Sunday, July 31, 2016

Embrace of the Serpent / **** (2015)

A shaman stands fixed at the edge of a river embankment, his posture denoting tireless confidence. The forest behind him rests as a blur of deep vegetation and ominous noise – a towering portrait of natural order. Closed within that image is the soul of a man at war with the ideology of others; as the last known of a tribe thought slaughtered by missionaries, his skin is hardened by encounters with foreign tradesmen that seem interested only in exploiting the treasures of the Earth. Then a canoe carrying two passengers drifts in nearby, containing a pair of friends from different worlds (in his eyes, a civilization built on destruction). One is a former being of the forest who has abandoned the embrace of nature in favor of more sensational influences; the other, born in a world far beyond the trees, has wandered into it seeking adventure and discovery, no doubt with some level of misplaced elitism. But he has fallen ill amidst the search for a legendary item, and this lone warrior of the jungles – known as Karamakate – may possess the key to both its whereabouts and his own recovery from an ominous fever. But does the native have any sympathy to offer in this man’s hour of desperation, much less the basic desire to help?

Friday, July 22, 2016

Into the Abyss (2011)

There are two decisive moments towards the beginning of Werner Herzog’s “Into the Abyss” that left me in the inertia of sobering contemplation. The first involves an interview with a prison warden who oversees the comfort of death row inmates during their final minutes; as they are strapped to the table and prepared for lethal injections, his is the face that they will see last, looking down on them with only the offer of empathy in their transition to another plane. Some are grateful for the opportunity of a kind gesture in those moments, and in a confessional monologue he suggests a sense of complicity in their executions; these are human lives regardless of their misdeeds, and doing a job that contradicts those beliefs reduces the value of his soul. Herzog seems to echo these sentiments in the following scene when he comes face-to-face with Michael Perry, a death row inmate in Texas who is just eight days away from his own fatal punishment. “I don’t’ have to respect you or even like you,” he warns his interview subject. “But I don’t believe in capital punishment. I don’t believe you should be killed.”

Sunday, July 17, 2016

The Conjuring 2 / ***1/2 (2016)

When the mode of creating a horror film must involve some level of imitation, a director sometimes takes comfort in calling on the suggestion with shrewd wisdom. “The Conjuring 2” begins with a prologue in which the famous Warrens, Ed and Lorraine, are asked to descend upon a haunted dwelling to investigate the source of fright, previously held responsible for causing a disintegrated family to rush off in desperation during the middle of the night. Though it is never directly stated (it doesn’t need to be), dialogue and camera shots indicate that this site is the famous house in “The Amityville Horror,” and the fallout related to the exact same family that was featured in said film. Why did James Wan, the impassioned director of this ambitious series, go the route of creating such a connection? Perhaps it has just as much to do with setting a tone as it does emphasizing his own admiration. The original “Amityville” picture is frequently elevated as a benchmark in the rebirth of modern haunted house stories, but its most influential detail amounts to the realization that mere ghosts or malevolent spirits are nothing if there isn’t an instrument in the human world pushing their schemes. Like that film, here is a series that assumes a weakened soul is easily seduced by the evil in alternate plains of existence, no matter how strong an offense to it may become.

Friday, July 15, 2016

Jaws / **** (1975)

The key image in Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” is not the first time we see the shark toss its head above water but one in which a little boy named Michael is seen settling into shock, just having witnessed a nearby swimmer swallowed by the mammoth predator. That moment, by all facets of an effective thriller, is the bridge that joins the terror unfolding to the relatability of it: suddenly the movie is no longer just about a horrifying danger lurking beneath the dark waters, it has become a working laboratory of personal fears projected into situations that could happen to us. A less farsighted movie would have ignored the inclusion of such a moment, or shamelessly tacked it into the crevice of a minor subplot. But even as a novice in the scene of Hollywood’s evolving machine Spielberg had the stimulus of a well-trained emotional conductor, and the plight of his young star – the son of the movie’s heroic center – was a shrewd maneuver that reverbed powerfully in the tense hearts of the audience. The clarity of an intention had seldom been so strong in the thick of so much ambiguous fright, and here is a man who made the moment seem as effortless as the delivery of a mere musical cue or establishing shot.

Tuesday, July 12, 2016

The Shallows / *** (2016)

“The Shallows” taps into that persistent fear of being in the ocean waters just as a ravenous shark swims nearby, and in doing so creates a space where predator and prey (in this case, a lone woman) engage in a bout of scuffs that is among one of the more taut excursions of recent thrillers. The early scenes work in disruption to that suspicion, mind you; colorful and optimistic, they seem edited together as if highlighting a travelogue of Caribbean memories. The heroine, an adventurous woman named Nancy (Blake Lively), engages the locals with enthusiastic formalities, although there are moments interlaced with pathos – she has come to this hidden beach isolated from family, who are still grieving the loss of her mother to terminal cancer. Why would she make suck a trek at such a pivotal time? It was a treasured vacation spot of her deceased parent, and surfing the turbulent blue waves is her device for grieving. And from the vantage point of the beach an important image emerges: a collection of rocks resting off shore that resembles, to Nancy’s eye, a pregnant woman about to give birth. “I don’t see it,” one of the natives chimes in upon her observation. Of course he feels that way; this is more a conduit to her deepest feelings, many of which will empower her sense of survival as the movie turns more menacing corners.

Monday, July 11, 2016

The Secret Life of Pets / ** (2016)

A dog finds happiness by merely being in the company of his owner. When that person walks out of the front door, it becomes a lonesome game of waiting until he or she comes back through. “The Secret Life of Pets,” a new cartoon about that mysterious slog between the departure and return of an owner, suggests there’s much more for canines to do in the meantime, not the least of which is get swept up into a city adventure where they are chased and hunted after they wander too far away from the comforts of their routine. Others – perhaps more busy with trivial matters – are inclined to join them out of loyalty. Sometimes that also includes encountering other animals during their venture, including those that have been discarded by owners; they thrive in the sewers of New York as a faction of four-legged gangsters, eager to recruit others in their scheme to rid the world of selfish and cruel pet owners. Much of this sounds rather exciting and whimsical when you paint a portrait in a movie review, but replace the dogs and cats with inanimate childhood objects and what you basically have is “Toy Story.”

Saturday, July 9, 2016

The Purge: Election Year / **1/2 (2016)

On the eve of my viewing of “The Purge: Election Year,” news headlines were flooded by reports of another police officer gunning down a black man during a traffic stop, reportedly because he was concealing a weapon. Cameras caught footage of the killing and a wave of protest swept over social circles, and with good reason: it was yet another in a growing list of offenses in which legal authorities had applied questionable judgment against a civilian of color (the second in the same week, even), and another in which the victim had been injured fatally. I bring this issue to mind not in any way to make light of it in a movie review, but essentially to highlight the relevance of present culture paradigms at the cinema. In a volatile genre like horror, where the degree of considerations usually amount to the depth of axe wounds or the consistency of a murderous rampage, it can be a rare thing for a modern scare-fest to build its foundation on current political ideologies. Eli Roth used it implicitly in “Hostel” at a time when anti-American sentiment was widespread in foreign countries, and James DeMonaco has echoed that call in a trilogy of films about government-supported holidays devoted to massacre. This third entry, certainly the most direct at connecting to the trend of the times, is the tipping point of a thesis that feels all too familiar in the world we live in – because we are living it with each new tragedy against the oppressed.

Monday, July 4, 2016

Independence Day: Resurgence / ** (2016)

Roland Emmerich was once a name synonymous with the loud and ambitious blockbuster trend of the late 90s, but in today’s movie climate his is a reputation diminished by a generation of technical wizards that have fully upstaged him. That prospect (not a minor consensus) weighs heavily as we descend head-first into the fatalistic “Independence Day: Resurgence,” a rather strange phenomenon of an endeavor: arriving exactly 20 years after its predecessor was a box office heavyweight, the wonder of a collective audience is interlaced with befuddlement, as if out of sync with the notion that this story was ever worthy of a follow-up. Emmerich has certainly made a career out of gargantuan catastrophes causing generational slaughter (his two most recent end-of-the-world vehicles, “The Day After Tomorrow” and “2012,” took that theme to the edge of catastrophe), but when it came to an Earth that faced off against an alien race that sought planetary destruction, where else could the concept go when the villain faced a clear defeat? Better yet, in a movie realm where the remaining population seemed to consist of just a few wisecracking cynics and emotionally scarred invalids, who would even want to go back?