Released almost exactly 30 years to the day since the original film hit screens, “Pet Sematary,” starring Jason Clarke and Amy Seimetz as a couple who discover a mysterious burial ground in the woods near their new home, is a remake of one of Stephen King’s scariest novel adaptations. The 1989 movie was so scary King, the master of all things terrifying, says it was the only one of his films that genuinely scared him. Will the remake offer up the same kind of undead thrills?
Exhausted from years as a night shift emergency room doctor in Boston Louis Creed (Clarke) is looking forward to spending more time with his family, Rachel (Amy Seimetz) and children Ellie (Jeté Laurence) and Gage (Hugo and Lucas Lavoie), in their new, rural home in Maine. “The whgole place is ours?” asks Ellie. “I even got them to throw in a forest as a new backyard,” jokes dad. The move offers the change the family so desperately needs but then tragedy strikes when their beloved family cat Church is flattened by a truck on the country road in front of their home.
Their helpful neighbour Judd Crandall (John Lithgow) suggests they bury the cat in a secret spot known as the “Pet Sematary.” Local folklore has it that the eerie burial ground has supernatural powers. “Kids used to dare each other to go into the woods at night,” says Crandall. “They feared it.” The Creeds soon learn there may be some truth to the legends when Church comes back but this time he isn’t so cute and cuddly. “There is something in those woods,” Crandall says. “Something that brings things back. Sometimes dead is better.” (SPOILER ALERT) Later when the stakes are raised, and daughter Ellie is killed, the limits of Louis’s love are tested.
Horrifying things happen in “Pet Sematary.” Undead filicide, patricide and lives taken too soon but as awful as some of things that happen on screen are, the movie isn’t scary. The idea of much of what happens will send a shiver down your spine but the actual rendering of it doesn’t. Perhaps it’s because we’ve been desensitized by “The Walking Dead” but the idea of the dead coming back to malevolent life doesn’t have much of an impact here. There are some jump scares but they are more uncomfortable than actually chilling.
As a study of grief it works better. Louis’s extreme actions are driven by anguish but because so much of what happens feels generic it’s hard to care about any of the characters, alive or dead. Like the pallid cover of the title song The Ramones made famous in 1989, the new film is a pale imitation of the original.
A story infused with both passion and compassion, “The Aftermath,” starring Keira Knightley, Alexander Skarsgård and Jason Clarke, takes the themes of grief and reconciliation and pushes them through the Melodramizer Machine.
Based on the 2013 book of the same name by Rhidian Brook, most of “The Aftermath” is fiction but the idea of a British soldier sharing his requisitioned house with its former occupants was borrowed from the experience of the author’s grandfather Walter Brook.
Set in Hamburg, Germany five after the close of World War II, the story begins with
British army colonel Lewis Morgan and wife and Rachael (Clarke and Knightley) moving into a large homer requisitioned from German national Stefan Lubert (Alexander Skarsgård) and his teenage daughter Freda (Flora Thiemann). Lubert, once a wealthy architect, is forced to cede his palatial home to the Morgans while Lewis assists in the post war building of the badly bombed city.
There is much to do. Lewis says Hamburg took more Allied bombs in one weekend than London took during the entire war and there are thousands of bodies still unaccounted for. Conditions are deplorable. Families living in camps fashioned around old, burned out buildings. No water, heat or electricity. Taking pity of Lubert, Lewis offers the former homeowner the chance to stay in the house. “It’s chaos out there,” Lewis says. “There’s no where to put them. Nothing to feed them. It makes no sense to put the Luberts out.”
Rachael isn’t keen on the idea of sharing the house with their once, sworn enemy. “I thought we’d be together,” she says. “Alone.”
The two families cohabitate, mostly at a distance. “What a house,” says Rachel’s friend (Kate Phillips). “It’s almost worth living with a German!” Stefan, once a wealthy man now relegated to living in the attic of his former home while Rachel and Lewis live downstairs. Everyone is suffering. Lewis and Rachel from the loss of a young son, the victim of a German air raids. Stefan and Freda are still mourning the loss of their wife and mother as they try and acclimatize to the life after the war.
Outside, in Hamburg, tensions are rising. A small group of Nazis in the guise of freedom fighters are stirring up trouble. When Lewis is called away to deal with one of their uprisings Stefan and Rachel form a bond based on a shared sense of loneliness and grief.
“The Aftermath” looks fantastic. Director James Kent has an eye for detail and uses the house almost as a character. The shadowy space on the wall where a portrait of Hitler used to hang looms over the proceedings, its absence helping to set the time and place. Rachel’s interaction with the modernistic Bauhaus Furniture, which she finds so uncomfortable, helps us understand her state of mind.
It’s an interesting canvas on which to paint this story but unfortunately the love story feels torn from the pages of a not-so-steamy Harlequin Romance. Characters change abruptly, hissing one second, cooing the next. Knightley and Skarsgård’s emotional arcs suggest that the thin line between love and hate is even thinner than previously thought. Their love affair is born out of a desire to feel something, not out of actual desire and, as such, is about as steamy as a cold shower first thing on a Monday morning.
Clarke fairs better as the stoic but compassionate army colonel but this isn’t his story. He’s at the center of much of the action but his story of reconciliation is overshadowed by the clumsy melodrama.
People who complain trailers give away too much or that movies have become predictable may find something to keep them guessing in “Serenity,” the strange new Matthew McConaughey thriller. Or is it a metaphysical drama? Or should I call it a new age noir? I honestly don’t know what to file this under. However you classify it, this weird film will keep you guessing for better and for worse. Strange days indeed.
McConaughey is Baker Dill, the broke, headstrong owner of a boat for hire in the crystal clear waters surrounding the remote Plymouth Island. “In Plymouth everyone knows everything,” says Reid Miller (Jeremy Strong). “Except what’s going on,” drawls Dill.
He’s a Captain Ahab type, minus the prosthetic leg made out of whalebone, and obsessed with hooking and reeling in a giant tuna he calls Justice. Everyone on the tiny island knows of his obsession. Even the local radio announcer broadcasts, “It’s a perfect day to go out and catch that damn fish,“ during his weather update.
He’s a haunted man, troubled by the carnage he witnessed in Iraq and the family, wife Karen (Anne Hathaway) and son Patrick (Rafael Sayegh), he lost to divorce. When Karen reappears with a job offer it sends him into a tailspin. “I’m here to tell you that you were right and I was wrong about Frank,” she says about her new husband, a wealthy but abusive man played by Jason Clarke. Her deal is simple. “Take him out on your boat, let him get drunk and dump him in the ocean. Do it and I’ll give you $10 million.” Divorce is not an option she adds. “He’ll find a hole for me in one of his construction sites.“ Dill is conflicted until he hears that Frank has been violent with Patrick. Now all bets are off.
There’s more but you won’t read it here because this is about the time in “Serenity” where the story takes a left turn that would make M. Night” Shyamalan green with envy. Does it work? Not really but you have to give credit to writer-director Steven Knight for swinging for the fences. That it’s a foul ball is unfortunate because the gears shift from neo-noir to existential treatise on the fundamentals of life is the kind of risky move that we don’t see much of these days.
You don’t just see a movie like “Serenity,” you witness it.
It is one of the most baffling movies to come along in years. McConaughey is in full-blown “are-we-all-just-pawns-in-a-great-big-game?” mode while Hathaway convincing channels femme-fatale Veronica Lake. Both give heightened performances but the tone of the piece is so off kilter I can’t decide whether they are sleepwalking through this toward a paycheque or doing some edgy work.
If nothing else “Serenity” takes chances, not the kind of chances that are likely to please an audience but at least you can’t guess how it will end. Intrigued?
We all know how “First Man” will end. No surprises there. What may be surprising is the portrayal of its titular character, American astronaut and hero Neil Armstrong. It’s a small story about a giant leap.
Focussing on the years 1961 to 1968 “First Man” introduces us to Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) as an engineer and envelope-pushing pilot. When an X-15 test flight gives him a glimpse of space he becomes obsessed with going further. When his three-year-old daughter dies of a brain tumour he turns his grief inward, throwing himself at work. Becoming a NASA Gemini Project astronaut over the next seven years he fulfils the dream of President Kennedy 1962, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth,” speech. Alongside Buzz Aldrin (Corey Stoll) and Jim Lovell (Pablo Schreiber), he begins a journey that will take him to the moon and back.
“First Man” is based on one of mankind’s greatest achievements and yet feels muted on the big screen. Deliberately paced, it nails the bone-rattling intensity of the early flights, the anxiety felt by the loved ones left behind as the astronauts risk everything to beat the Russians to the moon, and yet it never exactly takes flight.
Part history lesson, part simulator experience, it doesn’t deliver the characters necessary to feel like a complete experience.
Gosling is at his most restrained here as an analytical man who loves his family but is so stoic he answers his son’s question, “Do you think you’re coming back from the moon,” with an answer better suited to the boardroom than the dinner table. “We have every confidence in the mission,” he says. “There are risks but we have every reason to believe we’ll be coming back.” He is buttoned-down and yet not completely detached. His daughter’s memory never strays from his mind, even if he never discusses her death with his wife, played by an underused Claire Foy. Gosling embraces Armstrong’s fortitude but has stripped the character down to the point where he is little more than a distant man of few words.
“First Man” contains some thrilling moments but for the most part is like the man himself, stoic and understated.
In the annals of political scandal several names loom large. Watergate, Profumo and Chappaquiddick, the subject of a new film.
Starring Jason Clarke as Senator Ted Kennedy and Kate Mara as the ill-fated Mary Jo Kopechne, Chappaquiddick recreates an infamous event to unveil the inner workings of one of America’s most powerful families.
The incident that gives the film its name took place on Friday, July 18, 1969. Kennedy threw a party on Chappaquiddick Island as a reunion of the “boiler-room girls,” six women who were the engine of Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign. Also in attendance was political campaign specialist Kopechne.
While the others drank, danced and dined Kennedy and Kopechne took a drive that would end when Kennedy veered off a bridge and into a tidal channel. He escaped, she did not.
What followed was the battle between Ted’s conscience and his political well-being, a mish-mash of power, influence and morality. Kennedy ultimately fessed up, pleading guilty to a charge of leaving the scene of an accident causing bodily injury, but not before crafting a carefully worded statement and faking a concussion.
The word scandal comes from the Greek word for “snare,” suggesting those enmeshed in trouble are trapped in a breakdown of morality. Politicians, people many hold to a higher standard, caught in a scandal offer up enticing opportunities for drama.
Chappaquiddick’s salacious story of a weak man who panicked is a compelling one, especially when embellished with layers of political and personal intrigue.
Speaking of intrigue, All the President’s Men portrays Watergate, the political scandal that tore down Richard M. Nixon’s presidency. Surprisingly Nixon doesn’t appear on a single frame. Instead it’s the story of the shoe leather burned by the dogged Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. The meticulously researched film was noted for it authentic portrayal of newsroom life and it’s take on Tricky Dick’s dishonour. It struck such a nerve in Washington that it was the first film Jimmy Carter requested to be screened at the White House during his term as President of the United States.
Watergate had all the makings of a great scandal except for one thing, sex. That vital component was more than evident in the Profumo affair, a tawdry British tabloid story brought to vivid life in the 1989 film Scandal. Sunday Herald reporter Barry Didcock called it, “the yardstick against which all other political scandals are measured.”
Ian McKellen stars as John Profumo, the British Minister of War. He’s having an affair with Christine Keeler who is also seeing K.G.B. agent Eugene Ivanov. When news of the love triangle broke the resultant Cold War scandal lead to the downfall of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government.
Scandal has all the elements of a great controversy, sex, suicide and secrecy. It was such a hot potato that more than two decades after the real life events several British politicians lobbied to stop the film’s production. Co-star John Hurt lashed back, calling the complaining politicos hypocrites simply trying to prevent the truth from coming to light.
“It did seem to have pretty much everything,” said Profumo’s son David of the 1963 brouhaha. “It had sex and drugs and class and color and espionage and intrigue—and at a particularly explosive time.”
“Chappaquiddick,” a new film starring Jason Clarke and Kate Mara, recreates an infamous event to unveil the inner workings of one of America’s most powerful families.
Clarke, an Australian actor best known for his work in “Zero Dark Thirty,” plays Senator Ted Kennedy, the youngest son of a political dynasty. As the movie begins brothers John and Bobby have both been assassinated, gunned down while in office. It’s 1969 and Ted is eyeing a White House run in 1972.
The incident that gives the film its name took place on Friday, July 18, 1969. Kennedy threw a party on Chappaquiddick Island, a ferry ride away from Edgartown on the nearby larger island of Martha’s Vineyard, as a reunion of the “boiler-room girls,” six women who were the engine of Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign. Also in attendance is Kennedy’s cousin (and fixer) Joseph Gargan (Ed Helms), former U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Paul F. Markham (Jim Gaffigan) and political campaign specialist Mary Jo Kopechne (Mara).
While the others drank, danced and dined Kennedy and Kopechne took a fateful drive that would end when Kennedy veered off a bridge and into a tidal channel. Kennedy escaped, leaving Kopechne to drown.
What follows is the battle between Ted’s conscience and his political well-being, a mish-mash of power, influence and morality. Kennedy ultimately fessed up, pleading guilty to a charge of leaving the scene of an accident causing bodily injury, but not before crafting a carefully worded statement and faking a concussion.
“Chappaquiddick’s” story of a weak man who panicked is a compelling one, especially when embellished with layers of political and personal intrigue. Clarke is physically imposing, a bear of a man, but plays Kennedy as a little boy. Blustery on the outside but always looking to his wheelchair-bound father (Bruce Dern) for approval. Kennedy Sr., a power broker who valued his son’s success more than the boys themselves, is only onscreen for a few minutes but his presence and influence looms large in the story.
The wheeling and dealing that surrounds the partial cover-up of Ted’s involvement in Kopechne’s passing are in part to try and protect Kennedy’s upcoming run for the White House and in part to the father of all Kennedys happy. It’s a fascinating dynamic and director John Curran finds a balance between the two high-stakes situations.
A strong supporting cast, including Ed Helms in a rare dramatic role, help pull back the curtain on the latter day Camelot, revealing the behind-the-scenes machinations that kept Ted Kennedy in the Senate and out of jail. “Chappaquiddick” is step-by-step, methodical, but the crime procedural elements of the story are second to the examination of the Kennedy power structure.
The house is one of the strangest buildings ever erected. A massive 24,000 square feet, the rambling Queen Anne-style Victorian mansion has zigzagging staircases, 2,000 doors, rooms-within-rooms and over 10,000 windows. Some will even tell you the old place is haunted. Located on nine acres in Silicon Valley it is known as the Winchester Mystery House.
These days the house is open to the public but for many years it was the obsession of Sarah Winchester, the eccentric heiress of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company fortune, who envisioned the place as home to an “army of ghosts.”
This weekend, in the mystery thriller Winchester, Helen Mirren plays her. The backstory sees the widowed Winchester, reeling from the loss of her husband William in 1881, visit a psychic in hopes of finding solace. He says her recent tragedies — the loss of a daughter, father-in-law and husband — were the work of the spirits of people killed by the Winchester repeating rifle, a.k.a. The Gun That Won The West. To save herself from the restless spectres, he told her to move west and build a home big enough to accommodate all the phantoms that bedevilled her family.
She took the advice to heart, buying a large 161-acre plot of land in San Jose, Calif., and began building. And building. Legend has it that with no blueprints, Winchester, one of the richest women of the 1880s, spent the next 38 years — 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year — working on the strange dwelling.
Winchester lived in the house during construction and, to confuse curious spirits, never slept more than one night consecutively in any of the bedrooms. At night she held séances to confer with the ghosts who shared her living space, hence the nickname The Mansion Designed By Spirits. Guided by those apparitions she ordered never-ending alterations that required the use of maps to navigate. The place grew to such a size that after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake damaged the home, it took the staff hours to find her in the labyrinth of rooms.
Just as eccentric as the ever-evolving layout were Winchester’s home decor choices. She engraved the numbers 7 and 11 throughout the house for good luck and the number 13 to ward off evil spirits. A chandelier was redesigned to hold 13 candles instead of the usual 12 and drain covers on sinks were punched with 13 holes. Today, in tribute, a large 13-shaped topiary tree sits on the property and every Friday the 13th a bell is rung 13 times at 1300 hours.
Winchester lived in the home until her death in 1922. Work on the home ceased instantly and there are several half-driven nails in the walls where carpenters stopped hammering when they heard the news.
Winchester has the underpinnings of a good psychological drama but a biography dampens the mythology with a dose of reality. In the book Captive of the Labyrinth: Sarah L. Winchester, Heiress to the Rifle Fortune, author Mary Jo Ignoffo says Winchester “routinely dismissed workers for months at a time ‘to take such rest as I might.’”
Whatever the truth, Mirren sums it up best: “There’s nothing like it anywhere that I’ve ever seen. It grew out of such very specific circumstances that are sort of unrepeatable.”
Here are Richard’s “Canada AM” reviews for “Black Mass” and “Everest,” plus a look back at the highlights from the Toronto International Film Festival!
If you’re an armchair adventurer like me the hardships the characters in the new snowsuit drama “Everest” put themselves through—and pay handsomely for—seem extreme. Paying $65,000 to climb to the summit of Earth’s highest mountain seems a high price to risk life and limb and when I say life and limb, I mean it. If the altitude and avalanches don’t get you, frostbite may well take an arm or a leg.
Based on the real events of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, Jason Clark plays Rob Hall, experienced climber and leader of commercial expeditions up the mountain. His group, Adventure Consultants, is one of several making the trip. Another, led by party boy Scott Fischer (Jake Gyllenhaal) leaves at the same time, and agrees to share resources on the trek. Climbers include Beck Weathers (Josh Brolin), Doug Hansen (John Hawkes), Yasuko Namba (Naoko Mori) and journalist Jon Krakauer (Michael Kelly). Some reach the summit, others do not, but the trick isn’t getting to the top, it’s getting back down again, and that’s where the drama really begins.
Director Baltasar Kormákur delivers a screen full of beautiful—and occasionally vertigo inducing–“You are there 3-D shots” to give the viewer a sense of the dangers Hall and Company are up against and you will want to take a hot bath after the frostbite scenes, but the human element is lacking.
Kormákur tries to set the stakes before much actual climbing happens. Back home marriages are crumbling and wives are expecting babies but that’s about as far as we get with any real character work. Sure, Hall is a principled and skilled climber, heroic even, but the movie gets beyond the broad strokes with the cast. When they start falling and freezing to death it’s hard to muster much emotion, given that we never really get to know the characters. The fact they’re all bundled up in snow gear and mostly unrecognizable most of the time doesn’t help. Remind me again, was Doug wearing the blue or the yellow suit?
(SPOILER ALERT) There are some unexpected turns. Suffice to say that marquee value does not guarantee survival.
We never get a palpable, passionate answer as to why the climbers are so driven to hike up the side of a mountain to the approximate cruising altitude of a Boeing 747. It’s not enough to say, “It’s not altitude, it’s the attitude.” A little more depth would have helped the movie scale new heights and given us a reason to embrace the characters.
If George Mallory, the English mountaineer who took part in the first three British expeditions to Mount Everest in the early 1920s, was a film critic he might suggest you go see “Everest” “Because it’s there,” but his famous line doesn’t apply here. Instead, go for the scenery, but don’t expect great drama.
