Drake Doremus’ “Breathe In” is certainly aptly named. There’s a lot of breathing in, and breathing out, and pausing, and meaningful glances exchanged between characters. Doremus (“Like Crazy”) likes to have lots of dramatic improvisation on set, but this is the first time I can remember seeing actors improvising non-verbally.
Ivan Locke seems like a man who knows what to do. A construction foreman in Britain, we get a glimpse of him at the beginning of “Locke” as he gets into his car, a big and confident man. (After all, he’s played by Tom Hardy, who doesn’t look like he loses a lot of arguments.)
Locke has a firm, patient voice, giving orders to his sons and his employees in the same way, like a headmaster explaining sums to a befuddled student. Ivan Locke knows what to do.
And, as the events in “Locke” transpire, Locke knows exactly what he needs to do. He’s going to tear his entire life down to the foundation, brick by brick.
This may be a strange thing to say about an actor best known for playing a chipmunk-cheeked slacker zombie, but Nick Frost always exudes a certain dignity on screen. As Simon Pegg’s sidekick in Edgar Wright’s Cornetto Trilogy of movies, Frost could have easily been relegated to porky comic relief. Instead, as the layabout friend in “Shaun of the Dead,” the action-movie-loving rookie cop in “Hot Fuzz,” and the clone-battling middle-aged man in “World’s End,” Frost always brings a certain gravitas to ridiculous circumstances. He’s funny, but very self-possessed, and I wouldn’t mess with him.
It’s surprising that “The Big Chill” writer-director Lawrence Kasdan never pulled a Linklater and revisited the film’s seven Baby Boomer characters 10 or 20, or now even 30 years later. It may be that the movie business has changed — movies like “The Big Chill” just didn’t get sequels back then. Or maybe Kasdan was hellbent on moving forward, even if that forward momentum led him into, uh, “Dreamcatcher.”
Or maybe it’s because “The Big Chill” is a film that needs to be stuck in its time — both in 1983, the year that the ex-hippies got rich, and in the single weekend that brought the seven college friends together for the funeral of the eighth, to take stock of their lives, play old records, get drunk, and maybe reconnect on a deeper level. As Harold (Kevin Kline, sporting a distracting Southern accent) puts it, “I feel like I was at my best when I was with you people.”
With 29 DVD editions and four movies in each edition, you’d think Shout! Factory would be running out of bad movies to put in its “Mystery Science Theater 3000” boxed sets by now.
But nope, “Mystery Science Theater 3000: Vol. XXX” is out in stores this week, and still has some top-level cheese in it, from the cut-rate swords-and-sorcery of “Outlaw of Gor” to the classic ‘50s giant-insect shocker “The Black Scorpion.”
You certainly can’t criticize the documentary “GMO OMG” by complaining that it bombards the viewer with facts and figures. The presence of genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) is a complicated and controversial subject, so how does filmmaker Jeremy Seifert tackle it? By showing us lots of footage of his kids.
For the first half, French-Canadian director Denis Cote’s “Vic + Flo Saw a Bear” plays like a naturalistic drama about an older lesbian couple starting a new life on a farm in rural Quebec. I expected certain things to come to pass — suspicion from the locals, touching love scenes, and an overall affirmation of the enduring power of love.
Yeah. Yeah, no.
Since up to 60 percent of the human body is water, consider the documentary “Watermark” to be something of a self-portrait.
There’s more than a whiff of bitterness to the title of Peter Davis’ landmark documentary “Hearts and Minds,” now reissued by Criterion in a new Blu-ray edition. The phrase refers to a Lyndon B. Johnson speech suggesting that the Vietnam War would be won not just tactically, but philosophically. We could not only defeat the North Vietnamese but turn the Vietnamese people into our spiritual allies, winning their hearts and minds for freedom and democracy.
“Judex” was one of several silent movie serials made by director Louis Feuillade, and it left a major impression on one of the many French childen who went to the cinema in the 1910s. That child was Georges Franju, who would later go on to make the classic chiller “Eyes Without a Face.” After “Eyes,” he decided to make his own “Judex.”
Madison Movie 