ARKANSAS Review

Right off the bat I'd like to acknowledge the fact I live in Hot Springs, Arkansas which is situated about forty-five minutes north east of Glenwood where writer/director and actor Clark Duke was born; his experiences in the area clearly informing his connection to and desire to adapt John Brandon's best-selling book of the same name. And yes, the climactic scene of the movie takes place on historic bathhouse row, and was shot about five minutes from my house in downtown Hot Springs National Park. I say all of this not to try and convince you of how cool I am (unless it's working, then yes-I'm very cool), but instead to make it clear there will be no playing favorites here simply because the movie takes its name from the state I've called home for nearly three decades and because I recognized a few locations. In fact, despite the title of the film Duke and his crew shot the majority of his directorial debut in Alabama rather than in or around the Little Rock area as the movie suggests. So while there is certainly a layer of appreciation and affection for some of the sites we see and the accents we hear, there was almost more of an eagerness to see these things serve as a backdrop for what is a genre of movie we're all very familiar with whether from the natural state or not. Arkansas pays plenty of homage to the overall tone of the state, especially in its flashbacks to the mid to late eighties as we're delivered the backstory of Vince Vaughn's character, Frog, as he belts out the Gatlin brothers and cruises past open fields and dilapidated barns in his Nissan Fairlady 300ZX Coupé. At one point, Vaughn's Frog asks a couple of his associates what they're up to in which they respond with a generic comment before summarizing the feeling as being, "asleep at the wheel of the American dream." There's almost no better phrasing one could have concocted to define the stagnant air of progress yet fierce commitment to maintaining aged ideals (some good, not all bad). It is in this kind of mentality that we find the best facets of Duke's film as he's not simply telling a story of the "Dixie mafia" and funneling said crime/drama through the lens of the south, but he's utilizing this contradictory air of the south where everything feels ironic without the slightest bit of intent to add specific tone to his crime caper. Arkansas, the film, although a story about drug dealers is mostly a story about two generations of men whose aspirations are only limited by the economic options of their environment and whose intelligence is only undermined by their (mostly) unassuming appearances dictated by that same environment.

SPLIT Review

It's hard to remember, but there was a time when a new M. Night Shyamalan film was an event in and of itself. In 2002, at the ripe old age of thirty-two, there might have been no more hotly anticipated film of the year than the director's fifth film, Signs, but what was only his third feature since defining himself as the auteur he seemed destined to be. Fifteen years later and we are in a very different time and space. After the success of Signs (over $400 million globally on a $72 million budget) the studio system continued to only throw more and more money at the writer/director and increasingly his films became examples of trying too hard to do what his first few features had seemingly done with such ease. After 2008's utterly confounding The Happening it seemed Shyamalan might have given up completely as he then resorted to being a director for hire on projects like The Last Airbender and After Earth, but even in these endeavors he experienced some of the more scathing reviews and certainly some of the worst box office returns of his career. Where was the director to go? What was there to do next that might reinvigorate his career? Did this once glorious storyteller that TIME magazine so famously labeled "The Next Spielberg" even care to continue to put forth effort and/or art into the world or was he done? In one way or another it feels like we haven't had the real Shyamalan with us for some time. That the person he was in his early thirties had been lost to the grueling system and there was no certainty as to whether he'd ever come back. In truth, Shyamalan hasn't taken a break longer than three years in between films since 1998 film Wide Awake and those three years came in between Airbender and After Earth. It was only two years after the nepotism on a spaceship tale that was Will Smith's After Earth that we caught a glimpse of who we thought Shyamalan was and might become again. I didn't write about The Visit, Shyamalan's 2015 feature that experimented with the found footage approach, but it was a deliciously pulpy little thriller that not only provided a signature Shyamalan twist that worked with the rest of the narrative, but melded the humor, the uncertainty, and the tension of the situation in ways that felt organic-as if the marriage of story and image were flowing out of the director like they hadn't in some time and this upward trend in quality only continues with Split. Like The Visit, Split is set in a single location and relays a rather simple story in both interesting and horrific ways. It is a portrait of a character and in being that it explores a subject with multiple personalities it might be something of a twisted self-portrait from a director who was labeled as one thing, attempted to remain that thing until he was told he wasn't good at that thing anymore and then tried something else only to fail thus forcing him to re-invent himself once more.

First Trailer for M. Night Shyamalan's SPLIT

Unfortunately, a new trailer for an M. Night Shyamalan movie doesn't carry as much excitement as most thought it might in the early years of the new millennium. Fortunately, Shyamalan seems to be finding his footing more recently as last years fairly underrated The Visit was a pleasant surprise from a director who'd taken a detour from what his predetermined course seemed to be. The Visit, which I didn't get the opportunity to review last year, was a clever little play on the handheld camera horror genre where it was still up to the characters to capture the necessary elements of the story, but at the same time retaining the elements and mystique of a classic Shyamalan script. That the writer/director has again come to operate in something of a larger genre while seemingly still applying his own twisted mentality to the situation is promising. As I watched the trailer I couldn't help but be reminded of this years 10 Cloverfield Lane, but with the added element of knowing what was wrong with our captor from the get-go rather than that mystery remaining the backbone of the movie. This hopefully indicates the film has more to it and can deliver in its third act. Besides the engaging premise that sees a man with twenty-three personalities living inside of him kidnapping three young girls and holding them hostage in his cellar the film looks to feature a show-stopping performance from James McAvoy. McAvoy, beyond his most prominent role as Charles Xavier in the new wave of X-Men films, is an interesting performer that chooses some diverse projects to participate in and it seems that the actor has found a formidable collaborator in Shyamalan who supports pushing the envelope. The film also stars The Witch star Anya Taylor-Joy, The Edge of Seventeen's Haley Lu Richardson, and Jessica Sula as the three young girls McAvoy's Kevin kidnaps with Jason Blum again producing and the director teaming up with cinematographer Mike Gioulakis (It Follows) for the first time. Split opens on January 20th, 2017.

FURY Review

Ernest Hemingway said, "Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime." Hemingway means to inform us of the repercussions of getting carried away with violence as power, but director David Ayer asks us to contemplate not the repercussions but the mentality it takes to execute such acts of war. Is the ruthlessness with which these men approach their actions acceptable? Is their matter-of-fact attitude towards taking a life understandable within the confines of the circumstances? There is never a moment in Ayer's latest effort, Fury, where we let ourselves become distracted by the action sequences or the curiosity of where the story is going because we know exactly where it's taking us and that, in many ways, is the only let-up the film offers as it's otherwise a consistently tense and mentally exhausting experience. In order to deliver this disjointed, but outwardly insightful look Ayer has combined a typical plot-driven narrative with large elements of a pure character study. The director clearly wants to depict the type of men and personalities it took to win World War II, but further than this it is about how they became these beings free of any kind of moral compass yet trapped in a mindset that left nearly every other human an enemy. When we look at history we see what we are taught in textbooks and reference what we learn in lectures, but the little details escape us, the unimaginable is left at that and the countless lives sacrificed are best forgotten as their bodies are lost in a sea of limbs. Carnage is a disgusting act of man that seems to settle little more than who has more men fighting for them and Fury gets to the heart of this ugly method that sees men, people just like you and I, transformed into these conditioned warriors that see things in nothing but black and white, all or nothing, live or die. It is in these hands governments put as much power as they can muster which naturally translates to the indestructible mentality of soldiers thinking of themselves as an exception while the talkers, the leaders sit back and hope for the best possible outcome. Fury commentates on the ugliness of war by laying waste to the idea those we call heroes couldn't feel less like one.