Ghost in the Shell
by George Wolf, MaddWolf.com
For all the celebrated vision of the 1995 Japanese anime standard Ghost in the Shell, it resembled the inspirations of a teenage boy hopped up on the works of Phillip K. Dick and Hugh Hefner. There was warmed over sci-fi pondering, and there was plenty of gratuitous boobage.
Director Rupert Sanders delivers the live action remake as a visually rich feast, bringing a welcome upgrade to both character and storytelling.
In a technically dizzying future where the line between human and machine is growing constantly thinner, Major (Scarlett Johansson) emerges as the first true “ghost in the shell”: human brain in a cyber body.
She’s viewed as the perfect weapon, but her mission to locate Kuze (Michael Pitt), a cyber-terrorist capable of hacking into human minds, leads to some revelations that will have Major questioning her loyalties.
The studio defense of Johansson’s casting amounts to a weak tap dance around the truth: she’s a big star who looks the part and they think she’ll combine butts with seats. While the “whitewash” criticism is fair, Johansson also brings a necessary shift away from Major as merely a ridiculous adolescent fantasy.
Johansson conveys well the clash of mind and machine at work in Major, while Pilou Asbaek (A War) steals scenes as Batou, Major’s macho partner who’s sporting a nifty new set of cyber eyeballs.
Sanders (Snow White and the Huntsman) and his visual team work wonders (the 3D version is worth the investment), re-creating various scenes from Mamoru Oshii’s original film with stunning new flourish. This future world pops with visual style in every corner while maintaining a cold, unforgiving and detached aesthetic that feels right.
Screenwriters Jamie Moss and William Wheeler do provide crisper dialogue and a more polished narrative than the original film, but it’s a tale still rooted in overwrought tropes and stale cliches. Ironically, with a moral so consumed by the preservation of humanity, Ghost in the Shell doesn’t give you much to think about.
This beautiful body needs more of a soul.
Raw
by Hope Madden, MaddWolf.com
Much has been made of barf bags and fainting during screenings of writer/director Julia Ducournau’s feature debut, Raw.
A festival favorite, the film has been plagued by rumors of aggressive audience nausea, let’s say, as well as ambulance calls. Several theaters recently have offered vomit bags with ticket purchases.
Don’t let that cloud your expectations. Raw is no Hostel, no Human Centipede.
What you’ll find instead of in-your-face viscera and nihilistic corporeal abuse is a thoughtful coming of age tale.
And meat.
Justine (Garance Marillier, impressive) is off to join her older sister (Ella Rumpf) at veterinary school – the very same school where their parents met. Justine may be a bit sheltered, a bit prudish to settle in immediately, but surely with her sister’s help, she’ll be fine.
The film often felt to me like a cross between Trouble Every Day and Anatomy. The latter, a German film from 2000, follows a prudish med student dealing with carnage and peer pressure. In the former, France’s Claire Denis directs a troubling parable combining sexual desire and cannibalism.
Ducournau has her cagey way with the same themes that populate any coming-of-age story – pressure to conform, peer pressure generally, societal order and sexual hysteria. Here all take on a sly, macabre humor that’s both refreshing and unsettling.
A vegetarian from a meat-free family, Justine objects to the freshman hazing ritual of eating a piece of raw meat. But once she submits to peer pressure and tastes that taboo, her appetite is awakened and it will take more and more dangerous, self-destructive acts to indulge her blood lust.
In a very obvious way, Raw is a metaphor for what can and often does happen to a sheltered girl when she leaves home for college. But as Ducournau looks at those excesses committed on the cusp of adulthood, she creates opportunities to explore and comment on so many upsetting realities, and does so with absolute fidelity to her core metaphor.
She immediately joins the ranks of Jennifer Kent (Babadook) and Ana Lily Amirpour (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night) – all recent, first time horror filmmakers whose premier features predict boundless talent.
The Boss Baby
by Hope Madden, MaddWolf.com
Imaginative only child Tim (Miles Christopher Bakshi) loves his life. He loves to play with his mom (Lisa Kudrow) and dad (Jimmy Kimmel), loves to have adventures, and loves to go to sleep after his three favorite stories, five hugs and one special song.
All that changes when his little brother (Alec Baldwin) arrives. Why can’t his parents see that this stranger in their home is all manner of wrong?
Tim’s right – there is something up with the wee one. Baldwin’s Baby has been sent to Tim’s house to infiltrate a pet company. Why? Because puppies are so darn cute, people might want to stop having babies and just get puppies.
Things get considerably more convoluted from there.
Marla Frazee’s children’s book The Boss Baby is a clever metaphor brought to life. There’s a new boss in the house, and he is a total baby. Cute.
It was Michael McCullers’s unfortunate task to turn Frazee’s couple dozen lines into a screenplay that would take up approximately 90 minutes. That leaves an awful, awful lot of space to fill with McCullers’s imagination, and that brain takes us in some weird directions.
The film’s foundation combines ideas from the recent animated mediocrity The Secret Life of Pets and Storks. Plus there’s a surprisingly good dose of The Office tossed in there, and, of course, some Glengarry Glen Ross.
But still, there is more time to kill.
How shall we fill it?
How about with Elvis impersonators? Lots of poop jokes? An evil Mrs. Doubtfire? Pacifier acid trip? Maybe a pot shot or two at designer puppies?
Why not?
As it turns out, The Baby Boss is a very strange and strangely subversive little cartoon.
Many of the jokes are aimed high above the average 3-foot-tall and under crowd, but honestly there’s not a great deal for the tykes to cling to. The story is far too complicated, and the dazzling array of bizarre ornamentation only further confounds viewers.
Maybe you have to settle for the little things. Does Tim learn that there is enough love to share with his baby brother? Does Alec Baldwin say, “cookies are for closers”?
Yes and yes.
The Blackcoat’s Daughter
by Hope Madden, MaddWolf.com
Winter break approaches at a Catholic New England boarding school. Snow piles up outside, the buildings empty, yet Kat (Kiernan Shipka) and Rose (Lucy Boynton) remain. One has tricked her parents for an extra day with her townie boyfriend. One remains under more mysterious circumstances.
Things in writer/director Oz Perkins’s The Blackcoat’s Daughter quietly unravel from there – although quiet is not precisely the word for it. There is a stillness to the chilly, empty halls. But thanks to the filmmaker’s brother Elvis, whose disquieting score fills these empty spaces with buzzing, whispering white noise, a sinister atmosphere is born.
Like Perkins’s Netflix-produced follow up I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House, Blackcoat’s Daughter breathes atmosphere and tension. Perkins repays your patience and your attention. You can expect few jump scares, but this is not exactly a slow-burn of a film, either.
It behaves almost in the way a picture book does. In a good picture book, the words tell only half the story. The illustrations don’t simply mirror the text, they tell their own story as well. If there is one particular and specific talent Blackcoat’s Daughter exposes in its director, it is his ability with a visual storyline.
Perkins is also a master at generating tension, a kind built on unsure footing. The filmmaker routinely touches on your expectations, quietly toying with them. He introduces characters and situations rife with horror possibilities, but equally plausible as images of safety: priests in a boarding school, cars on an icy road, James Remar in a motel room.
Remar’s mug can be associated with so many villainous characters that his presence in this film as a concerned father figure is perfect. There is one masterpiece of a scene between Remar and Emma Roberts – one that dances with to so many different rhythms of danger – and it perfectly encapsulates this filmmaker’s power over an audience.
When the slow and deliberate dread turns to outright carnage – when Perkins punctuates his forbidding atmosphere with hard action – he loses his footing just a bit. But Blackcoat’s Daughter is a thoughtful little horror show, its final act a fascinating rethinking of old horror tropes.
Pay attention when you watch this one. There are loads of sinister little clues to find.
