ENEMY

ENEMY Review

By Darin Skaggs

     Film can be used to show many emotions.  It can bring so many metaphors, visually and verbally.  It could be viewed as pretentious to make a film that is full of these metaphors.  Every once in a while they could also work as brilliant works of art.  Sadly in Denis Villeneuve’s new film Enemy these attempts at visual and vocal metaphors fail and become an unnecessarily confusing mess.

     The film is about Adam Bell (Jake Gyllenhaal), a bored professor who doesn’t have much of a life and normal routine that he seems not to care about or care to change.  One day he finds out that there is a lowbrow actor that looks just like him named Anthony (also Gyllenhaal).  Adam searches out to meet Anthony which takes a crazy turn that turns into the film just trying to be many metaphors.

     The film does obsess with making us wonder what is up with these two men.  Could they be twins?  Or could they be clones?  Does it matter?  In the long run, it doesn’t.  The film spends so much on the mystery of the identical look of these men and spends so little time to solve it.  It is clear after leaving the film that there is some deep meaning to these look a likes.  Instead the whole film is a mess of secret meanings.  It does not flow to well together, while other movies work well as a confusing mess that when you put your mind to it, the meanings will all come together.  This one is too confusing and messy to mean much to someone.  There are doppelgangers that never figure out anything and a weird load of spiders that could be anything and most likely nothing.

     The film is not a total failure.  It looks incredible and the score is fairly effective.  They are so good it could make you believe the story being told is worthwhile.  Gyllenhaal is spectacular in both roles playing a boring teacher and also an active out of work actor.  Every technical aspect of the film is astounding.  The film is a honorable failure and with last year’s Prisoners also directed by Villeneuve and a solid thriller, this really shows promise for the director.  Sadly this part of his filmography will most likely just have to be near the bottom of his hopeful career.

UNDER THE SKIN

UNDER THE SKIN Review

By Darin Skaggs

     Film is an unique art form.  You can edit scenes together, add sounds that all culminate in a certain feeling of emotions that can’t be felt in any other format.  In Johnathon Glazer’s Under The Skin, he uses these tactics and creates one of the most emotional and effective films of the year.

      Under The Skin tells the tale of a mysterious being in the form of Scarlett Johansson, in one of the best performances of the year, that lures men into her van and traps them in black goo.  She does not use money or violent force, she uses sex.  She compliments the men’s looks and flaunts hers to get them to come into her home where they are trapped in black goo, where any number of things could be happening.

     This film is not concerned with solving your mysteries or telling you plot points.  These men are sunk into the black goo and there are very little hints of why these men are being trapped.  The film gives off vibes that Johansson is an alien, but it never really says.  It is not concerned with these facts because it has more to say then what is happening factually on screen.  It wants to explore the male gaze and the sexual awakenings and nightmares of being a woman.  She starts as just letting the men admire her body but never giving them what they want.  About half way through the film there is a change and this being starts to get curious which leads to some beautiful and haunting moments.

     The film works on a visual level with beautiful sets and visual effects.  It also has some great sound effects and the score is striking.  As technical effects go, this is a masterpiece.  It uses all the unique aspects of film; the score, acting, sound mixing and editing, subtle writing, to make you feel the emotions.  It lets you react to the moments not because you are told to feel something or that a character is feeling something, it is all the surreal magic that film can bring.

     Scarlett gives one of the greatest performances of the year and of her career.  She plays this strange being again never saying what she is feeling or thinking.  All she has to work with is the subtle script and the minute emotions on her face.  The film is unique and strange in the best way possible.  It chooses to take everything about film, except dialogue, and make it just as emotional as any film with people procliaming what they are feeling. 

NON-STOP

NON-STOP Review

By Darin Skaggs

     Liam Neeson is an actor that gets cast into a certain type of film.  In the last five plus years he has played the over qualified undercover fighter that is going through something that finds himself in a Die Hard-esque situation.  There were the two films where his family members were, well, taken and he had to use his action film skills to get them back.  Then there was the one where he had to fight the wolves in the snow filled wilderness.  In his most recent outing, Non-Stop, Neeson plays Bill Marks the Air Marshall, finds himself on a plane that is secretly being high jacked.  He knows this by the texts he is receiving on his secret line. 

     The ultimate goal of this venture is to have fun.  For the most part it succeeds.  There is a good sense of mystery of this who-done-it.  The mysterious texter is threating to kill a person every twenty minutes unless a large amount of money is transferred into a certain bank account.  This attacker is somehow succeeding and the bank account ends up being in Mark’s name.  It makes you feel like you need to know what is going on and gives you plenty of character set up so you could go back and forth on who you think is up to no good.  All this is done in a fairly entertaining way.

     The true problems here stem from the social commentary and even a bit of why the perpetrator is committing this act.  The plane is believed to be high jacked, it has turned direction which gives us the line from a passenger “Any of this sound familiar?”  As said before the film is fun, too fun to need any allegory for 9/11.  If the film was less silly and action packed it could stand for this, but those elements make the 9/11 moments make you roll your eyes.

     While this film is enjoyable, Liam Neeson can only do this for so long.  We can’t keep seeing him become an action star in silly situations.  This film you might leave feeling cool, but when you get far enough away from it, it probably won’t be top of list material.   

THEY CAME TOGETHER

THEY CAME TOGETHER Review

By Darin Skaggs

     The spoof genre of today is a joke.  Not a good joke, a bad one.  Spoofs like Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans and others with silly long titles are lazily written and have no substance.  David Wain’s They Came Together is a new spoof of romantic comedies that takes a look at lazy screenwriting and ends up being incredibly funny.

     They Came Together tells the tale of the telling of the tale of the meeting of a cute couple Joel (Paul Rudd) and Molly (Amy Poeler).  Joel works at a big candy firm that is threating to take down a small independent candy shop owned by Molly.  Sound familiar?  Like any good spoof the film hits every cliché from its genre.  This one being romantic comedies hits everything like the two hating each other when first meeting, the guy heading to a bar to drown away his sorrows and even a black best friend with endless amounts of relationship advice.  This film works mostly because there is a good amount of affection for this genre that most look down upon.  Wain, and Michael Showalter, wrote an amazing script that pays homage to the genre but also takes the genre, and lazy screenwriting, to task.

     There are moments in this film, and every Romantic Comedies, that don’t make sense to the characters.  Why do these two fall in love so quickly?  Why is Molly going to marry a strange man named Eggbert?  Some of these scenes are interrupted by the couple who is on a double date with Joel and Molly who are unfortunate to hear this story as they say “Why did you make that choice?”  The answer is mostly “Nothing.  Let’s move on.”  As to say other screen writers should figure out the most realistic way these invented characters would act.

     While this film does take screen writers to task it does not shy away the fact that it is a comedy.  It is one of the funniest films of the year and honestly, it is one of the funniest of the decade.  Many jokes poking fun at the romantic comedy like saying New York City is like a character in their life or Joel having different friends that all have a different view on love.  The film is truly brilliant.  It is a hilarious movie that actually has something to say.  It is lot of fun to watch, so many cameos, dorky jokes and a great scene featuring Adam Scott.

LIFE ITSELF

LIFE ITSELF Review

By Darin Skaggs

     Life Itself is a documentary about one of the most famous film critics, Roger Ebert.  The film is directed by Steve James, who also directed Hoops Dreams, a film that Ebert adored.  So that makes the life story of this respected film critic a little more personal.  This explains all the time spent in the hospital near the end of his life.

     The film takes a look at Ebert’s whole life exploring his childhood, career advancements, his big heart and his big head.  Even though the documentary feels personal like a friend is making it; it does not shy away from the negative part of Ebert.  In his early years he was an alcoholic and later when he became a film critic he was very stubborn and cocky.  And of course it explores what makes him so smart.  They say he could write an article with the snap of a finger, fairly young he won a Pulitzer Prize and always tried to stay up to date with what the public was using technology wise.  The film takes a look at a man we all know and adds information that others might not know and explores what we do know. 

     One of the problems that could be put onto the movie is that it might not be for people who are not passionate for the art of film.  Throughout the film stories are told about how Ebert inspired young filmmakers and film fans.  A couple of directors tell how Ebert came to their small film at a festival and gave it a rave, yet honest review.  Martin Scorsese is interviewed and tells a story on how early in his career Ebert loved him as a director and a couple decades later The Color of Money came out and Ebert, and Siskel who is his TV coworker, hate on the film.  This showed that all Ebert wanted to do is name good and bad about films he watched. 

     The film is about this man’s whole life and the moments that are hard to watch are the ones in the hospital.  These moments are tonally different in the film but needed to make you really feel for this normal human with a heighted job.  The film is very good, but film fans may be bias.  Others might not be interested.  There are some basic human moments everyone can relate to but the majority of the film is about movies and the passion they can bring.