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Posts Tagged ‘Alex Wolff’

A Quiet Place: Day One

Friday, October 4th, 2024

A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE is something rare and kind of lovely: a big franchise genre movie that uses those expensive trappings for something modest, simple and beautiful. As the title implies, it takes place right before and during the initial onslaught of super-hearing monsters from space that eat anybody who makes a sound, quickly causing the fall of society and leaving a smattering of by-necessity-non-verbal post-apocalyptic survivors. We get those monsters, some tense set pieces, some clever ways to deal with them, some (I believe) new information about how they work and how mankind first reacted. But really it could be almost any disaster scenario, because what’s great about it is that it spends this day of almost certain doom with a protagonist who was already about to die anyway.

You see, it opens in a hospice somewhere outside New York City, where Sam (Lupita Nyong’o, NON-STOP) is grouchily living out her last days. We see a little bit of her life before the aliens, but at that point she’s already dealing with a different apocalypse. Before that she was a poet, daughter of a jazz pianist, we don’t know much else. Now she’s funny but kind of a bummer, anti-social, disruptive of the peace. A friendly nurse, Reuben (Alex Wolff, HEREDITARY) seems worried about her, is trying to nudge her out of her grim mood by convincing her to come on the weekly field trip to see a performance in the city. He bribes her with a promise to get pizza afterwards, and she brings her cat Frodo. (read the rest of this shit…)

Oppenheimer

Wednesday, August 16th, 2023

First thing I want to say is that I’ve been calling this movie “Oppy” while having no idea that it’s what everyone calls him in the movie. I guess it’s just the natural, instinctive nickname that comes to mind for J. Robert Oppenheimer, even before “J.R.”

Second thing I want to say is that I was so wrong about the phenomenon of OPPENHEIMER! I had been confused as to why people were talking about it as a sure-thing blockbuster smash, but here I am finally having seen it after 3 weeks of sold out shows at the Imax. I had to give in and buy the tickets a week in advance, and the show did sell out in the same theater that never filled up for DEAD RECKONING, JOHN WICK 4, CREED III, DIAL OF DESTINY, etc. There’s lots of hype about it being shot for Imax format, and this is is the only full Imax format screen in the state, so that’s important context. But still – a 3-hour R-rated drama about a scientist selling out every show every day for weeks? Just because Christopher Nolan directed it? Hooray for the auteur theory! (read the rest of this shit…)

Pig

Monday, July 19th, 2021

PIG is an unusual new Nicolas Cage joint that I was happy to have as my second post-vaccination theatrical experience. But this one is about as different from an F9 type spectacle as can be achieved by science. When you see the trailer or hear the premise (somebody steals Nic Cage’s truffle pig and he goes to the city to get it back) you might think about TOM YUM GOONG/THE PROTECTOR (where somebody steals Tony Jaa’s baby elephant and he goes to the city to get it back) or maybe JOHN WICK (where somebody kills Keanu’s dog and he goes on a rampage to get back at them). The truth is that it only shares the emotional center of those ideas (people form bonds with and assign meaning to their animal companions) – it’s decidedly not an action movie or even a revenge thriller. It’s a slow burn character piece and parable that doesn’t even have much violence, and will probly be pretty boring to some people, especially if they came in with the wrong idea. But it was just what I wanted.

Cage’s character Rob is a loner who lives in a cabin in the woods somewhere outside of Portland, Oregon. He seems very enamored of his nameless pig, who comes when he whistles and helps him dig up truffles in the forest. When he makes himself a “rustic mushroom tart” for dinner he shares it with her. The rest of the truffles he puts in a cooler to sell to the young hot shot Amir (Alex Wolff, HEREDITARY), who drives in every Thursday in his bitchin’ yellow Camaro. It feels like a drug transaction. Amir tries to make conversation, but Rob doesn’t so much as grunt. (read the rest of this shit…)

Hereditary

Thursday, June 14th, 2018

Many horror movies have a little bit of the ol’ status quo at the beginning, a seemingly normal day to contrast with when things start getting crazy. HEREDITARY starts with a funeral, but it’s fairly uneventful, so that’s our calm day to want to get back to when the world starts shitting right into a fan.

Annie Graham (Toni Collette, SHAFT, xXx: RETURN OF XANDER CAGE) has just lost her mom. But the family’s feeling strange about it because Grandma Ellen, from the sounds of it, was a weirdo and a total pain in the ass. Annie starts hallucinating her mother’s presence and decides to go to a support group. Her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne, END OF DAYS, COOL WORLD) looks out for the family. Their teenage son Peter (Alex Wolff, MY FRIEND DAHMER) doesn’t really care and just wants to smoke weed and stuff, while their younger daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro, Tony winner for playing Matilda on Broadway!) is… strange. Builds things out of junk, plays with dead animals, munches on a chocolate bar next to grandma’s open casket.

Eventually, weird shit happens. There are apparitions, seances, paranoia, pretty standard stuff. But it’s put together and unfolded in ways that feel new. I’m trying to be non-specific, even though it’s the type of movie that would be hard to spoil. The things that happen are too wild to pin down as a premise or plot twist that can be succinctly explained. It’s a good one, as you may have heard. (read the rest of this shit…)