07 Sunday Jun 2015
Posted in News
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The best of the teasers and trailers for HBO’s True Detective, Season 2. Colin Farrell welcomes judgement. In two weeks, when the new season begins, it will be rendered.
04 Thursday Jun 2015
Posted in Interviews
Hayley Kiyoko is having a busy 2015. In February, the 24-year-old actor and singer/musician released an EP, This Side of Paradise, in February. In October, she’ll be seen as Aja in Jem and the Holograms, a live-action adaptation of a beloved 1980s cartoon series. She also plays a former black-hat hacker turned hacker for the FBI on the CBS series CSI: Cyber, starring opposite Oscar winner Patricia Arquette. Currently, she can be seen on movie screens as the best friend of a teenager stalked by demons in Insidious: Chapter 3. It was that horror thriller that brought her to San Francisco along with the “Into the Further 4D Experience,” a virtual reality/oculus rift haunted house installed on the grounds of a Mission district high school for Carnival weekend.
Q: How did the Insidious 3 script strike you when you first read it?
Hayley Kiyoko: I had to skip through a lot of it, ‘cause it was so scary. I definitely had to read it during the day. You can’t read those kinds of scripts at night. You end up reading them at night. You’re lying in bed and you’re like, ‘Are you kidding me? Why did I just read that? I’m about to go to bed. Now I’m going to have nightmares.’
Q: You’re a musician as well an actor. Which came first?
HK: Music was always the first thing, but music, as anyone knows, is such a long journey. You’re constantly trying to find your sound sonically, and so now I’m finally where I want to be, as well as now the acting thing is blowing up. It’s really cool. They’re kind of surfacing together.
I was a drummer since I was little, so I’m very into rhythm. I’m doing a tour on the East Coast this summer, which will be really fun. I love playing music. I’m always doing that when I’m not acting.
Q: When did you know that you wanted to do both?
HK: I never planned on being an actress. When I was little, I planned on being a performer, whatever that was, whether it was a dancer or a drummer or a singer. I knew I wanted to perform. The acting thing happened through music. I would do commercials playing guitar, doing music stuff, and then it just evolved and I started building my resume. Then I took a shot in the dark and got a great offer to do a movie, Scooby-Doo, way back when. That started the bug of loving to act. It was so different and it was such a challenge. I’d done musical theater when I was younger and stuff. It’s such a different way of performing and exuding that artistic expression from music.
Q: You’re also a regular on CSI: Cyber.
HK: I’ve never really had such a steady job as a network show before, so I’m looking forward to the challenge. I’m actually kind of nervous. It’s just such a long thing, that I’m very excited. And my character is fun. And I’m working with a Golden Globe/Oscar winner, that’s kind of cool. That’s a plus.
Q: You’re Aja in this fall’s Jem and the Holograms movie. Can you tell me about it?
HK: It’s crazy hair and makeup and wardrobe. It’s not a remake of the cartoon. It’s definitely just inspired by the cartoon and placed in a modern time. It’s going to be great for the new Jem fans. It’s really geared toward the new generation, but I think old Jem fans will really enjoy it. The trailer’s out and they’re all going, ‘It doesn’t have this and this and this.’ Well, you’re going to have to see the movie. Don’t be too scared. Go check it out.
04 Thursday Jun 2015
Posted in Reviews
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Bill Pohlad, Brian Wilson, Elizabeth Banks, John Cusack, Love & Mercy, Oren Moverman, Paul Dano, The Beach Boys, The Wrecking Crew
There are moments of transcendence in Love & Mercy, Bill Pohlad’s sensational depiction of two discrete chapters in Beach Boy Brian Wilson’s life. When a 1960s era Wilson (Paul Dano) is in the studio recording first Pet Sounds and then Smile, collaborating with legendary studio band The Wrecking Crew and transforming the sounds he can hear in his head into music, his joy is palpable. That makes all the more tragic scenes of a 20 years older Brian—now played by John Cusack—a shambling wreck living in terror of Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti), the psychiatrist who controls him. As these two threads weave in and out of the drama, two portraits of Wilson emerge of a young man at the height of his creative powers able to keep the darkness at bay long enough to produce some of a singular decade’s most brilliant music and of an older man practically a walking ghost who finds a foothold in life through the intervention of a wise woman. Love & Mercy is one of the best films of the year.
This is longtime producer Pohlad’s (Into the Wild, 12 Years a Slave) only second directing job in nearly 25 years and with a brilliant assist from screenwriter Oren Moverman, he delivers a remarkably assured feature. In a way, the two sides of Love & Mercy are almost like bookends. The younger Brian’s slide toward mental illness is most obvious when he is home with his family and the other Beach Boys. His house high in LA’s hills is idyllic, but his discomfort in his own skin is apparent at the best of times. At the worst, the glimmers of a bleak near future are only too apparent. He’s stopped touring with the band by now, which can be taken as a sign, but then when he’s in the studio collaborating with the best session musicians in the business, all of that falls away. Wilson’s genius comes to the forefront and so does the happiness that eludes him in everyday life.
By the time Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks) meets Brian in the 1980s in the Cadillac dealership where she works, the satisfaction that music gave him has long since evaporated. Landy has separated Brian from his family and his band. The doctor controls every aspect of his patient’s (and meal ticket’s) life, even arranging for chaperones when Brian starts dating Melinda. Medicated out of his gourd, Brian is no shape to protest, but as Love & Mercy morphs into a romantic drama, he has found a fierce advocate in Melinda.
The intertwining of the two parts of Wilson’s story is flawless. If the 1960s Brian’s story has more energy, well, it is the tale of a younger man and it extracts that much more oomph from all of the recording scenes between both Brian and The Wrecking Crew and Brian and the rest of The Beach Boys. The older Brian is slower and a lot sadder with a vulnerability that tugs at Melinda’s heart. Dano and Cusack look nothing alike, but nevertheless are convincing playing the same person. The two Brians possess the same sweetness. The two actors deliver among the finest performances of their careers and so does Banks.
Beach Boys fans will lap up Love & Mercy, and the film certainly adds to the mythology surrounding some of their most iconic recordings. But while the music features heavily in the soundtrack, it is not essential to be familiar with it or even necessarily like it. The drama is about the man, not his art. Love & Mercy delivers what all those old VH1 shows used to promise. It really does get behind the music. –Pam Grady
22 Friday May 2015
Posted in Reviews
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Brad Bird, Britt Robertson, Disneyland, George Clooney, Hugh Laurie, Kathryn Hahn, Keegan-Michael Key, Raffey Cassidy, Tomorrowland
“Tomorrowland and Tomorrowland and Tomorrowland…It is a tale told by an imagineer, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Sorry, William Shakespeare, couldn’t resist the appropriation. Brad Bird is an enormously talented filmmaker as he proved with The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and even Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. But his gifts fail him with his latest, a libertarian fantasy of a better world that only the best and the brightest can access and where they will be free to perfect the future. The problem isn’t that Tomorrowland is a libertarian fantasy—although that is problematic—it is that there is precious little wonder to be had in a silly saga inspired by the Disneyland attraction in which a teenage girl’s optimism is the one thing that might prevent apocalypse.
Britt Robertson (Under the Dome, Cake) has the thankless task of playing the gee-whiz kid herself, Casey, the daughter of a NASA engineer, who spends most of the movie in constant amazement, her eyes so wide it’s a miracle that her eyeballs don’t pop out. Counterbalancing Casey’s sunny disposition is sour Frank Walker (a gruff George Clooney), one-time boy genius turned embittered recluse. Athena (Raffey Cassidy), an old friend of Frank’s, puts them together. Casey’s had a glimpse of Tomorrowland and is eager to visit. Frank spent part of his childhood there, but his sense of wonder is long gone. Athena knows the sands of time are running out for the world and senses that Casey is the key to reversing the situation—but only if she and Frank can make it to Tomorrowland.
Naturally, there are forces determined to keep Casey and Frank from making their way to this eden. Nix (Hugh Laurie), who runs things in this sleek, futuristic world, doesn’t even want the ne plus ultra of humanity darkening Tomorrowland’s doors, since even the elite aren’t immune to humanity’s self-destructive pathologies. Not that he’s one talk, based on how he defends his realm. For a Disney movie, there are a lot of explosions.
Most dispiriting of all is Tomorrowland itself. While Casey insists that the place is “amazing,” bits of it resemble a well-appointed airport, parts of it evoke an oil refinery, and even the sections of it that are genuinely spectacular are still a little antiseptic. It’s a museum world, not a living one. The film’s recreation of the 1964 World’s Fair and vision of the Eiffel Tower with a couple of special additions are much more awe-inspiring than this utopian world. And it’s not nearly as amusing as the junk shop Casey visits presided over by Ursula (Kathryn Hugo) and Hugo (Keegan-Michael Key)—the two best reasons to see the film, hilarious in their cameo performances—two more characters obsessed with Tomorrowland. After all the trouble, Casey and Frank take to get to the place, it is a letdown. Kind of like the movie itself.—Pam Grady
14 Thursday May 2015
The best part of the Despicable Me movies—by far—were the banana-colored, gibberish-spouting minions. So it was only a matter of time until they got their own movie. Will all minions, all the time be too much of a good thing? We’ll all find out when Minions opens on July 10. The trailer has cameos by Dracula, Queen Elizabeth II, and a corgi and it’s hilarious. So far, so good. —Pam Grady
27 Monday Apr 2015
Posted in News
Aardman Animations’ little sheep’s prank leads to a grand adventure in one of the most purely delightful films of the year from the folks behind Wallace & Gromit and The Pirates! Band of Misfits. The whole flock, the farmer, and his dog all end up in the Big City where animal control and fancy hair salons await. American distributor Lionsgate has set the US release date: August 7, wide. Mark your calendars. Bonus points if you use one of those cute little lamb stickers. –Pam Grady
17 Friday Apr 2015
Posted in Reviews
If nothing else, True Story reminds us that when he is not preciously playing at being a modern-day renaissance man, James Franco is one of the finest actors of his generation. Playing family annihilator Christian Longo, an Oregon man who killed his wife and three children, in Rupert Goold’s adaptation of journalist Michael Finkel’s memoir to chilling effect, Franco’s performance is his best since 127 Hours and the one compelling reason to see this drama that remains too firmly in Finkel’s corner to tell an effective story.
A New York Times reporter, Finkel (Jonah Hill) thinks he’s headed for a Pulitzer Prize with his latest feature, a Times magazine cover story on exploited boys in Africa. Instead, when his editors find out that he conflated characters and otherwise “improved” his story in ways that cross over into fiction, he’s fired, making him virtually unemployable as a journalist anywhere else. Retreating to his girlfriend Jill’s (Felicity Jones) Montana home to lick his wounds, the first ray of light in his new life is a phone call asking him comment on the Longo story. After his crimes, Longo lit out for Mexico where he claimed to be the NYT reporter until his capture. Intrigued, Finkel arranges to visit the alleged killer. A weird friendship is born. Finkel sees that there is a book to be gotten out of their meetings that might restore his reputation. Longo, too, realizes that there are things to be gained from continuing to see Finkel. It is a relationship of mutual utility.
Certainly, there is charm to Longo as Franco plays him, but with his dead eyes, evident narcissism and unlikely explanations for what happened to his family, the police, the prosecutors and even Jill see right through him. But not Finkel, who may think he’s about to write the next In Cold Blood, but for too long buys into Longo’s unlikely explanations. Is he fooled by Longo’s flattery (Longo claims to be a fan and asks Finkel to help him become a better writer)? Or is he fooling himself in his focus to fulfill the terms of his book deal?
Hill’s baby face, large blue eyes behind thick glasses, and Finkel’s gentle (if arrogant) demeanor suggest someone who could be duped, but is he really? The real Finkel has suggested that he became too involved in the story, but would that really make him buy into Longo’s version of events as much as he does? True Story’s major flaw is that while Longo comes into sharp focus, Finkel never does. That’s a limitation perhaps in adapting FInkel’s book, but it would have made for a sharper, richer drama if Goold and his co-screenwriter David Kajganich had thought more about what motivated Finkel. The man fired by The New York Times for writing fiction titled his comeback True Story, but is it? Is this a story of one man’s heinous crimes leading to another man’s redemption or is it a tale of two unreliable narrators seeing in each other the means to an end? –Pam Grady
17 Friday Apr 2015
Posted in Reviews
Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a coder at BlueBook (think Google) is enjoying quite the heady week. Invited to BlueBoook founder Nathan’s (Oscar Isaac) remote mountain home, he has been tasked with performing a Turing test on the boss’s pride and joy, Ava (Alicia Vikander), the latest iteration in ongoing experiments in artificial intelligence. But having now interacted several times with the comely robot with a woman’s beautiful face, voice and shapely, metallic body, he wants to know why Nathan made Ava humanoid at all. Artificial intelligence doesn’t need a body to exist, after all. With that question, Caleb gets to the one of the flaws in writer Alex Garland’s (The Beach, 28 Days Later) tense, creepy directorial debut Ex Machina. It’s the wrong question, though. The correct question is why would a man clearly interested in building himself a high-tech blow-up doll bother with granting it intelligence at all?
Isaac suppresses his considerable charm to play the poster child of a tech overlord divorced from humanity. Nathan’s chilly, impersonal home, filled with surveillance equipment that lets him watch everything that goes on inside his house, reflects the personality of a man who knows how to say the right things (social cues no doubt gleaned from his endless spying on BlueBook’s users) to appear that he’s just a regular guy who just happens to be a billionaire genius—“appear” being the operative word. As Caleb’s week with him wears on, it’s is increasingly clear that Nathan has little use for the world the rest of humanity inhabits and for all his assertions that it is great to converse with an actual human being for a change, his contempt for Caleb is never far from the service. It is no wonder that Caleb becomes confused as he tests Ava: In a wig and with clothes to mask her robotic parts, she seems far more human than his host.
Stephen Hawking is among those that have expressed reservations about where the development of AI might lead. That question simmers beneath Ex Machina’s sleek surface as Caleb and Ava interact during the “tests.” But despite stunning visual effects that transform Vikander into a mechanical being, the vibe is less sci-fi than neo-noir. Gleeson is brilliant as a man seemingly in way over his head. But is he really the classic chump he appears to be, and if so, who is playing him: Nathan, Ava or both? And why?
The whys are what is problematic about Ex Machina. Nathan’s explanation for why he wanted Caleb to visit and perform the Turing test rings hollow. And his experiments in artificial intelligence don’t compute not only in the form they take with his female models but also in the fact that a guy with this man’s ego is not going to risk not being the smartest being in the room.
Looking past that, the film is a nifty thriller. The remote location, the sterile house where the rooms can only be accessed by key cards (and not all cards work for all rooms), the wild card that is Ava, and the growing distrust between Nathan and Caleb keep the tension humming even in the quietest scenes. Garland delivers the goods with this stylish and suspenseful first feature. –Pam Grady
27 Friday Feb 2015
Posted in Interviews
While recently chatting with John Boorman about his latest (and perhaps final) film Queen and Country for a San Francisco Chronicle feature, the talk turned to Hell in the Pacific. Made in 1968, a year after the tense, striking, wholly inventive thriller Point Blank established him as a directing great, the World War II drama starred the earlier film’s lead Lee Marvin and iconic Japanese leading man Toshirô Mifune as enemy soldiers stranded together on a deserted South Pacific island. It was a fraught shoot. Boorman and Marvin experienced real terror shortly before filming commenced when a plane they were on nearly crashed into a volcano. The director cut his knee and it became badly infected. Mifune, an actor Boorman had admired in so many Akira Kurosawa films, refused to take direction.
Looking back on it, Boorman describes Hell in the Pacific, which was shot on the Pacific Ocean island of Palau, as a kind of teaching moment that began when he was in Tokyo working on the script and realized that that he did not have an ending that satisfied him. He saw Kurosawa and explained the problem. Did the legendary auteur have any ideas?
“He thought for a long time, then he said, ‘They meet a girl,” Boorman laughs. “I have to say there are moments when I wish I’d taken his advice.”
Even if Mifune had been more cooperative, Marvin hadn’t been working through the trauma of returning to the same area of the world where he’d fought (and nearly been killed) during World War II, and his leading men could actually understand each other’s language, Boorman realizes in retrospect that the shoot still would have been challenging. And it didn’t need to be.
“I shot it on a very, very remote island,” he says. “We lived on a ship and went to work on this beach every day in a tank landing craft. I could have shot it in Hawaii and lived in a comfortable hotel. I’m not as foolish as that anymore.
“Sadly, the lesson I learned there was don’t make it too hard for yourself.” –Pam Grady
21 Friday Nov 2014
Posted in Interviews
“There is an old Chinese proverb: “There is your truth, my truth, and the truth.”
Director Bennett Miller has made three narrative features—Capote, Moneyball, and now Foxcatcher—inspired by real people and real events. How does he know when he has found his particular truth?
“It’s almost too good a question, because if I could answer that perfectly, maybe I wouldn’t make movies,” Miller says.
“I was seeking some sort of experience of what feels truthful to me about these sorts of relationships. For me, movies are most compelling when you can look at them and say, ‘That’s right. That’s life as I know it. That illuminates something I’m familiar with that had never been expressed.’”
Foxcatcher spins an American tragedy out of a true-crime tale, the 1996 murder of Olympic wrestling gold medalist Dave Schultz (Mark Ruffalo) by John Du Pont (Steve Carell), a deeply disturbed heir to an old money dynasty. Miller’s film traces the path to the killing beginning with Du Pont luring Dave’s younger brother Mark (Channing Tatum), who, like his sibling, won a wrestling gold medal at the 1984 games, to his Pennsylvania estate, Foxcatcher Farms, to train.
“I came to believe certain things about the story, including how lost and lonely John DuPont was and the discomfort of the lie he was living and the inability to process the unacceptable that life confronted with him as he tried to play this role,” says Miller.
“Those moments when you see him trying to charade as a coach in front of his mother, and not have one person acknowledge it is a different kind of loneliness. He was so friendless.”
Miller points out that there is a difference between what is factual and what is the truth. The latter is what he attempts to present in “Foxcatcher.” The film is not documentary; it is drama.
“There are all kinds of little details. This particular thing happened to a different wrestler, but this kind of thing happened to Mark. It’s a similar type of thing, but this works better in the story,” Miller says.
“This is cinema. It’s a narrative film and you’ve got actors playing roles and it’s necessarily fictionalized. There’s no way around it, period…There is some kind of truth to be derived from this story that can only be derived via cinema. Film can do something no other medium can do and in order to do it, it does employ artifice. That doesn’t diminish the validity of the truth that the medium can expose.
“Where do I draw the line? To the best of my ability, there’s nothing within the movie that violates the sense of who these characters were and the decisions that they made and the events that happened, so it’s essentially true. That’s my feeling about it.”—Pam Grady
Cinezine Kane 