Separate Ways: TOGETHER and THE SHROUDS

Together is a gnarly little horror movie that emerges like a growth out of a simple relationship drama. It’s about a couple who’ve been dating for five years. Their move from the city to the country might induce a breakup. But that’d be pretty messy given all the entanglements that develop over so long living in each other’s lives. The horror springs up when it literalizes the idea that these two people might find it difficult to pull away and separate. It stars Alison Brie and Dave Franco, actual married actors, as the long-term couple. As such they have the sort of easy rapport that shows a total comfort with one another as they portray people who’ve started to take each other for granted. Brie plays the one who took a job that necessitated the move; Franco’s trying to make an idling career in music kick into another gear and laments leaving theoretical opportunity. She suggests they break up before they move or else it’ll hurt more later. (How right she is.) He dismisses the suggestion, shrugging off resentment we know is brewing under his increasingly strained grins as they move in.

Writer-director Michael Shanks, in his first feature, has a fine sense of atmosphere, letting their new little house in the woods become a reason for them to heighten the tension of the cracks forming in their relationship. And then there’s a paranormal thing in the woods that they come into contact with and suddenly, when they touch, it’s more and more difficult to pull apart. Hence the title. There’s are some fine cringing moments of sticky makeup and squishy Foley sound effects as the skin on their legs or arms (and even more uncomfortable parts) pull and stretch, increasingly strained as they rip apart. The trajectory of this logic is pretty clear once we get a fun sliding contortion scene where their bodies are literally drawn closer from across a hallway as they desperately try to grab hold of door frames and furniture. As a picture of a reluctantly co-dependent relationship that’s become a ’til-death situation whether they wanted that or not, it has its potent moments and crescendoes effectively. It also has a few moments where characters behave irrationally for plot purposes, and indulges some (hopefully accidental) nasty stereotypes in its suspicious neighbor character. That's all in service of an ending that’s satisfying in theory, but pretty underwhelming in execution. It may not ultimately know what it’s doing with its metaphor, but the vivid visuals are enough to keep it interesting right up until it’s not. 

David Cronenberg’s body horror movies never have that problem. In the likes of Videodrome and The Fly and Dead Ringers and eXistenZ and Crimes of the Future, he’ll follow a neatly nasty metaphor’s oozing and spattering with easy jolts and deep chills to its logical protrusions. He’s a master at the unsettling and the uncanny, looking at the fragility of the human body, penetrating the mysteries of life with keen psychology and a brave, unflinching look at physical and mental states of disrepair. Not to be too morbid, though I’m sure he won’t mind morbid, it’s worth mentioning that he’s at the age where every new movie might be his last. His latest, The Shrouds, is a work of such bone-deep grief and unshakable melancholic mortality that you’d surely pick up on its easy late style even if you didn’t know it was made by an 82-year-old. The movie stars Vincent Cassel as an entrepreneur who is an owner of a new style cemetery. His signature invention is a burial shroud weighed down with high-tech sensors that allow mourners to live stream the corpse. His wife is in one of the graves, and he shows her off to a date. The living woman’s expecting to see an old picture and is visibly disturbed in the background of a shot as, in the foreground, he pulls up an image of decaying skeletal remains. He obsessively zooms in and rotates the image, inspecting his late wife’s bones. He can’t look away, clinging all the more tightly the more she’s gone. 

Here’s a movie that literalizes a most painful aspect of a long-term relationship: how difficult it is to permanently lose the presence of a person whose life, and whose body, was joined with yours. We watch a man who has never emerged from mourning, watching as his wife quite literally fades away piece by piece. It’s unsettling, and in its exaggeration, painfully understandable. Cronenberg extrapolates upon this pain in his typical clinical style, staring straightforwardly into the plot’s complications with cold observational frames and a steady metronomic pacing that grows icily nightmarish. We get dream flashbacks to the wife (Diane Kruger) as she undergoes cancer treatments, showing up as a fleshy specter gaining stitches and losing limbs with each appearance. Kruger also plays the woman’s living twin sister, married to a frazzled programmer (Guy Pearce). The story soon encompasses gravestone vandals, a potential Chinese hacker conspiracy, eerie A.I. personal assistants, and a Hungarian tycoon’s blind wife (Sandrine Holt) who starts an affair with Cassel. It all clicks together with a chilly illogic, watching bodies and considering what we do with them, alive or dead. Where, then, is the soul, and the mind, as the body fails and exposes its fatal weaknesses? Cronenberg’s movie is so self-reflective and retrospective that it can’t help but echo back across his filmography’s pustules and decay and find another dark mirror on which to ruminate, all signposts and signifiers, an austere headstone to a auteur’s master thesis about human persistence and cold inevitabilities. 

Better Not Cry: HAPPIEST SEASON

Happiest Season, like any good grownup Christmas comedy, is a fizzy charmer leavened by the acknowledgment that, to adults, holidays can be just as much about family tensions and microagressions as togetherness and good cheer. So it is with the Caldwells, whose middle daughter (Mackenzie Davis) invites her serious girlfriend (Kristen Stewart) home to meet her parents (Victor Garber and Mary Steenburgen). The problem: dad’s a conservative mayoral candidate and mom’s an equally clenched socialite. So they’ll have to be introduced as roommates for the time being. Thus kicks off a Christmas week in the closet, which of course draws out fault lines in the women’s romantic relationship as a simmering backdrop to the twirl of social engagements and similarly fraught emotional sniping and jostling between the other grown daughters (Mary Holland and Alison Brie) back in the nest. Here’s a movie that knows that grown people back in their hometown, under the roof of their childhood home, can all-too-easily revert to bad habits and adolescent pettiness. The combination makes the movie thoroughly cozy —fireplaces and sweaters and scarfs and snow-dusted small-town shops and sidewalks — but also tremulously prickly—as eggshell-walking sensitive as its leads need to be to navigate the stresses of the week. Like that great Jodie Foster picture Home for the Holidays, if not quite on that level, here’s a movie that’s full of types in interesting combinations, and generously proportioned to give each their due. The cast (down to small parts for Ana Gasteyer and Aubrey Plaza) enlivens the drama beyond the formula so much that, even when the screenplay leans into some mild farce, a wacky best friend (Dan Levy), and big speeches, it nonetheless rings true. The movie sparkles with good laughs, and amusing scenarios (the kind that only occasionally tip over into sitcom broadness). It benefits greatly from the chemistry between all involved, and by treating their dilemmas with the weight they require while not letting it deflate the whole soufflé on the rise.

And how confidently the movie knows its lead characters' hearts. The proceedings are attuned to their shifts of feeling and desire. It knows keenly the way an off-hand comment can cut like a knife, a new situation can throw new light on a person you thought you knew. Stewart, especially, enters the picture as the outsider, and the way she gingerly tries to ingratiate herself with the family and do right for the woman she loves, even as she questions her (and their!) priorities, is written across her every gesture. (Stewart is truly one of the finest performers of her generation for how casually she holds the screen and communicates a scenario, even without a word.) I was invested in the emotional complexities at hand, even as the movie does its best to use them as grist for the feather-light touch it uses to draw them out and tie them up. Ultimately, the film plays fair by its characters while wearing its heart on its sleeve. And writer-director Clea DuVall not only gets great dynamics out of the cast, and paces out the comedic and dramatic bits with fine timing, but helms it all with high gloss and Christmassy production design and needle drops. It’s refreshing to find any studio comedy (albeit rerouted to Hulu in another of this year’s endless necessary schedule shuffles), let alone the rare Christmas one, that works this well at a human level. It’s broadly appealing and appealingly specific.

Playtime: THE LEGO MOVIE

You’d think by now I’d have more trust in writer/directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller. Instead, I’ve gone into each and every one of their films suspicious of the entire project and left feeling pleasantly surprised, won over by their manic energy and thoughtful thematic playfulness. Who would’ve guessed their Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, a feature-length expansion of a slight, whimsical picture book, would be one of the funniest movies of any kind in recent years? Or that their reboot of musty old TV series 21 Jump Street would be a jocular undercover-cop comedy perceptive about shifting teen mores and feature one of the best cameos I’ve ever seen?  Now they’ve tackled The Lego Movie. That’s right. It’s a movie based on the tiny bricks with instructions on how to build them into vehicles and buildings that come with square, stiff yellow people to put inside. I don’t see the story in it, although Lego has tried some original fantasy brands and media-tie-in parodies for TV on occasion to move product. Thankfully Lord and Miller found a way to make more than an advertisement. Under their direction, The Lego Movie is a freewheeling and clever family film.

Making terrific use out of the mix-and-match ability of Lego, the filmmakers have thrown out the instruction book. Actually, that’s the crux of the film, a conflict between the two basic ways one can use the product. Computer animation that looks like the expensive Hollywood version of what you’d get making stop-motion Lego movies on your bedroom floor (a quick YouTube search reveals this a popular subgenre of amateur filmmaking) builds a world built entirely out of these multicolor bricks. It’s a generic metropolis filled with generic Lego people: construction workers, police, cat ladies, surfers, coffee shop patrons. They all follow the rules, the same homogenous lifestyle that uses each and every brick in exactly the way the manufacture intended. Disruption comes when an average Lego man (Chris Pratt) finds a legendary brick and falls in with a motley group of assorted outcast Lego people, Master Builders who insist that the bricks can be used to make anything you could dream up. Ostentatiously evil President Business (Will Ferrell) wants to keep the masses oppressed and in line, but our hero teams up with the Master Builders in a last-ditch effort to save their Lego-world by opening it up to be played with however they want.

The film moves at a breakneck pace through colorful madness that spoofs the usual three-act structure of big sci-fi fantasy spectacle. There’s our naive Chosen One who finds the piece and is told by a wise old bearded Master Builder (Morgan Freeman) that he’s the fulfillment of prophecy and the savior Lego-world needs. That this is obviously phony makes for a fun, adaptable running joke. Their allies include a funny mix of characters from various Lego product lines – a punk woman (Elizabeth Banks), Batman (Will Arnett), a pirate (Nick Offerman), a unicorn kitten (Alison Brie), and an astronaut (Charlie Day). Their goals are typical stuff – find this crucial object and use it to shut down a superweapon – but it’s treated with a wink and a sly sense of humor. At one point, a character explains backstory most movies of this kind would take very seriously indeed, but here it literally devolves into “blah, blah, blah.” All we need to know is that our heroes are being pursued by President Business’s henchman Bad Cop (Liam Neeson) and his robots in elaborate, endlessly clever action sequences that hop through a variety of Lego worlds like a wild west set, a pseudo-medieval land, and a hodgepodge oasis of secret imagination.

The Lego nature of everything from the clouds in the sky to the water in the oceans, down to even the explosions and dust plumes, is put to good use. Good guys frantically rebuild the necessary equipment on the fly, while the baddies march forward mercilessly rule-bound. Cameos from all sorts of Lego types litter this high energy romp through relentless action and invention, from Shakespeare and Shaq to Wonder Woman and C-3PO, all cracking a joke or two before falling back into the big picture. It’s all such an exuberant sense of childlike play, the characters and setting deconstructing themselves and building new fanciful wonders before our eyes with delightful speed and complexity in the rapid-fire action slapstick. Imagine those charming moments in Toy Story when we watch Andy act out scenarios with his toys stretched to fill 90 minutes and you’ll get a sense of the tone here. This exceptionally, endlessly cute and quick film isn’t afraid to go very silly and step out of its narrative. The villain hoards mystical objects, like a massive used Band-Aid he calls the Shroud of Bahnd-Aieed. In the climax, his giant evil machine sounds exactly like a little kid making a growling engine noise.

For the longest time, I was simply charmed by what was an awesomely high-functioning technical exercise. But in its final moments, Lord and Miller take the film a step towards brilliance, pulling back the focus and revealing new information that moves away from thin genre play and towards something deeper, but no less hilarious. I won’t spoil it for you, but it says something almost profound about the way the act of creativity can bring people together. There’s also something in there about free will and a higher power. One character we meet late in the game is literally named The Man Upstairs. But it’s all folded into a sugary blast of entertainment. It’s amazing how a movie so light on the surface opens up bigger questions effortlessly. Just as amazing is that this multi-million dollar corporate advertisement doubles as an anti-corporate call to individuality in the face of crushing conformity, that this blockbuster movie doubles as a commentary on how blockbuster plots are built out of material as generic and interchangeable as Lego blocks. Lord and Miller are masters of having it both ways and getting away with it too.

Love and Marriage: THE FIVE-YEAR ENGAGEMENT

Lacking the focus and bite that gave Nicholas Stoller’s bad-break-up island-getaway comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall its notable power, his newest film, The Five-Year Engagement, starts strong, but gets softer and lousier the longer it goes on. It follows Tom (Jason Segel, also the co-writer) and Violet (Emily Blunt), who keep pushing back their wedding date whenever they encounter new obstacles. He’s a chef in San Francisco, but she gets a job offer at the University of Michigan. Why not take the job, move across the country and delay the wedding? The timing just doesn’t work out, but they love each other. They’re devoted and supportive. But why rush? They’ll be spending their whole lives together, after all. What’s another year? Or two? Or three?

As the story slips through events that take place over the course of what is eventually the five years of the title, it becomes a relatively lengthy, shapeless movie that meanders from scene to scene. At first it’s a rush of parties and preparations, but then time stretches out and seasons turn. Tom’s parents (great character actors Mimi Kennedy and David Paymer) and Violet’s parents (Jim Piddock and Jacki Weaver, so frightening in her Oscar-nominated role as the crime family matriarch in Animal Kingdom) would like to see them married sooner rather than later. The wedding is always on the horizon, but the distance to it never seems to shrink. Tom sees his goofy friend (Chris Pratt) receive the promotion he would have gotten had he remained in San Francisco. Violet sees her sister (Alison Brie) get married and have a baby.

But those happenings are more than half a country away from Ann Arbor, Michigan, a great city in its own right. It’s a charming college town that nonetheless provides wintry challenges to these Californians. And the people they meet are certainly friendly and challenging in ways related to their individual eccentricities. Violet’s boss (Rhys Ifans) and colleagues (Mindy Kaling, Kevin Hart, and Randall Park) and Tom’s newfound friends (including pothead sandwich maker Brian Posehn and stay-at-home dad Chris Parnell) are supportive, if eccentric. They know their way around local bars and hunting weekends respectively. The couple tries again and again to get wedding plans off the ground, but for one reason or another the date is pushed back again and again.

A wobbly mix of shapelessness and sharpness gives the movie its lackadaisical approach. The main problem here is the way it becomes clear that Tom and Violet have a pretty good relationship. I’m glad that the filmmakers at first steer clear of stupid movie-plot conflicts as ways to push back the wedding. It seems perfectly reasonable to avoid rushing into marriage, especially when Tom’s struggling to restart his chef ambitions in their new environs and Violet is trying to navigate the start of a promising career in academia. They love each other and, even if professional goals frustrate them at times, it doesn’t seem to effect their essential compatibility or their enjoyment of each other’s company, even when they argue. In the film’s most quietly funny and painfully accurate scene, Tom lashes out, complaining about his seemingly stagnant path in life, and finally says that he’d like some alone time. Violet gets up to go into the next room, but he calls after her. “Where are you going? I want to be alone here with you.”

What’s so unexpectedly sharp and recognizably humane about this film is the way it soberly approaches romance from a practical standpoint. This isn’t a swoony love-conquers-all Hollywood concoction. This is a movie that acknowledges in a serious, albeit in a mostly comedic context, the difficulties of blending two lives into one, especially when the people involved are struggling to get their lives as individuals started. It’s a movie about the futile pursuit of future perfection when the present is pretty good already.

By the movie’s back half, though, the sweetness and laid-back observation of this couple living their lives becomes just another romantic comedy. Contrived conflicts arise that divide the two, causing them to rethink their entire relationship. The plotting devolves into a distended version of the standard strained crisis before eventual reconciliation that can be found in so many romantic comedies, even some of the good ones. What’s particularly disappointing about this change is that the movie starts as a nicely unconventional look at romance, questioning a pressing need for matrimony when things seem to be so unsettled. The easy charm of the cast and the likable rapport of Segel and Blunt remain, but the supporting cast has been underdeveloped and the jokes have been a bit undercooked and so they just can’t carry the slow switch into formula. The whole thing starts to take on a feeling of an affable but lumbering episodic mess. 

Run for Your Life: SCRE4M

Now practically, rightfully, part of the horror canon, Scream hit theaters in 1996 bringing a sense of self-awareness to what otherwise would have been stock horror characters. It is a loving homage to slasher films that’s also a great slasher film in its own right. The follow up is a winking homage to sequelitis, while the third is such homage to bad sequels that it is one.

Scre4m is a back-to-basics slasher picture that also dives deep down the rabbit-hole of franchise metatextuality with all of the wit you’d want to expect from this series. It’s rare for horror fans to get a worthy sequel, rarer still to get one fifteen years after the original. With the same behind-the-camera talent, the film has Wes Craven bringing crisp, suspenseful direction and Kevin Williamson bringing a frighteningly fun script. Together, they approach the level of terrifying snark that makes Scream such a great entry in the horror genre, and the lack of which causes the other sequels (especially 2000’s Scream 3) to feel so discouragingly rote.

But Scre4m, recognizing and exploiting its own status as a cultural memory, pulls off the unexpected feat of feeling at once old and new. It’s old because the Scream veterans, perpetual final girl Neve Campbell, bumbling cop David Arquette, and reporter Courtney Cox, return to see a new bloodbath. It’s new, because they’re set up in tension with the changing times. Their tragedy, the Woodsboro murders that take up the first film, is now settling into the past, nothing more than a scary story. The films-within-the-films based off of the tragic events are now the source of cult appeal amongst the local teens, for which they feel like a quaint throwback. These kids are of the generation of Saw and Paranormal Activity, after all.

Rather than address the found-footage and torture horror head-on, this new film brushes them aside. This isn’t a Scream movie for our time; this is a Scream movie in our time. It cleverly works as a hybrid remake and sequel with a new mysterious Ghostface killer patterning a killing spree on the original film’s events. The new group of teens is centered on Emma Roberts, Julia’s niece playing the niece of the original film’s final girl. Her friends include a number of hot young starlets like Hayden Panetiere and Marielle Jaffe along with Erik Knudsen, Rory Culkin, and Nico Tortorella. In fact, this slasher film has so many characters on hand to be both victims and suspects (with little comedic turns for the likes of the very charming Alison Brie, Adam Brody, and Anthony Anderson and roles for Mary McDonnell, Kristen Bell and Anna Paquin) that the cast sometimes seems to be lining up for a much more sprawling film.

What we get, however, is nicely focused, no matter how cluttered it seems to get along the way. The new cast of vulnerable horror-savvy high-schoolers mixes well with the old favorites and Craven and Williamson are smart enough to keep both parts of their two-pronged plot lively and complementary. They feed off of each other and comment upon each other, much like a sequel (or remake) feeds off of its original, which is part of the point.

The movie is, in the best Scream tradition, energetically entertaining with jump scares and laughs, some surprising kills and at least one truly unexpected (and also surprisingly thematically satisfying) twist. In fact, I would venture to say that Scre4m is the best of the sequels. It’s a devilish delight that I thoroughly enjoyed experiencing. I doubt anything in this series will ever get back to the shock of the original, especially its masterful rug-pulling opening scene, but this is about as close as we’re likely to get.