First Man (2018)
Dir. Damien Chazelle
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Claire Foy
Review By Greg Klymkiw
If you're going to make a true-life dramatic recreation of a piece of space exploration history, wouldn't it make some sense to ask yourself, "How am I going to create a film that is at least as good as Philip Kaufman's The Right Stuff?"
The classic 1983 epic about the early days of space travel, based on Tom Wolfe's bestseller of the same name, focused on test pilot Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) and the astronauts who comprised the Project Mercury team (including stars Ed Harris, Dennis Quaid, Scott Glenn, Fred Ward and Lance Henriksen) and led the world into space travel. Kaufman's film is a dazzler - groundbreaking special effects, brilliant satire, thrilling personal/professional drama, swirling romanticism and, much like Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, is one of the few films that actually gives us a sense of what space travel must really be like. There's nothing quite like it.
First Man by Damien Chazelle (Whiplash) focuses upon Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling), the first human being to actually set foot on the moon in 1969. Written by the normally talented screenwriter John Singer (Spotlight) and based on the James R. Hansen book First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong, this is a screenplay that plods along with cliches - focusing, almost by-rote on TV-movie-like family drama, de rigueur preparation and training and the eventual journey and moon landing.
The whole movie feels like a been-there-done-that affair. It doesn't help that we have to stare at the supremely overrated, dewy-eyed, annoyingly soulful and humourless hunk Ryan Gosling.
Even worse are the endless jittery closeups used to replicate the actual space travel. Yes, I'm sure the litany of technical/science experts provided insight for Chazelle to create this mise en scene, but given the cinematic brilliance employed by Kaufman in his film (never mind Kubrick), this cliched shaky-cam approach is all sizzle, but no steak.
The movie feels dead. Even the sequences involving Armstrong's first steps upon the moon surface have a kind of blah "quality" to them. There's no oomph or dramatic/emotional resonance to any of it.
It was hard slogging through this movie with memories of The Right Stuff dancing through my head. Not that I wanted the usually original Chazelle to approach the material in any sort of derivative fashion, but again, I reiterate: the bar for space travel movies was set so high by Kaufman that it flummoxes me that Chazelle chose such a dull approach to the material. When I think of the verve and excitement he demonstrated with the astonishing Whiplash, I expected so much more than something that feels so dull and familiar.
And here's something I never thought I'd find myself saying, but why, oh why does the film place absolutely no emphasis upon the planting of the American Flag on the surface of the moon? Yes, the flag is there. We see it clearly as Armstrong goes through his routines on the lunar surface, but given the importance of this flight to both the government and people of the United States, how can we not get a glorious moment where the flag is planted?
I'm sure this was an intentional omission on the part of Chazelle and his writer. God knows they wouldn't want to sully themselves with anything that might seem vaguely propagandistic. But you know what? This might have been one of many things to give this movie some life. Too much emphasis is placed on a kind of "documentary"-like approach.
But damn! This is a movie! It should be BIGGER than life, not smaller than one of America's most astounding historical achievements.
Poor Agnes (2017)
Dir. Navin Ramaswaran
Scr. James Gordon Ross
Starring: Lora Burke, Robert Notman, Will Conlon
Review By Greg Klymkiw
These days, when the first image in a movie is an aerial shot of a lone house in the deep woods, the heart usually sinks because it signals the inevitability that we're probably going to be spending most of the remaining running time at that location in a picture of the no-to-low-budget variety. This doesn't have to be a bad thing if the content is worthy, but Poor Agnes gets off to a very wrong start with the opening voiceover accompanying this familiar image as the title character intones:
"Men murder whores. Women murder their babies. What does that make me?"
Uh, I don't know. A whore, perchance? Maybe. But, you see, Agnes (Lora Burke) is clearly alive and continues to utter some pseudo-poetic nonsense from her bed with a heavy tone of portent. She's not dead and as such, not a whore murdered by a man.
We follow her into the basement as she opens a freezer full of meat to select a little something for dinner. She considers the array of comestibles, selects decidedly, but before slamming the lid shut, our ruminating lassie glances over to the back corner of the freezer and regards the frozen head of a grown man, his face locked into a ghoulish death grimace.
Phew!
She is not a woman who's murdered her baby nor a whore murdered by a man. Agnes is, however, a killer. If she isn't, how did that frozen head get there? In any event, we are grateful, since she gets an answer to her vaguely rhetorical, if not downright existential question.
And so it is that Agnes has lived for over a decade in this beautiful old country house in Thunder Bay, Ontario (birthplace of longtime David Letterman bandleader Paul Shaffer) with no visible means of support. At one point she reveals that her now-dead parents left her quite a sizeable estate, but she proves, time and time again, to be such an inveterate liar that it's impossible to believe this or anything else she says. Given that the script is littered with bonbons that strain credulity, it feels like something shoehorned in to explain her lack of anything resembling a livelihood (save for killing a parade of men and occasionally pawning their belongings).
When a private detective (Robert Notman) shows up to question her about an old boyfriend who's been missing for ten years, sparks fly twixt the two. We get plenty of provocative quipping a la Billy (Double Indemnity) Wilder (though in reality, the repartee comes closer to approximating the already-derivative banter Lawrence Kasdan belched out in Body Heat). Well, before you can spit out the title of James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, the couple are grappling amorously with each on the kitchen counters and floors. No coitus interruptus, either. Our dick-for-hire finishes bareback inside of her and in no time, she trains a double-barrelled shotgun in his direction, plunges a hypodermic needle into his arm, renders him unconscious, chains him up, tortures him and slowly employs Stockholm Syndrome techniques to turn him into her acquiescent boy-toy.
Agnes is a firm believer in the spice of life that is variety and soon kidnaps another hapless fella. Now she's got our submissive detective to become a willing participant in torturing her new victim and, it seems, possibly killing him.
If it wasn't for the brave star-making performance of leading lady Lora Burke (she fires out her lines with the straight-faced panache of Barbara Stanwyck, Rosalind Russell and even Jean Arthur - pretty amazing that she's playing a serial killer), it would be near impossible to swallow any of the film's proceedings. Though screenwriter James Gordon Ross has clearly done his homework on the machinations of Stockholm Syndrome, it's simply not enough to buy all the opportunities the kidnapped dick has to escape and/or fight back. His character is weirdly underwritten. Though at one point, when a grocery cashier notices his wrist bruises and happily chirps, "You're a sub!", these "qualities" in his character are merely trotted out as a script convenience rather than being skilfully woven into the narrative.
One of the stupidest (and jaw-drippongly WTF) moments actually occurs when another private detective shows up at Le Maison de Agnes to ask questions about the missing dick. He reveals that the character has a reputation for "hanging around in low social circles" (more convenient character shoehorning) and even more ridiculous is when he says to Agnes, "Don't take it personally, but, are you a prostitute?" I'm sorry. What experienced detective, or anyone for that matter, would ask a question like this? It's an idiotically offensive question and in fairness to the script, Agnes reacts appropriately to it, BUT what is this line of dialogue doing there in the first place? Yes, it might be intentional on the part of the filmmakers to add a dollop of the kind of patriarchy women must put up with, but the delivery of the line is so absurdly chipper and oh-so polite that it's not only unintentionally funny, but brings into question the intentions of the film, submerged or otherwise.
Poor Agnes often feels vaguely misogynistic. While I'm grateful to the filmmakers that they provide no real reason/explanation for Agnes's psychopathic tendencies, what feels horrendously machine-tooled is the idea of taking a typical serial killer story (which always involves men kidnapping, torturing and killing women) and reversing the gender roles, for no other reason than this - they can! They seem to think (at worst) it's "cool" and at best (if we can call it that), that they're making some sort of point about sociopathic tendencies in women (and by extension, how they are treated and/or ignored in the movies). Either way, this is not good enough. The whole thing feels rotten to the core. It's too bad. The director clearly has some talent for more-than-adequately capturing the visceral elements of suspense and the leading lady serves up one of the best performances I've seen in a long time, but neither of these things are enough to wash out the foul taste the picture leaves in one's mouth.
The movie just doesn't add up. It's impossible to buy that Agnes has been doing this for years and has never been caught, especially considering some of the mistakes she makes during the final third of the film which seem to conveniently ignore how meticulous her murderous machinations have been. I usually try to avoid writing about independent films that are this mediocre, but the combination of the moral repugnancy of the whole movie with its considerable flaws, forces me to do so. Too many "critics" and even those who should know better, might potentially fall for the picture's trick-pony styling and sometimes it's important to not just point fingers at the myriad of studio pictures sharing these woeful attributes.
I was also tempted not to mention the boneheaded scene wherein Agnes wanders through the empty hallways of a school, the walls adorned with children's artwork and comes upon a sign that reads: "Torture Survivor Meetup". (Yup, she attends to get torture ideas.) I cannot help myself. This bears mentioning. Sorry, most self-help group meetings avoid such signage, but even if they didn't, the timing of the cut to the shot of the sign inspires unintentional howls of laughter. And, MEETUP? What is this? A kaffeeklatsch for victims of torture?
No surprise. There's far too much in this movie that feels unintentional and its intentions feel wrongheaded.
THE FILM CORNER RATING: **
Poor Agnes enjoyed its World Premiere at Fantasia 2017.
It sure would be nice to see this grizzled mug in a real movie.
Logan (2017)
Dir. James Mangold
Scr. Mangold, Scott Frank, Michael Green
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Boyd Holbrook, Stephen Merchant,
Richard E. Grant, Dafne Keen, Eriq La Salle, Elizabeth Rodriguez
Review By Greg Klymkiw
Logan is the best X-Men movie ever made, but that's not really saying much since all of them have been pretty unwatchable to date. This "final" installment in the long-running film series based upon the Marvel Comics adventures of crime-fighting mutants has one big thing going for it - star Hugh Jackman.
Living in hiding as an anonymous limousine driver in Texas, our title character is slowly dying from the adamantium coursing through his veins. His ability to heal from wounds is seriously affected by this. He's caring for the dementia-riddled telepath Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), who lives secretly in a dusty, rusting old factory just across the border in Mexico. Logan reluctantly becomes the chief protector of little girl Laura (Dafne Keen), a "wolverine" mutant just like he is. Pursued by the evil cybergenetic mutant Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook) and scumbag Transigen Corporation mad scientist Zander Rice (Richard E. Grant) and the mutant-tracking Caliban (Stephen Merchant), our three heroes hit the highways and byways of America in search of a mutant paradise called Eden (existing across the northern border in Canada, no less).
It's a road movie punctuated by several ultra-violent set pieces.
Cute little girl a baby Wolverine with deadly moves.
The picture isn't really any good - the action scenes are all directed mostly in closeups and medium shots with far-too-much herky-jerky camera moves and ADHD-infused editing and the script defies the most basic logic of the premise it sets up. Since Logan is all too aware that they're being meticulously tracked, it seems especially dopey that he allows himself, the old man and little girl to hunker down with an innocent farming family for an evening on the road to Mutant Mecca.
Surely he knows deadly harm will come to the family - and, of course, it does.
There isn't a single unpredictable moment in the whole narrative. Given the overwhelming portent of co-writer and director James Mangold's mise-en-scene, it's also obvious that Logan and Xavier are doomed. Given that it's a superhero movie and that more sequels and/or a reboot are just around the corner, it's also obvious that the little girl and a whole whack of her mutant kidlet friends will beat the bad guys and make their way to asylum in Canada.
The predictability factor in movies like this goes without saying, so it seems silly to dump on Logan just for that. What can receive a nice smelly turd-release is that the movie fails as a decent rollercoaster ride since Mangold simply has no talent for staging action scenes - all of which are a total mess. Given the astonishing craft of action movies like John Wick and its sequel, when will the studios realize they need to hire directors who know how to direct action? The math on this is pretty simple - long shots, longer takes, first-rate stunt work, a solid sense of geography and edits that are "story" influenced, not merely kinetic.
Well, the math might be simple, but it takes the cinematic equivalent to Einstein to pull it off with aplomb (something Mangold is bereft of). Not that previous X-Men helmsman Bryan Singer is God's Gift to cinema, but even he has certain basic skills to carry this sort of thing off with a relative degree of competence. What Singer lacks is anything resembling a distinctive voice. Mangold, for better or worse, has one - his pictures all have a dreariness to them that borders on, interesting (not really a compliment), but which tends to have some effect in his chamber pieces like Cop Land, his 3:10 To Yuma remake and even his first foray into X-Men territory The Wolverine. He's kind of like Christopher Nolan, but with far less in the way of pretension (and unlike Nolan, he occasionally displays something resembling a sense of humour - a bit dry, but it's there at least).
Logan does, however, have the estimable Hugh Jackman at its core. Jackman has genuine star power. The camera loves him and he's a much better actor than most of his films allow him to be. And Good God, the man is aging beautifully. Clint Eastwood has thirty years on the guy, but Jackman is giving that delicious old coot a decent run for his money in the brawny decrepitude department.
Someday, Jackman will star in a real movie. Maybe he will even play Clint Eastwood's son or baby brother someday. I look forward to that movie.
Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton as interracial Loving couple.
Loving (2016)
Dir. Jeff Nichols
Starring: Joel Edgerton, Ruth Negga, Marton Csokas, Nick Kroll, Michael Shannon
Review By Greg Klymkiw
The story of Richard and Mildred Loving (Joel Edgerton, Ruth Negga) deserves better than an earnest, plodding, vaguely pretentious made-for-television-styled movie like Loving. Thankfully Nancy Buirski's fine 2011 HBO feature documentary The Loving Story, upon which this dramatic rendering by Jeff Nichols is based, has already delivered the cinematic goods this important story deserves.
Alas, the legal case involving an interracial marriage which challenged the grotesque anti-miscegenation laws of the backward State of Virginia is dramatically rendered here with all the artistic panache of a connect-the-dots colouring book puzzle. The promise writer-director Jeff Nichols displayed in his 2007 Arkansas-cracker family feud drama Shotgun Stories and the extraordinary 2011 survivalism end-of-days psycho-drama Take Shelter has subsequently and sadly dwindled.
Like so many laws of diminishing returns, his output increasingly underwhelms. His Dullsville 2012 contemporary Huckleberry Finn-like Mud and this year's ludicrous science fiction drama Midnight Special maintained his quiet, measured voice, but served up stories unbecoming of his earlier work.
Loving is the worst of the lot. He retains his voice almost to a fault, but does so within the trappings of something that might be more suited to an episode of the Hallmark Hall of Fame.
Marton Czokas as scumbag racist Virginia cop.
Nichols's film introduces us to working-class Caucasian drag-racing aficianado Richard Loving who, with longtime African-American girlfriend Mildred, decides to flout the moronic Virginia law against interracial relations. They visit Washington D.C. to get married in a civil union after they discover she's pregnant with their first child. Upon returning, their home is raided by cracker-barrel cops led by the systemically, virulently racist Sheriff R. Garnett Brooks (Marton Czokas). Rather than face a year in prison, the couple cop a plea and agree to leaving their home in Caroline County, Virginia and promise never to return to the state together.
Life in the big city proves untenable and the couple "illegally" returns home to the rural idyll they've known their entire lives. They're subsequently arrested and the film continues to detail their long legal battle (with the assistance of dogged ACLU lawyers) to have the Virginia law eventually overturned by the Supreme Court of the United States.
There's nothing especially wrong with the film in that it's nicely acted and extremely competent on a craft level, but there's nothing all too right with it either. The "competence" factor is especially egregious and renders a movie that feels like it's been made rather inconsequentially for the small screen rather than the ordinarily high stakes needed for big screen theatrical product. There's nothing wrong with a quiet, subtle approach, but it's employed here to the point where our emotional investment is ultimately more rooted in the basic facts of the case rather than anything imparted dramatically.
Nichols probably thought he was being oh-so clever by focusing upon the "normal" and "mundane" details of the couple's life, but he tries to have his cake and eat it to by framing his approach within an otherwise conventional, by-rote structure.
For one of the most important events in American History to be handled with competence and precious pretence, inadvertently deflates the whole thing. If the movie was dreadful, one could at least say it was shameful. That it's strictly middle of the road is even worse. It's just one big pile of nothing.
La La Land (2016)
Dir. Damien Chazelle
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, John Legend,
Rosemarie DeWitt, J.K. Simmons, Tom Everett Scott
Review By Greg Klymkiw
"I should have known better with a girl like you
That I would love everything that you do
And I do, hey, hey, hey, and I do...
So I should have realized a lot of things before
If this is love you've got to give me more" - The Beatles
So you go to see a movie. You're primed to love it.
In spite of every alarm bell going off in your head while you actually watch the picture, you still manage to convince yourself how much you love it.
You should have known better.
You sit there, jaw agape during an opening musical number on a Los Angeles highway traffic jam. There's nothing wrong with the idea, per se, but the song itself is so godawful and the choreography is so stock and clumsy that if the film had been made by another director instead of one you admire, you'd throw in the towel.
You also know that you're going to have to spend the movie staring at one of the most insufferable actors working in Hollywood today, not to mention an actress you admire (in spite of the fact that she reminds you of a carrot-topped Pekingnese).
And still you stay.
Why?
Because of the director.
You see, as dreadful as the opening musical number is (not always a good sign when you've come to see a musical), you forgive everything because at least the director is not without panache. Individual shots and camera moves during the sequence are, in and of themselves, first-rate.
So you persevere.
For writer-director Damien Chazelle.
And is it all for nought?
Yes and no.
You leave the movie. There are tears in your eyes, but you do not trust them. It's as if the movie itself has reached out to grind cheap-ass cooking onions into your ocular orbs. You feel like you're soaring, but for some reason you sense it's because someone has shoved a tube up your ass to fill you full of helium.
What do you do with these nagging thoughts?
You see the movie again.
And then, you know.
La La Land is just not very good. Taking its cue from the great Technicolor musicals from days of yore, Chazelle skillfully and stylishly (well, mostly) serves up an old fashioned singing-dancing extravaganza that rests on the narrative coat hanger of boy-meets-girl-boy-gets-girl-boy-loses-girl. The big diff here is that boy does not get girl back. They do, however, reunite in a genuinely show-stopping musical dream sequence and one is thankful for this departure from the norm. It works on a first helping, but when you see the picture again, you realize just how shoe-horned the whole sequence is. In fact, the entire movie feels shoe-horned.
That the movie chooses to utilize and recreate the tropes of great musicals within a contemporary context is just fine. Unfortunately, the contemporary context is Los Angeles, surely one of the most vapid and downright ugly cities in the world. Worse yet, it's set against the backdrop of the contemporary entertainment business - a world that has, for the most part become as indicative of Western Civilization's decline as a world in which Donald Trump has become a serious contender for the highest political office in America.
Granted, old Hollywood often used the entertainment industry as a setting for its musicals, most notably for me the magnificent Busby Berkeley musicals like 42nd Street, but the big difference is that the contemporary context of those movies is from a time when people could actually write great musical scores (unlike the grotesqueries of Justin Hurwitz's annoying melodies here) and when the studios were actually run by moguls who, for the most part, genuinely loved the product they were generating.
La La Land plunges us into a much different world and as such, suffers for it.
I'm happy to doff my hat to the Whiplash director's desire to take what is old and make the beautiful new again, but the detestably jejune world we (and by extension the characters) must live inside is borderline intolerable. At one point in the picture, Ryan Gosling's character is chided by his friend/nemesis Keith (so nicely played by John Legend one wonders if he's ever going to get his own musical to star in). The successful contemporary jazz band leader craps on Gosling's adherence to the greats of yesteryear instead of trying to find a way of taking the form further. He wisely notes that jazz was always about the "future".
But what does Gosling's character eventually do?
He hangs onto the "old" like a dog to a bone.
Then again, La La Land is all about following your dreams.
Because of this, what we have to suffer through is Emma Stone paying her monthly rent as an on-studio juice-bar clerk to support her burgeoning-actress habit who meets-cute with the insufferable Ryan Gosling as a bitter jazz musician who dreams of owning his own nightclub. Of course, they hate each other at first - he spills iced latte all over her shirt as she storms off to an audition and he unceremoniously brushes her off when she attempts to compliment his ivory tinkling - but all it takes for them to make the ultimate google-eyed connection is when she teases him at a vapid Hollywood party at which he's playing keyboards with an 80s tribute band. From here, he supports her dreams, she supports his, and in so doing it is inevitable for both to part ways.
Ugh!
So what are we left with? An interminably long feel-good musical that merely purports to make the old new again. Even this, however, is not all that original. It's been done before and so much better. The great Dennis Potter BBC mini-series Pennies from Heaven and Herbert Ross's astounding feature-length remake (which Pauline Kael acclaimed as "the most emotional movie musical I've ever seen") took what was old and made it new again by presenting the tropes with a contemporary perspective on the period in which the films (and film) were set. Sure, Chazelle is not looking back in quite the same way because he wants to utilize the tropes in terms of the here and now, but how are we to take any of this seriously given how empty the world actually is?
Well, maybe we're not supposed to take it seriously, but how then are we to at least respond seriously to Chazelle's aesthetic?
We don't. We can't. No matter how much we want to.
Thinking back on Pennies from Heaven, one can't help but note what great hoofers Steve Martin and Christopher Walken (yes, Christoper-fucking-Walken) are. Ryan Gosling's woeful galumphing in La La Land is a true abomination. One only need watch a few frames of Walken's striptease and compare it to anything Gosling stumbles through in La La Land to realize what folly it was to cast a leading man in a musical with tin ears for feet.
I almost unfairly chose to equate Gosling's miserable footwork with that of Buddy (Uncle Jed from The Beverly Hillbillies) Ebsen's hoofing in the early part of his career until I had to remind myself that Ebsen could dance Gosling into the oblivion he deserves.
Sorry Buddy. Gosling's shit-stomping can't begin to hold a candle to yours.
As for Chazelle's movie, a few decently-staged musical set pieces, in spite of Gosling's lead-footed incompetence and a mediocre score, just doesn't add up to anything special. I think it might boil down to the vapidity of the setting. One recalls how the great Val Lewton changed the very genre of horror by moving the act of scaring audiences into a world they recognized (The Cat People, The Seventh Victim). In doing the same thing, however, La La Land changes nothing. If anything it makes the old, the truly beautiful, little more than an empty vessel - a bauble of numbing nothingness.
Impossibly gorgeous Iranian women who marry
bus drivers in Paterson, New Jersey NEVER have to work.
Paterson (2016)
Dir. Jim Jarmusch
Starring: Adam Driver, Golshifteh Farahani, Barry Shabaka Henley,
Cliff Smith, Chasten Harmon, William Jackson Harper, Masatoshi Nagase
Review By Greg Klymkiw
Look, I love Jim Jarmusch as much as the next guy, but the fact remains that he really hasn't made anything worth seeing in a long time. That said, I have no intention of ever giving up on him. After all, the man gave us Stranger Than Paradise, Down By Law and Mystery Train - all terrific pictures. His new film Paterson, is however, so utterly, mind-numbingly mediocre that it's really tempting to never see another one of his movies ever again.
Here's the deal: Paterson (Adam Driver) is a bus driver in Paterson, New Jersey (birthplace of the immortal Lou Costello). He lives in a modest post-war bungalow with his impossibly gorgeous Iranian wife Laura (Golshifteh Farahani) and their super-cute, mega-wrinkly bulldog. Now, maybe it's just me, but do New Jersey bus drivers make enough money to own a bungalow (albeit modest) and support impossibly gorgeous Iranian wives who appear to do nothing for a living? Well, maybe they can. After all, this couple appears to not do much of anything.
Every single day is pretty much the same. (Jarmusch used to be a master of making "sameness" both entertaining and thought-provoking, but in this movie, it's anything but. It is 118 minutes long. That's what it is.)
Bus drivers in Paterson, New Jersey can support impossibly
gorgeous Iranian wives who don't work. They can also be
poets like fellow Patersonians Ginsberg & Williams.
Starting with the title card "Monday" and cycling through an entire week, this is what happens - each day.
Paterson wakes up and engages in his morning ablutions.
Sometimes he talks to his impossibly gorgeous Iranian wife, or at least nuzzles her.
Paterson walks to work.
Paterson sits in his bus, waiting for his shift to begin. He writes (supposedly good) poetry in his notebook. His boss comes by and talks about his personal problems.
On the road, he listens in on one key conversation between a couple of passengers.
At lunch, he eats and writes more (supposedly good) poetry in his notebook. (This makes sense, I suppose, since Paterson, New Jersey was the home and/or birthplace of many notable writers including Allen Ginsberg and William Carlos Williams. Pretty cosmic, if you ask me.)
When he returns home, he discovers his impossibly gorgeous Iranian wife Laura working on some ornate, hand-crafted interior design element for their modest post-war bungalow. They talk and nuzzle. Their conversation usually consists of his impossibly gorgeous Iranian wife Laura reminding him that he absolutely must photocopy his poetry notebook and/or the baked goods she is planning to prepare for a weekend market. The conversations are often punctuated with shots of their super-cute, mega-wrinkly bulldog.
After dinner, Paterson leaves his impossibly gorgeous Iranian wife Laura home alone and takes their super-cute, mega-wrinkly bulldog on a walk. He stops at a local bar, ties the dog outside, goes in, orders a beer, talks to some fellow patrons and always has a conversation with the bartender.
That, folks, is all there is. Day in. Day out. There is no conflict, save for a subplot involving a bar patron and the woman he loves (but who refuses to love him back).
Impossibly gorgeous Iranian nuzzles loving bus driver.
On the weekend, Paterson and his impossibly gorgeous Iranian wife Laura go to a movie. Upon their return they discover that the super-cute, mega-wrinkly bulldog has destroyed the (not-yet-photocopied) notebook of (supposedly good) poetry. His impossibly gorgeous Iranian wife Laura feels badly, but still manages to chide him for not photocopying his notebook.
On Sunday, Paterson is depressed. He sits on a park bench. An older Japanese man sits next to him. For some reason, he knows Paterson is a poet. He gifts him a brand new empty notebook.
Gee, I wonder what Paterson is going to do next? Perhaps he'll write some (supposedly good) poetry. Perhaps we'll find out if Jarmusch ever bothers to make a supposedly good sequel to this supposedly good movie.
THE FILM CORNER RATING: ** (Two Stars)
Paterson is a Special Presentation at TIFF 2016. It is a Mongrel Media release.
American Honey (2016)
Dir. Andrea Arnold
Starring: Sasha Lane, Shia LaBeouf, Riley Keough
Review By Greg Klymkiw
If self-flagellation is your idea of a good time, then you might enjoy sitting through Andrea Arnold's meandering, 163-minute Dogme-style wallow through White Trash America. The rest of us might prefer a less pretentious way to blow precious moments of life on Earth, but there are plenty of pseuds out there who might get off on this. Like all of Arnold's personal work, American Honey is a dour, humourless slog. This time around, she manages to retch up a picture that's much longer than either Red Road and Fish Tank and worst of all, feels about twice its already-interminable length.
This latest Arnold schlepp through Von-Trier-Vinterberg-Cassavetes-Wannabe-Land focuses upon Star (Sasha Lane), a gorgeously grubby, dreadlocked, tattooed teen drifter on the run from a troubled childhood who finds herself caring for the kids of an abusive loser dad and a line-dancing miscreant mommy. When we first find our heroine, she and the kids are rummaging for food in a trash bin. Scoring a rancid chicken, they wander over to the local K-Mart parking lot to hitch a ride. It's here she encounters the slimily handsome Jake (Shia LaBeouf), a charismatic Pied Piper leading a group of unkempt young people as they cavort across the tarmac and into the fluorescent-light-flooded discount store.
Jake is a recruiter for his chief paramour Krystal (Riley Keough), a sexy tough-talking hustler who runs a crew of millennial magazine subscription salespeople. Star and Jake make an immediate connection and it doesn't take too long for our heroine to join the ragtag group of damaged kids in their trek across America. Sex, drugs and partying are the order of the night and by day, they wander a variety of burbs to sell their wares. Needless to say that when magazine sales are slow, there are plenty of opportunities to whore themselves out - something Star appears to be particularly adept at.
Tensions rise and fall, loyalties are challenged and by the end of the journey, Star frees a tortoise in a pond before taking a cleansing dip in it herself. This, I trust, is meant to mean something.
There's nothing especially wrong with a movie focusing upon aimless youth in a crazy, empty America and Arnold certainly serves up more than a few evocative images and elicits a clutch of fresh performances. Unfortunately, she lets scenes run on forever and we're all supposed to be enamoured with the improvisational yammering and activities - most of which is captured in glorious (not) shaky-cam.
One wants to give points to any filmmaker that takes us out of our comfort zone as viewers, but so much of what transpires feels egregiously willy-nilly and though the intent is to provide considerable food for thought, most everything that transpires is as wispy and forgettable as the empty lives of its characters.
The picture is finally forgettable, save for the boils on our butts from sitting though it in the first place. For an experiential picture to work its magic and veer beyond the ephemeral, it requires some formal control and a clear sense of what it really wants to be. Alas, the movie has very little idea of anything other than letting the camera roll interminably, resulting in the kind of psuedo-Neo-realist floundering that titillates critics, film festival programmers and all other hoity-toity granola bars who need to suffer in order to feel like what they're watching is art.
Suffering is one thing, but suffering through a wank is something else altogether. It's nice to feel like the wanking comes from a place of genuine skill, designed to generate the kind of orgasmic blast that allows its wanker and wank-watching audience to feel something. You see, no matter how deep the chasm of humanity we're plunged into is, it's no crime for the filmmaking itself to be joyous.
The Light Between Oceans (2016)
Dir. Derek Cianfrance
Starring: Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander,
Rachel Weisz, Bryan Brown, Jack Thompson
Review By Greg Klymkiw
Early into this historical romance, the two lovers-to-be (Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander) go for an extra-long picnic, walking and talking ad nauseum through hilly, seemingly treeless and wide-open Aussie wilderness until, settling several hours later on a cliff overlooking a gorgeous sunset on the ocean, they kiss and profess their love for each other. As Alexandre Desplat's ludicrously lush score throbs over cinematographer Adam Arkapaw's dull picture-postcard images, all I could think about was when, where and for how long did our lovebirds relieve themselves of waste matter. Worse yet, I wondered about how the two deposited heavier loads with no apparent evidence of toilet paper.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the last thing one should be thinking about in any romance are bowel movements, but think about them, I did - long and hard. And as the film plodded along, I thought about my own need to relieve myself. Thank heaven for tender mercies.
The Light Between Oceans had plenty of potential to be a weepy in the 40s Warner Bros. tradition, but alas it suffers from a horrendously miscast leading lady and worse yet, plods along to a relatively safe denouement.
Fassbender and Vikander play a newly married couple living an Eden-like existence on a remote island - its only practical reason for being is to provide a lighthouse to guide ships from its rocky shores and towards the safe harbours about 100 miles away. We watch them boink like minks, but their attempts to generate progeny result in not one, but two - count 'em - still births. Vikander takes it especially badly. When a small boat washes ashore with a dead man and a living, breathing newborn baby, she petulantly, selfishly insists that Fassbender bury the evidence of the obviously real Daddy and keep the child for themselves.
For what seems like several hours of running time, we watch our couple raise the child as if it were their own. Alas, back on shore, there is the baby's real grieving mother. Rachel Weisz suffers quite magnificently in this role - so much so that occasional sojourns to the mainland by our baby-napping couple inspire Fassbender's guilt to overwhelm him.
Needless to say, things will probably not turn out too well. Unfortunately, instead of some really unbearable suffering, we're dealt the unkindest cut of all, a relatively happy ending tinged with bittersweetness. Some of the melodramatic elements in the movie do indeed work in a rudimentary sledgehammer fashion, but neither the screenplay nor the direction take brave enough steps into completely ludicrous tear-wrenching territory - it's all eventually so bloody tasteful.
Under the circumstances, Fassbender and Weisz acquit themselves nicely and it's great seeing Aussie stalwarts like Bryan Brown and Jack Thompson in top form, but the ubiquitous Alicia Vikander pretty much upends the whole picture. She seldom wipes the dimple-inducing smile from her face and even when she expresses sadness or desperation, there's more giddiness in her visage than anything remotely real or harrowing. In fact, her dimples become so bothersome, one wants to pave them over with cement. Most embarrassing are her line-readings which seem oddly anachronistic. Ultimately, Vikander galumphs her way through the proceedings with such misplaced intensity that the movie galumphs alongside her.
THE FILM CORNER RATING: **
The Light Between Oceans opened the 2016 Venice Film Festival and is now in wide release via Disney.
War Dogs (2016)
Dir. Todd Phillips
Scr. Phillips, Jason Smilovic, Stephen Chin
Starring: Jonah Hill, Miles Teller, Ana de Armas, Bradley Cooper, Kevin Pollak
Review By Greg Klymkiw
War Dogs is about assholes. That the picture is based upon real-life assholes certainly takes it out of the usual territory of male mayhem director Todd (The Hangover) Phillips has specialized in to date. Alas, aside from a knockout performance from Jonah Hill and superb support courtesy of Bradley Cooper and Kevin Pollak, the picture never quite lives up to its potential to explore the savagery of international arms dealers.
From an article, then full length book ("Arms and the Dudes") by investigative reporter Guy Lawson, the screenplay cobbled together by Phillips and his co-scribes Jason Smilovic and Stephen Chin never takes flight into the territory of black humour and/or outright satire that might have been its saving grace, especially since it never really works as a straight-up drama, nor a comedy.
Charting the story of old school chums Efraim Diveroli (Hill) and David Packouz (Teller) who team up to secure government contracts to provide arms to the U.S. military, the film reduces most of their actions to cliches. Packouz is a loser facing the responsibilities of being a husband and father who is swept up by his flamboyant buddy into the legal, but morally dubious world of supplying implements of destruction. When the temptation of riches beyond their wildest dreams dangles before them, they acquiesce to illegal activities which will ultimately lead to their downfall. Though fact-based, we've seen stories like this before and a movie like War Dogs needed far more than the derivative bargain-basement Scorsese-like voiceovers and montages driving it.
The film required genuine savagery. Perhaps it even needed to go into Robert Altman-like M*A*S*H territory to make its protagonists even vaguely understandable. If anything, the film seems like bargain-basement Todd Phillips. A lame fact-based version of The Hangover films with arms dealers replacing the hapless clowns of the aforementioned comedy trilogy just isn't very compelling.
Jonah Hill, however, continues to dazzle and display his remarkable range and gifts as an actor. He attacks his role with ferocious, maniacal and nasty glee that injects considerable life into the otherwise blah proceedings. Bradley Cooper pops up as a slime ball arms dealer infused with an oddly friendly malevolence and Kevin Pollak lights the screen up with both humour and slime whenever the dry cleaning mogul he plays shows up.
The entire domestic subplot involving Packouz's wife (Ana de Armas) is a drag, sucking the life out of the proceedings and once the story takes genuinely dark turns, the movie continues to go through the motions, doing very little to shock or move us.
By the end of the film, we're left with a perfunctory wrap-up of the actual events, but never do we feel like we've waded in the utter hell of the world these two men crawled through. They're ultimately less than assholes, they're slugs and vipers and how we're supposed to feel about either of them is finally one big question mark. We don't have to "relate" to them or even empathize with them. It might have been nice if we could have even mildly revelled in their sheer scumbaggery, but the movie doesn't even afford us that one meagre pleasure.
As The Gods Will (2016)
Dir. Takeshi Miike
Starring: Shôta Sometani, Ryûnosuke Kamiki, Rirî Furankî
Review By Greg Klymkiw
The ridiculously prolific Takeshi Miike generates a blood-spattered Lewis Carroll-like fantasy from the manga by Muneyuki Kaneshiro and Akeji Fujimura in which a trio of high school students need to outwit a few bizarre entities in order to survive. The first episode is a truly hilarious and vicious adventure involving a not-to-bright daruma doll playing red-light-green-light with a classroom full of adolescents.
Any student caught moving in the daruma's gaze results in their head exploding. Needles to say, there are plenty of opportunities for Miike to focus on cerebellum-popping carnage. Head explosions never overstay their welcome. Unfortunatelty, a few other elements, do.
Alas, the film grinds oppressively after this terrific opening as our hapless heroes are pursued by a huge "waving cat, amongst other other grotesqueries. There's a kind of live-action video gaming quality to the proceedings and things just seem to go on and on for what seems like an eternity.
At four minutes shy of two hours, "eternity" seems to be the operative word here.
THE FILM CORNER RATING: ** Two Stars
As the Gods Will enjoys its Canuck premiere at Fantasia 2016.
Top: I SAW THE LIGHT ***
Bottom right: MILES AHEAD **
Bottom left: BORN TO BE BLUE *
Born to Be Blue (2015)
Dir. Robert Budreau
Starring: Ethan Hawke, Carmen Ejogo, Callum Keith Rennie,
Stephen McHattie, Janet-Laine Green, Dan Lett, Kevin Hanchard, Tony Nappo
Review By Greg Klymkiw
If you've seen Let's Get Lost, Bruce Weber's haunting 1988 feature-length documentary about the sad, sexy, tragic genius Chet Baker, there's no reason to see Robert Budreau's dreadful biopic misfire Born to Be Blue. Weber's documentary succeeds because it harrowingly focuses on Baker's drug addiction as much as his turbulent life and extraordinary music. Rather than obviously charting tried-and-true rise-and-fall beats in Baker's life, we get subtle glimpses into just how Baker's demons were as much a part of his art as they were what ultimately destroyed him.
Born to Be Blue is a fruit-loopy, simple-minded fantasia on Chet getting his musical mojo back after having his teeth knocked out by some scumbag dealers. Writer-Director Robert Budreau's film reduces Baker's life to some kind of Brian Grazer-like "winner" story dappled with plenty of fake dark touches. Amalgamating all of Baker's wives into one convenient punching bag/inspiration (Carmen Ejogo) feels horribly by-the-numbers and on-point.
Hello, my name is Ethan Hawke.
I can be tortured, eh. Just like Chet Baker.
I'll concede the film could not have possibly shoehorned Baker's whole existence into ninety-or-so minutes, but why it felt the need to concoct so much nonsense and avoid even a smattering or pie-slice of the man's genuiely fascinating life as a microcosm of the whole, is beyond me.
Ethan Hawke is a fine actor when he's in good movies, but he seems to take on a lot of garbage. He must know when it's crap, but sometimes, how's a fella to really know? I'm sure he thought the role in Born to Be Blue would have been a supreme challenge and maybe even Oscar bait, but aside from bearing an occasional resemblance to Baker, his performance is never more than skin-deep. We see no demons in Hawke. All we experience is an actor pretending that they're there and working overtime to prove it.
Most of all, though, Baker is presented as a man on the road to self-discovery, hence "success". Neither the film nor Hawke let us forget it. Give me a break.
Skip this. Just watch Let's Get Lost again.
Born to Be Blue is an IFC Films picture in very limited theatrical release.
THE FILM CORNER RATING: * One-Star
Shaft? Superfly? Nope. Don Cheadle as Miles Davis.
Miles Ahead(2015)
Dir. Don Cheadle
Scr. Steven Baigelman & Cheadle
Starring: Don Cheadle, Ewan McGregor, Emayatzy Corineald
Review By Greg Klymkiw
As jazz legend Miles Davis, there's no denying Don Cheadle's charismatic work as an actor. Veering from the afro-and-shades-adorned 70s cocaine addict to the suave, dapper young man in the 50s flashbacks, Cheadle is never less than engaging and his performance comes close to capturing the genius of this great musical artist.
Unfortunately, we have to put up with the film. Reducing the 70s Davis to some kind of participant in a lame, TV-movie version of a Blaxploitation programmer, then clumsily flashing us back to Davis's loving, but ultimately abusive treatment towards his wife (Emayatzy Corineald), the picture is all over the place and rife with dullsville cliches.
STARSKY and HUTCH? Nope!
The Miles Davis Story as Cop TV show
melded with supremely lame 70s Blaxploitation.
Worse yet, we have to put up with the increasingly insufferable Ewan McGregor. Here he plays a scruffy freelance writer pretending to be a Rolling Stone journalist. Far too much of the movie is Cheadle and McGregor verbally jousting, and not too convincingly at that. What really begins to pale, though, is an endless subplot involving the disappearance of Davis's master tapes to his new album and McGregor helping him retrieve them. The whole movie turns into an endless episode of "Starsky and Hutch", replete with a supremely lame car chase and gunplay action.
Cheadle's direction is, at best, mildly competent and at its worst, barely competent. That said, his performance, especially during his coked-up crazy-ass scenes, is never less than a blast. There was probably a terrific movie with Cheadle as Miles Davis - somewhere out there. Miles Ahead, sadly, is not it.
THE FILM CORNER RATING: ** Two Stars
Miles Ahead is currently in theatrical release via Mongrel Media.
Tom Hiddleston as fine a Hank Williams
as Gary Busey's Buddy Holly was.
I Saw the Light (2015)
Dir. Marc Abraham
Starring: Tom Hiddleston, Elizabeth Olsen, Maddie Hasson
Review By Greg Klymkiw
Marc Abraham's Hank Williams biopic might not go too far beneath the surface, but it hits key points in the life of the famed post-war American country crooner with a spate of lovely performances and an evocative attention to period detail. With only enough manipulation of the facts and compression of the events to make approximately 10+ years of Williams's life pass by amiably and entertainingly in a surprisingly breezy 123 minutes, this is by far the best of the recent trio of musical biopics.
Abraham's screenplay for I Saw the Light is based upon the book “Hank Williams: The Biography” by Colin Escott, George Merritt and William Macewen and as such, it seems less concerned with exploring the ennui which contributed to the singer's unique renderings of hits like the title track, “Why Don’t You Love Me,” "Move it on Over" and among others, “Lovesick Blues”, as it is with charting key events in Williams's life. We go from his romance and marriage to first wife Audrey (Elizabeth Olsen), when he was a local radio performer and follow him on his endless gigs in smoky honky-tonks until he eventually achieves the necessary chops to headline at Nashville's "Grand Ole Opry".
The story doesn't shy away from his Jekyll and Hyde-like transformations from kind, loving and charming to mean-spirited, hard-drinking and philandering. He's both a good father and a negligent father. He's as caring as he is violent. As he rises to the top, we see him abandon his first wife (who insisted too strongly upon performing with him - her voice was, at best, spiritedly competent and at its worst, bordering on caterwauling) and eventually settling down with second wife, Billie Jean Jones (Maddie Hasson).
Husband and Wife Duet
One Sings, The Other Doesn't
Abraham lets the narrative plane touch down on Hank's squabbles with the record company and promoters, his debilitating back pain and his eventual reliance upon highly addictive painkillers. A good chunk of the film is imbued with a pleasing sentiment and basks in the warm glow of Dante Spinotti's gorgeous cinematography.
The real star of the picture is the music. Leading man Tom Hiddleston (Loki in the Thor movies) is nothing less than compelling when voicing Williams's work and much of the running time is pleasingly toe-tapping. If anything, I Saw the Light shares a great deal with Steve Rash's Buddy Holly biopic with Gary Busey - it's old fashioned and goes down easy.
The picture's like a nice, mellow moonshine. It cuts through the dust in the throat, clears the pipes, the senses, the raw emotions and finally keeps us glued to the proceedings just long enough to leave the cinema satisfied, but also compelled to whip out our own vinyl and CDs of Hank's music, so we can keep our toes a tapping and the tears a flowing.
THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** 3-Stars
I Saw the Light is in national release via Mongrel Media.
The Keeping Room (2014)
Dir. Daniel Barber
Scr. Julia Hart
Starring: Brit Marling, Hailee Steinfeld, Manu Otaru,
Sam Worthington, Kyle Soller, Nicholas Pinnock, Ned Dennehy, Amy Nuttall
As Sherman marched through the South, decimating everything in his path, he placed considerable trust in his scouts to sniff out what lay ahead that could be burned and/or pillaged. Given that the menfolk on the Rebel side were off being slaughtered by the Yankees in a bloodthirsty, unevenly matched war, those left behind in the South were women, children, the old and infirm. One can't exactly place much in the way of heroism in Sherman's deeds, nor according to this movie, in those of his scouts who only had one thing on their minds - and we all know what that was.
Julia Hart's screenplay focuses upon those women left behind and her earnest efforts certainly exemplify the old college try, but for all its female bonding, attention to detail and attempts at putting a revisionist feminist spin on things, the whole affair comes up short - partially due to the too-lean script and Daniel Barber's precious direction.
The picture is finally little more than a Straw Dogs wannabe crossed with Kelly Reichardt's astonishing Meek's Cutoff.
Three women, comprised of two Southern belle sisters (TV stalwart Marling and True Grit's Steinfeld) and their female slave (Manu Otaru) live a hard, lonely life without the menfolk around to handle the heavy lifting. In addition to all the womanly household chores, they're out in the fields trying to yield what they can from the earth - Marling even ventures into the woods with her shotgun to try hunting.
Goldurn it, these ladies is never goin' hungry agin.
Just a ways down the road, a pair of Yankee scouts (Sam Worthington, Kyle Soller) are having one grand old time: pillaging, stealing, drinking, cussing, killing and most of all, raping. Yes, these boys just loves to rape. They spend so much time sniffing out prime flesh and then raping and killing it, one wonders when they have any time to do what General Sherman needs them to do.
Soon enough, these randy rapists will be coming to call upon our trio and we spend a good chunk of the movie watching the womenfolk defending their virtue and home. Along the way, the movie provides some passing nods to race relations and sexuality, but the name of the game is rape and revenge. Curiously, there's not much in the way of rape - there's one attempt upon the feisty Steinfeld, followed by plenty of prowling around and eventually the inevitable extraction of vengeance.
One can't quarrel with any of the solid, try-as-they-might performances and the gorgeous visuals, but this is one dull, precious and pretentious movie. It carries itself with an elegiac lope, but there's no real heft to its pseudo-arty rambling. It wants to have its cake and eat it too by taking a good wallow in girlie-girl concerns and some good old fashioned ultra violence, but just in case we'd mistake it for an exploitation item, everything is paced like that snail Col. Kurtz talks about in Apocalypse Now, slooooooowwwwwwllllllyyyy "crawling along the edge of a straight razor".
By the time the relatively modest running time unspools towards its "surprise" (not really) killing and the fake solidarity of womanhood as the ladies destroy everything before the Yankees can destroy it, we've felt like the movie has gone on forever and we're delivered one final sickening blow, the trilling of a mournful song whilst our trio disappear into the vastness that will become a new America. (Hmmm, I think I'm making it sound better than it is.)
The only real revisionism here is taking a potentially drama-charged setting and scenario, then slowing it down to a molasses ooze to fool some people into thinking they're seeing art. If there was a good screenplay here, director Barber hasn't done it any favours by applying a bargain basement Kelly Reichardt Meek's Cutoff contemplative approach to the proceedings. What was great there, is a big snore here. And, by the way, if you are hankering for a great revisionist western with a solid female character and perspective, you'd be better off with that film than The Keeping Room.
It's the real thing. This one's a fake.
THE FILM CORNER RATING: ** Two Stars
The Keeping Room is in limited release via FilmsWeLike. In Toronto it unspools at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.
The Martian (2015)
Dir. Ridley Scott
Scr. Drew Goddard
Nov. Andy Weir
Starring: Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, Kristen Wiig, Jeff Daniels, Michael Peña, Kate Mara, Sean Bean, Sebastian Stan, Aksel Hennie, Chiwetel Ejiofor
Review By Greg Klymkiw
The worst thing to say about Ridley Scott's The Martian is that it's, well, uh, okay, uh, I guess, uh, sort of. Well, it's not bad, I suppose, but to suggest it's any better than moderately watchable would be stretching it.
The best thing to say about The Martian is that it's the finest work the overrated hack Ridley Scott has pulled out of his ass since he delivered the miraculous fluke Alien. Seeing that he's only made two or three watchable pictures since the astonishing 1979 horror-in-space masterpiece, this is clearly as back-handed a compliment I can pay to this new bloated effort.
By now, most viewers will know it's the story of a manned mission to Mars in which one astronaut is left behind for dead, only he's most assuredly alive and needs to muster all of his scientific know-how to survive until a rescue mission can be launched. And that's pretty much it.
One man alone against the Angry Red Planet.
Based on the popular novel by Andy Weir and with workmanlike scripting by Drew Goddard, the tale is well-structured as a science fiction survival tale with relatively distinctive (though hardly credible) characters in the rescue ship (all solidly played, especially the always-engaging Michael Peña) and at NASA (all solidly played as cliches), plus a fair whack of semi-amusing monologue-style dialogue for hunky Matt Damon to utter as the stranded astronaut.
The film conjures memories of Byron Haskin's (The War of the Worlds, From the Earth to the Moon, Conquest of Space) modest, but terrific 1964 survival adventure Robinson Crusoe On Mars. The memories Ridley Scott's film inspires are good ones - mostly how good Haskin's film was and how woefully overblown and occasionally dull The Martian is.
We know from the beginning that yummy Matt is not going to die and that good, old fashioned American bravery and know-how is going to save the day. The ride to get to this predictable conclusion is intermittently entertaining, but buried beneath its layers of fat is a much snappier, pulpier movie wanting to burst forth like the parasitical penis creature exploded from within John Hurt's chest in Alien.
I've always wondered what happened to the Ridley Scott of that 1979 classic. The Martian could have used that guy.
THE FILM CORNER RATING: ** 2-Stars
The Martian makes its world premiere as a TIFF Gala at TIFF 2015. For tix, times, dates and venues visit the TIFF website HERE.
