Some Movies to See This Weekend, October 17, 2014

Some Movies to See This Weekend, October 17, 2014

It's another eclectic (eccentric?) weekend at the movies, with the wide releases covering as huge a range of interest and audience as possible, and the latest acting showcase from one of cinema's best premiering at the Chicago International Film Festival. As usual, this isn't a completely comprehensive list of everything you can find, but you're likely to find something of interest when you look at a marquee this weekend.

The Book of Life

Director: Jorge R. Gutierrez

Writers: Jorge R. Gutierrez, Douglas Langdale

Starring: Diego Luna, Zoe Saldana, Channing Tatum

This is the big time animated family release, featuring the voices of big time stars and showcasing a big time adventure. In a faux-stop motion CGI style, a lovesick young man (Luna) has to return from a party-filled afterlife to reunite with the woman he loves (Saldana) and save his town from destruction at the hands of other supernatural beings.

The trailer features two frustrating modern crutches, a dated pop culture reference (Biz Markie's “Just a Friend”) and the use of “Seriously?” (see also: “Really?”) in place of a constructing a true punchline. Pet peeves aside, there's some pedigree here, with filmmaker Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth, Pacific Rim) producing a fairy tale that is refreshingly non-Anglophile in origin. Luna and Saldana always do strong work, and Tatum's dopey charisma is palpable even in animated form. You're probably in good hands here, especially if you have kids in your life.

The Best of Me

Director: Michael Hoffman

Writers: J. Mills Goodloe, Will Fetters

Starring: Michelle Monaghan, James Marsden, Luke Bracey, Liana Liberato

The latest from the Nicholas Sparks adaptation factory, The Best of Me spans two decades in the lives of a pair of high school sweethearts torn apart by drug-related prison time. They reunite 21 years later, looking absolutely nothing like their high school selves – the Bracey-Marsden age-up is particularly mystifying – to give it another go despite some big life obstacles.

Sparks adaptations are overwrought with schmaltz, but sometimes they can work – The Notebook is a fairly strong melodrama – plus Monaghan and Marsden (Mr. Liz Lemon himself) have done strong work elsewhere. This fulfills the romance portion of the weekend bill.

Fury

Director: David Ayer

Writer: David Ayer

Starring: Brad Pitt, Shia LeBeouf, Logan Lerman

The grim, horrific nature of war is on full display in this men-on-a-mission film from End of Watch writer-director David Ayer. I wouldn't count on much uplift here, despite the premise taking place at the very end of the European theater, with our heroes on the cusp of their most triumphant moment.

Ayer is working in John Ford-Sam Peckinpah territory here, with camaraderie, duty, violence, and masculinity being the driving forces. Brad Pitt does his gravitas thing as a tank sergeant and the no-way-he's-possibly-22-years-old Logan Lerman (The Perks of Being a Wallflower) continuing his progression toward leading man status. Despite its gritty violence, this is likely to get a big Oscar push, so you can probably expect to be seeing it mentioned a lot in the coming months.

Two Days, One Night

Directors: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne

Writers: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne

Starring: Marion Cotillard, Fabrizio Rongione, Pili Groyne

A woman (Cotillard) on the verge of losing her job has to make a frustrating, demeaning choice to visit her coworkers, one-by-one, over the course of a weekend in order to convince them to give up part of their salary to leave her position off the chopping block. They have already voted on pay raises for themselves at her expense, so she's in a precarious, frightening spot.

Coming off The Immigrant earlier this year, the already great Cotillard (Inception, Rust and Bone) is at the height of her skills as an actor, able to turn desperation into strength and tenacity. It's a theme that has followed her throughout her career, and she is able to make broken characters become something more than victims, avoiding easy sympathy-only pathos and creating rounded, human people. And she gets to do it again Sunday at CIFF.

Stream Oscar Season Now: Snowpiercer Review

Stream Oscar Season Now: Snowpiercer Review

It's Academy Awards season. Halfstack's resident film critic, Rob Samuelson, has been hard at work catching up on many of the year's most important movies through on-demand and streaming services.  You all want a great top 10 list, don't you? As a way to join in the fun, read his reviews of movies you can see right now on a variety of platforms. First up, this summer's Snowpiercer, now available to rent on iTunes, Google Play, Amazon Prime, and YouTube.

I can't use copyrighted material here according to our blogging service, so enjoy my artistic rendition of the movie.

Snowpiercer

Director: Bong Joon-ho

Writers: Bong Joon-ho and Kelly Masterson

Starring: Chris Evans, John Hurt, Tilda Swinton, Kang-ho Song, Ed Harris

Anytime a powerful body starts making claims about the necessity of everyone knowing their rightful place, they should be viewed with supreme skepticism and, sometimes, outright opposition if their policies begin to demean, subjugate, and effectively dehumanize the less powerful. But these policies often spring from the minds of those looking to preserve something about humanity, and in their fear, stress, and yes, sometimes greed, their choices can become hellish. That doesn't mean their initial urge to protect the system was necessarily wrong, but an unquestioning faith in a system or ideology leads one to miss its imperfections and cause problems. Those not in power aren't always altruistic victims, either, often making choices for survival that are contrary to any human decency. And if, by some miracle of chance, the roles get reversed, the allure of power almost always prevails. In Snowpiercer, director Bong Joon-ho – in his American filmmaking debut – explores these themes to their wrenching logical ends, never losing control of any aspect of cinematic storytelling in the process.

In the decades following the worldwide climate collapse, caused by a catastrophic decision to flood Earth's atmosphere with a cooling chemical, what's left of humanity resides on a gigantic train, the Snowpiercer of the title, barreling through an uninhabitable tundra. Like in any social system, winners and losers emerge in this deal. The wealthy, the opulent, the gilded reside up front, with all the markers of high society bestowed on them. Snowpiercer shows how they are probably not bad people, per sé, rather blissfully lucky and unwilling to lose the relatively nice situation they've found themselves occupying.

But they're not Bong Joon-ho's primary concern. He's worried about the lowest ebbs of the order, those at the back of the train, greedily consuming – eating is not the right word for it – bars of gelatinous protein and biding their time to move up in the world by force if necessary, and those tightening their grasp of power at will. The back of the train world is reminiscent of a nightmarish coal mine, dank, frozen, barren yet overcrowded. Worse, the train's overseers, headed up by a gleefully twisted Tilda Swinton, don't show any kindness when these poor creatures get out of line, like opposing the theft of their children for reasons they aren't aware of. Questioning in any way the logic or morality of the powered leads to torture-as-public-service-announcement, a way of saying, “We're in charge – The More You Know.” Limbs are lost, the children are taken anyway, and Chris Evans's Curtis, the caboose's reluctant leader, begins an assault to upend the social order and take control of the train's undying engine.

What follows is one of the most functional films in recent memory. Every train car takes a different shape, the colors and costumes change dramatically, Joon-ho's camera moves more fluidly to take in an aquarium and rigidly in a claustrophobic, yellow steam room when the cronies of power are bearing down on their diminishing rebellion.

But it's not just production design and camera movement that makes Snowpiercer such a strong film from a pure cinema standpoint. Joon-ho has one of the deftest hands in modern movies at dispensing vital plot points. Characters mention a threat, the train's constructor and conductor, Wilford (Ed Harris), but they don't need to explain his role to each other. They already know. In a lesser filmmaker's work, the characters would say something clunky like, “Wilford, the man who built this vessel and has kept us in chains for years.” But Joon-ho understands this is silly and unnecessary. At Wilford's first mention, we get a statement of purpose from Curtis to kill him and a subtle tilt pan up to a Wilford Industries emblem forged on the walls behind him. This tells the audience everything they need to know about who this man is, and what he stands for has already been established by the brutality of his army. It doesn't talk down to the audience with momentum-crushing exposition, but it realizes it's also not the type of movie that can thrive by willfully obscuring information from the audience, either. Joon-ho finds the perfect use of his visual medium to explain who the MacGuffin-villain is. It is the simplest, most efficient way to impart these useful messages and it almost never happens in movies. This should be taught in introductory film classes.

Joon-ho's staging and fight choreography changes throughout the journey, too, never once relying on a trick multiple times. There are blunt object brawl-a-thons, gun fights, stabbings, a bit of parkour, and one central set piece in the middle of the train involving an army of ninja-reminiscent men donning night vision goggles and cutting the lights. Besides the stunning technical nature of the fight sequences, this violence always derives from or informs character motivation while working as their own miniature narratives. Losses are cut, eyes are kept on the prize, order is instilled, and personal spite enters the equation multiple times to raise the stakes higher.

Evans's superhero film background has prepared him well for those fight scenes, but where he truly matters to the film is in his quiet moments. He's wracked with guilt over the horrific things he did as a younger man, the ways he pushed aside his basic humanity for sustenance. The rage in his eyes can almost scorch through the final door to meet his adversary. But it's not just rage at Wilford. It's a cancer inside him, growing because he allowed it. He had the chance to say no to his urges and keep his dignity and goodness intact, but the situation corrupted him. He is livid at himself and the world for what those two entities combined to make him do.

But even the darkest of pictures need some levity. Swinton is the perfect slippery public face of the Snowpiercer, always looking for the positive, propagandized spin on things to keep the caboose people in check. The noises that come out of her when things startle her are hilarious, and her constant clumsy self-preservation provides many of the film's laughs. Ditto Kang-ho Song's drug addict security expert and his daughter (Ah-sung Ko), who can't stop sniffing noxious bits of what amount to large wads of gum while performing dangerous, complex tasks, always asking for more as a pat on the head for a job well done.

If there is one qualm with this film, it is the unnecessary clairvoyance angle Joon-ho takes with Ko's character. She can see the future but is unable to stop it, noticing several threats before they arise and then watching in horror as they commence anyway. A supernatural subplot doesn't make much sense here, given the hard sci-fi trappings of the setup. It doesn't work and it isn't integral to these characters reaching the engine room. The movie could have cut these mentions of her powers, lost maybe two minutes of screen time, and been just as functional in the end.

But that minor quibble aside, Snowpiercer is an extraordinary piece of cinema. It's gorgeous, with unending innovation in mise en scéne, framing, and camera movement. It wrestles with some of the biggest themes we have to contemplate in society – how to treat each other and what is fairness – and lets these themes embody actors perfectly suited to personify them. Bong Joon-ho is a modern master.

Kill the Messenger Review: More "Mediocre" Like This, Please

Kill the Messenger Review: More "Mediocre" Like This, Please

Kill the Messenger

Director: Michael Cuesta

Writer: Peter Landesman

Starring: Jeremy Renner, Rosemarie DeWitt, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Oliver Platt, Andy Garcia

Walking out of Kill the Messenger, I was reminded of something that has bugged me for a while. “Good not great” is often seen as a mark of the limp, the middle of the road, disappointment. We're always on the lookout for perfection and we don't always appreciate when things are pretty all right. Take our city's hockey team for instance. They're entering their seventh year of league dominance, with two Stanley Cup championships in that span. But because they were a lucky bounce away from possibly adding a third ring last year, I am upset and struggling to get back on the “full throated fandom” horse with a new year of possible greatness having just started while I was in the theater. Instead of enjoying the fun ride, I worry about their window closing and that the fun will dry up.

This is a silly thing to worry about, but we movie buffs do it all the time. We look at the state of Hollywood – billion dollar franchises of dubious quality, sequels and remakes galore, et al – and freak out when something that doesn't fit within that narrow moneymaking bracket isn't perfect. When Argo won Best Picture at the Academy Awards a couple years ago, the narrative had it that it was because Ben Affleck's third straight solid, thinking adult's entertainment was a mediocrity that was hard to root against – more difficult art was somehow forgotten. Same thing with the awards season hype for American Hustle last year, which failed to take home the Oscar, but was unfairly maligned by some as a bad movie when it was merely a not perfect one – pretty good, in fact, but nothing to knock you over. Kill the Messenger, I worry, is headed for the same fate. And often, in our less reflective moments, we worry about these entertaining mark hitters – they don't fail, but they don't transcend the medium to teach us something new about ourselves or the world – mean that filmmaking is in danger or has already crossed the Rubicon into the banal and therefore, death. I'd argue that's a huge mistake. These are the types of movies we need more of. They should be the baseline and be treated as such, because they are better than the Transformers of the world, no matter what our emotions tell us when we're disappointed in non-perfection – what hubris. And Kill the Messenger is part of the solution.

In it, Jeremy Renner stars as Gary Webb, a journalist for the San Jose Mercury News who discovered through what amounts in the film – I cannot vouch for how it happened in reality – to a fluke of clerical error that the CIA had worked with Nicaraguan rebels who also happened to be flooding the United States with cocaine. Perhaps the CIA weren't the ones selling the drugs and conspiring to addict the poor on crack, but their planes were used and they supported these cartel-rebels because they were on “our” side of the Cold War. Webb follows the story where it takes him, and he uncovers a slew of corruption along the way. He publishes a harrowing story and gets commended, wins awards, goes on national television. Then the denials come flooding in. Some sources change their stories. Others disappear. Soon he looks less reliable, possibly fraudulent to the public's eyes.

It is in this, the fallout, where the movie lives. His triumphant publication, which, in a lesser movie, would have been the end of a long line of hard work, tenacity, and do gooding, instead forms the basis for a sadder story about perception and how it can quickly turn on the weak when the powerful have their say. It's a tremendous, powerful story, populated by terrific actors – Renner has been on quite a roll these last several years – and the way it pursues its theme about telling the truth no matter the consequences is stupendous.

Don't sleep on Peter Landesman's script, either, because he never forgets or sells out his central characters, Webb and his family. Rosemarie DeWitt is forgiving, strong, and wounded as Webb's wife, and their family life as depicted is one of great effort to make everything work, despite indiscretions and obsessions that can easily derail it. Renner as Webb is abrasive, sure of himself, and self-righteous when called for, but he's not without his deep flaws. He doesn't always make it easy on himself when interviewing people, often reverting to combativeness rather than necessarily looking for understanding. It's exceptional character building.

But a great script, layered characters, and a thematically satisfying ending – though not a happy one – do not make a great film. The direction of Kill the Messenger is competent and nothing more. Director Michael Cuesta comes from the world of television, one that rewards efficiency. That's how things need to work in such a tightly scheduled medium, where there are only eight days or so to shoot an episode. Unfortunately, this rarely leads to great artistry on the filmmaking side of things. Having directed several episodes of Dexter and Blue Bloods, Cuesta has developed a style that is handsome but nondescript. It stays out of the actors' and script's way, allowing them to do often great work.

However, on a film where there is only an approximately two hour window to do things right, more is needed from the director, particularly on a film like this, which requires a boatload of exposition. I understand the idea to present things as realistically as the medium will allow because of the journalism angle, but this isn't a documentary. There are different requirements, and Cuesta barely addresses those, let alone the requirements of the paranoid thriller genre. There's one moment in a parking garage that Cuesta shoots as a pair of tracking shots, with Renner in the foreground of each and a blurry-faced man following him. It's thrilling and the blur of the possible pursuant's face is subjective, concise, and offers all the information the audience needs while simultaneously ratcheting up the tension. It's a superb bit of how to do both efficient and artful direction, but it's the only notable moment in the film of that variety. The rest is filled with straight-on shots of Renner thinking, lots of conversational two-shots, and that's about it. Cuesta doesn't invalidate the story's claim to being worthy of the cinematic medium, but he doesn't use that medium to its full extent.

And that's okay. I remained entertained, shocked, moved, and most of all informed by Kill the Messenger. Just because it's not going to end up in any future editions of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die doesn't mean it's not good. It's a well made picture that happens to have flaws. Let's welcome that and embrace it, then hopefully there will be more like it. I know I like to experience those feelings mentioned above, even if they aren't the strongest versions I've ever felt.

Some Movies to See This Weekend, October 10, 2014

Some Movies to See This Weekend, October 10, 2014

With the Fall Movie Season now in full swing and the Chicago International Film Festival in town, there is no shortage of movies to catch this weekend. You probably don't want to read 20,000 words previewing everything, so here are some snippets of what I hope to get to this weekend. It's an exciting time, so exciting in fact that I am skipping the first couple Blackhawks games of the season to see some of these. Dedication means sacrifice.

Opening this weekend, October 10, 2014.

ABCs of Death 2

Director: Various
Writer: Various

Starring: Various

The second installment of the alphabet-themed horror anthology, featuring work from the young and hungry (for gore) across the genre looks to be a blend of humor and scares, both of the jumpy and earwormy. It can startle you momentarily or make you more afraid of the encroaching evils of the world, then make you cackle like a maniac. This plays late Saturday evening at the Chicago International Film Festival, located at the AMC River East 21 on 322 E. Illinois St.

The Babadook

Director: Jennifer Kent

Writer: Jennifer Kent

Starring: Essie Davis, Daniel Henshall, Tiffany Lindall-Knight

Playing tonight at CIFF, writer-director Jennifer Kent makes her feature directorial debut with a subjective camera and expressionistic lighting and sets. From the trailer alone, it's clear Kent is returning to the horror of very old, the type of thing that freaked out people when Nosferatu was slowly sauntering toward them and the Somnambulist of Dr. Caligari's cabinet awoke from his slumber.

Plus it's about how freaky kids can be. Not just by saying weird things, like most movies of this ilk rely on for easy fright, but the scary stuff they actually do, like creating working crossbows out of blocks of wood and darts.

Kill the Messenger

Director: Michael Cuesta

Writer: Peter Landesman

Starring: Jeremy Renner, Robert Patrick, Jena Sims, Michael Kenneth Williams, Ray Liotta

Jeremy Renner stars as journalist Gary Webb, who chased down a story in the mid-1990s about the U.S. government's involvement in cocaine smuggling, via the CIA. For all the hoopla made about believing in conspiracy theories in the early part of the trailer, this looks like a smaller version of what audiences have been accustomed to in the paranoid thriller genre since Marathon Man, the “everything is connected” plot that encompasses the whole world and indicates that evil is everywhere, so you better watch out.

This is based on reality, a heightened truth as per its medium, but truth nonetheless. Webb discovered that the CIA did do at least some of these things, but I'm hoping to see a narrative retrenchment away from the expansiveness and hard-to-keep-secret (therefore less plausible) nature of older conspiracy thrillers and more about the smaller, easier-to-cover-up evils perpetrated in reality.

StretchDirector: Joe Carnahan

Writers: Joe Carnahan (screenplay), Jerry Corley & Rob Rose and Joe Carnahan (story)

Starring: Patrick Wilson, Ed Helms, Ray Liotta, Brooklyn Decker

Joe Carnahan makes movies about masculinity to the hilt, the alpha males of the world drawn to gargantuan proportions, like a little kid drawing the biceps on Superman. This can be fascinating and transporting (The Grey) or it can be stylish atom bombs of empty violence (Smokin' Aces). The fact that the latter is used in the trailer for this, Carnahan's sixth feature, gives me pause.

However, this week's Grantlandinterview with Carnahan, in which he discusses his strained, often explosive relationship with Hollywood and its influences on his work here, which he describes as a satire, gives me hope. Lots of bleak, selfish people populate the trailer, with presumably more to come in the full film, and they don't seem to get the best fates. Best of all, it's now available Video On Demand to watch anytime you want.

Whiplash

Director: Damien Chazelle

Writer: Damien Chazelle

Starring: Miles Teller, J.K. Simmons, Paul Reiser, Melissa Benoist

If anyone has had a contentious, negative reinforcement relationship with a teacher, this is a film that might drudge up some nasty memories. Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons spar in screw-tightening fashion in a movie that made people flip at Sundance earlier this year. Some have said it's on the shortlist of best films of the year, and I think this trailer is only a hint of what is involved. Instead of the gleeful violence depicted in Stretch, this is horrific, real world violence caused by pain and poor instruction. All this atop the knowledge that writer-director Damien Chazelle also worked on 2014's other great classical music-themed thriller, Grand Piano, and I cannot wait to see it.

Gone Girl Review: A Satire for Our Days

Gone Girl Review: A Satire for Our Days

Gone Girl

Director: David Fincher

Writer: Gillian Flynn

Starring: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris, Tyler Perry

In our culture, overreaction saturates us. It's everywhere. If you boot up the internet or turn on cable news, you're confronted by face saving to extreme degrees, and you can be coerced into going along with it. Something bad happened in another part of the world and it doesn't actually affect us? Scorched earth policy. Let's get 'em. A drunk celebrity upstaged another celebrity at an awards show? He's a sign of the disintegrating fabric of society. Ben Affleck got cast as Batman? Someone needs to die.

Speaking of Ben Affleck and people dying, let's talk about Gone Girl.

Director David Fincher's latest film internalizes those cultural anxieties and our poor reactions to the surprises life throws at us. Affleck and Rosamund Pike, who turns in a performance that yanks stardom away from the ether, play a married couple with problems. Pike's character, Amy, writes about them in her diary, which provides a running narration for the movie. They get pretty big. Scary big. And then she's gone, which you might suspect would happen given the title of the picture.

But what happened? Where did she go? Is she dead? Did her husband, Nick (Affleck), kill her? What's with him not knowing about her friends, her activities, her blood type, their money problems? Why does he sneak around with a second cell phone?

Cable news makes up its mind quickly. Nick did it. He's a sociopath who couldn't wait to get rid of her. He's the scum of the earth and there is nothing anyone can do to change the story. Case closed.

Then the rest of the movie happens. The audience is clued in to the truth, but Fincher, and novelist-screenwriter Gillian Flynn, are concerned with the way the conversation evolves via the media and the way media manipulates those who are exposed to it in any way, whether through direct consumption or dealing with people who do directly consume it. The longer the cable talking heads harp on the man in question, the easier it gets for the police – personified by the film as investigating officers Kim Dickens (Deadwood) and Patrick Fugit (Almost Famous) – to believe that version. The court of public opinion sways them despite some suspicious indications that maybe not all the facts are in.

And it's funny. It's meant to be. This is not the dour, obsessive, Fincher-by-numbers (Seven, Zodiac) the trailers make it out to be. Fincher and Flynn find each leaked piece of evidence to the press, and the ensuing grasping at narrative straws, to be hilarious. The culture's need to create a narrative, any narrative, is funny to them. Anyone portrayed on a television in this movie is looking to craft a particular story. Even when Nick does a one-on-one interview with a journalist who's out for blood, it's not about him telling his side of the story or trying to get out the truth. He's telling a carefully constructed narrative in order to reach a specific goal. This is not what he does in the “real world” scenes. In those, he's desperately attempting to make sense of a bizarre and unsettling situation while trying not to get caught for lesser misdeeds. But once those bright lights and TV cameras turn on, he's in control and on message, a suave devil. He's playing a role the media predestined for him. Everyone in this TV world has their own role, and each plays it without a hint of remorse for any mistakes made in pursuing those goals. It's all about that creation, that cultivation of story, and not about the truth, which is miles more fascinating.

But it's not just the media that overreacts and manipulates. It is the pair at the heart of story, too. Amy is upset about their move to small-town Missouri after both lost their jobs in New York during the recession, followed by Nick's mother getting sick. Nick manipulates Amy into the move and she “just wish[ed] he'd asked.” Things go south from there. Fights get worse, they stop communicating their thoughts and feelings with each other, and their relationship sours to the point of toxicity. But instead of being honest with themselves and each other, they don't divorce. Amy tries like crazy (key word) to shape and mold Nick, just as she had the previous men in her life, like Neil Patrick Harris's Desi, who is simultaneously eager to do the right thing and menacing nonetheless. Nick retreats into a haze of laziness and resentment, never caring for Amy's day-to-day life, or is she hiding that life from him? For all the talk about how hard they knew marriage would be, the simplest solutions stare them in their faces: either end it all and move on or actually tell each other what bothers them when it bothers them and avoid a festering issue of control and deceit.

But no, Amy and Nick let (force?) disaster, and a media circus, strike before going in the healthiest, safest, most efficient direction.

If you think that doesn't make Gone Girl one of the most dynamic, essential discussions of modern American culture, go improve on it. I'd love to have more great movies to see.

Some Movies Out This Weekend: October 3, 2014

Some Movies Out This Weekend: October 3, 2014

This weekend seems to mark the true beginning of Fall Film Season, with some prestige-y stuff from Oscar-nominated filmmakers. There's also one big one that brings to mind my mistakes of pop culture past and the first Halloween-related movie this month. This isn't everything that's coming out, but the two wide releases are at least included, plus a couple other counter-programming options.

Opening this week, October 3, 2014.

Annabelle

Director: John R. Leonetti

Writer: Gary Dauberman

Starring: Annabelle Wallis, Ward Horton, Tony Amendola

October is also horror movie month, and the big scary release this weekend is about a creepy doll that is possessed and tries to kill a young family. It sounds like Child's Play on paper, but the atmosphere of the trailer suggests something darker and more traditionally horrifying than just a bunch of jump scares. It certainly has those, too, but the ideas of dark spirits and the darkness hiding inside people and objects is frightening indeed. Director John R. Leonetti comes from the cinematography world, with credits including highly regarded recent horrors The Conjuring and the Insidious series. That's a good sign for anyone looking for a horror movie that understands the visual aspects of the medium.

Left Behind

Director: Vic Armstrong

Writers: Paul Lalonde, John Patus

Starring: Nicolas Cage, Lea Thompson, Chad Michael Murray

The apocalyptic book series-slash-thrift store staple – seriously, if you go to 100 thrift stores, approximately 94 of them will have at least three dogeared copies of each volume – comes to theaters in a reboot of the Kirk Cameron-starring 2000 direct-to-DVD adaptation. This time, though, it stars people you might recognize a little more, like Nicolas Cage, the mom from Back to the Future, and the guy from One Tree Hill who looks like my friend Peter.

I've actually read a few of these books, my interest spurred by a Time article I read about the series in my eighth grade homeroom. I figured, “Hey, a dramatization of the wacky stuff late in the Bible sounds like a good story to me.” I was wrong.

Very little about the books stick in my brain. One is the antichrist's all-time great name, Nicolae Carpathia, whose background served as the basis for a satirical article I wrote for my college literary magazine about then-candidate Barack Obama's 2008 run, an article I regretted when I realized people around the country actually believed he was a foreign-born harbinger of the end times. Oops. The other thing is one of the primary reasons that protagonist Rayford Steele – man, they all have amazing names – didn't get chosen to join the Rapture because he had thought about committing adultery. He didn't go through with it but was tempted. That's some insane person logic that completely misses the point of free will, choice, and doing the right thing.

But whatever, go see it if you want. Based on the trailer, it looks like it drops the second two-thirds of the book – including everything about the antichrist – in favor of the action-packed stuff about people disappearing from the planet. Toss some Bible flavoring in and it could be a halfway interesting angle.

Gone Girl

Director: David Fincher

Writer: Gillian Flynn

Starring: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris, Tyler Perry

David Fincher is perhaps the strongest pure technician working in Hollywood today. His impeccably precise films have stretched the limits of their stars' patience – dozens of takes will do that to a person – but resulted in some uncompromising statements about obsession and the evils people (mostly men) do. Now, directing novelist Gillian Flynn's bestseller Gone Girl (Flynn adapted her book for the screenplay), he seems headed down the same path.

I'm a longtime Fincher fan, dating back to my time as, like every other middle class white guy of my generation, a gigantic fan of Fight Club while in high school. I've moved on from that fandom a bit, but movies like The Social Network and his masterpiece, Zodiac, have really done it for me. What concerns me a little about Gone Girl is that it seems to be walking the same path of “look at how horrible humanity can be” that Zodiac and his previous film, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo(disclaimer: that's one of two Fincher movies I haven't seen, but I've read a fair amount of criticism on both the book and movie to at least grasp the plot and themes) did. I don't want him to spin his wheels.

That said, this is a movie that's getting a lot of good notices. Todd VanDerWerff at Vox calls it “one of the bestmovies ever made about marriage” and the A.V. Club's IgnatiyVishnevetsky says it's surprisingly funny, so there must be something else going on. This is the one film this weekend I'll be reviewing for sure, so check back.

Men, Women & Children

Director: Jason Reitman

Writers: Jason Reitman, Erin Cressida Wilson

Starring: Adam Sandler, Jennifer Garner, Rosemarie DeWitt, Judy Greer

Jason Reitman makes handsome, alternatively funny and sad movies about damaged, quirky people. Men, Women & Children seems to go the same direction of his sadder stuff, like Up in the Air, than his funnier work on, say, Thank You for Smoking and Juno.

Here are the things I can tell you about it. It involves the internet. Adam Sandler looks sad, so there's hope of a return to Punch Drunk Love-level goodness from him. People hurt each other and talk behind each other's backs.

Whether that's good, I don't know. I like Reitman, so I'll get to it soon.  

The Equalizer Review: Yikes

The Equalizer Review: Yikes

The Equalizer

Director: Antoine Fuqua

Writer: Richard Wenk

Starring: Denzel Washington, Chloe Grace Moretz, Marton Csokas

One time, my dad tried to broil a couple steaks without cleaning the broiler first. Things went okay for a couple minutes, then smoke started flowing from the oven. Things got bright. A spark ignited and everything went up in flames. My dad, thinking quickly, grabbed the enflamed pan and ran out the front door with it, dropping it on the sidewalk where we watched it continue to burn even after shooting it with the garden hose. It was a grease fire, and those things don't end until they are good and ready, no matter how badly you scald your hand or how much you plead.

This is the experience of watching The Equalizer, a never ending, astronomically bad movie.

First, the good stuff. Denzel Washington does what he can to show the two sides of this man of violence and compassion. Chloe Grace Moretz, as a teenager forced into prostitution, gives one heart wrenching look early in the movie as she walks out the door to an ill-fated night of work that is top notch acting from a young actor who is likely to win a lot of awards in her career. Director Antoine Fuqua shoots everything with a professional sheen and stages coherent action scenes that you can actually follow, unlike most modern action films.

The rest of it is willfully insulting to the audience. The first 30 minutes play out like Taxi Driver in microcosm, except with all the complexity removed. Washington is a well trained Travis Bickle with a conscience, where his acts of violence are made directly for the common good instead of serving semi-good ends in a lucky fluke of sociopathic rage. Moretz is Iris, but here she's an aspiring musician with no displayed talent – the movie makes it a point multiple times but never plays a note of her songs – and a laughable knack for telling the audience exactly why Washington's character is a good man, over and over. And several actors playing Russian mobsters take on the Sport role. This would be a fine, if overly familiar, premise if this morality play were to form the movie's plot.

But Washington punishes these people swiftly, the movie forgets all about Moretz after her part in the inciting incident, Bill Pullman shows up looking disturbingly like Mitt Romney's twin in a pointless role, and more Russian mafia higher ups try to kill Washington. For two and a half hours.

This is the type of movie that tells the audience at every turn exactly what to think. I don't mean that figuratively. Characters explain in the most literal terms who is good and who is bad many, many times. Every time there's a chance for the movie to show instead of tell, it chooses to talk down to the viewer. There is no trust that the people watching the movie will understand, for instance, the hero might have strong feelings about seeing an innocent person beaten to a pulp. It flashes back to scenes from minutes earlier to remind people of what they already witnessed. If you've ever seen Rocky IV, the king of "'memba dis?" seconds-later montages, you will have a good idea of what happens several times in The Equalizer. Moretz and Washington's hardware store coworkers are used as mouthpieces for the script to explain how sad the lonely insomniac with sad eyes is, or how kind the man who donates his time to help his coworkers achieve their goals is. Even when the movie tries to work in a non-verbal way, it bashes the viewer over the head as Washington strikes a Jesus Christ pose. In a visual medium where even the most subtle gestures are perceivable to an audience, nobody needs to these stupid overtures. But the movie misunderstands its medium to the utmost degree.

It also ends approximately 40 times. Every time you think you can leave, it tricks you into staying another several minutes. Oof. What a slog.

Some Movies Out This Weekend

Some Movies Out This Weekend

Usually my caveat of, "This is not meant to be a complete overview of every movie out this weekend," applies, but there are only two new movies opening this week in wide release.  I actually had to look up the limited releases to find something intriguing. You will be able to find the third listing at a handful of theaters around Chicago if you're so inclined.

Opening this week, September 26, 2014.

The Equalizer

Director: Antoine Fuqua

Writer: Richard Wenk

Starring: Denzel Washington, Chloe Grace Moretz, Marton Csokas

Based on the 1980s television series, The Equalizer looks to up the violence of the source material and bring some gravitas to a pulpy story – the director and star previously paired on Training Day, which won Washington an Oscar. That's all well and good, but the sting of filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn's (Bronson, Drive, OnlyGod Forgives) departure from the project remains. It's likely the skeletal structure of what drew Refn to the material still exists, but the looks we've had at this movie so far don't promise more than Denzel Washington doing the same thing he's done for a decade. He'll be solid as always, with a stiff-upper-lip resolve and sense of justice, but with the short lead time Fuqua had after taking the project off Refn's hands, it's unlikely he had the option of imbuing it with his personal vision, instead being forced into a director-for-hire gig.

Or it could be an exploration of masculinity and chivalry and how that can go wrong. It can expand on the straightforward hand-to-hand action style hinted by the trailer to become a new action touchstone. It can show Chloe Grace Moretz continue her maturation into a possible awarding winning actress – she clearly is meant to bring to mind the Jodie Foster-in-Taxi Driver role here. The ingredients are there, but it'll likely be a slick Hollywood action thriller instead of the gonzo ultraviolence Refn promised.

The Boxtrolls

Directors: Graham Annable, Anthony Stacchi

Writers: Irena Brignull, Adam Pava

Starring: Isaac Hempstead Wright, Elle Fanning, Ben Kingsley, Jared Harris, Nick Frost, Tracy Morgan

Stop-motion animation and charm go a long way with people. So do adaptations of children's literature. This is one ostensibly for kids, but from the looks of it – some good fish-out-of-water humor, a wonderfully talented voice cast, and most importantly, no instantly outdated pop culture references in the trailer – it won't be a bad experience for the parents either.

It looks like a simple hero's journey, but if it's done well, as directors Annable and Stacchi (Coraline, Paranorman) are known to do, chances are this one will be a pleasant way to spend an hour and a half.

Jimi: All Is by My Side

Director: John Ridley

Writer: John Ridley

Starring: André Benjamin, Hayley Atwell, Imogen Poots

Writer-Director John Ridley is a newly minted Oscar winner after having penned last year's 12 Years a Slave. He continues the biopic trajectory here, but with a different century surrounding the subject who is tragic for different reasons than the subject of Ridley's last film.

André Benjamin has always had a theatrical flair as one half of Outkast. He's charming and has a career's worth of knowledge on how to captivate a crowd, so his onstage work as Jimi Hendrix looks to be spot-on. We'll see about his ability to cover the range of human emotions, but he's got the performance aspects down pat.