SKIN MEN & TIN MEN

Opening this weekend:

Green Room—The Ain’t Rights, a down-and-out punk band on a broke, exhausted, gasoline-siphoning tour, lines up a dodgy gig at an isolated club in the Pacific Northwest. The place turns out to be a hive of skinheads and neo-Nazis, but they play their set, get paid and are in the midst of getting the hell away when one of the band members goes back into the green room to retrieve a forgotten cell phone and sees…well, let’s just say something that very definitely ain’t right.

From there on, The Ain’t Rights are besieged by the scumbags, who are determined not to let them leave after what they’ve witnessed. Eventually the club’s owner (Patrick Stewart) shows up, and starts plotting the band’s elimination in earnest.

This very violent, gory shocker has a terrifying plausibility, especially in its first half. We can see from the start that these idiots are in trouble, but we glimpse the overt mayhem they’ve blundered upon elliptically, and the response of their skinhead hosts to the situation feels real.

These aren’t a bunch of hyper-confident professional villains, like in a Die Hard movie—they’re scared too, and unsure about what to do next, and also on the stupid side, a deeply dangerous combination. Patrick Stewart hits just the right, loathsomely believable note as the harried proprietor frantic to protect a secret; it’s pretty clear that he uses Nazi ideology as a business tactic to maintain employee loyalty and retention.

Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier, of the excellent 2013 noir Blue Ruin, obviously had a bigger budget this time, as he could afford Stewart, as well as Anton Yelchin as the most reflective of The Ain’t Rights. He’s a smashing talent, though Green Room, like Blue Ruin, is stronger and more excruciatingly tense in its first half than its second. Sauliner seems to have a weakness for runaway bloody carnage and body counts that verge on comicality, perhaps intentionally.

The Jacobean final quarter of Green Room seems meant to be a little tongue-in-cheek, and if so this may show Saulnier’s shrewdness. Had he maintained the same atmosphere of doom and desperation, unvaried and unrelenting, for the whole movie’s length, Green Room might have been more convincing and harrowing, but it wouldn’t be such good nasty fun. Which, if you’re not too squeamish, is what it is.

 
Ratchet & Clank—Ratchet is a “lombax,” sort of a cat-like creature with ears like a fennec fox and a talent for mechanics, while Clank is his small robot pal. Their interplanetary adventures have, I understand, been popular among video gamers for more than a decade, so now they’re getting the computer-animated feature treatment.

I hadn’t heard of the game, so I’m in no position to comment on how the movie compares to it. On its own merits, however, I found it pretty slow and by-the-numbers, and its attempts at knowing humor mostly fall flat. On the other hand, it’s visually strong, with some pretty cool robot and alien designs.

Ratchet, voiced by James Alan Taylor, is a drearily standard yearning-for-glory underdog hero obligatory for this sort of film. The movie’s best element is Clank (David Kaye), a very polite and endearing robot. Had it simply been called Clank, it might have been livelier.

I'M TOO LISTY, & TOO MUCH IN LOVE

Time again for the film critic’s annual self-indulgence—as opposed to all those weekly self-indulgences—the Top Ten List. Admitting that there are still quite a few high-profile flicks I haven’t gotten to yet—The Theory of Everything, Selma, Get On Up, Boyhood, Calvary and Belle, among others—here are ten moves that, as of this writing, I’m willing to admit I really liked and found memorable:

Jodorowsky’s Dune—The mad director narrates us his abortive ‘70s-era film version of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel, to the accompaniment of glorious conceptual art. This documentary is marvelously entertaining, probably more so than the movie Jodorowsky would have made back then.

The Imitation Game—Fascinating, inspirational, ultimately infuriating account of pioneering British computer scientist Alan Turing’s code-breaking efforts during World War II, and his heartbreaking struggles after the war. Benedict Cumberbatch is moving and maddening as the off-putting genius.

Blue Ruin—Badly overlooked, this gruesomely violent, highly suspenseful revenge noir, made on a tiny budget by writer-director Jeremy Saulnier, doesn’t put a foot wrong. Macon Blair is startling as the homeless man roused to horrific action against the family he holds responsible for the murders of his parents.

Rudderless—Also overlooked, William H. Macy’s debut feature as a director is a painful and emotionally challenging drama about the power of music. After his son’s tragic death, a stricken father (Billy Crudup) discovers, and starts performing, beautiful songs written by the boy. Crudup does his best movie work since his (very different) performance in Almost Famous.

Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me—James Keach recorded the final tour of the Alzheimer’s-afflicted country great. It’s a powerful document, and an artful, warm, occasionally funny piece of filmmaking.

Snowpiercer—After an apocalyptic Earth-wide freeze, a supertrain carries the remnants of humanity in an annual circuit of the planet—lower classes confined to the rear cars; upper class toward the engine. Movies don’t come much more elegantly weird than this…

Frank—…unless they’re accounts of a visionary punk musician who walks around all day wearing a huge papier-mache head that makes him look like Davy from Davy and Goliath, and keeps his band in cult-like semi-isolation while he strives for perfection. This bizarre, all-but-impossible-to-explain movie is funny, unsettling and unexpectedly poignant.

Guardians of the Galaxy—Critics can feel a little sheepish putting a big-budget smash hit like this on the list, but James Gunn’s sci-fi comedy really gave me a good time. Also, its soundtrack is full of wonderful ‘70s-era pop music. And also, it features a talking raccoon.

The Boxtrolls—This stop-motion fantasty about well-meaning subterranean trolls who wear boxes is pungently grotesque, with a tendency toward the gross-out. But it has a big heart.

The Book of Life—Maybe the most ambitiously-titled movie since The Tree of Life, this animated fantasy spun from Mexican Day of the Dead motifs feels both authentically traditional and vibrantly modern. It’s a visual knockout, and the music is beautiful as well.

And here are ten very-near-misses: the delightful Mike Myers documentary Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon, Million Dollar Arm, Noah, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Into the Woods, Wild, The Homesman, Chef, Unbroken and Tim Burton’s fascinating misfire Big Eyes.

While I admit the excellence of its filmmaking and of Michael Keaton’s acting—I hope he wins the Oscar this year—I couldn’t quite bring myself to like Birdman, but other movies I wasn’t sorry I sat through this year included: Gone Girl, Interstellar, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, Mr. Peabody & Sherman, Joe, Big Hero 6, Penguins of Madagascar, Top Five, Elsa and Fred, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Jersey Boys, The Monuments Men, Stonehearst Asylum, The Lego Movie, Obvious Child, How to Train Your Dragon 2, Planes: Fire and Rescue, The Skeleton Twins, The Trip to Italy, For No Good Reason, The Hundred-Foot Journey and The Last Days of Robin Hood, with Kevin Kline, excellent as Errol Flynn on his last legs.

And finally, there’s The Interview, which I heroically attended at Harkins Valley Art instead of watching on pay-per-view, in defense of our American way of life.