Reel Thoughts: The Vamp Next Door

Now, come on! If Colin Farrell moved next door to you, in a dull, foreclosure-riddled Vegas subdivision, would you really wait more than five seconds before you were at his door asking for a little sugar? The new Fright Night is a meaner, leaner version of the 1985 classic, which changes up enough of the story to make it worth remaking. The original featured some bizarre casting including Stephen Geoffreys, a Tony-nominated actor who went into gay porn, and Amanda Bearse, playing Charlie’s virginal girlfriend a few years before she came out of the closet. William Ragsdale exhibited an acting range that rivals Zack Galligan in its lack of quality. Still, Chris Sarandon was a dark and sexy vampire nemesis and Roddy McDowell was a hoot as the faded TV ghost host Peter Vincent.

Fright Night 2011 takes advantage of the modern economic downturn to explain how a vampire could be preying on people without anyone noticing their absence. Families are fleeing their tract homes in Charlie Brewster’s (Anton Yelchin) North Vegas neighborhood by the truckload, so what who’s to know if they were foreclosed on... or fed upon? Toni Collette (who must have had Yelchin when she was 16) plays Charlie’s mother, a lonely real estate agent who is ticked at new neighbor Jerry (Colin Farrell) who works nights in casino construction and has a butt-ugly dumpster in his front yard.

Narrative whiplash sets in as Charlie is informed that Jerry is a vampire by his nerdy former best friend Ed (McLovin’ himself, Christopher Mintz-Plasse) almost immediately. Ed had been tracing Jerry’s movements and managed to not-capture him on camera, and he begs his old friend to help him take the bloodsucker down. Once Charlie realizes that Ed was right, his buddy is missing, so Charlie seeks out Vegas Goth magician Peter Vincent (David Tennant, channeling Russell Brandt and Chris Angel), a dissolute so-called vampire expert. The drunken lothario is not very supportive, to say the least.

Fright Night ramps up the action above the original with Jerry baring his fangs early and launching an all-out assault on Charlie, his mom and his hot girlfriend, Amy (played by the unfortunately-named Imogen Poots). While the original’s acting was sitcom-my, Farrell’s hot, dangerous performance makes the new version sexier and funnier. Wait until you see how Jerry gets around the old, “Vampires can’t come in if you don’t invite them” rule.

Even the ubiquitous 3-D is used well in Fright Night. While Yelchin is a little long in the tooth to be a high schooler, he’s way better than Ragsdale, who inexplicably had a career after the 1985 opus. While Geoffreys was creepy and cringe-worthy (“You’re so cool, Brewster!”), Mintz-Plasse actually gets some sympathy as the spurned friend. Poots does well in the thankless girlfriend role, and Collette is fun to watch and really knows how to wield a realty sign!

If you’re looking for a fun night with a few frights, Fright Night should be just right.

Review by Neil Cohen, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and Phoenix's Echo Magazine.

Men on Film: Two Critics, One Day

Reverend's Reviews: One (Not Very Fine) Day:

July 15th is revered in Anglican Church circles as the feast of Saint Swithin (sometimes spelled Swithun), a 9th-century bishop of Winchester known for — in the words of his Wikipedia entry — "posthumous miracle-working." Swithin is referenced several times in the new movie One Day, opening nationwide today. If only the good saint's miracles extended to cinematic adaptations of bestselling novels; One Day could use one.

An uneasy mix of romantic longing and thwarted fairy tale, the plot follows two British friends and occasional lovers over a 20-year period beginning with their initial encounter on July 15, 1988. A middle-class, ambitious wannabe-writer, Emma (played by American actress Anne Hathaway), meets the wealthy, uninhibited Dex (Jim Sturgess of the Beatles-inspired musical Across the Universe) following their college graduation. The film subsequently revisits the pair each July 15th thereafter, and we watch the ebb and flow of their careers and angst-ridden relationship via vignettes accompanied by period-appropriate pop songs.

This "annual checkup" conceit ultimately proves precious and plodding, despite the occasionally clever ways each date is worked into the scene visually. I haven't read the novel by David Nicholls upon which the film is based (Nicholls also wrote the screenplay). A co-worker who has read the book informs me that the years and events aren't presented chronologically/sequentially on the page as they are on screen. I therefore suspect that events in the novel are presented in a more nuanced and layered way than they are in this heavy-handed movie version.

At least viewers are privy to some lovely scenery in Great Britain and France (shot by Benoit Delhomme) while we watch the lead characters struggle, work, love, grieve and skinny dip. By film's end, one of them learns "Whatever happens tomorrow, we've had today" as the result of a tragic twist so heavily foreshadowed in the moments before that it should surprise no one.

The cast can't be faulted for One Day's shortcomings. Hathaway and Sturgess are fine in their roles and have good chemistry. I am already weary, however, of Hathaway playing tortured romantic victims following this and last year's Love & Other Drugs. Here's hoping she gets to bust loose and kick some ass as Catwoman in next summer's The Dark Knight Rises. Patricia Clarkson (Far from Heaven, Easy A) is good as always in her brief turn as Dex's doting, terminally ill mother.

Directed by Lone Scherfig, One Day serves as a disappointing follow-up to her more subtle, Oscar-nominated film of 2009, An Education. It also represents a rare misstep for the usually reliable Focus Features, maker of such gay-interest successes as Brokeback Mountain, Milk and Beginners. Some fellow critics and audience members may find One Day miraculous somehow. By it's final 20 minutes, though, I was praying to Saint Swithin for deliverance.

Reverend's Rating: C-

Review by Rev. Chris Carpenter, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and the Blade California.

On the other hand...

Reel Thoughts: A Blue Valentine (That People Will Actually Want to Watch):

From Same Time, Next Year to (500) Days of Summer to last year’s brutal Blue Valentine, films that unfold on timelines are fascinating, because you get to see the characters change, sometimes radically, from date to date. One Day is like Same Time, Next Year in that we follow Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess on the same date over twenty-three years, starting with a night of passion on the graduation day in 1988 all the way to 2011. At first, the date skipping from year to year seemed too quick and too facile, but as the film progressed, you grow to love Emma and Dex, flaws and all. July 15th, or St. Swithin’s Day as Dex informs Emma after their not-completed tryst, grows dramatically in significance as the pair grow older.

David Nicholls has adapted his best-selling novel masterfully, showing Dex’s rise as a smarmy television host and Emma’s escape from a dead-end restaurant job to become the teacher and then novelist she always wanted to be. Of course, Dex’s superficial fame leads to a drug-addicted, sex-drenched superficial life that is bound to burn out, and it does. Through everything, Emma’s and Dex’s friendship and love survives, and this is what makes One Day so powerful and moving.

Everyone has regrets and wonders how there life might have been different if they had engaged with that one elusive person. Writer Nicholls and Danish director Lone Scherfig (An Education) frankly show the highs and lows that fate gives us, and never stoop to easy laughs or unearned payoffs. Hathaway and Sturgess each give incredibly nuanced performances, aided by the luminous Patricia Clarkson as Dex’s mother and a cast of fine British actors. Emma and Dex’s relationship is presented in a real, mature fashion, full of the fights and reconciliations that every couple faces.

Anyone who has ever experienced the highs of love and the devastating lows of loss will want to experience this One Day. Its hopeful ending will comfort you with the promise that life can rebound, even when you think it cannot. With Sarah’s Key, The Help and now One Day, the best movies of the year are finally arriving.

Review by Neil Cohen, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and Phoenix's Echo Magazine.

Reel Thoughts: Ch-Ch-Changes

The Change-Up is a "Career-Down" for everyone involved, a piece of cinematic baby poop so noxious, it could wipe out the rain forests. I was personally offended by every single minute of this stupid, curdled monstrosity. It is all the more depressing for how it sours the charisma of Ryan Reynolds, Jason Bateman, Olivia Wilde and especially poor Leslie Mann. The scene where Mann is forced to sit on a toilet and fumigate the bathroom with her Thai food diarrhea is the kind of thing you would force an actor to do when you really, really hate them. Similarly, Reynolds’ debased slacker and Bateman’s mopey drip make you wonder why they’re stars at all. My "Worst Movie of the Year" list just got a lot easier to compile.

Easily the worst entry in the Freaky Friday body swap oeuvre, The Change-Up presents us with two equally awful baby-men who exchange pea brains after peeing in a magic Atlanta fountain. Dave Lockwood (Bateman) is a work-obsessed family man while Mitch Planko (Reynolds) is a repulsive womanizer who trolls Lamaze classes for his sex partners. Alan Arkin plays his hugely disappointed father, echoing the audience’s feelings. Once they’ve traded places, each man ruins the other’s lives, and we couldn’t care less.

Trust me when I tell you that after the opening scene where Dave’s baby shoots projectile poop straight into his mouth not once but twice, the film only goes downhill from there. The story has no point, the characters change from scene to scene from hating the switch to loving it and the narrative has the momentum of a clogged sewer line. Only the least discriminating viewer could laugh at the admittedly outrageous and sometimes sickly funny sight gags without feeling supremely guilty and dirty afterwards.

The Change-Up even looks cheap and low budget. Supporting characters like Arkin’s newest wife look like they were plucked from a mall contest, and the Atlanta setting feels like the winner in “the cheapest filming location” sweepstakes (watch out, Albuquerque!). I hope that Bateman and Reynolds can change up their agents and get better parts in better movies.

Reel Thoughts Rating: F

Review by Neil Cohen, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and Phoenix's Echo Magazine.

Reel Thoughts Interview: Could It Happen Here?

When you listen to the vile rhetoric of Christian Conservatives like Michelle Bachmann and her “therapist” husband Marcus, who call LGBT people “barbarians” who are “linked to Satan”, it isn’t hard to sympathize with the foreign-born French Jews in Sarah’s Key, Gilles Paquet-Brenner’s heart-breaking drama based on the best-selling novel by Tatiana De Rosnay. Could such a witch-hunt happen again, this time to the LGBT community, the Mexican immigrant population or the Muslim community?

Director Paquet-Brenner pondered the question of whether such inhumanity as occurs in his film could happen again to another scapegoat minority when we spoke recently at the Phoenix Ritz-Carlton. “I don’t see gay people as different people, so I think everyone will appreciate the story. I am more in a political or religious perspective with Sarah’s Key, but I see where you are going,” Paquet-Brenner replied. “What is very important to me is that the film is universal, and so of course, you can include other minorities such as the gay community. I can see how someone especially in, how you say Deep America (Middle America), I understand how you can feel excluded or attacked, so you can definitely relate to these people. That is very interesting.”

Sarah’s Key interweaves two stories set almost seventy years apart in Paris. In 1942, ten year-old Sarah (the amazing Mélusine Mayance) is a Jew living in the Marais section of Paris when the police suddenly show up door-to-door to arrest all foreign Jews. Instinctively knowing that something terrible will happen to her family, she locks her young brother in a closet, assuring him that she will return. She is sure that her father, hiding in the basement, would come upstairs and free him, but he is found also and there is no one to save the boy as the family is taken to an indoor sports rink called the Vel’ D’Hiv.

In 2009, American journalist Julia Jarmond (Kristin Scott Thomas) is investigating the infamous round up, where 13,000 French Jews were locked into the hot arena without food, water or bathrooms for three days, leading to conditions much worse than the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina. Those who survived were taken to concentration camps, including Sarah’s family. In her research, Julia discovers shocking connections to Sarah through her French husband’s family, and she is determined to uncover the truth of what happened to the little girl and her brother, who escaped internment in the camps.

“I often say that the story isn’t about a Jewish family, it’s about a family. The same thing could have happened in Rwanda during the genocide,” Paquet-Brenner explained. “It could happen to a gay couple living in Iran or Uganda.” He also knows that Scott Thomas’ following in the gay community holds appeal. “She’s an icon, right? I can see it because she is a very strong woman.”

The film is very faithful to the book. “I chose to work very hard on the screenplay, because if you try to fix it in the editing room, you’re dead. It has to work as a reading experience, and then it translates straight to the screen.” He did expand on what happened to Sarah, which turns out to be one of the film’s most touching parts. He split the filming in two to accommodate Scott Thomas’ schedule and to allow him to give the 1942 scenes the raw, hand-held camera technique that puts you right in the terrifying action.

“The thing with the round-up is that it’s not like the authorities were brutal on purpose with the Vel D’Hiv, it’s just that they were totally unprepared. In the police, you had people who were against it, and people who supported it. It was a very, very difficult time in France, society was totally torn apart. You had this Vichy Government who was collaborating with the Germans. My grandfather was a German Jew from Berlin and he was arrested by the French. It was very complicated. I like when Kristin says to the young journalist (who asks why no one objected to the round up), “What would you have done? You have no idea what you would do in that situation. Some people want to simplify it; I don’t.”

Paquet-Brenner has already received acclaim and French awards for his first film, Pretty Things, in which future Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard played twin sisters, one who assumes the other’s identity when she is murdered. The handsome director shows such mastery with Sarah’s Key, he deserves Oscar attention as well.

Sarah’s Key Review:

As terrible as it sounds, some films about the Holocaust and its aftermath leave you feeling unmoved, well-made though they may be. Schindler’s List was the most searing and gut-wrenching experience on the subject, and Sarah’s Key possesses a more modulated but similar power to devastate you.

Kristin Scott Thomas plays a part close to her life as Julia, an American married to a French man and living in Paris. Julia is a passionate journalist who wants to shed light on a shameful period in France’s history, when they aided the Nazis in persecuting the Jews. Like in Arizona today, however, it was the foreign-born who were singled out for arrest and who found themselves demonized by the politicians.

Julia discovers the story of one little girl who escaped in order to save her brother who’d been left behind in their Paris apartment, but she has no clue how close to home the story will hit. Gilles Paquet-Brenner does an incredible job putting you into Sarah’s life, and seamlessly layering it with Julia’s journey of discovery and heartache. The film leaves you feeling uplifted by the end, much like the experience of reading a perfect novel.

The performances, especially by young Mélusine Mayance as Sarah and Scott Thomas, will leave you catching your breath with their honest power. The story itself will reduce you to tears many times, but Paquet-Brenner is a compassionate director who cuts back and forth in time perfectly, saving you from dissolving into uncontrollable sobbing from the brutality of the 1942 atrocities.

Sarah’s Key is a mystery well worth unlocking, and you will find one of the best films of the year.

Interview and review by Neil Cohen, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and Phoenix's Echo Magazine.

Reel Thoughts: Don't Be Stupid

In a summer full of pumped-up superheroes and marauding car-robots, Crazy, Stupid, Love. is a much-appreciated change of pace, a witty, hilarious and constantly surprising comedy for adults without a single “We got so wasted... what did we do?” joke. Directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (who can do no wrong after I Love You, Phillip Morris) and starring a fantastic cast including Steve Carell, Julianne Moore, Ryan Gosling, Marisa Tomei and Emma Stone, Crazy, Stupid, Love. is a multifaceted romantic classic in the vein of Love, Actually (maybe the secret of success is putting punctuation in your title).

Cal (Steve Carell) is blindsided when his wife of twenty-five years, Emily (Julianne Moore), announces over dessert that she wants a divorce, and that she slept with a coworker. Drowning his sorrows at a hip LA bar, he meets Jacob (Gosling), the ultimate player, who takes pity on the clothing-and-haircut-challenged Cal. Jacob gives Cal a macho makeover and ‘lessons with the ladies’, while finally meeting the girl of his dreams (Stone), who makes him want to reform.

Meanwhile, Cal’s thirteen year-old son (the unfortunately-named Jonah Bobo) is madly in love with his seventeen year-old baby sitter (Liv Tyler look-alike and America’s Next Top Model finalist Analeigh Tipton), who in turn, has a crush on Cal. Tomei has a priceless supporting role I can’t divulge, and suffice it to say, there are more surprises in Crazy, Stupid, Love. than in a case of Cracker Jacks. Ficarra and Requa, along with Tangled scribe Dan Fogelman, have mined yet another off-center piece of comedy gold.

Gosling seems to revel in playing off his good looks and killer abs, rather than hiding them as he did in Blue Valentine, and it is a joy to watch. Carell and Moore have such great, mature comic timing and chemistry that you can’t help but root for their success.  Stone is quickly becoming a Julia Roberts wattage star, based on this performance, Easy A and the upcoming The Help.

You would have to be crazy or stupid not to love Crazy, Stupid, Love.

Review by Neil Cohen, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and Phoenix's Echo Magazine.