I’m hard pressed to know whether the appeal of “Escape from Tomorrow,” the much talked about 2013 Sundance Film Festival hit, is that it is a surreal psychological drama about a man who loses it at The Happiest Place on Earth, or if it is simply a stunt film, destined to be best known as the first feature film shot at Disneyland without the permission of the Mouse House folks.
Jim’s (Roy Abramsohn) life disintegrates when he is fired form his job. Unfortunately the middle-aged father of two is on vacation at Disneyland when he gets the news.
What should be a fun filled final day at the park soon becomes a nightmarish journey into Jim’s heart of darkness. While trying to navigate his wife and kids through the park, he becomes overwhelmed by the sensory overload, the artificial fun and even some sexy tourists.
As he slowly becomes immersed in the fantasyland inside his head and the Disney fantasy surrounding him he loses his grip on reality.
Director/writer Randy Moore and cast spent ten days shooting at Disney World with another two weeks at Disneyland, filming surreptitiously on small digital cameras.
The result is a stylish black-and-white movie—a Disney noir—that doesn’t reveal its guerilla roots. It’s a slick looking slice of surrealism that benefits greatly from its iconic setting. The manufactured gaiety of the surroundings provides production value far beyond what a micro budgeted feature like this could afford and is a perfect dreamlike backdrop for the story of the deconstruction of Jim and his psyche.
But I have to wonder if we’d be talking about this movie at all if not for the audacious circumstances surrounding its production. The film’s wonky pacing and indulgence of male fantasy—Princess / Prostitutes anyone?—would suggest this is a feature film that may have benefitted from some story and picture editing.
There are some good ideas here about not being able to run away from your problems, even if you are at the Happiest Pace on Earth but the film changes tone midway through and becomes more self aware as the insanity mounts. Bleeping the word Disney is jarring (although I imagine it is meant to draw a laugh) and too much exposition drags things down in the final half.
“Escape from Tomorrow” is definitely a one-of-a-kind cinematic experience (and the strangest film to bear any Disney imprint, legal or not) but despite Moore’s obvious passion the film feels like it is straining to reach feature length.
How did director J.C. Chandor convince screen legend Robert Redford to drop everything and star in a one man movie?
“He has a good ego on him, so he loved it,” says Chandor. “Just kidding. Actually he does have an ego, but he knows it, which is partially what makes him great.”
In All is Lost Redford plays a character called “our man,” a sailor on a solo yacht trip on the Indian Ocean. When his thirty-foot boat collides with an abandoned shipping container he must use all his resources to survive.
The actor is alone on camera for the entire film, battling the elements and facing his fate.
“I think he realized it was a wonderful time in his life to get rid of all the distractions,” says Chandor. “He has an unbelievably complicated and interesting life with Sundance, the Sundance Institute, his non profit work and directing.
“His life is a bit of a race but he came to Mexico for two-and-a-half months [to shoot the film]. His personal secretary was the only one who knew how to get in touch with him so all that other stuff faded away and for a two-and-a-half month period we went on this very intense journey.
“By the end of it we had gone someplace together, as a crew, an actor and a director. He really loved exposing himself both emotionally and as a performer more than he ever had.”
Critical reaction has been strong and Redford’s name is being tossed around as a shoo in for a Best Actor Oscar nomination.
“He was able to do these very complex emotional transitions but you don’t just see the shift [as a viewer] you actually feel like you’ve been on a little bit of the journey with him.”
It is a raw, emotional performance unlike anything Redford has done before on screen. In his virtually wordless performance the actor becomes a blank canvas that viewers may project their own notions of the meaning of life death and everything in between.
“If the film is working for you you’ll see the man go, ‘Don’t freak out, pull yourself together,’” Says Chandor. “[Redford] and I talked a lot about that. We are not people that have that kind of dialogue out loud so we internalized it. Our hope was that by internalizing it we would create a far more open book for the audience to bring their own hopes and fears to it. What you’re dealing with is one person coming to grips with death, alone.”
Big monsters are back. Movies like “The Host” and “Cloverfield” have reintroduced audiences to that rarest, but biggest of beasts, the giant out-of-control monster. Who needs vampires and zombies when you could have a ninety foot tall squid with a bad attitude and a Christmas bulb for a head?
The latest addition to the big monster genre is “Monsters,” an indie movie that reportedly only cost $15,000. Part road trip, part romance and all atmosphere, the story of Andrew (Scoot McNairy), an opportunistic photojournalist, who must escort his boss’s daughter, Sam (Whitney Able), back to the U.S. border through the treacherous quarantine area inhabited by… you guessed it, giant creatures left there when a NASA space craft carrying samples of extraterrestrial life crashed.
It’s a pure b-movie premise and for the first fifteen minutes or so promises to be little more than a Roger Corman film with better CGI. Then something happens. The movie becomes about the relationship between total opposites Andrew and Sam as they bond over their trip’s hardships and the strangeness of their surroundings. It’s a giant monster movie that focuses on the characters and despite some wild plot contrivances, it works.
The character study is a slow burn that leads up to the big reveal, the unveiling of the creatures. For most of the film they are seen and not heard but director Gareth Edwards paces the film carefully building up suspense through use of sound effects to climax with a wild mating dance between two of the Lovecraftian beasts. It’s a strangely beautiful and eerie sequence that brings the movie to a close.
“Monsters” isn’t as effective as “District 9” or “Cloverfield,” two other recent movies that introduced us to new creatures, but it is a complex film with timely messages about immigration (the US is protected by a giant fence to keep the monsters out) and our reactions in times of danger.
Cormac McCarthy may not be a household name around your place, unless you live with the Coen Brothers or maybe with the Pitt’s.
Literary critic Harold Bloom called the writer one of the four major American novelists of his time, and he has two all-star movies set for release, which may make his name a little more commonplace.
Later in 2013 James Franco directs, scripts and stars in Child of God, an adaptation of Cormac’s 1973 novel about, “a dispossessed, violent man whose life is a disastrous attempt to exist outside the social order.”
This weekend a star-studded cast lead by Brad Pitt, Cameron Diaz and Michael Fassbender headline The Counselor, directed by Ridley Scott.
Producer Steve Schwartz says the story of a lawyer in over his head after dipping his toe into the drug trade, “may be one of McCarthy’s most disturbing and powerful works.”
And that’s saying something about the writer who gave us a character like No Country for Old Men’s killing machine Anton Chigurh. Empire.com warned that when, “McCarthy throws “a dark character at you, it’s a safe assumption that you’re not going to be able to get them out of your head for a good, long while—if ever.”
As written by McCarthy and played by Javier Bardem, who earned an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the part, Chigurh is merciless, a murderer who makes life and death decisions with the flip of a coin.
The Road—a 2007 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction—is another disturbing McCarthy novel adapted for the big screen.
The story is simple. A man and his son (Viggo Mortenson and Kodi Smit-McPhee) try to survive in a dystopian world. Armed with only a gun and two bullets they must scavenge for food amid the ruins and protect themselves from cannibals who roam the desolate land.
The Road is a movie based on small moments set against a big backdrop. No parent will be able to forget the stark image of seeing a young boy who doesn’t know what a can of Coke is or a father teaching his son how to commit suicide.
It’s tough, no nonsense work from a writer who says he’s “not that big a fan of exotic foreign films,” especially movie with magical realism. “You know, it’s hard enough to get people to believe what you’re telling them without making it impossible,” he says. “It has to be vaguely plausible.”
Horror fans must have an almost permanent feeling of deja vu these days. It seems that the horror films that we grew up with in the 1960s and 70s, like The Amityville Horror, Dawn of the Dead, The Fog and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, are all being re-made, which makes the new releases list in the newspaper occasionally seem like it came from the Twilight Zone.
The latest cult horror film to find a new life in 2006 is The Hills Have Eyes, the 1977 Wes Craven film that gave us the immortal line, “We’re going to be French fries! Human French fries!”
The 2006 version is directed by the French director Alexandre Aja who gave us the deeply unpleasant, but rather effective thriller High Tension last year. For the most part Aja takes his lead from the original film about an unfortunate family of vacationers who get stranded in desert of New Mexico, falling prey to mutant cannibalistic hillbillies. The bad guys are descendents of miners who worked in this remote location and continued to live there even after the government started testing nuclear bombs in their backyard. A generation later they have mutated into some very unpleasant creatures with bad tempers and a taste for human flesh.
Aja’s version takes one major liberty with the source material. In the original Craven established that the mutants, although they were evil, were a family. In fact they mirrored the poor family they were terrorizing—all American verses Americans all messed up by their own country’s experiments. I thought the contrast was one of the strong points of that film and lent a tone of social commentary about nuclear testing to the piece.
Aja forgoes social comment for shocks, and although he takes his time getting to the hard-core action, once the thrills arrive they’re worth the wait. This movie is not for the easily disturbed or the faint of heart, but if you like your scares gruesome and fast paced the Hills Have Eyes is for you.
The pitch for “Jennifer’s Body” is certainly attention-grabbing. Mix “Transfomer’s” sexpot Megan Fox and “Juno” screenwriter and all round “it’ girl Diablo Cody and the result should be pure gold. Well, pure gore splattered gold in this case. “Jennifer’s Body” leaves behind the world of giant robots and pregnant teens for a bloody story about demonic transference and a cheerleading succubus who feeds on the intestines of teenage boys.
Despite its name the town of Devil’s Kettle, Minnesota is not a demonic hot spot. Not at least until a rock band named Low Shoulder plays at a local bar. At the concert are Jennifer Check (Fox) and Needy Lesnicky (Amanda Seyfried). Best friends since they were kids the underage girls are there to check out the band, and in Jennifer’s case, specifically the lead singer. When a fire breaks out in the bar, chaos ensues and as most of the concert goers are trapped inside, Jennifer and Needy make it out, but something is isn’t right. Jennifer is glassy eyed and unresponsive, and when Needy last sees her, in the band’s van. Later, when Jennifer comes back to visit Needy she isn’t so pretty anymore—unless blood covered, tar vomiting girls turn you on. Something has happened to Jennifer, but what? When boys from school start to go missing Needy thinks she might know…
“Jennifer’s Body” breathes the same air as the great Canadian horror film “Ginger Snaps.” Both are inventive takes on established horror mythology—in Ginger’s case it was the werewolf legend here it is demonic possession—both feature humor and lots of blood and guts. But—you had to know there was a “but” coming—where “Ginger Snaps” had effortless dialogue that sounded like real teenagers talking to one another, “Jennifer’s Body” is weighed down by the overly cute pen of Diablo Cody.
In Cody’s world teens talk as though they have Hollywood screenwriters feeding them lines. Oh wait! They do. They drop sparkling bon mots as easily as Dorothy Parker after her fifth martini in the Oak Room. Cody’s characters don’t get jealous, they get “jello;” they don’t feel ill they feel “boo hoo,” and when they curse they say things like “cheese and fries.” I’m all for inventive language but much of the dialogue here seems to be trying a bit too hard.
Cudos to Cody though for coming up with an inventive story and peppering the script with laughs. When she describes one of the creature’s victims resembling “lasgna with teeth,” when they found him it’s funny. It’s dark humor reminiscent of the horror comedies of the 1980s like “An American Werewolf in London” and “The Toxic Avenger” that covered the laughs with lots of red stuff.
At the heart of “Jennifer’s Body”—or should that be soul?—is Megan Fox. As the victim of a botched satanic ritual—they apparently don’t work if the sacrifice isn’t a virgin—she seems to be having more fun here than in either of the “Transformers” movies, but despite being this year’s Zeitgeist grabber she’s upstaged by Amanda Seyfried. Only in a movie like this could Seyfried be portrayed as the “dorky, plain girl.” I guess it’s because she wears glasses, but there is nothing dorky or plain about Seyfried or her character.
“Jennifer’s Body” is bound to grab a teenage audience—the gratuitous kissing scene between Fox and Seyfried alone is bound to sell tickets to many a seventeen-year-old boy—but despite being an enjoyable bit of fun, likely won’t have the same impact as Cody’s attention grabbing work on “Juno.”
Here’s a shot from the Q&A Richard hosted with the “Knights” of the Living Dead (from left to right) Russ Streiner, George A. Romero, and John Russo after the October 19, 2013 performance of “Night of the Living Dead Live”! Thanks to John Migliore for the photo!
Here’s a shot from the Q&A Richard hosted with the “Knights” of the Living Dead Russ Streiner, George A. Romero, and John Russo after the Oct 19, 2013 performance of “Night of the Living Dead Live”! Thanks to John Migliore for the photo!
I’m hard pressed to know whether the appeal of “Escape from Tomorrow,” the much talked about 2013 Sundance Film Festival hit, is that it is a surreal psychological drama about a man who loses it at The Happiest Place on Earth, or if it is simply a stunt film, destined to be best known as the first feature film shot at Disneyland without the permission of the Mouse House folks.
