The Witch

***1/2 out of ****

When it comes to cinema that dares to break away from the norm, the movie industry allows artists more freedom in the horror genre than any other. Moviegoers often desire familiar faces, conventional narratives and happy endings - when they’re going to a movie for a laugh, a moving experience or a non-stop thrill-ride. When it comes to getting a big scare, however, a lot of people are willing to put those requirements aside so long as they can expect to see very nasty things happen to terrified characters on the screen.

I’m disgusted by this observation, but I always stop to acknowledge when a work of effective art has been produced, even if it takes a built-in audience of sadists for it to happen.

Robert Eggers’ The Witch is a horror fantasy set in seventeenth century New England and begins as a father tells leaders of his Puritan town that he intends to guide his family down a more righteous path. Shortly thereafter, the family begins a new life in a territory near a heavily wooded area. The oldest daughter in the family is burdened with heavy responsibilities but enjoys looking after her infant brother until, one day, he vanishes.

Without the slightest sense of ambiguity, the movie lets us know that a satanic elderly female dwells in the woods and the baby’s fate is displayed with the kind of sparing horror that leaves it to your imagination to visualize worse things than the movie will show you.

With the disappearance of their youngest resulting in despairing misery of the mother along with the general struggle to survive off the land, the family begins to believe they have been cursed. Fingers are pointed at the older sister for being present whenever sinister happenings occur. Unfunny madness ensues.

The Witch is a deeply unsettling film but it dodges the gratifying tropes of most horror movies and feels closer to the patient character examination of Michael Haneke’s the White Ribbon or other slow-paced scary stories about people who compromise their love and morality in response to fear. The movie has a dreary yet natural tone with no overt digital manipulations that I could detect. All of the dialogue is spoken in a credible sounding Early Modern English. This is possibly the gutsiest aspect of the film, but leave it to a determined new distribution studio like A24 to get behind a film that takes this kind of risk.

Anya Taylor-Joy plays the unimpeachable daughter bound for needless punishment, whose perspective dominates the majority of the film; Harvey Scrimshaw plays her brother who rises to the challenge of a very difficult scene late in the film; the mother is played by the sharp featured Kate Dickie whom some may recognize from Game of Thrones (where she played another hysterical mother); but the father leaves the strongest impression through the performance of Ralph Ineson, whose rich guttural voice inspires intimidation despite all the doubt it conceals.

This movie is more likely to scare people out of the theater for being history lesson with dialogue that is difficult to discern but those who stay will be treated to a nightmare world informed by old superstitions that will leave a sense of deep dread. The Witch does not aim to satisfy; it aims to haunt everyone –even the philistine sadists who go to see it without reading anything about it ahead of time.

Deadpool

***1/2 out of ****

Deadpool is a welcome February release because it’s a movie the studio probably considered to be “risky.” This isn’t because it’s bad like so many other beginning-of-the-year releases. Despite the built-in audience for comic book movies, R-rated films that wield child-like escapism for the sake of displaying gruesome violence starring amoral heroes who display dark humor (that is often in very bad taste) has the potential to upset some people.

Tim Miller’s debut film fulfills this potential in ways that should make the likes of Kevin Smith and Robert Rodriguez very envious. It’s fearlessly filled with the unfiltered aggression of an angst-filled young man without the slightest concern for who may be turned-off by the smartass anti-hero that is Wade Wilson… aka Deadpool.

With temptation to see the broadly appealing Zoolander 2 or even the progressive chick-flick How to be Single over Valentine’s weekend, I shamefully decided to favor the guy-centric comic violence filled with perfect trope-bashing voice-over narration by the film’s star Ryan Reynolds - which may rival Robert Downey Jr.’s in the very similar film, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

Following some of the funniest opening credits I’ve ever read (next to Monty Python andthe Holy Grail's), the movie introduces our unethical superhero in the midst of a huge carnage filled freeway chase that is broken up by flashbacks explaining his origin and the deranged part of the Marvel Universe where he lives.

Wilson was a dirty-work mercenary for hire who met the love of his life (the lovely Morena Baccarin) shortly before he was diagnosed with a terminal form of cancer. Wilson was then recruited by a sinister organization that promised him a cure along with extraordinary powers if he worked for them. Needless to say, Wilson is deformed in the experiment and the organization turns out to be evil beyond anything he can abide. Assuming the name Deadpool, he goes off on his own and vows to destroy the organization that created him.

Even if the plot sounds familiar, this is a comedy movie and a very funny one. The soundtrack is filled with some hilariously strange song selections for a comic book movie, the pop-cultural references speak to an entire generation of moviegoers and the PS at the end of the credits is the first time I’ve seen a spoof of another film’s PS.

It’s easy to withhold top recommendations for a snarky carefree movie and if it weren’t for a few places where this film’s energy felt tiresome, I would call it a great film. It certainly is a breath of fresh anarchistic air when compared to the current climate of “universe-building” that dominates the world of big-budget filmmaking. Deadpool is a gleefully free movie in all of its cinematic playfulness.

While Kingsman: The Secret Service was not among my favorite films last year, I'm glad that along with Deadpool, it shows evidence that Twentieth Century Fox is willing to take their Marvel properties in an adult direction, rather than follow the other studios in the pathetic attempt to capture Disney's broad age-range crowd.

With that being said, let me stress that you don’t bring your grandparents or your little kids to this movie you idiot.

Hail, Caesar!

*** out of ****

With Hail, Caesar! the Coen Brothers have made a film that exists as a playground for everything they love: Kidnapping plots, classic Hollywood, cultural stereotypes, ineffectual radicals, cowboys, and character actors as far as the eye can see. The movie is another stylistic exercise in their tendency to produce entertaining yet meaningless stories made up of rich aesthetics accompanied by brilliantly clever dialogue exchanges.

Set in 1950s Hollywood, the story focuses on a movie studio executive (Josh Brolin) who is swamped with fixer tasks to cover up scandals and protect the image of people under contract. The studio’s biggest star (George Clooney) - while in the middle of shooting an over-budgeted biblical epic - has been kidnapped by an organization called "The Future” who demand ransom money.

Meanwhile the simple-minded movie B-movie star (Alden Ehrenreich) of singing cowboy pictures finds himself in the middle of strange studio dealings when he’s cast against type in a romantic drama much to the dismay of a regal director (Ralph Fiennes).

The movie is filled with many actors getting a chance to shine with this material (Channing Tatum, Scarlett Johansson, and Tilda Swinton all have their share of fun too) but don’t expect to be swept up in a grander type of Coen experience. This isn’t Raising Arizona or The Big Lewbowski and it’s certainly not A Serious Man. This is more like Burn After Reading – if that title alone gives you the right idea. Temporary gratification is often found in the Coens large body of work, but the experience is usually worth it.

Anomalisa

***1/2 out of ****

Strange experimental works of cinema rarely wind up on the big screen lately. As the demographic that enjoys analytical thinking during a movie continues to prefer staying at home, we can expect fewer movies like Anomalisa slowly make their way into multiplexes across the country regardless of its accolades (This film has an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature). Charlie Kaufman’s second directorial outing is co-directed by animator Duke Johnson to create a stop-motion journey through a depressed man’s mid-life crisis and is not intended for children.

Kaufman’s writing often focuses on artists going to great pains by using impractical methods in order to re-enact the normality of their own lives. John Cusack’s puppeteer character in Being John Malkovich, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s playwright in Synecdoche, New York, and Nicolas Cage’s portrayal of Kaufman himself in Adaptation” are all characters who use art to find connection with themselves and others –but they usually fail.

With Anomalisa the film is representative of this kind of art as we experience one of the most difficult styles of animation going to great lengths to realistically portray the monotony of a middle-aged man staying in a hotel in Cincinnati. The value of this quixotic recreation of everyday tedium is evident in the control that animation offers.

The main character (voice of David Thewlis) is an author and motivational speaker in the area of customer service and the importance of perceiving individuality in clients. With great irony, the world he perceives is made up of people who all have the same generic face and the same voice (Tom Noonan). It is only at the film’s midpoint that he falls madly in love with a guest in the hotel who has a different face and voice (Jennifer Jason Leigh).

The film succeeds in its mission to present mundane human existence in a way that feels compellingly dreamy and surreal, but its structure feels a little off. The 90-minute runtime was actually the augmentation of a short film concept. When it ended, I was almost prepared for another act to the story.

I found Kaufman's first film as director, Senecdoche, New York, to be so filled with despair that I feared it to be the beginning of a new period for him as an artist who has stopped caring for his audience -which the film was about. I am glad that Anomalisa is slightly more accessible even if it is bound to turn a lot of people off in a time when theatergoers would rather come together to watch characters dying horribly than reflect the common problem of human disconnection.