New York Film Festival Review “Only Lovers Left Alive”

Starring: Tom Hiddleston, Tilda Swinton, Mia Wasikowska, John Hurt, Anton Yelchin and Jeffrey Wright
Directed By: Jim Jarmusch
Running Time: 123 minutes
Sony Pictures Classics

Our Score: 5 out of 5 stars

Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston, already pretty ethereal as they are, are well cast as vampire lovers Adam and Eve in Jim Jarmusch’s wonderful upcoming film, Only Lovers Left Alive. The film finds Adam at a low point in his long existence with wife Eve swooping in to lift him from his disappointment at the state of the modern world. It’s a clever, macabre character study that beneath its too-cool undead protagonists lies a tremendously romantic beating heart.

As Adam, Hiddleston drives away any and all comparison to that other shaggy, dark-haired immortal he has so expertly played recently. Adam is a fascinating creature who displays a wall full of iconic mortals in his den, all the while repeatedly protesting that he has no heroes. Everyone from Edgar Allan Poe and Oscar Wilde to Rodney Dangerfield and Iggy Pop are framed in a shrine to human imagination that at this point in time Adam is lamenting the “zombies” have lost. This admiration for human achievement somewhat undermines Adam’s intentions to kill himself with a wooden bullet obtained from his stoner human buddy Ian (Anton Yelchin in a Renfield-goes-Rock-n-Roll mode). Adam wants to seem the depressive loner, it’s a romantic notion that suits his look and music, but every so often there are cracks in this facade where Hiddleston lets through brilliant moments of enthusiasm. He can be completely enchanted by an unknown singer in a back alley club or excited over a new guitar despite an already huge collection. Adam gives an angry impassioned speech about the world’s dismissal of great scientists–Tesla, Darwin and the like–but that he is able to get so worked up about the fate of humanity weakens his stance that he’s lost all hope in it.

These small embers of optimism are fanned by Adam’s wife Eve and Swinton is perfect at embodying his more mischievous other half. When we meet her, Eve is living apart from Adam in Tangier trying to stir up some controversy in the mortal world by goading her friend, fellow immortal Kit Marlowe (John Hurt), into dusting off the Shakespearian authorship debate just for a bit of entertainment. She’s recalled to her husband in Detroit when she senses Adam’s melancholy over a touching video phone call they share.

Eve having to carefully engineer night flights to make such a journey possible is one of the many vampiric touches Jarmusch cleverly slips in without being explicitly expository about his brand of bloodsucker. Others include Adam’s usage of preternatural speed only when really pushed or their eyes growing paler the more in need of a drink they are. There are references to a larger crisis of contaminated human blood, causing Adam to haunt a complicit doctor (Jeffrey Wright, making a huge impact in just two scenes of bouncing dialogue off a hilariously unresponsive Hiddleston in scrubs) for a healthy supply, but that’s not the focus here.

Rather, Eve is content to share blood popsicles with Adam during a game of chess or bond over their mutual appreciation of Jack White. Such smaller moments are where Hiddleston and Swinton really shine. They have a chemistry that feels lived in without any of the negative connotations so often associated with the “old married couple.” And they really can’t get much older than these two. One gets the sense that Adam’s depression is just part of a larger cycle the two have weathered many times before with the gleeful Eve returning to turn over the hourglass that Adam says is running out of sand. In a particularly joyful scene, Eve finds Adam’s would-be means of suicide and defuses the tension by drawing him into a heartwarming dance to Denise LaSalle’s “Trapped by a Thing Called Love” instead of an argument. This tendency to physical interaction over words in many instances adds to an animalistic dynamic this little clique of vampires share. It becomes more pronounced when Eve’s party-vamp sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska) drops in on the couple. In the only concrete conflict of the film, the sister from LA throws a monkey wrench into Adam and Eve’s chilled out lifestyle, demanding they all go out and over indulge on their “good” blood. Like most bingeing, it doesn’t end well. The sisters together are able to push Adam around rather like the females in a pride of lions, an idea reinforced by Gerd Zeiss’s wild hair designs which incorporated actual animal furs.

Beyond the cool makeup design, Jarmusch creates a fascinating nighttime world for his characters to inhabit. Eve is surrounded by books in her lush Tangier location while Adam’s lair in Detroit is completely wired and filled with all the things he’s engineered himself from decades of technological equipment. Both the cities are richly shot by Yorick Le Saux who finds beauty both in the dark and in locations of complete decay. Jarmusch’s own band SQURL reinforces this dark environment with a hypnotic guitar driven soundtrack that will haunt viewers long after the credits roll. Still, despite its gothic trappings, Only Lovers Left Alive is a surprisingly funny and touching character study of what it is to sustain love and inspiration throughout a very long lifetime.

Note: This film screened as part of the 51st Annual New York Film Fest where we were informed it would be aiming for spring opening in the US. For now, it’s continuing to make festival rounds and has a UK release date of February 21st. You can view a recently released trailer below and check back here for further updates as we get them! 

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Filed Under: Film Reviews, Misc Tagged With: alive, film, left, lovers, nyff, only lovers left alive, ...

The Cast and Creators discuss their new hit show “Sleepy Hollow”

Sleepy Hollow returns to Fox this Monday after a brief World-Series-imposed break from the schedule. The new hit series follows Lieutenant Abbie Mills (Nicole Beharie), a cop in the small town of Sleepy Hollow, who finds herself partnered up with resurrected Revolutionary War soldier Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison). They’re on a mission to stop the four horsemen of the apocalypse lead by Death in the form of the Headless Horseman. So far the characters have encountered all manner of witches, demons, history and folklore from the Biblical Revelations to the lost colony of Roanoke. Sleepy Hollow marked Fox’s highest premiere ratings since 2006 and was renewed for a second season in the beginning of October. I sat down with the cast and creators of the show at New York Comic Con to discuss the supernatural drama.

Creator Alex Kurtzman spoke about the origin of the show, “the initial idea was just a modern take on The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. It was something that’s never really been presented or approached in modern context, so that was fascinating to all of us and…when we came to the idea of blending that legend with Revelations and it seemed crazy, but can it possibly work? And that was where it all started. And can we put these things together and have something really compelling?”

Tom Mison added about his approach to the show, “Lots of people wonder whether how much we went back to the original short story, which was something I’d read a long time ago, but when we got the script for the pilot it was so vastly different to that or anything that I could begin to research. I just let that script speak for itself, really.”

Co-creator Len Wiseman is best known for helming the female-led Underworld film franchise, a trend which continues here. Not only is Lieutenant Mills leading the case, but as the series has gone along, viewers have seen how Ichabod’s wife Katrina (played by Katia Winter) revealed to be a witch caught in purgatory, has played an integral role in leading the case from beyond the grave. Additionally Mills has in recent episodes enlisted her sister Jenny in determining the fate of humanity. The cast spoke about having kick ass women taking the lead on the show.

“I think it’s kind of ground breaking what’s going on” said Nicole Beharie. “First of all, they brought in Abby and Abby is a hero sort of unbeknownst to herself. Like, she didn’t know that all these things were going to happen to her and that she had all these powers to sort of draw upon. And then she also finds out, when she reconnects with her sister that her sister has all of this information and these resources. And then we find out that Katrina is this witch that has all these–I love that all these women in the show actually are an integral part of saving the world. There not just there as like a piece to sort of move the story on. And they’re not just batting eyelashes, like we’re helping to make the thing happen–If not making the thing happen. I personally think, if you look at all the episodes, okay? I threw the book, I saved the guy, so yeah that’s really a big part of it and I’m honored to be a part of it. And also you know, it’s a diverse cast too, so that’s ace.”

Mison was attracted by this aspect of the show. “One of the things when I read the pilot that made it appeal to me so much was that you have the two female leads who aren’t defined by a man. You have Abby who, she’s just a strong modern woman with important things on her mind and [Katrina’s] well, a witch, who’s far more powerful than her pathetic mortal husband. And you don’t see it enough. All too often, scripts are–the women are the girlfriend or the daughter and they have very little to do other than support the male characters’ stories. Whereas this from the start and throughout, the female characters have been rounded and clear individuals. And that’s–hats off to the show for doing that.”

A great deal of fun on the show is derived from Mison’s 18th Century Crane dealing with the modern world, including its ladies. Not only does Crane seem to connect with Mill’s sister Jenny, but in one fan favorite moment, Ichabod advised a tearful OnStar representative about romance while being locked in his  21st Century car.

Mison commented on this trend, “I’ve not really thought about that! That in every episode, there’s a new girl who Ichabod kind of semi-flirts with. Just because the wife’s in purgatory…[Ichabod and Jenny] seem to be kindred spirits, she’s ballsy and she fights for what she believes is right…But then I think there was a very tender connection with Yolanda, the OnStar lady and I’d like to see her become a recurring character. She could be like Ziggy from Quantum Leap! She could, anytime he needs advice but can’t find Katrina, he just goes and talks to Yolanda….maybe.” On-screen wife Winter remained quiet, “No? Everyone completely disagrees!”

Meanwhile, Crane’s wardrobe has yet to be updated as he assimilates the modern era, since he’s in the same outfit five episodes along. Mison laughed and defended his character’s jacket “that he’s worn for two-hundred fifty years?…Uh, it’s a nice coat though, at least!” A moment later he added “That will be addressed in some way or other” while another member of the press rooted for a good pair of jeans.

Of course this wouldn’t be Sleepy Hollow without its legendary Horseman and other supernatural elements running around. Everyone involved with the show had a lot to say on that monstrous aspect of the show.

“Okay, I’m 5’1″.” Beharie began on the topic of the giant Headless Horseman, “In the next few episodes, I run down stairs, he’s like chasing me with an axe. And I’m a little person, he’s a big guy. Like in real life, the guy who plays the horseman. So I’m scared by the Horseman. He’s on horses and I’m in heels.”

Having the Horseman on set is likely due to Wiseman’s preference for practical effects wherever possible. He said “Tv lends itself to practical effects due to its schedule and time. It’s a bit of a double edged sword but we try to–and you don’t really have time for elaborate visual effects. You don’t have a load of time for practical, but if you plan ahead, it’s the perfect platform for practical and it’s one of the things that Alex and I both are fans of, like the movies that we grew up on, to be able to have an actual–if you have a creature on the episode. If it actually really is a creature, whether it’s Hellraiser or Pumpkinhead or you know, these, I think there’s just more of a connection to it and I miss that. You don’t see that on television a lot.”

Orlando Jones, who plays Mills’s boss Captain Irving, brought up some other demonic foes as scarier “The show is crazy because the Horseman’s there! It’s not like it’s CGI, and she’s right, he’s like 6’6″ and when he’s swinging an axe you know…but I’m sorry…the Sandman and the Blurry [a recurring horned demon that only appears blurry to viewers so far]? Come on, I’m sorry. That’s just weird!” When Beharie agreed about the Sandman, Jones went on, “Homeboy turns into dust? I ain’t with that. It’s creepy, for me. I mean honestly.”

The Sandman they’re referring to was a chilling creation defeated by Abbie in the third episode, Kurtzman elaborated on what set him apart from being just a demon-on-the-week. “Sandman was literally a manifestation of Abby’s past. And of her guilt and something she hadn’t dealt with. And so we really try and take the approach with our monsters, is not just having them be random monsters but actually echo something very important in our characters and what they’re going through.”

Speaking on future monsters, Wiseman and Kurtzman teased their versions of the classic characters such as a gollem and a scarecrow while Beharie assured us we’d see plenty more of the Horseman.

As for future plot spoilers, the cast was a bit more hesitant with Mison saying “there are things that I can’t say because I’ll get in trouble. And then there are things that I don’t want to say because they’re such nice twists that I want you to enjoy them when they come. But it’s all about Katrina. The more Katrina comes back, the more revelations there are not only about Ichabod but about the fate of humanity. So keep your eyes on her, really.” Jones later added ominously about his own character, “I think the best description for Irving is assume I know everything.”

Sleepy Hollow airs Mondays at 9pm on Fox.

Photography by Elizabeth Phillips

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Filed Under: Interviews, TV Interviews Tagged With: Katia Winter, Len Wiseman, Nicole Beharie, nycc, NYCC 2013, Orlando Jones, ...

New York Comic Con: Main Stage Highlights

Photography by Elizabeth Phillips

            Media Mikes had an awesome time at the Main Stage of the Javit’s Center throughout this year’s New York Comic, here’s some of the highlights of the panels we enjoyed. Click on any of the banners to take a look at additional photos from each.

            Same as last year, the Adult Swim panels on NYCC’s Friday evening, Venture Brothers followed immediately by Robot Chicken, were hilarious. Doc Hammer and Jackson Publick brought no clips but assured the crowd of a great premiere of the next season of the show–chiefly because it was originally intended for the fifth season’s finale!

            The Q&A session featured much discussion of David Bowie and was capped off by a fan in an amazing Venture-covered dress being too nervous to ask Doc a question, “ARE YOU TOO NERVOUS TO DANCE WITH ME?” he replied before launching off the stage and sharing a short dance to, oddly enough “Greased Lightning” from Grease.

            Robot Chicken’s panel, or the meeting of the silly hats club,  was moderated by Adult Swim VP Keith Crofford and included co-creators Matt Senreich and Seth Green and actors Clare Grant, Breckin Meyer and, in his “annual public appearance”, Macauley Culkin. Later, Doc Hammer emerged from back stage for a bit of light streaking and group hugging that ended with Seth Green licking Doc’s nipple (“He tastes like Dr. Girlfriend!”)

            The Q&A with fans produced their now-traditional sexy pose request and a sudden rivalry between Meyer and a ten-year old audience member named Emmett, who came to the mic with a beef against Green’s new sitcom “Dads.”

            On Saturday, The Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. panel was light on cast and crew—moderator/executive producer Jeph Loeb spoke with the duo of Iain De Caestecker and Elizabeth Henstridge who play techies Fitz & Simmons on the show. A short Q&A was followed by a screening of the “Eye Spy” episode of the show. In the pre-screening talk, De Caestecker discussed his desire for his character to gain a pet monkey while Henstridge offered supervillain Loki as her favorite Avengers character.

            Also making showings on NYCC’s Saturday were three tween hit shows with MTV’s Teen Wolf and the CW’s Beauty and the Beast and Reign. The latter two screening full episodes which, admittedly had some of the audience impatiently shifting in their seats anxiously for the Walking Dead that evening–fans seated in the Main Stage are not cleared between panels–making waiting it out a popular option. Meanwhile, the Teen Wolf panel of Dylan O’brien, Linden Ashby, and Jeff Davis was one of the loudest of the day with a hugely enthusiastic crowd.

        Finally the people behind The Walking Dead took the stage to a huge reception from the crowd. An awesome surprise was Dead fan and Community star Yvette Nicole Brown moderating the panel. For a show about a zombie apocalypse, there was quite a bit of arguing over coupling on the show. On relationships in the show, Brown yelled at the crew, “You don’t have to put love in the show, we’ll put love in…we’ll add it in our minds!” From the fan Q&A, a young boy decked out as Daryl Dixon threw down a challenge to actors [Lauren Cohan and Steven Yuen], “Since Maggie is such a bad ass, do you really think she needs Glen to protect her?” 

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New York Film Festival Review “12 Years a Slave”

Starring: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Lupita Nyong’o, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Dano
Directed By: Steve McQueen
Fox Searchlight
Rated: R
Running Time: 133 minutes

Our Score: 5 out of 5 stars

As evidenced by his first two features, Hunger and Shame, director Steve McQueen is fearless in his approach to difficult subject matters. The same is true here in his unflinching and unforgettable third feature, 12 Years a Slave.

The film is based on the true life account of Solomon Northup (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free black man in New York who was deceived and sold into a life of slavery from 1841 to 1853. The film opens with Northup already in this role working on a sugar cane plantation and then brings us back to his family life in New York leading up to his deception. The men who will eventually drug and betray him come in the form of Brown and Hamilton, played by Scoot McNairy and Taran Killam, who offer Solomon the promise of violin work in Washington DC. The whole sequence is reminiscent of a sort of hellish version of Pinocchio being lead off by the circus folk and it plays out with a dreadful inevitability that left my stomach churning. When Solomon is awoken in chains, Ejiofor’s bewilderment is heart-wrenching as he struggles between fighting for his identity and recognizing how powerless he’s just been rendered.

Ejiofor is at the center of an embarrassment of acting talent throughout this film with even smaller roles occupied by the likes of Brad Pitt, Michael K Williams, Paul Giamatti, Paul Dano, and last year’s Oscar nominee Quvenzhané Wallis (Beasts of the Southern Wild). Benedict Cumberbatch has a key role as Ford, Northrup’s first owner. Ford is initially presented as a sympathetic man, even seen as such by Solomon himself, but the way McQueen and screenwriter John Ridley disillusion us of the very notion of this idea is masterful. For all Ford’s sympathetic looks and guilt about the institution he is undoubtably a part of, he will still allow a family to be split at auction and won’t hear a word of Solomon’s story despite recognizing his intelligence. Actions speak louder than words and under Ford, Solomon still suffers through some of the harshest tortures in the film. Including selling Solomon off again to the monstrous Edwin Epps in the film’s final act.

Coming from both Hunger and Shame, Michael Fassbender successfully reteams with director McQueen again as Epps. Fassbender is fascinating to watch as his character rages against his slaves with frightening conviction he backs up with biblical scripture. He is further driven to violence by his complete inability to deal with his unhinged infatuation with his most productive slave girl, Patsey (incredible newcomer Lupita Nyong’o).

Truly however the film belongs to Chiwetel Ejifor who imbues Northup with an unwavering determination to not only survive his ordeal, but as he says, to live. To not give into despair. Moreover when it comes to his re-emancipation, we feel the weight of the time lost as much as the relief of freedom.

12 Years A Slave opens is now playing , I screened it as part of the 51st New York Film Festival, you can read our red carpet coverage from the event with an interview from the film’s star Michael Fassbender.

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Filed Under: Film Reviews Tagged With: 12, 12 years a slave, chiwetel ejiofor, festival, film, Michael Fassbender, ...

Zachary Levi Raises Money For Operation Smile at NYCC

If you found yourself in The Nerd Machine booth this past weekend at New York Comic Con, you may have noticed a multitude of celebrity guests dropping by for impromptu photo and signing sessions with fans. These guests, as announced via the twitter hashtag #Smiles4Smiles, included stars such as Seth Green, David Duchovny and “Community’s” Yvette Nicole Brown. Actor Zachary Levi, who is currently in New York appearing in Broadway’s First Date, was behind bringing these guests together at NYCC to raise money for Operation Smile.

Can you talk about what Smiles4Smiles is?
Zachary Levi: “So basically, I’m an ambassador for Operation Smile and our main events called NerdHQ that we do at San Diego Comic Con, we make most of our money doing the panels that we do called “Conversations for a Cause“. But there’s a lot of time in between where celebrities might not be able to do a panel for us but they have time to do some photos for us or or do some signings for us. And by for us, I mean for the fans obviously. And I just kind of believe that, I don’t know, for me, you know I’ve been really blessed and…I make my money doing the acting gigs that I do and I love that I’m able to do signings and do photos and stuff and make it affordable– twenty bucks a pop–and you tell people that that all goes to charity, everyone feels a lot better about the whole process of it. So then I was just trying to figure out a catchy way to call it. So it’s Smiles, you’re smiling for a camera for Smiles, Operation Smile. And Signing4Smiles. So that’s what Smiles4Smiles is.”

Levi will next be seen in Thor: The Dark World and I couldn’t help putting a spoiler-free question to the new–taking over the role from Thor‘s Josh Dallas–Fandral the Dashing.

What’s the coolest thing about being an Asgardian?
Being a blond, I guess. (Laughs)

It was more fun being a blond?
It was! It was fun. It was different.

.

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Filed Under: Film Interviews, Interviews Tagged With: Fandral, levi, money, nycc, NYCC 2012, operation, ...

“12 Years A Slave” Premieres at NYFF

12 Years a Slave, an intense new drama from director Steve McQueen, made its New York premiere on Tuesday October 8th as part of the 51st Annual New York Film Fest at Lincoln Center. The film follows the true life story of Solomon Northup (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free black man in New York, who in 1841 was deceived and sent southward to be sold as a slave. I spoke with two of the actors behind the most sinister figures in this harrowing story. They discussed the sources of their characters’ malevolence.

Paul Dano plays unstable slave driver John Tibeats who abuses his power over Solomon.

Lauren Damon: Tibeats is so spiteful in his actions, did you work out what makes him like this?
Paul Dano: Well you know that’s kind of one of the big things you do to prepare for something is you know, create a personal history for the character. So…I think he was probably somebody who was treated poorly or was made to feel like he had no authority. I don’t think he had a great life and so the only place he could take out his feelings about himself were slaves.

LD: What was the most challenging scene for you?
Dano: I have to do a song in it. That was…that was interesting.

LD: Having to cultivate all this anger for your scenes, did you do anything to come down from that after shooting?
Dano: You know it was pretty hot in those period clothes, in July, in Louisiana so a shower and a cocktail.

Michael Fassbender plays monstrous planter Edwin Epps. Fassbender has previously worked with director McQueen on critical hits Hunger and Shame.

Lauren Damon: Since this is your third film with Steve, do you think you trust him more than any other director now?
Michael Fassbender: Pretty much!

LD: You’ve been to some very dark places in his films.
Fassbender: Yeah, I think–you know, human places. Human stories.

In the film Edwin Epps’s infatuation with his own slave Patsey (played by Lupita Nyong’o) drives him to extreme violence.

LD: Where do you think all that rage that Edwin has comes from?
Fassbender: I think out of confusion. He takes it out mainly on the person that he loves because he can’t process that information. He doesn’t have the intellect to do it. Or the substance as a human being. So he thinks by destroying it, he’ll destroy his emotion towards her and of course that doesn’t work.

NYFF continues through October 13th while 12 Years a Slave opens in theaters on the 18th.

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Filed Under: Featured, Interviews Tagged With: 12, nyff, premieres, slave, years

New York Film Festival Review “Exhibition”

Starring: Viv Albertine, Liam Gillick, Tom Hiddleston, Mary Roscoe
Directed By: Joanna Hogg
New York FIlm Festival
Running Time: 110 minutes

Our Score: 4 out of 5 stars

Set in London, “Exhibition” focuses on a middle-aged married couple, known only in the film as D (Albertine) and H (Gillick). Both artists living a spectacular modernist house, itself built by an artist, we join them at the critical moment of their decision to sell the place. D is hesitant to make the move from a home that has defined their lives for nearly two decades.

It’s surprising to learn that the two leads of the film were themselves not actors. Albertine, the guitarist for band The Slits and Gillick, who is actually a conceptual artist himself, have an amazing chemistry as a long married couple. Though much of the film finds them in a state of disconnect–they communicate with each other through a very clinical intercom system in the house–we get these small moments of levity that make their relationship feel very lived in despite their tensions. You feel a sort of united front the couple present when they are engaging with painfully chatty outsiders like their neighbor going on and on about her children or the constantly upbeat realtor attempting to reassure D they’ll find good buyers (Hogg’s former film alums Mary Roscoe and Tom Hiddleston, respectively). Albertine has most of the screentime and she goes a long way in selling her attachment to both her home and her husband through her heartfelt pleas for H not to go wandering the city at night and later her running outside to confirm the ambulance down the block has nothing to do with H. Her anxiety about a prior ‘incident’ she doesn’t wish to repeat is never fully explained in the film but the desperation you sense when D alludes to it is enough to explain her unease.

I was fortunate to see this film, Hogg’s third feature, as part of a series showcasing all her work at this week’s New York Film Festival. Her first two features, Unrelated and Archipelago, established Hogg’s tremendous control over and emphasis on setting. Though Unrelated and Archipelago took place on family holidays and Exhibition is confined to the house, the sense of place feels like an additional character in her stories. Aesthetically beautiful as they are, they can also turn alienating at a moment’s notice. “Exhibition” takes this a step further through Jovan Ajder’s amazing sound design that morphs the home from a shelter from the sirens outside, to an oversize cavern with all it’s metallic creaking and huge sliding doors that dwarf D when she is on her own. Though D professes to a friend over Skype to be able to feel the love of the previous owners of the house in the walls, the audience may need some convincing. Hogg’s sound design coupled with her meticulous visuals bring us into the growing anxiety that D feels.

“Exhibition” is screening as part of the 51st New York Film Festival taking place through October 12th in Lincoln Center. For more information on it’s remaining screening, visit FilmLinc.com

 

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Filed Under: Film Reviews Tagged With: exhibition, festival, film, joanna hogg, nyff, review, ...

Glenn Howerton on the Ninth Season of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia began it’s ninth season this month on new network FXX.  Four episodes in and it’s clear that the gang from Paddy’s Pub is just as dysfunctional as fans have come to expect. Executive producer and writer, Glenn Howerton, who plays Dennis Reynolds, held a phone conference to talk about the show’s new season.

Seeing as last season’s opener played up a significant prop from Charlie and Frank’s apartment (a dog painted by Hitler), I wondered about something viewers can spot in Dennis and Mac’s home:

Lauren Damon: I love the fact that there’s a prominent Hulk hand on the TV in Dennis and Mac’s apartment. Is that Dennis’s, Mac’s, or is it just because everyone has anger management problems? 
Glenn Howerton: “I don’t know whose that is.  I mean, that’s one of those things where early on in the series we had a set decorator, they decorated the apartment to have all this stuff in it, and we just never changed it.  So, really, a lot of those things weren’t deliberate decisions at all.  The only deliberate decisions we’ve made, in terms of our apartment, were probably when you go into Mac’s room and you see that it’s pretty sparse, and there’s just this crucifix on the wall, and like a picture of his dad.  But, all that stuff, it’s just ridiculous because now, us being in like our mid-thirties, it looks like the apartment that, you know, two 19-year-olds would share together, which I actually think is kind of funny.”

Accidental Hulk hands aside, Howerton did reveal in a recent Reddit AMA that he would be interested in playing The Riddler from Batman if given the opportunity.

Have you ever pursued or been pursued, for any of those big budget superhero films?
Howerton: “Not really… Let’s see, I think ten years ago, I auditioned for the Superman reboot, and that was about like two years before that actually came out, the one with Brandon Routh.  But, that was before Sunny.  And then, I did audition recently for the Guardians of the Galaxy, to play the role that Chris Pratt is playing.  I know that the director of that movie, supposedly, is a big Sunny fan, which is cool.  But, usually, they’re already looking for some giant movie star to play those roles.

I certainly don’t have anything against doing something like that.  I have to admit, I really do enjoy playing bad guys, and extremely evil people, which is why it’s a lot of fun for me to play Dennis, or at least the challenge is making Dennis, you know, likable even though he’s such a despicable person.  I think playing something like The Riddler would definitely feel like it was in my wheelhouse.”

LD: One of my favorite things about Dennis, is that he such an incredible sociopath kind-of character, and I was wondering if you could talk about what do you think are some of the creepiest things he’s done in the series, and is there anything we can look forward to him getting up to in the rest of this season?
Howerton: “You know, it’s a funny question for me to try and answer because we do work very, very hard to—I guess you could argue that things like having the conversation about ‘the implication’ is pretty dark [from the season 6 episode “The Gang Buys a Boat”].  But, it’s weird, I get a little bit defensive about that, because in a way, for as dark as it is, I think the character does make it very, very clear that he wouldn’t ever actually hurt these women.  He just wants them to think that the possibility of them getting hurt is there, so he can get his way.  It’s still dark, but I’d say that’s one of the darker things.

Last season, in order to stay in character as playing this Ryan LeFevre personality that Dennis was playing, I almost—well, not me, but my character almost had sex with, like, a small Asian caddy, just to see how far he would be willing to take this whole thing.  So, yes, he’s definitely come very close to crossing some lines that you don’t really recover from, but, yes, there’s definitely going to be some more of that this year.  It’s sort of the nature of the character at this point.”

Howerton’s discussion came not only the morning after the primetime Emmy Awards, for which Sunny continued to be inexplicably unrecognized, but also on the heels of the season’s third episode “The Gang Tries Desperately to Win an Award” which saw the gang attempt to conform to ‘normal’ restaurant standards to impress the TV-Academy-like Philadelphia restaurant association. Watching Paddy’s Pub trying its hardest to conform to standard sitcom hangout tropes (Bright lights! Sassy quips!) was painfully hilarious and begged the question, what did Howerton think of actual “Best Comedy” winner, Modern Family?

Howerton: “Well, to be honest, I haven’t seen a ton of episodes of Modern Family.  But, the episodes I have seen, I think are great.  Because I work in comedy, I actually don’t enjoy watching most comedies just because it’s hard for me not to just sort of analyze it, break it down structurally, and be overly critical of it, you know what I mean?  Not for any other reason other than it’s what I do for a living.  I just don’t watch a lot of stuff.

But, the episodes I have seen of Modern Family, I’ve really enjoyed.  I think it’s a great show and I think it’s very, very difficult to consistently make a funny show on a network, A, because you have more restrictions, and, B, because you have to do more episodes per year.  I’m always very impressed by the fact that I’ve never watched an episode of that show where I wasn’t laughing consistently from start to finish, and I think that’s a hell of an achievement…There are other shows that have won multiple Emmys, and I won’t name any names, where I simply don’t understand why, and I would not put Modern Family in that category at all.  I think that’s a very funny, smart show.”

Why don’t you guys get Emmy love?
Howerton: “I’m the wrong person to ask.  I don’t know.  I mean, I don’t know if you saw the last week’s episode, but we did an entire episode, essentially, about that.  I’m not really entirely certain, all I’ve got are theories, and I’d be happy to spout them for you, but I don’t really know.  I mean, I think first impressions are huge in this business.  I think we started as a very, very small show, and I think we looked so low-budget and FX wasn’t known for comedies, and I don’t think people really paid any attention to us.  We didn’t have Danny [DeVito] on the show, and I think because it took so many years for it to grow its audience, it just, I don’t know.

I think that first impression of a low-budget, we-don’t-need-to-pay-attention-to-this-small- cable-comedy thing kind of stuck.  It seems like, though, the Emmys, in general, they really love cable dramas.  But, they don’t really seem to love cable comedies.  I could be wrong; I don’t pay that close attention to it.”

Probably some of the biggest news for this season actually involves huge cable drama Game of Thrones. Thrones writers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss came on board this year to do one episode titled “Flowers For Charlie” Howerton elaborated on how that came about:

Howerton: “They are actually massive, massive fans, and I think they just floated the idea that they had an idea for an episode, and they really wanted to write one, and we just thought let’s just see if that could work.  It’s really the only time where somebody from outside of our ‘organization’ has successfully written an episode, I’ll put it that way.  We took them through the process, and gave them the best shot.  We actually brought them into the room and broke the episode with them, and sent them off to write a draft, sort of incredibly shocked that they would even have the time or the energy to do it.  They came back with a great episode.  We, of course, did what we always do, and we had to do some re-writes, but really not that many.  It was pretty solid.”

Can you share with us any upcoming  guest stars?
Howerton: We’ve actually got Seann William Scott; he’s going to be in an episode.  Dude is super fun, super funny.  We’ve also got Josh Groban doing an episode; I think the week after that.  We’ve got a lot of fun people.  Then, of course, we have a lot of our recurring cast, the McPoyles, and Artemis, the Waitress.  We’ve also got Mary Lynn Rajskub from 24, she is going to be back of the show this year [as fan favorite ‘Gail the Snail’], too.

Finally, of course the big question is how much more Always Sunny can viewers expect?
Howerton: “We are definitely going to do one more after this, which I’m sure you know, and then it’s being tossed around the idea of doing more.  It is a question mark, but we’ll see.  We’re still having fun, I can tell you that.”

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia airs every Wednesday at 10pm on FXX.

FXX launched on September 2nd and specific cable listings for the new network can be found on GetFXX.com

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Filed Under: Interviews, TV Interviews Tagged With: glenn, howerton, ninth, philadelphia, season, sunny, ...

DVD Review “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia: The Complete Season 8”

Cast: Charlie Day, Glenn Howerton, Rob McElhenney, Kaitlin Olson, Danny DeVito
Rated: Unrated
Studio: 20th Century Fox
DVD Release Date: September 3, 2013
Run Time: 220 minutes

Season: 5 out of 5 Stars
Extras: 3 out of 5 Stars

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia continues to be one of my favorite comedies on TV and revisiting its eighth season just as the ninth has begun this month (on new network, FXX) only reinforces this.

When we left Dee, Charlie, Mac, Frank and Dennis in the finale of season seven, they’d been very publicly rejected by all of their peers at a disastrous high school reunion. Consequently, either by accident or design I feel like many highlights of season eight saw the Paddy’s Pub crew in isolation facing their own twisted internal conflicts and the episodes were stronger for it. Putting each character separately under a microscope in my personal favorite, “The Gang Gets Analyzed,” for example was a genius way of checking in on where they all stand. From Dennis’s sociopathetic drive to control those around him (he gets worse every year and Howerton is amazing to watch as he just barely keeps Dennis’s mania in check) to Mac’s “reverse body dysmorphia”, the psychiatrist only has to scratch the surface to expose all of these characters’ neuroses. The finale as well sees the gang holding their own trial in “Reynolds Vs Reynolds: The Cereal Defense” which began over a simple rear-ender and yet somehow spirals into theological debate complete with charts. Escalation is something Always Sunny does best.

By far however, season eight will most likely be remembered for standout episode “The Maureen Ponderosa Wedding Massacre” which has Dennis’s disgusting ex-wife from season six marrying into the even-more-disgusting McPoyle clan. Told in flashback from an interrogation room, it’s the only episode lacking the traditional Sunny credit sequence and goes into full on zombie horror mode. It also features a hysterical cameo by Guillermo Del Toro (apparently he asked for a part while directing Day on Pacific Rim) as a cannibalistic McPoyle. As if that family could get any worse.

The extras include commentaries on four episodes that are not particularly enlightening, though fun for die-hard fans. The cast here also gets a chance to vent a bit about twitterverse complaints, particularly in regard to the episode aptly titled “The Gang Recycles Their Trash.” The answer’s in the name, folks. Personally, I had fun with that cleverly constructed episode, catching some references only upon repeat viewing. There’s also a blooper reel, a fully produced cheesy sitcom featuring Mac and Charlie’s mothers inhabiting a Golden-Girls-like sitcom universe and a brief moment of “In Memoriam” to Fat Mac to acknowledge actor/creator Rob McElhenney’s sixty pound transformation between seasons.

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Filed Under: DVD/Blu-Ray Reviews Tagged With: 8, complete, dvd, philadelphia, review, season, ...

Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Edgar Wright talk about “The World’s End”

This Friday sees the US release of The World’s End, the final installment of Edgar Wright’s “Cornetto” trilogy. It’s the third comedy following 2004’s Shaun of the Dead and 2007’s Hot Fuzz, to star Simon Pegg (also co-writer of all three) and Nick Frost. While the films are standalone stories across wildly different genres, they’ve been consistently hilarious variations on common themes. Hence, more comparable to Cornetto flavors—a British ice cream that found its way into all three movies—than narrative installments. The trio of Pegg, Wright and Frost sat down in New York to discuss the completion of the trilogy with this apocalyptic pub crawl.

The movie centers on Gary King (Pegg) who is dead-set on reuniting his old schoolmates, now grown men, in an attempt at completing an epic pub crawl they left unfinished as youths in 1990. He faces the most opposition from his onetime best friend, Andy, played by Frost.

How would you each describe the other’s characters?
Nick Frost: I would say Gary King is a forty-one year old man stuck sadly in…1990, it never got better for him than that night. I like to think about Gary in the space between then and when we meet him. What he got up to. And what I think is getting pissed on a kibbutz a lot, being like a rep in Portugal in like a resort, maybe traveling to Australia, doing the same thing there. You know, I think he did a lot of drinking and a lot of fornicating and then he reaches a point where he, he was just sadly empty. And I think where we meet him…that gear that he wears in the film, I don’t think he wears it all the time. He’s like a general who’s going to commit suicide on telly and he puts all his gear on. He puts his gloves on and his medals. That’s his last hoorah and I think he has a suspicion that he knows he’s not coming back.
Simon Pegg: As an addendum to that I think there’s a lot of parallels between World’s End and Scent of a Woman. Gary is like Colonel Frank Slade.
Andy is you know this guy who was, who had his heart broken by his best friend when he was very young and has never been able to let go of that anger about that. And he’s moved away from it. He’s excelled in his job, he’s married and had children, he’s created a life for himself. He’s a success in many ways, maybe not emotionally to a degree. We find out things later on. But he’s a guy who has been let down by someone he loves and hasn’t addressed that yet. So when we meet Andy he kind of seemingly Gary’s enemy, they’re not friends anymore but really what underpins that enmity is a deep affection which we eventually learn the truth about.

Lauren Damon: In both Shaun and Hot Fuzz Simon was the more straight-laced character at the start of the film, was that reversal of roles fun?
Pegg: It was yeah.
Frost: Yeah I mean those other roles, the central character is not always the craziest or the funniest even though Simon is incredibly funny, but this time it was. And it was always going to be Simon and I never look at it and think ‘oh why am I this again?’ It never feels like that. Its for the good of the film, but this was you know—Simon’s gonna laugh when I say this because I said it lots of but—[Pegg joins in in unison] We are actors!

The chance to play any different person or different character is what you want to do as an actor. And I’d kind of argue that Danny and Ed are very different characters. Ed is quite cynical and lazy and Danny is just a big, lovely labrador, you know? And so the chance to be a kind of hard knot and to be the kind of moral voice of the audience essentially at certain points in this film is a great challenge. And also I get to kick arse.

LD: And rip your shirt off.
Frost: That was the only thing I put my foot down. Edgar wanted me to rip my whole shirt off so essentially I would be topless for the second half of the film and I had to say no.
Pegg: Which was a relief because it was winter.
Frost: Well I’ve got quite a lot of tattoos so the coverage of tattoos would have been an issue. And also, it don’t look s’good!
Pegg: I beg to differ!
Frost: But it got cold it got up to minus ten at night when we were shooting.

All three men elaborated on the amazing stunt work in the film, choreographed by frequent Jackie Chan collaborator, Bradley James Allan:
Pegg: The important thing for us was that we, in all the fight sequences in the movie, we retained the characters. Often in films when you cut to action sequences, stunt performers have to take over and as such, the characters that the actors have created vanish slightly in favor of the action. What we really wanted to do was make sure that the characters were maintained throughout the action and that meant us doing it…And we always wanted it to be the case where it’s like we’re—particularly for Nick’s character—all this simmering rage that he has, all this resentment towards Gary, all this kind of dissatisfaction that he has with his own life it just bursts out of him like—we used to call him the Pink Hulk because he had a pink shirt on underneath—and Andy turns into the pink Hulk. And each of them have a different—like Gary fights one handed because he’s trying to protect his pint. Andy, you know, fights like a berserker. Paddy [Considine], because he’s a boxing fan, uses all these great big haymakers like a brawler. Martin [Freeman]’s always wriggling out of stuff—
Frost: Like a hobbit!
Pegg: Which he picked up from somewhere, I don’t know. So yeah, it was all very much there in the script.
Frost: Eddie [Marsan]’s the coward.
Pegg: Eddie hides under tables. Which is funny because Eddie’s pretty handy. Eddie’s got some good punches.
Frost: Yeah he is, he trains a lot to be a fighter.
Pegg: He’s a little East End boxer.
Frost: He does “Ray Donovan” so he spends a lot of time in the boxing ring
Edgar Wright: What we tried to do is not actually use like…If you have a scene in an action film and you have like there’s a waiter who looks particularly tall and muscly, you know that he’s going to go through a window at some point. So like you can kind of pick out, that’s a stunt man, that’s a stunt man, that’s a stunt woman. What we tried to do with this was have people you wouldn’t—when you see those five kids, you don’t expect it. They’re kids. And the lead guy is fifteen years old. So you don’t expect him to be in a fight. And then they do all of their own stunts… And that was something I said to Brad Allan, our choreographer. I did a scene in Hot Fuzz, I ended up cutting out of the movie because it didn’t really work, it was a scene where Simon arrested some kids and so I said ‘I really wanna do this fight scene, but do you think we could get teenage stunt men?’ He goes ‘Absolutely, we got circus schools, tumblers, gymnasts, martial artists…’ and so the kids in that sequence are from the ages of fifteen to twenty. And they’re amazing.

LD: Going way back to Lee Ingleby’s crew in “Spaced” [Wright’s 1999-2001 sitcom starring Pegg and Frost], through the hoodies in Hot Fuzz, do you just have a distrust of youths gathering anywhere together?
Wright:  think a central theme is no matter how young you think you are, there’s always someone younger. That fear of being usurped by the people like are sort of like ‘Oh my god, that fifteen year old is gonna kick my ass!’ The emasculation of being beaten up by somebody younger than you, I think it’s that kind of fear. I think once actually Nick in London got mugged by a bunch of teenagers which is like an extremely distressing thing because hey, you know, you might be twenty-eight but these fifteen year olds…they’re are gonna kick your ass! And it’s just a horrible horrible thing. I think it’s just a part of the nightmare of emasculation of being beaten up by teenagers, people fifteen years younger than you.

At what point in working with Edgar did the word trilogy come up?
Simon Pegg: I think probably on the Hot Fuzz press tour when we realized we had been able to make two films and those films were in essence connected. You know, sort of tonal sequels in a way, in that they were not directly sequels—not the same character stories obviously—but they were definitely variations on a theme. And we figured if we could possibly be able to do it again, we could wrap it up as a sort of nice Hegelian whole. As a threesome as it were. And do it again. So we refined the ideas we had started on. It wasn’t like we set out to make the trilogy. We would never be so arrogant as to assume we would be able to make three films.
Nick Frost: I think one was enough.
Pegg: Yeah.
Frost: I think we thought, being British filmmakers we were lucky to make one, you know. [laughter] It’s true!
Pegg: We didn’t think it would come out there, let alone here.
Frost: We thought, if we could sell it to Lufthansa and they show it on the flight, we’ll be lucky. And you know, we get a chance to make Hot Fuzz and then that seemed the logical thing to do really.
Wright added:  …The fact that Hot Fuzz was shot in my hometown so I’d had that experience of being back in my hometown very vividly. So it was very much preying on my mind and that’s where it starts to factor into this of the idea of the homecoming…But then we decided we would go off our separate ways and do separate projects and in a way I think we wouldn’t have written the same script six years ago. Because the nice thing is actually, not to get older, but to actually deal with that in movie. Shaun of the Dead, which we shot ten years ago is a film about he’s a twenty-nine year old about to turn thirty. And then in this film, they’re forty…I feel like when I watch a lot of the American “man child” comedies, sometimes I always think it’s kind of forced because there are people who–there’s that thing of being a big kid forever is always glorified– but never really scratches below the surface. In reality a lot of those actors are married and have kids and so I think it’s a good thing to do these movies and actually acknowledge that the characters are older. So I think in that way, me and Simon, it was great going away—it’s not like we didn’t see each other in six years, we’re like best friends– but it was the first time we’d written together in like five years.

Was it different coming back to write together after so long?
Wright: No if anything, I think it was easier in a way. I think out of the three, Hot Fuzz was the most difficult one to write. Because I think we realized that Agatha Christie is a genius and that murder mystery is really hard! We would have kind of the constant headache of trying to figure out the mystery plot…But the nice thing about this is we had the story, we had the plot and then like it was just like a huge outpouring of personal experience. Of like everything from our upbringing. Once you’ve got the story, I think the first thing that we did when we started talking about it was just start talking about personal experience. All of that stuff goes straight into the movie. So it is like, Shaun of the Dead too, but this one is definitely the most personal because so many themes of it are just straight from our experience. Everything from the sister [Sam, played by Rosamund Pike] is based on a real person…the bully is based on a really person. The experience of—I went back to my home town and a number of times after I’d left to live in London and I remember vividly one of the things that sparked the whole thing was going back to my hometown, going to a pub, and seeing your school bully, who didn’t recognize me. And I wasn’t sure whether he didn’t know who I was anymore or didn’t care. But the fact that he didn’t acknowledge me at all made me so mad. I didn’t want him to acknowledge me! And I certainly didn’t want to get into anything. But I was so mad because I was thinking ‘does he not recognize me, this guy?’ So things had just stuck. That’s something that happened like fifteen years ago, but it stuck with me. And so that’s what’s great about doing these films is that things you’ve been thinking about for a long time then just come flooding in. Then it just becomes like a whole like ‘this is the plot of the movie.’

Is this the end of the trio?
Wright: I think this, we thought would be nice to be a piece. It’s not like a trilogy in terms of they’re three of the same movie, it’s more like a triptych of three separate films that can be viewed separately or together. You know, separately they can be Kelly, Michelle and Beyonce, but together they’re Destiny’s Child.

LD: Who’s Beyonce?!
Wright: I don’t know! I don’t want to pick any favorites!

It might be a few years until we do another one. But this is not the end of us working together. Because we love working together so we’d like to do other stuff. But it might be something radically different next time.

The World’s End releases in the US on August 23rd, you can read our review of it here.

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Filed Under: Film Interviews, Interviews Tagged With: edgar, frost, nick, pegg, simon, talk, ...

Film Review “The World’s End”

Starring: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Paddy Considine, Eddie Marsan and Martin Freeman
Directed By: Edgar Wright
Focus Features
Rated: R
Running Time: 109 minutes

Our Score: 5 out of 5 stars

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the fantastic ‘Cornetto’ trilogy, it’s don’t let Edgar Wright near your pub. Beginning with the climatic zombie destruction of The Winchester in 2004’s Shaun of the Dead through the collateral damage of all of Sandford’s local establishments in Hot Fuzz and now here in the eleven pubs leading to the twelfth and titular The World’s End, no barstool has been left unsplintered or unweaponized in one man’s struggle against a violent collective. It’s fitting that the oft tapped beer in this final installment is called Crowning Glory as Wright pulls out all the stops to deliver not only another great original action-comedy, but also a heartfelt conclusion to a trio of films that asked their audiences to face up to adulthood even if that also meant facing undead or intergalactic threats along the way.

In this case, the man on a mission is Gary King, a gloriously wild-eyed, drunken Simon Pegg. King brings us up to speed regarding an attempt him and his four mates made on their town’s Golden Mile pub crawl—five guys, twelve pubs, sixty pints. In 1990, they couldn’t complete their mission and King’s never lived it down. While his four friends have grown up into normal lives, King retains all the trappings of his youth from his Sisters of Mercy tee to the mix cassette in his car’s tape deck. Getting no reaction to his epic pub tale from his Alcoholics-Anonymous-like support group, Gary resolves to get his men back together for another try. He faces the harshest resistance from Andy (Nick Frost), his one time best friend, but having duped the other three men (Paddy Considine, Eddie Marsan and Martin Freeman) to get on board first by lying about his complicity, Andy grudgingly joins in.

In their hometown, the friends find everything the same and yet strangely alien. The pubs    have lost their individuality, the town center marred by Modern Art (a statue that looks like Thor‘s Destroyer, which can’t be a good sign). Worst of all, none of the residents seem to recall or acknowledge any of Gary’s crew. Either the residents of the town are not themselves or they never really cared at all to begin with. The first of many illuminating realizations for Gary is that the discovery the residents really aren’t themselves because of a robotic threat is actually a relief compared to the alternative. At the very least, it keeps King’s crew united in battle right at the point in Gary’s desperate mission where they’re all just about to go home.

The action scenes are the most creative you’re likely to see this year with Gary’s other worldly opponents offering plenty of surprises while not being completely invulnerable (sometimes a problem in your summer action flicks). There’s a video-game like playfulness to a couple of the best sequences that I can only think were strengthened through Wright’s Pegg-and-Frost-free work on Scott Pilgrim vs The World. Similarly on the human side, every man brings their own skill set to the struggle from Andy’s simmering Hulk-like rage, to Gary’s one-handed defense of his glass of beer. It translates to the physical comedy actually maintaining the level of rapid fire laughs that Wright’s writing is known for.

In between the drinking and the brawls, the men gradually fall into the roles of their teenage selves in the group which allows for touching emotional moments as they confront their own unfinished business completely separate from the pub crawl. Particularly moving and early in the film is Eddie Marsan’s Pete reacting to the utter indifference shown to him by his once school bully.

Fitting for the film, I remember my own sixteen year old self doing my best to get the word out on Shaun of the Dead in my high school newspaper and am elated to report that this trio of films has never dipped in quality. What a relief that we’ve made it through so many other apocalyptic films  this year unscathed in order to get to Wright’s crowning glory.

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Filed Under: Film Reviews Tagged With: film, review, worlds

Film Review “Paranoia”

Starring: Liam Hemsworth, Gary Oldman, Harrison Ford, Amber Heard and Richard Dreyfuss
Directed By: Robert Luketic
Relativity Media
Rated: PG-13
Running Time: 109 minutes

Our Score: 1.5 out of 5 stars

Paranoia, paranoia, Gary Oldman’s coming to get me. Or is it Harrison Ford? Unfortunately it really doesn’t matter in the film Paranoia as this amazing cast’s greatest weapons are sadly their cell phones and techie babbling.

The film centers on Adam Cassidy (Liam Hemsworth), a young employee at a major tech company whose group is about to propose a smart phone concept to the intimidating Nicolas Wyatt (cockney Gary Oldman). The proposal’s a failure and Adam’s entire peer work group are abruptly fired. Immediately they all turn to heavy drinking on the not-yet-cancelled corporate credit card. Despite his stupidity in this decision, Wyatt decides Adam’s just the man to infiltrate the company of his equally tech-savvy rival, Jock Goddard (Harrison Ford). Helping Adam on his mission is that in his drunken celebration he just happened to have sex with the rival company’s marketing woman, Emma (Amber Heard). Of all the bars in all of New York…Also coincidentally, Emma has the highest level of access in the Pentagon-level security surrounding Goddard’s new smart phone. If you’re already questioning a lot of the logic in this setup, you get the gist of what you’re in for. The questions never stop piling up.

I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise that a film titled Paranoia is actually fairly self aware but blatantly stating it’s own flaws as when Goddard calls out protagonist Adam for being nothing but “a tool, an empty vessel” in his fight with Wyatt seems a bit much. Even if director Luketic’s usage of Hemsworth seems to actually be something akin to a man fatale to exec Emma. This emptiness in our hero isn’t the only lack of personality in this film, virtually no one here is playing a real human. Richard Dreyfuss appears as Hemsworth’s sickly father whose care drives Adam’s financial need to work for Wyatt. He’s there to be used as bait and do little else, though he does manage to wring some laughs out of his curmudgeonly character. Likewise, while it’s exciting to think of Harrison Ford having a snarl off with Gary Oldman, when they’re both saddled with the specs of fictional smart phones, you actually get really bored. In one scene, cell phones were treated with such over the top suspicion that I was tempted to thinking the film had been sent through that controversial process E.T. underwent some years back where guns were actually replaced with walkie talkies for the family audience. Unfortunately not the case.

Finally, despite all its late in the film twists, Paranoia remains completely predictable. For this reason the movie unfortunately lives down that mid-August/end of summer of mainly just being forgettable.

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Filed Under: Film Reviews Tagged With: film, paranoia, review

Film Review “Byzantium”

Starring: Gemma Arterton, Saoirse Ronan, Caleb Landry Jones, Jonny Lee Miller and Sam Riley
Directed By: Neil Jordan
Rated: R
Distributed by: StudioCanal
Running Time: 118 minutes

Our Score: 4 out of 5 stars

It’s been nearly twenty years between Neil Jordan’s gorgeous star-filled adaptation of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire and this new bloodsucker story, an interim which has really seen the genre stretched to its limits. It is with great relief then to report that despite having a sixteen year old lead, Byzantium has much more in common with that 1994 classic than Twilight or any of its pretenders. While not quite reaching the sprawling grandeur of Interview, it manages to create its own lore and is worth a watch for its two powerhouse leading women.

The film follows Clara (Gemma Arterton) and Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan), a mother-daughter vampire team who have been eking out a living on the road for the past two centuries. Unable to create a stable home for themselves as they’re chased by a patriarchal secret society, the two women take drastically divergent approaches to handling their bloodlust. Clara, who we meet in a modern strip club, has grown alongside The Oldest Profession—picking off those who, to her mind, “the world would be a more beautiful place” without—while Eleanor takes a more euthanasic approach. The younger one steals into the rooms of the dying and gently sees them off. Their most recent home base here is the titular Byzantium hotel that Clara commandeers from a lonely client of hers (Daniel Mays) for use as a brothel. As the society in pursuit of the women gets closer, we watch in flashbacks their vampiric origins and how they came to cross these men. All the while Eleanor is trying to rebel against mother Clara by sharing their story with others. Clara never lacks company, while Eleanor is in need of actual connection.

The film’s main strength lies in its cast. Saoirse Ronan is perfect as the perpetual sixteen year old. Despite minimal bloodshed, her interactions with her victims are among the most chilling moments in the film. In one standout scene Eleanor is forced to defend her life story to an incredulous creative writing professor when the assignment was for pupils to write something true. You can sense the centuries old fatigue in Ronan’s youthful face as she calmly lays out to this professor why its impossible for her to prove her immortality in this moment, but one day… It’s a performance that may remind you of Ronan’s icy breakout role in Joe Wright’s Atonement, another character who sought to work out her troubled life through writing. Meanwhile, Arterton’s Clara is just as magnetic. Under the cover of her sexual confidence (and a jaw-dropping wardrobe to match) is layered a much more desperate mother who’s still trying to support her child in the only ways she knows how. Only eight years apart in real life, some of Arterton and Ronan’s best scenes feature all-too-human “mother knows best” type arguments which really sell their relationship. Clara means well, but her growing fear of even her two hundred year old baby going off into the world throws her into a frenzy which makes Arterton increasingly scary while remaining sympathetic. The leading ladies are also given excellent support from the likes of Tom Hollander, Caleb Landry Jones, Jonny Lee Miller and Sam Riley. Riley and Miller greatly boost the somewhat slower flashback sequences as soldiers from whom Clara originally stole the route to immortality from in the 1800s. These scenes are gorgeously shot (by Sean Bobbitt of Shame) but tend to linger more than necessary while the modern scenes hold more forward momentum.

Byzantium is also notable for its casual disregard of some of the more famous vampire “rules.” Daylight isn’t preferred but nor is it deadly, everyone casts reflections and so forth. Most strikingly, it’s fangless, opting instead for a growing thumbnail spike that called to my mind the pointed ring that Tom Cruise’s Lestat used in Interview. Such touches keep the traditional horror aspects—and blood loss— to a minimum and shift the focus instead to the relationships of these immortals to each other. That’s not to say the film isn’t without some shocking gore moments—a decapitation in the first five or so minutes will dispel this notion anyway—but that it’s not the primary focus of the film and it really doesn’t need to be. It’s a haunting, visually beautiful film that while slow at times, warrants revisiting this often seen genre.

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Filed Under: Film Reviews Tagged With: byzantium, film, review

Film Review “Maniac”

Starring: Elijah Wood, America Olivo, Nora Arnezeder
Directed By: Franck Khalfoun
Rated: R
Running Time: 89 minutes

Our Score: 2.5 out of 5 stars

This updated Maniac is an improvement on the original in every way. Whether or not this is a recommendation depends heavily upon your opinion of William Lustig’s 1980 cult film. It is definitely not for the squeamish.

Maniac follows Frank (Elijah Wood, more from Sin City than the Shire) a loner who lives in a warehouse with a collection of mannequins he restores for a living. When he’s not at this, he’s prowling an eerie, deserted Los Angeles for female victims to kill and scalp due to some serious mommy issues. Actually, we don’t follow Frank so much as actually get inside his head. The best way to describe Maniac’s dominant visual style is “first person stabber.” It’s an interesting gimmick to take the famed slasher POV in a horror film and just stay in it, however it eventually wears out its welcome as I felt some motion sickness setting in. Thankfully, director Franck Khalfoun does opt to exit Frankvision for some of the key murder scenes in order to underscore his loss of control over his darker side, as well as to showcase some truly remarkable gore from KNB effects. The climatic bloody finale which brings Frank’s victims back to attack is really something to see here.

Frank’s killing spree is disrupted by Anna (Nora Arnezeder) a photographer who finds Frank’s mannequins appealing subjects for her upcoming gallery show. The interactions of Wood and Arnezeder are one of the film’s strengths. Anna here is much sweeter and the considerably younger Wood looks more believable than Joe Spinell’s Frank trying to fit in with his future victims. Just the idea that Anna’s appreciation for Frank’s work is what draws her to his shop makes for a much stronger tension as to whether or not Frank will treat her the same as all the other ill-fated women who have crossed his path. After inhabiting the
disgusting Frank it’s a relief to have a sympathetic character to grasp onto when Anna comes along.

Having better drawn characters than the 1980 movie still doesn’t leave us with much depth though. Besides being a remake, the film also features nods to other genre films such as Silence of the Lambs and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Maniac does not fare well in drawing these comparisons. Despite all the stylish upgrades from the original, Maniac will most likely still appeal to only the most diehard gorehounds.

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Filed Under: Film Reviews Tagged With: film, maniac, review

Jackson Publick & Doc Hammer talk about the 5th season of “The Venture Brothers”

Debuting in 2003, The Venture Brothers follows the animated misadventures of super scientist and former “boy adventurer,” Dr. Thaddeus ‘Rusty’ Venture, his Hardy-Boy-like teen sons Hank and Dean, and their self-proclaimed arch nemesis, The Monarch. The show has created an amazing universe of heroes, villains and henchmen throughout its first four seasons while sending up everything from Johnny Quest to Hunter S. Thompson. Leading up to this Sunday’s fifth season premiere on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, creators, co-writers and stars, Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer got on the phone to discuss the show’s diverse roster of characters, super science, and the challenges of animating convincing tin foil jokes.

Lauren Damon: Your show revolves around a lot of Super Scientists, is there anything in actual modern science that’s freaked you out or sounded like something from the show?
Doc Hammer:  I’m personally not that educated. So I’m personally not up on actual scientific discovery.
Jackson Publick: I have recently subscribed to Popular Science.
Doc: So he knows all the things that are popular.
Jackson: I’m super excited that they might be figuring out warp speed and when they grew a human ear on a mouse’s, I’ve never forgotten that.

LD: How about the 3D printers?
Jackson: I’m not that excited by the 3D printer—Somebody showed me a Green Lantern ring they made with a 3D printer the other night. Actually it was a White Lantern ring, calling it a “White Power” ring, which is weird!
Doc: Do you have to wear glasses for the 3D printer?
Jackson: No, it’s a printer that makes a 3D object for you. Out of like, resin or something, it just carves this thing for you.
Doc: Oh yes. You know what? Those are more like 3D fax machines than they are 3D printers.

LD: You have so many characters on the show, do you find that you have favorites to write or watch interactions between?
Doc: Oh yeah, you can tell just by watching the show.
Jackson: Yeah, you can tell who we’ve turned into pairs, we like those guys.
Doc: And you’ll start seeing pairings that are not appropriate. Like Hank and 21 for some reason are weird pairing…
Jackson: Yeah, yeah.
Doc: They’ve been together and we kind of keep throwing them together because they interact well. Because they both have this kind of love and exuberance. And then there are just classic pairs. I mean 21 and 24. Even though we murdered one…
Jackson: I like when we put 21 and the Monarch together.
Doc: 21 and the Monarch is another…I think when we put them with The Monarch, he was trying to hang out with them…That’s when we realized these guys will interact well because they’re so different.
Jackson: And the power dynamics of their relationship—
Doc: Yea.
Jackson: ‘The creepy boss is trying to be my friend now…I don’t know what to say, he shoots guys sometimes when he doesn’t like what they say.’
Doc: Yeah, and weird combinations show up. Billy and Doc are funny because Billy dresses Doc down a lot. It’s an odd combination—
Jackson: Also he lifts him up a little bit.
Doc: He does! He does, because he fanboys on him. But at the same time he—
Jackson: Yea he’s like ‘I can’t believe that’s what a fucking mess the thing I’m fanboying about has become!’
Doc: Yeah, it’s a weird thing. It’s a weird thing because he loves Rusty Venture but I think he can barely tolerate Dr. Venture.
Jackson: ‘Please try once try to be what you used to be!’
Doc: [In Billy Quizboy’s voice] “I used to love you and you’re nobody! You’re a horrible person!”

LD: Last season, with the death of Henchman 24, Henchman 21 went through so many changes, did you anticipate such an arc when you singled out these henchmen at the beginning?
Doc: Oh no, those two guys were anonymous henchmen!
Jackson:Yeah, we just got sick of them being anonymous. And we liked two voices we did.
Doc: Yeah they were made up on the spot. I mean it was just two voices that we used to do while reading people’s emails. [Both laugh] So we just put them in the show. I mean, I remember when it first happened, you know Jackson was trying to do that every time we would get a nerdy e-mail. He would get like 21 and then he did that weird Ray Romano voice. We just did it not knowing that these characters would be around for ten years.

LD: What type of e-mail would instigate the Romano voice?
Jackson: It was just him. I think we would just pick on him because we had like watched like past episodes—
Doc: We would pick on him and we would use his use his voice for just being not us but not being a character on the show. But now we can’t.
Jackson: Right. To express the opinion of someone—usually a negative one. [in Henchman 24’s Romano voice] ‘HEY WAY TO GOOOOO’
Doc: ‘GOOD JOB.’ That kind of crap.

LD: And, as opposed to 21, which character do you think has changed the least over the course of the show?
Doc: Has changed the least? Doc, actually.
Jackson: Yeah.
Doc: He’s gone through a lot of revelations but his basic character has not changed so much. Even Brock has had more changes than Doc has and Brock is rock steady.
Jackson: Even Hank has had more changes.
Doc: Hank, the boys, have had a lot of changed.

LD: Your characters have such great names, working on this for ten years are you  just constantly thinking of new potential characters?
Doc: It’s like a bi-annual thing.
Jackson: Yeah, I forget the good ones…
Doc: I think both of us have notebooks filled with idiot names and then there are actual documents of names of episodes that don’t exist. Like “Return to Spider Skull Island” was just a bad episode name that we wrote around.

LD: Does that happen often?
Doc: More than it should. I don’t know about often.
Jackson: Probably yeah, like two episodes out of every season we like, just have a working title the whole time we’re making it and then when we’re making the credits, we have an argument about what to name it and then we both make a list of about forty things and try to hone in on one.
Doc: Oh yeah. The amount—just like the season premiere, we both probably wrote forty different titles for. All of them would have been fine in anybody else’s book, and of these eighty, of the eighty titles that we came up with “What Color is Your Cleansuit?” was the one that we liked. Which is insane. That was just a good one for us.

LD: Any names from season five that you’re particularly excited about that you can share?
Doc: We’re very particularly excited about season five, but we can’t give out any spoilers because season five is coming and the episodes themselves—
Jackson: Oh! You can drop a name out, can’t you?
Doc: What? Titles? Characters?
Jackson: Or name.
Doc: Go ahead! I’m not gonna do it. I have a firm line on spoilers. But you can do it.
Jackson: We’ve already told people that there is an Augustus St. Cloud. Which we were excited about him this season. He exists. What’s the best episode title do you think?
Doc: Best episode title?! Pick yours…Mine are awful.
Jackson: [laughing]
Doc:  I have awful episode titles. They’re always awful. Name one of yours. One of yours that isn’t clever or just stupid. Those are my favorites.
Jackson: Right.
Doc: “O. S. I Love You” is a good title.
Jackson: There ya go.
Doc: That’s not bad.

LD: You’ve had a lot of gross stuff on the show—half-formed clones and skinsuits are jumping to mind—has there been anything that’s made you as grateful as I am that it’s all animated?
Doc: Like disgusting things that happened? Well nobody wants to see anybody turn into a caterpillar, we did that in episode three.
Jackson: Oh that would look so much better if we did it in episode five.
Doc: Oh, right? Yeah…
Jackson: It really just kind of looked like he was wearing a caterpillar costume, it was very just flat and stiff back then.
Doc: Some of the things that we do are bad ideas. Like we make a lot of jokes that really don’t work as well in cartoons as we think. Like we made a terry cloth joke. And you can’t animate terry cloth. It looks just like color.
Jackson: Right, or tin foil. We did eventually get good tin foil though…
Doc: We kept asking for tin foil and eventually we got tin foil.
Jackson: We did the worst tin foil hats for season one and then we did like amazing ones last season that the Korean studio even called us and went ‘Hey, can you simplify the tin foil design please?’ It was like five hundred facets of tin foil…
Doc: And you couldn’t really move it. You could only draw it once and then have tin foil floating. The first season just looked like a gray hat—
Jackson: Like a gray walnut shell is what it looked like.
Doc: Yeah, you knew it was tin foil. But you can’t make tinfoil jokes, you can’t make terry cloth jokes—
Jackson: My god, I want to make corduroy jokes so bad!
Doc: And you can’t show corduroy because you can’t really animate corduroy…
Jackson: I know!
Doc: We can barely get a car to turn the corner nicely. We’re never gonna get corduroy on that screen.

Venture Brothers premieres Sunday, June 2nd on Cartoon Network. Also making a return this year is the show’s exclusive weekly Shirt Club, not seen since season three. More info can be found, here. 

In the meantime, Adult Swim has released a full four-season recap video hosted by Henchman 21 to get you all ready for the new season!

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Filed Under: Interviews, TV Interviews Tagged With: 5th, brothers, doc, hammer, jackson, publick, ...
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