"We all complete."

"Never Let Me Go"

Never Let Me Go is a film with a bit of a secret. Not really considering the very telling opening scene. Surprising then how far publicity for the film has gone not to speak the premise at the core of director Mark Romanek's adaptation of the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. Maybe it was not mystery they were after but nondisclosure of its grim conceit. I will spell it out, as the film does, right away. Kathy (Cathy), Tommy (Andrew Garfield), and Ruth (Keira Knightley) are walking, talking, thinking, breathing, loving organ farms. Created from existing people, mostly junkies and convicts they say, these three and many others live sheltered, uncomplicated lives. They attend a school called Hailsham at which they live oblivious to their doomed futures. Until one day a new teacher, Miss Lucy (Sally Hawkins) is compelled to spill the beans. They grow older and embrace their role in life. Sometime in their mid-to-late 20s, before time has done damage to their bodies, they will each begin to donate vital organs one at a time, until they "complete." If you are lucky you will "complete" sooner rather than later because the more donations you make, the more insufferable your existence becomes.

Romanek, with just two feature film projects, has set a certain standard for chilly, inward looking photography. His focus here, as in One Hour Photo, is to portray the unspoken pall over these characters' whole lives. His visual reservations reflect a restraint of human impulse, a world without soul whose surface is drab and gray. Unfortunately, for all its technical craft, these same choices also strip away the fun, the verve, the vigor. We cannot get into the minds of these characters or the world of this film because it is so artfully stripped of everything we could possibly relate to ourselves as an audience. It's representation of period, from an alternate 1980s onward, is idiosyncratic to say the least. It exists as a static old-fashioned place in which children speak like robots and wear perfect school uniforms. They play with scrappy wooden dolls and listen to cassette tapes of music which sounds like it was recorded in this reality's 1960s. There don't seem to be personal computers or technology devices of any kind. Except for the advanced dog leash chips in their arms which scan them in and out of Hailsham, keeping tabs on the product. These empty children then mature into adults none of whom ever seem to want more for themselves than to have sex and “complete.” They discover television, which in this or any reality seems to contain only trash sitcoms. They are allowed day trips beyond the boundaries of their living complex. Yet no on ever seems to think...what if I just ran away? The idea is never mentioned.

We have not yet even gotten to the film’s head spinning cross generic novelty. It is science fiction filmed through the lens of Masterpiece Theatre. It takes time to get used to and once I was used to it, I determined that I did not care for it one bit. The notion of stripping science fiction of its futuristic shininess is perfectly respectable but to replace this not with a vivid humanity but with a stylized glob of fantastical soap opera further deadens the heart of the picture. So often it feels exhausted under the weight of its own melodramatic energies. There is a beautiful allegory somewhere in here, with lovely performances by Mulligan, Hawkins and the cast. Its final conclusion, that “donors” are not all that different from the rest of the world. That everyone accepts the social contract that they will have life and then, eventually, death. This frames everything in a better light. It makes the film feel momentarily vibrant and human as does the whole final act in which love and passion are actually spoken of and capitalized upon in ways with impact. Unfortunately, it’s just not enough to make this sometimes good, always unusual film honestly worth recommending, When Andrew Garfield’s Tommy goes ballistic with a giant throaty wail at the side of the road, it registers not as a welcome relief to all the prior stoic tolerance of pain but instead as too much too late. You cannot go from a whisper to a scream. Somewhere in between there must be a relatable, compelling conversation.

Ivan does not smile

"I thank God for the catfish."

"Catfish"

Catfish is a film with a secret. What can be said is this: Filmmakers Henry Joost and Ariel "Rel" Schulman begin filming the burgeoning friendship between Rel's brother Nev, a Manhattan based photographer, and Abby, an 8 year-old painter from Michigan who first contacts Nev by mailing him a painting of one of his published photos. The two begin to communicate on Facebook. He sends her additional photos for her to use as subjects for her paintings. He not only communicates with her mother, Angela, but also other relatives as well, including her older half-sister, Megan. This relationship with Megan progresses to the point of a tentative romance made complicated by the distance between the two. After an 8 month correspondence, Nev offers to meet the family during a gig in Colorado. And suddenly everything begins to change.

Joost and Schulman hit the narrative doc jackpot on this one and for all the arduous experiences Nev endures you cannot imagine that they didn't fall head over heels madly in love with the emerging weirdness. The film has the momentum and structure of a psychological thriller, inching ever closer to the truth about Megan. It also has a very winning unpolished naturalism. It is not a very "professional" documentary. Joost and Rel weave in and out of their own footage. For better or worse, the suggestion is just that of a bunch of guys playing around with their cameras who happened to have stumbled onto a treasure trove of complex story.

The experience of watching Catfish is addictively tense and surprisingly emotional. Obviously, its press materials which allude to a "shocking twist ending," position it in an interesting way as horror documentary, which is very different but related to the trending documentary style horror. Its finale does indeed boast a surprising number of recurring motifs from American horror cinema myth. An empty barn. A family secret. A "don't go into that house" sense of nervousness. What it captures brilliantly is the anticipatory boogeyman quality of horror. That moment at which anything could be inside that house. And as long as it could be anything we are free to imagine everything which scares us the most. One of the strongest notes in the final act is seeing Nev, standing at Abby's doorstep, ready to confront his mystery and feeling the sudden incredible urge, along with audience, to give it up and just go back.

Catfish's even bigger secret is that it takes us through that door, past the boogeyman phase of nervousness, and portrays with a surprisingly humane tenderness just what lies at the core of this unusual circumstance. Lobbied claims that this is exploitation or belittling to the revealed subjects are ludicrous. No doubt everyone involved was made better by this experience. To discredit sympathetic realism as condescension concludes that all subjects should only be filmed by their peers and that all filmmakers should film only themselves. By this measure all cinema is exploitation. On some level this may be true but in any case, it is not a unique condition of Joost, Schulman, or Catfish.

Ivans smiles

"You guys seen Hoosiers?"

"The Winning Season"

Despite looking like a 21st century Bad News Bears approximation and bearing the tell-tale mark of a long shelf life and limited theatrical release, The Winning Season is a complete and wonderful surprise. Writer/director James C. Strouse (Lonesome Jim, Grace Is Gone) ironically seems to have hit his biggest business snag with what is easily his most commercial film. Indeed The Winning Season has all the comfortable formula and fast Hollywood pace a film would need to cross over. It also has some of the best executed character work in recent memory, a likable lead in Sam Rockwell, and a refreshingly nuanced and realistic portrayal of teenage girls.

The ever reliable Rockwell picks up where Walter Matthau left off as a drunken busboy who reluctantly takes the offer to coach a girl’s varsity basketball team. At first sight, he laughs off the ramshackle team of just six players. “One of those girls has a broken foot!” But, in true sports picture fashion, both parties will be transformed by the experience of their collaboration. The Winning Season is a reminder that formulas, loathed as they may be, actually did become popular for a reason. There is a stirring principle in the oft maligned “underdog story” that really can’t be shaken. The burden really lies on the cast and storytellers in delivering the premise of the film with genuine heart and authenticity. The Winning Season does just that. Rockwell is surly in a fashion which borders on too rough to forgive but never quite crosses the line. His assistant coach, played by the wonderful character actress Margo Martindale (you’ll know her when you see her), is delightfully dry with just the right amount of optimistic spirit. The girls on the team, led by Nancy Drew star Emma Roberts and Indie Spirit Award winner Shareeka Epps (Half Nelson), operate in a wonderful space of believable normalcy unlike the doe-eyed vixens of Twilight or the crass and mean-spirited 25-year-olds-pretending-to-be-teenagers of the average “teen comedy” these days. They are funny, sometimes selfish, sometimes angry. Always very real. An attribute not to be taken for granted in an industry in which even the best works about adolescent girls tend to offer only a choice between cartoon bitches (Mean Girls) or tortured indie souls (Thirteen). At last, a wonderful in-between for girls who don’t say “fetch” or cut themselves.

Kudos to Strouse for his creation of the best competitive sports story in a good long while and for imbuing it so wonderfully with depth and character. How a film so commercially appealing and genuinely entertaining could be received so quietly is beyond my comprehension. This is a sports genre picture of the most satisfying variety. It also happens to be simultaneously a beautiful and warm character comedy with a delightfully warped streak of dark humor. Let’s hope audiences discover it and give the film its deserved spot in the canon of underdog sports comedies.

Ivan smiles

"I'll think about it."

"The American"

The American, director Anton Corbijn's follow up to the ingenius biopic Control, is every bit as still and stoic as a film about a hitman could be. George Clooney stars as a man called Jack, then Edward. He is shrouded in mystery. His apartment is sparse. The most we know of his personal routine is that he exercises daily and visits prostitutes nearly as much. Oh, yes. And someone is trying to kill him.

Affected banality is not just the whiff of the review but the spirit of the film. Death, violence, sex, redemption. Somehow they all get played in the very same key. A day to day feeling of nothing despite a motorcycle chase here and a very vivid brothel visit there. There is an effect. This is all no doubt intentional. The source is a book entitled "A Very Private Gentleman" by Martin Booth. Indeed Edward is, for all his interactions, a placid and hollow hero so resistant to sentiment and absent of will that he becomes painful to watch despite Corbijn's spectacular compositions and Clooney's vibrant, movie star presence.

The film builds to a finale of great suspense and delicate grace. The final impact, having weathered the storm, is quite positive. It exists as a satisfying whole, deliberately paced and with careful methodology. There's not so much a flaw as there is a contagious lack of electricity and what you are left with, in spite of all things, is an elegant bore.

Ivan wants to smile but cannot.

"Machete don't text."

"Machete"

Robert Rodriguez's Machete could easily qualify as one of the most prefabricated pieces in cinema history. Based on a mock trailer which premiered as part of Grindhouse, the director's double-feature collaboration with Quentin Tarantino, and built from the ground up with pulp stylization, Machete exists to both execute the outrageous sequences filmed three years ago and continue the Grindhouse tradition which failed to launch after the film's DOA premiere.

The film stars stone-faced Danny Trejo as an ex-federale known only as Machete. The vigilante hero's tenacious disregard for Mexican gang hierarchy leads to the murder of his wife and daughter at the hands of a ruthless drug lord named Torrez (Steven Seagal). Years later, Machete is working as a day laborer in Texas and gets setup by Booth (Jeff Fahey), the campaign manager for anti-immigration Senator McLaughlin (Robert De Niro). Booth proposes that Machete execute the Senator to ensure the state a steady stream of cheap illegal labor. In actuality, he has intentions to use the attack to paint McLaughlin's racist tirades in a sympathetic light. That McLaughlin has ties to Torrez only furthers Machete on his path toward revenge. His avenging brand of justice gets helped along by an underground immigration leader (Michelle Rodriguez), an evolving ICE agent (Jessica Alba), and his brother, the Padre (Cheech Marin). Lindsay Lohan also stars as a spoiled drug addicted brat who appears alternately nude and in a nun's habit, for good measure.

In truth, Machete lacks the kick of nonsense fun which made Rodriguez's Planet Terror the better of the two Grindhouse features. While that film was whimsical in its gruesome despair, this one can be quite mean and unwinking in tone. It's a darker film and less witty in the way it executes scenes of violence. Nonetheless, Rodriguez's homage exercise does pay off as a "you wanted it, you go it" picture which integrates the indelible trailer moments into a bigger story with only occasional lag. It also features some beautifully hammy performances by a cast of interesting middle-tier, non-A-list talent (excepting De Niro, a very famous ham indeed). Trejo has been so menacing so often and so successfully without ever being asked to carry a feature, as he does so wonderfully here. Alba has never been made to do so much in a film, even though she is not entirely removed from being the token sexpot. Michelle Rodriguez does her best work here since Girlfight as a perfectly tenacious freedom fighter who transforms into a powerhouse action heroine. Hers is probably the closest to the arc Rose McGowan's Cherry so magnificently executed in Planet Terror and is easily one of the best things about this wildly uneven splatter-fest.

Ivan smiles.

"Chicken isn't vegan?"

"Scott Pilgrim vs. the World"

A romantic action comedy set in an exaggerated video game world complete with spare lives and cartoon sound effects, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is its own thing, to be sure. Even most films based on actual video games try to gain distance from the looked down upon form, but this film, based on a comic series by Bryan Lee O'Malley and directed by Shaun of the Dead genre buster Edgar Wright, fully embraces the kinetic energy, cheesy dialogue, and stylized action of the gaming world. It brings all these devices and more to the forefront and creates a wonderfully vivid, surreal, play realm in which to set its romantic, explosive, hysterical narrative cocktail.

Michael Cera stars as the film's unlikely titular hero, a heartbroken outsider who plays bass in a ramshackle band called Sex Bob-Omb with a delightfully deadpan Allison Pill and comic foils Johnny Simmons and Mark Webber. His dry-humored, ultra-diminishing roommate, Wallace (Kieran Culkin), painfully lords his superior wealth over the out of work Scott, whom he gleefully points out must even share his bed. In the midst of a somewhat embarrassing fling with high school girl Knives Chau (Ellen Wong), Pilgrim discovers the mysterious and beautiful Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and pursues her in spite of warnings from his nemesis Julie (Aubrey Plaza) and sister Stacey (Oscar nominee Anna Kendrick). Ramona, it turns out, has seven evil exes whom he must defeat in order to successfully date her. These range from a vegan with psychic powers (Brandon Routh) to a movie star with hardcore skating skills (Chris Evans) to a sleazy music exec (Jason Schwartzman) and just about everything in between. All the while, Scott is being haunted by the memory (and reality) of his rock star girlfriend Envy (Brie Larson) and a gnawing sense of unworthiness which plagues his precious little life.

Perhaps its abrasive, fast-paced wit will cast a narrow net but I see no scenario in which Scott Pilgrim vs. the World does not somehow become an honored cult classic in the tradition of Wright's other films. It is, without a doubt, a film of its time. It contains offhand references to Legend of Zelda and "Seinfeld." It moves around in illogical patterns facilitated by narrative flow rather than chronological order. It thinks nothing of having an Indian pirate man fly around with demon women as he throws fireballs in slow motion and sings an original song. In other words, this film will in all likelihood make traditionalists barf. Its charms, though, are ample. It is easily the most entertaining film in a wash of a summer season. Without a doubt, it contains more heartfelt nonsense and adrenaline junkie goodness than any traditional rom-com or action picture all year. And most of all, for every indulged outcry of "They don't make 'em like they used to," there is, of course, the equal and opposite truth that they didn't make 'em like they do now. The Hollywood golden age in all its glory could not create a postmodern whacked out thrill ride such as this. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World makes a serious case for contemporary reflexive funhouse cinema. KO.

Ivan smiles.

"All is clear."

"[Rec] 2"

Directors Paco Plaza and Jaume Balagueró made an indelible imprint on the international horror landscape with their little seen but much revered Spanish thriller [Rec]. As the difficult to communicate title may suggest, [Rec] depicted its subject - a terrifying virus infecting one very unlucky apartment building - in a first-person hand held camera style. It managed to do right what other films employing the device got so wrong. Plaza and Balagueró used a real location, very believable practical effects, and a visceral sound design to create a film whose space, characters, and monsters seemed all too real. The duo also mastered the art of utilizing negative space. [Rec] is all about not being able to see what is directly to the right or to the left and the deep rooted fear that when the camera finally does turn, you will not like what you see.

[Rec] 2 picks up almost instantly from the end of the first film and proceeds uniquely as a continuation rather than a new scenario or loosely related second series of events. Jonathan Mellor stars as Dr. Owen, a supposed Ministry of Health employee leading a SWAT team on an investigation of the infected space just moments after what we last saw at the end of [Rec]. Part of the beauty of [Rec] 2 is the brutal echo of [Rec] at almost every turn. Its novel in a horror series to walk back into the same space where we have previously witnessed so much carnage. These new characters see just a blood splatter while fans of [Rec] are reliving the terrified memory of their experience watching the first film. In a genius early moment, the directors recreate a specific scare from the first film: a 360 degree turn in a tight crawl space. They know very well viewers of [Rec] 2 expect to find the same shock at the completion of the turn that they did last time around. Instead there is nothing. "All is clear." For now.

Ultimately, [Rec] 2 does not quite equal its predecessor. [Rec] was such a shock of a film, perfectly calibrated in its gradual escalation of terror and increasing sense of claustrophobia. In its final scene, we feel the most nervous and the most trapped. It did not just create terror but funneled it into an unbelievably precise journey into fear. [Rec] 2 is perhaps as scary. Certainly, it stands high above its horror genre peers in genuine scares. However, it is not as neatly developed as [Rec]. Moreover, it lacks the sense of the unknown which made the first film so unnerving. In [Rec], we knew nothing of what was happening. We were unfamiliar with the space, the rules of the infection, or its cause. The mere suggestion near the end of the film that this pertained to a religious conspiracy and could indeed be demonic (or perhaps was misconstrued as such by a mad priest) packed a wallop as far as terror goes. [Rec] 2, in disappointing horror sequel tradition, gives too sound an answer to the questions raised in the first film. We are told exactly what is happening, how, and why. Without the mystery it is simply not as scary. The flow is also confounded by characters who behave just a bit less intelligently than last time, including the infected ones. I know a bigger budget means more obvious effects and bloodier fights. Nonetheless, can anyone explain to me why the infected here have a precarious need to chew the camera lens rather than the bodies of their victims?

It was probably too much to expect [Rec] 2 to surpass or equal [Rec]. As horror sequels go, though, this has got to be one of the strongest. It continues the legacy of the original quite well and without doing much, if any, damage to its legacy. Most importantly, it is a damn good horror film in its own right, albeit entirely dependent on information from the first film. If the upcoming prequel, [Rec]:Genesis, and sequel, [Rec]: Apocalypse, can retain the true horror and smart style of these first two films, we may just be looking at the rare horror franchise for which sequels are considered essential viewing rather than unwanted exploitations.

Ivan is disappointed but still smiles.