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    Romantic Weepers Versus Doc Week

    September arrives with the first OSU home game, some gorgeous weather, and a smattering of mediocre to poor options in theaters – unless you want a weepy romance. If that’s the case, you are in luck. For the rest of us – weep not. It’s Doc Week at Gateway Film Center!

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    The Light Between Oceans

    Can stellar performances, skilled direction, pristine cinematography and an evocative score elevate a story built on weepy schmaltz? Well….yes.

    The Light Between Oceans is definitely a melodramatic weeper, but one saved from outright embarrassment by the sheer force of the talent assembled to bring it to the screen. Writer/director Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond the Pines) adapts M.L. Stedman’s best-selling novel with a determined earnestness and a rock solid cast.

    Michael Fassbender is Tom, a WWI veteran who takes a job as lighthouse keeper off the coast of Australia in 1918, eventually bringing his bride Isabel (Alicia Vikander). Years at the island lighthouse go by without an addition to the family, when suddenly an old rowboat washes ashore…with a crying baby inside.

    The plot turns that follow seem born from a unholy union of Sparks and Dickens, as contrived circumstance begets impossible choice, painful sacrifice, and a search for absolution through that far, far better thing to do.

    The Light Between Oceans amounts to a two-hour struggle between talent and substance. One side brought the varsity squad.

    Grade: C-

    The Sea of Trees

    Matthew McConaughey loses himself in a Japanese forest and befriends another wayward traveler (Ken Watanbe), their treacherous journey offering life lessons aplenty.

    Because horror writer Chris Sparling penned The Sea of Trees, I was kind of hoping the film would be a cross between director Gus Van Sant’s 2002 flick Gerry and The Blair Witch Project. It is not.

    No, it’s an overtly sentimental, culturally patronizing waste of one Oscar winner and two Oscar nominees.

    Van Sant falls back on the crutch of the flashback to help us understand what handsome scientist Arthur Brennan (McConaughey) is doing in “the suicide forest.” It’s in these segments that we meet Naomi Watts’s Joan Brennan and begin to unravel the mystery.

    Van Sant is no stranger to schmaltz. As great a filmmaker as he has been, sentimentality tripped him up in Promised Land, Finding Forrester and others. His career is peppered with other writers’ projects, many of them with a point to make, and those statement films tend to be Van Sant’s weakest.

    Perhaps it’s because, rather than finding his own language for the story via camerawork or score, he relies on an existing style. The Sea of Trees certainly suffers from a heavy handed score. Van Sant also misses opportunities to create a sense of foreboding, claustrophobia, isolation or even redemption with the forest itself, Kasper Tuxen’s photography instead offering irrelevant yet lovely images of windblown treetops.

    Trees can definitely be sappy.

    Grade: C-

    Documentary Week

    Doc Week returns to Gateway Film Center this weekend. Their full lineup:

    • TOWER
    • INDIAN POINT
    • THE OTHER SIDE
    • A SPACE PROGRAM
    • RICHARD LINKLATER: DREAM IS DESTINY
    • DON’T BLINK – ROBERT FRANK
    • ANTS ON A SHRIMP
    • BREAKING A MONSTER
    • DYING TO KNOW: RAM DASS & TIMOTHY LEARY
    • AN ART THAT NATURE MAKES: THE WORK OF ROSAMOND PURCELL
    • UNDER THE SUN
    • THE SEVENTH FIRE
    • KAMPAI! FOR THE LOVE OF SAKE
    • JUST DESSERTS: THE MAKING OF CREEPSHOW
    • WALL WRITERS
    • GERMANS AND JEWS
    • HOOLIGAN SPARROW
    • SOUND OF REDEMPTION: THE FRANK MORGAN STORY
    • MADE IN VENICE
    • SEED: THE UNTOLD STORY
    • FOR THE LOVE OF SPOCK
    • ONE MORE TIME WITH FEELING

    Also opening in Columbus this weekend:

    • THE 9TH LIFE OF LOUIS DRAX (R)
    • KICKBOXER: VENGEANCE (NR)
    • LITTLE MEN (PG)
    • MORGAN (R)
    • NO MANCHES FRIDA (PG-13)

    Reviews with help from George Wolf.

    Read more from Hope at MADDWOLF and listen to her weekly horror movie podcast, FRIGHT CLUB.

    Looking for more film events in Columbus? CLICK HERE to visit our Events Calendar.

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    Hope Madden
    Hope Maddenhttps://columbusunderground.com
    Hope Madden is a freelance contributor on Columbus Underground who covers the independent film scene, writes film reviews and previews film events.
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