NateWatchesCoolMovies
Joined Feb 2008
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Steven Soderbergh's The Laundromat is a silly film about about subject matter that is anything but, a deliberately lighthearted choice of tone and cadence that didn't sit too well well me given the grim financial atrocities entailed in this true story. Meryl Streep is a middle class elderly woman whose husband (James Cromwell) is killed in a river boating accident. When his life insurance policy suspiciously fails to cough up the cash, she follows the poisoned breadcrumb trail back to two scumbag Panama City lawyers (Gary Oldman & Antonio Banderas) who are running an elaborate offshore scam using shell companies and various operatives. Soderbergh makes the bizarrely vaudevillian decision to have Banderas and Oldman (the latter trying on a jarring, uncharacteristically bad German accent no less) narrate the whole thing as their characters in fourth wall breaking meta fashion and the template is just... weird, obnoxious and insulting to a very sobering matter. I understand the impulse to use these gimmicks to bring a bit of levity to a depressing story (Adam McKay tried this in his cluttered misfire The Big Short) but I think the film would have fared better if Steven had taken the somber, meditative, fractured yet ultimately straightforward approach to it like he did the illegal drug trade in his brilliant Traffic. Oldman and Banderas strut around like two fabulous peacocks and try every kooky mannerism in the book to win us over, somehow swallowing up Streep's workmanlike performance in the process, no easy feat. Soderbergh also does this other odd gimmick where he cuts away from the main story to several interminable asides that are happening elsewhere in the world and are only very tenuously connected to the main story, feeling like dislocated story elements that never shift into a discernible place. There are a ton of cameos including Robert Patrick, Rosalind Chao, Jeffrey Wright, David Schwimmer, Will Forte, Sharon Stone and more but they feel like trendy accessories rather than indispensable factors in the story. Something very specific was attempted with the material here, and unfortunately it just didn't work, at all.
Osgood Perkins' The Monkey is a wonderfully deranged slice of deadpan horror comedy and has now proven that he is an incredibly versatile filmmaker, effortlessly shifting from the eerie arthouse slow burn of LongLegs towards something more maniacally hysterical. Based on a short by Stephen King, the film yarns of twin brothers whose father (Adam Scott in a quick, terrific cameo) brings home a windup plush monkey one day, a toy that will change their lives and those of basically a few entire towns. When the monkey is wound up and beats his little drum, chaos ensues. Like, super gory, unpredictable, Final Destination level chaos. It's a delicious concept that's ripe for bloody situational pandemonium and Perkins makes great use of it with some death sequences that transcend the inspired and enter the realm of... I dunno, but they're pretty damned insane. The usually alpha leading man Theo James does a nice bit of dual character actor work playing both brothers when they're older and Tatiana Maslany utterly steals the show as their kind, loopy mother in flashbacks to the past. Perkins, who shows up himself in the cast sporting a magnificent pair of mutton chops, just understands horror and what makes it work. Whether he's doing a super creepy, more eerily paced chiller like LongLegs or a madcap, deranged bit of lunacy like this, he always seems to engage with his audience on a personable level, make unexpected narrative choices and create atmospheres we want to hang out in. This film is a blast and I can't wait to see whatever he does next.
Guy Pearce can always be counted on to pick unique, unexpected scripts and show up in consistently fascinating, really terrific films. Imagine my surprise then at coming across Disturbing The Peace, an utterly bottom of the barrel, shockingly inept small town cop vs. Criminal flick that offers nothing new and displays embarrassingly amateur production value at every turn. Pearce looks mortified to be in this, playing a disgraced Texas sheriff trying to defend his one horse town from a gang of murderous, bank robbing bikers led by a tweaked out looking Devon Sawa. Everything in this sorry ass flick plays out exactly as you'd expect, completely by the numbers plotting. Pearce makes just enough effort that he doesn't fall asleep but he looks like he'd rather be anywhere else than stuck here for what couldn't have even been a big payday, while Sawa chews moderate scenery as the baddie and struggles to make something of his inertly written lines. The rest of the 'cast' seem like they walked right out of a 3rd grade school play, and not one of the good ones. The action is clumsy, messily photographed and never satisfying, the camera work a spastic parade of bad angles and clunky staging decisions and the score a droning sustained pitch of numbing elevator music. Whatever led Pearce to get hooked up with this production is his own business and I try not to judge but for such a uniquely talented guy who seems to always get sought out for artsy, ambitious stuff it just seems... weird. This film is worse than this decade's consistent deluge of low budget action flicks put out by guys like Nicolas Cage and Bruce Willis and buddy, that is saying something.