Sundance Film Review: Moon (dir by Duncan Jones)

Posted on January 28, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

With this year’s Sundance Film Festival getting underway in Colorado, I’m going to be spending the next few days looking at some films that caused a stir at previous Sundance Film Festivals. Today, I’m taking a look at the 2009’s Moon.

It’s time for all good people to praise Sam Rockwell.

As far as I’m concerned, Sam Rockwell is one of the patron saints of character acting. Is there anything that he can’t do? He can do comedy. He can do drama. He can play the cool, older guy, like he did in The Way, Way Back. He can play the nerdy, weirdo as he’s done in too many movies for me to list. He can play a mentor and he can play a student. He can make you laugh and he can make you cry. He’s one of those actors who can seamlessly transition from small indie films to huge blockbusters without missing a beat. Rockwell won an Oscar for his performance in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and he might just win another one for playing President George W. Bush in Vice. He can even dance, as anyone who has seen him in Iron Man 2 can tell you. Rockwell’s been acting since he was a teenager and he’s definitely earned the right to be known as one of our greatest actors.

For that reason, it can sometimes be a little bit difficult to decide just which performance is Rockwell’s best. He’s appeared in so many different movies and he’s played so many different characters. Even when the movie’s bad, Rockwell is usually great. However, if I had to sit down and pick one Rockwell performance as being the epitome of everything that makes him a great actor, I’d probably go with his performance in Duncan Jones’s contemplative sci-fi film, Moon.

In Moon, Rockwell plays a man named Sam. Sam has spent three years living on the dark side of the moon. He works for shadowy Lunar Industries. His job is to mine the moon for helium-3, an alternative energy source that is now all the rage on Earth. It’s a lonely job for Sam. He gets up every day. He rides his lunar rover across the stage. He returns to the sterile facility, where he lives. Sometimes, if he’s lucky, he gets recorded messages from his wife and daughter. His only companion is a robot named GERTY. Though Sam trusts GERTY, we know better, if just because GERTY speaks with the voice of Kevin Spacey.

From the minute we meet Sam, we can see how living on the Moon has affected him. He’s quiet and a bit meek. After three years of isolation, Sam accepts whatever he has to accept to survive. He doesn’t complain about rarely getting to talk to his family. He doesn’t question why he has to work alone. Whatever fight Sam once had in him is gone. Now, Sam just wants to finish out his time and go home.

And then, one day, Sam is driving the lunar rover when he has a sudden hallucination and then passes out. He ends up crashing into a crater….

Suddenly, Sam wakes up at the facility. However, it doesn’t take long to notice that this Sam seems different from the Sam who we met at the start of the movie. The Sam who wakes up in the facility is younger and angrier than the Sam who we first met. This new Sam is less willing to accept everything that GERTY tells him. Even more strangely, this new Sam is convinced that he’s just arrived on the moon….

And then the new Sam meets the old Sam….

In Moon, Sam Rockwell gives two empathetic and memorable performances as the same person. Old Sam is beaten down by life. New Sam is angry and just a little bit arrogant. And yet, what makes the performance so brilliant is that you can easily see how the New Sam could eventually transform into the Old Sam. Thanks to both Rockwell’s performance and the film’s stark imagery, it’s easy to see how the isolation could eventually rob Sam of his passion, his will to fight, and his intellectual curiosity. When the Old Sam meets the New Sam, he’s reminded that there used to be more to his life than just the drudgery of his daily routine. And when the New Sam meets the Old Sam, he’s confronted with what a future of isolation means to him.

Of course, the new Sam and the Old Sam weren’t meant to meet. And now that they have met, Lunar Industries is on their way to clean up the mess….

Released in the same year as James Cameron’s bombastic Avatar, Moon is a low-key and thoughtful science fiction film, a meditation on isolation and identity. Duncan Jones directs the film in a stark and low-key style, allowing the film’s story to play out at its own pace. As visualized by Jones, the lunar landscape is impressive the first time you see it and increasingly bleak with each subsequent look. Far more than Ridley Scott did in The Martian, Jones captures what it actually is to be totally alone. (That no critics compared The Martian and Moon, despite their obvious similarities, is astounding to me.)

Featuring Sam Rockwell at his absolute best, Moon is a sci-fi film that remains haunting and powerful, even after films with bigger budgets and flashier special effects have faded into obscurity.

Music Video of the Day: Please by Saro (2019, dir by Alex Cook)

Posted on January 28, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

It’s a strange world, isn’t it?

By this point, everyone should know that I have a weakness for surreal music videos, especially when they’re in black-and-white and they involve an overhead shot of a maze. So, my selection of this video for music video of the day should come as a shock to no one.

I like this one. The eyes remind of Salvador Dali’s famed work on Hitchcock’s Spellbound. For that matter, they also remind me of Argento’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet. One of the plot points of Four Flies is that the identity of the killer has been preserved on the victim’s retina.

(Though that’s scientifically impossible, you might be surprised to learn that there’s quite a few people who believe that can actually happen. In fact, I was recently reading about a police interrogation in which the cops got a guy to confess by telling him that they had found his image preserved in his victim’s eyes.)

Of course, you really can’t talk about eyes in cinema without mentioning Lucio Fulci. One of Fulci’s trademarks was that almost every film featured either an eye getting popped out of a head or otherwise split in half. I have to admit that, after seeing Zombi 2, I am now incredibly protective of my eyes.

Enjoy!

Lisa’s Week In Review: 1/21/19 — 1/27/19

Posted on January 27, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

For the rest of eternity, this week will be known as my Red Dawn week.

And, oh my God, what a week it was! It’s not just that I came down with a pretty bad cold on Thursday and I’ve spent the past 4 days on curled up on my couch, feeling bitchy and miserable. It’s not just that the Oscar noms were kinda disappointing. It’s also that the news from the rest of the world was so annoying as well. Between the kickoff of the 2020 Presidential campaign, the now temporarily resolved government shutdown and the media screwing up the Covington Catholic story, is it any wonder that I watched the original Red Dawn not once but twice this weekend?

Seriously, I don’t even like violence but, after a week like this one, there’s something cathartic about watching people blow stuff up.

Here’s what else went on this week:

Films I Watched:

22 Jump Street (2014)
The Cutting Edge (1992)
Diary of a Hitman (1992)
Essex Boys (2000)
Gamera vs. Monster X (1970)
Movers & Shakers (1985)
Narcotics: Pit of Despair (1967)
The Omega Code (1999)
One More Time (1970)
Pretty In Pink (1986)
Red Dawn (1984)
Rent: Live! (2019)
Report to the Commissioner (1975)
The Ride (1998)

Television Shows I Watched:

60 Days In
Ask the Undertaker
The Bachelor 23
Brooklyn 99
Catholic Answers Live
Celebrity Big Brother 2
Celebrity Big Brother After Dark
Chaplet of St. Michael
Charlie’s Angels
Conversations With A Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes
Couples Court With The Cutlers
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
Degrassi
Doctor Phil
Dynasty
Face the Truth
Frasier
Friends
Ghost Whisperer
The Good Place
Hell’s Kitchen
Icons
Impractical Jokers
King of the Hill
Last Man Standing
Lauren Lake’s Paternity Court
Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath
Lindsay Lohan’s Beach Club
The Magicians
Many Sides of Jane
Saved By The Bell
See No Evil
Shipping Wars
Seinfeld
Someone You Thought You Knew
The U.S. Figureskating Championships
The Wild Goose

Books I Read:

No Blonde Is An Island (1965) by Carter Brown
The Passionate (1959) by Carter Brown

Music To Which I Listened:

Britney Spears
Computer Magic
Dua Lipa
Gwen Stefani
J Balvin
Jakalope
JaydenART Music
Maggie Rogers
Sleigh Bells
Starcrawler
Terror Jr.
Vampire Weekend

Links From Last Week:

Links From The Site:

Erin profiled artist Wynne W. Davies and shared the following artwork: Dream, The Nylon Pirates, Angelique in Revolt, Murders in Silk, Why Get Married?, A Road Divided, and The Evil Sleep!
Gary offered some thoughts on the Oscar nominations and reviewed Our Relations and Way Out West, Buck Benny Rides Again, and Frankenstein Created Woman and Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed!
I shared not only my Oscar nominations but also the actual Oscar nominations. I shared music videos from Computer Magic, Starcrawler, Britney Spears, Gwen Stefani, JaydenArt Music, Dua Lipa, and Terror Jr. I shared the trailer for the new film about Ted Bundy. And I reviewed The Tale, Three Identical Strangers, and Searching!
Ryan reviewed First Reformed, Found Footage, Bad Friends, and Out of the Nest, along with sharing his weekly reading round-up!

And this concludes my Red Dawn week!

(Want to see what I did last week? Click here!)

Stay strong, everyone!

Sundance Film Review: Searching (dir by Aneesh Chaganty)

Posted on January 27, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

With this year’s Sundance Film Festival getting underway in Colorado, I’m going to be spending the next two weeks looking at some films that caused a stir at previous Sundance Film Festivals. Today, I’m taking a look at the 2018’s Searching.

Searching tells the story of David Kim (John Cho) and his daughter, Margot (Michelle La).

David thinks that he has a close relationship with his daughter but, in reality, they’ve been drifting apart ever since David’s wife died two years earlier. Now, Margot is away at college and David is alone at home. They still communicate, of course. They message each other on Facebook. They Skype. David sill sends Margot money for her piano lessons.

And yet, even if he can’t bring himself to fully admit it, David knows that they’re not as close as they once were. Their conversations are often awkward and he doesn’t really know much about the friends that Margot has made at college. Too often, he finds himself starting to ask her about what’s really going on in her life, just to then erase the message before sending. One night, when Margot tells David that she’s going to a friend’s house for a study group, he has no reason not to believe her. It’s not until Margot fails to return from studying that David is forced to confront how little he actually knows about his daughter’s life.

As a film, Searching is set almost entirely on smartphones and computer screens. Considering that the movie could have just as easily been called Unfriended 3: Searching, this is a surprisingly good and emotionally resonant film. We watch as David helplessly sends out messages to his daughters, messages that are destined to be unanswered. We watch as David looks at old pictures and videos of the family he once had, searching for some sort of answer hidden in the past. And, as we watch all of this, we come to realize that David is not just searching for his daughter’s whereabouts. Instead, in a world dominated by social media, he’s also searching for a human connection, for something more than just a tweet or a cryptic status update.

Of course, the film does occasionally threaten to take its format just a bit too far. Sometimes, you really do find yourself wishing that David would just get offline and go outside and look for his daughter. (Actually, he does do that but, because of the film’s narrative structure, we don’t really get to witness it.) By the time David is having nightly FaceTime sessions with the detective (Debra Messing) assigned to his daughter’s case, you can be excused for fearing that the film’s style is going to end up collapsing in on itself.

Fortunately, Searching is held together by the lead performance of John Cho. Whenever Searching threatens to veer into self-parody, Cho is there to bring it back on track. Before this film came out, I guess Cho was probably best known for appearing in the Star Trek movies. Searching made him the first Asian-American to headline a mainstream thriller in Hollywood and Cho gives such a sympathetic and compelling performance that you’re willing to excuse whatever flaws might be present in the film’s narrative. Because he’s played by John Cho, you want David to find his daughter. You want him to find that for which he’s searching.

Music Video of the Day: Terrified by Terror Jr (2019, dir by Millicent Hailes)

Posted on January 27, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today’s music video of the day is one of those video’s that I think works best if you imagine that everyone in it is dead and that the video itself is taking place in Purgatory.

It’s seriously not that outlandish an idea. There has to be some sort of entertainment in Purgatory and the bartender certainly appears to have seen his share of singers and drinkers.

Another possible option is that this video is taking place at the Overlook Hotel. Again, the ghostly atmosphere would seem to suggest that we’re in another world, one that probably running parallel to ours. It’s very easy to imagine Jack Torrance sitting at the bar, watching the singers and wondering why Grady keeps denying having been the caretaker.

And, of course, there’s always the chance that we’re visiting a section of the Black Lodge. Or maybe we’re at the Roadhouse again….

Well, regardless of where this atmospheric video is taking place, enjoy!

Music Video of the Day: Swan Song by Dua Lipa (2019, dir by Floria Sigismondi)

Posted on January 26, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

We’ve seen the future and wow, there’s a lot of trash.

Seriously, that’s the main thing that I’ve noticed about movies set in the future. No one ever picks up after themselves. You would think that we’d have robots cleaning and polishing every inch of the Earth but apparently, WALL-E was a lie.

Even with that in mind, though, I still cry every time that I watch WALL-E. Damn, that’s a good movie. It totally should have been nominated for Best Picture. Between that and not nominating Three Identical Strangers for Best Documentary, I don’t know what’s wrong with the Academy….

Anyway, this song appears on the soundtrack of a movie and no, it’s not WALL-E. Instead, it’s from Alita: Battle Angel, which was written and produced by James Cameron and directed by Robert Rodriguez. The movie’s coming out this February and maybe it will replace the Valentine-shaped hole that’s been in our soul ever since the Fifty Shades trilogy came to an end.

Or maybe not. I just hope it’s good!

Anyway, the video is a party in a futuristic rubbish heap. I don’t suggest trying this in your own neighborhood landfill. Party clean, everyone.

Enjoy!

Sundance Film Review: Three Identical Strangers (dir by Tim Wardle)

Posted on January 25, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

It’s generally agreed that last year was a great year for documentaries. Between RBG, Would You Like To Be My Neighbor?, and Free Solo cleaning up at the box office, 2018 was the year that proved the audiences were willing to pay money to see reality captured on film. For me, there was no better documentary released last year than Three Identical Strangers.

Three Identical Strangers starts out like a Hallmark movie and then slowly turns into a horror movie. In New York, in the early 1980s, three young men who have previously never met discover that they’re triplets. At first, they’re a media sensation. Young, handsome, and charismatic, Edward Galland, David Kellman, and Robert Shafran become instantly celebrities. We watch archival footage of them appearing on a talk show and talking about how they discovered each other and everything that they have in common. They all smoke the same brand of cigarette. They all tend to have the same fashion sense and interests. All three of them smile while announcing that they’re single and they like women, which causes the audience to break into applause.

It was the 80s and we’re told that meant sex, drugs, and rock and roll. There are the three brothers at a club. There they are walking down the streets of New York, with three huge grins on their faces. There they are making a cameo appearance in a film with Madonna. Soon, they’re opening up a restaurant together, they’re getting married, and they’re starting families of their own….

And yet, as we watch all of this happy footage, we’re also watching present-day interviews with David Kellman and Robert Shafran. It’s impossible not to notice that, in the present, both of them speak in voices tinged with weariness. In the present day interviews, neither one of the brothers smile. Both of them have their guard up. To put it simply, neither one of them appears to be particularly happy.

It’s also impossible not to notice that Edward Galland, who is frequently described as having been the most charismatic of the triplets, is nowhere to be seen.

While the three triplets are becoming celebrities, the families that adopted them are wondering why they never knew about the other brothers. All three of the brothers were adopted through the same adoption agency and, interestingly, all three of them were put into families that had just recently adopted a daughter as well. One brother was given to an upper class family while another was adopted by a middle class family and finally, the third brother was given to a lower class family. It quickly becomes clear that this was not a coincidence.

Instead, the three brothers were a part of a social experiment, one designed to see how growing up at different economic levels would effect them. And, as quickly becomes clear, Edward, David, and Robert weren’t the only part of that experiment. Under the direction of psychologists Viola W. Bernard and Peter B. Neubauer, several sets of twins and triplets were separated for the exact same reason….

To say anything else about this haunting documentary would run the risk of spoiling it. It’s a thought-provoking film, as well as a rather disturbing one. Watching the film, it’s impossible not to mourn for the childhoods that the brothers lost. At the same time, you do find yourself wondering if all of the triplets’s subsequent problems can be blamed on the experiment or if they would have happened even if they all had been raised in the same family? The documentary leaves the answer to that question ambiguous. Much like the triplets, the audience is left wondering what could have been.

Oddly, Three Identical Strangers was not nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar. Well, that’s the Academy’s loss because this film was the best documentary of a very good year.

Here’s The Trailer for Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile!

Posted on January 25, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

When I heard that there was a trailer out for the Ted Bundy biopic, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile, this was not what I was initially expecting to see:

Now, if you go over to YouTube and read the comments under this trailer, you’ll see that there are a lot of people who are upset because they feel that the trailer portrays notorious serial killer Ted Bundy as being some sort of hero. While I can understand the concern, I think those people are missing the point.

Yes, the trailer portrays Bundy as being a smooth-talking sociopath who was apparently having the time of his life while killing women, escaping from jails, and fleeing the police. That’s largely because that’s the way that Bundy, in his interactions with others, tried to present himself. That doesn’t mean that the film itself is meant to excuse or make light of Bundy’s crimes. Here’s a statement from MW Film Studios, which was left underneath the film’s trailer:

Seems like a lot of people are missing the point. The reason why the trailer seems to painting him as some charismatic good guy is precisely because Ted Bundy was a very manipulative person who on the surface, one could believe was really that kind of person, but underneath that was someone cold and calculating. Like the person, the trailer is purposely misleading.

Given the fact that this film was directed by Joe Berlinger and any biopic of Ted Bundy would seem to be destined to end with him getting executed in Florida, I am more than willing to give this film the benefit of the doubt. Zac Efron’s appealing but somewhat blank prettiness would seem to make him the ideal pick for the role of Bundy. At the very least, I’ll wait for the initial reviews from Sundance before jumping to any conclusions about whether the film is properly anti-Bundy.

(Incidentally, Joe Berlinger not only directed this film but also Conversations With A Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, which is currently streaming on Netflix. Judging from the docu-series, I doubt Berlinger’s film is going to present Bundy as being anything other than evil and manipulative.)

Music Video Review: Affection by JaydenART Music (2017, dir by Jayden Yoon ZK)

Posted on January 25, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Who doesn’t occasionally love a good cry?

The 4 and a half minute video below is guaranteed to bring tears to your eyes. It certainly did to mine. It’s the story of a dancer and it’s also the story of a father’s love for his daughter and the way that we can all live on through music, art, and memory. It starts with a dancer — according to the video’s YouTube description, her name is Fiona — dancing and then takes us into the past, showing us how her pianist father supported her dreams until he eventually fell victim to his own mortality. The film ends with her achieving her dream, along with her younger self, and the sound of her father’s composition playing in the background.

And it’s really nicely done. The scenes of Fiona dancing are flawlessly combined with the flashbacks to her father, creating a true sense of a dancer living in the moment while still surrounded by her memories and how she came to be the person who is now on stage. It’s a tribute to not just her father but also to everyone who has ever supported us in our dreams, whether those dreams were artistic or something else. It’s a heart-felt and sentimental tribute and you can check it out below:

Sundance Film Review: The Tale (dir by Jennifer Fox)

Posted on January 24, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

With this year’s Sundance Film Festival getting underway in Colorado, I’m going to be spending the next two weeks looking at some films that caused a stir at previous Sundances. Today, I’m taking a look at 2018’s The Tale.

The Tale is all about memory.

Jennifer Fox (Laura Dern) is, as her mother (Ellen Burstyn) often reminds her, nearly fifty years old and childless. She’s been engaged to the sensitive Martin (Common) for three years but she’s in no hurry to get married. As for children — well, she decided a long time ago that she didn’t want to have children. Jennifer is a documentarian and a teacher. She not only records real life but she also teaches others how to do the same thing. She makes films that, in the decades to come, will be used by future students of history who want to know what it was like to live in the late 20th and early 21st Century. And yet, it’s her own history that Jennifer has never come to terms with.

When her mother comes across a school essay that a 13 year-old Jennifer once wrote about her relationship with her riding instructor, Mrs. G (Elizabeth Debicki), and her running coach, Bill (Jason Ritter), Jennifer dismisses her concerns. As Jennifer explains it to Martin, her mother is just upset because Jennifer once had a boyfriend who was “older.” Of course, that older boyfriend was in his 40s. What’s obvious to everyone but Jennifer is that her coach took advantage of and raped her. Jennifer, however, refuses to accept that. She refers to the coach as being her “lover” and, more than a few times, she attempts to dismiss the whole topic by shrugging and saying, “It was the 70s.”

It’s not that Jennifer doesn’t realize the truth about what actually happened. Laura Dern gives a fiercely intelligent performance as Jennifer, one that slowly and deliberately peels away at the layers of defensive protection that Jennifer has spent the past 35 years developing. Jennifer knows what happened but she’s allowed her memory to cloud the reality of it, largely because that’s the only way that she could deal with the aftereffects of Bill’s sexual abuse. When Jennifer thinks back to the summer that she spent with Mrs. G and Bill, she first sees herself as she was when she was 15 years old, curious and headstrong. It’s only when Jennifer looks at a photograph that was taken that summer that she sees starts to see herself as she really was, an introverted and vulnerable 13 year-old (played by Isabelle Nelisse) who was groomed and abused by two predators.

As Jennifer investigates her past and finally begins to understand what really happened over the course of that summer, her memories begin to change. Hazily-remembered conversations take on new meaning and she begins to understand that terrible truth between the looks that were often exchanged between Bill and Mrs. G. At times, the older Jennifer finds herself interrogating her memories of Bill, Mrs. G, and even her younger self. She demands to know how they could have done what they did and their answers leave you wondering whether you’re hearing what they would really say or if your just hearing what Jennifer would hope they would say. When Jennifer talks to others who were around that summer, she’s shocked to learn that she wasn’t the only one who Bill abused and her insistence that she was Bill’s lover (as opposed to his victim) sounds more and more hollow. When Jennifer finally does track down some of her abusers, you wonder if their somewhat confused reactions are due to guilt or if it’s possible that there were so many victims that they don’t even remember what they did to Jenny Fox. And if they do remember, they seem to be either horrifically ignorant or curelly unconcerned about the consequences of their actions.

It’s a brave and powerful film, one that is made all the more disturbing by the fact that director and screenwriter Jennifer Fox is telling her own story. At least year’s Sundance Film Festival, it premiered to acclaim and controversy. There was also some surprise when, instead of securing a theatrical release, the film was instead sold to HBO. At the time, there was a lot of concern that the film’s power would somehow be diluted as a result of playing on television as opposed to a big screen. However, in hindsight, the small screen — with its unavoidable vulnerability — was the perfect place for this uncompromising and emotionally raw film.

The Tale is not an easy film to watch but it is an important one. It’s a film for anyone who has ever struggled to come to terms with the past. It’s both a reminder that you’re not alone and a warning to not ignore or laugh off your suspicions. It’s also a good example of the type of film that probably would never have been discovered if not for Sundance. There’s a lot of legitimate criticism that one can direct towards the Sundance Film Festival but occasionally, it does do what it’s supposed to do.