Math Class Redux!

A scalene triangle is one in which all three sides (and therefore, angles) are not the same. Since Scalene is not a movie about triangles, you should keep this in mind.

Quick Plot: We open on some sudden violence as a middle aged woman named Janice Trimble barrels her way into an upper middle class suburban home in a clumsy attempt to gun down a pretty young woman named Paige. Awkward girl fight commence!

We quickly cut to a chronologically earlier scene as Janice purchases her gun, and next, to one where we see why: her mentally impaired son Jakob has been sent to a mental hospital after allegedly attacking Paige, his home aide. Along with these scenes comes some heartbreaking moments as Janice tries to raise the silent Jakob while attempting to start a sweet romance with a bearded nice guy. As the scenes flash backward Memento style, we see that the sad roots of this family's plight. It's heartbreaking.

Or is it heartbreaking for other reasons? After we flow through Janice's past, we're switched to the more surreal point of view of Jakob, who sees the world from shaky, even LESS linear eyes. We only linger there a little while before switching to the (maybe) more straightforward perception of Paige, a sociology major with good intentions who begins to suspect something amiss at the Trimble house. Is she right, and have we been tricked by Janice's point of view? Or is Paige damaged in her own twisted style in a way that, due to her position, nobody (including the audience) will ever have any reason not to trust her instincts and actions? 

Scalene is a difficult film, something I say as a compliment. Much like the even darker Red White & Blue, Scalene is film that challenges its audience and refuses to let them know if they've won. Grounding it all are three fantastic performances in roles that require an awful lot from their actors. Margo Martindale is one of those faces that you've seen in bit parts forever before she finally gained some mainstream fame with an Emmy award for Justified. She's the kind of 'real woman' actress who you always want more of, someone who can steal a scene from Dexter's Michael C. Hall while laying in a hospital bed bemoaning the lack in quality of key lime pie. As Janice, Martindale gets an incredible chance not just as the long-deserved lead, but as a character who acts from three distinctive point of views. It's juicy, and she squeezes it for all its worth.

Equally good is Hannah Hall (young Jenny in Forrest Gump!) in the tricky part of Paige. While it's easy to side against her, Hall plays Paige with an intriguing balance of entitlement and good intentions. As Jakob, Stake Land’s Adam Scarimbolo has to play a brain-damaged young man with little glamour. It works.

Directed by Zach Parker (who co-wrote the script with Brandon Owens), Scalene is bound to be a divisive film. The backwards approach might seem to some to be derivative of Memento, though I found it an effective way to immediately catch you off guard, forcing you to see the sad effects of some choices and putting your pity in a certain place, only to later twist that around with another point of view. Ultimately, the fact that the narratives don’t *quite* add up makes Scalene something deliberately uneasy, a film less about who’s right than who’s who.

High Notes

It’s called ACTING!

Low Notes

The opening scene features an appropriately awkward, even humorous fight scene. While it's an entertaining and ultimately fitting way to start the film, the choice in score--which goes from Hitchcockian suspense to near-circus cues in less than 3 minutes--almost calls too much attention to itself. I think I understand what Parker is trying to do in terms of toying with tone, but upon first viewing, I just found it distracting

Lessons Learned

When it comes to college, blonds only hang out with blonds

Always check the flipbook before ordering pizza

In some states, it’s REAL easy to buy a gun

Rent/Bury/Buy

I hesitate to heartily recommend Scalene, as it's sure to polarize a large chunk of any viewing audience. While virtually everyone will appreciate its key performances, the very nature of its ambiguity is bound to make some viewers flat-out angry. I for one thought Zach Parker's approach was both unique and incredibly powerful, especially when aided by the powerhouse that is Margo Martindale. The pieces don't add up, and while that might indeed be frustrating, it also makes its own point. Scalene is currently streaming on Netflix and makes me an uncomfortable, but fascinating view. Word on the Internet Superhighway says that the DVD includes a few special features, and considering this is a movie that will easily benefit from a rewatch, I just might put it on my shopping list.

A Horrible Way To Open Your Film Up To Easy Title Jokes

For whatever psychological reason you want to apply, many of us are endlessly fascinated by serial killers. Adam Wingard’s 2011 A Horrible Way To Die is quite aware of that fact, using the concept to explore several themes. None are cute and fuzzy.

Quick Plot: On a windy winter day, a man drives a tied-up woman to a secluded mountain overlook to apologetically strangle her to death.

Puppies!

Sorry, just trying to lighten the mood here…

Next we meet Sarah, a fragile thirtysomething dental hygienist celebrating three months sobriety at an AA meeting. There she meets Kevin, a fellow recovering alcoholic with a compassionate face. The two begin a hesitant relationship as we learn the root of Sarah’s life-changing decision: the opening killer is her ex, currently serving multiple life sentences for a mass killing spree that had rocked the media a few months earlier.

One of the most interesting aspects of A Horrible Way to Die is how it plays with its timeline, calmly moving between Garrick (genre champ A.J. Bowen)’s past killings, his current escape and the carnage it causes, and Sarah’s drunken past through fragile sober present. Much like the brilliant Dream Home, this structure works well in making the film interesting without unnecessarily toying with the narrative. The choice enhances the characters’ actions rather than ever feeling like a gimmick to use an unusual format.

Unfortunately, the filming style DOES feel like a gimmick. Over the last few years of independent filmmaking, we’ve seen our share of shaky cam and while it has its place, its use in A Horrible Way To Die is positively annoying. Yes, the film is going for a form of hardened realism, but that doesn’t mean the audience is required to leave with a headache.

But if you can get past some of the film’s styling issues, the story inside (by Dead Birds writer Simon Barrett)  is quite good in an unexpected way. As Sarah, Amy Seimetz creates an effective shell of a broken woman with a believable and understated performance that provides a solid center. While I’ve never dated a serial killer (that I know of), I think anyone can wonder what it mean to discover someone so close to you has been doing such terrible things. What does it say about you if you didn’t realize?

That’s one of the major questions asked by A Horrible Way To Die. Along the way (to die), we also get to think an awful lot about addiction (be it to Jack Daniels or throat slitting), relationship transitions, and America’s sick fascination with criminal minds. We don’t get answers, but it’s an interesting exercise for viewers looking for a little more challenge in their genre fare.

High Points

Between Seimetz’ distraught Sarah, Bowen’s conflicted killer and Joe Swanberg as the nice guy Kevin, all the performances are top notch in a way that shuns showiness for a harder sense of honesty.

I won’t give away the big twist, but I will give the film credit for its execution. I didn’t see it coming, but I imagine a rewatch would show the signs were there without ever impeding on the initial narrative

Low Points

I won’t lie: the title “A Horrible Way To Die” sets a definitive exploitation expectation that doesn’t in any way fit the film (though yes, it is catchy and makes jerks like me want to rent it). While I think one could assign an interesting interpreations of how the phrase refers to the film, it also seems like a cheap trick to mislead its audience

The aforementioned filming style, something that makes the film feel far more pretentious than it actually is

Lessons Learned

Going to a wine-laden Italian restaurant on your first date with a recently recovering alcoholic is probably ill-advised

When your life has already been something of a horror movie in the past, the last thing you need is a snowy trip to a cabin in the woods

It’s really hard to hurt someone in prison

Rent/Bury/Buy

A Horrible Way To Die calls to mind something like Red White & Blue, a similarly sad look at broken people made with a sprinkle of cinematic pretension. I was a huge fan of that Simon Rumley film, although it certainly sank in deeper with time. I imagine A Horrible Way To Die will have a similar fate. The more I think about Sarah and what it means to have loved a man capable of pure evil, the more intrigued I become with the film I’ve already watched. It has its problems—drink an O’Doules every time I mention shaky cam—but there’s something there in Simon Barrett’s script and Wingard’s direction. To go into the themes might reveal some plot twists and in truth, I haven’t fully decided what they’re trying to say anyway. But that’s part of the enjoyment of a film like this or Red White & Blue. It’s something to think about, a sort of film that gives birth to more questions than answers. I won’t say I liked it or didn’t, but those seeking a challenging spin on the genre could certainly get something out of a rental. That ‘something’ may be a headache or conversation, but hey, it’s something you didn’t have before watching, right?

A Boy's Best Friend Is His Mother (but that doesn't necessarily go both ways)

One of the biggest compliments I can give a film is to say that it made me want to seek out more by the people it involved. This is how I felt after watching Simon Rumley’s brutal Red White & Blue. I had problems with the film, but was nevertheless fascinated by his storytelling both on the page and the screen. 

Hence, when Netflix flashed the naughty little red warning that Rumley’s previous feature, The Living and the Dead, was leaving Instant Watch, I hopped to it.

Quick Plot: James (28 Days Later and The Fall’s Leo Bill) is a sheltered young man coping with serious schizophrenia. He lives in an old school mansion with his wealthy, but soon-to-be bankrupt father, his bedridden mother, and a few pieces of furniture that barely fill out the floor. It's a sad, small family facing disaster on several fronts and when Pops goes out of town, James seizes the chance to prove his independence by locking out the hired nurse and tending to his ill mother on his own.

Things, as you might expect, do not go well. James doesn't really understand what it means to be a caretaker, as evidenced by his thought process that if taking your pills helps make you feel better, taking them ALL AT ONCE should be the cure. The second act of The Living and the Dead is excruciating in an incredibly raw way, as James, for all his good intentions, puts his poor helpless mother through true hell.

Rumley also explored the relationship between a son and his ailing mother in Red White & Blue, and much like that film, that is the ultimate strength of The Living and the Dead. James isn't a bad guy. "I like people!" he tells his father, who replies with something truly heartbreaking: "Yes son, but they don't like you." Like Marc Senter's Franki, James hurts his mother when trying his best to save her. It's as sad as it is terrifying to watch.

Where I fell a little out of the film (and it should be said, where other reviews seem to think it shines) is during James’ more extreme descent into madness. Rumley pulls out a batch of tricks to try to put us into the mind of a schizophrenic, and while I have no idea how accurately the condition is portrayed here, I personally felt it was a tad too artificially constructed. The sudden mix of aggressive sounds and shaky camera angles came off more as a filmmaking tool than character point of view and it frustratingly took me out of a story that I had previously been fully invested in.

This isn't to shortchange the film, as some of the other posts I've read about it praise Rumley's use of style. If you’ll allow me a Gene Siskel moment, the issue I had was that at a certain point, I just wanted Rumley to follow a different story than what he’d planned. It’s still a unique and deeply effective film well worth a serious watch, particularly for its strong performances and hauntingly unusual imagery.

High Points

The austere mansion goes far in honing the atmosphere of The Living and the Dead, as the family’s surroundings come off as a tragic old school aristocracy slowly eroding with their current state. Wide open rooms are littered with a random artifact and no real personality from the people that actually live there, creating an empty shell of a home for an empty shell of a family

Low Points

As explained earlier, the extreme camera tricks didn’t work for me, perhaps because the more human narrative was just fine on its own

Lessons Learned

Only one, and trust me, that’s enough: the importance of those “I’m Falling And I Can’t Get Up” button things simply cannot be overemphasized

Rent/Bury/Buy

The Living and the Dead just left Netflix Instant Watch, but I’d still recommend a rental if the premise sounds like something you’re interested in. It’s a sad watch, but one made with innovation and, odd to say, heart. Based on this and Red White & Blue, it seems that Simon Rumley is one of the genre’s more interesting new talents, a filmmaker with a strong eye, interesting handle on style, and most importantly, a lot to say and explore. 

In Honor of Flag Day, Let's Do This:

So here’s the thing: I can’t really discuss today’s feature, 2010’s Red White & Blue without revealing a major plot point that emerges nearly one hour in. If you haven’t seen the film--and I do recommend it, providing you ‘enjoy’ similarly mean and complex horror along the lines of Jack Ketchum--then I would urge you to admire this photo of an adorable puppy carrying an American flag--

And now leave.


All others, here goes:


Quick Plot: Erica (a hauntingly straightforward Amanda Fuller) works menial manual labor jobs during the day while prowling cheap bars when the sun goes down. With white cowgirl boots riding high, the pretty enough redhead beds a man (or three) each night, never repeating herself or lingering for a morning spooning. She mysteriously draws the line (and closes her legs) at Nate, a war veteran and former interrogator now slumming away at a hardware store and boarding house.

Nate is played by British actor Noah Taylor, something you might not believe until IMDB tells you so. With a wiry black beard and loaded Texas drawl, the actor formerly known (to me) as Charlie Bucket’s dad or the Exposition Deliverer in Vanilla Sky disappears into the role of a self-aware sociopath with a mushy soft spot for the cold Erica.

A hesitant courtship follows, cutting off just at a point where it seems our mismatched would-be lovers might get serious. The film switches to the point-of-view of Frankie (The Lost’s Marc Senter), an almost maybe kinda successful rocker balancing a busboy job with his band’s upcoming tour and mother’s cancer treatment. The switch is odd, but not unreasonable; we should remember Frankie as one of the three men who picked up Erica in the opening scene.

In case you didn’t read my intro or decided to take a gamble (much like a few key characters in Red White & Blue), I’m about to get spoilery. Walk away kids. Walk. A. Way.

Frankie gets some bad news in the form of an HIV positive diagnosis, a double whammy since he’s been donating blood to his mother. He concludes--and we an the audience can *almost* be sure--that his one night of unprotected sex with Erica is to blame. Upon dragging her to his basement, it’s more or less confirmed. Erica was raped as a young girl and has essentially spent her life apathetically spreading her disease to any male irresponsible enough to blow his chances on a few hours of condomless sex with a stranger.

What to make of that? What Erica is doing is akin to murder, something made all the more powerful when we see the snowball effects that poisons Frankie’s innocent mother (wonderfully played by Sally Jackson). At the same time, Frankie made his own choice, playing Russian Roulette with his penis. It’s a risk people are taking every day.


Oh but the film doesn’t end there. Come now, this has been dubbed one of the more disturbing films of the year for very different reasons than moral quandaries. Frankie holds onto Erica for a night, creepily seducing her and making a doomed marriage proposal. It does not end well.


Once Nate discovers Erica’s fate, things get...bad. Families are slaughtered. New uses for deadly duct tape are discovered. Stab wounds juiced. It’s ugly. It’s senseless. It’s a nihilistic roller coaster that ends with pure hell.

Hugging your pound puppy yet? Feel like you learned anything about humanity, America, sexual responsibility or vengeance? I can’t say that I have. Part of me wants to roll my eyes at Red White & Blue’s pretentiousness, balk at its self-important title and passive aggressive attempt at linking everything from the Iraq War to revenge-fueled beheadings.

Red White & Blue IS pretentious, but it’s also quite fascinating as both a film and moral question asker. The three lead actors are excellent, giving vanity-free and layered performances that don’t let their characters off the hook. Though the score occasionally oversteps its place, it’s generally well-done with a sound entirely of its own. I don’t quite know how Red White & Blue was supposed to make me feel, but during its running time, I didn’t want to think about anything else and now that it’s over, it’s still there. While that's not necessarily the sign of an enjoyable film, it does make it worth watching for a certain type of viewer.


High Points
Credit must also go to the look of the film, in particular, its actual characters. Fuller is an attractive young actress, but the film is smart enough to let her look natural, patchy skin and all. It’s refreshing to believe our characters as real people, something too many films are too terrified to try

Low Points
As I said, the soundtrack does become a tad obtrusive at times


Lessons Learned
Never send a diner burger back to a Texas kitchen


When bound to a chair with your family’s life hanging in your voice, listen to the crazed war veteran asking you questions and for goodness sake, answer them 

Condoms people. Condoms.


Rent/Bury/Buy
Red White & Blue is currently streaming on Neflix and is certainly worth a thoughtful viewing, providing you enjoy complicated and brutal horror that tries to/might be socially important. I’m still not entirely sure where I fall, but I’m glad I watched the film and look forward to eventually revisiting it with a director commentary track. It does make me curious to seek out filmmaker Simon Rumley’s other work, including the also-Instant Watch The Living and the Dead. I like his ambition and directorial guts.


Now let's forget our problems with another helping of flag puppies: