Review: The Dog Stars

Image courtesy of 20th Century Studios.

Reviews of his latest film, “The Dog Stars,” have noted that director Ridley Scott’s recent output has not been his strongest.

While I’d agree that “Gladiator II” was one of his lesser efforts – sharks in the Colosseum, really? – I found “The Last Duel” to be pretty gripping and thought “Napoleon” was decent as well.

“The Dog Stars” is, admittedly, not one of his strongest films, but it’s a little better than some of the reviews you’ve read likely suggest. The film is yet another story about survivors in a postapocalyptic setting – this time, it’s only nine years in the future after a disease has ravaged the world.

Hig (Jacob Elordi) is a soft-spoken man who flies a small plane with his dog on reconnaissance, looking for resources and keeping an eye out for potential dangers, while Bangley (Josh Brolin) is a tough former military guy who sits with a gun in the guard tower watching over the large property that the two share.

There’s little information as to how these two men paired up, but we learn that Hig’s wife died from the disease. Hig likes to explore and occasionally, much to Bangley’s chagrin, drops off food and other supplies to a Mennonite community located in an isolated spot in the mountains. Bangley, on the other hand, seems fine being disconnected from the world, other than the marauders who occasionally attempt to enter the property and are promptly gunned down.

An attack from a group of marauders one day leads Hig to try his luck elsewhere and he sets out in his plane, which stalls and drops him off near a farm where a surly farmer, Pops (Guy Pearce), and his daughter, Cima (Margaret Qualley), live. At first, Pops doesn’t trust Hig, but Cima quickly takes to him and helps him to restore his plane.

Without giving away too much more about the plot, suffice it to say that these new friends accompany Hig on his travels, while Bangley attempts to fend off a massive number of marauders that are part of a roving gang. The film has action sequences, but often plays more as a somber story about loneliness at the end of the world.

Some of it works pretty well. There’s a nice camaraderie between Hig and Bangley, and the scenes between Elordi, Pearce, and Qualley are some of the picture’s best. It’s a film with some nice touches – for example, when Pops uses a story involving blueberry pancakes to gain the trust of a new group of people.

Then again, there are also some misses – namely, an extended sequence during which Hig, Pops, and Cima find themselves in Grand Junction, Colorado, where a utopian-seeming society has been set up and is led by Allison Janney feels almost cartoonish compared to the rest of the film’s solemn vibe.

All in all, this is not one of Scott’s best films, but it has its moments and throughout I was curious to see where the character’s journeys would take them. It has a solid cast and some beautiful cinematography. Even if it doesn’t all completely come together, it’s better than some reviews of the film might lead you to believe.

Review: Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma

Image courtesy of MUBI.

Jane Schoenbrun is one of the most unique among the crop of new directors to watch. Their surrealist horror dramas often relate to personal experiences - this can be gleaned from watching the films, but also from Schoenbrun's interviews about them - from being a trans filmmaker.

While I can't remember if this applies to "We're All Going to the World's Fair," Schoenbrun's second and still best film to date, "I Saw the TV Glow," had to do with the process of coming out as trans and both the acceptance one seeks from oneself and others during that process.

The director's third picture, "Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma," covers both topics in its title - but mainly the former. The film's murderous villain's name is Little Death, which clearly references the French phrase "le petite morte," which translates to the same thing and refers to an orgasm.

Much like "I Saw the TV Glow," Schoenbrun's latest takes a roundabout - and intriguing - method of examining something (in this case, sex) from the trans experience. One of its two central characters, Kris (Hannah Einbinder), is a filmmaker who has always kept sex at a remove and has trouble with intimacy. It's not until she imagines herself as someone else - literally placing herself mentally in another body - that she is able to fully experience what she seeks.

In this case, the other body is one of the many victims of the murder sprees at Camp Miasma, a fictional camp where counselors are murdered across a series of films by Little Death, a character who was humiliated for exploring both their masculine and feminine sides and then drowned in the camp's lake.

The picture takes obvious cues from "Sleepaway Camp," which also featured a serial killer with a female-masculine complex and there's a shot in Schoenbrun's movie that clearly mimics the frightful face being made by that killer at the film's end. 

But even more so, the film is an homage to the "Friday the 13th" series in that its central villain was teased and then drowned in a lake. There's an installment in the fictional franchise that is set in Manhattan, and there's even a scene in which a man (Patrick Fischler, of "Mulholland Drive") tells the campers in the first entry in the series that they are all doomed. There's also an installment titled "A New Beginning." 

The film's plot centers around Kris' attempt to reboot the franchise and, in the process, visiting the snowy lake where the films were shot and where the original final girl from the series, Billy Presley (a delightfully vampy Gillian Anderson), is now living a secluded life. During the course of the visit, Kris is able to examine her problems with sex and how the film series plays a role in this.

Along the way, the picture involves some nutty needle drops - Donna Lewis, Sade, and the usage of a Counting Crows song that is unlikely to be forgotten. Long clips of the fictional film are interspersed with the main action, so that in many ways the film within the film becomes a bit more interesting than what's going on outside of it. And considering that this is a horror movie, of sorts, there is a lot of bloodshed in that film within the film.

The picture ultimately takes a surreal turn in its final third that approaches the material in a much more meta method. Although I could appreciate why Schoenbrun chose to do so - considering what it represents - and how it speaks to the overall narrative, I found these scenes to be a bit too literal, while also being surreal if that makes sense, to be effective. 

That being said, this is, much like their previous films, a truly original work from a distinctive cinematic voice. "I Saw the TV Glow" remains, for me, Schoenbrun's finest hour so far, but "Camp Miasma" is a mostly effective and often quite entertaining film that combines genre with some very personal elements. It's probably unlike anything else you'll see this summer.

Review: The End Of Oak Street

Image courtesy of Warner Bros. 

David Robert Mitchell's "The End of Oak Street" is a lean and mean sci-fi thriller in the mold of a "Jaws"-era Steven Spielberg film that is likely to be one of the summer's genuine surprises for unsuspecting audiences. The film is Mitchell's first in eight years after "Under the Silver Lake" was mostly met with derision (somewhat unfairly), whereas his sophomore film, the great "It Follows," was a critical darling.

His newest film shares some similarities with "It Follows" - both films are set in the suburbs, a place that people have created to make themselves feel safe, but in Mitchell's films have been infiltrated by evil or violence. Both pictures also use the nerve-wracking tactic of showing something dangerous lurking and slowly approaching as unwitting characters go about their business.

Aside from those similarities, the film feels like a fast paced, but shorter and more gruesome, version of "Jurassic Park" in the suburbs. But Mitchell has managed to make the drama involving the picture's central family as compelling as the tense and fast-paced set pieces.

In the film, Greg (Ewan McGregor) and Denise (Anne Hathaway, who's having quite a summer) are lying to each other. He is taking part-time jobs - such as delivering pizza - to cover for the fact that he has lost his job. She is secretly sneaking away to the basement to write a novel about a woman who is thinking about bailing on her family. Their teenage son (Christian Convery) and daughter (Maisy Stella) are aware that something is wrong.

One night, the family's suburb witnesses a strange light and some rumblings. The next day, the power and water are out. To their horror, the family notices that dinosaurs of varying sizes and appetites are roaming the streets, picking off the neighbors.

I'm not going to delve too deeply into how this phenomenon occurred, but the concept of wormholes and Carl Sagan's work is later cited and explained well enough - that is, if the science behind this whole enterprise really matters much to your viewing experience. It probably shouldn't.

Much of the rest of the film is a tense game of cat-and-mouse as the family - and several other characters in their orbit - attempt to survive and find their way to the wormhole, in the hopes that they can jump back into the present. Between chases through backyards involving T-Rexes and a gigantic snake-like creature slithering into a house during one of the film's best set pieces, "The End of Oak Street" mostly plays like an exciting - albeit expensive looking - B movie.

On the whole, it's pretty fun - and there are a few genuine shocks during its brisk running time. It also has an ending that might be viewed as happy, but perhaps not so much when you stop to think about it. The cast is solid across the board, with Hathaway as the MVP, once again starring in a movie this summer in which her home invaded by unwanted guests.

"It Follows" remains one of my favorite horror movies of the 21st century, and it proved Mitchell to be a master of tone and mood. Much like that film, "The End of Oak Street" depicts the suburbs as a place of  superficial safety and deeply-buried angst. While Mitchell's 2015 horror movie is a bit deeper thematically, "The End of Oak Street" provides enough to chew on to compliment its thrill-ride moments. 

It's been a good summer for big budget, blockbuster filmmaking - including the latest from Spielberg and Christopher Nolan and, now, Mitchell. For a movie that's theoretically a bit bleak, "The End of Oak Street" is pretty enjoyable.

Review: Sheep In A Box

Image courtesy of Neon.

Hirokazu Koreeda is one of Japan's greatest filmmakers and has been considered the heir apparent to the great Yasujiro Ozu. Both filmmakers are known for their measured paces and quiet observances of the human condition.

Koreeda's latest, "Sheep in the Box," finds the filmmaker venturing a little further from his typical subject matter, despite it still being a family drama, by confronting the topic of AI and telling a story that could best be described as science fiction.

In the picture, Kensuke (Daigo Yamamoto) and his wife, Otone (Haruka Ayase), live a quiet but seemingly normal life, considering that their young son, Kakeru, died two years before in an incident that only becomes more mysterious as it is further discussed.

Otone learns about a company that provides artificially intelligent (AI) family members to those who have lost love ones - and despite Kensuke's reluctance, the couple agrees to welcome a new Kakeru, who looks like their son but is obviously a robot, into their home.

No, the film doesn't turn into a horror movie, but instead focuses on how the couple tries to reconcile that their son is lost forever and that the being who looks like him - and seemingly has recovered some of the boy's memories - isn't actually him.

There are some interesting scenes to be mined from this story and, for about two-thirds of the film's running time, it remains intriguing. Koreeda makes an odd storytelling choice in its final third that involves Kakeru being mentored by a teenager who might also be AI and who leads a group of robots who have been abandoned. The film portrays this crew as a lost boys (of the Peter Pan variety, not vampires) type of group and ends on a utopian note that I can't help but view as a misstep.

Koreeda has made some great films - notably, his Palm d'Or-winning "Shoplifters" as well as "After Life," "Maborosi," and "Broker" - and his latest film adopts the gentle style and character-driven storytelling techniques with which one has become accustomed, but it doesn't completely come together. 

"Sheep in the Box" is far from a bad movie - in fact, it's a pretty decent one before the misstep late in the film - so it ends up just being a minor movie from a typically reliable director. 

Review: One Night Only

Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.

"One Night Only" mostly induces groans (though not the type for which the film is hoping), but I suppose it deserves some sort of credit for being the only - checks notes - raunchy rom com that is set in a Christofascist regime.

Playing sort of like a more humorous (albeit only occasionally) version of "The Purge," replete with meet-cutes and jokes involving people running around barely clothed in Manhattan, "One Night Only" doesn't exactly start with the greatest premise. 

In the film, Congress has recently voted for The Mandate, which declares that non-married people can only have sex one night per year and, therefore, this one particular night turns into a sexual free-for-all in which people are roaming the streets desperately trying to hook up with strangers.

At the center of this story is Allie (Monica Barbaro), whose job singing jingles to the tune of popular songs about such things as psoriasis is one of the picture's few jokes that land. Allie had a seemingly successful hookup the previous year, but was ghosted by the guy.

The film's other lead character is Owen (Callum Turner), a sincere pizza shop owner whose girlfriend (Maya Hawke), tells him on the big night that she plans on sleeping with someone else, leaving him bummed out and scrambling for companionship.

Most of the film involves these two characters continually bumping into one another - the first time literally - and becoming friends throughout the day, all the while evading the obvious solution: that they should be together. Instead, they ignore the obvious and seek sexual healing elsewhere - he with an older British woman whom he awkwardly brings to his mother's house for a hookup and she with a musician who gets increasingly creepier.

But while the film, for most of its running time, is a mostly harmless rom com with a premise that seems relevant to the moment, but then doesn't do anything interesting with it, the movie ultimately takes a very peculiar route toward its end in which its protagonists decide to simply embrace the fascist rules imposed on them - but for the sake of romance, or something like that. 

There have been a few films that have adequately captured the present moment we're living in, whether it's Paul Thomas Anderson's Oscar-winning "One Battle After Another" or some of the horror movies of the past few years. "One Night Only," however, isn't one of them. It tries to mine laughs out of an unsettling situation before ultimately saying to just give in to it. 

If there's anything that makes the film watchable, it is its two leads, both of whom are likable. But the script demands ludicrous things from them and, ultimately, their presence isn't enough to recommend this oddly conceived film.

Review: I Want Your Sex

Image courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

It's been 12 years since indie provocateur Gregg Araki made a feature film, so if nothing else his latest, "I Want Your Sex," is a cause for celebration. The film is a comedy with a slight element of mystery involved - its wraparound story involves its lead character being grilled by two detectives - in which a young man just out of college named Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) gets into a sub-dom relationship with his boss (Olivia Wilde), a controversial artist who sees sex as the thing that most informs her art. 

Elliot's life is less than lively when we first meet him. He lives with his best friend, Apple (Chase Sui Wonders), and is looking for his first job after having graduated school. His girlfriend, Minerva (Charli XCX) is disinterested, both in bed and in general, and he doesn't have much money to live on.

So, he's naturally enthused to land a gig as the assistant to Erika Tracy (Wilde), a provocative artist whose gallery is filled with her works, most of which have to do with sex. One assignment involves Elliot and co-worker Zap (Mason Gooding), who brags about the orgies in which he's involved seemingly weekly, sticking numerous pieces of chewed bubble gum on a large picture of a vulva that Erika has drawn to give it a certain look and texture. At times, Erika sits and listens while she's working to a soundtrack of her moaning from her at-home masturbatory activities. You get the picture.

No sooner than Elliot takes the job than he is asked by Erika to be her sub. This involves everything from him having to crawl around in her office to being spanked and, in one case, meeting up with a friend of Erika's from out of town and being her "date" for the evening - one which goes spectacularly wrong.

The film opens with a female body floating in the water in a scene that is reminiscent of the opening of "Sunset Boulevard" and the film drops other cinematic references - one cue card says "9 1/2 Weeks Later" - along the way. As usual for an Araki film, there is near constant music playing on the soundtrack, though there's very little of what we might typically expect to hear (no Cocteau Twins, Slowdive, or Ride).

Araki was one of the most outrageous filmmakers of the 1990s indie scene, most notably for his bleak and nihilistic Teen Apocalypse trilogy that included "Totally Fucked Up," "The Doom Generation," and "Nowhere." But it wasn't until 2005 when he reached his creative peak with the devastating and ethereal "Mysterious Skin," one of several movies from that decade that haunted me for years.

"I Want Your Sex" is his most potent film since "Mysterious Skin." It's not as powerful or thoughtful as that picture and comes off as more of a lark. The film somewhat explores issues of power in the workplace and the fact that Erika has economic dominance over Elliot, while at the same Araki tries to keep things light, rather than peeking into some of the darker corners that his previous films did.

Araki has discussed in interviews that he believes Generation Z is sexless and, in the film, this is explored through Elliot and his milieu, though Zap is far from a prude and Elliot gradually learns to become comfortable with his sexuality. This would probably make Erika an avatar for Araki, although she is also clearly viewed as being in the wrong for the manner in which she exploits Elliot and how she uses her persona as a transgressive artist to shield herself from criticism. 

A heavier movie might have followed this thread a little further down the road, but Araki is working in a mode here that has more in common with his other comedies such as "Splendor," "Kaboom!" and "Smiley Face." His latest is not his best movie, but it's his best in a while and I'm glad to see him making another film at long last.

Review: Her Private Hell

Image courtesy of Neon.

It happens sometimes that talented filmmakers become too enamored with their style or obsessed with their fetishes and find themselves adrift. There are numerous directors who could be cited, some of whom eventually bounce back and others who never do.

This seems to be the conundrum for Nicolas Winding Refn, the Danish provocateur who was once the toast of the Cannes Film Festival but has in recent years been cranking out neon-lit fever dreams that are long on atmosphere but short in other departments.

I have championed some of Refn's films, most notably "Drive," the 2011 film that won him Best Director at Cannes and ended up in my top 10 of that decade. Prior to that stellar neo-noir, I was a fan of Refn's "Pusher" trilogy and "Bronson," and thought that his "Bleeder" and "Fear X" were underrated.

But he followed "Drive" up with "Only God Forgives," a grim and surreal gangster saga set in Japan that felt like a letdown, and "The Neon Demon," which was a slight improvement but once again favored style over substance. Unfortunately, his latest, "Her Private Hell," is his furthest delve into the trance-like zone in which his most recent films have been set. 

The film has some stunning imagery and a stellar score from the great Pino Donaggio, but these are both in the service of a story that is borderline nonsensical and performances that seem as if they are tuned in from another wavelength. 

There's the typical Refn stuff here - a complex mother figure, slow stylized violence, eyes being gouged, women who look like models, a hero clad in leather, and inspiration from David Lynch, Samurai, and Giallo films. But very little gels in a way that makes it a watchable film.

There's little point in trying to explain its plot, but I'll give it a shot: Elle (Sophie Hatcher) has a complex relationship with her father (Dougray Scott) and stepmother (Havana Rose Liu). At the film's beginning, she meets a young actress (Kristine Froseth) who says she is excited that the two of them will star in a movie together, though we never get a glimpse of that.

Meanwhile, a mysterious man known as Private K (Charles Melton) roams the foggy, neon-lit city where the film is set, brutally attacking Yazuka figures and searching for a demonic presence known as the Leatherman, who literally tears young women apart. Private K believes that the Leatherman stole his daughter from him some years before.

All of this material is presented as if it's the coolest thing you'll ever see. Characters speak lines as if they are disinterested whether they will register with the audience. Mostly, they come off as posturing. The Leatherman is described in a manner that is meant to strike fear in the heart, but the entire plot line involving this figure is ludicrous. How any plot strand in the film connects with another is beyond me.

Many of my favorite films could be described as strange or oblique, but it's all about how you present your material. Refn here appears to be nurturing his obsessions and stylistic trademarks, but seemingly without much concern as to whether it comes together and forms a movie that might engage an audience. 

He's a talented filmmaker - "Drive" remains one of my favorite films from the past decade, and his earlier work still holds up - but this is now the third film in a row in which he relies solely on style and mood to do the heavy lifting, but it ultimately provides very few rewards for sticking it out.