Sunrise: The Blood-Consuming “Red Coat”

It is tempting to think of the “Red Coat” as a vampire, especially (apparently) if you are writing copy for a film about it. Yet, even though the forest spirit of Northwest Native mythos feeds on blood, it shares little in common with traditional vampire lore. Whatever you call it, the Red Coat is still dangerous to provoke in Andrew Baird’s Sunrise, which releases in theaters and on-demand this Friday.

Reynolds runs this depressed town like an old school crime boss. Unfortunately, he is also a virulently racist boss, so he is not what you call welcoming to the Loi family (recently immigrated from China). If Mr. Loi had just signed over their farm, Reynolds might have let him live, but he killed him for refusing.

Since the body never surfaced, Yan Loi has been living in limbo, but her teen son has given up hope. He still has some fight left in him, despite the regular bullying, but his secret high school flirtation with a white girl could bring down a great deal of trouble on the family. Reynolds wants to run off the Loi’s for good anyway, but the mysterious Fallon interrupts the latest attempt. He used to be the law in these parts before the Loi’s arrived, but as far as they know, he is a sullen drifter with a bizarre appetite for blood—mostly animal, at least for now (and he can walk around in the daylight, despite the title).

Baird and screenwriter Ronan Blaney deserve credit for trying to do something new and different in the supernatural genre. However, the final film’s pacing is so deliberate and restrained, it is debatable whether Sunrise can be properly categorized as horror. The burn is definitely slow in this one.

On the other hand, the atmosphere and grim sense of place is highly potent. Evil palpably hangs over this community, so viewers will emphatically root for some payback in the E.C. tradition. The cast is also quite impressive, particularly Alex Pettyfer, who plays Fallon with a quiet, seething intensity that is unusually disconcerting (especially for an ostensive “good guy”).

Guy Pearce also chews the scenery like nobody’s business as Reynolds. His is certainly a sinister villain, but much of his dialogue is over-written. His long racist diatribes sound like they were written for the audience’s benefit, to show us what troglodytes like Reynolds really think. However, in reality, guys like him are usually bluntly to the point.

The Clearing, on Hulu

This Australian cult has its members undergo recorded confessions, or so-called “clearings,” which provide them ample blackmail fodder, should anyone ever step out of line. Gee, can you imagine any purported cults with ties to Hollywood engaging in similar practices? Yet, for Australian audiences, the cult matriarch’s “children,” amassed through questionable adoptions and foster arrangements, would immediately recall “The Family,” led by Anne Hamilton-Byrnes. In the case of Adrienne Beaufort’s cult, things start to fall apart when an over-zealous member kidnaps a little girl, who refuses to be indoctrinated into the “family.” The mystery of young Sara’s fate will haunt every character in writer-creators Matt Cameron & Elise McCredie’s The Clearing, which premieres today on Hulu.

Sometime in the past, Freya (as she now calls herself) was traumatically associated with the cult based at Bronte-esque Blackmarsh Manor. She got out, but the scars remain, especially when news of a child abduction triggers (the word is actually appropriate in this case) bad memories.

Tamsin Latham is a true believer, unwaveringly devoted to Beaufort, but her initiative has been disastrous. No matter how hard they try to brainwash Sara, she refuses to accept her new name, “Asha,” or her new “mother.” Beaufort’s favorite “child,” possibly her own biological daughter, Amy, was supposed to win Sara/Asha over. Instead, the little girl’s deep sense of self raises questions in Amy, at the worst possible time—right before her first ritual “clearing.”

Cameron and McCredie play a lot of devious games with the timeline that might be easier to guess from this review than from watching The Clearing from the start, despite my good faith efforts to be vague and misdirecting. However, they are not simply being clever for the sake of cleverness. By the time you get through the first four episodes provided for review (out of eight), you get a potent sense of how the sins of the past continue to exert an evil influence over everyone in the present, especially since several characters cut their own deals, rather than holding fast to their principles.

Without question, Miranda Otto is the star of Clearing as the chillingly regal Beaufort. She makes the cult leader’s Svengali-like control over people totally believable and absolutely terrifying. Likewise, Kate Mulvany might be even scarier as the sadistic Latham, who seems to have joined the cult for the opportunity to bully children. Guy Pearce is also pretty creepy and clammy as Beaufort’s consigliere and theoretician, Dr. Bryce Latham, but it is still not clear why the role was meaty enough to attract the well-known thesp.

The Last Vermeer: Guy Pearce is Han Van Meegeren

Joseph (Joop) Piller was a hero of the Dutch resistance, who would eventually be awarded America’s WWII-era Medal of Freedom. Han Van Meegeren (HVM) was not. Ironically, the failed artist-turned dealer of ill-repute would have to prove a lesser guilt when accused of collaboration. To do so, he needed the help of Piller, the investigator who initially pursues him in Dan Friedkin’s historically-based The Last Vermeer, which opens tomorrow nationwide.

The war has been over long enough for most of the Dutch to feel it is time to resume “normal” life. Piller still works for the provisional Allied command rather than the Dutch government, but the writing is on the wall. HVM will likely be his final case. The artist-dealer admits he joined the National Socialist Party for business purposes, but denies selling any of the Netherlands’ national treasures to the enemy. Unfortunately, the bill of sale for a hitherto unknown Vermeer suggests otherwise.

As he digs into the case, Piller struggles with the legacy of the war. His relationship with his wife is decidedly strained. Being Jewish, Piller had to go underground, while his wife survived doing clerical work for the occupying Germans, quickly becoming the boss’s mistress. She also became Piller’s best source, so he knew all about it.

Accused of collaboration by the Dutch authorities, HVM offers a novel defense and it will be Piller (now a private citizen) who argues the case on his behalf. This wild tale of art and deception, adapted from Jonathan Lopez’s nonfiction The Man Who Made Vermeers, might sound familiar to some, especially if they saw Austin Pendleton portray HVM Off-Broadway in Another Vermeer. Yet, the film and the play offer radically different takes on the artistic rogue, while generally agreeing he was a morally ambiguous and bitterly resented the proper art world’s snobby rejection of his talents.

Guy Pearce is grandly arrogant and flamboyant as HVM. His petty, prickly flaws are manifest, but he is never boring. It is hard to love him, but you can easily see why he was invited to parties. On the other hand, Claes Bang broods with unusual charisma as Piller, quietly expressing a sense of how deeply conflicted and tortured the war left him. Bang offers a rare example of a sensitive yet decidedly strong and masculine performance (like vintage Harrison Ford).

Brimstone: A Western from Hell

This evil priest makes “Reverend” Harry Powell in Night of the Hunter look like Father Flanagan. He is such an evil cuss, he is never given a proper name. When he rides, death, sadism, and incest follow in his wake. Just when his grown daughter thought she had started a new life, he reappears like Freddy Krueger in Martin Koolhoven’s ridiculously lurid Brimstone (trailer here), which opens today in New York.

Frankly, it is hard to say whether Brimstone was intended as a horror movie or a revisionist western. In this case, the ambiguity is due Koolhoven’s wild, unrestrained indulgences. When Liz’s tormentor suddenly appears as the new minister in town, he need only touch the stomach of a pregnant woman to induce a miscarriage his midwife daughter will inevitably be blamed for. That sounds pretty darn Satanic, yet the Rev talks like Church Lady. Through his Mephistophelean influence, he turns the community against Liz and her adopted family, yet Koolhoven suddenly downshifts to grungy realism when he flashes back to explain how Liz and the Rev became so antagonistic.

After years of abusing Liz’s mother, the preacher decided to marry his daughter, because it is God’s will. Bizarrely, the stiff collared Dutch immigrant community he ministers to thinks nothing of it when Liz’s mother attends services in a steel muzzle. Subtlety, be gone. Koolhoven hast cast thee out of this movie.

Obviously, Koolhoven has a pathological hatred of Protestantism, but the obsession with menstruation he projects onto the Reverend-Without-a-Name really opens up a window into his own dark psyche. The sort of misogynist violence and transgressive sexual kinks assembled in Brimstone cries out for a psychological intervention. Frankly, it is more than a little disturbing to think Koolhoven was working with children, while filming both Brimstone and his infinitely superior Winter in Wartime.

Guy Pearce clownishly overacts as the evil Reverend. At one point, he literally howls at the moon like a wolf. Both Dakota Fanning and Emilia Jones maintain more dignity playing Liz and her fifteen-year-old self, when she was known as Joanna. Sadly, Carice van Houten is largely wasted and sort of humiliated as Liz/Joanna’s horribly abused mother. However, her Game of Thrones co-star Kit Harington provides a bit of hope and energy, even though the contrived presence of his gunslinger character stretches believability to the breaking point.

Brimstone gives over-the-top excess a bad name. Who in their right mind would name their saloon-bordello “Frank’s Inferno?” Yet, that is where Liz is forced into white slavery after temporarily escaping her father’s lustful clutches. Nothing is too on-the-nose, as long as it fits Koolhoven’s crude hit-you-over-the-head-with-a-2x4 symbolism. Arguably, Brimstone is so barking mad, some folks will want to see it for its own freak show appeal, but you should probably avoid such temptations for the good of your soul. Not recommended, especially not at its life-sucking two-and-a-half hour running time, Brimstone opens today (3/10) in New York, at the Cinema Village.

Genius: Maxwell Perkins Edits Thomas Wolfe

Maxwell Perkins fostered the development of Twentieth Century American literature like no other, as the editor of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Dawn Powell, and James Jones. He always made his p&l’s editing Taylor Caldwell, but the “Perkin’s touch” also guided his literary luminaries to bestseller status. Perhaps none of Perkins’ bestsellers were as unlikely as Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel and of Time and the River, nor were any of his other professional dealings as tempestuous as those with the Southern Modernist. Their storied editor-author, surrogate father-and-son relationship is dramatized in Michael Grandage’s Genius (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

The Great Depression is in its early days, but Perkins’ world remains untouched. He lines edits during the day at the prestigious publishing house Charles Scribner’s Sons, returning to his quiet home outside the City in the evenings. Thomas Wolfe hardly seems to have noticed the current state of affairs either. The garrulous writer seems to live in his own little world, financially maintained by his formerly married lover, Aline Bernstein. Thanks to her support, he has completed an intimidatingly long manuscript that has been rejected by nearly every house in New York—but not Scribner’s.

Much to everyone’s surprise, Perkins agrees to buy what was then known as O Lost, but he insists Wolfe trim some of its girth. The novelist is amenable in principle, but he will fight for every phrase and passage. It will be a difficult editorial process, but it yields Look Homeward, Angel—and the rest is history. While still enjoying the success of his first novel, Wolfe delivers his second, the even more ambitious and unruly Of Time and the River, which will make the editorial give-and-take for his first book look like child’s play.

It looks somewhat odd to see the definitive American book editor and three of the greatest American novelists of the Modern era played by three Brits and an Australian, but at least that spares us the spectacle of little Leo DiCaprio trying to fill Hemingway’s shoes or Ryan Gosling moping about as Fitzgerald. First and foremost, Colin Firth has the perfect urbane sophistication and Ivy League reserve for the patrician Perkins. Jude Law can get a bit theatrical as Wolfe, but the novelist’s Walt Whitman expansiveness is hard resist unleashing. Regardless, he develops some nice master-apprentice chemistry with Firth.

Dominic West clearly has a blast chewing the scenery in his brief appearance as Papa Hemingway, but it is Guy Pearce who really gives the film some tragic heft as the Zelda and alcoholism afflicted Fitzgerald. Similarly, Nicole Kidman’s complex portrayal of the difficult, desperately possessive, but not unsympathetic Rubenstein will probably be overlooked or unfairly discounted. However, Laura Linney is grossly under-employed as Louise Perkins.

Screenwriter John Logan’s adaptation of A. Scott Berg’s biography, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius actually shows an understanding of how the book business worked in the 1920s and 1930s. Unlike The Girl in the Book, there are no misuses of publishing jargon to make industry professionals wince. It is also a classy period production that even includes an era appropriate jazz club sequence, featuring appropriately swinging Jools Holland Big Band sidemen (Kenji Fenton, Winston Rollins, and Chris Storr).

Frankly, it is just refreshing to see a film that believes Wolfe’s prose is worthy of feature treatment. It is a highly literate film that respects American culture and the circumstances that shaped it. Recommended with affection for those who admire and re-read Perkins’ stable of authors, Genius opens this Friday (6/10) in New York.

Tribeca ’16: Equals

In the future, employee fraternization will be strictly forbidden. The entire world will be a “safe place” because all emotions will be “switched-off” at birth. Unfortunately, Silas has contracted “Switched-On Syndrome,” or “the Bug.” As a result, he has it bad for his co-worker, whom he also suspects is similarly afflicted. All love is forbidden and hurts like the dickens in Drake Doremus’s Equals (trailer here), which screens during this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

Instead of Big Brother, the drones of this Collective are constantly inundated with PSAs designed to maintain public order. Silas has what still ought to be a cool job working as an illustrator, but he constantly asks Nia unnecessary questions about her stories. That makes her uncomfortable, perhaps too uncomfortable. It turns out Nia is indeed a “hider,” who secretly tries to control her SOS symptoms to avoid being ostracized like Silas, who admitted Maoist-style to his stage-one condition.

Silas and Nia soon commence a reckless, highly illegal love affair. He also gets some understanding and practical advice from an underground support group led by Jonas and Bess. The latter will be especially handy to know, since she is a hider working at the Collective’s dreaded Health and Safety Department. Inevitably, Silas and Nia are discovered, at which point Equals becomes a dystopian riff on Romeo & Juliet.

Granted, we have seen this severe future before, but maybe we need to see it again, because we keep forgetting how much freedom we sacrifice when we demand absolute safety from the government. The Switched-Off science of Equals might be speculative, but its implications are already with us. Doremus and his location scouts also help freshen things up with some strikingly neo-futuristic backdrops, including the I.M. Pei designed Miho Museum in Japan and Singapore’s Marina Barrage and Henderson Wave Bridge. If Kristen Stewart fans start making Equals pilgrimages, they might actually learn a little something about modernist architecture and Asian art.

Of course, probably Doremus’ most inspired strategic decision was casting Stewart and Nicholas Hoult as a couple trying to hide their emotions. Presumably, his direction amounted to “be yourselves.” They look perfect together, as if you could stick them on a dystopian wedding cake in World on a Wire or Gattica. Fortunately, Guy Pearce and Jacki Weaver are reliably engaging as Jonas and Bess. Evidently, when an all-powerful collective starts bleaching the human spirit you can still trust Australians. Unfortunately, Claudia Kim is ridiculously under-employed as the PSA voice of the Collective.

In retrospect, the relative reserve of Doremus’s conclusion is rather fitting, even if the optimism is forced. Regardless, it is a stylish and arguably somewhat timely return to the tightly regimented future 1984 and Metropolis warned of decades ago. Recommended for fans of anti-utopian and relationship-driven science fiction, Equals screens again this afternoon (4/21), as a Viewpoints selection of the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival.

33 Postcards: An Official Australian-Chinese Co-Production

There is a debate whether sponsor-a-child programs are truly beneficial or counterproductive.  This film is more likely to confuse the issue rather than clarify it.  Be that as it may, viewers looking for a good cry will probably find it in Pauline Chan’s 33 Postcards (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Mei Mei (“Little Sister”) never really knew the parents who abandoned her at the orphanage.  While she watched as many other girls were adopted, she always remained.  At least, she had one thing going for her: the Australian sponsor covering her school tuition.  When the Orphanage choir books an Australian tour, she is excited to finally meet Dean Randall.  Yet, for some strange reason he never responds to arrange a meeting.

Playing hokey, Mei Mei eventually tracks Randall down—in prison.  It seems he is not a park ranger after all.  On the bright side, he is up for parole soon, assuming he survives the prison protection racket.  Being a trusting sort, Mei Mei falls in with Carl, the son of Randall’s old boss.  Actually, he is not such a bad kid, but trouble is inevitable in their world.

While one might argue Postcards presents both the pluses and minuses of sponsorship program, it pretty unequivocally suggests the Australian prison system is ridiculously mismanaged. Regardless, it is impossible to root against the pure-of-heart Mei Mei.  There is something about her earnest innocence that harkens back to China’s propaganda films of yore.  Yet, Zhu Lin’s performance has such sincerity and charisma she will keep even the most jaded viewers totally invested throughout the film.  It is a breakout turn that deservedly won her the Rising Star Award at the Shanghai International Film Festival.

Realizing there is no way he can outshine his young co-star, Guy Pearce doubles down on understated reserve.  Nonetheless, they develop real chemistry together, even though their scenes together are largely confined to the prison visiting room.  Unfortunately, as Randall’s public defender, Claudia Karvan (Padme’s elder sister in Revenge of the Sith) just stands around condescendingly, as if she is trying to decide if she really wants to be part of the movie or not.  However, Lincoln Lewis (a great actor’s name) is kind of not bad as Carl.

Is 33 Postcards manipulative?  Good gosh, yes, but the winning Zhu Lin carries it like a champion, while getting a quiet but effective assist from Pearce.  Recommended for those who appreciate well executed sentimentality, 33 Postcards opens this Friday (5/17) in New York at the AMC Village 7 and is also available through Gravitas Ventures’ VOD platforms.