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New Movie Releases: 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, Be Kind Rewind, and More
To say that the Palme d'Or-winning drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is about abortion is to drastically underestimate it. Though the film follows two young Romanian women (Otilia and Găbiţa) as one helps the other obtain an illegal abortion during the last years of Ceauşescu-era Romania, it's not a pro-life or pro-choice film. Rather, it's a hopelessly sad, occasionally thrilling portrait of life under oppressive rule.
It's probably best if you don't know much about 4 Months before seeing it--the slowly unraveling plot is one of the film's major strengths, and Director Cristian Mungiu subverts expectations at every opportunity. What you think is going to happen often doesn't, and watching sometimes feels like waiting for the hammer to fall.
Mungiu so expertly recreates grimy communist Bucharest that you can practically feel the weight of oppression around your neck, and all-in-all 4 Months makes for a difficult two hours. But for those who can hang in there, it's a thoroughly riveting, intensely rewarding experience. Recommend.—Matt Smith [Trailer] [Website]
The Signal
On New Year’s Eve, the city of Terminus is plunged into chaos when a strange, um, signal takes over the nation’s airwaves. Once seen or heard, the transmission amplifies a person’s paranoia, hatred and selfishness, quickly turning most humans into violent, irrational monsters bent on murderous mayhem.
A surprise hit at SXSW last year, The Signal is a disaster-as-metaphor flick, with the mysterious techno-hypnosis (referred to as “The Crazy”) standing in for our inherently paranoid, post-9/11 human nature. We think. And it generally works really well. Like the best disaster movies, The Signal highlights our growing reliance on a delicate social and technological order that could, conceivably, come crashing down at any minute—and that revelation itself is enough to lend the proceedings some terrifying weight, especially during the first act.
Directed by three different people (David Bruckner, Dan Bush and Jacob Gentry), The Signal is a mix of tense horror and dark comedy. But unlike, say, Shaun of the Dead, a film that masterfully blended absurdity and terror, The Signal neatly compartmentalizes the two, opting for a scary/funny/scary approach that’s hardly seamless. In fact, the film sometimes seems to work against itself, with the hilarious second act so thoroughly wiping away any pent-up tension that you don’t really have a chance to be scared again before the otherwise solid ending.
But besides the unusual gear-switching, The Signal is a solid indie horror, with some cool new ideas thrown in amongst the nods to classic fright flicks. And while it’s not perfect, it’s sure to please genre fans.—Matt Smith
[Trailer] [Website]
Charlie Bartlett
Did you ever see that made for t.v. movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble? If you were to mix up the main character from that film (played by none other that John Travolta) and say, Ferris Bueller, what would bake out is a teenager resembling Charlie Bartlett. From bubble boy you would get all of the kind, socially unaware, hopeful traits that you would expect from someone who lives in a bubble, or in Charlie's case, a fairytale land of privilege, aided by a doped up mom who has no grasp on reality, and from Ferris you would get all of the popular, mischievous, and enterprising traits, except instead of faking voices over a telephone line to get a table at a swanky restaurant, you get a kid with a psychiatrist on retainer and the ability to leverage a lifetime of therapy into a profitable pharmaceutical endeavor.
Charlie Bartlett (Anton Yelchin) may be either the nicest, most well adjusted person in all of film history, or possibly the most delusional. He has absolutely no concept of the social constructs of the typical high school experience (steer clear of the bully, don't befriend the outcasts, etc) which makes him an extremely refreshing and endlessly surprising character. Well, at least for the first half of the movie. After being kicked out of private school for the umpteenth time (his most recent crime being the manufacturing and selling of fake ids), Charlie finds himself and his sport coat in the halls of the local public school. After a run in with a stereotypically mohawked bully (in our high school, most of the bullies wore football jerseys, but whatevs), Charlie strikes a truce with his tormentor by first psychoanalyzing him and then by making him a partner in his latest business/get-everyone-to-like-me scheme.
In a bathroom stall, Charlie makes himself de facto therapist to the angsty, hormone fueled school population. Gaining acclaim and popularity along the way, he finds himself to be the mobilizing force for all of the students hopes and dreams, however misguided they may be, which sets him at odds with the principal (Robert Downey, Jr.), who happens to be the father of Charlie's love interest (Kat Dennings). This little triangle (plus Charlie's mother, played by the pitch perfect lush, Hope Davis) is the most interesting aspect of the film. In one corner you have a kid who is actually quite bright and sweet, who possibly makes bad decisions because nothing has ever been off limits to him, and in the other you have a single father who works a job that he hates so much that he must sink into a bottle at the end of every day and is overwhelmingly paranoid by the distance that seems to be growing between him and his precious daughter.
Overall, the film is kind of a mess: it is totally schizophrenic (no pun intended), including some very random and awkward piano room sequences between Charlie and his mother, an abbreviated school dance scene (we totally saw that one coming) and a wacky ritalin-high montage. Despite all of this, Yelchin, Downey and Davis somehow find a way to lift themselves above the mere situations they inhabit, creating interesting enough characters that you can see through all of the silly season antics, and focus not on what they are doing, but how they are doing it. Charlie Bartlett is no Ferris Bueller as far as we're concerned, but we like him all the same, just as he is. —Steph Beasley [Trailer] [Website]
Be Kind Rewind
Words to live by, if you ask us. Michel Gondry is a frickin' genius and we should be in line for this movie right now. Some people are saying that Gondry continues to try too hard to be weird, but has anyone ever considered that he actually is this weird without any effort and that possibly his brain doesn't see the world the same we do? In any case, we enjoy the carnival freak show that he consistently produces and hope that the movie is as playful as the trailer makes it out to be. —Steph Beasley [Trailer] [Website]
Vantage Point
Merriam Webster defines a vantage point as "a position or standpoint from which something is viewed or considered." Yeah, that's pretty much all you need to know about this one. A United States president is assassinated and you get to watch it over and over again from different angles and, gasp, points of view. We once escorted Dennis Quaid to his hotel room and from our vantage point he looked old and frowny, although we're sure he would make an excellent secret service agent. —Steph Beasley [Trailer] [Website]
Witless Protection
Yeehaw! Honey, that real funny guy is on teevee again, ya know, the one who talks real funny like, and you'll never believe it, but he's gonna be in anuther movie! I ain't shittin you! Yup, he's gonna be doin' funny stuff and messing up an FBI investigation or somethin'. I don't know, but he better make sum a those bathroom jokes and blow sum stuff up. Now go fix me anuther turkey pot pie! —Steph Beasley [Trailer]
