film, it’s Carvey’s performance. When not doing silly voices and impersonations (some of which are quite good), he’s actually very charismatic and effective. He plays the scenes of Eddie questioning his path in life and the morality of what he’s doing to Milt and Annie with the weight of a serious drama and pulls the transition in tone off nicely. Maybe it’s just because Carvey’s movie career never took off or the fact that he’s so associated with his Saturday Night Live characters, but I was surprised at the range he showed.

Unfortunately, Carvey’s performance and a supporting cast of reliable character actors are unable to salvage much of anything from the wreckage of the script. As it exists, Opportunity Knocks has a fundamentally flawed idea at its core. The inability to deliver in the comedy department only makes the story problems more glaringly obvious.

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From The Parallax Review Vaults: The Kids Are All Right (2010)

The following review originally was written for The Parallax Review, a film review site of which I was the co-founder and managing editor. I have decided to collect the writings I did for The Parallax Review and preserve them here. I will be posting a few of these older pieces every week. My review of The Kids Are All Right was for the “In Theatres” section of The Parallax Review.

by Matt Wedge, Managing Editor

The Kids Are All Right is a good but frustrating movie. On the one hand, it features an honestly original story with some very good acting. On the other hand, co-writer/director Lisa Cholodenko finds it difficult to just get out of the way and let the story play out. It’s not that she’s using unnecessarily flashy camerawork or editing; she just doesn’t seem to trust that the audience is smart enough to understand what she is trying to accomplish. This results in three cringe-inducing monologues that bring the film screeching to a halt.

Jules (Julianne Moore) and Nic (Annette Bening) are longtime partners who have two children. Their oldest, Joni (Mia Wasikowska), is preparing to leave for college, while fifteen-year-old Laser (Josh Hutcherson) is a (thankfully non-stereotypical) jock who hangs out with a real jerk of a friend. When Laser and Joni track down and meet their biological father, Paul (Mark Ruffalo playing a slightly more successful version of his irresponsible man-child routine), the family dynamics are shaken up to such a point that none of the characters will ever be the same again.

Cholodenko takes pains to portray the nontraditional family unit as being just as normal as any family with a mother and father. Nic is the stern, uptight parent who is a successful doctor. Jules is the loving wife with hippie leanings who wants to branch out beyond her domestic duties and start a business. Joni and Laser are sweet, intelligent kids who are going through the traditional growing pains involving sex, peer pressure, and growing apart from friends with whom they no longer have much in common.

The early scenes of their routine domestic life are well-acted (especially by Moore), if a little dull. While Nic drinks too much wine and lets the pressures of her job and being a mother take over her life, she ignores Jules’s needs to the point of taking her wife for granted. With the introduction of Paul into the mix, Nic chafes at his ability to bond so quickly with Joni, who has been slowly drifting away. As Paul becomes increasingly present in the lives of the kids, Nic becomes angry and possessive, feeling she’s being replaced in her own family. Meanwhile, Jules, upset with being taken for granted, acts out in ways that surprises even herself. This dynamic works well for the film and makes for very engrossing viewing.

Unfortunately, Cholodenko gives Nic several speeches where she articulates exactly what she is thinking, instead of letting Bening’s bitter take on her character get across her feelings. The same thing happens with Joni and Jules, as they lay out exactly what they are thinking and feeling in prolonged monologues. This is not necessarily a deal breaker as far the film goes. Moore, Bening, and Wasikowska all do excellent work in the film, and they put everything they have into these scenes. Still, with as natural as the dialogue and performances in the rest of the film are, I couldn’t help but feel that, as written, these scenes were the fake kind of emoting that are used for clips at the Oscars.

If not for the need to hit the audience over the head every now and then, The Kids Are All Right could have been a great film. As it is, it’s merely a good one. It’s entertaining, with some emotional honesty and great work by the entire cast. Cholodenko also shows a generous amount of sympathy for all the characters, even when they are making poor decisions that have disastrous consequences not just for them, but the people they love. I just wish the characters had been allowed to tell the story through their own words and actions, instead of resorting to canned speeches when it matters most.

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From The Parallax Review Vaults: Black Irish (2007)

The following review originally was written for The Parallax Review, a film review site of which I was the co-founder and managing editor. I have decided to collect the writings I did for The Parallax Review and preserve them here. I will be posting a few of these older pieces every week. My review of Black Irish was for the “On Cable” section of The Parallax Review.

by Matt Wedge, Managing Editor

Now Playing on Starz Cinema     

I have long suspected that the only reason independent American films about unhappy, working-class families are set in places like Long Island, South Boston, and the Southside of Chicago is so they can attract actors who really want to do an accent, but can’t pull off playing a Brit. Black Irish is just more evidence to confirm my suspicions.

It would be an understatement to say that the McCoy family is a miserable bunch. Patriarch Desmond (Brendan Gleeson) is unemployed and — in the best clichéd Irish-American tradition — a functioning alcoholic. His wife, Margaret (Melissa Leo), no longer loves him, only staying with him out of a misguided belief that being married is better for the children. And oh, what a stereotypical brood they have. Terry (Tom Guiry) is the oldest. He is a teenaged thug who always seems to be one screw-up away from going to prison for most of his adult life. Kathleen (Emily VanCamp) is the middle child. She is pregnant and in no hurry to get married, making her an embarrassment to her righteous Catholic mother. Cole (Michael Angarano) is the youngest. He’s the “good” child who never gets in trouble, is a pitching phenom, and is a whiz kid at his Catholic school, where he is on the fast-track to the seminary.

Most of the film follows Cole as he leaves Catholic school, discovers the horrors of attending public school with his borderline psychotic brother, gets his first job, goes through the humiliations of dating, and proves himself on the baseball field. All the while, he tries to connect with his distant father and deal with the fact that he no longer is interested in the Priesthood. This is a lot to ask of a great actor, let alone one who is only as adequate as Angarano.

As if the plot was not busy enough with Cole’s myriad coming-of-age problems, writer-director Brad Gann piles on subplots about Kathleen’s pregnancy and a terminal cancer diagnosis for one of the family members. All of these plot threads are introduced by the middle of the second act, turning the film into a lumbering monster of overwrought melodrama. This is too bad, because, with some trimming back of a few of the more extraneous plotlines, Black Irish could have been a decent, if unexceptional indie-film.

The cast does what they can to save the film from Gann’s overly ambitious plot. Angarano, while overmatched by the material and most of the cast, isn’t bad. He remains likable even as he goes overboard on the “Bawston” accent. Gleeson is reliable, as usual. While his character is verbally abusive when drunk or angry, he tempers this with the attitude of a man who can step back and see the humor in the absurdity of the way everyone around him behaves. I’m sure this was not intended, but in a way, he plays Desmond as the audience surrogate, taking in the drama of the proceedings and seeing it for the overblown mess that it actually is. Guiry does his best impression of Matt Damon from Good Will Hunting, which is not all that good. VanCamp is lovely but vacant as the shamed sister. Leo is given next to nothing to play, but at least she sports a flawless Irish accent.

And that is the problem with the movie in a nutshell: so much time was spent on accents, finding the perfect locations, and lighting everything moodily, yet apparently no time was spent trying to come up with a story that didn’t hit one clichéd plot point after another. By the forty-minute mark, I knew exactly how the film was going to play out to the end. With the exception of one scene (Cole’s truly funny and terrible first date), there was nothing surprising or interesting about this film.

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From The Parallax Review Vaults: The Woods (2006)

The following review originally was written for The Parallax Review, a film review site of which I was the co-founder and managing editor. I have decided to collect the writings I did for The Parallax Review and preserve them here. I will be posting a few of these older pieces every week. My review of The Woods was for the “Bargain Bin” column of The Parallax Review.

by Matt Wedge, Managing Editor

Every month, at least one movie is quietly shuffled onto DVD despite having major stars and intriguing premises. Bargain Bin seeks to find the direct-to-video features unjustly buried by studios.

Admittedly, The Woods barely holds the minimum requirements for a Bargain Bin column. Individually, there is no member of the cast who I would say it’s a shock to see in a direct-to-DVD feature. But combining them all in one feature without even the briefest of a theatrical release is somewhat surprising. Given how long the film sat on the shelf before being quietly slipped to the home video market with a barebones DVD, you would think it was a true stinker, an embarrassment that the better known members of the cast would quietly drop from their résumés. The truth is the exact opposite.

The film takes place in 1965. Heather (Agnes Bruckner) is a sullen teenager who is shipped off to a boarding school by her parents (Emma Campbell, Bruce Campbell) after numerous fights with her mother finally lead her to set fire to a tree in their yard. The school, a large gothic building, sits in the middle of an overgrown patch of woods. The woods have actually grown so close to the school that vines extend through the windows and along the interior walls while dead leaves blow through the hallways. If not for the students and teachers, the school would appear to be deserted.

Once dumped at the school, Heather finds herself the subject of special attention by the headmistress, Ms. Traverse (Patricia Clarkson) and the uppity school bully, Samantha (Rachel Nichols). Ms Traverse conducts special one-on-one sessions with Heather that are supposedly a requirement of her scholarship. These sessions find Ms. Traverse asking Heather to do everything from balancing rocks to answering personally invasive questions designed to draw out emotional responses. Meanwhile, Samantha makes it her mission to make Heather’s life a living hell and drive her from the school. While she initially comes across as a stereotypical “mean girl,” Samantha is eventually revealed to have very logical motives for her behavior that are best learned from watching the film and not by a spoiler in a review.

Unhappy at being dumped at the school, creeped out by Ms. Traverse’s special attention, and pissed off by Samantha’s taunts and threats, Heather quickly becomes an outcast. She quietly connects with Marcy (Lauren Birkell), another outcast at the school. Through Marcy and the other girls, Heather learns of a bloody legend that the school was violently overtaken by a sisterhood of witches a hundred years earlier. While she says nothing to the teachers or other students, Heather has had terrible nightmares about the woods and a mysterious student who tried to commit suicide. When combined with an effective sequence where she becomes lost in the woods, hears whispering voices, and sees figures darting among the trees, the legend takes on a disturbing plausibility to Heather.

The script by David Ross is rather derivative. With a story centered on the new girl in a boarding school that may be run by witches, it lifts whole chunks of the plot to Suspiria, leaving behind (most of) the graphic violence of Dario Argento’s Technicolor nightmare. But Ross manages to make the familiar story work by giving true dimensions to Heather, Samantha, and Ms. Traverse. Even the seemingly clichéd roles of the ineffectual parents are afforded extra shading to make them more than they initially appear. For most of the first two acts, the film focuses more on building the characters and creating an atmosphere of decay and desperation among the teachers.

It’s the commitment to character building and slowly ratcheting up the tension that makes the film stand out as a superior horror film. This is not surprising considering that director Lucky McKee made one of the best horror films of the decade with May, another female-centric film that focused on an outsider as she dealt with coming-of-age issues complicated by the demands of the horror genre. Like May, The Woods depends heavily on a stellar lead performance to anchor the film’s melancholy tone, leisurely pace, and drops of dark humor. Bruckner is more than up to the job. She’s able to handle Heather’s hardboiled, tough-girl dialogue with panache while maintaining audience sympathy. Unlike many other actresses her age, she’s also not afraid to let Heather show off complex emotions. She plays Heather’s friendship with Marcy tenderly, allowing furtive smiles to break up her normal tough-as-nails exterior. When she and Marcy have a falling out, it’s that much more upsetting for the audience when Heather destroys the most symbolic object of their bond. Their friendship feels real because of the complex emotions that Bruckner and Birkell play so well.

This complexity carries over to the supporting characters. Just when you think you have them pegged as a “type,” characters are revealed to have unexpected subtlety or hidden reasons for behaving the way they do. This applies not just to Samantha, but also Ms. Traverse (who is a tad underwritten, but Clarkson’s performance balances out the character’s inherent menace with a surprising amount of sympathy), Marcy, and Heather’s parents as the plot ensnares them in the final act. It’s a real credit to McKee, Ross, and the actors that the characters all feel so real and don’t fall victim to the normal horror movie clichés.

The Woods was completed and ready for release in 2004. At that time, Agnes Bruckner and Rachel Nichols were both considered rising stars; Patricia Clarkson was coming off an Oscar nomination for Pieces of April; and Bruce Campbell had already secured his place as a legendary cult favorite by starring in the Evil Dead films and the TV show The Adventures of Brisco County Jr., among many other titles. Bruckner had risen from doing soap operas as a child actor to guest roles on 24 and Alias to high-profile indies Blue Car, Haven, and Stateside. Nichols had a memorable supporting role in the otherwise forgettable Amityville Horror remake and was getting ready to start a high-profile role on Alias. While Bruckner has continued to work steadily, she has yet to blossom into the star so many expected her to be just a few short years ago. Nichols has built her career with a lead role in the horror film P2 and prominent roles in Star Trek and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. Clarkson has continued to be one of the busiest character actors in Hollywood. Campbell has arguably achieved his most widespread fame as one of the stars of Burn Notice. So why hasn’t The Woods achieved the cult status it deserves?

I believe the simple answer is that it’s too good. When you step back and take a look at the plot from the point of view of a video store customer looking for a cheap thrill, The Woods has to feel disappointing. It’s a horror film that takes its cues from slow-burn classics like Rosemary’s Baby and the original The Haunting. It revolves around an all-girls boarding school, without sexualizing or fetishizing the students. Aside from a nearly surreal climax that finds an axe being put to effective use against the skulls of various evildoers, there is next to no gore. When what is expected to be a trashy movie to watch with friends while consuming a six pack and a pizza turns out to be a thoughtful, character-based exercise in sustained mood and suspense, the word-of-mouth can become toxic.

Which is yet another shame that the movie missed the theatrical release that might have garnered it the art-house audience that would have appreciated it. A victim of United Artists’ and MGM’s financial woes, McKee never directed the film to be a straight-to-DVD release. Given a reported $10-$12 million budget, every dollar is on the screen in terrific production design with elaborate period details, pristine photography by veteran cinematographer John R. Leonetti, and the impressive cast. This is the type of film that the horror genre desperately needed at the time of its production (and still needs to this day). It’s ripe for discovery and deserves recognition as an under-seen mini-classic.

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From The Parallax Review Vaults: The Fighter (2010)

The following review originally was written for The Parallax Review, a film review site of which I was the co-founder and managing editor. I have decided to collect the writings I did for The Parallax Review and preserve them here. I will be posting a few of these older pieces every week. My review of The Fighter was for the “In Theatres” section of The Parallax Review.

by Matt Wedge, Managing Editor

An underdeveloped script can only hide for so long behind good direction and performances. In the case of The Fighter, the amount of time that director David O. Russell and his talented cast are able to distract the audience from underwritten characters and the clichés that they act out is approximately ninety minutes. It’s too bad that the film goes on for another twenty minutes.

Set in the blue-collar town of Lowell, Massachusetts, Mark Wahlberg is perfectly cast as Mickey Ward, a promising boxer held back by his domineering mother, Alice (Melissa Leo), and his crackhead brother, Dicky (Christian Bale). Alice and Dicky act as Mickey’s manager and trainer, respectively. But they both do a lousy job in their roles with Alice setting up fights that Mickey has no shot at winning and Dicky often too strung-out in a crack house to properly prepare Micky for the fights. When he gets pummeled by a boxer twenty pounds bigger than he is, Mickey takes a break from boxing.

Spurred on by his new girlfriend, Charlene (Amy Adams), Mickey makes a break from Dicky and Alice. He signs on with a new manager set up by his father, George (Jack McGee), and trains with O’Keefe (Mickey O’Keefe, playing himself), a local policeman who sees the potential for Mickey to break away from the family who is holding him back.

Based upon the real life of Mickey Ward, the story is rife with conflict and dramatic potential. For most of the way, Wahlberg, Bale, Leo, and Adams manage to sell their characters as people with hidden wounds and secret reasons for behaving the way they do, but eventually the script catches up to them with a poorly written scene between Dicky and Charlene where they hash out their differences to do the right thing for Mickey. It’s a moment that should be a dramatic turning point in an inspiring underdog story. But the dialogue is so frustratingly on-the-nose, with the characters speaking in obvious platitudes that not even Bale and Adams can keep from sounding forced, that it pulled me right out of the movie. It was then that I realized that the rest of the film contained countless scenes of characters explaining who they are and why they have turned out this way in fairly unrealistic ways. It was strictly the impressive performances that kept these scenes from coming across as obvious and simplistic.

But there is something to be said for Russell and his cast that they are able to take a script that squanders such a good story and make it into a watchable, very entertaining film for most of its running time.

Never before has Wahlberg’s reserved, nice-guy persona been put to such good use. Mickey spends much of the film (and, I assume, his life up to the film’s starting point), trying to make everyone happy while quietly shrinking in his brother’s outsized shadow (Dicky is the self-proclaimed “pride of Lowell” for going ten rounds with Sugar Ray Leonard and knocking him down). The hurt, embarrassment, and confusion about the fact that his mother dotes on washed-up loser Dicky, while he is the son who has a shot to make something of himself, is ever-present on Wahlberg’s face. He easily made me forget that much of the mess Mickey has made of his life is his own making, and had me rooting for him to finally stand up for himself.

But the questions I had about the many other relationships in the film all point to a frustrating lack of detail when it comes to the characters. Why is Alice so blind to Dicky’s faults? Why does George put up with the way Alice treats Mickey? He obviously thinks Mickey should strike out on his own, away from the family, but until Dicky is sent to prison, George doesn’t make a move. Sometimes it is best to leave questions unanswered, but here the lack of answers become frustrating. Even worse, these questions make Leo and McGee work overtime to keep their characters from being total enigmas, while all around them other characters are spelling out their motivations in forced question and answer sessions.

Even with all my complaints regarding the script, I have to admit that I enjoyed the film. Russell adds some much-needed humor and propels the film along to its inevitable, but uplifting conclusion. As a feel-good movie and exercise in impressive acting, The Fighter is worthy entertainment. Just be prepared for the post-movie letdown as you realize the puzzle pieces don’t fit.

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