FFF 2015 Movie Review: ‘Nixon’s Coming’

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“Nixon’s Coming” is a 9-minute short film about a weird meeting between President Richard Nixon and a small group of drugged up student protesters in the early morning hours on night in 1970. Based on photographs from student activist (at the time of course) Bob Moustakas and recordings made by Nixon which were declassified in recent years, this little movie paints an interesting portrait of a strange visit to the Lincoln Memorial.

Due to Nixon’s weird penchant for recordings, he decided to record his own recounting of the spontaneous meeting at the Lincoln Memorial, and as a result of the declassification of this tape in 2011, we have a short film with a voice over from Nixon himself. Now do we want to believe him? It’s not like this was some momentous event or that historians would even care about such a small little thing, so why would he feel the need to lie about what happened there? So we can rest assured that what Nixon says happened, he at least BELIEVED it happened.Continue Reading …

FFF 2015 Movie Review: ‘Spearhunter’

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“Spearhunter” is a 14-minute short film about a man’s obsession with not only a particular form of hunting, but with the idea of securing his own legacy, one that would live on well after he would be dead.

Welcome to Alabama, where Gene Morris has honed his hunting skills to such a degree that he became bored with normal hunting techniques. Guns, bow and arrows, he was done with all of that. Instead he wanted more of a challenge, and hence set about to be the world’s great spear hunter. And he loved spear hunting so much that he constantly filmed and videotaped himself doing it and also talking into the camera and cutting promos like a professional wrestler, declaring himself to the greatest in the world. Whom he was addressing or expected to ever view these proclamations is never made clear, and maybe it never was to begin with.Continue Reading …

FFF 2015 Movie Review: ‘Welcome to Leith’

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“Welcome to Leith” is a fascinating documentary about a small town in North Dakota and how they reacted when a well-known white supremacist moved in with the intention of turning it into a safe haven for his fellow racists.

This old fella named Craig Cobb found this tiny town in North Dakota with only 24 residents, which includes the children, and yet this town named Leith still has a functioning government, in that there is a mayor and a town council and all that good stuff. And Cobb saw this little rundown town in the middle of nowhere and saw an opportunity to take it over. What he didn’t see was a small group of people who didn’t want anything to do with their brand of foolishness. What ensued was a six-month stand off, with Cobb and his hate-filled compatriots on one side and some honest people who just wanted to live their lives without having to worry about any of this bullshit on the other.Continue Reading …

FFF 2015 Movie Review: ‘The Desk’

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So what is “The Desk?” Apparently submitted to the festival as a narrative feature despite clearly being a documentary (a meta-documentary, but a documentary nonetheless), “The Desk” is part biography and part exposé, while also getting into the role of social media in journalism and in our culture as a whole, which brings with it a bit of an indictment on many peoples’ need to be outraged about…well, about anything. Combining footage from a failed short film about a failed television late night talk show with interviews, recreations from actors, cell phone footage and some audio from previous celebrity interviews, this movie is a hell of a ride as it documents a man’s fall from grace, a time during which just about everything goes wrong for the apparently very well-intentioned guy.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Furious 7’

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Seven movies into this franchise, we have all now come to expect a certain mood and tone for our increasingly over-the-top sequels to that little “Point Break” rip off from all those years ago, “The Fast and the Furious.” After safely driving cars off of cliffs in “Fast Five” and battling military tanks and planes in “Furious Six” (subsequently renamed “Fast & Furious 6“), the most extreme things that could be done with this new movie not only include dropping cars from planes and car chases down the side of mountains, but also adding the one and only Jason Statham as an iconic villain, something these movies have not had yet. And because “The Fast and The Furious Vs. The Transporter: Dawn of Justice” would have involved too many copyright issues, here we are with the simply titled “Furious 7.”Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Wild Tales’

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“Wild Tales” is a fun, crazy, over the top movie about six separate scenarios, short stories involving different characters, none of them related to each other at all save for the fact that each story involves some sort of revenge, usually stemming from very innocuous and seemingly simple actions, all of them building to insane crescendos of some sort of violence.

To go into details about each short story and to give away what happens in each one would do a disservice to you, so there will be a lack of deets here. Suffice to say, these stories involve a strange coincidence on an airplane, a mobster getting dinner at a deserted diner, a bit of road rage, undeserved parking tickets, a family cover-up, and lastly, a wedding party gone horribly wrong. In each story, seemingly normal well-adjusted people are pushed to the edge of civility (sometimes they are shoved, and sometimes it just takes a tiny little nudge), and that thin line that separate people from wild animals often gets blurred, if not outright erased. This is evident with the opening credits, as actors names are shown over images of wild animals, like lambs and foxes – sure we drive cars and exchange pleasantries and observe man-made laws, but in the end, we are all just as wild and unpredictable as any animal in nature.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘It Follows’

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A film that focuses on atmosphere and sustaining a sense of pure dread, “It Follows” is the most interesting and well made horror movie since 2012’s “Cabin in the Woods.” Imagine knowing that you are always being stalked by an unknown, unnamed thing, something horrible that brings only doom with it, and you keep running but it always catches up eventually, always there, ready to get you, and no matter how long you prolong it, you know that it will get you eventually. That is “It Follows.”

Jay (Maika Monroe, “The Guest“) meets Hugh (Jake Weary) and after a few dates, they have sex. This kind of thing happens. But what happens immediately after this? Not so common. Very shortly after the sex, Hugh informs Jay that there is some sort of thing out there, a supernatural entity that can take the shape of any person, and it will start coming after Jay, slowly yet steadily walking towards her at all times. She can even get in her car and drive far away from it, but it will eventually show up again, stalking her wherever she goes and if it ever catches her, it will kill her in some absolutely horrific way. This happened as a direct result of her sexual encounter with Hugh, who “passed it on” to her, and he instructs her to sleep with someone else to pass it on, hoping that this thing keeps going right down the line.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Red Army’

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“Red Army” is a documentary about the nation-wide hockey program of the USSR of the 1970’s and 1980’s, but of course this movie is about so much more, it is about the people within this system, the ones who ran it, and how it reflected the Soviet system overall as well as the Cold War between the Soviets and the capitalist West.

The focus of the film is Viacheslav Fetisov, which I am sure upsets him a little because as the captain of the USSR national hockey team and a product of dozens of years of Soviet-style teachings starting with him at a very young age, he has totally bought into the socialism, “there is no I in team” mentality, but he does deserve to be singled out among the rest of the team because of his insanely long list of accomplishments and rewards. Starting at 8 or 9 years old, he was entered into the Soviet hockey program, which found and cultivated the best players throughout the entire country and brought them up to eventually play for the National team. And on top of that the government practically made it mandatory for all men to at least attempt to play hockey, seeking to root out the best of the best, and using the sport as an opportunity to prove that their model of governance was the best one.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Gunman’

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Sean Penn is all like, “hey, Liam Neeson can’t be getting ALL the tough old man parts, is he?” but he was also like “If I’m going to do an action movie, it has to be ABOUT something, amiright?” and that is how we have “The Gunman” which is about people’s sins coming back to haunt them and is also kind of about the pilfering of natural resources in Congo and how that was made worse by a civil war and political corruption and whatnot but mostly this is a movie about Sean Penn’s biceps.

Gunman (Penn) is doing some contract security work in Congo in 2006, which is really a cover for him being on some team of assassins, and a job he does forces him to leave the country, leaving behind the woman he apparently loved without giving her an explanation. Eight years later, some guys are trying to kill Gunman and he knows this is somehow connected to the Congo job, so he tries to find out who wants him dead and why, and this brings him back into the life of the woman he left behind. Complications and murders ensue.

Not only is this yet another entry into the tough old guy subgenre of action movies, it is directed by the guy who directed “Taken,” the film that really kick started this current trend of flicks that would have starred Charles Bronson in the 70’s and 80’s. And much like that movie and this fella’s other old man action movie “From Paris With Love” with a bald headed John Travolta, “The Gunman” is a reasonably watchable movie, with good actors slumming it in dumb action movies, although this time around this movie tries not to be so dumb.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘What We Do In The Shadows’

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From Kiwi comedians (as well as writers, directors, performers, etc.) Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, “What We Do In The Shadows” is a mockumentary in the same vein as the great Christopher Guest films “Best in Show” and “For Your Consideration,” films that follow around a very specific group of people and explores their weirdness, especially in comparison to the rest of “normal” society. But instead of dog owners or bad actors, this is a movie about centuries-old vampires, who also happen to be flatmates.

“What We Do In The Shadows” centers on Viago, Vladislav (the Poker), Deacon and Petyr, who all share a flat together in Wellington, New Zealand. Most of the movie is them hanging out and building up to the masquerade ball held every year for undead folks like them, zombies and witches (though are witches really undead? Anyway…), but before we get there, it really is more like a slice of life kind of thing, what do these guys do with their time, what are they thinking, how they do coexist, and so on. So we get scenes like the one in which three of the flatmates sit together to go over the rules of the flat again, as one of them has been neglecting their chores, and obviously the humor of this kind of scene comes from the fact that they are having a very basic, standard argument among people who live together, just with the exception that they are vampires, so an argument could devolve into them flying in the air and hissing at each other.Continue Reading …