Tag: Ethan Hawke

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The Black Phone

Ethan Hawke plays The Grabber, who happens to be just one figure of horror, plaguing the kids in this film.

One of the most unlikely success stories of the last decade is Stranger Things. When it debuted in 2016, the ’80s horror pastiche was an immediate hit and proved Netflix could create original content that was as good as or better than the best broadcast and cable TV networks had to offer. Encouraged by the success of the Duffer Brothers’ vision, Netflix spent the next few years throwing money into original content. After riding high on new subscriber numbers driven by the pandemic lockdown, Netflix’s stock price (which was financing all that original content) dropped suddenly after reporting a slight loss of subscribers in the first quarter of 2022. As they canceled projects and laid off staff, it seemed that the Netflix magic had dissipated.

Then, a funny thing happened. Stranger Things season 4 was released after a multi-year pandemic delay. Now set in 1986, the new season featured a pivotal scene involving a 30-year-old song by Kate Bush. That week, “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” instantly became the best-selling song on iTunes, then the most listened-to song on Spotify, then Bush’s first No. 1 song in England since 1978. Stranger Things had made an esoteric art rock song about trading bodies with your boyfriend into an international smash hit. That is cultural power on a scale rarely seen in our fragmented media age.

Stranger Things didn’t invent the modern thirst for horror, but it did take it mainstream. The Duffer Brothers’ influence can be seen everywhere from the recent Stephen King revival of Doctor Sleep and It to the self-aware ’70s horror of X. Now, The Black Phone is the latest to answer the call that is coming from inside the house.

Finney (Mason Thames) and his sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) live in the sleepy suburban Denver of 1974. On the surface, it’s a world of little league baseball games and dewy morning walks to school. But there is darkness lurking just under the surface. Finney is bullied mercilessly at school by roving packs of jerks who think he’s not manly enough. At home, their father Terrence (Jeremy Davies) has reacted to the death of their mother by crawling into a bottle.

On top of that, there’s a rash of missing children in the area, which the media has dubbed the work of The Grabber. Gwen starts to have dreams about her missing classmates, and when she tells someone about the details, it earns her a visit from the police. It seems she knows details of the crimes that no one but the cops and the killer should know. The cops can’t pin anything on her, but her father reacts with a savage beating. Her mother had prophetic dreams too, he tells Gwen, and that’s why she killed herself.

That scene between McGraw and Davies is where the vibe departs from the feel-good scares of Stranger Things and ventures into much darker territory. It’s one of the most real depictions of child abuse I’ve ever seen on film. The next day, Finney gets grabbed by The Grabber (Ethan Hawke) and wakes up in a concrete basement, featureless except for a bare mattress and an ancient wall phone that was long ago disconnected.

Hawke (whose daughter Maya Hawke is currently stealing scenes on Stranger Things) brings his considerable acting chops to bear on The Grabber. The passive aggressive kidnapper is a little bit Norman Bates and a little bit Buffalo Bill. He doesn’t kill Finney immediately but instead holds him hostage and puts him through mind games. When the disconnected phone rings, Finney thinks it’s just another of The Grabber’s tricks. But when he answers (what else is there to do?), the voice on the other end claims to be the spirit of one of The Grabber’s other victims.

The Black Phone is directed by Scott Derrickson, whose last project was Marvel’s Doctor Strange, and based on a 2004 novella by horror writer Joe Hill. The film embraces the theory that horror films serve as a way to process trauma. It’s hard to think of another set of child characters who have been so obviously traumatized even before the film starts. But they are not beaten down by it — Gwen is feisty enough to call the police detectives “fart-knockers” in front of her school’s principal. The chemistry between the brother and sister duo of McGraw and Thames feels very natural, which is a credit to the two young performers. Like Stranger Things, it is the bond between the kids that ultimately saves the day, in a world where the adults have seriously messed things up.

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First Reformed

One thing the great filmmakers of the 1970s valued above all others was intensity. That’s evident in a pair of the decade’s masterpieces—Taxi Driver and Raging Bull—that were collaborations between director Martin Scorsese and writer Paul Schrader.

Ethan Hawk stars as a priest in existential crisis in First Reformed.

Schrader is something of a legendary figure in Hollywood, which is understandable when you see his filmography. He appears in the infamous New Hollywood gossip epic Easy Riders, Raging Bulls holed up in the Hollywood Hills with a pistol and a pound of weed, furiously pounding out the script to American Gigolo. Schrader called those films “man alone in a room stories.” They, along with his films like Auto Focus, rotate around a single individual, tortured, mysteriously driven, and often trying to make sense of a chaotic world. Usually, the protagonists, like Travis Bickle, come apart in the end in some spectacularly weird fashion.

Ethan Hawk and Amanda Seyfriend

First Reformed is a major comeback for Schrader, now 71. In this case, the man alone in the room is Ethan Hawke as Toller, an Episcopal priest in rural New York. His titular church was a stop on the Underground Railroad, but now it’s a dwindling congregation in a fading town. Toller spends more of his time giving tours to leaf peepers and school groups than ministering to his flock. That’s why, when Mary (Amanda Seyfried) asks him for counseling, it’s something of a relief. Her boyfriend Michael (Philip Ettinger) is a environmental activist who just got out of prison in Canada on charges related to an oil sands pipeline protest. Mary is pregnant, but Michael doesn’t want her to have the baby. He no longer thinks the fight against climate change is winnable and believes its wrong to bring a child into a world that is doomed to foreseeable catastrophe.

Amanda Seyfried

The scenes between Hawk and Ettinger are brutal in their intensity, even though they’re just two people sitting alone in a room, talking. In his diary, which Schrader uses as a voice over device, Toller says the philosophical, scientific, and theological debate felt “exhilarating” like “Jacob wrestling the angel”.

The repercussions of that single conversation echo through the lives of the three characters. Toller was an Army chaplain whose son was killed in Iraq, driving him from the service and breaking up his marriage. He’s struggling to keep his psyche together and his job intact as the 250th anniversary of the founding of his church approaches. Mary and Michael’s dilemma puts pressure on him at exactly the wrong time as he prepares for a ceremony where his megachurch-leading boss Pastor Jeffers and the governor will attend, bringing unwanted attention to a man who just wants to disappear.

Hawke puts himself into the frontrunner position for the 2018 Best Actor Oscar with his performance as a strong but brittle man nearing his breaking point. Schrader’s screenplay is unsparing in its honesty and directness. Toller’s inner turmoil is existential, but grounded in real world pain. The situations are entirely believable and throughly of today, but Toller’s philosophical ponderings are right out of Shakespeare. Is it all, in the end, worth it?
The film’s unsparing intensity is at once its greatest strength and biggest weakness. To watch First Reformed is to stare unsparingly into the most basic, unanswerable philosophical questions we have. It is, as Toller says, both exhilarating and exhausting. Schrader earns his depth—there’s no such thing as gratuitous Christ imagery in a film with a priest for a leading man—but it’s about as subtle as a gold brick to the face.

First Reformed

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The Magnificent Seven

2016 has had more than its share of remakes, both good (Ghostbusters) and not so good (The Jungle Book). Director Antoine Fuqua’s version of The Magnificent Seven gives us something new: A remake of a remake.

I’ll cut Fuqua a little slack here: People have been remaking and reimagining the Seven Samurai practically since the moment Akira Kurosawa locked picture. First up was John Sturges’ 1960 western The Magnificent Seven starring Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, and five others, which made “assemble a team of misfits to perform a seemingly doomed and intractable task” a thing in American film. Then there was The Guns of Navarone, which put Gregory Peck and David Niven in charge of a group of misfit soldiers in World War II (It had a sequel starring Harrison Ford). The Dirty Dozen kept the World War II motif and postulated, if seven is good, 12 must be great! In 1980, Roger Corman cashed in on the Star Wars craze with Battle Beyond the Stars, which he successfully pitched as “The Seven Samurai — in space!” Pixar got into the act with A Bug’s Life. The upcoming Star Wars film Rogue One features a group of misfits recruited by the Rebellion to steal the plans for the Death Star. Guess how many people are on the rebel team!

Standard operating procedure is to give your Seven Samurai remake a different title, but this is 2016 Hollywood we’re talking about here, so we’re sticking with The Magnificent Seven. Taking up the leadership mantle left behind by Yul Brynner is Denzel Washington as Sam Chisolm, a tough but fair bounty hunter whom we meet single handedly busting up a saloon as he brings an evildoer to justice. Denzel (who is one of those actors whose reputation is so huge you only have to use his first name) sports the same all-black cowboy getup as Brynner and some impressive frontier facial hair. This is the kind of action role he’s mostly been relegated to in the last decade or so, which is kind of a shame, because the Malcolm X actor could use some good juicy parts besides Flight. Denzel’s been phoning it in the last few movies — most notably in director Fuqua’s 2014 snoozer The Equalizer — but there’s more pep in his step this time around. Denzel looks like he’s having fun riding high in the saddle through the Painted Desert.

Luke Grimes (left), Haley Bennett, and Denzel Washington saddle up.

Denzel’s opposite is Peter Sarsgaard as Bartholomew Bogue, a well-heeled mining magnate who aims to clear out the little frontier town of Rose Creek so he can extract the mineral wealth underneath it without paying any pesky royalties to the landowners. The film opens with the town’s denizens debating their best course of action in Rose Creek’s idyllic clapboard church, and Fuqua gives Bogue a mustache-twirling entrance, ringed by shotgun-toting heavies. It’s the first sign that this is going to be an old-fashioned, Western shoot-’em-up with well-defined good and bad guys. One of the casualties of Bogue’s opening strong-arm tactics is the husband of Emma Cullen (Haley Bennett); as she sets out to find armed help, she’s moved at least as much by revenge as she is by saving the town.

The other notable members of the band of seven heroes include Chris Pratt as Josh Faraday, a gambler who is pressed into service when Chisolm gets his horse out of hock. Pratt’s job, like Toshiro Mifune in Seven Samurai, is to provide a side order of comic relief to the relentless gun-toting heroism. Ethan Hawke plays a former confederate sharpshooter named Goodnight Robicheaux as a PTSD case seemingly held together only by the marijuana cigarettes his sidekick Billy Rocks (Byung-hun Lee) provides at crucial moments. Vincent D’Onofrio’s Jack Horne is a tracker who is introduced just after receiving a major head injury, and he plays it to the hilt by quoting jumbled, half-remembered biblical passages. It’s inevitable in a cast this size that some of the members are going to get short shrift, and that’s what happens with Vasquez (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), the Mexican outlaw, and Red Harvest (Martin Sensmeier), the Comanche warrior.

The best way to sum up this Magnificent Seven‘s strengths and weaknesses is to say that it’s an old-fashioned Western, with all that implies. Fuqua and company construct some killer action sequences, and at least make a nod toward multiculturalism with the integrated cast. But it doesn’t expand the genre in a significant way like Clint Eastwood did with The Unforgiven, and it lacks the verve of the Coen brother’s True Grit remake. Ultimately, it’s the reinvigorated Denzel Washington that makes this worthwhile, if not essential, viewing.

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Good Kill

CREDIT: Good Kill

Behold the gaunt, bony, rodent-like face of Ethan Hawke, who often spackles his strongest performances with the feints and dodges of a scared, reluctant rule-breaker too dim-witted to completely cover his tracks. Hawke’s distracted, sad shiftiness — which makes it seem as though he’s trying (and failing) to pull one over on you — serves him well in Andrew Niccol’s Good Kill, a crisp, smart, talky film about the escalating absurdities of the ruthless, endless war on terror.

Although Good Kill is set in 2010, its hand-wringing over combat ethics and shell-shock remain current. Hawke plays Major Thomas Egan, a middle-aged Air Force pilot whose latest tour of duty is part flight simulation and part desk-jockey drudgery. From inside a cramped, windowless mobile bunker on a military base not far from his suburban Las Vegas home, Egan and his fellow airmen sit at their computers and watch live UVA (unmanned aerial vehicle) video footage of potential targets in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East. Whenever Egan and company are given the order to strike, they abstract their actions and its destructive consequences by repeating a grim mantra: “Missiles away. Time of flight: 10 seconds.” They are then rewarded with footage of faraway people, places, and buildings blowing up.

It’s clear that the job is getting to Egan; the coals in his backyard grill at night remind him of the fiery destruction he helped unleash during the day. Plus, he no longer feels like a soldier — he misses the “fear” of actual manned flight. His drinking is getting worse, his relationship with his wife Molly (January Jones) is falling apart, and he can’t seem to explain to himself why he’s following the orders he’s being given.

Egan’s dilemma is not lost on Lieutenant Colonel Jack Johns (Bruce Greenwood), his superior and occasional confidant.

In contrast to Hawke’s hoarse underplaying, Greenwood imbues his weary philosopher-coach role with swagger and gusto. He gets to curse and rage at new recruits while standing in front of a giant American flag, and he also gets some of the film’s most self-consciously aphoristic dialogue: “Drones aren’t going anywhere. They’re going everywhere.” Although Johns is too on the nose a bit too often about the subtle catch-22s of the new war technology, his willingness to think about the paradoxes of his job seem visionary when contrasted with the devastatingly cruel orders given in perfectly scrubbed English by a CIA member (Peter Coyote, literally phoning it in) whose directives push Johns, Egan and others into grayer, darker moral corners.

Niccol keeps his ideas about war in the foreground while the suspenseful action unfolding on the monitors remains chillingly remote and abstract. The drone strikes and explosions are both devastating and completely silent, and there’s some artsy stylistic rhymes thrown in, too: Through Niccol’s use of extremely high-angle establishing shots for both rural villages and suburban backyards, the parallels between Vegas and Afghanistan grow more obvious. People may live and work in these places, but the eye in the sky sees no meaningful distinctions.

Good Kill
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Boyhood

“Boyhood is a most complex and incomprehensible thing … A man can never understand a boy, even when he has been the boy.” — G.K. Chesterton

“We need guidance, we’ve been misled. Young and hostile, but not stupid … “ — Blink-182

If you’re the type of person who watches older movies and whispers things like, “Wow, I can’t believe how young Matthew McConaughey was in The Newton Boys,” to the person next to you, then Boyhood, Richard Linklater’s everyday epic spanning 12 years in the life of Mason Jr. (Ellar Coltrane), his older sister Samantha (Linklater’s daughter Lorelei), his mother Olivia (Patricia Arquette) and his dad Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke), might speak to you in a voice as old and irrefutable as time itself.

Then again, it might not. It’s odd to like but not love Boyhood, which coasts into Memphis on a tidal wave of critical praise. However, like life itself, the film is full of ups and downs.

Because it was shot in installments over 12 years, Linklater’s film occasionally seems to lunge from one time period to the next, jarring you like a teenager learning how to drive a stick shift. However, it soon becomes clear that Linklater chose to follow Mason’s road from childhood to college without consulting the usual mile markers or signposts. We never see anyone win the big game, lose their virginity, or follow their bliss into the bright future. The few scenes of domestic unrest are troubling, but they don’t drive the story either. Moreover, people who seem like they might be important — a kid with a Victoria’s Secret catalogue, a cute girl in middle school who thinks Mason’s short hair is “kewl,” two bullies in a bathroom — often recede quietly into the background.

Impatient viewers might grow exasperated with these go-nowhere encounters and see them as symptomatic of the film’s apparent lack of focus. For example, Linklater explores Mason’s teen years in much greater detail than his early childhood, while Samantha’s transformation from a mean, mouthy toddler to a sad-eyed but cool college girl is, unfortunately, put aside. Which is too bad, because Lorelei Linklater is my favorite thing about the film.

On the other hand, Boyhood’s resistance to conventional narrative rhythms is crucial to its larger philosophical point. Although it’s comforting to imagine that a person’s life follows a pre-ordained script, Boyhood depicts Mason’s life as a series of potential stories that begin and end without notice or warning. One long scene where Mason shares beers and stories with some upperclassmen at a house under construction (nice metaphor) seems to lay the foundation for lifelong friendships. Yet after this scene, the boys never reappear. They are merely passing through Mason’s life, just as he is passing through theirs.

Yet, Mason and Samantha’s change and growth over time remain queerly compelling. In one cut, Mason’s voice drops an octave; he’s beginning to sound like a teenager. Almost imperceptibly, his pre-teen cuteness matures into a soft handsomeness that eventually prompts a family friend to hit on him at his graduation party. In full view of everyone, the sullen little eighth grader becomes an intelligent, opinionated slacker-in-training. In a sense, then, Boyhood is an earnest, literal attempt to understand what all those distant relatives are trying to say whenever they exclaim, “You’ve gotten so BIG!”

Lorelei Linklater, Ethan Hawke, and Ellar Coltrane

Getting big is easy, though. Growing up is harder, even when it could be much worse. For Mason, growing up consists of sitting through a dozen years of poor advice from adults too old or too embarrassing to take seriously. The best scene in this vein involves Mason Sr. trying to explain birth control to Samantha in a bowling alley while Mason looks on with a bemused and curious eye that may explain his later interest in photography.

Boyhood may seem formally daring and unique, but it speaks to other works in Linklater’s filmography as well. Linklater’s decision to cast Hawke, one of the leads in the similarly time-obsessed Before trilogy, only tells part of the story. An animated vision of Lorelei appears at the beginning of 2001’s Waking Life — she’s the little girl with the paper fortune teller who says, “Dream is destiny.” And when Mason and his step-brother go into a liquor store to cash a check for their drunken dad, the one who helps them out is an actor named David Blackwell, who played a similarly mellow liquor-store clerk in Linklater’s 1993 masterpiece Dazed and Confused. As Samantha grows up, she starts to look like her dad; as Mason starts to express his skepticism about the future, he starts to talk and think like him.

When the drama wanes, the intertextuality fascinates. And so does the film’s unintentional scrapbook of cultural and technological change. The pop songs, playthings, and young-adult obsessions in the film’s first hour or so become suggestive and profound in part because Linklater probably had no idea that he was filming potentially extinct rituals, practices, and everyday-use items. It’s a trip to see a college professor using an overhead projector while students take notes with paper and pencil, or hear Samantha talk on a cordless phone and tell her friend that she’s got someone on the other line, or watch Roger Clemens fanning batters for the Astros.

At times like these, there’s such an artless, determined ground-level documentary element at work in Boyhood that its average-looking imagery and melodramatic seasonings feel like unwelcome intrusions from less interesting movies. In other words, one alcoholic dad is understandable, but two is too much. In addition, Mason’s awkward interactions with many of his fellow Texans seem strangely cartoonish. The older, bohemian audience I saw this with chortled with mirth at Mason Sr.’s theft of a McCain-Palin yard sign, and they laughed at the “red letter” Holy Bible and 20-gauge shotgun Mason gets from his grandparents for his birthday. However, the last laugh is on the audience. Mason takes these things in stride, and the first time he shoots something he has the same euphoria as anyone else who’s aimed at something and hit it.

There’s more here than there is room to talk about it, or at least it seems like there is: It seems like a highlight reel from a potentially endless rough cut. Yet after nearly three swift-moving hours, Boyhood ends — or I guess you could say it begins.