Don't Breathe (Brockway)

Don't Breathe

Three spoiled friends, Money (Daniel Zavatto), Alex (Dylan Minnette), and Rocky (Jane Levy) have a sure fire way to burglarize a house in desperate Detroit. A blind recluse (Stephen Lang) lives alone and is sitting on thirty thousand dollars. After all, what can go wrong?

You will find out in Fede Alvarez's "Don't Breathe," a horror film that plays with the audience using effective scares, magnetic suspense and the logic of dreams. One is put on edge right away. An aerial shot of a leafy green neighborhood suddenly narrows into the sinister as an old man is dragging a limp woman on the pavement. Suffice to say things are muy mal on Buena Vista Street.

The film starts with the uncomfortable premise that the house is to be feared, as the blind man is turned into a kind of superhuman monster, borrowing a bit from John Carpenter's original "Halloween." These amoral youngsters try to reason with the taciturn and seemingly weak man only to realize to their horror that he is very strong, his senses are intensified and he is not letting them go.

While one can well argue that this is another chase-in-the-attic or haunted house film, the suspense never panders and the tension is far from anemic. Locked doors, shaking keys and breath itself have never been more nerve-wracking. While some might find the "surprise" at the end a bit too Gothic and outrageous, the real mystery of "Don't Breathe" is in the character of the blind hermit himself and the film definitely teases our assumptions.

No matter what one might think, the stranger has a resolve that just won't quit. The film's deadpan "what if" ending satisfyingly brings to mind the eerie "It Follows" (also set in Detroit) and the legendary Wes Craven.

Write Ian at ianfree1@yahoo.com

Little Men (Brockway)

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

Little Men

"Little Men" is yet another stirring and percussive film from director Ira Sachs (Love Is Strange). The film is compressed and potent, having the power of a good short story.

13 year-old Jake (Theo Taplitz) has moved to Brooklyn from Manhattan. He is shy, awkward and feels a bit alien. Jake's ambitious drawings and paintings are his only island of security. By chance, he meets the glib and boastful Tony (Michael Barbieri) who recalls a bit of  Sal Mineo as a young boy. As both of the boys are creative, they quickly become friends. Tony's mother Leonor (Paulina Garcia) rents shop space from Jake's father Brian (Greg Kinnear).  She was also a confidant of Brian's father, who has recently passed on. Brian's father is never seen in the film. He is a symbol of a more sincere and honest past.

The two boys grow so close that they want to go to the same school, LaGuardia High. But, all is not harmonious. Under pressure from Brian's sister, Audrey (Talia Balsam) the father agrees to raise the rent on Leonor's dress shop, which in turn puts a strain on the boys' friendship.

The film is excellent in portraying the insecurity and need for bravado at early adolescence. There is one rave music episode in particular, highlighting the overconfident swagger of Tony that is as funny and real as anything by Woody Allen.

"Little Men" also points to the grim circumstance of money, of selfish (but not monstrous) urges and the unavoidable gentrification of a quaint Brooklyn. In a brilliant turn, the film makes Jake and Tony into star-cross'd friends in the manner of Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet.

One late scene showing Jake spotting the uninhibited Tony with a transfixed wanting  from across a museum floor proves the  piece de resistance.

Before puberty, childhood friendship is the ultimate drive.

Write Ian at ianfree1@yahoo.com

Deepwater Horizon (Brockway)

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

Deepwater Horizon

Peter Berg (Lone Survivor) directs the horrid events of the Deepwater Horizon explosion. His story has all the uncomfortable tension of a horror film. Crewmember Mike Williams (Mark Wahlberg) is a conscientious oil rig worker and family man. Though he works hard, Williams is light in spirit, easy with a joke and always does the right thing.

His daughter, Sydney (Stella Allen) pines for a fossil from the next drilling site and Williams resolves to get one for her. His character recalls Sheriff Brody from "Jaws" (1975) in his  care, compassion and modest joie de vivre.  He is about to spend 21 days at sea and he hates to leave his wife Felicia (Kate Hudson)

From the start, one has the feeling that engineer Williams is the backbone of the rig. He is called upon to back up the indignation of the supervisor, Mr. Jimmie (Kurt Russell) who is flabbergasted when he learns that the cement seals were not tested along with the drilling pressure. Continuing the "Jaws" comparison, Mr. Jimmie is akin to Quint, given his deapan saltiness.

We know immediately that BP supervisor Donald Vidrine (played by a scaly John Malkovich ) is not on the level. He is behind schedule and pressures crewmember Jason Anderson (Ethan Suplee) to approve a botched test run. Sinister rumbles are heard very much like the presence of a Great White.

Pressure and temperature readings go haywire. So begins the explosion of a hungry and rabid beast. The crew is thrown about like driftwood. This is a hurricane of blood, oil and fire. Shellacked pelicans fall from the sky, paralyzed by the gook of greed.

The film is first rate for operating two-fold, both as an action suspense film and a moral lesson. The pursuit of profit and cutting corners have rarely been portrayed so bluntly. Mercenary attacks on the earth combined with aloof arrogance lead to a slaughter rivaling The Book of Revelation, toned in red and black.

Mike Williams is a very real and almost superhuman person who would make us feel safe in face of any deadly peril. But despite this hero, one is left with a sense of helplessness and outrage while watching "Deepwater Horizon."  The shaming  apocalypse of this oil rig on fire could well have been avoided given the proper care and precaution.

Write Ian at ianfree1@yahoo.com

Week of October 28 - November 3 (Rhoades)

Tropic Overview

Eight Films: Plenty to See at the Tropic

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

Lots of new films this week on Tropic screens, eight in all. You’ll find a handful of indies surrounded by some mainstream biggies.

No, “Little Men” is not based on the classic book by Louisa May Alcott. Rather it’s a tale about two boys whose friendship is interrupted by their parents’ squabble over the rent on a dress shop. A small film, but it offers up some big names: Greg Kinnear and Alfred Molina, along with Jennifer Ehle (Rosemary Harris’s daughter) and Talia Balsam (Martin Balsam’s daughter and George Clooney’s ex-wife, now married to John Slattery). Times (UK) calls it “a deceptively intimate drama that presents itself as a quirky coming-of-age story.” And Cinencuentro declares, “‘Little Men’ has an amazing cast. It’s one of this year’s best films.

Another small but interesting film is “Queen of Katwe,” the true story of a Ugandan girl who becomes an international chess master. Along with Madina Nalwanga in the lead role as the young champion, you’ll also find excellent performances by Oscar-winner Lupita Nyong'o and David Oyelowo. Associated Press tells us, “The colors and rhythms of life in the slums of Uganda are what set ‘Queen of Katwe’ apart from other underdog chess movies.” And Sunday Independent adds, “It’s uplifting, feel-good, nice, well shot and really well acted.”

“Denial” recounts the trial of historian Deborah E. Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz), sued by holocaust denier David Irving (Timothy Small). Her barrister (Tom Wilkinson) makes the case against Irving’s distasteful theories. Newsday notes, “Facts and opinions duke it out in this thought-provoking if slightly low-key drama based on true events.” And The Young Folks adds, “The entire cast gives a monumental performance that does justice to this monumental story.”

“The Girl on the Train” continues to thrill with its tale about an alcoholic ex-wife (Emily Blunt) who snoops on her former hubby and his new wife, in the process spotting what might be a clue in a murder. El Antepenúltimo Mohicano calls it “an entertaining film with interesting plot twists that will keep the audience hooked from the first minute to the last…” while BuzzFeed accuses it of “positioning itself unabashedly as a knock-off ‘Gone Girl.’”

“Sully” keeps making a miracle landing as it retells the story of the heroic American airlines pilot (played by Tom Hanks) who landed his crippled plane on the Hudson River. The Nation tells us, “This is pretty much the truth of New Yorkers’ feelings about the landing on the Hudson -- and director Clint Eastwood brings them back with a crisp, unmannered efficiency of which few other moviemakers are capable.” And CNN.com calls it “a no-frills affair, almost to a fault.”

“Don’t Breathe” is a scary film about a blind man (Stephan Lang) whose home is invaded by three teenagers. But they wish they’d picked another house when the blind man turns off the lights. New Yorker says, “The suspense is built as carefully as it is in a good John Carpenter movie; director Fede Alvarez uses the camera like a stealth weapon, exploring dark corners and hidden areas of the house with devilish glee.” And Detroit News calls it “a breathless, visceral, nerve-racking thrill ride that doesn’t stop coming at you until its final gasps.”

“The Magnificent Seven” is a remake of the classic John Sturgis Western, this time around starring Denzel Washington as the leader of a pack of gunmen who set out to save a town from outlaws. Deadline Hollywood Daily observes, “This Denzel Washington Western vehicle still has its moments even if there is too much gunplay and not enough character development.” And NPR adds, “If body count is what you go to Westerns for, by all means drift into this one’s corral.”

And last on the list, but not least, is “Deepwater Horizon,” based on the BP oil spill that threatened the Gulf Coast. Here Mark Wahlberg (yes, the former Marky Mark) proves his acting mettle as one of the engineers on the deep-water platform when it blew. Rolling Stone says, “The film depicts the worst oil spill in American history and director Peter Berg recreates the cataclysm of that day with unbearable tension and healing compassion.” Forbes calls it “a taut, mostly engaging, and just slightly melodramatic (in a good way) ‘you are there’ retelling of the events that took place on April 20, 2010.”

Yes, there’s plenty to choose from at the Tropic.

srhoades@aol.com

The Magnificent Seven (Rhoades)

Front Row at the Movies

“Magnificent Seven” Remade for Third Time

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

You’ll recognize the music from all those Marlboro commercials. But older moviegoers will remember the swelling strands as being Elmer Bernstein’s iconic theme for “The Magnificent Seven,” the John Sturges Western about a group of hired gunslingers who protect a Mexican village from banditos.

Turns out, director Antoine Fuqua has given us a remake. The same-named movie is currently playing at Tropic Cinema.

The Hollywood Reporter proclaims: “The big difference between the new version of ‘The Magnificent Seven’ and the revered 1960 feature is the ethnic background of the main characters.”

Okay, we’ll give them that -- kinda. In Fuqua’s remake, the leader of the seven mercenaries is played by African-American actor Denzel Washington. In the John Sturges Western that role was handled by a White Russian, Yul Brynner.

Ethnic differentiation also can be used to describe the Sturges film, for it was a redo of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 classic, “Seven Samurai.” In it, the characters were all Japanese. A wandering ronin (Takashi Shimura) gathers six other samurai to help him defend a village from bandits.

Kurosawa based the seven major characters on historical samurai. Then he wrote a complete profile for each character, including details about what they wore, their favorite foods, their speech patterns, and scores of other details. He even created a dossier on all 101 residents of the village, including a family tree to help the extras understand their characters’ relationships to each other.

This film is often described as the greatest Japanese film ever made.

The 1960 remake by Sturgis featured then-unknown actors Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Brad Dexter, Horst Buchholz, and Robert Vaughn. The new version offers upfront better-known stars.

Just like in the earlier version, a black-clad gunslinger (Denzel Washington) recruits a group of social misfits to help him protect a town. These miscreants include a charming cardsharp (Chris Pratt), a Confederate sharpshooter (Ethan Hawke), a grizzly mountain man (Vincent D’Onofrio), a Korean assassin (Byung-hun Lee), a swarthy outlaw (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), and a Comanche warrior (Martin Sensmeier).

In another ethnic shift, the new version features Peter Sarsgaard as the mining baron whose armed goons are killing off any residents of Rose Creek who refuse to sell their land to him. Unlike the ‘60s, it’s no longer political appropriate to have a Mexican villain.

But as the Hollywood Reporter observes, “The actors in the Sturges film oozed far more attitude” than this new cast.

Antoine Fuqua was obviously gambling on reuniting his Oscar-winning “Training Day” cast (Washington and Hawke) to pull off this remake. However, this is not titled “The Magnificent Two.” Chemistry between seven actors is harder to deliver.

srhoades@aol.com

Don't Breathe (Rhoades)

Front Row at the Movies

“Don’t Breathe” In the Dark

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

Are you old enough to remember that 1967 Audrey Hepburn thriller, “Wait Until Dark?” In it, she’s a blind woman being terrorized by a trio of home invaders, until she turns out the lights putting everyone on equal footing. Made shivers go up your spine.

Now we have “Don’t Breathe,” a new film starring Stephan Lang. Here he’s a blind man whose home is invaded by a group of teens hoping to pull off a simple heist. Bad idea, it turns out.

Sure, these films sound about as different as the old and new “Ghostbusters” movies. Only the sex of the protagonist has been changed. Odd that it’s the fifty-year-old Audrey Hepburn movie that empowers women.

“Don’t Breathe” is currently playing in a darkened theater near you. Tropic Cinema, for instance.

You can be sure the film’s scary because it’s produced by Ghost House Pictures.

Stephen Lang plays The Blind Man. As you’ll recall, he had the roles of Col. Miles Quaritch in “Avatar” and General Hopgood in “The Men Who Stare at Goats.” He even narrated the PBS “Medal of Honor” documentary. And he portrayed General George Pickett in “Gettysburg” and General Stonewall Jackson in “Gods and Generals.” Stephen Lang exudes a certain military bearing, despite having attended a Quaker boarding school as a youth.

The three teenage invaders are played by Jane Levy, Dylan Minnette, and Daniel Zavatto. You might have seen Levy in “Evil Dead,” Minnette in “Goosebumps,” and Zavatto in TV’s “Fear the Walking Dead” – good horror credits for each.

In this turnabout tale, they find themselves locked in a cat-and-mouse game with a man willing to kill them. A little more than they bargained for.

Director Fede Alvarez points out that Lang’s character starts off as an underdog, but soon we learn “there’s no way he can let them go. There’s not another option. He has to kill these kids.”

“Well, he’s really not a villain,” Stephen Lang defends his character. “He’s a brokenhearted man, is what he is. But, for all his heartbreak, he’s got a steel backbone, too. This all takes place in a really … kind of a bombed out section of Detroit. It’s a place that was one time a nice neighborhood that really reflected the values of the country in the ‘40s and ‘50s that was affluent and growing, and industry was booming and everything like that. And now when you see it, he’s an isolated guy in this neighborhood. People have left. Everything is falling to disrepair. It’s not only a metaphor of the nation and that city, it’s a metaphor for his own state of being….”

Victim or villain – you decide. But he’s certainly not as nice as Audrey Hepburn.

srhoades@aol.com

Denial (Brockway)

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

Denial

Director Mick Jackson (L.A. Story, Chattahoochee) takes on the insidious and offensive subject of historical revisionism in "Denial," deftly but without as much gusto as the outrageous subject demands. The film covers the 1996 court case of David Irving vs. Penguin Books and Debra Lipstadt in the UK.

Irving, an infamous historian of some thirty books, ranging from Hitler to Churchill, gained poison-pen notoriety in the late 80s for asserting anew that there is no real factual evidence for the use of gas chambers during The Third Reich. He argued that there were no free-standing photographs or explicit documentation (no supposed "gas holes") and as Irving opines, only a handful of survivors' so called false accounts.

This was a "volte face" from his 1977 position when Irving clearly acknowledged the chambers' locations in the first version of his book Hitler's War.

Irving took his new stance as a licence to question history's causes and effects, to further state that Hitler had no knowlege of the Final Solution and that it was not possible for lethal gas chambers to be in use from the start, given that they were "air raid shelters"

Like one possessed, Irving hounded Ms. Lipstadt in Atlanta, Georgia and aggressively begged to debate her. In the 1990s and lasting for a good fifteen years, Irving understandably became Public Enemy Number One, only having some respite under the sun in Key West. He continued to write and give toxic Apologist lectures, typing over many a naive nose including my own. I have some guilt over Irving, as I once wrote him a colorful letter, thinking that he was a benevolent writer of fiction.

Onscreen, the always arresting Timothy Spall plays Irving, as a hell-bent mole of the Baskervilles, (more of a diminutive figure than the formidible person he is in real life) driven to uphold his case of "no holes, no Holocaust" against the threat of a resolute Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz) who must bear the burden of proof in accordance to British law.

This is a somewhat pedestrian courtroom drama but that is not to say that it is not meaningful with meaning and revelance. At its core, it is of good vs. evil.

The camera is terrifically pointed, frequently giving the audience angles at knee level or from above as if we are all groundling witnessses awaiting a verdict of great import, and indeed such is the case. There are some virtuosic and telling moments: Lipstadt waits at Auschwitz as a filmed exposure of survivors scramble and cry around her like phantoms. There are shots from the back of Irving's pommaded hair as he talks of "political correctness" as if hinting of Donald Trump.

When Irving tries to avoid racist claims speaking of the wonderful largeness of his au pair's black breasts, he very much appears to be one of the men of orange.

Although you might wish for more ire and passion, the film is as accurate, true to life and spirit. Under the ridiculous but toxic threat of Trump and his ilk, "Denial" is as topical today as it was some 12 years ago at the conclusion of the case.

One of the last scenes show Lipstadt at a church under Saint George slaying a slippery serpent. The real living serpent is the notion of historical revisionism and half-formed truisms, hissed by Irving with cheers and jeers. Sensitive thinkers must guard against this lazy tease under whatever shape it assumes, be it now or in the future.

Write Ian at ianfree1@yahoo.com