The best horror films are never only about the Double Gs—guts and gore. Sure, part of the appeal of scary movies is that they make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end, and that frequently requires a spray of blood or a nightmarish vision of terror in the form of Freddy Kruger or Jason Voorhees, but great horror films are always about something other than the thrills and chills.
To be truly effective scary pictures must tap into a collective anxiety; societal hot buttons that elevate the frights to a new level. For instance, Frankenstein plays on people’s fear of science while Godzilla is an obvious cultural metaphor for nuclear weapons in reaction to the devastation of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and you don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to see Dracula as the metaphorical embodiment of everything from drug addiction and old age to alternative lifestyles and capitalism.
Perhaps the most socially self-aware horror film of all is Night of the Living Dead. It’s got zombies galore but director George A. Romero had the braaaiiins to include a subtext that echoed the contemporary state America’s of race relations, the horrors of Vietnam and cynicism with government. It’s the best of both worlds—a thought-provoking movie that gushes with gore.
Film historian Linda Badley suggests Night of the Living Dead horrifies because the zombies weren’t bizarre creatures from outer space or from Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory, but because, “They’re us.”
This weekend a new film, Unfriended, turns the camera, or in this case the Skype screen, on us in an eerie story about bullying. On the surface Unfriended may look like a cheapo teen horror flick with a cast of unknowns—which it is, but so was Night of the Living Dead—but by basing the plot in the world of social media and the bad behaviour that comes along with anonymous avatars, it becomes a ripped-from-the-headlines comment on a very touchy societal subject.
The movie begins a year after Laura, a popular high school student, was cyber shamed into killing herself. A teenage girl is on a group Skype session when she begins to receive cryptic and threatening messages from Laura’s old account. As the movie unfolds secrets are revealed and the danger is amped up.
The mysterious killer is a hoary old horror convention, but here it’s told in the contemporary language of Millennials. Unsurprisingly, the movie has already sparked the interest of the Y Generation—the trailer garnered almost 300,000 Twitter comments on its first day—who relate to the setting—by-and-large it takes place on a computer screen—and who are all too familiar with the everyday brutality of Twitter, Facebook, Skype, Instagram and Spotify. They understand what a minefield the web can be and the filmmakers realized the narrative possibilities of creating cinema’s first deadly internet troll. Freddy Kruger is your father’s baddie; the new horror comes in bits and bytes.
Similar to Psycho’s Norman Bates or the undead of 28 Days Later, the kids of Unfriended tell a very specific story—the sad tale of a teen suicide—that becomes a universal horror tale by making the characters and setting ordinary and relatable. Like the best of classic fright films, it breathes new life into a form we’ve seen before by recontextualizing it for a new generation.
Years from now when people look up the meaning of the word “unnecessary” in the dictionary the definition will be the synopsis of “Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2.”
In the original 2009 movie Blart (Kevin James) was living the life of a security guard—excuse me, Security Officer—at New Jersey’s West Orange Pavilion Mall after failing the physical portion of his State Trooper’s exam. He was a lovesick loser, unlucky at love and life.
Things have changed a bit since then. He’s still working security, but is flying high off his last major caper, single-handedly taking on a group of thugs who took over the mall and held his lady love hostage on Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year.
In the new film he’s in Las Vegas attending the Security Officer’s Convention. Tagging along is daughter (Raini Rodriguez) a teen working up the courage to spill the news that she’s leaving home for university in Los Angeles. On what should be one of the greatest nights of his life—delivering the keynote speech at the convention—duty calls when a disgruntled high roller (Neal McDonough), who lost a bundle on his last visit to the casino, kidnaps Blart’s daughter and attempts to recoup his money by stealing priceless art from the Wynn Hotel.
You have to wonder why Kevin James waited six years to make a Paul Blart sequel. After seeing number two I’m tempted to think it was to give people enough time to forget how brutally unfunny the first movie was. You have to hand it to him, however. With “Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2” he’s managed to top the first movie, making a comedy even more relentlessly unfunny than the first one.
There are, to be generous, about three laughs in “Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2,” all of which can be viewed in the trailer. The other 89 minutes are filler. The audience I saw it with seemed to be laughing out of pity rather than because anything in the movie is actually amusing.
In the old days monsters were usually found in places like Transylvania or in remote castle laboratories, recognizable by protruding fangs or giant, square green heads but Frankenstein and Dracula are now symbols of an older kind of scare fare. Today, as the movie “Unfriended” shows us, the most terrifying places on earth aren’t far flung physical locations but closer-to-home sites like Twitter, Instagram and Skype.
“Unfriended” begins a year after popular high school student Laura (Heather Sossaman), was cyber shamed into killing herself when an unflattering video of her passed out at a party went viral.
Jealous of her popularity, six of Laura’s schoolmates—Blaire (Shelley Hennig), Jess (Renee Olstead), Val (Courtney Halverson), Ken (Jacob Wysocki), Adam (Will Peltz), and Mitch (Moses Jacob Storm)—were chief among the internet bullies behind the distribution of the video.
One night, on the anniversary of their classmate’s death, and during a group Skype session, they begin to receive cryptic and threatening messages—“If you hang up all your friends will die!”—from Laura’s old account. “It’s a glitch!” “Well, the glitch just typed!”
Secrets are revealed and the danger is amped up as they try and save themselves by checking chat rooms like “Do Not Answers Messages From the Dead.” Something is, as they say, srsly messed up. Cue the cyber screams.
The mysterious killer is a hoary old horror convention, but here it’s told in the contemporary language of Millennials who are all too familiar with the everyday brutality of social media. They understand what a minefield the web can be and the director, Leo Gabriadze, realized the narrative possibilities of creating cinema’s first deadly internet troll. Freddy Kruger is your father’s baddie; the new face of horror comes in bits and bytes. After all, what’s more terrifying than a missing “forward” button on an e-mail?
“Unfriended” is a “Blair Witch Project” for a new age. It’s a found footage film of sorts—the action takes place entirely on a computer screen—and there are no bells and whistles. Entire scenes go by with very little or no dialogue, just the eerie clicks of a computer mouse and there is even an homage to the famous “Heather’s extreme close-up” from the 1999 film.
It’s a very modern thriller that relies on old school scare generators like unnerving silence, anticipation and darkness and shadows, while throwing in a little gore—hand in a blender!—for good measure.
“Unfriended” puts very real seeming (although slightly hysterical) teens in an unreal situation. As the stakes rise so do the emotions, so parents, be warned that you may be as horrified by the language as you are by the thrills and chills.
“Monkey Kingdom,” the new film from Disneynature, begins with “(Theme from) The Monkees” on the soundtrack. The actual monkeys in the film—a tribe of toque macaques—however, don’t sing, but they do monkey around.
This time Mark Linfield and Alastair Fothergill, the co-directors of Disneynature’s “Earth” and “Chimpanzee” show us a family of monkeys living in ancient ruins in the jungles of Polonnaruwa in Sri Lanka. It’s a complex society built around the hierarchy of the stone structure and a tree. Those at the top, like alpha male Raja, enjoy blazing sunlight and all the ripe fruit they can eat. Like a feudal lord Raja carefully guards his place and the rank of the other “high-borns” from interlopers.
Under him are “the sisterhood,” red-faced (not embarrassed monkeys, they are literally red-faced) moms and aunties who are the next in charge. “These ladies get what they want,” says narrator Tina Fey. They are brutal and uncompromising. Think “The Walking Dead’s” Carol and you get the idea.
In this world a jackfruit isn’t just food, it’s a political tool used to assert prominence and humiliate underlings.
Born at the bottom of the tree, figuratively and literally, is Maya, a “low-born” toque macaque and single mom of Kip. Like a simian Kitty Foyle all she wants is to make a better life for herself and move up the social ladder. When a warring clan overruns their home Raja and company are forced to leave and relocate in a nearby city. Urban life stands in stark contrast to the rural kingdom they left behind, but it is here Maya thrives and improves her standing in the macaque community.
A mix of education and entertainment, “Monkey Kingdom” is filled with useful information, beautiful imagery and ape anecdotes. Fey’s narration blends learning with light-hearted joshing—like a parent reading a picture book to a child—and images guaranteed to appeal to up younger viewers. Is there anything cuter than a snoring monkey? I’ll answer that for you. No there isn’t, and I’m sure your kids will agree. The voice over occasionally tries a bit too hard—describing Maya’s mate as “fifteen pounds of hunky monkey” is too cute by half—but as a vocal tour guide to the story Fey is an agreeable presence.
“Monkey Kingdom” does feature some mild “circle of life” scenes but focuses most of its kid-friendly 77 minute running time on the familial lifestyle and complicated relationships of these fascinating creatures.
“Dancing with the Stars” has brought dance into the very center of popular culture. Each week b-listers don sparkly outfits and strut their stuff to huge ratings. Whether it’s the Cha Cha Cha or a Quickstep or the Paso doble, dancers are rated and celebrated by a panel of judges.
There is no “Dancing with the Stars” in Iran. Dancing of any sort has been banned in that country since the 1979 revolution, and it is against that backdrop that the story of “Desert Dancer” takes place.
But this isn’t a Middle Eastern “Footloose.” It’s the true story of a young Iranian man named Afshin Ghaffarian (Reece Ritchie). Obsessed with dance as a youngster, he grew up in the shadow of oppression, hiding his passion from the world until he enrolled in university in Tehran. There he met a small group of like-minded people, including Ardavan (Tom Cullen), Sattar (Simon Kassianides) and the beautiful but troubled Elaheh (Freida Pinto), who poured over contraband dance videos and tried to emulate the moves of Rudolf Nureyev and Michael Jackson.
In the days leading up to the 2009 presidential election the underground troupe staged an illegal dance show, a rebellious act that gave them their first taste of true freedom but was also is a dangerous political act.
“Desert Dancer” contains important messages about human rights, cultural liberty and the significance of artistic expression but, despite the real-life source material, is weighed down with clichés. More background and a dose of nuance could have fleshed out the story, elevating it to a strong statement about creative freedom instead of simply a presenting a manipulative tale that put me in the mind of a dogmatic “Dancing with the Stars” episode.
A few years ago the romantic comedy was flat lining, suffering from a seemingly incurable case of the Katherine Heigls. The once proud genre—think “When Harry Met Sally”—had surrendered to predictability with witless stories and characters who took the bus straight from Central Casting.
Director Matt Sadowski skirts around this by calling his new movie “Pretend We’re Kissing,” a non com, but make no mistake, this is a rom com, but the kind of romantic comedy that won’t make you run from the theatre suffering from saccharine overload.
Dov Tiefenbach is Benny, a pensive twenty-something who pays the rent by covering downtown Toronto with band posters. His flatmate is a nudist (Zoë Kravitz) with a worldview somewhere between Shirley MacLaine and Gloria Steinem who has crashed there for a year while looking for work.
Despite living with a beautiful, often naked woman Benny is a lonely heart. Single, until he meets Jordan (Tommie-Amber Pirie) and is instantly smitten but too insecure to do anything about his feelings. Soon a courtship begins—this is a rom com after all—but it’s not all smooth sailing because this isn’t a Drew Barrymore rom com.
“Pretend We’re Kissing” is tribute to Toronto—the Toronto Islands and the Cameron House are almost characters in the film—and a funny, occasionally sweet, occasionally cringe-worthy look at ups and downs of millennial love. More importantly it breaks the mould as to what a romantic comedy can be.
Cut Bank director Matt Shakman has something in common with 35 mm film fanatics Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino. For his movie debut the director insisted on shooting on film rather than digital.
“I’m an analogue kind of guy,” he says. “To do this movie, which is about a town that feels trapped in a distant era, it felt right to shoot it on film. We had to find a way to deal with the financial impact of it, but I found a solution to that. I gave up my salary in order to do it.
“I’ll only get a chance to make a first movie once and to make it on film feels special. I may never get a chance to do it again.”
Set in the hamlet of Cut Bank Montana, the action begins when auto mechanic Dwayne (Liam Hemsworth) accidentally videotapes the murder of the local postman (Bruce Dern). He reports the crime to the local sheriff (John Malkovich), hoping for reward money, but there are complications in the form of the suspicious father of his girlfriend (Billy Bob Thornton), a postal inspector (Oliver Platt) and a reclusive man (Michael Stuhlbarg) violently obsessed with getting his mail.
The script appeared on Hollywood’s 2009 black list of the best unproduced films and has been in Shakman’s hands for five years.
In the beginning he simply loved the twisty-turny story. “Then,” he says, “I [became] like a dog chasing a rabbit at the track. You get these tantalizing elements that start to make everything feel more real.
“When someone like John Malkovich signs on it is so helpful for so many reasons. One, the pleasure, personally, of getting to work with one of my heroes. Two, he certainly helps tell other actors that this is a party worth coming to and the third thing is just the business reality of having a person in the film who can help you with financing.”
Shakman says he knows after the film’s theatrical run “a lot of people will see Cut Bank on their iPads,” and while he prefers the communal experience of watching movies with an audience, he knows times are changing. “They’ll also watch Breaking Bad [on their tablets], so the line has blurred very much between the two kinds of content. It’s all just become stories and where you choose to find them and how you want them delivered.”
Novelist Nicholas Sparks is the current king of romance writers. His flowery prose even gives Harlequin a run for their money in the three-hanky tearjerker department. Who else could write a line like, “Love is like the wind, you can’t see it but you can feel it,” with a straight face?
He is to romance writing what Buckley’s cough syrup is to a tickly throat. They both get the job done, but leave a sickly sweet aftertaste.
His best-known novel adaptation is The Notebook, a cross-generational love story that spent over a year as a New York Times hardcover top seller. Inspired by the story of his wife’s grandparent’s sixty-year marriage, the novel became a 2004 movie starring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams. The tale of love and Alzheimer’s is emotionally manipulative—writer Gary Panton called this passionate weepie “mushier than a mushed-up bowl of mushy peas that’s just been mushed in an industrial-strength mushifier”—but opening weekend it surfed a wave of tears to the box office top five.
Sparks, a former pharmaceutical salesman writes tales of love and loss, of mighty obstacles overcome and lip-locks galore, which he defines as “dramatic epic love stories” along the lines of “Eric Segal’s Love Story or The Bridges of Madison County… But you can even go all the way back. You had Hemingway write A Farewell to Arms, the movies of the forties—Casablanca, From Here to Eternity—Shakespeare, and that’s the genre I work in.”
He caught some flack for comparing himself to Shakespeare—one writer said, “If Sparks is like Shakespeare, then a housepainter is like Picasso.”—but the fact remains that his unconventional love stories, his parcels of passion, have made his name synonymous with the romance genre.
This weekend prepare for another flurry of Sparkisms—tearstained romantic letters, lines like, “Love requires sacrifice but it’s worth it,” and passionate make-out sessions—as The Longest Ride hits the big screen.
This time around “Two stories separated by time, connected by fate,” get Sparksified as the lives of a young couple, played by Scott “Clint’s son” Eastwood and Britt Robertson and older love birds Alan Alda and Oona Chaplin, interlace. “I wish I could tell you it’s all happily ever after,” says Alda’s character, “not everybody gets that.”
Expect unexpected poignancy.
Critics haven’t always warmed to Sparks’s stories on film—Safe Haven with Julianne Hough as “a young woman’s struggle to love again” has a paltry 12% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes while The Best of Me starring Michelle Monaghan and James Marsden as high school sweethearts reunited after two decades sits at a miserable 8% rating—but audiences can’t seem to get enough of his weepy tales of unrequited love, lost love, mature love and love in a time of trouble. Ten of his books have already been adapted for the movies, with one more, The Choice, scheduled for 2016.
His style of romance has caught on, but don’t call him a romance writer. “I write dramatic fiction. If you go into a further subgenre, it would be a love story, but it has its roots in the Greek tragedies. This genre evolved through Shakespeare. He did Romeo and Juliet. Hemingway did A Farewell to Arms. I do this currently today.”
The flowery prose of Nicholas Sparks has singlehandedly kept Kleenex in business since “The Notebook” made the former pharmaceutical salesman the King of the Weepie. The latest big-screen Sparksisms—tearstained romantic letters, lines like, “Love requires sacrifice… always,” and passionate make-out sessions—come in the form of “The Longest Ride,” an intergenerational romance starring Clint-spawn Scott Eastwood, Britt Robertson, Oona Chaplin and Alan Alda.
This time around Sparks tells of “Two stories separated by time, connected by fate.”
The first couple is twenty-something sorority sister Sophia Danko (Robertson) an art major—“I love art,” she gushes, “I love everything about it.”—lured to the rodeo by her housemate with the promise of “the hottest guys you’ve ever seen.” There she lays eyes on a cowboy named Luke (Eastwood)—aren’t all cowboys named Luke?—a bull rider trying to make a comeback after almost being killed the last time he competed. They lock eyes and you know it won’t be long before they’re line dancing off to happily-ever-after land. “Before I met you the closest I got to cattle was steak,” she coos.
Fate brings them in contact with ninety-year-old widower Ira Levinson (Alda). Driving home from a date the newly besotted couple spots a nasty car crash on a remote road. They rescue Ira, but the accident has left him near death. The only thing that keeps him going is the urging of his late wife Ruth (Chaplin).
That’s right, dead Ruth gets Sparksified, brought back to life as an ephemeral spirit through the reading of old letters (and sepia toned flashbacks) that recount their life and the ups and downs of marriage.
Brought together by circumstance, the couple’s lives mix and match, as the stories—one existing in memory, the other at the rodeo—converge and they learn about sacrifice, bull ridin’ and the power of love to overcome the challenges life throws in the way of romance.
“The Longest Ride” made me cry, but not in the way Nicholas Sparks intended.
The movie takes place in a world where ranch hands and Warhols co-exist and couples are expected to walk off into the sunset hand in hand. In other words it’s Über Harlequin; an alternate universe romance where two tangentially related stories can be fused together by tears and warm group hugs.
There are parallels between the tales—both men are North Carolina “country bumpkins” who fall for women from out of state, both couples take pictures in photo booths, both have “I don’t know how to make this work” moments and Sophia is about to go to New York to intern at a gallery while Ira left town to go to war—but mostly the stories are tied together by an abundance of Sparksian clichés. There’s the “elevated kiss”—most famously used in “The Notebook” when Ryan Gosling hoisted Rachel McAdams over his head and locked lips—which is overused here as are the obligatory “lake scene,” longing glances and reliance on epistolary to tell the story.
Ira’s letters to Ruth make up the backbone of the romance, but they don’t exactly make sense. To push the story forward they are written in a weird stilted way—“I took over my dad’s booming business while you taught at school”—that appears to be telling Ruth a story she was already familiar with, you know, having lived it and all. It’s a strange way to provide exposition and makes the movie narration heavy.
Stranger still are some of director George Tillman Jr.’s choices. The cross cutting between love making and a bull riding lesson may be the least subtle thing ever and couldn’t feel any less romantic. Add to that one of the worst war scenes in recent memory, close-ups of rage-a-holic bulls and you walk away not feeling filled with romance, but as though you have messed with the bull and gotten the horn.
