Schrader/Bunker's DOG EAT DOG gives Nicolas Cage his most interesting role in some time

Compulsively watchable, even as it has you occasionally rolling your eyes, the new film by Paul Schrader and adapted by Edward Bunker from the novel by Matthew Wilder), DOG EAT DOG, is Schrader's most enjoyable, if hugely violent, in quite a few years. From its opening in a pastel-colored suburban home (soon to be heavily blood-splattered) to baby kidnapping-and-murder, it is also his most transgressive -- even given his past array, including The Comfort of Strangers and The Canyons.

Mr. Schrader, shown at right (and below, left), also plays a supporting role in the film, and he does a bang-up job portraying a criminal king- (or at least prince-) pin known as El Greco. I am guessing what attracted him as a filmmaker to this tale of really, really bad guys gone worse is its combo of macho posturing laced with light philosophizing on everything from love and need to religion and violence. In any case, it proves a very good match.

Visually, the film is lots of fun, too. As much as I've enjoyed and respected a number of Schrader movies -- from Blue Collar and Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters to Auto Focus and (especially) Adam Resurrected -- it seems to me that this screenwriter and director is loosening up quite a bit from his earlier, more restrained elegance (remember American Gigolo?) to a more relaxed and occasionally even enjoyably florid visual sense.

As restrained as proves Nicolas Cage in his role as the "leader" of a trio of pretty stupid criminals hoping to do that last job that will set them up for life, he is matched moment for moment by another oft-seen (and oft off-his-noggin) actor Willem Dafoe, who has here his juiciest crazy-man role in some years.

Cage narrates the film in a low-key monotone, which reaches its apotheosis in the final moments with a dark, ugly but maybe on-the-nose appreciation of us humans and our motives. Beforehand we're treated to the three first-class performances of Cage, Dafoe and the other member of the trio, a big, bald, beefy lug played with equal parts finesse and frightening menace by an actor new to me, Christopher Matthew Cook (below, right) -- who would steal the film were it not for his co-stars

The women on hand are more or less cursory, but several of them are given very nice scenes to play -- usually with fear and/or loathing, given the characters of the men they're up against -- and they accomplish this with some panache.

The old honor-among-thieves gets the usual workout here, but so dishonorable in so many way is our little group that it takes the film into new realms of betrayal. To note that no one gets out of here alive is to put it rather mildly. The fine cinematography is from Alexander Dynan, and the alternately ugly and gorgeous (oh, that scene in the diner!) production design comes from Grace Yun.

From RLJ Entertainment and running just 93 minutes, the film does not outstay its dark and stylish welcome. It opens this Friday, November 4, in Los Angeles (Laemmle's Music Hall 3) and New York (AMC Empire 25) on November 4th, with a theatrical expansion and VOD to follow on November 11th. The DVD and Blu-ray hit the street on December 27.

Steven C. Miller graduates to the semi-big-time via imperiled-youth thriller, SUBMERGED

Each Thanksgiving TrustMovies tries to acknowledge a deserved "turkey" among the past year's films. Because nothing in particular came to mind this year, and because he had just watched a new-and-not-very-good film opening tomorrow in New York City, I'm afraid it's this one that gets my Turkey Award for 2015. I realize that there were some worse movies this year, but after sitting through 99 long and increasing silly minutes, "turkey" seems a perfectly acceptable description for SUBMERGED. It's a bit of a sad one, too. As one of those critics who enjoyed an earlier film -- a little scare movie called Under the Bed -- by this director, Steven C. Miller (shown below), I was eager to see what he might do with a bigger budget and some better-known and usually quite dependable actors (Tim Daly and Mario Van Peebles, to be specific).

Daly and Van Peebles are not the stars, but they are the most professional in the bunch; the remaining cast members seem practically interchangeable, including the movie's would-be star, Jonathan Bennett (below). The plot has to do with a nicely designed limo that in the opening scenes careens off the road and into the bottom of a body of water, trapping the driver (Bennett) and his "guests." The latter are made up of a couple of post-high-school girls and their would-be boyfriends/drug dealers. While underwater and figuring out how they might escape or be rescued, our "hero" keeps flashing back to better, out-of-water days, and we slowly learn particulars regarding who everyone is and how they got to the bottom of the barrel -- whoops -- the canal. Turns out it was a long journey, filled with sibling problems, sexual attraction and rebuffing, and a local businessman (Daly) who is having to lay off a lot of his current employees.

The movie, in fact, is about way too much. By the finale, full of action that is not very well or believably executed, you'll realize that the film's screenwriter Scott Milam has read (or at least heard about) the famous Matt Taibbi piece for Rolling Stone on Goldman Sachs as the vampire squid. This is because the movie suddenly turns into a treatise on the evils of corporations, money and especially downsizing.

Prior to this we spend way too much time with characters (above), about whom we grow to care less and less, when it ought to work exactly the opposite. But these clunkers scream and fight and act irredeemably stupid for far too long. On the plus side, Miller makes the fear and dread of imminent drowning pretty palpable, but then forgets that the water level in the buried car needs to keep rising (at one point along the way, it appears to have gone down a lot for no good reason). As contained-space movies go, this one -- by opening up and out every few minutes so that we can learn more of the back story -- loses traction, suspense and much else. And one scene in particular telegraphs the villain all too easily, too early and too obviously.

Otherwise, I guess, Submerged is a barely adequate scare-movie/thriller, if you're not too picky. It hits theaters in a very limited release tomorrow, Friday, November 27 (in New York City, it plays at the IFC Center, in Los Angeles at the Arena Cinema), while simultaneously appearing On-Demand.

A girl's best friend remains her mother: Jorge Michel Grau's follow-up film, BIG SKY

When We Are What We Are hit theaters back in 2010, it looked as if a original new genre filmmaker, Jorge Michel Grau (shown below) had appeared. (That film's American remake in 2013, supposedly inspired by the original, came nowhere near the level of its source.) Then arrived Grau's contribution to The ABCs of Death, "I Is for Ingrown," which was one of the horror omnibus' best segments. Now we finally have his full-length follow-up to his Mexican break-out hit, a little damsels-in-distress thriller called BIG SKY (not to be confused with The Big Sky), and what-do-you-know: it's... pretty good.

If that's damning-with-faint-praise, well, so be it. Genre fans will have seen much better, but they'll also have witnessed much worse. Written by Evan S. Wiener (co-writer of Monogamy), Grau's film tells the tale of a teenager (Bella Thorne) beset with both agoraphobia and some heavy-duty OCD requiring equivalent meds. When her mother (Kyra Sedgwick) decides to take her, via special-needs van, to a desert rehab center, things don't work out quite as planned. And that's all you need to know about plot. Be surprised a bit and enjoy the film more.

Grau and his casting director (Angelique Midthunder) have rounded up a bevy of good actors to bring the story to life -- from the leads right down to smallest roles -- and watching the performers bring to fruition some rather quirky tics provides some fun.

Two of the "tic-iest" roles belong to actors Aaron Tveit (below) and François Arnaud (above and further above). The former's tics are upfront and obvious from his first scene; the latter has only a single scene but it's a doozey, and so is Arnaud -- going from odd to odder in no time flat.

But it's the ladies here who do the heavier lifting, and Misses Thorne (below) and Sedgwick (further below) make a mighty fine troubled family, bouncing off each other, initially in anger, then bonding once the chips are down.

The movie is always interesting -- thrillers had better be -- but it ought to have been quicker, tighter. Grau lets his pacing lag (do we need to see Bella's OCD habit of arranging her pills acted out twice? Tveit's nuttiness is made clear immediately and then repeated again and again. And getting lost in the desert is never as interesting as filmmakers seem to think it is). These aren't necessarily deal-breakers, but they lessen what ought to have been greater white-knuckle suspense.

Coincidence, along with some just-in-time moments, play their part in also weakening the film. Sure, these are standard practices of the genre, but by now we expect a bit more from Señor Grau. The performances, however, are fine (that's Frank Grillo, below, as a somewhat "iffy" local sheriff), and the film, at 95 minutes, runs only a little too long.

From eOne Films, Big Sky opens this Friday, August 14, in New York (at the Cinema Village) and Los Angeles (ar the Arena Cinema) and simultaneously across the county via VOD.

Woooo-eeee! Let's hear it for Israel -- as the Keshales/Papushado BIG BAD WOLVES opens...

Hey, Quentin Tarantino thinks it's the Best Film of the Year. (That'll send some cinephiles, particularly those who love uber-violence, to the theater.) But I wonder what the Israeli powers-that-be, cultural and otherwise, have to say about the new movie BIG BAD WOLVES, which, of all the films to come out of Israel that I have so far seen, including Rabies (Kalevet), paints by far the nastiest picture of the place. Granted, this is a genre movie, of the type which, if we are to believe the very good article by John Anderson that appeared in the The New York Times of January 10, those cultural/political powers-that-be would prefer not be made by talented Israeli filmmakers.

As much as I found Big Bad Wolves to be mostly a crock of ugly and very smelly faux shit, the men who made it are without doubt quite talented. The film-making team here is comprised of Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado (shown above, with Mr. Papushado on the right), who also gave us the crazily enjoyable, if awfully bloody, 2009 Rabies. Their new one is so much more accomplished in most ways that I am guessing their budget may have doubled (or better).

The film's opening, which offers in gorgeous slo-mo three kids playing hide-and-seek, in which the camera covers so much so beautifully that when, soon after, we see a pair of shoes emptied of their owner, our heart skips a beat. What happens to the little girl who was wearing these we see only sidelong, in bits and pieces, but it's horrible enough. Soon after we're treated to a point-by-point, blow by blow description of her torture, mutilation and demise. This isn't simply strong stuff: Because Big Bad Wolves is, first and foremost, an entertainment, it is also disgusting stuff. You'll want to stop the film to bathe or maybe wash the filmmakers' mouths out with soap, or their eyes with acid.

Well, hey, this sort of torture/mutilation/murder of children does go on. Even, I expect, in Israel. Further, Big Bad Wolves, turns out to be a (very) black comedy of sorts. Really. Occasionally, you'll imagine it's the blackest you've seen. And, yes, I did guffaw a few times. The give-and-take between the fellow with the shovel, above, and his mother is choice indeed, as is what happens to and with a certain birthday cake.

After this beginning, the movie is mostly then devoted to the capture and torture of a young man (Rotem Keinan, above) whom someone sort of suspects of doing this horrible deed, without -- from what I could tell -- having more than the very slightest circumstantial evidence with which to convict him. Involved in all this is a policeman (the fine Lior Ashkenazi, below, right) and his underlings; his boss (Menashe Noy, below, left); the father of the child victim (himself a former military man) played by Tzahi Grad, two photos above and in the penultimate one; and finally the father's own father. All the men in the movie turn out to be thugs of one sort or another (hence the title) -- except perhaps for our poor, put-upon victim, who teaches in a religious school (oh, yes: and an Arab who rides by on a horse from time to time).

Though it makes more sense on the surface than did Rabies, the movie has some rather gaping holes. Israeli cities have always struck me as rather heavily inhabited places, yet Big Bad Wolves exists in the kind of movie la-la-land in which a man can be chased in broad daylight down a perfectly respectable middle-to-upper-class street, then tasered and dragged back a block or two to a car and then kidnapped -- with absolute-ly nobody around to notice any of this. Yet, earlier, when the police are illegally interrogating their suspect in what is supposedly a totally deserted and abandoned building (below), all this is conveniently videotaped by a school-kid and then streamed out to YouTube-style to Israel and the world. (I can understand and sympathize with budgetary restrictions, but surely someone could have sprung for a few extras now and then, not to mention a little more logic?!)

If you can buy into crap like the above, then I am guessing that you'll buy most anything in order to get your rocks off via some super violence. Along the way the movie says a mouthful, if is to be believed, about the grossly incompetent Israeli police force and the mindset of the military. And while it is difficult not to see these scarily macho males and what they do as mirroring what Israel is doing to its in-state, Arab neighbors (and has been ever since the new state was first created), we'd best not go there. (After all, those god-damned Arabs have plenty to answer for, too!) In any case, this film can be viewed from all sorts of aspects -- social, political, or Dada-esque.

While I will not give even a hint as to what happens in the end, I will say this: Because the filmmakers clearly want to make this the darkest of dark comedy/horror/torture films (it really does achieve the level of torture porn, by the way), I simply suggest that, before it's all over, you try to imagine the very darkest outcome that you can. Depending on your own capacity for ugliness, you'll either be near correct or right-on.

Big Bad Wolves, from Magnet Releasing and running a too-long 110 minutes, opens today in New York City at the Cinema Village and the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center. Simultanesouly it will open in Chicago at the Music Box, and across Canada in Ottawa, Toronto and Victoria. In the weeks to come, look for it to open in another 20 cities (click here to see all playdates) across the USA, though oddly enough I don't see Los Angeles or Hollywood listed among them. I wonder why?

The photos of the two filmmakers, second from top, 

is by Rina Castelnuovo and comes courtesy 

of the The New York Times

Robert Lieberman's THE TORTURED per-fectly describes the audience experience.

The kind of movie they call "torture porn," THE TORTURED isn't actually good enough to rate as "porn." It might serve best as a kind of canary-in-the-coal-mine: If the guy (or gal) you're watching this with gets at all aroused by the movie, head for the hills--for both artistic and safety reasons. Directed by Robert Lieberman (often an artisan for Disney and shown below) and written by the Czechoslovakian-born Marek Posival (though it was filmed in Canada, the movie does have a grungy Eastern European feel), it tells the tale of a husband and wife who, after their little boy is kidnapped and murdered and the murderer not given the kind of justice they deem correct, decide to kidnap that felon and torture him to death. Which they do. Almost.

There is one surprise in the movie, and it is indeed a big one, though in retrospect, it doesn't make much sense; nor does some of the other plotting and behavior shown. The screenplay is rife with characters who need to explain what they're feeling and doing -- and why -- which comes across as far too expository. And because the movie was made two years ago and is only now being foisted upon us, at a time in which the country's most famous missing-child case since the Lindbergh baby has been back in the news for months, only makes the movie more difficult to watch, while simultaneously calling attention to the motives behind the release of a film this unnecessary and crummy.

The biggest credibilty problem for the film is that, once the parents decide on their course of action, everything seems too easy. Up to this point (the kidnapping itself is filmed skillfully), the movie maintains a certain force and thrust, with performances at least as good as the script allows them to be. Mom (Erika Christensen) and Dad (Jesse Metcalfe) are hot, young actors who get to emote and undress enough to please their fans (they're shown above, in the de rigueur morgue scene with dead son, and below, with their own victim; and that's Ms Christensen in the bath, at bottom).

There's little reason to say more about this movie, which has a small but probably ever-committed audience, who knows what it wants and will seek out movies such as this one to satisfy. If you are going for torture films, however, a much better one in every way -- also Canadian -- can be found in Seven Days.

Meanwhile, The Tortured (unrated, from IFC FIlms) opens (barely) at one theater here in NYC (the IFC Center) but for a single midnight screening. Better check the theater schedule, however, because some days it does not appear to play at all, and others -- this coming Tuesday, for instance -- it shows once, and only in the afternoon....

The photos above are from the film itself, 

except for that of Mr. Lieberman, 

which comes courtesy of Getty Images.

The Lancaster/Ryder ABDUCTION OF ZACK BUTTERFIELD: so wrong it's camp

What can one say? Maybe, "Whew!"

It's been several years since I have seen what would appear a provocative and interesting story idea made into a movie as insufficiently imagined and over-the-top misguided as THE ABDUCTION OF ZACK BUTTERFIELD, which was co-written by its director Rick Lancaster (shown below) and Stephen M. Ryder.  The latter is credited as a co-writer of L.I.E., though this current work ought to make us even more grateful for the contributions of Michael Cuesta, as director and co-writer of that earlier and groundbreaking  film.

This film's title tells you its story, while its poster (above) lets you see that abduction coming. Our protagonist, Zack, is the jogger and his antagonist is one, April McKenna -- played by newcomer Brett Helsham (shown below). April, a veteran of our current wartime follies in both Afghanistan and Iraq, is one terrifically troubled young woman who has some major problems with men. And so she has decided to kidnap a teenage boy, hold him captive and slowly turn him into the man of her dreams. Makes sense, right?

If I tell you that my six-year-old granddaughter would make an equally believable war veteran/nutcase as the version Ms Helsham gives us, this should provide a hint as to how ridiculous this whole enterprise quickly becomes. I don't mean to demean the actress, who might very well go on to become a gifted rom-com comedienne. But she -- like everyone associated with this fiasco -- is way out of her depth.

From the "action sequence" of the kidnapping scene to April's dressing up as a seductress (above), this is a high-school-level performance. I would say this, too, about her co-star TJ Plunkett, below, except that he is in high school. Wearing one expression throughout the film, and sounding exactly the same whether he is simply having a conversation with his captor or trying to "put one over" on her, he runs the gamut of emotions from A to, well, A.

Much of this must be attributable to Mr. Lancaster, as co-writer and director and his associate Mr. Ryder -- who see fit not to have the abductee bother to ask his abductor "Why am I here and why are you doing this?" until the movie is more than half-over. The filmmaker allows a huge chunk of exposition -- April's past history -- to be doled out in one long, boring barf that practically puts us, not to mention her captive, to sleep. One of the more interesting characters in the movie (played by Walter Masterson, below) comes off needlessly confusing: Is this guy a little slow, or was he simply directed to act unduly goofy?

Even the card game between teen-age friends that take place early in the movie, shown at bottom, while relatively well-written, is staged without an accompanying sense of reality. Didn't anybody on set, or during the rushes, notice how silly this all looked? Or were they all just hoping for a miracle? The big "sex scene," during which the camera pans politely away, 'natch, is scored to the strains of -- oh, god, no -- Swan Lake. I never thought I'd ask for this, but, please, bring back Black Swan!

The supporting cast members do a bit better in their roles, especially Zack's mom and dad, played respectively by Lisa Gunn (above, right) and Aaron Letrick (left). But other than the glossy, infomercial-level cinematography (by Aric Jacobson), this is amateur night at the movies -- so bad that it becomes that much-sought-after but rarely discovered joy: unintentional camp.

The Abduction of Zack Butterfield (91 minutes) opens this Friday, May 27, in New York City at the Quad Cinema and in Los Angeles at Laemmle's Sunset 5. Go, I say, and giggle away!

Lucas & Hamm star in Anders Anderson's moving missing-child movie, STOLEN

Threat and danger hover over STOLEN like a curse. Then the deaths start piling up: one, two... The third takes longer to appear, which makes waiting for it all the more difficult to endure (not to worry: there is practically no blood or gore here). Anders Anderson's sorrowful and moving film about parental responsibility, love, sexual need, grief and guilt travels back and forth in time to tell a tale of loss and odd connections that dispenses with much of the "thriller" aspects that might have given it more standard pizzazz and chills -- probably at the expense of the deeper-than-usual feelings that surface from time to time.

Directed by Anderson (shown at left, whose first film this is) and written by Glenn Taranto, Stolen is a quieter movie than most in this genre, and fortunately it has two leading men who can handle the emotional aspects well. Jon Hamm plays the small-town policeman in the present-day plot, and it's good to see this actor in something other than Mad Men (or the uselessly standard role he had in the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still). Even better is Josh Lucas, who has been proving his mettle over the past decade in film after interesting film: The Deep End to Undertow, Poseidon to Death in Love.

Lucas (above) has by far the most layered role, and as usual, he gives it his all, making us feel his loss and guilt, his need for both sex and religion, and his insistence on doing what he imagines is the right thing. Hamm (below) is saddled with the lesser role, in which his grief and guilt overshadow all else, and this does begin to grow tiresome, which is less the actor's fault that that of the director and writer.

Yet the graceful weaving of past and present, with its occasional surprise (not the villain's identity, which is given away midstream) plus the romantic interludes provided by several women (who later appear as their older selves) make this story memorable in unex-
pected ways, leaving the viewer freighted with a deeper under-
standing and appreciation of all that has transpired than is usually achieved in films about kidnapping and murder. (In fact, Stolen manages this better than does a much higher-profile movie The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, about which I'll have more to say soon.)

Also in the cast is James Van Der Beek (at right, above, whose very square head and sturdy body is put to good use in the past portion and made to age relatively well for the present-day) and Jessica Chastain, Rhona Mitra and Morena Baccarin (the latter shown below) as some of the women in the lives of these two men.

Stolen (formerly known as Stolen Lives), from IFC FIlms, opens Friday, March 12, at the Clearview Chelsea in New York City and at the Laemmle Sunset 5 in L.A. on March 19.  Already available from IFC On-Demand, you can click the previous link to learn if your TV-reception-provider offers it, and if so, how to get it.