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TriBeCa Diary, The Home Stretch: Sad Arnold

TriBeCa Diary, The Home Stretch: Sad Arnold

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Although your humble correspondent missed three days of TriBeCa films in a row due to a back injury, there was no way he could miss Maggie. Director Henry Hobson was able to attract Arnold Schwarzenegger to his low-key zombie project, despite the fact that Hobson was making his feature debut with a budget so small that you could make Maggie two or three times over for the amount that Arnold was paid to appear in Terminator: Genisys. The uniqueness of Hobson’s vision is evident from the first scene, where he is able to establish clearly the particulars of his zombie semi-apocalypse with only the barest minimum of exposition. As society teeters on the edge, both law and medicine struggling to handle the “Necroambulist” virus, Abigail Breslin plays the infected Maggie and Schwarzenegger plays her father, agonizing over the decision of what to do when she turns.

So many zombie movies jump right over the impossibility of this decision – even Shaun of the Dead had to find an excuse to skip past it after a minute of debate – and thus Maggie earns a lot of goodwill for taking the pain and drama of this situation head-on and at length. Plus, Breslin is terrific, capturing all of the horror and heartbreak of this hypothetical tragedy in a way that is essential for a movie named after her character (Breslin’s performance is so important to the film that one could reasonably question whether Arnold is the lead). The only problem is that, despite Schwarzenegger being better than he has ever been, his casting still feels like a stunt: more dramatic power is added to the character’s reluctance to kill by having him played by one of action cinema’s most prolific killers. Imagining, say, Michael Shannon in this role gives me the chills all over, in a way that Arnold simply can’t do… Grade: B+

Viggo Mortensen is fairly close to Schwarzenegger on the A-list, thanks to his star turns in the worldwide hit Tolkien adaptations, but unlike Arnold he is no stranger to appearing in independent films as well. The multilingual Mortensen especially likes to appear in foreign productions, and in Far From Men he tries on his French and Arabic for an adaptation of Albert Camus’ story “The Guest.” Mortensen plays a teacher in a far-off part of colonial Algeria, who would like to stay out of the Algerian revolt against the French. However, he gets drawn in when he is entrusted with the care of a prisoner (Reda Kateb) who must be taken to the capital for trial. Like most Camus heroes, both of these characters have been put in an impossible position by forces outside of their control, and despite an impassioned performance by Mortensen the movie carries a great deal of Camus’ existential coldness as well. A few references to “war crimes” and “terrorists” add some present-day relevance to the story, but not enough to bring any new meaning to the source material. The main appeal of this film is its incredibly gorgeous cinematography, which lends untold beauty to landscapes as empty as Camus often found life to be… Grade: B+

New York-based writer/director Michael Larnell’s feature debut Cronies has a title card that includes the dictionary definition of the word “crony,” which immediately made your humble correspondent roll his eyes, because almost every movie which does that sort of thing is too dumb and full of itself to be enjoyable. Thankfully, Cronies is the rare exception. Shot on a micro-budget in and around Larnell’s hometown of St. Louis, and featuring music entirely from St. Louis artists, Cronies follows three young men through one full day of hanging out, getting high, and trying to pick up both money and girls. It’s interesting to compare this film to two other feature debuts which are thematically similar: both Mean Streets and Boyz N Tha Hood focused on young men in rough surroundings, and like those films, one member of the trio in Cronies is the “wild one” who is more prone to violence than the other two. But unlike its predecessors, Cronies goes to great lengths to humanize its “wild one,” and explain why the other two would be friends with him despite that fact that he could put them in danger. Also unlike its predecessors, the central trio in Cronies is racially mixed: two of the men are black and one is white, and Larnell deftly shows how much that matters without hitting the issue on the nose. Cronies occasionally feels like a first film, particularly in the way it shoves its female characters aside and forgets them for most of the movie’s run time, but it also shows tremendous promise. Spike Lee executive-produced Cronies through his 40 Acres And A Mule production company, and at its best, Cronies feels as fresh and new as She’s Gotta Have It and School Daze did in the ’80s. Here’s hoping that Larnell has his own Do The Right Thing soon to come… Grade: A-

In the British thriller Hyena, Peter Ferdinando plays Michael Logan, a London cop so dirty that he makes Bad Lieutenant look like Serpico. Ostensibly working vice by day, Logan spends his cocaine-powered sleepless nights working on becoming a drug kingpin in his own right, until a pair of ruthless Albanian gangsters turn his world upside down. Hyena‘s neon-blue credits evoke Michael Mann’s Thief, and writer/director Gerald Johnson displays Mann’s ear for hard-boiled dialogue as well as Mann’s gift for making grungy fluorescent-lit locations look beautiful. However, Hyena soon goes to places where Mann never dared to tread, with horrific bursts of gory violence and a rape scene so graphic and protracted that it blurs the line between cinema and pornography. All of that ugliness becomes a psychic assault by about the 90-minute mark, but then Johnson delivers a daring and ambiguous ending which calls into question what we expect when we watch movies with corrupt cops as the protagonists. After the rape scene I wanted to give Hyena a D, and after the ending I wanted to give it an A, so I will split the difference and say… Grade: B-

Coming Tomorrow: Awards and wrap-up

-Mark Young

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