Tag: Matthew Modine

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Indie Memphis Announces Opening Night Film, Special MLK50 Programming For 2017 Festival

The Indie Memphis Film Festival will take place November 1-6, 2017. This will be the twentieth year the festival has brought films produced independently of the Hollywood studio system to the Mid-South, and organizers say they intend to pull out all the stops.

The opening night film will be Thom Pain, the film adaptation of a 2004, one-man play called Thom Paine (based on nothing) by English playwright Will Eno that won the first ever Fringe Award at the prestigious Edinburgh Festival. The star of—and presumably only actor in—the film, Rainn Wilson, will be on hand for the gala screening, which will be the film’s world premiere. Wilson made his film debut in 1999’s Galaxy Quest, appeared for five seasons on HBO’s Six Feet Under, and achieved international notoriety with his portrayal of Dwight on the American version of The Office.

The festival is partnering with the National Civil Rights Museum for a series of films to commemorate April’s 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. These will include Up Tight, a rarely seen, 1968 independent film by Jules Dassin starring Ruby Dee that includes footage taken at King’s funeral, and the 1970 documentary King: A Filmed Legacy From Montgomery To Memphis by Sidney Lumet.

The work of American indie auteur Abel Ferrera will be celebrated with two screenings: Bad Lieutenant, a 1992 film starring Harvey Keitel as a corrupt cop who cracks up while investigating the rape and murder of a nun, and The Blackout, a 1997 comedy starring Dennis Hopper and Matthew Modine as a director and movie star who get themselves into trouble while drinking in Miami Beach. Ferrera will appear at both screenings, along with his cinematographer Ken Kelsch and editor Anthony Redman.

For its twentieth anniversary, the festival will have a three day block party in Overton Square that will block off Cooper between Union and Monroe. The party will feature the Memphis premiere of Thank You Friends: Big Star Live…and More, a concert film of Big Star’s Third album performed live by an all star band that includes members of R.E.M. and Wilco, and Robyn Hitchcock, among others, with the sole surviving original Big Star member Jody Stephens on drums. “The Indie Memphis team went all out this year to celebrate our 20th anniversary,” says Indie Memphis Executive Director Ryan Watt. “The addition of the block party and more venues will make this our largest and most eclectic festival to date. I’m most excited to see our audience and filmmakers, local and traveling, come together as a community to discuss what they’ve seen after each credits roll.”

The festival’s competition lineup will be revealed at a party at the Rec Room on September 26. Organizers have had a record number of entries this year and expect to screen at least 200 documentary, narrative, experimental, and animated features and shorts during the festival’s weeklong run. Festival passes are on sale now at the Indie Memphis website.

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Film Features Film/TV

47 Meters Down

Conflicted as to whether or not to see 47 Meters Down? You gotta ask yourself, “What do I want from my shark movie?”

This is not to say that 47 Meters Down is a crappy movie. It’s no Jaws, but then again, neither is anything else. It’s a cheap shark flick that at least has the decency to keep the sharks mean and underwater and not have them become super-intelligent or fly through the air. Sharknado, I’m looking at you. It respects the audience’s intelligence enough to wear a fig leaf of reality so as not to openly offend our suspension of disbelief — at least until it doesn’t.

Two sisters, Lisa (Mandy Moore) and Kate (Claire Holt) are on a beach vacation in Mexico. The trip began as a girls’ outing, but Lisa’s expanding dark mood alerts her sister to something wrong. Seems Lisa’s boyfriend is moving out. Kate tries to cheer Lisa up by taking her out clubbing, where they meet a couple of guys, Louis (Yani Gellman) and Javier (Chris Johnson), who are hot to trot. The next day, the guys invite them to go on a shark dive. Hoping to spark a palate-cleansing fling for Lisa, Kate pressures her sister into going along, even though it’s clear that the thought of being trapped in a cage under the Gulf of Mexico surrounded by sharks scares her to death.

Despite her horrible taste in corporate alt-rock, Lisa seems like a nice sort. Maybe shark diving isn’t for everyone, but Lisa bends to Kate’s pressure. After all, it’s a tourist thing, so it must be safe. And not only are Louis and Javier super-cute, but when they get to the dock, they discover the captain is Matthew Modine. But as they’re boarding the SS Hunk Boat, it’s clear that it’s just an old rust bucket on its last sea legs. Captain Modine takes the aging trawler out of sight of land and illegally chums the water before sending the girls down for some sightseeing.

Claire Holt (left) and Mandy Moore play a pair of sisters struggling to survive in shark-infested waters.

None of these are good ideas, but good ideas don’t get us to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, trapped in a broken cage, surrounded by hungry sharks. That’s where writer/director Johannes Roberts wants to go with his intrepid camera crew. The underwater photography is the highlight of 47 Meters Down. It’s almost like Roberts watched Gravity and said, like a true B-movie auteur, “I can do that underwater, much cheaper, and also with sharks!”

But as anyone who has worked with James Cameron will tell you, shooting underwater is no joke. Moore and Holt seem game for anything and have to be commended for a pair of brave performances in what look like actual life-threatening conditions. The way to keep costs down in these movies is to limit their scope, and Roberts and crew wring out every last dramatic situation they can think of that involves two women on the bottom of the ocean.

Which brings us to 47 Meters Down‘s ultimate downfall. I’m about to spoil the ending, so if you care about such things, stop reading now and just go see the stupid shark movie.

After coasting along for an hour or so of fairly impressive shark-related jump scares, 47 Meters Down commits what is, to my mind, the deadliest narrative sin. Writer/director Johannes Roberts pulls an “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” In that 1890 short story, Ambrose Bierce spins a tale of daring escape by a condemned Civil War soldier, only to reveal at the end that everything that has transpired was the dying hallucination of a hanged man. The “It’s all been a dream!” move is a direct betrayal of the trust the audience puts in a storyteller. Even for a movie dedicated to cheap thrills, it’s the cheapest trick of all. Judging from the collective groan that went up at the end of 47 Meters Down, audiences know when they’ve been had, and they don’t like it.

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Film/TV TV Features

Stranger Things

Unlike a movie studio or traditional broadcast network, Netflix is not in the business of appealing to a mass audience with each new release. Instead, for their original productions, the streaming service tries to create shows that will find a niche audience. The business model for a show like NBC’s America’s Got Talent involves delivering ads to the largest number of people at once. But Netflix doesn’t sell ads. It sells subscriptions, and its execs know that it will only take one great show to hook someone into paying that monthly fee. Netflix doesn’t release rating numbers, but shows such as Orange Is the New Black, House of Cards, Sense8, and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt have enjoyed critical praise while amassing large enough loyal audiences to justify their existence. In the traditional advertising model, the interests of the networks are more closely aligned with their advertisers, but selling subscriptions directly to the audience switches that allegiance to the fans.

The latest successful product of this realignment of forces is Stranger Things. Netflix took a chance on a pair of twin brothers from North Carolina, Matt and Ross Duffer, a pair of newbies with a killer pitch: What if we remade all of the films of the 1980s at once? Well, not all ’80s movies, just the low- to mid-budget sci-fi and horror films of the type Hollywood rarely makes any more. Like The Goonies, the heart of the story lies with a group of precocious kids. Mike (Finn Wolfhard) is introduced as the dungeon master in the midst of the weekly Dungeons and Dragons session with fellow tween dweebs Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) and Will (Noah Schnapp). After a 10-hour bout of snack food and polyhedral dice, the boys bike home, but Will is intercepted in the dark woods of rural Indiana by a sinister, faceless monster who kidnaps the boy into a spooky parallel dimension that resembles the spirit world from Poltergeist. The next morning, Will’s mom, Joyce (Winona Ryder), calls the police, sending Chief Hopper (David Harbour) on a search for the missing boy.

Winona Ryder

Meanwhile, a young girl wanders out of the woods. Disoriented and almost mute, she has a shaved head and a tattoo on her wrist identifying her as “11.” When the owner of a diner offers her aid, a group of shadowy government agents show up in pursuit. Led by Dr. Brenner (Matthew Modine), the staff of Hawkins National Laboratory seem to be somehow involved with the monster’s parallel universe and responsible for Eleven’s telekinetic powers, whose depths are slowly revealed as the series progresses through eight episodes.

Matarazzo, Brown, and Wolfhard channel ’80s horror.

The Duffer Brothers follow the Tarantino formula of creating a pastiche out of loosely related genre films, taking images and moments from films like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Stand by Me, and Flight of the Navigator and sculpting them into something fresh. Stranger Things subverts as it mimics. Mike’s older sister, Nancy (Natalia Dyer), escapes the sexual punishment aspect of ’80s horror, while her prudish bestie, Barb (Shannon Purser), disappears into the netherworld. The crumbling Midwest of the Reagan era is painstakingly reconstructed, and the Duffers’ meticulous world-building pays off again and again, such as the way they luxuriate in 1983’s lack of cell phones, allowing them to keep information selectively hidden from their characters while letting the audience in on the bigger picture.

None of that would work without good characters, and Stranger Things has those in abundance, led by Winona Ryder in pedal-to-the-metal parental hysterics mode. The other adult standout is Harbour as the deeply damaged police chief, haunted by memories of his dead child. The heart of the show is Millie Brown as Eleven, whose combination of spooky intensity and wide-eyed innocence personifies the appeal of Stranger Things.