Hollywood gets a lot of flack for giving more chances to new male talent than to women. Accurate as that is, it forgets how you not only need to be male – you need to be male, young, and handsome. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck write themselves a feel-good movie and get Oscars and a career. If you give a remarkable performance but are unremarkable looking... god help you. You're starting off in debt and will need to work your way up to where anyone cuter starts.

Macon Blair had been acting for 14 years before he got the perfect vehicle in Jeremy Saulnier's Blue Ruin. I'm not going to rehash what I wrote about it – you can read my original comment from four years ago. It should have propelled him to... well... working status, at least. But he hits the trifecta: he is plain, pudgy, and understates his performances.

Nevermind that, though. Plain-looking folks need to take matters in their own hands and turn to writing and directing.

Small Crimes, the first of his scripts I saw, was a modern go-fuck-yourself noir aiming for the same naturalistic style of Blue Ruin. His second script, I don't feel at home in this world anymore, is also the first movie he directs himself, and it's a different threat: Blair shows he is capable of more than just moody, gloomy, tortured souls. It still has enough self-destructive behavior to go around. He plays it for chuckles this time, with the movie's world populated entirely by people who have no idea how silly they are.

Melanie Lynskey plays Ruth, who you could place anywhere between junior accounting staff or nursing home assistant, the latter being her actual profession here. It feels like everyone around her is an unsympathetic, unthinking, uncaring jerk. They block her on the street with their huge, honking, fume-spewing trucks; they cut across her in the supermarket; they leave dog shit in her yard – right in front of the “no dog poo” sign.

When someone breaks into her house and steals her medication, her laptop and the silver her grandmother left her, Ruth takes it with resignation – it's just another sign that everyone is terrible to each other. When the cops seem uninterested in her case, she mostly mutters while giving them the benefit of the doubt. But when she finds a clue and the police refuse to send a team to deal with it (because of silly reasons like lacking a search warrant), Ruth teams up with Tom, goes off her meds and on wonky a journey of mild self-empowerment.

Oh yeah, Tom. Elijah Wood is Tom, every nerdy metalhead you've ever encountered, complete with nunchakus and Saxon t-shirts. Tom... I don't know what Tom does for a living. I don't think anybody does. He is professionally self-unaware. Tom is sidekick, would-be love interest, comic relief, and the cause of at least one of the problems plaguing Ruth.

No spoilers. They get that out of the way at their first meeting. As Ruth goes into what is less a rampage and more a reluctant, slow-motion hissy-fit, Tom is a reminder that not everyone who does something that pisses you off is doing it on purpose – some are just unaware. Once she wigs out, though, she doesn't think about that anymore. There are wrongs to be righted.

The movie tries to remind her, but doesn't wag the finger at her as she disregards all the warnings and goes through her amateurish sleuthing and micro-retributions. It sits with us, watching them bumble around, chuckling at them. It prods them into mishaps that start escalating, pushing back with consequences. First, they escape unscathed by sheer luck, but realize neither how lucky they got nor how they look to the other side. Then someone gets a finger snapped, but painkillers help. Then things get serious when a different set of idiots (only more mean-spirited ones) get more actively involved, and she realizes reality doesn't care if you are kinda, mostly, not entirely wrong.

I realize that's not sounding funny enough. It is, if you derive your humor out of escalating facepalms and sudden violence. But it's a movie where you're mostly laughing at the characters, not with them. There are a lot of laughs in it, but you need to be the kind of person who doesn't mind feeling a bit like an asshole.

#maconblair #netflix #comedy #melanielynskey #elijahwood

A director is pre-packaged style with a built-in audience. That audience could be small or huge, but I've always thought that it is one thing a director brings to the table: the unshakeable belief that if they film this, someone will come. For the audience, they act as a seal of trust, a selling point – “from so and so who made That Thing You Liked”.

Now I suspect that Netflix will make directors not matter anymore. In the future, all that will matter is that a movie was made to your preferences, not who made it.

But I digress.

Joe Denton crashes back at his parents' house after his release from prison. He looks like a 40-year-old Shaggy from Scooby-Doo gone rogue. His mother treats him as a rowdy teen, not as a violent former cop and alcoholic whose raging drug addiction made him lose control and landed him in jail. When he finds out his wife took his daughters and moved away, he immediately falls off the wagon, a manipulative asshole going back to old habits.

Not that his old pals help. Like the old buddy of his who wants Joe to kill someone before they all get ratted out.

Small Crimes is a small-town noir, petty people trying to run their petty grafts, but where the everybody-knows-everybody-else air gives Joe little room to hide.

The dialogue is good, modern go-fuck-yourself noir without falling head-first into Tarantinisms. The way Nikolaj Coster-Waldau blurts out his lines as Joe, alternating between sorry as aggressive, shows how little the Joe himself believes in his own redemption. There's little remorse in the guy.

Good for Coster-Waldau. This is a much better choice than the B-list action fantasy movies that Gods of Egypt made me fear he was going to end up doing. It shows a range I didn't know he had in him.

He's no Viggo Mortensen, mind you. But he has a lot more in him than what Game of Thrones or Headhunters had shown.

The fact that he doesn't stand out is an accomplishment in and of itself. It goes with the movie's focus on the commonplace-ness of it all: a prostitute looks like an average person, instead of someone's tarted-up idea of an archetype; Robert Forrester and Jacki Weaver as Joe's old folks look weary and defeated, caring parents who can no longer deceive themselves about their son's behavior but see no way to change it; Macon Blair plays an old buddy who was in the army but looks like he just spends his time hunting for Budweiser and chips.

It's written by Blair, too, and his script seems to be aiming for the same natural quality that Jeremy Saulnier captured in Blue Ruin and Green Room. Blair is now trying his hand at writing and directing, and this is the second script of his that ends up on Netflix.

Might be a sign of things to come. Maybe Netflix will end up as a place for edge-cases and weirdos. People who would not get a major movie deal, or might even have trouble with indie distribution, finding a home on a service that knows there's an audience for them.

If that's the case, I'm all for it. About time something good came out of all the data mining and behavioral analysis.

(Published originally on Filmsnark, my old blog)

#smallcrimes #maconblair #nikolajcosterwaldau

Fuck yeah, Jeremy Saulnier!

I waxed lyrically about Blue Ruin, his crowd-funded movie about a pudgy, milquetoast drifter on a meandering pursuit of revenge. A movie of gradual but inexorable acceleration, Blue Ruin took its time to gather momentum, pushing forward, going from shambling to walking to stomping until its characters' actions could not be stopped.

It was a critical and commercial success, making almost a million dollars. It may not sound like a lot, on this day when even a mediocre comic book movie can bring in hundreds of millions, until you realize that they produced it with a $37,000 Kickstarter campaign.

Its success allowed Saulnier to have his pick of projects, this time with a proper budget. He chose to make Green Room, his own script, a thriller about a punk band trapped by a gang of white supremacists after one of the band members witnesses something he shouldn't have.

Green Room is pure punk rock. Aggressive. Fast paced. With a jagged edge. It throws out conventions, establishing shots, transitions. It's in a hurry to get to the point.

Got expectations? Fuck them. Off they go.

An audience of skinheads wants something to stomp to. They get Nazi Punks Fuck Off.

We get teased to the Aint Rights' (our heroes' band) own brand of Sabbath-punk. We get a lyrical, slow-moving dream-ballet of glinting sweat and dancing brutes instead.

We see camaraderie. We don't hear it.

Our heroes say they're going to party, we hear a few bars of a record, then we cut to the morning after. We cut away from their interview. We cut to the end of a song.

Cut. Cut. Cut.

Until it gets to the point.

Then it doesn't blink until it's over.

The movie starts as then the band wakes up inside their van. They veered off-course into a cornfield in the middle of the night. Or so they guess, at least, considering their circumstances. They were all too hammered to remember.

They're Tiger, the singer and true punk; Reece, the drummer hot-head; Sam, the guitar player, den mother, and organizer; and Pat, the bass player who seems to have an idea of who he is but can't articulate it.

A gig they'd gone 90 miles out of their way for gets canceled. They're left with $24 – barely enough for a tank of gas to get back home. The promoter for the canceled gig, who's just as much a kid as they are, hooks them up with a paid performance at a clubhouse in the woods.

“Mostly boots and braces down there”, is how he describes it. Just so they know.

“Skins?”, asks Tiger, before dismissing the concern. “There's some at every show”.

The gig pays and it fits their style. They want to keep their concerts up close and personal. The Aint Rights are happy to tell anyone to shove it, including a barn full of skinheads. They thrive on playful aggression. They want texture, want to be there for effect, chase that energy that can't last.

They rock their set.

After they've played and collected, Pat, the insecure bass player (played with a trembling touch by Anton Yelchin), goes back to the green room to pick up their communal mobile phone.

It looks like a crime scene. A weeping girl asks for help.

It all goes to hell.

They end up locked in the green room, guarded by a goon, unsure if the Amber – the witness Pat saw weeping and who is now cooped up with them – is even on their side. With the calculating but mercurial way that Imogen Poots plays Amber, I wouldn't trust her either.

They get their aggression. Barricading themselves against an army of armed thugs, it won't get more up close and personal. Boy, do they get their texture. And they get their cuts.

I called it a thriller. That's wrong. Worse, it's a piddling description. Green Room is a mimetic horror movie. Events come slashing out of nowhere. I cringed more times than I counted. Once I bolted, straight up, because of a deliberately brutal solution to a human Gordian Knot. The moment felt like it lasted a minute. The shot was a couple of seconds long.

It's not only the violence that's horrifying. Once the skinheads have the band cornered, it falls to Gabe (Macon Blair, from Blue Ruin) to figure out what to do. Gabe is not a stomping boot himself – he's just the type of efficient bureaucrat without whom evil couldn't thrive. He gets things under control, provides a credible cover story, and summons their leader, Darcy Banker.

Patrick Stewart's Darcy is a taut, inhuman snake-person. When Darcy tries to get the band to come out, his voice is as persuasive as it is grating. It grinds through their barriers, oozes over them, corrodes their will. His tone carries just enough meaning, leaves no doubt as to who he is.

His monster is as spare as the movie is. Most of the action takes place in a shed, other than the initial ten minutes of “getting there.” A room, a hallway, a stage, an exterior. No centimeter is wasted. And as the band tries to break out, the few meters to the nearest window will feel like kilometers.

Both for them and us.

(Originally published on Filmsnark, my old blog)

#greenroom #jeremysaulnier #maconblair #antonyelchin #imogenpoots #patrickstewart #joecole

I loved Blue Ruin. As far as revenge movies go, it’s almost late Stuart Gordon meets early Coen Brothers, a brutal amalgam of King of the Ants and Blood Simple. I’m going to go out of my way not to spoil it, but bear in mind that it might be the kind of movie that you want to know as little as possible about when watching it.

Dwight is a drifter, living in his decaying car on the beach, feeding off the garbage, and breaking into people’s houses to take a shower.

Early on, after Dwight has just escaped discovery on one of these houses, a police car approaches his “residence”. The cop, a large, affable black woman, tells him that she wanted him to be in a safe place when he found out, and that someone’s going to be released.

Dwight shambles around for a bit, preparing for something. It doesn’t take too long for us to learn that his parents got killed some time back, and it’s the killer’s release the cop told him about. We only learn it as the plot’s pendulum swing past that particular point, unstoppable, slowing down on only to pick up speed to swing back, leading us on and pushing Dwight along the way, sometimes not letting us see a bit of information so that later it can confirm our guesses or wave them away.

It’s sensational at building suspense.

A violent act against his parents has left Dwight looking like a homeless Moses. In one of those oscillations that Saulnier built his plot around, another act of violence shakes him back to almost normalcy. He shaves his face, cuts his hair, and shocks us when we realize he was in his early twenties, not late forties. The movie had made no attempt to hide it, just had allowed our assumptions to mislead us. Moments ago, we thought of him as the Charles Manson of beach bums. Now he seems someone who’d be in the basement of a board game shop nervously attempting to argue Power Rangers chronology.

Violence begets violence, and once he pushes events in one direction, they will come back. And yet we don’t know in what way, or if Dwight will be successful on pushing back again, or if he even has an interest in trying to. And so the movie keeps us waiting for the next swing, which we sense but can’t predict, every pass near the centerline triggering repercussions faster and faster.

It’s not just the script that’s spot on. The photography is not only gorgeous but perfect at setting the mood to the right combination of pastoral, nostalgic, and lost. Family members look related. The pacing is relentless. Everything falls into place for the best effect.

That made it all the more surprising that not only it is Jeremy Saulnier ’s second movie, with his first being a horror comedy, but that it was funded with a $37,000 Kickstarter. Lack of funds has never been an excuse for shoddy craftsmanship, but I can respect when someone does an impeccable job with less budget than other films spend on catering.

I love that between digital filmmaking, free worldwide distribution via the net and crowdfunding, we live in an era where a talented enough team can will Blue Ruin into existence with almost no money. When someone complains that they can’t make art because nobody will recognize their talent and give them a few million, tell them to watch this.

(Originally published in Filmvore, my old blog)

#blueruin #jeremysaulnier #maconblair