The nervy and intelligent actress Brie Larson headlines two noteworthy titles released this week of July 17th: Warner Home Entertainment's Kong: Skull Island and Lionsgate/A24's crime-comedy Free Fire. The former is the latest in Warner/Legendary's Battlin' Monsters Universe, and if nothing else, it's a wittier, more fleet adventure than 2014's humdrum Godzilla. That earlier picture withheld the titular beastie almost to the point of disinterest, whereas Kong: Skull Island wastes almost no time in getting its simian antihero (played, through about ten billion layers of digital trickery, by Terry Notary and Toby Kebbell) on-screen, establishing Kong's menace in a thrilling set-piece where he smashes his way through a U.S. helicopter convoy (an all-star cast that, in addition to Larson, includes Tom Hiddleston, Corey Hawkins, Shea Whigham, John Goodman, Jing Tian, and Samuel L. Jackson, who goes for a mix of Martin Sheen's Willard and Captain Ahab). Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts directs this sequence like he's making the comic-book version of Apocalypse Now, using Larry Fong's widescreen lensing and rich colors to make an already-distinct action scene vivid and visually idiosyncratic -the whole movie looks like Fong's Vietnam sequence from Zach Snyder's Watchmen adaptation, and that's a very good thing, indeed. And Vogt-Roberts is smart to build that Vietnam connection into the fabric of the whole movie. Credited screenwriters Dan Gilroy, Max Borenstein, and Derek Connolly set Skull Island in 1973, with the most interesting non-monster dynamics emerging from that failed conflict's real-world implications. Jackson's warmonger refuses to admit that the U.S. was waging an unwinnable battle, so he's immediately testy around Hiddleston's more cynical SAS tracker and Larson's peacenik photojournalist. That's all before Kong emerges, and it isn't a stretch to view his effortless decimation of the U.S. forces sent to explore his island as analogous to the Viet Cong's advantages over the U.S. military in 'Nam. That subtextual material is so rich that you wish Skull Island did more with it. After the helicopter crash, the film contents itself with being another Aliens remake, and one that softens Kong's menace. Would it surprise you that the island is host to hordes of nastier monsters, or that Kong emerges as the human protagonists' unlikely savior? Again, this thin material plays so much better than Godzilla, but would that Vogt-Roberts and his team could have made it weirder or even more socially resonant, or that the actors had more shades to play. Jackson, Hiddleston, and Larson are engaging as hell, and their natural charisma just hides the fact that they're playing tired archetypes: the hawk, the quiet badass, the empath. So it goes for the rest of the cast, save for John C. Reilly, who's a delight as a WWII flyer that crash-landed on the island in 1944 and has been avoiding certain death ever since. Reilly isn't afraid to go broad (there are times he could be playing a relative of Dr. Steve Brule), yet the quirks make sense within the character's traumatic survival experience. I know there are no do-overs in the blockbuster world, but the ideal Kong: Skull Island plays like Hell in the Pacific with giant monsters and gives Reilly full reign to shine. Sigh. One can dream.
If Kong: Skull Island needs to be less conventional, then Ben Wheatley's Free Fire needs to be more. The previews all sold this one as a profane, violent thriller about a bunch of gunrunners (including Brie Larson, Armie Hammer, Sharlto Copley, Cillian Murphy, Sam Riley, Jack Reynor, Noah Taylor, and Wheatley's favorite leading man, Michael Smiley) who turn on each other after a deal gone wrong. Imagine my surprise that Free Fire is actually a very silly, very foul-mouthed comedy. Wheatley approaches the film's violence as just a shade more realistic than what you'd see in Looney Tunes cartoons. His thoroughly disreputable leads might absorb bullets at an alarming rate, but the gunshots act as slapstick punctuation, from a bullet to the head that really doesn't serve its intended function to rounds fired at flanks and limbs out of exasperation at petty insults. The physics are elastic, and to Wheatley's credit, he nails that live-action-cartoon tone that lets him justify the bloody-but-largely-consequence-free shootouts. At maybe a half-hour long, Free Fire might be my favorite movies of the year. But here's the thing: at ninety minutes, it wears out its welcome long before the end. At a certain point, the lack of real stakes cripples anything in the way of emotional connection - with only one or two examples, all the characters are a) hateful, b) stupid, or c) all of the above - while the jokey mayhem doesn't seem to serve any real purpose besides the cartoon insanity and occasional gross-out effect. I'm actually amazed Martin Scorsese attached himself to this one as an executive producer. Scorsese loved Wheatley's psychedelic chiller A Field In England, but Scorsese has always shown a greater respect and fear for what violence can do – he's never treated killing with tongue-in-cheek. Plus, as an action movie, the film is also lacking. Wheatley doesn't have the kinetic sense of movement and place of, say, John Woo in his prime, so once we've tired of the glib proceedings, we can't even appreciate the filmmaking on a technical/aesthetic level. What lingers, then? The early goings: in setting up the hour-plus shootout that follows, Wheatley actually finds a good mix of comedy and menace. And the performances are all great, with Larson and Hammer taking top honors as a no-B.S. middleman and a debonair sleazebag, respectively. Ultimately, though, Free Fire feels like an exercise, and if it leads Wheatley to making a better movie next time around, then I'm glad it exists. But grow up, if only a little.
Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "perhaps it's unnecessary for characters to be developed when the main focus of the film is simply gun play, not to mention the fact that it doesn't take all that long for at least some characters to meet their fates (making 'development') kind of meaningless in any case), but this is a film without much in the way of psychological insight, preferring instead to simply plop down a motley crew of nemeses in a warehouse where a supposedly epic gun battle ensues…Probably the single biggest issue facing Free Fire is that there's not exactly anyone most people are going to be rooting for as various folks get picked off like veritable flies. Now, there's a nicely and rather well articulated blackly comedic flow to some of the shenanigans at play, and it is admittedly funny (in a very dark way) to see various people get dinged or grazed by bullets in the early going, leading to a bunch of 'kvetching' as folks take up hiding places around a location that is both cavernous but claustrophobic. But then - well, there's the rub. There really isn't that much 'then' to this film, with basically an hour given over to seeing who, if anyone, makes it out alive…With the bantering between criminals, all of whom are intent on doing the others in, it might have been more helpful had Free Fire offered the imprimatur of Quentin Tarantino rather than Martin Scorsese. There's a certain Tarantino-esque quality to at least some of the goings on in this film, and those who are willing to devote an hour and a half of their lives to an ersatz version of Tarantino may get enough bang for their buck (so to speak) out of this middling but occasionally exciting and bleakly humorous film."
From Twilight Time and MGM Home Entertainment comes one of writer-director Woody Allen's most idiosyncratic pictures: the comedy anthology Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex *But Were Afraid to Ask. Ever the accomplished filmmaker, Allen has also long been a master of the short story - his hilarious "The Kugelmass Incident" and "The Whore of Mensa" are the stuff of legend - so it makes sense that he'd try attempt the cinematic equivalent here. In a typically puckish fashion, Allen is playing some absurdist games with the structure of his work. Theoretically, he's adapting David Reuben's popular nonfiction tome, but no one would ever mistake Allen's film for documentary. We get seven shorts in just under ninety minutes - a court jester (Allen, obviously) involved in sexual misconduct with the queen (Lynn Redgrave); a woman (Louise Lasser) who finds that only public intercourse excites her; a boring everyman (Lou Jacobi) experiments with cross-dressing; a faux-game-show (hosted by Jack Barry!) where guests interrogate different sexual perversions; a monster-movie parody where the monster is a particular part of the female anatomy; a look inside the reproductive system that casts the body as a NASA-type operation (Burt Reynolds plays, essentially, the head of Mission Control, as it were) and features Allen as a very neurotic sperm cell; and, most notably, a romantic melodrama starring Gene Wilder as a doctor who falls madly in love with a sheep. Now, while Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex remains one of Allen's most financially successful pictures, it's also one of his most uneven, and maybe that's by design. As with most anthology pictures, the quality varies from short to short. On one end of the spectrum: the tiresome Jacobi and Lasser sketches. On the other: the Gene Wilder showcase, which remains as uncomfortable and hilarious now as it was in 1972. Allen would only mount this type of project again with 2012's To Rome with Love, which is even more uneven, but I still like to see him playing with form in such a manner. His creative imagination is such that the anthology feels appropriately sprawling.
But the most important release this week - most thrilling, most maddening, most inexplicable - is Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, which is getting a stunning new edition from the Criterion Collection. Of all the important contemporary filmmakers, Tarkovsky ranks among the most challenging. People often compare his works to those of Stanley Kubrick, but Kubrick works within fairly traditional narrative and aesthetic modes, for the most part. With Tarkovsky, you get the sense that film itself is but a tool for mutating us, whether that's demolishing our perspectives or forcing us to create new ones, and he uses films like Solaris and The Sacrifice as exercises in time, light, and space. Nowhere is this sensation more pronounced than in his 1979 masterpiece Stalker. Initially, it seems like Tarkovsky might be making concessions to conventional cinema; he sets us in a dystopian future where the title character (Aleksandr Kajdanovsky) leads two men (Anatoli Solonitsyn and Nikolai Grinko) through a ruined wasteland. Some kind of catastrophe has befallen the planet, but Tarkovsky is content just to allude to possible reasons why, and we soon realize that ambiguity and obfuscation are his primary interests. Using minimalistic (but striking) set design and an unnerving electronica score, Tarkovsky creates a dreamlike world that seems to twist and shift the more his protagonists venture inside it. Maybe the closest proxy I can think of stems from literature: Mark Z. Danielewski's postmodern horror novel House of Leaves which, while much funnier than Stalker (this is a bleak, bleak piece of work), takes the same delight in destabilizing its narrative universe for the "benefit" of its characters and viewers. Ultimately, Stalker is an experience, and one that isn't for everyone. But it rewards patience and observation. Almost forty years later, there's still nothing quite like it.
Of Stalker, Svet Atanasov wrote that "films like this one are very, very rare. For a short period of time they can truly transport you to a different world. They can make you see the place you have temporarily left behind from a different angle and ponder whether you might be a visitor there as well. They can energize your mind in a way you never thought possible...The structure of the narrative and the manner in which the film ultimately engages the mind are absolutely brilliant. The entire journey through the Zone basically becomes something of a deeply personal experience that forces the viewer to think about a wide range of philosophical subjects. The spectacular visuals also create a very special ambience. The unique use of filtered light and shadows and the very specific range of desaturated primary colors and nuances give the film a truly unforgettable poetic quality. In a way it feels like an elusive dream that somehow has suddenly come alive."