Film Review: Midnight Special (2016)

Copyright: Warner Bros. Pictures

Jeff Nichols is an authentic voice in the American movie industry. His relatively small body of work includes brilliant films like Mud and Take Shelter which offers a colorful (even though rarely cheerful) setting where he is free to explore the thing that really fascinates him: family. In his latest film Midnight Special, the same process is present, but this time, the setting is way beyond anything he created before.

On some levels, the story about a boy who is clandestinely escorted by his father and his friend who believe he possesses a supernatural power plays out as a vintage adventure film. Close Encounter of the Third Kind is a logical choice for a connection, but Midnight Special works on an entirely different tune. While the 1970�s Sci-Fi classic provided a sense of wonder and amazement, the same is practically non-existent here. 

Instead, in its place feelings like abandonment and desperation take root. The film doesn�t especially try to capitalize on them but adds them as passengers on the journey taken by the characters. This makes the film a very somber and ghostly experience, something that cuts deep and offbeat in the tech thriller and chase segments which showcase what the government is trying to do to find and stop the main characters. I certain that there was a predefined dynamic how this should have played out, but the movie almost certainly doesn�t hit that mark, whatever it might have been.

The same goes for the cult moment the film presents, especially in its beginning. The boy is seen as a prophet by a group of people who function as a cult, while his parents are also members � it�s unclear if the cult grew around the boy, even though the film addresses this at one point.

It is possible that the same factor also threw off Michael Shannon, who plays the boy�s father. Shannon, an otherwise terrific actor, performs here as if he is playing a Biblical character � determined to a level of madness, full of rage and desperation. While in theory, this is in line with the rest of the plot, in practice looks weird and distracting, leaving Shannon as the ultimate sports dad who is trying to keep it cool even though he is boiling on the inside.

Midnight Special is a compact mystery science fiction, but also the weakest film made by Nichols to date. There is some family themes in it, but nothing that the director really could have used in his own distinctive style.

Crowdfunding Push: Dreaded Light

A new feature film is currently in the pre-production phase in the UK and it is looking for funding. However, the Dreaded Light comes with a slightly different way of finding the funds for this project. Led by Mark MacNicol, an industry veteran, here's some additional info about it:

A recently widowed father is struggling to cope with his grief as well as his two teenage daughters. The youngest has developed a fear of daylight � The eldest died when she was a baby.

Aside from a horror plot, the film provides an interesting, investment-like process for those who want to support it.

We applied for and received clearance on to a programme called Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme �SEIS�. It�s designed to give flagging industry sectors like film a boost. As a result any investment in Mark�s new feature film is very low risk thanks to a 70% refund (regardless of the film making a profit or not) by combining SEIS 50% with the film fund of 20%. In summary we�re giving you the opportunity to potentially make a profit, support the arts (in particular the struggling film sector) and also have some fun too. In addition we�re giving young people from socially excluded areas work experience on the film.

This means that potential funders can help make Dreaded Light happen while at the same time they end up making an investment. I always thought that was a sorely needed alternative in the independent movie-making industry and now it seems it is slowly becoming reality. If you might be interested in the project, check out the film's website here.

Crowdfunding Push: The Toymaker

There is a strange and inherent magic in the notion of toys, no matter where they come from, to whom they belong or what price tag they might once carried. A new mixture of a documentary and an animated feature desires to explore the idea of toys and how they made an impact on a man who produces them. 

This film is called the The Toymaker and it's currently in the final stretch of its crowdfunding. Here's how the movie presents itself on its official IndieGoGo page: 

THE TOYMAKER is a full-length film that mixes documentary, fiction and animation. It's about the life of the musician, collector and awarded Venezuelan toymaker Mario Calder�n. THE TOYMAKER is a true story, told by Mario and his toys. It is a travel back to childhood and memory, a mix of Toy Story and Buena Vista Social Club. THE TOYMAKER is a story about the importance of keeping alive our inner child.

The footage of the film looks really polished and the idea behind the film is rock-solid for a whimsical piece like this one. Currently, the crowdfunding attained slightly over 20% of its target with two days to go. Even though the project will likely not hit its target, this is a flexible campaign and the Toymaker deserves to happen.

Check out its IndieGoGo page here and see how you can help it out!

Film Review: The Nice Guys (2016)

Copyright: Warner Bros. Pictures

This film tries to follow in the footsteps of those comedy films which try to extract the hardboiled detective and place it into the weird and wacky world of show business. While they�re funny, they also utilize real violence to create a mix most similar to a black comedy, but not quite there when it comes to satire or cynicism (which these lack).

Every couple of years, one or more movies like that come along and replace the previous reigning king. That is why Get Shorty, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and other ones like it always tend to stick around for a somewhat prolonged period of time, mostly by being inflated in value mainly by the audience which digs the violence-fame-jokes mix-up.

The Nice Guys is a perfect representative of this trend and like most, it tries to innovate the form at least a little. In this case, there are two hardboiled detectives, here private investigators, who are working on a case of a missing porn actress in LA in the late 1970�s. 

 First, one is really a classic thug PI and is played by a very aged and worn Russell Crowe while the other is an alcoholic dandy (yes, this 19th-century expression does really apply to him) played by increasingly uninteresting Ryan Gosling.

They set off to get to the bottom of the case while they encounter a colorful range of character, most of whom either hurt them or the opposite happens. Directed by Shane Black, it�s basically Kiss Kiss Bang Bang all over again, only Robert Downey Jr. got transformed into an overweight Crowe and a boring Gosling.

The plot is convoluted and fails to make any impact on the viewer, especially when it mutates into a lame conspiracy that just goes nowhere even in the most basic terms of showing the key villain and their henchmen. As if Black struggled with the exposition, mainly which character should he show for how long, the film tries its best to be dynamic and fun but manages to do this only in snippets.

The rest of the movie is dragged down by weird side-stories and unclear goals of anyone involved, especially when the daughter of Gosling�s character enters the plot as an important element. Here, Shane struggles to even adequately present her age, interest, and ultimate motivation, aside from the most obvious of protecting her dad, even though she is (apparently) 13-years old.

Elements like this are all over, making the film strange in a not-that-good way. Essentially, every big scene is a gamble where the viewers can get a funny interaction, something random that likely includes Gosling screaming in a fake high-pitched voice or just something that tries to develop a backstory and mystery but ends up looking weak and anemic. Even a few dream sequences that come completely from the left field and seem like they belong in movies like John Dies at the End also just drag on pointlessly.

Being a Hollywood private detective is certainly very interesting, but The Nice Guys make it look like something boring, strange and tedious.

Film Review: Money Monster (2016)

Copyright: TriStar Pictures

We all got hurt in one way or another by the recession of 2008/09. While reasons for the crash are beyond most of us, many instinctively blamed the trader/broker/banker characters of the world, especially the US.

The same sentiment was founded on numerous elements, but the biggest cornerstone was the idea that those behind the reigns of this failed venture did not suffer when the excrement hit the fan.

Money Monster draws most of its energy on this premise and wants to serve one back to the financial community and at least in this fictional domain, make them sweat for what they have done and continue to do. But, no one can threaten them financially, so here a man decides to move his vengeance to the realm of bodily harm.

Directed by Jodie Foster, this thriller follows a single day in a studio where a money advisory TV show, led by Lee Gates (played by George Clooney) becomes a victim of a viewer who lost all of his money on one of Gates� suggestions. Armed with a handgun, he places a bomb on Gates and demands that the network finds out what really happened (the official story blames the loss on a glitch in an automated trading algorithm).

Films like this one and, for example, John Q could be placed in a genre of their own which could be called Righteous Hostage Takes. But, instead of providing anything of any marginal value, Foster�s film once again shows that the US consciousness is still terrified of a potential 1917 Tsarist Russia scenario, where the downtrodden masses take to arms and end a lineage of wealth and power that began when Mayflower made landfall centuries before.

In the movie, Foster tries her best to show that the victim and the unwitting accomplice (Gates) can work together for the greater good, fighting the real evil as they finally make it out, emerging from the shadows. But, below this Kumbaya story, there a deep-rooted anxiety which inexplicably seeps out from the fa�ade � the slaves are getting restless, they sense a disturbance in the force of wealth, so let�s serve them fantasies that are both satisfying (the bad bankers get what�s coming to them) and pacifying (we are all victims, after all).

It�s possible that I�m reading too much into all of this, but it�s difficult to enjoy this film on any level without accepting that there are bucket loads of emotional charge that cannot be properly directed, so it�s left to kind of eat its own tail and try to implode. On moments, a solid cast and unexpected snippets of events, like the appearance of the girlfriend of the hijacker, do provide a bit of freshness. However, aside from this, Money Monster remains just another piece of faulty financial flag-waving with a simple message:

�Do not rise up dear oppressed peasants. There�s still plenty cake left for you to eat.�

Film Review: Green Room (2015)

Copyright: A24

When Jeremy Saulnier made Blue Ruin he showed that he has the chops to make specific and very driven visions which are both familiar and deeply authentic. In Green Room, Saulnier got a chance to try and catch that AAA production wave and make a horror thriller with a great cast and a very original (yet easily relatable) setup.

Immediately, it�s clear that he successfully resisted all the temptations that mostly boil down to dumbing down of his vision. In the process, he didn�t quite make a perfect masterpiece which Blue Ruin (almost) is but still showed that he�s a force for the future of a type that is sorely needed. Often labeled in other reviews and media in general as punks vs. neo-Nazis, Green Room basically is this � after they book a gig at the wrong club in the woods and there open a wrong door, a DIY punk band ends up being under siege by a gang of murdering white supremacists.

Afraid and confused, the band members try as best as they can to stay alive and find a way out of the hell they�re in. Headed by Anton Yelchin, the acting cast is effective on both sides of the Nazi-punk divide. Aside from the tragically lost Yelchin, Joe Cole of the Peaky Blinders looks and feels good on the big screen, as does Alia Shawkat, while the Nazis have Macon Blair and none other than the legendary Patrick Stewart (which sadly didn't do anything overly interesting with his big poppa Nazi character). As the plot develops into a new version of Assault on Precinct 13, the action becomes gory and ultra-violent in a flash of an eye.

Here, like in Blue Ruin, the director demonstrates the ability to shock in a very casual manner, a thing he shares with Denis Villeneuve, another great director who used this idea recently in Sicario. But, Green Room has the advantages of being less about firearms and more about blunt or sharp instruments. Like the clash of these two very different mindsets, the physical representation of their conflict is very raw and visceral.

Of course, none of this makes the film perfect. At moments, it meanders heavily, especially in the second half, where its killer pacing gets a bit toned down. This is mainly seen in the Nazi side of the story, where there�s a lot of talking and planning and people management, but the end purpose is not overly clear. The same is true for the �mystery� of the initial killing which is completely uninteresting when it is compared to the main plot of the band�s survival. I guess this side plot looked better in the script.

But, regardless of this pacing slowdown, Green Room is a very fresh and engaging film. It works as a novel horror and a psychological thriller equally well, but even more importantly, now that Saulnier got his AAA production experience, who knows what gems we might expect from him in the future.

Gaby's Revenge Full Season Review (2016)

The thing which impressed me the most about the web series Gaby's Revenge is the ease with which it develops emotional connections. Like a neural network where nodes connect to other nodes and create a dense mesh so does this series place its characters in a living, breathing universe, where every action has a reaction.

Inside of it, the things people experience are not plot devices that simply take place and then disappear. Instead, like in the real world, they interact with each other, expanding a single event into a complex and tragic story of violence, family, and loyalty.

The creator of the series, Jonathan Vargas, pushes a clear vision for the episodes. The series consists of five individual episodes and they all differ greatly in tone, length, and exposition of the key plot elements.

The series begins simply by showing Gaby, a haunted contract killer who works, as the series puts it, as a freelancer for both the mob and the government agencies. She is under a huge amount of stress, especially because of a job that went haywire, so she decides to visit her family and try to get some bearing on her chaotic and exceedingly dangerous life. Gaby arrives at her family home, where she is greeted by her mother and her sister Angie.

However, the happy reunion is tainted by the news that her sister is struggling because of a false rumor started about her. Enraged by it, Gaby slowly but surely enters a mental place where only exceedingly bad things can happen and soon enough, they do. When I wrote the review of the pilot episode, I wished for darker things and I sure got them, but also something more important than that.


There are two main drives that power the show through the episodes. First one is the simple need to see how the story ends and how the events will lead back to one another. But, more than this, there is an emotional interconnectedness that I mentioned at the beginning. With it, Vargas manages to provide the viewers with a single character, paint him or her with a single brush, but then, later on, provide a new perspective on the same person. A bully can become a loving brother, a kingpin can turn out to be a rational man, and an assassin�s handler can be a surrogate parent. Like the very specific MagChop art the series features in its pilot, at first, the connections are random and irrelevant, as if they are simply splattered on the canvas. But as you immerse yourself in it, the art form begins to take shape.

All of this takes place in a very subtle manner and it doesn�t devalue the main plot or take anything away from it. It uses the noir setup and the thriller elements to tell a drama about pain, hurt, and suffering dealt out to those who don�t deserve it, but still are left with the gaping wounds, no matter if they�re physical or emotional. In some better reality, they victims would not get to suffer and would just relinquish this life, but in our world, Vargas tells us, people live one, struggling with the person�s they have to become because of those wounds. The whole acting cast, especially Amanda Ortega, carries this difficult setup with a lot of styles and their presence never breaks the pace that the series sets.

On some level, Vargas must have understood this while he made the series, which is why he utilizes the action elements with constraint and precision. From a cinematic perspective, this could have been the spot where some heavy stylization could have been used to make the viewing an even more smooth experience. Action scenes and limited production potential often are a big challenge, even for some big film companies. Here, an approach like the one used in Steven Soderbergh�s The Limey could make the series an even stronger neo-noir piece.

But, this is a minor observation and doesn�t really impact the current show. The main appeals of Gaby�s Revenge lie in the character development and their backstories which slowly fall into place, creating a sad but heartfelt painting of ordinary people in situations where there�s no good choice. The series shows that Vargas can grapple with plots that are both serious and complex; hopefully, he�ll get a shot at something bigger in the same thriller-like genre.