Another trailer is now out for Bruce Willis’ A Good Day to Die Hard, featuring Willis’ John McClane character returning to fight nuclear terrorists in Russia with his CIA-operative son. Check it out above. A Good Day to Die Hard opens Feb. 14th, 2013.
Posted on October 26th, 2012 at 11:30am.
By Joe Bendel. On the anniversary of their young son’s disappearance the Caleighs try to heal their grieving family by renting out the most haunted house in England. Most of the former orphanage’s charges supposedly died in the great flood of 1943, but the truth is far more sinister. It might also have very personal implications for the Caleighs in The Secret of Crickley Hall, a special three hour adaptation of James Herbert’s novel, which airs this Sunday on BBC America.
Eve Caleigh blames herself for the apparent loss of their son, Cam. So does everyone else, but they try not to say so. She was the one who dozed off at the playground and woke up to find him missing. She used to have a pseudo-psychic connection with her son, but since Cam vanished she has not felt his consciousness—until they move into Crickley Hall.
Convinced her son is still alive and in danger, Caleigh starts investigating the old house. It is not pretty. Most of the orphans were supposedly sucked into the well dug into the cellar during the tragic storm, but two remain unaccounted for. Her best source of information is the old gardener, Percy Judd, who understood the grim realities of Crickley that the rest of the town was unwilling to face. He knew the headmaster was badly abusing the children – particularly a shy Jewish refugee – despite the heroic efforts of his potential girlfriend (the new teacher at Crickley), as viewers witness during the frequent flashbacks to 1943.
Thematically similar, Crickley is sort of like the TV miniseries version of Nick Murphy’s The Awakening. Considering that they still have two perfectly good daughters to lose, it is hard to believe the Caleighs do not turn on their heels as soon as they take a gander at that ominous looking well. (What more do they need, a desecrated cemetery in the backyard?) Yet Gabe Caleigh stubbornly refuses to accept his wife’s ghost talk, despite all the spookiness going on around them. Certainly director-adaptor Joe Ahearne wrings plenty of chills and suspense from the eerie setting.
Although the ensemble does not have a lot of big names by the standards of Hollywood television magazines, it holds plenty of geek interest. Suranne Jones, (co-star of a fan favorite Doctor Who episode) is compellingly guilt-ridden as Eve Caleigh. Playing another mournful husband much like his character in The Fades, Tom Ellis is about as sympathetic and convincing as possible as the frustratingly incredulous Gabe Caleigh. However, it is reliable veteran David (Tron, Time Bandits) Warner’s Judd who really gives the film heart, while Game of Thrones alumnus Donald Sumpter also bears watching as the mysterious old parapsychologist come to allay everyone’s fears.
Even though none of the revelations are shockingly original, Ahearne still pulls it all together rather effectively in the third hour. He plays the old dark house card for all it is worth and juggles the two narrative time periods fairly adeptly. Still, the well produced, half-period Crickley’s three hours could have easily been condensed into two without losing much. Of course, it is important to bear in mind that Herbert is a major best-seller in the UK, so a longer Crickley would make sense for the BBC over there. All told, it is fairly scary stuff for an early Sunday evening. Recommended for fans of British supernatural programming, The Secret of Crickley Hall premieres this Sunday (10/28) on BBC America.
LFM GRADE: B-
Posted on October 26th, 2012 at 11:29am.
By Joe Bendel. It is not a case of class warfare, per se. A sociopathic doorman is determined to make his upscale residents miserable simply because he resents their capacity for happiness. It is only fair that he spreads the misery around a little, isn’t it? He will go to truly disturbing lengths to torment one pretty young tenant in Jaume Balagueró’s Sleep Tight (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.
In retrospect, giving a surly loner like César Manso access to the keys was probably a mistake. Morbidly obsessed with the cheerful Clara Blás, one of the few tenants who is always friendly and polite to him, Manso knows every inch of her flat. Not content with a mere look-see, he has tampered with items, undermining her health and emotional well-being.
Oh, but it gets even more sinister. Each night he waits under her bed for his victim to drift off. Then he goes to work with his bottle of chloroform. However, the nasty little girl living across the hall has seen him sneaking out of Blás’s apartment at suspicious hours of the morning. The police are also actively investigating the poisoned-pen letters Manso has been anonymously sending his victim, but the concierge has his own plans for a really twisted endgame.
A major hit in Spain, Sleep Tight plays on viewers’ deep fears and nagging paranoia. Manso really is a secret nemesis out to destroy his victims out of pure spite. The fact that he is incapable of taking pleasure from his actions makes it even more unsettling. In a way, he is the Dostoyevskian Underground man – in his darkest, most brutish manifestation. Be that as it may, his role in Sleep is to creep about, acting the malevolent heavy in Balagueró’s psychological thriller. Best known internationally as the co-director of the first two [REC] zombie films, Balagueró eschews the found footage conceit for a moodier, suggestive approach in the Polanski-De Palma tradition.
Luis Tosar is scary intense as Manso. You can see the gears turning in his head and it is a fearsome sight indeed. Iris Almeida also has moments that nearly equal him as Manso’s young blackmailer, Ursula. In the victim role, Marta Etura falls apart quite sympathetically and convincingly, even though her character really ought to be picking up on the scheming concierge’s bad vibes.
Pablo Rosso’s stylishly noir cinematography makes the apartment building look truly menacing. Balagueró maintains the ominous vibe, keeping the audience off-balance and on-edge, even though just about everyone should be much quicker on the uptake. Though Sleep Tight falls more towards the thriller end of the genre spectrum than outright horror, it is decidedly dark, and ruthlessly effective. Recommended for fans of Spanish horror movies nonetheless, as well as those who appreciate a thriller (and undaunted by lurid subject matter), Sleep Tight opens this Friday (10/26) in New York at the Cinema Village.
LFM GRADE: B
Posted on October 25th, 2012 at 10:49am.
By Joe Bendel. Those of us of roughly a certain generation fondly remember the Captains we came to know and love through kid’s programming; you know, like Captain Kangaroo, Captain America, Captain Crunch, and Captain Morgan. Captain Cornelius Cartoon follows in the tradition of them all. He and the crew of the Manta Ray salvage public domain cartoons from the watery graveyard of the Cartoon Lagoon, in order to riff on them MST3K style. The resulting blend of puppetry and retro nostalgia trips makes Captain Cornelius Cartoon’s Cartoon Lagoon the animated standout of the 2012 New York Television Festival’s Independent Pilot Competition.
The title is a little confusing, but this is indeed animated. Maybe they should have worked in the word cartoon a few more times. Regardless, the potential of creator Manny Galán’s concept is hard to miss. The biggest surprise is how cartoons from established franchises such as Popeye and Caspar the Friendly Ghost could fall into PD. There is no way you will ever see Mickey in the Lagoon. Yet, the clear highlight of the Lagoon pilot was an episode of the long forgotten mid 1970’s Undersea Adventures of Captain Nemo (another Captain) that bears absolutely no resemblance to Jules Verne.
The Me Generation Nemo is a blow-dried, jutting jawed male model who accidentally runs over a dolphin, permanently scarring his two juvenile companions for life. To nurse the dolphin back to health, Nemo puts it in a steel cage, while giving loud dramatic readings from Fifty Shades of Grey to scare away the sharks. Or something like that. Obviously, Nemo’s narrative development is a bit sketchy, making it a perfect foil for the Manta Ray crew.
The Lagoon creators readily acknowledge their debt of inspiration to MST3K, following the same format, right down to the portal door through which the cartoon goodness enters. It really works, though, because the creative team has the right pop culture sensibility. Lagoon delivers laughs from start to finish, sprinkling a number of truly memorable quips throughout the pilot. The old school miniature puppetry bringing to life the Manta Ray crew also appealingly resembles a slightly rum-soused Rankin/Bass special.
It is easy to see how a cable network could pick up Lagoon with confidence. That is not so true for the rest of the animated competition this year. Nathan Floody’s corporate head-hunting send-up Hunters is also wickedly cutting at times, but its raunchier inclinations might make it harder to place. However, the Captain pilot is never inappropriate for younger viewers, even though many jokes are aimed above their heads. Nicely executed and consistently funny, Captain Cornelius Cartoon’s Cartoon Lagoon ought to have a long life ahead of it, following its well received screenings at the 2012 NYTVF.
Posted on October 25th, 2012 at 10:48am.
By Joe Bendel. They debuted under the baton of Arturo Toscanini and often worked with guest maestro Leonard Bernstein. Founded as the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra (IPO) is one of the world’s most prestigious orchestras. Yet their founding members were very nearly caught up in the tragedy of the Holocaust. Bronisław Huberman’s tireless efforts to save Europe’s most accomplished and at-risk Jewish musicians – and the subsequent creation of Israel’s national symphony – are documented in Josh Aronson’s Orchestra of Exiles, which opens this Friday in New York.
Huberman was a child prodigy who played around the world. Yet he was also a politically aware Zionist, who had no illusions about the state of Europe in the early 1930’s. Obviously, the colonial territory the British called Palestine held great significance for him. For years, Jewish immigrants had come there, hoping to realize the Zionist dream home by home. However, the British occupiers halted Jewish immigration in response to Arab riots at a time when it was most needed.
Hoping to establish a symphony for the yet to be recognized nation, Huberman doggedly attempted to work around the various restrictions imposed by the British. Indeed, much of his heroics involved the paper-chase for this or that travel document. There was an important goal in sight: as a principled anti-Fascist, Toscanini had agreed to conduct their premiere performances.
Exiles captures the spirit of a certain group of people at a certain point of time for whom life and art were intrinsically intertwined. Indeed, the founding of the Symphony was critically important for the early émigrés, who dearly missed the refined culture of pre-war Europe. Aronson maintains an appropriately respectful tone throughout, but he stages a number of unnecessary dramatic recreations. For the most part, they are not very dramatic – aside from Alex Ansty’s agreeable appearance as the larger than life Toscanini.
With helpful context provided by an elite cast of interview subjects, including Itzhak Perlman, Indian-born IPO conductor and music director Zubin Mehta, and the Grammy Award-winning Joshua Bell (who currently performs on Huberman’s Stradivarius), Exiles is classy and authoritative. Regrettably, it comes at a time when the civilized world is becoming less civilized. Just over a year ago, an IPO performance in London was disrupted by extremists who were never prosecuted, partly due to the Royal Albert Hall’s refusal to pursue trespass charges (bad show, chaps). While conventional in its approach, Orchestra of Exiles is an elegant and informative film. Recommended for classical music connoisseurs and those who want (or need) a fuller appreciation of Israeli cultural history, it opens this Friday (10/19) in New York at the Quad Cinema.
LFM GRADE: B
Posted on October 23rd, 2012 at 10:43am.
By Joe Bendel. When we think of space, we think of lofty ideals, passed on down to us from JFK and Star Trek. However, an oppressive belligerent power will act the same up there as they do down here. Indeed, China’s saber-rattling off the coast of Taiwan will bedevil an American manned space mission in Josh Bernard & Bracey Smith’s Control, which screens as part of the 2012 New York Television Festival’s Independent Pilot Competition (IPC).
The NYTVF is the only meaningful festival of its kind showcasing independent talent looking to break into episodic television, in the same way scores of film festivals act as launching pads for indie films in search of theatrical distribution. There are real development deals to be won at this year’s festival. The dollar figures may not be much by studio standards, but they would constitute a significant step up compared to the budgets of many competing pilots. In the drama category, Smith & Bernard’s Control may well be the pilot to beat, which is not all that surprising, considering their Pioneer One (see here and here) won the drama competition two years ago.
The American and Chinese navies are engaged in a war of nerves in the South China Sea. Simultaneously, an American spacecraft is racing to beat their Chinese rivals to a resource-rich asteroid. Long in development, the American mission continued, even when China precipitously laid claim to the asteroid, in open defiance of international law. Apparently a quasi-private enterprise conducted with official government sanction, the mission obviously just became a whole lot more complicated.
The flight director isn’t helping much, either. Not only did he call the president a feckless ditherer on national television (but in more colorful terms), he is also carrying on a not so secret affair with the chief medical officer, who happens to be married to the flight captain.
Of all the genre-related pilots screening in the Drama 1 programming block, Control is by far the one that leaves audiences most eager to see more. Shrewdly, Bernard & Smith end on a monster cliffhanger that cannot possibly be as bad as it seems. Though the flight director resents the U.S. military’s secret involvement in the mission, he might be happy to have them around when it is all said and done. Based on the pilot, Control has the potential to become a cool submarine-warfare in space story, much like the classic Romulan episodes on the original Trek.
The tone of Control is sort of like a cross between Apollo 13 and Ben Bova’s geopolitical sci-fi thriller novels. To their credit, Smith & Bernard do not appear to have many naïve notions with respects to the current (and presumably near future) Chinese Communist regime. It also looks reasonably realistic, thanks to the control room full of computers bought on the cheap due to a tech firm’s bankruptcy (finally, the stimulus plan delivers).
Perhaps most importantly, despite all the intrigue and political infighting, it looks like it will still tap into the warm fuzzy feelings many viewers get when they think about the Space Program, particularly in its Apollo-era heyday. Showing loads of potential, Control is definitely worth seeing when it screens again this Friday (10/26) as part of the 2012 NYTVF’s IPC Drama 1 program at the Tribeca Cinemas.
Posted on October 23rd, 2012 at 10:42am.