HOLLAR TREE

Opening this week: 

The Hollars—Even though the small-town middle American family of the title isn’t especially prone to raising their voices, the name somehow fits just the same. They’re an explosive bunch; you get the sense that hollering is what they’re always on the verge of.

John Krasinski plays John Hollar, the son who ran away from home. An aspiring but blocked graphic novelist, he’s been living in New York, working a day job he hates, and reluctant to marry his girlfriend Rebecca (Anna Kendrick) even though she’s in the homestretch of carrying his child. When John learns that his beloved Mom (Margo Martindale) has collapsed and is in the hospital, he hurries home.

Immediately he’s dropped back into the squabbles between his blubberingly emotional, short-fused father (Richard Jenkins) and his divorced, underachieving, angry older brother Ron (Sharlto Copley), whose ex (Ashley Dyke) and two daughters are now living with a maddeningly nice, patient pastor (Josh Groban). Ron, by contrast, is living back at home with the ‘rents, even though Dad has fired him from the family plumbing business, which John also learns is about to go belly-up. Interrupting all of this drama is Mom’s massive brain tumor, for which she’ll quickly need surgery.

If you’re not hearing anything particularly groundbreaking in this synopsis, you’re not wrong. The Hollars, written by Jim Strouse and directed by Krasinki, is fairly standard dysfunctional family comedy-drama, the sort of modest, “character-driven” piece that actors have a hard time resisting.

Fortunately, the actors who couldn’t resist this script include several of the best now in American movies, and Krasinski managed them briskly. There are scenes that seem heavy-handed and obvious, as when the brothers confer with their mother’s Asian surgeon (Randall Park) and the anxious Ron can’t stop himself from bringing up the man’s race. But most of the interactions between these frightened, pissed-off, loving people ring more or less true, and the actors get all that there is to get out of them, and maybe a bit more.

Vibrant as the whole ensemble is, Krasinski deserves highest marks for giving Margo Martindale a juicy opportunity in a feature film. Long valued as a supporting player, Martindale is showcased here, and has a couple of Oscar-clip-worthy scenes with real punch. But her quiet scenes with the lantern-jawed, sadly smiling Krasinski are even better—John and Mom are the soft-spoken, mild-mannered Hollars, and their conspiratorial, amused alliance is the heart of the movie.

BUNKER CHILL

Opening this week:
  

 10 Cloverfield Lane—After a car crash on a rural Louisiana road, a young woman named Michelle wakes up imprisoned in an underground bunker equipped for doomsday. Her survivalist host/captor Howard tells her that there’s been an attack—maybe nuclear, maybe chemical, maybe alien, he’s not sure—that the air outside is toxic, and that they’re stuck underground for at least a year or two.

At first Michelle thinks Howard’s crazy, and tries several times to escape, but indications start to accumulate that maybe something apocalyptic really did happen outside. Corroborating Howard’s story, for instance, is the bunker’s uninvited third resident, Emmet, a young local guy who helped Howard build the shelter, and forced his way in, to Howard’s dismay, when he saw disaster starting to strike. All the same, over time Michelle also sees signs that Howard may not be entirely trustworthy.

This chamber-piece thriller, directed by Dan Trachtenberg from a script by John Campbell, Matthew Stuecken and Damien Chazelle, is being marketed as somehow very vaguely a companion piece to the 2008 found-footage monster picture Cloverfield. Any such connection seemed tenuous at best to me, but this isn’t a complaint, as 10 Cloverfield Lane is, on the whole, a stronger, more memorable movie than Cloverfield. The new film, for one very welcome difference, unfolds in conventional narrative rather than through the overused device of found footage.

Better still, this set-bound movie is of necessity driven by dialogue and acting—and, to some extent, by an old-school, high-tension score by Bear McCreary—and it’s anchored on the masterly turn of John Goodman as Howard. Aside from an occasional angry outburst, Howard is soft-spoken, patient, even kindly in a brusque sort of way, and he has moments, like his purse-lipped little smile when he and his guests sit down to dinner, that even suggest ironic humor. Yet a terrible, longing mania keeps seeping out of his eyes and from the corners of his mouth, signaling his scary potential to turn monstrous. Goodman doesn’t hit a false note, and his riveting performance gives the impression of effortlessness, of not breaking a sweat.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead, from the third version of The Thing and Tarantino’s Death Proof, among others, makes Michelle a courageous and resourceful heroine—her frightened but never paralyzed reactions win the audience’s admiration. And John Gallagher, Jr. is touching as the dim but decent Emmet; the bond he forms with Michelle is nicely underplayed and convincing.

Near the end, 10 Cloverfield Lane finally gives us a look outside. Without going into details, suffice to say that, for ten minutes or so, it turns into a different sort of movie, and, though entertaining, a lesser one, I’d say. It’s a testament to the claustrophobic force of 10 Cloverfield Lane that it still feels liberating, almost joyous, just to get out of that hole in the ground.

STAKES' RIGHTS

With Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln opening this weekend…

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s give the nod to Adam, the antebellum bloodsucker with Confederate sympathies, who takes on Honest Abe in the terrible but sort-of-amusing movie of Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter:

Here’s Adam, played by Rufus Sewell, before and after dining:

VARIOUS THINGS

RIP to a hero of Your Humble Narrator’s, the great radio dramatist & triumphalist liberal patriot Norman Corwin, passed on way too young at 101.

Though I’ve loved old-school radio drama ever since I heard War of the Worlds as a kid, it was seeing a live performance of Corwin’s classic airwave comedy My Client Curley, starring my dear late pal Tim Reader, that really got me jazzed about trying my hand at the medium. A few years later, my pal Julie, who directed that show & later worked on several of my Sun Sounds productions, kindly gave me a copy of Norman Corwin’s Letters. I was both humbled & exhilarated at the craft & polish that Corwin put into the prose of his private correspondence.

Corwin’s best-known work may be On a Note of Triumph, his word-concerto broadcast on V-E Day in 1945. Here’s a passage from the Prayer section which I wish we’d all make a daily devotion (it was later included, by the way, in a standard prayerbook for American Reform Judiasm):

Lord God of test-tube and blueprint
Who jointed molecules of dust and shook them till their name was Adam,
Who taught worms and stars how they could live together
Appear now among the parliaments of conquerors and give instruction to their schemes:
Measure out new liberties so none shall suffer for his father's color or the credo of his choice:
Post proofs that brotherhood is not so wild a dream as those who profit by postponing it pretend:
Sit at the treaty table and convoy the hopes of the little peoples through expected straits,
And press into the final seal a sign that peace will come for longer than posterities can see ahead,
That man unto his fellow man shall be a friend forever.

Can I get an Amen for Brother Norman?

Check out this terrific review of Pat Buchanan’s latest jaw-droppers…

I wasn’t able to get to it before it opened last weekend, so...

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week let’s acknowledge the title character of the new version of The Thing, now in theatres.

My review:

All it means, really, is “object,” yet somewhere along the line in American pop culture the word “thing” came to mean something scary, a monster, a freak. Maybe it says something about humans that it’s what’s undefined, not consigned to a pigeonhole, which raises our collective gooseflesh.

Despite short stories like Bierce’s “The Damned Thing” & Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep,” & despite the disturbing ‘40s-era radio play “The Thing on the Fourble Board,” the usage was probably truly popularized by the 1951 sci-fi classic The Thing From Another World, with James Arness, who passed on this June, in the title role. Based on John W. Campbell’s 1938 pulp tale Who Goes There?, the film was remade by director John Carpenter, simply as The Thing, in 1983.

The Thing in question in the 1951 version is a vampiric humanoid vegetable from outer space, discovered frozen in the ice near a U.S. military/scientific outpost in the Arctic. Accidentally thawed out, he wreaks deadly havoc until he’s outdone by American ingenuity & cooperation.

Carpenter’s remake sticks closer to Campbell’s novella. Discovered in Antarctica this time, The Thing is the ultimate chameleon, an amorphous mass that can assume the shape of a human host. But whenever its cover is blown, it suddenly unravels into a squealing, twisted, tentacled horror out of Hieronymus Bosch, & starts tearing everybody in the vicinity apart.

The film, with Kurt Russell leading a pack of top-notch character actors, is also pretty gripping. If there’s one, you know, thing that the movie world didn’t especially need right this minute, it was probably one more version of The Thing.

But we’ve got one, directed by the impressively-named Matthijs van Heijningen, Jr. Despite the identical title, it’s not actually a remake, but rather a “prequel” to Carpenter’s film, set in Antarctica in 1982, among the Norwegian researchers who make the initial discovery, & soon aren’t sure who’s human & who’s a Thing. The cast is full of manly types, but the resourceful heroine is a young American paleontologist, well-played by the incredibly adorable Mary Elizabeth Winstead.

This Thing takes an ill-advised excursion away from the outpost near the end which strains its convincing feel a bit, but up until then it’s a fairly tense, austere little thriller, with a soundtrack full of the unnerving pulses & thrums that used to make up Carpenter’s minimalist electronic scores. Some pretty shocking special effects are deployed, too, but van Heijningen derives most of the film’s atmosphere from his teasing out of the suspense & paranoia. He rather deftly keeps you wondering who the monsters are.

But while this Thing is a passable piece of work, I can’t find any pressing reason why needs to exist. The original is a fascinating study in Hawksian attitudes toward American collective strength against a generic common enemy. Carpenter’s The Thing has a more cynical, individualistic, spaghetti-western ethos, & a correspondingly thicker sense of paranoia.

The new film, conceived as a direct prologue to Carpenter’s, adds no new dimension, &—I hate to sound like a Luddite broken record on this topic, but—it loses some punch thanks to the CGI’s lack of solidity. There was a surreal poetry, a gravity, almost a horrific beauty, to Rob Bottin’s “practical” (mechanical & prosthetic) effects in the ’83 film that the computer-generated shocks in the new film, above-average though they are, can’t match.

The effects in Carpenter’s Thing could make you doubt the person sitting next to you. The effects in the new film make you doubt what you see on the screen. Rightly.