The Intern
by George Wolf, MaddWolf.com
If you need a feel-good romantic comedy about rich white people aging friskily, Nancy Meyers would be a safe bet to bring it.
With both Something’s Gotta Give and It’s Complicated, writer and director Meyers leaned on veteran talent (Jack Nicholson, Diane Keaton, Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin) to get the most out of amusing scripts that were fun first, feeling later.
She tries to bring the same formula to The Intern, but ends up pushing much too hard to manufacture something that just isn’t there.
Again, her A-listers aren’t too shabby. Robert DeNiro is Ben, a retired widower who needs something to do. Anne Hathaway plays Jules, the founder of an online clothing company that’s growing like a weed. Jules forgets giving the green light to a senior internship program (“Seniors in high school? No, seniors in life!”) and isn’t really thrilled when the 70 year-old Ben is assigned to assist her personally.
Not a thing wrong with pointing out how much older citizens still have to offer, but Meyers never wants her films to make you think too much. The Intern gets buried under shallow contrivance and outright silliness.
You don’t for one second believe Jules is the tough-as-nails workaholic taskmaster we’re told she is, and the entire workplace smacks of an overly rehearsed training video for hipster boss dot com. Ben? He might as well be Santa Claus, gifting life lessons to all he encounters, as his co-workers pose like department store mannequins and look on in amazement.
It all hits an embarrassing low point when Ben takes three of them on a needless adventure that leads to calling each other “Clooney” and “Affleck’s brother” while pretending they’re in Ocean’s Eleven. With a running time of two full hours, this 20 minutes would be welcome on the cutting room floor.
DeNiro and Hathaway give it their all, but like the rest of us, they seem to be waiting for the human moments that Jack or Meryl got to work with. They never come, replaced instead with empty speeches about “getting lost” while finding out “who I am.”
Rene Russo’s small part is a much-needed boost, and her scenes with DeNiro suggest where Meyers could have built a better movie, forgoing the younger generation that she can’t write nearly as well. As it stands, most everything about The Intern feels fake, and considering the resumes involved, that’s a big letdown.
Goodnight Mommy (Ich seh, Ich seh)
by Hope Madden, MaddWolf.com
There is something eerily beautiful about Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s rural Austrian horror Goodnight Mommy (Ich seh, Ich seh).
During one languid summer, twin brothers Lukas and Elias await their mother’s return from the hospital. They spend their time bouncing on a trampoline, floating in a pond, or exploring the fields and woods around the house. But when their mom comes home, bandaged from the cosmetic surgery she underwent, the brothers fear more has changed than just her face.
Franz and Fiala owe a great debt to an older American film, but to name it would be to give far too much away, and the less you know about Goodnight Mommy, the better.
Inside this elegantly filmed environment, where sun dappled fields lead to leafy forests, the filmmakers mine a kind of primal childhood fear. There’s a subtle lack of compassion that works the nerves beautifully, because it’s hard to feel too badly for the boys or for their mother. You don’t wish harm on any of them, but at the same time, their flaws make all three a bit terrifying.
The filmmakers’ graceful storytelling leads you down one path before utterly upending everything you think you know. They never spoon feed you information, depending instead on your astute observation – a refreshing approach in this genre.
Performances by young brothers Lukas and Elias Schwarz compel interest, while Susanne Wuest’s cagey turn as the boys’ mother propels the mystery. It’s a hypnotic, bucolic adventure as visually arresting as it is utterly creepy.
The film is going to go where you don’t expect it to go, even if you expect you’ve uncovered its secrets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hisSd7qyY40
Wildlike
By Christie Robb, MaddWolf.com
The movie Wildlike has the pace and emotional warmth of a glacier grinding down the slopes of Denali.
The first full-length feature from writer/director Frank Hall Green, the film follows Mackenzie (Ella Purnell, Maleficent), a 14-year-old girl sent to live with her uncle in Juneau while her widowed mother makes a stint at recovery.
The relationship, at first tender, soon becomes creepy and emotionally manipulative and Mackenzie flees. She spends the remainder of the movie stoically trying to get herself back to her mom in the lower 48. Ultimately, she ends up more or less stalking this poor widower (Bruce Greenwood, Star Trek) who’s on a solo hiking trip to mourn his ex wife. Mackenzie spots his return ferry ticket to Seattle, and after that adheres herself to him like a tick, and they wander about the – admittedly beautifully shot – Alaskan wilderness.
Although at first determined to get rid of her, the dude ultimately becomes a kind of surrogate dad. At least he rejects her awkward attempt to sleep with him, anyway.
The two bond for some reason—he tells her about his regrets and she…looks at him with watery, mascara-rimmed eyes.
The film has been praised for its minimalism and Purnell’s nuanced performance, but without seemingly necessary dialogue to flesh out Mackenzie, Purnell’s emotional restraint suppresses the character development necessary to understand why her travelling companion doesn’t simply turn her over to child protective services at the first available opportunity.
The Green Inferno
by Hope Madden, MaddWolf.com
Filmmakers often use their work to pay homage to other filmmakers. Sometimes this looks like a direct rip off, but when done well – as it was earlier this year in David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows – it can elevate a picture while generating nostalgia and paying tribute.
It works better if the films you homage were good in the first place, though.
Love him or hate him (and it appears most everyone does one or the other), Eli Roth is one such filmmaker. His latest, The Green Inferno, takes inspiration from a very particular style of film. These cannibal flicks, mostly made by Italians in the late Seventies and early Eighties, dropped naïve Westerners in jungles populated by flesh hungry head hunters.
Roth’s flick does likewise with a set of idealistic college students, including Justine (Lorenza Izzo – Roth’s real life wife). They just want to stop developers in Peru from destroying tribal villages, but when their plane crashes deep in the jungle, they go from activists to appetizers.
The films that inspired Roth’s picture – Ruggero Deodato’s infamous Cannibal Holocaust, in particular – are known for their goretastic imagery, exuberant violence, ethnocentrism, and general taboo-shattering.
Though it’s a slog getting to the action, when Inferno finally does pit student youth group against Peruvian cannibal tribe, blood, limbs and entrails go flying.
Like most of Roth’s work, there’s a dark and cynical sense of humor underlying the melee. As with his Hostel films, beneath the concussive violence and body part slurry there lies an attempt at political insight. But with Inferno, the traditional heroine arc and confused jabs at political correctness undermine any relevant statement.
Plus, the acting is abysmal, the writing clichéd, and the comic moments are so poorly executed you get the feeling the filmmaker and his writing partners felt equal contempt for characters and audience alike.
For true fans of this particular genre, though, solid performances and stellar writing are hardly the point, but here’s the rub. The Green Inferno feels like nothing more than a neutered Cannibal Holocaust.
Not that we need another Cannibal Holocaust, nor do we probably need to resurrect a genre that died out for reasons as extreme as those associated with the jungle cannibal movie, but if you can’t improve on its weaknesses and you can’t match its bombast, what is the point, exactly?