Seven Psychopaths

I'm a sucker for Sam Rockwell.  When you add in Christopher Walken and Woody Harrelson, you have just created a film that I will watch, regardless of the story.  So why try to get around it?  Check out the red band trailer for Seven Psychopaths:

Judging from the trailer, Seven Psychopaths is writer/director Martin McDonagh's attempt to make a fast-paced heist movie, along the lines of Snatch, but in English and with better dialogue.  McDonagh's first film (he is also a playwright) was the surprisingly enjoyable In Bruges; at first glance, it looks like he was trying to keep the humor, but up the pace with his follow-up.  And there is nothing wrong with that approach --- I bet McDonagh could make one hell of a great breakneck crime flick.  But that's not what he's going for with Seven Psychopaths, although it takes a little while for that to become clear to the audience.

Although there are hints that things will get weird

Marty (Colin Farrell) is a successful screenwriter suffering from writer's block.  The script he is working on is titled "Seven Psychopaths," but he's having trouble actually coming up with any characters.  That's where Billy (Sam Rockwell) comes in.  Billy is Marty's best friend, but he's not a particularly good influence.  Instead of working, Billy and Hans (Christopher Walken) kidnap dogs and then collect reward money when the owners post flyers around the neighborhood.  Billy is trying to help Marty finish his script, although nothing seems to be working.  That's why Billy puts an ad in the paper for psychopaths to contact Marty to tell him their stories.  

...which ultimately leads to Tom Waits carrying a bunny during a firefight

Meanwhile, it seems that Billy and Hans have made a mistake in their choice of dognappings.  Instead of a spoiled trophy wife's pet, they picked up a shih tzu belonging to a violent mob boss (Woody Harrelson).

That would be pretty bad, but they could theoretically give the dog back on the sly and hopefully avoid any violent repercussions.  Well, they could if Billy was a rational human being.  By holding on to the dog, the mob boss is able to identify the dognappers and send his underlings out to kill them.  Unless there happens to be some other psychopath on the loose, killing killers (and there is!).  So what do we wind up with?  A homicidal criminal out for revenge, a random killer on the loose, a confused and mostly drunk writer, an idiotic dognapper, and Christopher Walken.  And that is when the story takes an unusual turn, a metafictional turn that is better experienced than explained.

This is what you expect, but you get something slightly different

The acting in Seven Psychopaths is some of the better comedic work I have seen in a while.  As the mostly normal point-of-view character, Colin Farrell does a great job being surprised and helpless; he is mainly reacting to the other actors here, but he's refined the acting capabilities of his eyebrows as he's gotten older.  Sam Rockwell, as usual, was a bizarre delight.  Rockwell plays goofy exceedingly well, but he is exceptional when given a good script.  Christopher Walken was unmistakably Christopher Walken.  Some might argue that he's leaning into self-parody territory these days, but I love seeing him in good movies --- especially ones where his weirdness doesn't stand out more than anybody else's.

If I walked into my home and found Christopher Walken, I would expect him to look like this

Woody Harrelson clearly benefited from a script full of amusingly foul things to say.  Harrelson is a good actor, but he's at his best when playing up his comedy roots, and he does absurd comedy as well as anybody in mainstream Hollywood.

"Somebody cast me in a Coen Brothers movie!  A comedy, this time!"

The rest of the cast has what amounts to featured cameos.  Some of them, like Abbie Cornish, Olga Kurylenko and Harry Dean Stanton, don't get to do much, although their parts move the plot forward.  Others, like Michael Pitt, Gabourey Sidibe and Kevin Corrigan, receive little screen time but compensate by having chunks of pretty great dialogue.  Even the actors playing straight roles, like Zeljko Ivanek, turn in quality character work.  Of all the supporting cast, Tom Waits has the meatiest and strangest role, although it is easily the least bizarre movie role I have seen of his.  It's always a pleasant surprise when you watch a movie and see only good acting in it, and it's a treat seeing an ensemble cast having this much fun.

More entertaining than it appears

Martin McDonagh clearly has a talent for getting the best from his actors, although the more readily apparent skill would be writing awesome dialogue.  Here's where McDonagh succeeds where Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarentino often fail: he actually develops his one-dimensional characters.  It would have been extremely easy to make Marty the soul of this movie --- he's the only remotely normal main character, after all --- but he went out of his way to show the pain of almost every goofy-ass character in this script. 

Exception noted, Mr. Harrelson

The technical side of the film was all done well enough (I liked the cinematography, although it was never too showy), but it is the writing that stands out the most. 

That is a good thing and a bad thing.  The good side I have already explained --- funny script, unexpected depth, etc. --- but the bad side comes into play about halfway through the film.  It gets meta.  I'm not a huge fan of metafiction, but I can appreciate when it is done well.  Thankfully, Seven Psychopaths doesn't screw it up or get too pretentious.  This is probably my favorite metafictional movie since Adaptation.  It's not that the movie has a metafictional aspect to it that bothers me --- it's that that aspect doesn't really come into play until the film is half over.  It felt like the script suddenly sobered up at the 45-minute mark and decided to put off the predictably silly and violent ending that it was so clearly heading toward in the first half of the film.  Had the meta been more prevalent earlier in the movie (or less prevalent later), this would have been far more effective.  Still, Seven Psychopaths is a blast to watch.

Alien

There is never a bad reason to revisit the Alien franchise.  I've seen them all, every single Alien (the original, -s, -³, Resurrection, vs. Predator and vP: Requiem) and almost all of them are worth seeing, even if they're utter crap.  For whatever reason, as I waited to for a suitable time to go see Prometheus, I realized I hadn't watched the first two movies in almost a decade.  I can honestly do without the rest of the series (although AvP:R was pretty amusing), but those two are examples of greatness that do not often come along in science fiction.

Like curly hair and over-the-head headsets

I doubt I have anything too original to add to the chorus of positive reviews for Alien.  That won't stop me from reviewing it, but it does make outlining the plot in detail seem a bit unnecessary.  In short, some glorified intergalactic truckers on the spaceship Nostromo are forced (economically, not physically) to investigate a distress signal deep in Nebraska (AKA "middle-of-nowhere") space.  The signal comes from an alien vessel, and the aliens that sent it are long dead.  However, in the process of determining that fact, the crew of the Nostromo also accidentally encounter the creatures that killed off the aliens.  Worse, they bring one onto the ship with them and continue their voyage home.  Hence the tagline, "In space, no one an hear you scream."

"...Unless you have radios in your space suits, that is"

There's quite a bit more to it that just that, but explaining science fiction plots typically leads me to over-explaining them because I tend to find the little details in these movies fascinating.  And for people who enjoy reading into the production values of sci-fi movies, Alien is a treat.  Unlike just about every space flick before this one (Star Wars may be the earliest example I can think of for this), the spaceship and crew are not flawlessly clean; this is a universe where space travel has been around for a while, and there are spaceship equivalents of rust buckets.  This isn't a film that relies on special effects or fancy production values to succeed, but the unspoken history that the production design implies --- for the ship, for the spacesuits, for the alien species and crashed ship, etc. --- is very cool. 

Implication of the crew's appearance: fashion peaked in 1979

The acting in Alien is quite good for something that, on paper, amounts to a genre mish-mash.  I didn't realize it until I started browsing through their filmographies, but most of the cast in this film was fairly unknown at the time of its release; while many of the actors had been working for ten or fifteen years, they primarily played small character roles.  That means that the highest-profile actor in Alien is John Hurt, who received some award nominations the year before for his work in The Midnight Express.  As far as his performance goes, it was fine until it was rudely interrupted by his impending death.

Less erotic than it looks

Isn't that cool, though?  It's not something that a modern audience would think twice about, what with Sigourney Weaver starring in three other Alien pics, but having Hurt play the first victim is on par with Janet Leigh's surprise death in Psycho or Drew Barrymore's in Scream; you just don't expect the most well-known actor in the film to exit that early.  Thankfully, the non-Hurt cast is pretty respectable, so you don't really miss Hurt's gravelly voice too much as you're being sucked into this movie.  Obviously, Weaver is the star; she does a very good job here, assuming the lead as she makes smart and hard decisions and takes control when she has to.  This was her first major role, and she was pretty bad-ass for a lady with awful hair.  Tom Skerritt was definitely the second most likable and logical character in the film; Skerritt has never really wowed me as an actor, but he has always played authority figures well, even before he started going gray.  Yaphet Kotto, who I generally like, starts out the film utterly annoying, but he more than redeems himself by the end, playing up his fear and machismo as much as his small role would allow.  Harry Dean Stanton was Kotto's partner in crime, and he gave a typical Stanton performance.  He wasn't outstanding, but he always adds a bit of world-weariness to any role he's given.  Probably the best supporting character, though, was played by Ian Holm.  Already a veteran British Shakespearean actor by this point, Holm had yet to make much of an impression in an American film.  What I like about his performance is that it is subtle...until it suddenly isn't.

Tapioca and marbles: not key elements in "subtle"

Then he gets honest-to-goodness action scenes and a pretty fantastic special effects scene.  His character's reveal is a shock the first time you view it (unless you're familiar with the sequels, I suppose), and I really liked how his character acquiesced to certain things early on, but was still such a sinister company man at heart.  The only actor I didn't really care for was Veronica Cartwright, who more or less represented what Scott hoped the audience was feeling.  In other words, she whimpered and yelped a lot.

While I do like the acting in Alien, this is definitely not a film that relies heavily on a power performance.  This is a mood piece, more than anything else.  This was only the second film to be directed by Ridley Scott, but his direction is what makes this film so fantastic.  If Alien was simply a science fiction film, we would still be talking about Ridley Scott's team pre-production team.  I loved the look and feel of the ship, I liked the alien planet, and the futuristic tech on display (mostly in the form of the android) was very cool.  Of course, the best part of the production was the design of the xenomorph (AKA the titular alien).  How awesome is this thing?

It looks like a shark-person made with the sexy time to some demon scorpion and then covered their love-spawn in Nickelodeon Gak.  This alien is one of the most visually impressive creatures to ever hit the big screen, and that's even before seeing it in action.  When you combine the fantastic production with practical effects --- as good as it looks, most of the special effects are made with puppets and creativity --- this movie becomes something more.  It moves from "cool idea" to "cool movie," and that's still disregarding what actually happens in the film.  With Scott's talent for building suspense, you wind up with something truly special.  And when I reference the suspense in this film, I'm not talking about "Don't go into the basement, dumbass!"  I'm not even talking about "Wait for it...wait for it...wait for it...oh, it's only the cat ---- KNIFE IN THE FACE!"  I'm talking about a pervasive sense of dread that few horror films come close to matching.  Scott slowly reveals more and more about the alien menace, but still keeps the audiences off-guard.  The alien changes its appearance and the way it attacks throughout the film, so you're never quite sure what to expect.

Except death.  You always expect death

One of the things that I like best about Alien, though, is the immorality of The Corporation.  It's one thing to make a monster movie, but adding duplicity and cutthroat capitalism changes the threat from a simple (although dangerous) external one, to a two-front war, where the characters have to watch their backs, too.  Most movies would be happy to have just one of these layers, which is another reason Alien is such an interesting watch.

This is only the second or third time I have sat down to watch Alien, and it impresses me more and more each time.  I love when films transcend their genres, so the way Alien combines awesome sci-fi with horror just blows me away.  When watching movies with my friends, we often skip over this film in favor of the louder and more action-packed Aliens, but Ridley Scott's direction has won me over.  I am finally convinced that this is the best Alien movie.  Everything about it, from the slow reveal of the title in the opening credits to the genuinely shocking chest-burst scene, all the way to the fourth act scares is wonderful.

What a rip-off!  They did the same thing in Spaceballs!

I don't even mind the stupidity of the characters risking their lives for a cat or the fact that the iconic egg image on the movie poster doesn't resemble the actual eggs in the film very much.  This is a complex story with good, old-fashioned special effects and a slow-burning story that effectively amps up the terror in the plot.  And that's all it's about.  There are no distractions --- how many other filmmakers would have horned in a romantic subplot here? --- because this is all about dread and terror, and Alien does what it does so very, very well.

The Straight Story

I am convinced that director David Lynch soaks his contacts in a solution of LSD every night before bed.  Let's be honest, if you think there is any sane or sober way to completely explain Mulholland Drive, you're probably using the same "saline" solution.  A few months back, someone reminded me on Facebook that Lynch also directed The Straight Story, which is about as un-Lynchian of a project as you can imagine.  How un-Lynchian is it?  For starters, it was released by Disney.  And it was rated G.  Even more surprising, this film is based on a true story.

Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth) is an old man, and he looks it.  After enduring a LifeCall-worthy event, Alvin has to visit the doctor.  Well, he doesn't have to, he's a stubborn old mule that will doubtlessly do things his way until the moment he keels over, but he chooses to see the doctor to make his daughter, Rose (Sissy Spacek), feel better.  In the office, Alvin refuses to undress, have any tests done, or have any X-rays taken.  I can't wait to become an old curmudgeon like him.  However, I would have a Biff cane, complete with a brass fist for knocking on McFly's head.  The (exasperated) doctor makes some educated guesses about Alvin's condition; he needs hip surgery to stand without the use of two canes (because Alvin refuses to have a walker), is losing his eyesight as a side-effect of diabetes, and is probably in the early stages of emphysema.  He is a pretty frail old man, and the doctor clearly doesn't expect Alvin to have much life left in him.  Shortly after his doctor's visit, Alvin gets a phone call that his brother (Harry Dean Stanton) has had a stroke.  The two men have not spoken in over ten years, which gets Alvin to thinking.  Deciding that now is the time to bury the hatchet, Alvin plans to travel the 240 miles from his home in Iowa to his brother's in Wisconsin.  Only, thanks to his eyesight and hips, he doesn't have a driver's license.  Refusing the aid of his daughter and several others, Alvin comes up with an unusual solution to his problem.  He decides to ride his lawnmower to Wisconsin.  Of course he does.

On the surface, this seems like an odd choice for David Lynch to direct.  It is, but you can see his touch, if you know where to look.  Lynch has always had a talent for capturing wonderful scenery and holding long shots for effect, and that talent is on display here.  Lynch really brings out the beauty and vastness of the Great Plains with his cinematography.  Of course, he's too weird to play even a "straight story" completely straight; a good number of the supporting cast are kooky and have that bizarre awkward-acting quality that Lynch encourages in his actors.  Of course, the subject matter is pretty weird, too, if you think about it.  Lynch often makes movies about subversion of some type or another; is there anything more subversive than a person choosing to do things their way, no matter how many better options are available?

Most of the supporting cast is, like I mentioned, kind of awkward (deer lady, I'm talking to you), but Sissy Spacek is surprisingly effective as Straight's handicapped daughter.  There aren't many other noteworthy actors in the movie (Chris' brothers, Kevin and John P. Farley, and Harry Dean Stanton have bit parts), so the biggest responsibility for this film's quality rests on the shoulders of Richard Farnsworth.  He does a fantastic job.  He has great nonverbal acting skills and his subtle choices, like the way his eyes dart when he's nervous, really breathe life into his character.  Alvin Straight is a character that could be played as overly stubborn or idiotic, Farnsworth's portrayal is honest and endearing, and his Oscar nomination was well-deserved.  I would be making a mistake if I didn't point out how adorably the elderly are shown in this movie; the interactions between senior citizens are funny because they're true, and they are some of the most realistic portrayals of this age group I have ever seen on the big screen.

This is a slow movie.  I know that, sometimes, I am just not in the mood to see a slowly-paced film, so I just wanted to issue that caution.  The film's pace was not an issue for me, though.  What was an issue was the occasional over-dramatic conversations (how long have you known each other, and you say that?) and some of the goofy supporting cast.  Even those things don't diminish how much I enjoyed watching this.  This is a movie that just feels...I don't know, humble and wholesome seem like inadequate terms.  It is an emotional movie, one that speaks to some very basic things that everyone has in common, and the movie comes across as being so honest and unpretentious that it's disarming to watch.  It's no It's a Wonderful Life (because it's less cheesy), but it's playing the same ballgame.  It is a simple story, but it is so good at what it does, which is warm the cockles of your heart.  If your cockles get too warm, though, you might want to have a doctor check that out. 

...and, because nobody demanded it, here's the classic LifeCall commercial from the 80s.


I reviewed this movie because somebody requested it.  A long time ago.  But, better late than never.