Poopy pants Alec Baldwin, Cyborg ScarJo, demon possession, land mines and raw meat – these are a few of my favorite things! (Oh right, you can also catch The Sound of Music on April 1 at Gateway Film Center.) No, these are a few of the things you can catch at the movies this weekend. A couple of them are very worth the effort, although few of these options are not for the squeamish.
Ghost in the Shell
For all the celebrated vision of the 1995 Japanese anime standard Ghost in the Shell, it resembled the inspirations of a teenage boy hopped up on the works of Phillip K. Dick and Hugh Hefner.
Director Rupert Sanders delivers the live action remake as a visually rich feast, bringing a welcome upgrade to both character and storytelling.
In a technically dizzying future where the line between human and machine is growing constantly thinner, Major (Scarlett Johansson) emerges as the first true “ghost in the shell”: human brain in a cyber body.
She’s viewed as the perfect weapon, but her mission to locate Kuze (Michael Pitt), a cyber-terrorist capable of hacking into human minds, leads to some revelations that will have Major questioning her loyalties.
The studio defense of Johansson’s casting amounts to a weak tap-dance around the truth: she’s a big star and they think she’ll combine butts with seats. While the “whitewash” criticism is more than fair, Johansson also brings a necessary shift away from Major as merely a ridiculous adolescent fantasy.
Screenwriters Jamie Moss and William Wheeler do provide crisper dialogue and a more polished narrative than the original film, but it’s a tale still rooted in overwrought tropes and warmed over cliches. Ironically, with a moral so consumed by the preservation of humanity, Ghost in the Shell doesn’t give you much to think about.
This beautiful body needs more of a soul.
Grade: C+
Raw
Much has been made of barf bags and fainting during screenings of writer/director Julia Ducournau’s feature debut, Raw.
Don’t let that cloud your expectations. What you’ll find instead of in-your-face viscera is a thoughtful coming-of-age tale.
And meat.
Justine (Garance Marillier, impressive) is off to join her older sister (Ella Rumpf) at veterinary school. A vegetarian, Justine objects to the freshman hazing ritual of eating a piece of raw meat. But once she submits to peer pressure and tastes that taboo, her appetite is awakened.
Ducournau has her cagey way with the same themes that populate any coming-of-age story – pressure to conform, peer pressure generally, societal order and sexual hysteria. Here, all take on a sly, macabre humor that’s both refreshing and unsettling.
In a very obvious way, Raw is a metaphor for what can and often does happen to a sheltered girl when she leaves home for college. But as Ducournau looks at those excesses committed on the cusp of adulthood, she creates opportunities to explore and comment on so many upsetting realities, and does so with absolute fidelity to her core metaphor.
Grade: A-
Land of Mine
This film is almost impossible to watch. Not because it’s bad – it’s an amazingly crafted film that boasts an incredible screenplay and cast. It’s hard to watch because writer/director Martin Zandvliet’s film is so intense it leaves you on constant edge.
Roland Møller is Sargent Carl Rasmussen, a Danish soldier tasked with overseeing fourteen German POWs at the end of World War II as they clear a beach of land mines in Denmark. The thought of grown men forced to crawl across beaches searching cautiously for land mines is repellant enough. It’s made worse by the fact that many of the POWs were teenage boys.
As the film proceeds, tensions mount. The history of the situation is brutal and bleak, so as the audience gets to know the characters, it’s impossible not to sympathize and worry for their safety with each moment that passes. The mental torture inflicted on the prisoners is felt by the audience as we’re forced to watch their slow advance across the beach. Moments of quiet could be ripped apart at any moment. It’s nearly unbearable.
However, Zandvliet knows when to give the audience a break, and the scenes on the beach are countered by more lighthearted moments: a soccer game, the boys talking about their futures, and interactions between Rasmussen and the boys that show his shifting emotions.
Land of Mine is difficult viewing, but as Zandvliet brings empathy and compassion to a dark moment in history, it becomes equally vital.
Grade: A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCgLSY-3bYw
The Boss Baby
Imaginative only child Tim (Miles Christopher Bakshi) loves his life. All of that changes when his little brother (Alec Baldwin) arrives. Why can’t his parents see that this stranger in their home is all manner of wrong?
Marla Frazee’s children’s book The Boss Baby is a clever metaphor brought to life. It was Michael McCullers’s unfortunate task to turn Frazee’s couple dozen lines into a screenplay that would take up approximately 90 minutes. That leaves an awful, awful lot of space to fill with McCullers’s imagination, and that brain takes us in some weird directions.
The film’s foundation combines ideas from the recent animated mediocrity The Secret Life of Pets and Storks. Plus there’s a surprisingly good dose of The Office tossed in there, and, of course, some Glengarry Glen Ross.
Many of the jokes are aimed high above the average 3-foot-tall and under crowd, but honestly there’s not a great deal for the tykes to cling to. The story is far too complicated, and the dazzling array of bizarre ornamentation only further confounds viewers.
Grade: C-
The Blackcoat’s Daughter
Winter break approaches at a Catholic New England boarding school. Snow piles up outside, the buildings empty, yet Kat (Kiernan Shipka) and Rose (Lucy Boynton) remain. One has tricked her parents for an extra day with her townie boyfriend. One remains under more mysterious circumstances.
Things in writer/director Oz Perkins’s The Blackcoat’s Daughter breathes atmosphere and tension. He repays your patience and your attention. You can expect few jump scares, but this is not exactly a slow-burn of a film, either.
It behaves almost in the way a picture book does. In a good picture book, the words tell only half the story. The illustrations don’t simply mirror the text, they tell their own story as well. If there is one particular and specific talent Blackcoat’s Daughter exposes in its director, it is his ability with a visual storyline.
When the slow and deliberate dread turns to outright carnage – when Perkins punctuates his forbidding atmosphere with hard action – he loses his footing just a bit. But Blackcoat’s Daughter is a thoughtful little horror show, its final act a fascinating rethinking of old horror tropes.
Grade: B+
Also opening in Columbus:
The Devotion of Suspect X (NR)
The Freedom to Mary (NR)
From a House on Willis Street (NR)
Song to Song (R)
The Zookeeper’s Wife (PG-13)
Reviews with help from George Wolf and Rachel Willis.
Read more from Hope at MADDWOLF and listen to her bi-weekly horror movie podcast, FRIGHT CLUB.
