Regression

For F*** Magazine

REGRESSION

Director: Alejandro Amenábar
Cast : Ethan Hawke, Emma Watson, David Thewlis, Lothaire Bluteau, David Dencik, Aaron Ashmore
Genre : Thriller
Run Time : 107 mins
Opens : 3 December 2015
Rating : NC-16 (Sexual Scenes)

Ethan Hawke is out to unearth diabolical secrets in a small town in this mystery thriller. Hawke plays Detective Bruce Kenner of Hoyer, Minnesota, who is investigating the case of John Gray (Dencik). Gray confesses that he sexually assaulted his daughter Angela (Watson) but has no recollection of it. It is 1990 and the wave of “Satanic panic” sweeping America is at its height. Kenner begins to suspect that a devil-worshipping cult might have a hand in the case. Psychology professor Kenneth Raines (Thewlis) is called upon to perform “regression hypnosis”, a therapy intended to unlock repressed memories. Kenner goes to meet with Angela, clearly troubled and now under the care of Reverend Murray (Bluteau). Nobody is above suspicion, including Kenner’s partner, Detective George Nesbitt (Ashmore). As Kenner becomes more preoccupied with the case, he is afflicted by horrifying nightmares – but are they just dreams or something far more sinister?

            Regression is written and directed by Spanish filmmaker Alejandro Amenábar, whose best-known English language film is the Nicole Kidman-starring supernatural thriller The Others. While gloomy, oppressive atmosphere abounds in Regression, actual thrills and scares are scarce. The film claims to be inspired by true events, but it’s referencing the “Satanic panic” of the 80s and early 90s in general rather than any specific case. During this period, many Evangelical Christians were convinced that devil-worshipping, baby-sacrificing cults were operating right under their noses. Regression does that old dance of “maybe something supernatural is afoot, maybe it’s all perfectly explainable,” going around in circles until it reaches its predictable, unsatisfying reveal.

            Hawke has repeatedly proven himself as a talented leading man, but the Bruce Kenner character is a bland protagonist, the likes of which we’ve seen many times before. He’s basically every movie detective ever, yelling at suspects during interrogations, letting the case get under his skin, in danger of being consumed by his quest for the truth, etc. He doesn’t seem to be very good at police work either: if leaping to conclusions were an Olympic sport, then Bruce Kenner would be a gold medallist. This is a movie in which the main character amounts to little more than a plot device.

            Watson is the big draw here, and while she’s certainly competent, she doesn’t get very much to do either. Angela is the scared little girl, the weeping victim. Watson is believable as a small town girl, affecting a convincing accent, but the question of whether Angela is a survivor of unspeakable trauma or is stringing everyone along failed to hook this reviewer’s interest. There is a modicum of amusement to see Thewlis and Watson together onscreen, meaning it’s a Hermione and Remus Lupin reunion. Hoyer is presented as a small town in which everyone is some degree of creepy, though nobody is memorably so. Even Dale Dickey’s crazy cat lady hysterics as Angela’s grandmother Rosie fail to enliven the proceedings.

            Regression partakes in a laundry list of horror clichés, including an obvious, heavy-handed score by Roque Baños, eerie visions of dagger-wielding hooded cultists in white makeup and a jump-scare-by-cat. At the same time, it very much wants to be taken seriously as a grim exposé of how mass paranoia can cloud perception. The hallucinogenic haze never wraps itself around the audience, the spooky misdirection pointless rather than intriguing. Amenábar tries his darndest to sell the movie as a suspenseful mind trip, but most viewers familiar with the genre won’t be fooled for a second. Offering neither riveting tension nor all-out scares, Regression is dour and unsatisfying.

Summary: Regression is ominous in its atmosphere but obvious in its plotting, actors Hawke and Watson unable to imbue it with any energy.

RATING: 2 out of 5 Stars

Jedd Jong 

Noah

For F*** Magazine

NOAH

Director: Darren Aronofsky
Cast:         Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Ray Winstone, Logan Lerman, Emma Watson, Douglas Booth, Anthony Hopkins, Leo McHugh Carroll, Nick Nolte
Genre: Drama, Adventure
Run Time: 140 mins
Opens: 3 April 2014
Rating: NC-16 (Some mature content and violence)

“Survival at sea” movies seem to be making a comeback: over the last two years, we’ve seen Life of Pi and All is Lost, with Unbroken due later this year. Darren Aronofsky delivers his take on what might be the original survival at sea story with Noah. It has been ten generations since the creation of Adam and Eve, and Noah (Crowe) receives visions from God foretelling a great flood that will annihilate humankind, who has become wicked and violent. Noah is tasked with building an ark to shelter one male and one female of every animal during the flood. His wife Naameh (Connelly), sons Shem (Booth), Ham (Lerman) and Japheth (Carroll) and Shem’s wife Ila (Watson) help Noah with his divine mission, but they also witness the torment brewing within Noah. The vicious self-proclaimed king Tubal-Cain (Winstone) refuses to acknowledge the prophecy of the flood and leads his men against Noah. The fallen angels encased in rock known as the Watchers, led by Samyaza (Nolte), protect Noah and his family against the hordes as the waters erupt from the ground and fall from the heavens.



Most book-to-film adaptations are of full-length novels, and the first step in such adaptations is often trimming the material down to size and condensing it. The story of Noah is found in Chapters 6-9 of the book of Genesis in the Bible: it’s a short story that’s told matter-of-factly and this adaptation involves a good deal of expansion. Aronofsky set about making a film that would defy expectations associated with a Biblical movie, while staying true to the letter of the text – something definitely easier said than done. This is a filmmaker whose works include the provocative, disturbing likes of Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan and whose most technically ambitious film was the trippy The Fountain, so there’s no way he was going to play by established rules. Paramount got cold feet when test screenings last year generated controversy, but Aronofsky fought hard for the preservation of his cut of the film. The Noah audiences are getting stays true to Aronofsky’s vision, but it is easy to see why the studio panicked, and the multiple fades to black seem to indicate there’s still some re-editing that happened.



We don’t go to the movies to be preached to and Noah definitely isn’t a woefully laughable production the way Kirk Cameron’s Left Behind movies were. Aronofsky and co-writers Ari Handel and John Logan train the story’s focus on the humanity of the characters. The internal conflict that arises within Noah’s family and the external conflict provided by Tubal-Cain’s onslaught drive the narrative. All the players have their flaws, and oftentimes said flaws get magnified. The Bible is not a pretty book; many of the stories within are raw and hard to stomach. Aronofsky wanted to flesh out the darkness supposedly inherent in the story of Noah and the great flood, so the handling of the Watchers is particularly curious. In this film, they are fallen angels cursed to be imprisoned in stone, so they end up as rock creatures particularly reminiscent of Ray Harryhausen-style stop-motion movie monsters. In the Bible however, the Watchers lusted after human women, co-habiting with them and spawning the monstrous Nephilim; God bringing about the flood to wipe these giants from the earth. That Noah does not pursue this inherently juicy and fantastical story thread is puzzling.



There’s a lot of angst in this film, an understandable storytelling choice as angst breeds drama. Russell Crowe’s Noah is stoic but burdened with his divinely-appointed task, and as interpreted here, is intent that human beings not get a second chance. Russell Crowe certainly does “tough” and “angry” well; while this is a good performance, it’s not anything very new for him. Jennifer Connelly, who was also Crowe’s on-screen wife in A Beautiful Mind, is a dependable voice of reason as Naameh, who tries to reassure Noah that he loves his children and therefore cannot hate all of mankind.



Ila’s deal is that she is she is barren from a childhood injury and feels inadequate that she will not be able to provide Shem with children. Emma Watson attempts to give Ila a personality of her own, but it does seem like she’s defined by her role within the family. Logan Lerman’s Ham is the rebellious middle child, in danger of being swayed by the aggression and power Ray Winstone’s Tubal-Cain embodies. Winstone is as imposing and grizzled as he usually is and does make for a believable opponent to Noah, though he often falls into the position of “designated antagonist”. The slightest hint of levity in the film is provided by Anthony Hopkins’ Methuselah, Noah’s grandfather and a Yoda-type sage and mentor who misses the taste of berries.



Ideally, a film of this genre melds spectacle and intimate story-telling. It would seem that Noah accomplishes both, what with location filming in Iceland and on a purpose-built ark set at New York’s Planting Fields Arboretum, in addition to boasting the most complicated rendering in visual effects house ILM’s history. However, it sometimes feels like Aronofsky was reluctant to present a visual epic; that he was so intent on depicting a tense family drama that scenes like the masses of birds flocking into the ark were only included out of obligation. There is a time-lapse-heavy montage telling the creation story and illustrating man’s propensity towards conflict with several inventive touches. Perhaps it’s to do with the tonal approach: there’s a difference between “solemn” and “dreary” and most of the time, Noah leans towards the latter, resulting in a lack of sweeping majesty.

Darren Aronofsky wanted Noah to be “different”, and that it is. Filmgoers should appreciate the fact that a director as talented and as unique as Aronofsky was given around $130 million to tackle a story like Noah, rendering a well-worn story new again. It’s not necessarily going to sit well with the personal beliefs of every viewer out there but then again, that’s part of what sets this apart from the crop of Bible flicks – though it is at the expense of staying true to the source material. While the end result is far from watertight, it is interesting, it is sufficiently thought-provoking and taking a good deal of artistic license, the film explores the text as much as it challenges it.

SUMMARY: Far from the cuddly pleasure cruise drawn in so many children’s picture Bibles, Noah is complex, uneven, patchy but uniquely engrossing nonetheless.

RATING: 3 out of 5 Stars

Jedd Jong

The Bling Ring

For F*** Magazine

THE BLING RING

Director: Sofia Coppola
Cast: Katie Chang, Israel Broussard, Emma Watson, Taissa Farmiga, Claire Julien, Georgia Rock, Leslie Mann
Genre: Drama
Run Time: 91 mins
Opens: 12 September 2013
Rating: M18 (Drug Use and Coarse Language)

Celebrity lives have always held a certain fascination for us hoi polloi. Since the golden age of movies, the luxury and glamour enjoyed by the stars of the silver screen has been the source of many a fantasy. From Broadway Brevities and Society Gossip to Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous to TMZ, we seem to have been taught “who needs a private life when material pleasures are no object?” The Bling Ring, based on actual events, follows a posse of teenagers who take the fantasy a step further, endeavouring to live the celebrity lifestyle by way of burglary.

Shy new kid Marc Hall (Broussard) arrives at a Calabasas high school and gets swept up into the world of his new friend Rebecca Ahn (Chang). He is promptly introduced to drugs and larceny, plunging headlong into a risky, exciting new existence. Rebecca’s friends Nicki (Watson), Nicki’s adopted sister Sam (Farmiga) and Chloe (Julien) soon join in the “fun”. Motivated by boredom, bravado and a magpie-like love for shiny things, the group embarks on a serial burglary spree, the likes of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Megan Fox and Brian Austin Green, Audrina Patridge and Orlando Bloom numbering among their celeb victims.



This variety of “true crime” story with its frivolous trimmings seems like the perfect fodder for a Lifetime movie of the week – in fact, one already exists, 2011’s made-for-TV Bling Ring. Sofia Coppola’s take on things is, as can be expected, an artier affair. The director, inspired by Nancy Jo Sales’ Vanity Fair feature The Suspects Wore Louboutins, presents a heady world of youthful abandon and a callous disregard for consequence. However, one gets the feeling that she has held up a mirror to society, but all society seems interested in doing is gazing into that mirror, applying lipstick and preening.

Does The Bling Ring glamourise the illegal activities its protagonists are shown partaking in, or does it critique and examine it? It feels more like the former than the latter, but then again, this comes off as one of those “ah, but that’s how it was intended” movies.

“This is really shallow and vapid!”

“Ah, but that’s how it was intended.”

“I can’t bring myself to root for these characters!”

“Ah, but that’s how it was intended.”

“This movie seems to be trying to say something, but I have no idea what!”

“Ah, but that’s how it was intended.”

The fascination with Bonnie and Clyde-type stories is something that’s mentioned in the film, and “young people doing dangerous things”-type flicks such as Natural Born Killers might come to mind. Thing is, The Bling Ring is to Natural Born Killers what a Chihuahua is to a Pitbull. The frothy frivolity with which the whole thing is coated means any message the movie tries to get across, it ultimately doesn’t. The film focuses on the superficial acts of the breaking and entering bouts without delving into any profound impact it might have had. Perhaps that’s what Coppola was aiming for, less of a polemic and more of a casual observation. This approach will pull some viewers in but will just as easily turn others off.



One of the main draws for the general audience is definitely the casting of Emma Watson. While Katie Chang’s Rebecca is ostensibly the female lead, Watson handily steals the show, at once mesmerizing and intensely annoying. The actress nails the grating vocal cadence of Alexis Neiers, the real-life person on which her character is based; commanding the screen with an air-headed confidence. Props must also be given to newcomer Broussard, whose turn as the naïve neophyte inducted a world of flippant wrongdoing is remarkably natural.

Do the Hollywood Hills Burglar Bunch deserve the Sofia Coppola treatment? Probably not. The film doesn’t so much analyse the obsession with celebrity in the age of social media and the reckless impulses of privileged youth so much as it waves it in front of the audience. Sure, the movie’s nice to look at and isn’t shallow and vapid in that mass-produced bubblegum pop way – but it still is shallow and vapid.

SUMMARY: There might be something worthwhile lurking beneath the surface of the rich kids doing dumb things, but Bling and you’ll miss it.

RATING: 2.5 out of 5 STARS

Jedd Jong