Tag: Matthew McConaughey

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Film Features Film/TV

Time Warp Drive-In Feels The Best of the Burn

Dazed and Confused

Every year, the Time Warp Drive-In series dedicates one of its monthly programs to celebrate psychedelia in all its forms. Gotta hand it to ’em, they know their audience.

This Saturday night at the Malco Summer Drive-In is the Best of the Burn — audience favorites from the previous years’ burn nights. First up is the Richard Linklater classic that made master monologist (and possible Texas gubernatorial candidate) Matthew McConaughey a household name. Dazed and Confused is the ultimate hangout movie. Think American Graffiti, if everyone was stoned the whole time. Here’s a clip where you can hear one of McConaughey’s now-timeless line readings: “It’d be a lot cooler if you did.”

The second film of the evening is one of the great literary adaptations of all time. Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is about a journalist blowing an assignment to cover a motorcycle race. So relatable. Misunderstood cinematic genius Terry Gilliam was perhaps the only person capable of bringing this one to life. In this clip, Thompson’s literary doppleganger Raoul Duke, played by not-yet-superstar Johnny Depp, tries to check into a hotel with the help of his attorney, a not-yet-superstar Benicio del Toro. “Ignore this terrible drug.”

The third film of the evening has been called the genesis of the stoner movie genre. Who but OG counterculture comedians Cheech and Chong could have made Up In Smoke? Here’s how the movie was sold in 1978. They don’t make trailers like this any more.

And finally, the granddaddy of them all, Reefer Madness. Rarely has any film, or any work of art at all, had its meaning so thoroughly reversed as Tell Your Children, the film produced by a church group to keep kids off the devil’s cabbage. Instead, it was bought by an exploitation producer Dwain Esper, who changed the title to Reefer Madness. Check out this warning of what will happen if you touch “the weed with its roots in Hell!” The intended audience’s reaction was “Don’t threaten me with a good time!”

The Time Warp Drive-In starts at dusk on Saturday at the Malco Summer Drive-In.

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Film Features Film/TV

The Dark Tower

Stephen King can’t catch a break.

I’m speaking filmically, of course. In all other aspects of his life, King is doing fine. He is probably the most successful writer of the last 50 years. He’s the Charles Dickens of horror, to be read widely and remembered far longer than his contemporaries, even the ones who might have had superior talent. King is a good writer, but he has had fantastic agents.

King’s work has been adapted for film (checks Wikipedia) 67 times! That’s a lot! (The Mangler had two sequels? Who knew?) But with the very notable exceptions of The Shining, The Shawshank Redemption, and Stand by Me, movies based on King’s works have been pretty awful. (I admit, I have a soft spot for The Running Man, but that was technically a Richard Bachman book.)

The Dark Tower was King’s attempt at epic meta-fantasy and the project that he chipped away at between blockbuster airport paperbacks for 40 years. Clearly inspired by Tolkein, it’s not so much singing dwarves and lembas as it is a deep dive into King’s subconscious. The Dark Tower sits at the center of at expansive multiverse, protecting the multitude of realities where anything goes. Instead of knights in shining armor, the Tower — and thus, all of the multitudes of realities in the multiverse — is defended by a sacred order of Gunslingers, refugees from Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns that King was obsessed with when he started the series in the early 1970s. Bits and pieces of King’s passing obsessions and his other books float up through the more than 4,000-page narrative. At one point, King himself makes an appearance as both author and character. In the age when HBO is dropping a cool 10 mil on every hour of Game of Thrones, The Dark Tower‘s seven volumes sound like the perfect fodder for a long-running prestige TV series. Instead, we get this chop job.

Matthew McConaughey (left) fled across the desert, and Idris Elba followed.

Idris Elba was born to play Roland, the supernatural protagonist, last of the Gunslingers. He’s got the natural gravitas and credibility as an ass kicker. Roland’s gun was forged from the sword Excalibur, and he “kills with his heart,” as the Gunslinger’s credo requires. Roland’s sworn enemy is the Man in Black, played by Matthew McConaughey, so pencil thin he seems to have been existing purely on Soylent paste and self-satisfaction.

Armed with the power of suggestion, an army of demonic lackeys, a snazzy Zara for Men duster, and a variety of colored orbs, the Man in Black seeks to destroy the Dark Tower and let in the demons from the dark outer-world so he can … do something. There was a prophecy that said the mind of a child could destroy the Dark Tower, so the Man in Black’s minions prowl the multiverse finding younglings strong in the Shining to feed into his kid-powered super-laser. I was not really clear on what he was hoping to accomplish with the destruction of the multiverse, but maybe if McConaughey put more than a car commercial’s level of effort into the role, I wouldn’t mind.

The young Brooklynite Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor) is the latest in a line of generic “chosen ones,” complete with evil step family and doomed mother. While in our reality, (“Keystone Earth”), he is repeatedly upstaged by his neighbor Timmy, played by Michael Barbieri of Ira Sach’s Little Men. Director Nikolaj Arcel would have been better off casting Barbieri as his audience surrogate, given how completely charisma-free Taylor is.

The literary Dark Tower is the result of a prodigious mind high on the writings of Joseph Campbell and, in the ’70s and ’80s at least, heroic doses of drugs. But instead of floating freely in Jungian archetypal space, the film just touches all the bases of another generic post-Matrix action fantasy. In the grand scheme of this summers’ colossal wastes of money, it goes down easier than, say, the Pirates of the Caribbean death rattle. But I liked The Dark Tower much better when it was called Big Trouble in Little China. At least Kurt Russell knew how to commit to the ridiculous.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Kubo and the Two Strings

Kubo And The Two Strings starts out with a moment of quiet bravado: “If you must blink, do it now.”
The voice, we will soon learn, belongs to our hero Kubo (Art Parkinson, aka the youngest Stark on Game Of Thrones), and “If you must blink…” is the beginning of his carny pitch. But it also doubles as a manifesto for one of the most visually sumptuous films of the year.

11 years before, the infant Kubo washed up on a beach with his mother; now, he earns money to support her as a street performer. With his magic shamisen (a three-stringed, Japanese musical instrument), he can bring origami figures to life and use them to bring tales of derring-do to life for the curious villagers. The star of his stories is a paper samurai named Hanzo, modeled after the boy’s missing father.

Already it’s easy to see the mythic resonances in Kubo’s story: Perseus also survived abandonment at sea, and later learned he was demigod, son of Zeus and the mortal Danae. Kubo’s father Hanzo was mortal, but his mother was the most powerful of three daughters of Raiden the Moon King (voiced by Ralph Fienes).

You might think this curious, because Perseus was Greek, and the world where Kubo lives is undoubtedly a stylized version of feudal Japan. The mixing of East and West continues through the story, a largely by-the-book Hero’s Journey sprinkled liberally with concepts from Shinto and Japanese folklore. It’s the mark of a team of young filmmakers, led by Travis Knight, who have clearly grown up steeped in manga, anime, and Studio Ghibli.

Instead of hailing from Tokyo, Knight’s animation studio Laika is based in Portland, Oregon, and Knight’s father Philip is the co-founder of Nike. Laika is the studio behind great-looking stop motion films such as Coraline, but this is CEO Travis’ first credit as director, which might lead the more cynical among us to dismiss Kubo as a rich guy’s vanity project—or a shot across the bow of the Disney battleship.

Kubo is thrust into adventure when he inadvertently exposes his whereabouts to his evil aunties, a pair of black-clad twins chillingly voiced by Rooney Mara. Kubo’s grandfather stole one of his eyes when he was an infant, and now the Moon King wants the other one. Kubo’s questing companions include the wise Monkey, voiced with incredible precision by Charlize Theron, and the rather thick Beetle, a perfectly cast Matthew McConaughey.

The real star of the show is the seamless blend of advanced stop motion animation and CGI, which Laika use to create stunning, hyperreal images, such as an underwater garden of malign, staring eyes, and a boat made of orange fall leaves.

When he leaves the familiar environs of his village, Kubo awakens in a featureless, snowy landscape. There’s no shortage of eye-popping set pieces in the film, but this little moment of visual restraint stuck out as proof that Laika’s head is in the right place. A lesser film would have been afraid to bore its audience by going blank, but Knight and company let the landscape’s lack of landmarks reflect their hero’s psychic dislocation. Kubo’s visuals are not just knockout gorgeous, they’re always in service of character and story.

How has Laika succeeded where so many other have failed this year? There are four credited writers, none of whom are the director, which means it was not the vision of a single auteur, but the product of a healthy collaborative process.

This is the model of contemporary corporate filmmaking that has recently seen so many specularly expensive failures. A plucky little studio, both geographically and spiritually removed from the Hollywood sausage factory, has beat the majors at their own game, and they’ve done it for a fraction of the cost.

The dog days of August is when Hollywood traditionally dumps the losers from their summer line ups, but with Kubo and the Two Strings, they’ve saved the best for last. 

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Film/TV TV Features

True Detective Season 2

The cops in True Detective‘s second season are so world-weary, it’s a wonder they’re able to move. They’re so stern, grim-faced, and defined by work, they’re puritan. They wrap themselves in strip clubs, perps, and denial as they move about their fallen world. In real life, in the age of small cameras, cops can be terrifying. An iPhone can take corruption and put it online for all to see. But in fiction, police are vehicles for philosophy. The detectives and officers who solve the world’s mysteries on our screens always have reasons to step over the line and are always negotiating them. They’re the protagonists. The citizens they rough up are, depending on the show’s level of grit, incidental to the larger goal of getting the bad-guy-of-the-week.

Their weariness is part of the time-honored existentialism of detective noir, making sense of a world and finding your own code within it. True Detective‘s Season 1 wore this on its sleeve. Its most pure expression was its opening credits, which took images of the actors and story and mixed them like a soup. The appeal in Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle was his ability to take atheistic observations about the world, sprinkle in some nihilism, and serve them in a movie star’s mouth. Cohle and Woody Harrelson’s more lived-in Marty Hart were both fully realized characters, darkly funny amid all the Gothic imagery. Most everyone else was Southern stereotypes, and HBO-mandated nudity ate the agency of the female characters whole. But ultimately, everything was abandoned in an unconvincing last-minute switch to optimism by Cohle.

This season the grimness takes the forefront. The weary cops’ stories unwind in much more regular fashion. We have no Cthulhu mythology and unreliable narration to sift through. Rachel McAdams’ Bezzerides has problems with sex caused by her growing up in a cult her father ran. Her most prominent quality is that she smokes an e-cigarette. Taylor Kitsch’s Woodrugh’s sexual repression is defined by an unhealthy relationship with his mother. He likes to drive fast on his motorcycle, on highways we’re repeatedly shown in beautiful aerial shots. Farrell’s Velcoro is a crooked alcoholic cop who beats up the father of his son’s school bully. He works for mob boss Semyon (Vince Vaughn), after the former helped him kill his wife’s rapist years ago. They’re terse, they’re pissed off, they’re told they need therapy, and all they’ve got in the world is this case they’re obsessed with unraveling.

They aren’t different enough from the thousand previous iterations of these archetypes. Learning about their ex-wives and boyfriends feels like work. Some of the most effortless, efficient characterization so far has been Farrell’s hair. The Cape buffalo bangs and droopy moustache scream that this man has stopped caring.

Promisingly, each episode has gotten weirder, with small Lynchian touches. Water stains on a ceiling crossfade into carved-out eye sockets. A Russian trophy wife huffs pot smoke out of a bag. A character shot with rock salt hallucinates a Conway Twitty impersonator singing “The Rose.” Oral sex is a running theme.

But the weirdness isn’t enough to help Vaughn’s delivery of a speech about having to crush a rat with his bare hands as a child. It’s the moment when things should come together, told in a dead-eyed close-up at the start of the second episode, when his mobster’s money worries should take center stage. Vaughn always seemed capable of more since he carried the movie Swingers 20 years ago, but instead he has gotten less and less expressive with each role. He is better irritated and frantic than mournful and sad. His flashes of anger work, but the glum nervousness about his position in life doesn’t come across.

It’s a slow burn with wet kindling. Unless the weirdness builds or the performances build — or its depiction of police corruption comes to feel as immediate as watching a viral video — it might be more interesting if the characters actually went to therapy.

True Detective Season 2
HBO
Sundays

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Film Features Film/TV

Interstellar

Let’s start with what Christopher Nolan got right in Interstellar, which is a lot. After spending eight or so years making successful, culture-defining Batman movies (with a stop in the dreamtime for 2010’s Inception), he chose to spend his clout making a science-fiction epic in the mold of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Like Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s masterpiece, Nolan’s Interstellar is “hard” sci-fi, meaning it relies on known science for its settings and plot points. Until it doesn’t.

The first known science it throws at us is a near future earth ravaged by climate change and the resource wars we are already seeing break out in places like Central Africa and the Levant. Overpopulation is no longer as big a problem as it is today, because six billion people have died, including Cooper’s (Matthew McConaughey) wife. But crops are failing, species are dying, and corn, our last remaining foodstuff, is threatened by a dust borne blight. Cooper, a former star astronaut and aerospace engineer, is now using his talents to build robotic harvesters to keep feeding the starving masses. But then, he receives a strange signal: a location encoded in binary somehow sent through gravity waves to his daughter Murph’s (Mackenzie Foy) bedroom. The location turns out to be a secret NASA base where the world’s remaining space scientists, led by Professor Brand (Michael Caine) are preparing an expedition into a wormhole that unknown alien intelligence has opened near Saturn. Twelve expeditions have gone into the wormhole looking for a planet where humans can relocate to save the species when earth is no longer habitable, which will be within a generation. Three have reported back encouraging results, and Cooper, along with Professor Brand’s daughter (Anne Hathaway), is tasked with diving into the wormhole and finding out which exoplanet is just right for us.

Anne Hathaway in Interstellar

Shot on 70mm film with a pleasing mix of old-fashioned practical effects and digital wizardry, Interstellar is at its best when McConaughey is surfing his spaceship down a water planet’s Everest-sized waves or skirting the event horizon of a black hole called Gargantua that is the most spectacular and accurate image of the astronomical phenomenon ever created. If you’re going to see Interstellar — and if you’re any kind of sci-fi fan you absolutely should — see it on as big a screen as possible to appreciate Nolan’s impeccable craftsmanship.

But it’s too bad the craftsmanship didn’t extend to the script. Nolan’s Batman movies were generally worthy, but they had one too many subplots, an over reliance on coincidence, and characters acting like archetypes instead of human beings. Outside the superhero space, these flaws become glaring. Seemingly afraid of losing some mythical demographic of viewers who came to a space opera to see a father-daughter relationship drama, Nolan can’t go five minutes without repeating that it’s hard to leave your kids behind when you’re on a multi-year deep-space mission to save humanity. Then the (admittedly eye-popping) love-conquers-all ending undermines all that came before.

It boils down to this: Interstellar is 120 minutes of good movie stuffed into 170 minutes.

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Film/TV TV Features

True Nihilism

HBO’s True Detective

Three episodes in, HBO’s True Detective has sucked viewers deep into a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in Matthew McConaughey’s best character acting ever. It’s dark, sexy, grim, fatalistic, and the most compelling new series on television this season. It has parallel plotlines 17 years apart — with the same characters — two juicy murder mysteries that inform and in turn lead to more mystery; a whodunnit squared.

The story begins in 1995. McConaughey is Rustin Cohle, a former undercover narco cop who became addicted while on the job in Texas. His young daughter was killed in a car wreck, and his marriage died after that, pushing him further off the deep end. Given a final chance to clean up and save his career, he takes a job as a police detective in small-town southern Louisiana. He’s partnered with Detective Martin Hart, played by Woody Harrelson, a plain-talking local man with all the trappings of normalcy — pretty young wife, two kids, nice house.

They are assigned to investigate a bizarre, ritual murder of a young woman. (The crime scene reveal in Episode 1 is a chiller.) As they scour the desolate rural back-roads, questioning suspects, following leads, the two men unburden themselves, fill in each other’s back-story, and learn they have little in common, except a burning desire to solve the crime.

Cohle is a tortured nihilist, convinced the human race would be better off going extinct. Here’s a typical squad car soliloquy: “I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in human evolution. We became too self aware; nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, a secretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody’s nobody.”

Hart is repelled and creeped out. “Keep that kind of talk to yourself,” he says. But Hart has his own demons. We learn he’s got a mistress, anger issues, and probably a drinking problem.

But the show’s genius — and where Harrelson and, particularly, McConaughey elevate True Detective to another level — is how the writers handle the frequent time-jumps to 2012. We soon learn that, 17 years later, an identical ritual murder to the one in 1995 has occurred, though the first murder was supposedly solved by Hart and Cohle. (We don’t learn any of the details; that would spoil the first mystery). We see Hart and Cohle, several times in each episode, in what can best be called “flash forwards,” as they are being questioned, separately, by cops in 2012.

Hart has lost his hair and his marriage, and is running a private security firm. Cohle is a pony-tailed, chain-smoking alcoholic who does menial work to feed his habit. McConaughey inhales this role like a Marlboro, lives it, owns it.

Much of the power of True Detective stems from, well, its weirdness: the bizarre, rural characters — revival preachers, shade tree mechanics, teenage whores, bar hustlers — and the continuing revelations about its two protagonists: Cohle’s quaalude habit, his fetishistic, sometimes violent, investigatory techniques; Hart’s drinking and womanizing. They’re an odd couple, but irresistible.

What happened to the two men in the years between the two murders is yet another mystery to savor, as small details emerge. Did Cohle have an affair with Hart’s wife? Maybe. Did either — or both — of these men cover up something 17 years ago, letting a murderer go free, somehow? We don’t know.

Like every thing else in True Detective, information comes in small bits, like a jigsaw puzzle scattered over half a county. Once in a while, you find an interesting piece, like that abandoned church with scrawled paintings. Or that weird barn with the freaky totem. Or that Twin Peaks-ish country brothel. But how does it all fit together? I don’t know, but I’m going to keep watching.

True Detective

Sundays, 8 p.m.

HBO