Movie Review: Best Sellers (2021)

Genre: Dramedy

Director: Lina Roessler

Starring: Michael Caine, Aubrey Plaza, Scott Speedman, Ellen Wong, Cary Elwes

Running Time: 102 minutes

Synopsis: Lucy Stanbridge (Aubrey Plaza) is running the book publishing house made famous by her father. In financial difficulty and desperate for a best-seller, she turns to crusty retired author Harris Shaw (Michael Caine), whose one and only book was published by Stanbridge 50 years prior. Shaw reluctantly agrees to publish his latest manuscript and go on a promotional tour, but he is more interested in drinking and swearing than promoting anything.

What Works Well: Working from an Anthony Grieco script, director Lina Roessler crafts a heartfelt story about the past influencing the present, both Harris and Lucy dealing with the burden of legacies and expectations. After a lighter introduction, the second half is more sorrowful, as Harris confronts his regrets and Lucy grapples with defining her own future. Aubrey Plaza and Michael Caine shine in their key moments, while Harris' foul-mouthed crankiness provides a reliable source of social media-ready humour.

What Does Not Work As Well: The material is slight and Roessler stretches it thin to clamber over the 100 minute mark. Internal inconsistencies arise once Harris' past insecurities clash with his present literary resonance. Meanwhile, Scott Speedman as a rival publisher and Cary Elwes as a haughty book critic are both marginally underused. Ellen Wong enjoys a strong start as Lucy's assistant but also fades.

Conclusion: Modest and modestly enjoyable reflection on life's jumbled epilogues and prologues.



All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Movie Review: October Gale (2014)

A drama and thriller about grief and loss, October Gale sinks under the flimsy weight of incomplete ideas.

In Ontario, Helen (Patricia Clarkson) is a doctor still grieving the death of her husband, killed in a lake boating accident during a storm. She heads out to their isolated lakefront cottage, where memories of her marriage continue to haunt her. A power outage, no phone service and an impending storm heighten the sense of isolation.

Her solitude is shattered when a stranger with bullet in his shoulder washes up on her pier. His name is Will (Scott Speedman), and Helen nurses him back to health. Will reveals he served time in prison for accidentally killing a man, and the victim's father Tom (Tim Roth) is now tracking him down and wants him dead. Helen agrees to help and together they fortify the lakehouse, waiting for Tom's arrival.

A Canadian production written and directed by Ruba Nadda, October Gale suffers from a feathery script and unconvincing characters. The entire opening act is occupied with Helen cleaning the cottage and flashing back to intimate moments of cuddling with her deceased husband of 30 years. The middle third features the arrival of the wounded Will, an expert at running down the clock by revealing his story in micro-snippets.

And by the time the climax arrives, Helen's decision to get involved in the conflict of others only makes sense on the greasy napkin of bad movie ideas, and Tom's arrival and subsequent showdown exists in a void of rationality.

Patricia Clarkson frequently stops and stares into the middle distance, gradually realizing she deserved much better material. Scott Speedman enhances the narrative blankness, while Tim Roth gate-crashes proceedings, arriving straight from Quentin Tarantino mindspace.

October Gale anticipates a storm, but drowns in still waters.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: The Captive (2014)

A child abduction drama, The Captive peels away layers of secrets in frigid terrain to reveal a complex web of interconnected raw emotions.

The film is presented non-sequentially and in multiple timeframes, with all events occurring around Niagara Falls, Ontario (but also filmed in Sudbury). Chronologically, married couple Matt and Tina Lane (Ryan Reynolds and Mireille Enos) are rocked by the abduction of their young daughter Cassandra, an aspiring figure skater. Tina blames Matt, because Cass was kidnapped from his truck when he popped into a diner.

Police detectives and child abduction experts Nicole (Rosario Dawson) and Jeffrey (Scott Speedman) investigate, with Jeffrey suspecting Matt of selling his daughter for financial reasons. Years pass and the case goes cold. Tina and Matt separate but Tina maintains annual contact with Nicole. Meanwhile Cass grows up in captivity, held in a secret room by wealthy businessman and child pornographer Mika (Kevin Durand). Matt never gives up hope of finding his daughter, while the grown-up Cass (Alexia Fast) starts to exert her power over Mika to try and end her nightmare.

An intricate multi-faceted mystery, The Captive is spellbinding but also congested. Director, co-writer and co-producer Atom Egoyan weaves a fascinating multi-pronged tale of insidious evil hiding in a perpetually snow-covered small town, with the story ambitiously spanning many years of agony as Cassandra's disappearance casts a long shadow over the community.

The frequent jumps back and forth to multiple points in time are at first disconcerting, and for a movie clocking in at under two hours, there is a lot going on. But Egoyan maintains reasonable control as the narrative spreads its wings. The film is not just about grieving parents; it is also about Cassandra's burgeoning adulthood in a bewildering captivity, and the enticing but infuriating dead-ends well-intentioned detectives can be sucked into.

Still more sub-themes feature Mika deriving pleasure from torturing Tina with artefacts from her missing daughter's life while cameras secretly record her reactions, and Nicole herself becoming a target of the powerful pornographer cartel. The online luring menace, a pornographer's psychological weaknesses and a relationship between cops Nicole and Jeffrey also sneak their way into the film.

As the multiple threads intertwine The Captive inhales the icy coldness of working class desperation. The Niagara Falls are frozen in the background and stubbornly refusing to release any economic advancement. Matt struggles to run a one-man landscaping business while Tina works as a hotel room cleaner, their relationship comprehensively ruptured by her fury at what she perceives to be his carelessness in losing Cass. Ironically, the only moment of glitz is provided by two-faced slimy child porn merchants hosting a banquet.

The Captive appears to run out of either time or money, the climax rushed into an unsatisfying blur with a few threads left hanging. But the ever expanding ripples of trauma caused by one child's disappearance do leave a lasting impression.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Movie Review: The Strangers (2008)

For a horror movie to work, adhering to certain principles can be helpful. The murder and mayhem can be quick and sudden, to create the "who, when and where next" slasher-type tension; or it can be excruciatingly drawn out, in which case the audience expects some delving into the reasons why the killers are taking their sweet time to get the job done.

Halfway through The Strangers, it becomes apparent that the movie is trying to get away with extending the prelude to murder for the entire length of the movie, with no intellectual pay-off. The three masked killers remain faceless, voiceless, and lacking in motive, in which case the only reason to prolong the killing is to toy with the moviegoers.

The film is simply not good enough for that. Essentially a series of cliched "what's that sound in this spooky isolated house" scenes, The Strangers bumps along offering very little that is new, as Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman attempt to fend off three masked intruders who seem capable of finishing their murderous handiwork at any instant, but are waiting for about 90 minutes to pass so that the union guys can get paid.

Liv Tyler goes through the movie wondering if she really gave up a modeling career for nonsense like this. Scott Speedman appears to be wondering when he can cash his cheque and move on to the next movie in his non-career. Bryan Bertino, directing from his script, first connects the dense dots and then paints by numbers to ensure that no old idea is left unrecycled.

The final proof of innovative bankruptcy arrives with yet another horror movie dead body coming suddenly and inexplicably alive in the last scene before fade-out. Guys, this was old in the 1980's.







All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.