Reviewer: Phil

“The Princess Bride” is a movie that almost completely eluded my cognizance until college.  I don’t know why that is, as when I told my Mom that I lost a bet forcing me to watch it, she said that she loved it.  You think she would have convinced me and my brother to pop it into the VCR as opposed to watching Surf Ninjas for the 27th time.  However, I could see myself at that age reacting a bit like the grandson, hearing the title and scoffing at it.  I, much like the grandson, would have been sadly mistaken to do such.  I was a little hesitant going in, assuming that this was one of those movies that was bolstered moreso by nostalgia than anything else, but I was pleasantly surprised by smart, solid take on a tired story structure.

The story is pretty standard fare here – damsel in distress, true love saves said damsel from evil prince, everyone lives happily ever after.  Great.  The plot that connects all of it is what impresses me.  I like when we have a set of characters where everyone has clear motivations that at least make sense to them and would be a thought a rational person had.  No one here is 100% crazy or evil, something you rarely see in movies like these.  Everyone is also striving toward some sort of goal, and all those goals fall into place and interconnect in a smart way.  We understand why Westley is going through all this trouble, why Inigo feels it necessary to rescue Westley, & why Humperdinck is agreeing to marry a common girl.  Every important plot-driving decision has compelling evidence for why it is happening.  In fact, the smart plotting actually forced me to hold the movie up to a bit too high of a standard, as it did become even more grating when things did not make sense.  How did Inigo know that Westley was being held for trying to rescue his true love from the prince?  What was Fezzik’s deal?  How did the prince go about choosing Buttercup?  Why did Rugen and Inigo’s father fight in the first place and he’s now just coincidentally a count for the prince?  I don’t think the movie needs to be that much longer to explain a lot of this.  A handful of throwaway lines clears up most of it.  If there is anything to really complain about, it would be the portrayal of the princess bride herself, who is a boring damsel through and through, not even given a real name in the credits.  She takes zero initiative and her entire being is completely consumed by Westley.  It’s too bad too, because Robin Wright is actually really good in the role.

Speaking of Wright, in terms of performances, everyone brought their A game.  Cary Elwes as Westley and Mandy Patinkin as Inigo stood out big time.  Elwes played the self-assured hero extremely well – his performance made me think that I probably could revisit Robin Hood: Men In Tights and still find it enjoyable.  Patinkin as Inigo was a fun character who got to do quite a few different things, and he did them all well.

Several scenes within the movie were also highly enjoyable.  Westley’s trials to best Inigo, Fezzik, and Vizzini were all fantastic scenes.  The duel between Westley and Inigo might be one of my all-time favorite fight scenes now – it actually made the Inigo/Rugen duel feel very anticlimactic unfortunately.  There are several solid gags as well, much better than I’ve come to expect from 80’s movies, as so many movies from that decade have aged poorly based off our usual picks.

Before ending the review, one minor pet peeve I have to bring up – what world is this taking place in?  There’s clearly a magical quality to it, yet Inigo is from Spain and the poison is from Australia.  Is this some sort of parallel earth with magic?  Is it our world yet magic existed?  It doesn’t detract from the experience, but I found it odd.

The Princess Bride deserves its “classic” status.  It’s an old story told impressively.  It’s understandable after one viewing why it’s quotable and in the zeitgeist.  It’s definitely not a perfect movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it is highly enjoyable and rewatchable for sure.  I’m glad it’s in my movie vocabulary now.

+ Well-done version of an old story

+ Lot of great scenes

+ Performances were all spot-on

- Princess Bride is a boring character

- Needed more explanation to be fully realized

Grade: A-

By Jon Kissel

In Antiviral, the apple doesn’t fall from the tree.  Brandon Cronenberg, son of body horror master David, is just as enamored with decay and mutation as his father.  Where Papa Cronenberg employed nightmares of horrific tumors and growths, Cronenberg Junior counters with cloned human meat and copious bodily fluids.  The similarities go beyond the grotesqueries on display.  Both also like to overlay their images on top of a satirical base.  Antiviral is filled with the can’t-look-away, but it’s also concerned with the culture’s obsession with celebrity.  Its tabloid knob might be turned to 11, but a lock of Bieber’s hair can go for thousands of dollars and an episode of the Big Bang Theory revolved around Leonard Nimoy’s dirty handkerchief.  Antiviral presupposes a science-fiction future, but one with plenty of grains of truth.

Antiviral’s central conceit is that the bodily products of celebrities have become a giant market.  One facet of this is butcher shops, where cloned celebrity muscle cells are assembled into patties in the backroom and sold for consumption.  For the squeamish, pliable software programs are also prevalent, where the user can tell the computerized image of a celebrity to do anything they want him/her to do.  The most invasive new industry is the collection of pathogens that have infected celebrities, which are then injected into civilians for a hefty fee.  The pathogens are rendered incommunicable to ensure they can’t be passed on, but the point is to be able to proudly display the herpes sores that once adorned one’s favorite actress.  

It’s in this industry that the protagonist finds himself.  Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones) works as a salesman for the Lucas Clinic, which has several in-demand celebrities on retainer.  Lucas gets exclusive rights to their colds, flus, and rashes.  March is revealed as not only an employee, but also a client.  He is able to smuggle samples of the Lucas’s various diseases out of his workplace by infecting himself.  At home, using stolen equipment, he is then able to crack the genetic encryption that prevents the disease from infecting anyone else.  Now in possession of communicable diseases that once ravaged famous bodies, he sells samples to underground dealers.  When tasked by Lucas with personally collecting a heretofore unknown disease from the particularly in-demand Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon), he can’t resist injecting some of her blood into himself.  When the news breaks that she has died, March realizes that not only has he infected himself with a fatal disease, but he has also put a target on his back.  There is a significant demand to know what Geist felt like before she died, and March is now the key to that knowledge.

True to expectations, Cronenberg is repeatedly showing crumbling bodies and the general grossness of anatomy.  March is often collecting his own blood, and the entire process is captured.  When afflicted with respiratory diseases, March sticks a swab deep, deep into his nose to get a sample.  The sound of chopping up cloned muscle masses into single servings is captured in all its wet, sucking glory.  March’s fever dreams are predictably messed up, as his body sprouts cables and his skin grows over his mouth.  Cronenberg loves himself some red in the frame, but he also loves framing it against white backgrounds.  The labs and reception halls of Lucas are pristine, blinding whit, as is the opening shot, which is simply a sickly March standing against a white billboard.  That juxtaposition of the film’s messy and grimy actions against what feels like a sterile setting adds to the already-significant discomfort.

The dystopian satire on display is less effective than the body horror.  Making fun of celebrity culture is a big, easy target.  Its current incarnation is already so self-evidently absurd, that escalation is barely necessary.  Despite Cronenberg’s easy choice of topic, he includes a few touches that are appreciated against the broad metaphor of the premise.  It’s never stated what the coveted celebrities like Geist actually do: they are simply famous.  As the world of the film is obsessed with tangible experiences, the intangible products (music, film, art) that might make a celebrity worthy of admiration are irrelevant.  Cronenberg also designates a couple characters as sages that are allowed to pontificate on Antiviral’s society.  Memorably, a doctor played by Terrence Stamp derides organized religion in one breath and shows off his celebrity skin grafts in the next.  Everyone parrots the company line in Antiviral.  No truth-tellers are allowed to puncture the atmosphere.

Antiviral is a strong first feature from Brandon Cronenberg.  He manufactures multiple striking images, and he gets a chilling depiction of mental and physical deterioration out of Jones.  David Cronenberg has moved away from the body horror of his early career, exchanging larval abortions for acidic Hollywood satire.  Though one of the genre’s great proponents is paying it less tribute, there’s another potential master of the icky ready to take his place.  B-

By Jon Kissel

With John Travolta in a star-making role, Saturday Night Fever is part character study and part nature documentary.  Travolta's Tony Manero is his pack's leader, and at every opportunity, he leads them onto the savannah of the disco to show off their manes and moves.  Much more than the straightforward musical I always assumed it to be, Saturday Night Fever is both a snapshot of a subculture and a testament to how devoting oneself to a subculture can lead to isolation and ignorance.

Iconically introduced strutting down a Brooklyn street, Manero is king of all he surveys.  John Badham's camera captures him from all different angles while the Bee Gees ring out on the soundtrack.  Any conscious participant in American movie culture has seen pieces of this sequence, but it's actually Manero returning to a menial job at a paint store after running some errands.  He still lives with his parents as the second son, overshadowed by the pride his mother and father feel for his priest older brother.  Not only inferior in his parents' eyes, he also is belittled, despite his considerable talent on the dance floor.  That distance between Manero's self-confidence and his actual station in life sustains Badham's film from start to finish. 

Manero might be in a dead-end job  and live in an undermining home, but his self-confidence, derived from his high position in the disco community and among his crew, is justified.  Badham intercuts scenes of Manero getting ready to go out with scenes at the disco, as if it's both calling to its favorite son and incomplete when he's not there.  On the ride there, he dictates which cassettes his crew is going to listen to.  Once inside, Manero and his crew stake out the high ground, taking in their surroundings and making plans before they mingle.  Fawned over by the female clientele who plead to wipe the sweat off his brow, Manero will gladly dance with anyone that can keep up with him.  The more homely patrons can get their moment in the spotlight with him if they've got the moves, while the more beautiful patrons will be summarily dismissed if they're sloppy.  He's not dancing to get laid, like his friends, but because he loves to dance, and because he loves having all eyes on him while he's doing it. 

Travolta and Tony Manero are inextricably linked, and it's as strong a pairing of character and actor as any.  Travolta is exceptional in what's likely the best role of his career, moreso than Vincent Vega.  His Tony is a font of charisma, even when the character's being a casual racist or homophobe.  The viewer's willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, like he's doing it to fit in, as opposed to his crew who by turns are legitimately hateful.  Away from the club and his crew and his parents, when he's allowed to be more vulnerable with his brother Frank (Martin Shakar) or love interest Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney), Travolta is able to communicate how torn Manero is between the joy he gets from dancing and the fear that there is a firm expiration date on his talent.  That fear of being a has-been, stuck in the paint store without his sustaining outlet, makes it easy to sympathize with this alpha male despite his temporary command of his tiny community. 

In another surprising facet, that community is honestly depicted by Badham as an often ugly and tribal place.  On top of the casual intolerance mentioned earlier, Brooklyn is getting browner, demonstrated by the invasion of Latino music into the club and the hassling of Manero's crew by their Latino equivalents.  Women are treated poorly, especially unofficial crew member Annette (Donna Pescow) who longs for Tony's affection.  Badham gives everything a grubby feel, appropriate for the NYC of Taxi Driver and Serpico.

In this solidly working class and deeply religious environment, ambitions aren't running too high for Manero et al.  It's easy to imagine what the next several years has in store for them if they stay as is.  Stephanie is introduced as a contagion in this fairly-cloistered environment, sparking in Tony the possibility of something different.  Lacking that kind of encouragement from his friends and parents, Travolta makes it appear as if leaving Brooklyn or going to school has legitimately never occurred to him.  His desire to broaden his self-confidence on the dance floor to other aspects of his life is another deeply sympathetic impulse for a character otherwise trapped in his routine.

Alternatively raw and heightened, Saturday Night Fever was a pleasant surprise, an often-fun and affecting experience despite the innate corniness of the soundtrack and the film's broad legacy.  Events do hinge on a dance contest, but Travolta infuses too much life into his work to not be enchanted by it.  Badham isn't quite up to snuff when more action is required, as a rumble scene is a mis-ADR'd disaster, but Travolta more than picks up the slack.  Disco might be dead, but Saturday Night Fever justly lives forever.  B

By Jon Kissel

Amy Schumer's Comedy Central show, Inside Amy Schumer, wrapped its best year yet shortly before her big movie, Trainwreck, opened to rave reviews and big numbers.  Her show, in which the comedienne stealthily interrogates misogyny in topics ranging from rape in the military to the perceived hotness level of actresses, primed my expectations for her film to be an acerbic demolition of romantic comedy tropes.  Disappointingly, it is not that.  Trainwreck is funny throughout, but it exists comfortably and unironically in the company of earlier films starring Kate Hudson or Katherine Heigl.

Schumer's character, also named Amy, leads Trainwreck down its very funny, if formulaic, track.  Amy is a serial man-izer (?), sleeping with different anonymous dudes as often as possible.  This worldview has been inculcated in her by her father Gordon (Colin Quinn), who also engaged in prolific promiscuity throughout his life, though he's now crippled by multiple sclerosis.  Amy is very much her father's daughter, while sister Kim (Brie Larson) is the polar opposite, a settled-down wife and stepmother to dowdy Tom (Mike Birbiglia) and eccentric Allister (Evan Brinkman).  When not drinking, carousing, or hassling Kim about her hackneyed family life, Amy works at a despicable magazine that makes Maxim look like Good Housekeeping.  Ordered by her boss to write a cover story about ground-breaking sports doctor Aaron  (Bill Hader), the sports-phobic Amy and unlucky-in-love Aaron manage to hit it off and begin a fledgling relationship. 

From there, the film gets increasingly predictable and clichéd.  Two NYC montages are included, one happy and winking, the other downcast and sincere.  It's as if the city was another character.  Things begin to progress in a depressingly familiar way.  The central relationship undergoes a hasty separation based on the characters' fears, but it's nothing an embarrassing rock-bottom encounter, and some wise words from a child, can't fix.  There's no greater offender than the big reunion choreographed to a music number, something that beggars belief from a character and plot standpoint.  With Judd Apatow behind the camera, it isn't too surprising that there's a visible frame undergirding the film.  For all the fluidity that he's brought to individual scenes in his previous films, they all combine to a near-identical structure that no amount of improvised body-hair-removal scenes can distract from.

However, it's those improvised scenes that make Apatow successful, and Trainwreck has plenty of uproarious moments.  A deep supporting cast featuring comedy pros like Randall Park and Jon Glaser and comedy rookies like John Cena and Lebron James all pull their weight.  An unrecognizable Tilda Swinton is hilariously dismissive of her staff as Amy's boss, and Quinn effortlessly brings his crochety persona.  Hader is more of a straight man than he tends to play, but his timing remains strong when he's reacting to jokes instead of instigating them.  Schumer, however, is the clear winner, anchoring the film with her consistently funny outlook and delivery.  An early riff on Titanic sets the stage and from there, it's cutting remark after perfect reaction shot after stunned silence.  It was a given that she could play the fool, and, as expected in an Apatow movie, she also has no problem with the heavier scenes.  Led by Schumer, no one fails to get laughs in her egalitarian script.

For all the successful humor, the cliches of Trainwreck cast a pall over the film.  In an unfortunate coincidence, I had just watched They Came Together the previous night, and to my considerable shock, Trainwreck indulged in many of the tropes that that spoof viciously exposes as pablum.  It's possible that in her first lead role, Schumer and Apatow had to accept studio interference to compensate for her lack of a film resume.  Hopefully, with Trainwreck's great success at its back, she now has the clout to scrape together a smaller budget and make the film that her show insists she is capable of.  No montages required.  C+

By Jon Kissel

Slow West wins the 'Ain't Them Bodies Saints' award.  Like that earlier period drama, this one also manages to blow its excellent cinematograpy with too much telling instead of showing.  This is a significant let down because John Maclean's debut feature hits on several themes that I've long found interesting.  The collision of the Old and New World, romantic ideas of the West, and some interesting gender politics are present, but Maclean's script lacks the courage of its convictions. 

Michael Fassbender's character Silas Selleck narrates the goings-on, in which noble Scottish emigre Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is traversing the post Civil War frontier by himself, in search of his old-country crush Rose Ross (Caren Pistorius) and her father John (Rory McCann).  The low-born Ross's fled to the US after contributing to an accidental death.  Ill-suited to make the dangerous journey through war-town Indian country, Jay teams up with Silas, ostensibly as a guide though Silas is actually using Jay as a stooge.  Silas, and several other bounty hunters including a group led by the prolific Ben Mendelsohn, are searching for the Ross's, and Jay is leading everyone to them.

Filmed in New Zealand, Slow West looks so good that it nears the Uncanny Valley.  Establishing shots appear too painterly to be real.  Shot by Robbie Ryan, who also did the cinematography for Andrea Arnold's haunting Wuthering Heights, Slow West never lets the viewer forget how empty the environment is.  Characters often find themselves alone in vast fields, dwarfed by the untamed landscape with nothing in sight for miles.  Maclean and Ryan also juxtapose the expansive with the claustrophobic, as dust storms box characters in or dense forests limit movement.  As strong an advertisement for New Zealand as anything Peter Jackson has done, the natural beauty of the film communicates what was both alluring and forbidding about the frontier. 

The environment forms one half of that frontier equation, and the cultural response to it forms the other.  People like Jay, full of the romanticism that wealth allows for, were needed to spread the word, though people like Silas and the Ross's were the ones that had to do the hard and dangerous work of bending it to their will.  Jay's romantic notions are quickly disabused, as an early scene finds him wandering through a devastated forest, he going in one direction and Indian widows and children moving in the other.  Those he encounters on the way are desperate enough to steal or cunning enough to trick him out of his possessions.  Jay looks down on Silas as a brute, but Silas is surviving, and for far longer than the badly-prepared Jay could hope for.  The film proposes that survival requires a base of Silas with a pinch of Jay, lest all humanity be lost.  How those refugee Indians fit into the equation is something best not thought about.

In attempting to make a statement on Manifest Destiny, Maclean overplays his hand.  The narration is completely unnecessary, and repeatedly tells the viewer obvious things.  The pairing of Jay and Silas is textbook odd-couple, with each rubbing off on the other.  A traveling anthropologist apparently is coming from seeing Avatar in daguerrotypes, as he predicts that the vanishing Indians will eventually be condescended to with the noble savage trope.  It's in this formula and speechifying that Slow West loses its way.  A film that looks as great as this one should trust its audience to pay attention.

That impulse to make sure the viewer understands what the director is going for will hopefully be remedied as Maclean continues to work.  Slow West is close to being great, culminating as it does in a thrilling, unpredictable climax where motives are turned on their head and salt is literally poured in wounds.  A contemplative turn following the resolution is so striking, I'm surprised more films haven't done it before.  Hopefully, Maclean returns to the Western well with more faith in his audience.  B-

By Jon Kissel

The Sweet Hereafter opens on a painterly image of perfect familial bliss.  A husband and wife are sleeping in a sunlit room with their young daughter in between them.  There’s nothing in the room except the mattress and the covers on a hardwood floor, giving the impression that for this family, nothing else in the universe exists outside of this moment.  That Atom Egoyan opens his film in this fashion is a cruel juxtaposition to what it’s actually about.  The Sweet Hereafter depicts a near-unimaginable, though well-constructed, scenario of grief and loss.

The Sweet Hereafter tells a fractured narrative revolving around a bus crash that killed almost all of a small Canadian town’s children.  Mitchell Stephens, the husband in the opening tableau, is a tort lawyer attempting to craft a class-action lawsuit around the crash.  Played by Ian Holm, Stephens is mostly successful, enlisting the bus driver and several grieving families.  Those families are introduced in flashbacks intact and happy, from single dad Billy Ansel (Bruce Greenwood) and his twins, to a hippie family raising an adopted, universally beloved, Native Canadian boy named Bear.  When not assembling plaintiffs, Stephens is wrestling with how to deal with his drug-addicted daughter  Zoe (Caerthan Banks), currently in the midst of yet another relapse.  All subplots are infected with loss and longing, as happy memories are twisted and tainted in the face of a bleak reality.

Stephens gets the most screentime, and ably holds down the center of the film.  In meetings with families, he repeatedly has to make the case for monetary justice.  Someone has to pay, just not the school corporation because they have low insurance payouts.  Egoyan squeezes some much-needed black comedy out of Stephens’s tactics.  In trying to recruit Bear’s parents, the floor plan and lack of furniture means that he has to approach them literally on his knees, and when he ends his speech by saying they should talk it over privately while he gets something out of his car, Egoyan cuts to Stephens running through the snow.  There is no question that he is being mercenary, and The Sweet Hereafter certainly is not some paean to trial lawyers a la Erin Brockovich.  While he’s fairly despicable in dealing with the townsfolk, the inclusion of his tortuously complicated relationship with his daughter humanizes Stephens.  Though he doesn’t share his circumstances with the townsfolk, it’s readily apparent that he fears for himself what has happened to them.

It’s in those family scenes that Egoyan hits hardest.  He fills the background with details that demonstrate the gravity of what these parents have been dealing with.  Bear’s parents, previously welcoming and joyful, are now hopelessly, irrevocably depressed and deflated.  Another family still hasn’t replaced the calendar from the month of the accident, and the bus driver, played with a rural hospitality and sense of humor by Gabrielle Rose, has a wall covered in pictures of ‘her’ kids.  Items are infused with meaning, positive and negative, as parents become desperate for meaning and the answers that Stephens insists are out there.  Some are angry, some are faking normalcy, some are resigned to misery.  Egoyan honestly covers the spectrum of possible responses.

Despite its successful rations of black humor, The Sweet Hereafter nudges unwatchable territory due to its subject matter.  Children of Men, another film about the absence of kids, has the benefit of distance, as they haven’t been killed, but instead don’t exist in recent memory.  The two share an air of hopelessness pervades it, but Sweet Hereafter wallows in it.  Another personal favorite, the very similar Rabbit Hole, is more intimate, and arrives at a more profound conclusion.  In juggling all its characters, Egoyan’s film has some missteps, particularly a melodramatic subplot involving Sarah Polley’s dark home life.  The Sweet Hereafter is a valuable entry to the dead-kids genre, and one that avoids sap and manipulation, even as it doesn’t reach the top of the miserable heap.  B