Friday, May 9, 2014
This week in movies you missed: A few months ago, proud papa Dave Donohue of South Burlington, a cinephile and sometime filmmaker, wrote to tell me that his son Zachary's feature directorial debut was being released by IFC Midnight.
Cowritten by Zachary Donohue — who grew up in Vermont and the Adirondacks — and his partner, Lauren Thompson, The Den is a horror flick visualized entirely through web and phone cams that has drawn positive notice from outlets ranging from the New York Times to FEARnet. It hasn't screened in Vermont, but it is available on VOD, and I finally got a chance to watch it.
What You Missed
Elizabeth Benton (Melanie Papalia) just won an academic grant to study the sociology of a video-chat site called the Den. Like Chatroulette, it pairs users randomly for real-time web-cam chats as long or short as they desire.
At first, meeting random people is addictive, even if most of them are guys asking to see her boobs. Elizabeth starts shunning face-to-face encounters with her pregnant sister (Anna Margaret Hollyman), her friends and her boyfriend (David Schlachtenhaufen) to hang out in the Den.
Then she encounters a user with a blocked video feed who starts sending her odd messages. Her computer wakes up mysteriously at night. Suddenly she's looking at footage of a young woman being brutally murdered.
Tags: Movies you missed , horror , webcam , IFC Midnight , Image , Web Only
Friday, May 2, 2014
This week in movies you missed: Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace get uncomfortably close in the latest from director Brian De Palma, returning to his Hitchcockian thriller origins.
What You Missed
High-powered ad agency exec Christine (McAdams) loves to be surrounded by reflections of herself. She makes her lovers (of whom there are many) wear a mask that looks like a stylized version of her face. She has a creepy backstory involving her identical twin. And she's doing her best to make over her ambitious underling, Isabelle (Rapace), in her own image.
Christine takes credit for Isabelle's viral-video smartphone campaign, then patronizingly tries to turn her low blow into a teachable moment. Isabelle learns the lesson well and strikes back, seizing something her rival wants. But Isabelle is also sleeping with Christine's slimy boyfriend (Paul Anderson), which makes her vulnerable.
By the film's end, the women's twisted relationship will have encompassed murder, making out, police interrogations, double-crosses, trances, hallucinations and the wearing of umpteen sumptuous designer ensembles.
Tags: passion , brian de palma , rachel mcadams , noomi rapace , Movies you missed , Image , Video , Web Only
Thursday, May 1, 2014
"Oh, shit!" "That's brutal!"
Those were exclamations by members of the University of Vermont's Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity (or their guests) overheard as they left Merrill's Roxy Cinemas in Burlington at four this afternoon to discover that a warm, sunny day had suddenly become a soaker.
But the students didn't really seem that upset. After all, they'd just attended a special screening of Universal's upcoming comedy Neighbors followed by a Q&A with star Seth Rogen and his wife, Lauren Miller.
Pi Kappa Alpha won its meet-and-greet with the movie star by raising $27,000 for Alzheimer's research in a campus contest run by Rogen and Miller's organization Hilarity for Charity. (More info here.)
The brothers were clearly big fans, and they had a lot of questions for Rogen, all of which he answered with grace, frankness and humor. Also frequently heard: his trademark barking laugh and references to his recreational drug of choice.
Ironically enough, the plot of Neighbors pits family man Rogen and his wife (Rose Byrne) against the hard-partying fraternity that moves next door to their idyllic home, led by preening bro-meister Zac Efron. The poster's tagline is "Family vs. Frat."
So, naturally, the first question Rogen got from a PIKE brother concerned his feelings about fraternities — before he took the role, during the shoot and now.
"I'm from Canada," said the comedian. "We don't really have fraternities there in the same structure they have them here."
Tags: seth rogen , lauren miller , neighbors , pi kappa alpha , hilarity for charity , Image , Video , Web Only
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
“When Horror Came to Shochiku,” a four-DVD box set released under the Criterion Collection’s “Eclipse” imprint in 2012, is quite possibly the weirdest and coolest release by this venerable, taste-making video-distribution company. It’s a collection of oddball exploitation/horror movies from Shochiku, one of the oldest and most storied of all Japanese film studios. I haven’t yet watched all four films (though I’m especially looking forward to Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell), but did just spend an evening with The Living Skeleton, directed by Hiroshi Matsuno in 1968.
Tags: horror film , japanese film , low budget , criterion collection , val lewton , the living skeleton , Image , Video , Web Only
Saturday, April 26, 2014
This week in movies you missed: This film features James Franco and explicit male-on-male BDSM. Not together.
What You Missed
In case you haven't visited the internet since 2005, let me take the time to inform you that actor James Franco has recreated himself as an all-purpose merry prankster and multimedia provocateur. (Here's a piece on his latest NSFW art project. Ask Seth Rogen about that when he comes to town next week.) As part of that effort, Franco is now a prolific director of short films, features and sort-of-features, like this one, which he codirected with Travis Mathews.
"Interior. Leather Bar." is the title of a scene in William Friedkin's 1980 thriller Cruising, in which Al Pacino played a cop who went undercover in the gay club scene to catch a killer. To avoid getting an X rating from the Motion Picture Association of America, Friedkin had to cut 40 minutes of explicit footage, which was later destroyed.
Franco's mission? Recreate the missing reels using actor Val Lauren as a Pacino lookalike.
Tags: Movies you missed , interior leather bar , james franco , Image , Web Only
There aren’t too many documentaries I return to often, and I’m not really sure why. I probably watch as many docs as fiction films, but the latter show up more frequently in my “repeat viewing” list. You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve seen Big Trouble in Little China.
I don’t think favoring fiction films means it’s more fun to project yourself into an imagined world than into a slice of the real one. For one thing, I’ve found that the axiom “truth is stranger than fiction” is pretty accurate. For another, one of the few docs I do revisit is one that fills me with abject horror. That would be Errol Morris’ second feature, Vernon, Florida (1981), a film that most people probably don’t find as terrifying as I do. Whenever I see it I feel a chill, because I share most of my genetic material with the deranged lunatics who populate that great movie.
Another documentary in rotation at my place is Jeff Malmberg’s 2010 film Marwencol, in part because my wife, Laura, is very fond of it. Every time I watch it, I like it a little more, too.
Tags: marwencol , film , movie , what i'm watching , documentary , mark hogancamp , jeff malmberg , Image , Video , Web Only
Thursday, April 24, 2014
UPDATE 4/25: Owing to concerns about security at Rogen's appearance, we have removed any mention of its scheduled venue from this post. Please be aware that the screening is not open to the public, and its venue may change without notice.
In his new movie Neighbors, Canadian comedian Seth Rogen plays a nice family man who experiences hell on earth after he moves in next door to a rowdy college fraternity. In real life, Rogen's relationship with a certain University of Vermont fraternity is a lot more cordial. So cordial, in fact, that he and his wife, actress Lauren Miller, will come to an undisclosed Burlington-area theater on Thursday, May 1, to host a special, private screening of Neighbors for the men of Pi Kappa Alpha.
How'd that happen? Well, Rogen and Miller are outspoken advocates of Alzheimer's research — Miller's mother was diagnosed with the disease at age 55 — and started the organization Hilarity for Charity to get Generation Y behind the cause. Part of that is a collegiate contest called HFC U, in which more than 270 campus organizations around the country vied to raise the most funds for the Alzheimer's Association.
The winner? UVM's Pi Kappa Alpha, with more than $27,000 raised. (HFC U collectively raised nearly $130,000 for Alzheimer's research, according to an HFC press release.) Their prize is the special screening on Thursday, with Rogen and Miller in attendance for a Q&A.
Here are a WPTZ report and a Vermont Cynic article with details on the frat's fundraising effort.
So if you happen to see Seth Rogen around town next Thursday, just act normal. Maybe you could ask him if he's a freak or a geek, or how he feels about Vermont's maple penis. Meanwhile, check out this video of the funnyman testifying before Congress about the need for Alzheimer's research — a cause he's pretty damn serious about.
Tags: Alzheimer's , Neighbors , Pi Kappa Alpha , Seth Rogen , university of vermont , Image , Web Only
Saturday, April 19, 2014
Everybody loves Hitchcock, just as they should. No other director was as good at manipulating the audience into feeling whatever he wanted them to feel. Filmmakers are still learning from him, and probably always will be.
Hitchcock's well-known moniker, the "Master of Suspense,” is accurate. Hitchcock was absolutely brilliant at telling his stories in such a way as to highlight the disparities of knowledge at the root of every kind of suspense. That is, situations in which we, the audience, are given a piece of information that one or more characters do not know. Hitchcock exploits these relative degrees of knowledge — known as a narration’s range — for the purpose of creating suspense. He was very, very good at it.
One of my favorite examples of Hitchcock exploiting a disparity between two levels of knowledge occurs in Marnie, possibly my favorite Hitchcock film. The situation is that the title character, a pathological thief, hides in the bathroom at her office and waits for everyone else to leave. When she’s alone, she breaks into the company safe (she’s learned the combination earlier), steals thousands of dollars and skips town. She gets as far as opening the safe and grabbing the money when Hitchcock starts messing with the narration’s range.
Tags: stage fright , alfred hitchcock , narration , marlene dietrich , jane wyman , suspense , Image , Web Only , Video
Friday, April 18, 2014
This week in movies you missed: This drama about a group home for at-risk kids got wide-spread acclaim and Independent Spirit Awards, but no wide theatrical release.
What You Missed
Twentysomething Grace (Brie Larson) works at a residential treatment facility for teens with her boyfriend, Mason (John Gallagher Jr.). Both are veterans of the foster-care system. But, while Mason was raised by a loving family, Grace harbors dark memories that start to emerge when she tries to help a sullen girl from a middle-class home (Kaitlyn Dever) who's been cutting herself.
Meanwhile, all the young employees of the facility struggle with the built-in limits of their jobs: They can't question the decisions of therapists and "experts" who don't interact daily with the kids, and they can't do much to retrieve kids who manage to leave the property. All they can do is provide "safe space" in an unsafe world.
Tags: short term 12 , destin daniel cretton , brie larson , kaitlyn dever , Movies you missed , Image , Video , Web Only
Wednesday, April 16, 2014
The 1973 film Cousin Jules was considered French documentarian Dominique Benicheti's masterpiece, yet for decades it was impossible to see. Made over five years, the film does exactly what it says on the tin: depicts the everyday life of Benicheti's cousin, Jules, an elderly, rural blacksmith.
Despite the accolades for Cousin Jules upon its release, the film failed to find a distributor, in part because it was — and is still — difficult to categorize. More "poetic" than most cinéma vérité films, and verging somewhat into the territory of experimental cinema, Cousin Jules, for all its critical favor, wound up nearly forgotten. (Benicheti's insistence that it be screened only in CinemaScope with stereo sound — an unfamiliar exhibition format for most documentaries — surely complicated matters.)
Benicheti died in 2011 while in the process of restoring the film; the task was taken up by other archivists, and Cousin Jules made its debut at the 2012 New York Film Festival.
This week, it will have its Vermont premiere at Main Street Landing in Burlington; the event is sponsored by the Burlington Film Society and Vermont International Film Foundation Local cinephiles now have a rare chance to see this unusual and acclaimed film in a restored print, in its original aspect ratio and with stereo sound, as the late director intended.
Tags: film , movie , cousin jules , documentary , dominique benicheti , Image , Video , Web Only