Category: Watch Movies!

By Joe Bendel. It is both his cover and a euphemism for what he does. Ostensibly, he works for a neighborhood laundry service, but he specializes in removing “stains” from clients’ lives. He is a coolly dispassionate hitman, with support staff to help with the cleaning. However, he will have to seek professional help of a different sort when his recent victims start haunting him in Lee Chung’s The Laundryman, which screens during the 2015 Chicago International Film Festival.

His boss A-gu is the rainmaker and he does the dirty work. For years, this arrangement has worked for “No. 1, Chingtian Street.” Yes, that is what he is known as, to the few who know the contract killer (it is a long story that will be revealed in due time). He leads a rather solitary life, but that makes it easy for the stunningly beautiful A-gu to manipulate him. They go way back, in an ambiguous way. When he finds himself genuinely haunted, she refers him to nightclub psychic Lin Hsiang. Despite her hipster style, she is legitimate enough to see the abusive self-styled ladies’ man he just offed and the old couple he whacked before him. However, he has no idea who the silent young woman ghost is or was.

With Lin’s help, he will track down the customers who paid for their hits, in order to satisfy their curiosity and hopefully move them along into the spirit realm. Complicating matters, a sinister party seems to be trying to thwart them. The resulting chaos also attracts the attention of a soon to retire police inspector. It gets to the point where a hitman doesn’t know who to trust.

Although Laundryman starts out as a comedy, it gets real serious, real fast. Lee and Chen Yu-hsun have written a surprisingly complex tale of betrayal and dark secrets from the past, freely incorporating all kinds of genre elements cafeteria-style. It is a wild ride, but they keep us safely buckled into the roller coaster.

Rising star Joseph Chang Hsiao-chuan has the perfect brooding physicality for No. 1, Chingtian Street, not unlike his quietly ominous work in Soul. He also develops some radically different but equally credible chemistry with Sonia Sui Tang as the particularly fatal femme fatale A-gu and Wan Qian’s Lin, the increasingly sober and freaked out party girl psychic. These are not your standard genre film types, even before Lee thoroughly disrupts their worlds.

Lee fully capitalizes on the cinematic creepiness of A-gu’s laundry facility, settling into a zone best described as supernatural noir. Yet, despite the general moodiness (heightened by Yao Hung-i’s eerie cinematography), he maintains a vigorous pace. Frankly, The Laundryman is exactly the sort of foreign film that feels ripe for a wildly inferior Hollywood remake, but it would be especially daunting to follow in Sui’s compulsively scene-stealing footprints. Highly recommended as a first class supernatural mystery, The Laundryman screens Friday (10/16) and Tuesday (10/20), as part of this year’s Chicago International Film Festival.

LFM GRADE: A-

Posted on October 15th, 2015 at 2:44pm.

By Joe Bendel. Miles Davis was like Picasso. He had highly influential, readily identifiable periods. Each of Davis’s stylistic shifts usually heralded the birth of a new trend in jazz. However, in the late 1970s, Davis was in the midst of his “silent” period. Withdrawing from public performances and recordings, his reclusive hedonistic lifestyle further fueled fans’ obsession with the Miles Davis mystique. An aspiring music writer tries to snag the interview everyone wanted, but gets pulled head-first into the chaos of the Miles Davis experience in Don Cheadle’s Miles Ahead, which premiered as the closing night selection of the 53rd New York Film Festival.

If you can’t tell it is the late 1970s from Davis’s wardrobe, you’re never going to figure it out. Earlier in the decade, Davis released some of his most commercial recordings ever with Bitches Brew and Jack Johnson (heard prominently early on), but everyone still prefers his classic stuff, like Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain. After several years away from the studio, Davis has finally cut a new session, but he refuses to relinquish the tapes. This rather irks Columbia Records, since they paid for it, but considering how much they make off his back catalog, Davis does not feel he owes them anything.

Due in part to his heavy cocaine use, as well as his self-imposed state of isolation, Davis might be losing his grip on reality. He frequently experiences visions from his earlier life, particularly his marriage to first wife Frances Taylor (that’s her on the cover of Someday My Prince Will Come). Yet, his erratic behavior will make him even more formidable when an unscrupulous agent steals the master he has been so closely guarding. Pressing would-be journalist Dave Braden into his service, Davis lights out after the ambiguously mobbed up talent manager—and Hell follows after them.

As an actor, Cheadle channels the mannerisms, voice, and most importantly the attitude of Davis so well, it is truly eerie. In contrast to the secluded years of the 1970s, Davis was a true media presence in the 1980s, even appearing in an episode of Miami Vice and a commercial for Honda Scooters. We know exactly what he looked and sounded like around this time—and Cheadle nails it completely.

As a director and screenwriter, Cheadle’s choices will be more controversial, but they are mostly defensible. Everyone can probably agree the traditional short pants to long teeth bio-picture approach really does not fit a Miles Davis. Sort of like Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs, Cheadle uses the flashback structure to hopscotch back and forth in order to get at the essence of the musician’s life. It works for the most part, but the central fictional narrative following madcap scramble for his mystery master tape is pretty bogus.

Frankly, it is impressive how well Cheadle and his co-screenwriters understand his music, yet it is somewhat frustrating how much they cover through cinematic shorthand. Most Miles fans well understand what a substantial role producer Teo Macero played in shaping his fusion sessions, but he only gets name-checked. Likewise, you just have to know Cannonball Addderley and John Coltrane are the saxophone players on the sextet sessions, but Davis’ relationship with Trane was one of the most significant associations of his career. Still, Cheadle earns major credit for a scene showing the close collaboration Davis and arranger Gil Evans (nicely played by Jeffrey Grover) on the Miles Ahead sessions. To this day, many fans do not realize the uncredited work Evans did on innumerable Miles Davis albums as an unclassifiable musical fixer.

The choice of Robert Glasper to adapt the classic Davis music to fit within the film’s dramatic framework and to compose original tribute-ish themes with Cheadle was also inspired. Not only is Glasper comfortable with modal, fusionistic, and bop-based forms of jazz, he also has an ear open to contemporary forms of music. He is precisely the sort of musician Davis would be working with today if he were still with us.

Cheadle’s work as Davis is genuinely award-caliber and Emayatzy Corinealdi gives a strong, forceful performance as Taylor (one wonders what Cicely Tyson will make of the film, but you can’t please everyone). However, Ewan McGregor is basically dead weight as Braden, while Michael Stulhbarg makes an embarrassingly lame villain as the exploitative agent (is there any other kind?).

Regardless, Cheadle’s go-for-broke ethos is definitely cool and he shows unerring good judgment with respects to music placement. You will get the essence of Davis from the film, which is saying something. It might take fans a bit of time to chew on what is and is not incorporated into the film (no Charlie Parker, but the scandalous police assault outside the Vanguard is dramatized, with surprising restraint), but it is worth wrestling with. Recommended with largely good feelings, Miles Ahead is scheduled to open in spring 2016, following its closing night screenings at the 2015 NYFF.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on October 13th, 2015 at 9:56pm.

By Joe Bendel. Dr. Stanley Miligram was not a one-hit wonder in the field of social psychology, but his career arguably peaked in 1961. Yes, he continue to produce original and even groundbreaking research throughout his professional life, but he would always work under the shadow of the Yale experiments that bear his name. Miligram’s life and work are dramatized in an aptly psychologically expressive fashion in Michael Almereyda’s Experimenter, which opens this Friday in New York.

You have heard of Miligram’s work whether you know it or not, but in the early 1960s, plenty of unsuspecting subjects volunteered for his study on obedience and authority. Each participant agreed to serve as the “Teacher,” whose role is to administer electric shocks of increasing and potentially lethal power to the “Learner” for every wrong answer. Despite the pre-recorded screams of pain, they continued to mete out the punishment, because a man in a lab coat told them to.

The high percentage of subjects administering he maximum voltage startle even Miligram himself. For years, the implications of the test and the underlying deception are hotly debated. They make Miligram’s name and establish him as an expert, but he regularly finds himself re-debating his techniques and assumptions. Of course, his critics did their best to ignore the elephant in the room, which Almereyda boldly represents with a real elephant trailing Miligram down hallways. He was after all, the American-born son of Eastern European Jews, who was understandably fascinated by the Eichmann trial roughly coinciding with his [in]famous experiments.

Experimenter is a relentlessly stylized film that deliberately eschews any pretense of verisimilitude. Yet, it almost has to reject the trappings of conventional drama too accommodate Almereyda’s comprehensive survey of Miligram’s work and the criticisms he faced. He is a decidedly cold fish, but his constant fourth wall breaking commentary is fascinating stuff. Ranging freely between arrogance and defensiveness, Peter Sarsgaard gives one of the strangest, but still unconventionally effective performances you will see this year.

Throughout it all, we still get a sense of his personality and watch him develop relatively convincing chemistry with Winona Ryder’s Sasha Menkin Miligram. We get a sense of him as a husband and family man, who went to work to warn Americans they could easily carry out any number of atrocities, if they were duly ordered to while in a compliant “agentic state.”

Frankly, it takes a while for viewers to banish their reservations and buy into Almereyda’s rear-screen projections and self-consciously artificial backdrops. However, the artistry of Ryan Samul’s cinematography and the wonderfully exaggerated but not quite over period look crafted by production designer Deana Sidney and art director Andy Eklund is immediately impressive. It is also hard to beat the surreal eccentricity of Miligram meeting William Shatner and Ossie Davis (played with fitting attitude by Kellan Lutz and Dennis Haysbert) on the set of a TV movie based on his experiments.

It is rather encouraging to see a film as ambitiously cerebral as Experimenter let loose in theaters. Yet, it comes at an opportune time, when fewer people seem to have the skills to rigorously question and dissect what the media tells them. Intellectually challenging and visually playful, Experimenter is a film that engages on multiple levels. Recommended unruly freethinkers, it opens this Friday (10/16) in New York at the Landmark Sunshine.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on October 13th, 2015 at 9:56pm.

By Joe Bendel. You have to assume any New England building dating back to the seventeenth century must have been involved in witchcraft in some way. The historic Noyes-Parris House, former home of Rev. Samuel Parris of Salem Witch Trial infamy, is a good example. Fittingly, the early Colonial house serves as the central location of brothers Michael & Shawn Rasmussen’s old school The Inhabitants, which releases today on iTunes.

Despite the freakiness of Rose Stanton, the somewhat age-addled retiring proprietor, a married couple is delighted to buy the March Carriage bed & breakfast—and for such a reasonable price. Dan and Jessica Coffey believe it is an investment in their future, but they really did not poke around enough. If they had, they might have noticed the weird witchcraft paraphernalia in the cellar and the video surveillance monitors still functioning in the attic. They also might have been curious to learn Lydia March, a midwife accused of witchcraft, met her grisly end while living there.

The first few days are filled with rustic charm, but when Dan is suddenly called away on business, he returns to find a radically different vibe. If only their dog Wiley could talk. Instead, he will have to look for answers in the surveillance tapes and the local witchcraft museum.

There is no question the Noyes-Parris/March Carriage is an absolutely terrific location for a horror film. The Rasmussen Brothers fully exploit it, taking viewers into all sorts of dark rooms and passageways. The Inhabitants bears obvious comparison to Ti West’s The Innkeepers (some of his fans were down on it, but we were bullish on it here), with good reason. Both films seem to absorb and project the eerie energy of their backdrops, creating claustrophobic terror. However, The Inhabitants also brings to mind films like Ted Geoghegan’s We Are Still Here and, believe it or not, the first V/H/S film (they both make grainy video tape pretty damn blood-chilling).

Of course, you can also see stylistic hat-tips to the ambitious low budget horror films of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Everything feels real and hand-crafted. Presumably, any computer generated effects were used sparingly. Fortunately, the Brothers Rasmussen intuitively understand what we do not see is always scarier than what we clearly can (especially if it is cheesy looking). They also created an intriguingly eerie backstory that rings true to local lore. While we’re at it, let’s give Wiley (a.k.a. Bailey) some credit. He’s very well trained and rather expressive for a canine performer.

The humans are not bad either, particularly Michael Reed as Coffey, the out his depth everyman. He seems reasonably proactive and intuitive for a horror movie husband, while Judith Chaffee is suitably unsettling as Stanton. Elise Couture-Stone holds up her end well enough, but Jessica Coffey is just the sort of role that demands disciplined consistency rather than method emoting.

Perhaps most impressively, the Brothers Rasmussen demonstrate a really strong eye for visual composition. You can tell throughout The Inhabitants that they have carefully determined who and what should be in the foreground and background of each shot. It is a surprisingly well-crafted and satisfying ultra-indie film that deserves a wide genre audience. Highly recommended for horror fans, The Inhabitants is now available on most major VOD platforms.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on October 13th, 2015 at 9:54pm.

By Joe Bendel. Oddly enough, the Federal government is actually popular in this dystopian future. It is just ridiculously ineffectual. Combat 21 and his storm-trooper cult basically terrorize the futuristic capitol city with impunity. Only a group of genetically-enhanced twenty-something looking teenagers can stop them in Andrew Lau & Corey Yuen’s wildly over the top The Avenging Fist, which releases today on DVD from Well Go USA.

Sadly, Mega Nova and Belle never knew their father Thunder, an elite policeman killed in the line of duty—except not really. Thunder and their mother Wing were part of the Power Glove pilot program, one of the unpleasant secrets of the former government. Nova and Belle were tests cases in the next phase of the government’s efforts to harness the supposed unused 80% of the human brain (which implies mankind is devolving).

Rather than consign them to a guinea pig’s life, Wing spirited them away. Now they live an underground existence, if by underground you mean constant clubbing and jet-scooter drag racing. However, when Combat 21 gets wind of their X-Men like abilities, he unleashes his brainwashed army in their National Socialist uniforms, which tragically enough includes Thunder. At least they might have an ally in Inspector Dark, Thunder’s former colleague—the one who supposedly killed him, but he clearly didn’t do it decisively enough.

Everything about this film is totally nuts, in both good and bad ways. It started out as a rip-off of the Tekken video game franchise so blatant it led to billable hours, but apparently screenwriter Sap Sam (Thirteen) Chan resorted to time-tested strategy of convoluting the plot into such a nonsensical rat’s nest, nobody would want to claim it resembled their I.P. Seriously, this is a film in which a glove is used to access unused portions of the brain. If you are waiting for logic to show up, you will see the closing credits first.

On the other hand, The Avenging Fist also features Master Sammo Hung sporting a shiny silver fedora and Gigi Leung rocking an Afro-cut. Indeed, there is something reassuring about his presence and Cecilia Yip adds some class as “Aunt” Wing. Frustratingly, the cosmic fireballs and psychic force fields water down Yuen’s action choreography, but Biao Yuen still has his moments as Thunder. As for the special effects, they might have been considered state of the art in 2001, but they have not aged well. Gee, the cast is cute though, especially Leung as Erika, the supermodel.

Frankly, it is hard to fathom how Avenging Fist managed to miss becoming a midnight tradition at the Alamo Drafthouse. It is absolutely impossible to explain the film’s bizarre chain of events or how any of its internal systems supposedly work, but it is kind of fun to stare at it in utter disbelief. Recommended for fans of cult film lunacy, The Avenging Fist is now available on DVD from Well Go USA.

Posted on October 13th, 2015 at 9:54pm.