Jane Levy has a diverse resume that includes the cable hit Shameless (where she dies in a most fiery way), the sitcom Suburgatory and the 2013 remake of Evil Dead. But her new film, Bang Bang Baby takes her back to where she began: singing and dancing.
“I did musical theatre, mostly because it was the only theatre available, not to say anything negative about that, but I wanted to be an actor. I loved drama and that was the way to do it so I was in all the plays. I was in Annie. I was in Oklahoma. I was in Annie Get Your Gun and The Wizard of Oz,” When she was seven years old the California native recalls about her seven -year-old self.
She warbled her way through Broadway-style shows until she was about thirteen when she traded the stage for the soccer field. It took a few years but eventually she felt a familiar draw.
“I was eighteen and I just finished my first year of college and I hated school,” she says. “I was miserable the whole year and I couldn’t quite figure out why.
“I was in Europe with my friend and I said, ‘You know what? I’m not going to do it anymore. I’m not going to school. Why not pursue the thing that I know has always been, deep down, my dream?’”
She’s back to basics in Bang Bang Baby, a strange new big screen sci-fi musical that gives her the chance to strut her stuff. In it, she plays Stepphy, a 1960s teenager whose dreams of rock ’n’ roll stardom are dashed when a chemical leak in her town causes mass mutations and “threatens to turn her dream into a nightmare.”
When she first saw the script she says, “I thought, how cool and how strange. I thought it would be a challenge to explore singing and dancing which is something I had done as a kid but not since. And I also thought how unusual, how peculiar, how fun.”
Levy has a whole slate of films on the way, including the much-anticipated animated movie Monster Trucks, but the best part of it all, she says, is that she is able to act in a variety of projects.
“For me, I feel like this is the thing I have to do. This is the thing I enjoy the most and this is the thing I’m best at.”
“Real horror has always thrived in the mainstream and elsewhere. Always will.”
When was the last time you were freaked out by a Hollywood movie?
I can admit that It Follows and Unfriended raised a few goosebumps and I recall a Saturday matinee screening of Paranormal Activity that was the first and only time I have ever heard anyone actually scream in a theatre. I don’t mean a quiet whimper followed by an embarrassed laugh or a frightened little squeal. I mean a full-on, open-throated howl of terror.
But these days it seems to me those moments are becoming fewer and further between. Zombies have gone mainstream, vampires now sparkle in the sun and werewolves have hipster hairdos.
I find the news more upsetting than most mainstream monster movies.
A recent re-watch of In Cold Blood gave me a jolt unlike any recent traditional gore fest.
It’s not a horror film in the conventional sense, but because it’s a true story of a senseless murder, it sent shivers down my spine.
A new film this weekend, the haunted home-movie tale Sinister 2, can only be called a horror movie because it is so poorly made. It is terrifyingly badly made but there is nothing that will actually give you nightmares, and isn’t that the whole point?
George Mihalka, director of My Bloody Valentine — a movie Quentin Tarantino calls his all-time favourite slasher film — agrees that conventional horror is in a rut.
“As long as mainstream horror focuses on glossy monsters and the perfectly backlit villain and stylish gore shots that could pass for TV commercial beauty shots where blood and victims are interchangeable with beer and models, there is nothing left to fear,” he says.
“An honest well-developed character is the reflective mirror that conveys the reality of the monster, villain, serial killer, ghost, zombie or vampire. If there is no truth or reality in the performance we cannot truly believe in the menace. We are left as numb, detached voyeurs of slick boogeymen or at best rooting for them to kill off the annoying bad acting of interchangeable pretty plastic people.”
Horror hero and Rue Morgue editor-in-chief Dave Alexander agrees that much Hollywood horror errs on the safe side, but says there are still thrills to be had at the movies.
“Foreign and indie horror movies — those titles that play genre festivals — are the most exciting and innovative because they’re not as bound by the Hollywood business model that favours remakes, sequels and chasing trends. That said, there are still chills to be had at the multiplex when a breakout title with an original concept comes along — one of the best recent examples being It Follows.”
Chris Alexander, editor-in-chief of legendary N.Y.C.-based horror and dark fantasy film culture magazine Fangoria says “real horror has always thrived in the mainstream and elsewhere. Always will.”
“Throughout horror history, there have always been ‘lite’ versions of more palpable big-screen terrors. From the various monster comedies of the 1940s (how many times did Bela run afoul of Bowery Boys and Brooklyn Gorillas?) to Abbott and Costello romps to The Munsters. And Dark Shadows was a vampire soap opera that romanticized vampires for lonely housewives.
“Horror in the mainstream has long been a gateway drug for young people and, if they are affected and obsessed by the films they see with their pals on a Friday night, they’ll likely begin the endless quest to ‘chase the dragon’ and find darker terrors, which are in large supply, internationally. If it wasn’t… I’d be out of a job!”
“Mistress America,” the new Noah Baumbach farce, is a small gem, a movie so lovingly crafted and cast I’m tempted to pull out the Film Critic’s Big Book of Superlatives to adequately find words to describe it.
Like many of the director’s previous films it’s a New York-centric story, focussing on two characters, aspiring writer and Barnard College freshman Tracy (Lola Kirke) and her soon-to-be stepsister Brooke (Greta Gerwig). Brook is a much-needed breath of fresh air in Tracy’s stale college experience. She’s a few years older, has a zest for life Tracy has never experienced before, and, perhaps most importantly, inspires the young writer to do her best work. “There’s nothing I don’t know about myself,” she says, “and that’s why I don’t need therapy.”
Brook’s goal of opening a restaurant looks like it’s about to be sidelined when her rich boyfriend breaks up with her, taking his investment with him. Desperate for cash she convinces Tracy and two friends (Matthew Shear and Jasmine Cephas-Jones) from school to accompany her as she faces her fears and hits up an ex (Michael Chernus) and his wife (Heather Lind), a woman Brook calls her nemesis, for seed money. Secrets are revealed and lives are changed in a comedy of manners that would make Ernst Lubitsch proud.
At a scant 85 minutes this is a firecracker of a movie. Sharply observed, it’s an arch look at growing up, growing old (Brook feels over-the-hill at age 30) and the pressures that come with the passing of time. “Sometimes I think I’m a genius,” says Tracy’s friend Tony, “and I wish I could just fast-forward to that moment so everyone can see why.” Brook and Tracy speak in a cavalcade of words, volleying ideas and schemes back and worth.
Kirke is a naturalistic anchor for Gerwig’s flights of fancy, but they fit together like puzzle pieces.
The effervescent chemistry between these two is the heart of the film, but as more characters enter and the farce escalates the movie crackles with mad energy. Like early Woody Allen it feels like it’s riding the edge of going off the rails but is kept straight and true by Baumbach‘s rock solid direction.
“American Mistress” is unabashedly smart, funny and joyful. It’s a story that exists in it’s own carefully constructed world but peel back the layers and it has much to say about female mentoring relationships and the responsibilities inherent in those relationships. It’s about friendship, but above all, it’s about entertaining the audience.
“Fort Tilden,” the SxSW Grand Jury Prize winner, is essentially a two-hander starring Bridey Elliott and Clare McNulty as the two worst people in Williamsburg trying to make their way to a beach near Rockaway. Funny and insightful, it might be the most quotable movie of the year.
Allie (McNulty) and Harper (Elliott) are snarky, aimless Brooklyn twentysomethings who accept an invite from two handsome guys to spend a hot summer day at Fort Tilden. Harper is an artist who relies on her father’s money while Allie considers a two year stint in the Corps before returning to study law… or acupuncture. Turns out they are just as clueless about the trip as they are in life. Beginning the journey on bicycles, they dodge texts from Allie’s Peace Corps recruiter, go shopping, argue, impose on friends for transportation and take a rather expensive taxi ride. Thelma and Louise they ain’t.
Unwittingly the daytrip becomes a metaphor for their lives, pushing them to examine their path—to Fort Tilden and in life—and where their decisions will lead them.
Sharply written and hilarious, “Fort Tilden” is a snapshot of post millennial self-absorption and angst. We’ve seen that before, embodied by everyone in young Hollywood from Kristen Stewart to Jesse Eisenberg, but rarely has a movie embraced the unlikeability of its characters in such a wholehearted way. Allie and Harper truly may be the most oblivious, self-entitled twits to ever grace a movie screen, but when they’re spouting truly inspired lines like, “I didn’t believe her personality choice,” or “They are so boring, they’re like chapters in a book it’s OK to skip,” who cares. They may be objectionable on almost every level, but as it turns out they’re also starring in the year’s most quotable movie.
McNulty and Elliott (daughter of Chris Elliott, granddaughter of Bob and Ray) have the chemistry of people who have known one another forever, they have a rapport but when things take a turn and the ugly side of resentment bubbles up, they go at it as only close friends can. They’re Kardashians on steroids and every one of their “OMGs” both alienates them from and endears them to the audience.
At the end of the journey “Fort Tilden” is a story not about two cruel and narcissistic young people, but about a pair of women whose so-hip-it-hurts exteriors hide delicate inner lives plagued by neediness and self doubt. What begins in the shallow end of the story pool ends in the deep end, showing empathy for characters who, themselves, have little of that virtue.
“Hmmm… it needs a twist, something to make it fresh.”
“How about a young, stoned Jason Bourne?”
“Like Cheech and Chong and Robert Ludlum had a baby? Bingo!”
The movie is three days in the life of Mike and Phoebe (Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart). Young and in love, they live in small town Liman, West Virginia. When she isn’t working at a local bail bond joint and he’s not clerking at a rundown Cash ‘N’ Carry, they spend their days getting high and riffing on Mike’s idea for a comic book about an astronaut ape.
Meanwhile in Langley a midlevel CIA bureaucrat (Topher Grace) is looking to close the file on the abandoned Ultra Program, a government project that offered third strike drug offenders a chance to become part of an experimental program in return for their freedom. They were turned into highly skilled assassins. Trouble was, it didn’t work. The only success story was Mike, but when the pressure got to be too much for him, his memory was wiped and he was given a new identity.
Enter stoned Mike.
For five years he floated through life on a cloud of marijuana with no memory of his former life. When two killers show up in Liman to eliminate him his old instincts kick in and Mike turns from friendly stoner to lean mean killing machine. Still, he doesn’t revert completely. “I have a lot of anxiety about this,” he says as the body count mounts.
At the center of “American Ultra” are Eisenberg and Stewart, reteamed for the first time since 2009’s “Adventureland.” Both are fine actors—if you need convincing watch him in “The End of the Tour” or her in “The Clouds of Sils Maria”—and while neither are stretched as performers, they leave vanity at the door and have fun in the world director Nima Nourizadeh and screenwriter Max Landis give them to cavort in.
Strong supporting work from Connie Britton as Mike’s sympathetic CIA handler balances out the wackier performances by John Leguizamo as Mike’s mile-a-minute drug dealer and laughing killer Walton Goggins. The over-the-top turns fit the feel of the film, but Grace’s shrill sociopath is pitched a bit too high, even for a movie where someone is killed with a dustpan.
The violence in “American Ultra” often feels gratuitous—we’re told Mike singlehandedly kills seventeen people—but the look of stoned amazement that drifts over Eisenberg’s face each time he pulls off some feat of derring-do is worth the wanton bloodshed.
“Sinister,” the 2012 Ethan Hawke horror film, was a good old-fashioned spooky movie where it was misty at night, things went bump in the night, and every door in the house needed to be oiled. It was also the rare kind of modern scarefest that created mythology about a new malevolent force—no sparkling vampires or sexy werewolves in sight!—to drive the story. Unfortunately the largely Hawke-less (he only appears in a photo) sequel “Sinister 2” drives that malevolent force off a cliff.
Shannyn Sossamon is Courtney, a mother on the run to protect her 9-year-old twins Dylan and Zach (Robert and Dartanian Sloan) from their abusive father (Lea Coco). Their refuge is an abandoned home and church in a remote community. Trouble is, the place comes with a past. “It would be better if I didn’t live were so many people got killed,” says Dylan.
Dylan has been troubled by bad dreams and visions, like blood seeping from the floor and soon is hanging out with some undead devil kids in the basement of the rambling house. There, at the behest of a ghoul named Bughuul, they watch torture porn home movies with terrible endings, like giant alligators eating people popsicles and folks being buried alive. One of the dead kids tells Dylan, “Once you watch all of them you and you’ll never have a bad dream again.” That seems unlikely as the films are meant to unlock Dylan’s dark side.
Enter James Ransone (if they ever remake “Psycho” he’d be a good alternative universe Norman Bates) as the jokingly named Deputy So-and-So, a friend of Hawke’s character form the first film. No longer with the police, he now travels around, trying to locate and burn down all the houses infected by the spirit of Bughuul. His mission leads him to Courtney and the kids, and soon shadowy figures appear in doorways, bloody pop-ups appear on computer screens and still pictures come to life as Deputy So-and-So finds himself in the middle of a life and death battle between an angry ex husband, some malevolent kids and the grand ghoul himself.
Silly rather than sinister, this sequel squanders the promise of the first film with soap opera acting, clumsy pacing and worst of all, a complete lack of scares. There are some mildly eerie moments but the spine-chilling atmosphere that shrouded the first film is missing, replaced with garden-variety ghouls and “Goosebumps” level scares that don’t actually raise goosebumps.
Ransone, who provided some welcome comic relief in the first movie, doesn’t feel like someone who should be doing battle with demons, or whatever it is, exactly, that Bughuul is. Bruce Campbell could have pulled it off, bringing a mix of comedic heroism to the role but Ransone falls somewhere in the mushy middle, not quite funny, not quite plucky enough.
Like Ransone’s performance “Sinister 2” exists in the mushy middle. Not scary enough to be called a horror film, it isn’t funny enough, intentionally anyway, to be a comedy.
“Hitman: Agent 47” is about murder, mayhem, car chases and bullets but really, at the core of its dark little heart, it’s about family.
Based on the videogame series of the same name, the story begins in 1967 with the establishment of a top-secret government program to create the perfect killing machine agents with no fear, no remorse or humanity.
Cut to many years later.
A trio of three people are on the hunt. Katia (Hannah Ware) is searching for a man she sees in haunting, strange visions, while the genetically modified Agent 47 (“Homeland’s” Rupert Friend) and John Smith (Zachary Quinto) are looking for Katia. As it turns out, all are interested in the same end game, locating the father of the Agent program, Dr. Litvenko (Ciarán Hinds in a paycheque role). As their paths and allegiances crisscross the trio fight their way through a convoluted plot to contribute to cinema’s body count and come to a bloody climax
“Hitman: Agent 47” has all the assets you expect from a videogame movie. It’s the kind of film where the “hero” fights against seemingly insurmountable odds and walks away without breaking a sweat. It’s also the kind of movie where it is not enough for someone to get shot, they must also fall from a great height hitting things on the way down. There is stylized action and bad guys with sub dermal body armour.
Unfortunately there’s also enough bad dialogue for any two Ed Wood Jr. movies—it’s the kind of movie were people say, “What the bleep is happening?” as an excuse to forward the story with exposition—a non-twist—(BLAZINGLY OBVIOUS SPOILER) Litvenko is Katia’s father! OMG!—and a main character that makes Jason Voorhees seem like a barrel of laughs.
The whole idea of Agent 47 is that he’s a cipher, a relentless and lethal killer—imagine a human Terminator without the accent or bulging muscles and you get the idea—and the ironically named Friend pulls that off, but that is a big part of the problem here. It’s difficult to build a movie around a personality-free title character. It’s been done—think anything starring Taylor Lautner—but first time director Aleksander Bach doesn’t have the chops to keep a movie based on a blank slate interesting. “Hitman: Agent 47” has a few stylish moments and some big action scenes, but not enough to add enough personality to push this dull affair over the top.
Claridge’s Hotel in London is the kind of place you might expect a secret agent to call home. An unassuming entranceway leads into an opulent lobby with lots of quiet corners perfect for clandestine meetings. It’s the kind of place where Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin could do highly classified business over a martini, shaken or stirred. So, it’s appropriate I’m meeting Henry Cavill and Army Hammer here. They’re the stars of the Man from U.N.C.L.E. reboot and the latest actors, after Robert Vaughn and David McCallum, to play super spies Solo and Kuriatkin.
The TV show, which was equal parts camp and classic action, ran from 1964 to 68, made stars of its leads and established high-flying spy cool for a generation of television watchers. Cavill, who plays the suave Solo, however, says he has never seen the show.
“I prefer to operate as a blank canvas,” says Cavill, who will next be seen as the Man of Steel in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. “If you’re trying to make something your own you’re concentrating on the wrong thing. You should be concentrating on the story and evolving the story with your fellow actors and or director. That’s what we did.”
His co-star Hammer referred to the show to partially to craft his portrayal of the hothead KGB spy Kuryakin and partially “out of motivation of fear.”
“If I do this movie and someone asked me about the show I wanted to have an answer to give them,” he says. “I basically spent the weekend binge watching the whole show.”
He says the new movie incorporates elements of the original show, “so people who grew up with that will love and appreciate it but it is also a completely fresh take on it. That’s what we were going for, to make everybody happy.”
Like many spies (and actors who have played spies) before them, both utilized accents and costumes to disguise themselves and disappear into their roles.
Cavill, notes that the bespoke Saville Road suits he wore were the “final pieces of the puzzle” in creating the character. “The accent informs the way you physically interact with everybody and the suit the contains that.”
Hammer learned his accent listening to “old recordings of native Russian speakers trying to speak English, or barely speaking English and picking up little bits of both. At a certain point with the accent, I’d say after a week or two, it feels natural. You’re not spending your time making sure your words sound laboured. It starts to flow out as an accent.”
Blaine Thurier’s parents are OK with his day job as synthesizer player with the indie supergroup The New Pornographers but they probably won’t go be seeing his new movie.
“I had an evangelical upbringing,” he says, “so anything sexual you weren’t allowed to talk about and you certainly weren’t allowed to do anything about it. It can be very frustrating for a kid. The trauma of that has inextricably linked sex and religion in my brain. Everything I write these days seems to be about that.”
His new film, Teen Lust, is an homage to the teen comedies of the 1980s. The main character Neil (Jesse Carere) is determined to lose his virginity on the eve of his eighteenth birthday. The surprise is that he’s desperate to have sex, not just because of any natural desires, but because his parents are part of a Satanist cult led by John (Cary Elwes) and his wife Mary (True Blood’s Kristin Bauer van Straten) who plan on sacrificing Neil to prevent 1000 years of peace on earth. Imagine Porky’s with a dollop of Rosemary’s Baby.
“I won’t even tell them what it is about,” he says, adding, “It’s weird, but it is me trying to be normal.”
“I wanted to make a teen sex comedy but there are so many of them out there I felt it needed higher stakes and a little twist. I also wanted it to be a funny adventure, like Ferris Bueller, Back to the Future or Risky Business. They were touchstones. Stylistically it doesn’t look like any of those films but story wise, I wanted to have a big night of comedic adventure.”
The Manitoba-shot movie debuted at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival in the Contemporary World Cinema program. It was Thurier’s fourth visit to the fest and he was pleased with the response he received.
“If they laugh,” he says, “I’m happy. You wait for that first laugh. Once you get the first laugh it’s like, ‘OK, I can relax now,’ because if they found that funny they’ll probably find something else funny too.”
As for his parents, while Teen Lust would be too shocking for them, they seem at ease with the name of his band The New Pornographers.
“They think it is kind of edgy and out there,” he says. “I feel bad because my mom can brag to her friends at church that her son was on David Letterman but then they ask, ‘What’s the name of his band?’”
