Reed Morano, a successful cinematographer, takes her first shot at directing with Meadowland. And it may be because she’s so cinematically inclined, or perhaps she has a dark side the public is getting a taste of here, but she’s chosen some truly heavy material from Chris Rossi (also his first) to kickstart her directorial career. Granted, drama makes for plenty of opportunity to play with the camera, and she certainly does, providing dreamy, close-up, mood all over the place. And it may be because she usually only has control of the camerawork of a film that she felt so inclined to rev up the other sensory experiences of the film to maximum intensity.

The film is about Sarah and Phil (Olivia Wilde and Luke Wilson) who, at the film’s outset, are struck the heavy blow of having their only son kidnapped. Flash forward a year and Phil is back at work as a cop, dealing with his grief with the occasional support group meeting and lunches with a friend who lost his daughter (John Leguizamo). Sarah, on the other hand, stays fairly numb with the help of lithium, barely passing for a teacher at the grade school she teaches at. Clearly these two have chosen the grieve alone path, Sarah often wandering around Times Square late at night, not necessarily searching so much as distracting herself, and Phil parking outside the gas station where their son disappeared as though he may wander back in the dead of night.

The detective on their case presents some new evidence that suggests what neither, though Sarah especially, want to hear. In her own misguided attempt to avoid reality she goes to cringe-worthy extremes leading to a belligerent and uncomfortable end. Grief manifests differently for everyone, especially in the circumstance of a cold case where the absence of concrete evidence doesn’t allow for proper grief, but Sarah’s self-destruction is especially difficult to watch. Morano also makes it quite hard to listen to. The music and sound design of the film are pumped up so high at parts it hurts. What’s meant to be a distraction tactic for the characters is just plain wearisome for the viewer.

Calling the film a bummer is an understatement. Wilde is convincingly inconsolable—and a bit crazy—in what is clearly meant to be a showcase of her talent, but in the hands of Morano, we’re rather hit in the head with it repeatedly. Wilson is of course the easier to sympathize with, those trademark Wilson puppy dog eyes playing to his advantage, but Rossi could have written Phil with more backbone to counter Sarah’s intensity better. As is, the two don’t have much in the way of chemistry, or even a believable animosity befitting their situation. They are more like two characters sharing the same story by chance.

Rossi wrote a script exploring the most gruesome depths of repressed grief, Morano certainly pulled it out of the actors and added further intensity with her blurry focus and pore-revealing intimacy in almost every scene, throw in the ear-assault and too-serious actions of the characters and it stops being insightful and starts being a bit scary. The film does a full stop at the very end, attempting to bring the mood back up with a slipshod scene that feels so much like a therapy session it’s laughable. Sorry Morano, you can’t assail viewers for 90 minutes and not expect them to be numb by the end to any ploy at pulling at heartstrings. Like Rossi’s characters, we can’t help but follow their lead and remain neatly anesthetized.

Originally published as part of our 2015 Tribeca Film Festival coverage.

Silly horror movies are awesome. I’m gonna go on record here and say that Ronny Yu’s 2003 horror orgy Freddy vs. Jason is one of my absolute favorites. Yes…I said it! (It feels so good to come clean.) It’s hilarious, fun, and in some ways a precursor to the superhero mash-ups so fashionable in today’s multiplexes. Thoughtful horror movies are awesome, too; Splice, the 2009 film by genre great Vincenzo Natali, is an imaginative “thou shalt not play God” cautionary tale full of wonderful pseudoscience and body horror that, while delectably genre-tastic, has still got a brain about it and poses some interesting ethical quandaries.

David Gelb’s The Lazarus Effect is a medical horror thriller that tries to be dumb fun, but ends up being just plain dumb. It tries to be thoughtful, too, but again: just plain dumb. Not campy enough, not smart enough–this is a movie that paces back and forth, unable to commit to any one direction. It winds up lost in the middle of nowhere, a sort of genre-movie limbo reserved only for the most listless of wares. Legend refers to this mysterious place as “the bargain bin”.

At the center of the film’s plot are married scientists Zoe (Olivia Wilde) and Frank (Mark Duplass), who have discovered the key to waking the dead: they zap some white goop with electricity, spout some vaguely science-sounding nonsense (they might as well be chanting “ooga-booga ooga-booga”), flip some switches and…voila! They bring a dead blind dog back to life (his sight restored, no less)! They call the white goop “the Lazarus serum”, a miracle drug engineered to “bring someone back” from the great beyond. According to the giddy science duo, its purpose is to extend the window surgeons have to resuscitate immediately following a flatline. But let’s be real: this is immortality they’re messing with.

Joining Zoe and Frank in their sparsely-lit, unnecessarily shadowy lab (because horror movie) in the bowels of a fictitious California university are their two assistants, Clay (Evan Peters) and Niko (Donald Glover), and Eva (Sarah Bolger), a college student making a documentary about the team’s breakthrough for a class project (she’s really just there to be our surrogate). The team is left in a state of awe following their canine resurrection, but the dog’s strange behavior–it doesn’t eat, doesn’t want to play, looks clinically miserable–has alarmed Clay, who fears the ol’ pooch could “go Cujo” on them if they’re not careful. When Zoe and Frank bring the dog home (yes, they’re that stupid, and yes, they are also somehow scientists), dog hops on their bed and looms over Zoe as she sleeps. This shot, like the rest of the movie, is meant to evoke, uh…something (laughter, fear, suspense–I dunno), but doesn’t really stimulate anything; the dog stares blankly at Zoe, we stare blankly at the dog staring at Zoe. Crickets.

What follows is a torturously predictable series of events, all of which ape from other, better movies. When the big bad corporation that funds the school confiscates all of the team’s equipment and threatens manufacture the serum for profit, the nerd-squad sneaks into the lab late at night to replicate the experiment and document the process, beating the suits to the punch. An accident occurs during the experiment and one of them dies and…need I go on? Oh alright, alright. For the sake of journalism, I guess. One of them dies during the experiment and is hastily ushered back into the world of the living. But guess what? They don’t come back the same! Now they’re evil! Bwahahaha!

The generic jump-scares and store-brand horror imagery (floating furniture, little girl standing in long hallway, blacked-out “evil eyes”) pile up like shovels of dirt on the movie’s grave, and all the while we’re desperate for a breath of fresh air–a new idea, a kill we haven’t seen before–anything to save us from the blood ‘n’ guts coma we’re slipping into. But alas, the film never breaks loose from convention. Its most earnest attempt is when Zoe and Frank have a theological impasse early in the film about what happens to us at the moment of death. Frank thinks we hallucinate as a result of our brain flooding our body with DMT, Zoe thinks the DMT is meant to usher our soul from this plane to the next. But the debate is essentially only an explanation for the nutty things we see later in the movie rather than real food for thought.

What hurts the most is that Gelb managed to assemble such an exceptional cast. It feels misguided to have a capable funnyman like Glover play a low-key everyman, while Duplass, who plays a great low-key everyman, instead plays a frantic, senseless mad scientist. (Duplass is much better casted in last year’s The One I Love, an excellent sci-fi film you should run to right now if you haven’t seen it.) Wilde doesn’t fit her role either, her slinky charm feeling at odds with Zoe’s violent mental collapse late in the movie.

If you want to have some raucous, childish fun, go watch Freddy vs. Jason, be ready to laugh, and leave pretension at the door. If you fancy a moody chiller that’ll give your brain a little something more to chew on, Splice it up. The Lazarus Effect tries to do what those movies do so well, but gets lost along the way and mucks it all up, leaving us dead cold. The characters in this forgettable piece of horror schlock can “bring back” all the dead dogs and dead people they want; just please, please don’t bring me back. I don’t want to go back.

The sheer ambition on display in Third Person, from Crash writer-director Paul Haggis, is staggering and admirable without question. It’s actually a very, very rare thing to behold, with Haggis carefully constructing an intricately woven ensemble love story set in three famous cities with just a hint of supernatural mystery blanketing the entire thing. Despite the film feeling earnest and being a clear labor of love, it also manages to feel absolutely wrong in so many ways that it’s quite painful to sit through. Haggis had a beautiful vision in mind, but the elements used to deliver it from his brain to ours are, frankly, unsightly.

Liam Neeson leads the ensemble of A-listers in the tri-story drama, starring as a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who’s struggling desperately with writer’s block while piecing together his latest novel in an extravagant hotel room in Paris. This battle with creation is one of the film’s two major themes, the other being the unmerciful nature of love and longing. Representing love’s viciousness for Neeson is Olivia Wilde, who plays his nutty mistress staying in a suite a couple floors below his.

Their story line consists of them alternating between them being comically cruel to each other and hysterically in love, having wild sex at the drop of a hat. Nothing about their relationship feels authentic, believable, or natural, with them pinball-ing from brutal to enamored way too quickly to take seriously. Yes, there are couples in real life who have similar up-and-down, abusive relationships, but Wilde and Neeson’s relationship is so hammy, desensitizing, and exhausting you’ll want to take a nap. They’re just not relatable enough to make investment in them worthwhile. The pair’s acting does have energy, however, and in isolated moments they’re quite magnetic.

More interesting is a second love story involving Adrien Brody, playing an American in Rome who’s so unimpressed with the city all he wants is a burger, which he waltzes into a pub called Bar Americano to find, but with no luck. Instead, he meets a beautiful gypsy (Moran Atias), the first thing he’s found in Rome he actually likes (though he claims the shot of limoncello they share to be the first as a pick-up line). His attraction to her is so strong that he’s compelled to help her when her daughter’s life is threatened and she must come up with ransom money somehow. This is easily the most enjoyable strand of the three stories, as it mixes elements of danger and betrayal with Brody and Atias’ potent chemistry. It also heavily recalls the work of Antonioni (one of Haggis’ favorites) in a good way.

Mila Kunis leads the third story as a hotel maid in New York entrenched in a custody battle over her son with a cold-hearted painter played by a vacant James Franco. Kunis’ character is positioned to be the film’s most sympathetic, with everyone in her life having zero belief in her, but again, the obtuse way in which her plight is presented derails it early on. The final showdown between she and Franco is as overblown and numbing as the climactic gunshot in Crash.

The supernatural element I mentioned earlier comes in the form of Haggis interconnecting the three stories when they couldn’t possibly be, as they take place thousands of miles apart. We see Kunis, who’s supposed to be in New York, clean up Neeson’s Paris hotel room, for instance. The revelation that makes sense of all this is clever and actually ties in to the film’s themes nicely, but by the time we get there we’re so depleted it barely leaves an impression.

Third Person trailer

Writer-director Paul Haggis (Crash, In the Valley of Elah) spoke with us in San Francisco about his new film, Third Person, which follows three interlocking stories of love, taking place in New York, Paris, and Rome. A labor of love, the script took two and a half years to complete, with Haggis writing and re-writing the intricately woven story incessantly. The film stars Liam Neeson, Mila Kunis, Adrien Brody, James Franco, Kim Basinger, Moran Atias, and Olivia Wilde.

In Part 1 of our video interview, Haggis speaks with us about the nature of love, his love for flawed characters, the selfishness of artists, the painful process of writing the script, the influence of Blow-Up, and more.

WATCH OUR PAUL HAGGIS INTERVIEW PART 2

Last week it was announced that Spike Jonze’s latest film Her will close out the New York Film Festival in mid-October. The film stars Joaquin Phoenix as a lonely man who ends up falling in love with an advanced operating system (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) after the breakup of a long-term relationship. Those two are not the only recognizable names in the cast, Amy Adams, Rooney Mara, and Olivia Wilde all also make appearances.

Watch the trailer for Spike Jonze’s Her:

Joe Swanberg is a well-known independent director who is notorious for his no budget, no script approach to filmmaking. The results tend to be very personal (he acts in most of his films) and highly realistic since the actors are not confined to reading lines off a script. Drinking Buddies is somewhat of a crossover from micro-indie films into a larger budget film for Joe Swanberg; it contains a well-known cast (Olivia Wilde, Jake Johnson, Anna Kendrick) and much higher production values (having a dedicated director of photography, etc.) than his previous 14 films. The Duplass brothers proved it is possible to make a big budget film still feel small and intimate a few years back with Cyrus, Swanberg solidifies the transition can be achieved with Drinking Buddies.

Kate (Olivia Wilde) and Luke (Jake Johnson) are co-workers at a craft brewery in Chicago who get along with each other well enough that at times it would be easy to mistake them as a couple. However, they both are in existing relationships despite their personalities being much more aligned with each other than the ones that they are actually dating. In both cases, their significant others are much more grounded and would prefer to settle down. Luke has been dating Jill (Anna Kendrick) for long enough that the marriage conversation has already been brought up, though nothing has been finalized. Kate has only been seeing Chris (Ron Livingston) a short while and their relationship seems more sexually based than anything.

Blink and you will miss the conversation where the two couples agree to a weekend retreat at a lakeside cabin. Almost immediately after they arrive, the cabin acts like a pressure cooker for each of the relationships, creating drama when they divide after Kate and Luke opt to play drinking games together while their significant others both prefer to hike through the woods. So in case you did not catch the subtle hints in the beginning, the time at the cabin makes it completely obvious that the two couples seem much more comfortable with the opposite significant other. For the first time the couples are realizing the gravity of the situation as well. Sexual tensions begin to boil, yielding the perfect recipe for a relationship explosion.

The best part about Drinking Buddies is how well the unspoken tension and jealously of circumstances are articulated without directly announcing them. This means through body language and situational awareness you get a sense of what the characters are thinking without them having to verbally say it. For example, it is evident that Luke gets jealous after he gets injured while helping Kate move into her new place when she is forced to have another guy come help with the move. His first reaction is to call her out on it, but you can tell his head is spinning as he realizes there is no justification for him to do so because of his relationship with Jill.

One major element that Swanberg re-uses from his early Mumblecore films is working with a vague outline versus a detailed script. He puts a lot of trust in his cast to improvise much of the dialog in any given scene to provide a natural feeling environment. The gamble pays off in spades when the loose script works as well as it does in Drinking Buddies. The performances for some (Wilde in particular) end up being some of the best to date. Chemistry between Johnson and Wilde appears effortless, as if they have been close friends for years. Kendrick and Livingston provide the right about of counterbalance to make the equation work.

A common mistake for a film to make that is based on improvised dialog is allowing scenes to drag on and get off topic. Thankfully, this is not the case in Drinking Buddies, which is comprised of a light and breezy pace due to the magnificently concise editing. What was most gratifying about Drinking Buddies was the portrayal of emotion and inclination without coming right out and talking about them. Some people feared that a more accessible film would diminish the passion and genuine feel that often are associated with Swanberg’s work, but rest assured that the only thing he changes is how many people will see the film.

Drinking Buddies trailer

The majority of Joe Swanberg’s directorial career has been making micro-budget indie films such as Kissing on the Mouth, LOL, and Hannah Takes the Stairs, which many consider to be early pioneers of the mumblecore (yes, I said it) movement. It was just last year when Swanberg got a taste of more commercial work when he directed a segment in the horror anthology V/H/S. His latest film Drinking Buddies contains a cast of Anna Kendrick, Olivia Wilde, Jack Johnson and Ron Livinston, all of whom are much more well-known than what he has ever worked with in the past. With Swanberg at the helm and the film earning some solid buzz from it’s SXSW premiere, we should be in store for something more than just your average light romantic comedy.

Watch the official trailer for Drinking Buddies:

Tron: Legacy is a sequel to the original 1982 sci-fi cult classic Tron. Most of the film takes place in a video game fantasyland which shows off the film’s impressive visual effects. Even though this sequel was made 28 years after the original, thanks to crafty CGI, they bring back two of the same actors. Although the film looks extraordinary, the storyline is not far from ordinary. And since they had 28 years to create this sequel, this should not have been an issue.

In a flashback set in 1989 we see Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), a visionary inventor and CEO of ENCOM, speaking to his young son Sam (Garrett Hedlund) before he leaves on his motorcycle. That was the last time Sam would see his father as he mysteriously disappeared after claiming a major breakthrough in his work.

It is now 2010, Sam is an adult and primary shareholder of ENCOM. He has more interest in being a rebel than he does as becoming a CEO. Case-in-point, when Sam breaks into ENCOM’s building and steals the new Operating System just as they were about to release it. Not only that, but he uploads it to the internet for the public to download for free. After watching the film, I fail to see the relevance of this other than showing that Sam is good with computers and is not afraid of authority.

A longtime family friend, Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner) informs Sam that his father had stopped by his house a couple days before he disappeared with news that he will change the world. Adding to the strangeness, Alan got a page from his father’s arcade from a number that has been disconnected for 20 years. Alan gives Sam the keys to the arcade even though Sam is reluctant about going back.

Despite the fact Sam was not very enthusiastic about going to his father’s old arcade, he does anyway. As he puts his quarter into an old Tron arcade game, but it spits it back out. It is then that he somehow realizes that there is something more to this game cabinet. Behind it is a passage to his father’s secret office. The office that he claimed will change the world as Sam soon finds out. After searching around on his father’s computer, he somehow activates a trigger that transports him into The Grid of Tron.

There are a few things you must know about this new cyberspace. There is no such thing as a world, instead it is referred to as The Grid. Years are referred to as cycles. Humans do not exist, instead they are called users and robot super-humans are programs.

Sam soon finds out that the same computerized world his father invented is also where he has been stuck for the past 20 years. After Sam reunites with his father he is informed on what happened. His father tried to create a perfect world but instead Clu had manifested to destroy him. He is effectively trapped inside The Grid as the portal to escape only is open for a limited amount of time.

The plot of Tron: Legacy is remarkably flat. Scenes either go into great detail about things that do not matter or are ones that even a movie novice could predict. Thankfully, the visual effects were enough to keep you entertained.

Simply put, the visuals were stunning. The alternate universe of Tron was rendered beautifully. You could tell time was spent with the details, from the characters costumes to the trails left by vehicles. The game of discs that were thrown at opponents looked amazing. It baffles me why it was robbed from being nominated for Best Visual Effects at this year’s Oscars. Even though Inception deserved to win that category, this deserved a nomination for their achievement.

Although, the soundtrack is pretty solid, it mostly comprised of typical blockbuster action film style of music up until about an hour into the film. It is then where you really start to hear Daft Punk signature sound of music. Coincidentally, Daft Punk even makes their first cameo appearance around the same time. The soundtrack is easily one of the better qualities of the film.

Sam was way too confident of a character to make the story work. He seems to know everything and question nothing, even in a world of The Grid which normal physics do not apply. For that reason, it is impossible to connect to the character emotionally. This makes it hard to root for the character.

Kudos to the director Joseph Kosinski for keeping Jeff Bridges from the original film in this sequel. The special effects used to de-age him are surprisingly realistic. Jeff Bridges is good but not great here, the script is likely to be blamed for it. However, one cannot help but enjoy him showing glimpses of The Dude from The Big Lebowski, even though the line, “You’re messing with my Zen thing, man”, seems very out of place.

Even though Tron: Legacy had an estimated budget of $170 million, top notch visual effects, soundtrack by Daft Punk, Academy Award winning Jeff Bridges, it forgot an important quality that makes a film great – an engaging storyline. The dialogue was pretty poor thus making the acting sub-par. Let’s hope if they plan on doing another sequel in 2038, that it does not suffer from such critical downfalls.