With the Fall Movie Season now in full
swing and the Chicago International Film Festival in town, there is
no shortage of movies to catch this weekend. You probably don't want
to read 20,000 words previewing everything, so here are some snippets
of what I hope to get to this weekend. It's an exciting time, so
exciting in fact that I am skipping the first couple Blackhawks games
of the season to see some of these. Dedication means sacrifice.
Opening this weekend, October 10,
2014.
ABCs of Death 2
ABCs of Death 2
Director:
Various
Writer: Various
Writer: Various
Starring: Various
The second
installment of the alphabet-themed horror anthology, featuring work
from the young and hungry (for gore) across the genre looks to be a
blend of humor and scares, both of the jumpy and earwormy. It can
startle you momentarily or make you more afraid of the encroaching
evils of the world, then make you cackle like a maniac. This plays
late Saturday evening at the Chicago International Film Festival,
located at the AMC River East 21 on 322 E. Illinois St.
The Babadook
Director: Jennifer
Kent
Writer: Jennifer
Kent
Starring: Essie
Davis, Daniel Henshall, Tiffany Lindall-Knight
Playing tonight at
CIFF, writer-director Jennifer Kent makes her feature directorial
debut with a subjective camera and expressionistic lighting and sets.
From the trailer alone, it's clear Kent is returning to the horror of
very old, the type of thing that freaked out people when Nosferatu
was slowly sauntering toward them and the Somnambulist of Dr.
Caligari's cabinet awoke from his slumber.
Plus it's about how freaky kids can be. Not just by saying weird things, like most movies of this ilk rely on for easy fright, but the scary stuff they actually do, like creating working crossbows out of blocks of wood and darts.
Plus it's about how freaky kids can be. Not just by saying weird things, like most movies of this ilk rely on for easy fright, but the scary stuff they actually do, like creating working crossbows out of blocks of wood and darts.
Kill the Messenger
Director: Michael
Cuesta
Writer: Peter
Landesman
Starring: Jeremy
Renner, Robert Patrick, Jena Sims, Michael Kenneth Williams, Ray
Liotta
Jeremy Renner stars
as journalist Gary Webb, who chased down a story in the mid-1990s
about the U.S. government's involvement in cocaine smuggling, via the
CIA. For all the hoopla made about believing in conspiracy theories
in the early part of the trailer, this looks like a smaller version
of what audiences have been accustomed to in the paranoid thriller
genre since Marathon Man, the “everything is connected”
plot that encompasses the whole world and indicates that evil is
everywhere, so you better watch out.
This is based on reality, a heightened truth as per its medium, but truth nonetheless. Webb discovered that the CIA did do at least some of these things, but I'm hoping to see a narrative retrenchment away from the expansiveness and hard-to-keep-secret (therefore less plausible) nature of older conspiracy thrillers and more about the smaller, easier-to-cover-up evils perpetrated in reality.
This is based on reality, a heightened truth as per its medium, but truth nonetheless. Webb discovered that the CIA did do at least some of these things, but I'm hoping to see a narrative retrenchment away from the expansiveness and hard-to-keep-secret (therefore less plausible) nature of older conspiracy thrillers and more about the smaller, easier-to-cover-up evils perpetrated in reality.
StretchDirector:
Joe Carnahan
Writers: Joe
Carnahan (screenplay), Jerry Corley & Rob Rose and Joe Carnahan
(story)
Starring: Patrick
Wilson, Ed Helms, Ray Liotta, Brooklyn Decker
Joe Carnahan makes
movies about masculinity to the hilt, the alpha males of the world
drawn to gargantuan proportions, like a little kid drawing the biceps
on Superman. This can be fascinating and transporting (The Grey)
or it can be stylish atom bombs of empty violence (Smokin' Aces).
The fact that the latter is used in the trailer for this, Carnahan's
sixth feature, gives me pause.
However, this week's Grantlandinterview with Carnahan, in which he discusses his strained, often explosive relationship with Hollywood and its influences on his work here, which he describes as a satire, gives me hope. Lots of bleak, selfish people populate the trailer, with presumably more to come in the full film, and they don't seem to get the best fates. Best of all, it's now available Video On Demand to watch anytime you want.
Whiplash
However, this week's Grantlandinterview with Carnahan, in which he discusses his strained, often explosive relationship with Hollywood and its influences on his work here, which he describes as a satire, gives me hope. Lots of bleak, selfish people populate the trailer, with presumably more to come in the full film, and they don't seem to get the best fates. Best of all, it's now available Video On Demand to watch anytime you want.
Whiplash
Director: Damien
Chazelle
Writer: Damien
Chazelle
Starring: Miles
Teller, J.K. Simmons, Paul Reiser, Melissa Benoist
If anyone has had a
contentious, negative reinforcement relationship with a teacher, this
is a film that might drudge up some nasty memories. Miles Teller and
J.K. Simmons spar in screw-tightening fashion in a movie that made
people flip at Sundance earlier this year. Some have said it's on the
shortlist of best films of the year, and I think this trailer is only
a hint of what is involved. Instead of the gleeful violence depicted
in Stretch, this is horrific, real world violence caused by
pain and poor instruction. All this atop the knowledge that writer-director Damien Chazelle also worked on 2014's other great classical music-themed thriller, Grand Piano, and I cannot wait to see it.
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