Backcountry - Adam MacDonald (2015)

If you are willing to put yourself into the hands of a great storyteller, they can do wonderful and terrible things for you just with the backdrop of their story. If you rely on a mediocre storyteller, you are in for a tedious experience. So what advantages can a filmmaker take with the characters' surroundings? In the right hands, they can terrify you so deeply that you'll never, say, go into the water again ("Jaws") or never take another shower ("Psycho".)

So is Adam MacDonald up to the task? Does "Backcountry" do for the woods what "Jaws" did for the water?

Alex (Jeff Romp) has wonderful childhood memories about hiking and camping at a beautiful lake deep into the forest with his family. Now, he wants to share this place with his girlfriend, Jenn (Missy Peregyrn.)


So there's our background. We are in the woods where one can get turned around and lost or get into all sorts of trouble like meeting a threatening stranger or a bear. Our heroes deal with the fear of the uncivilized world.

First, they come across a stranger, Brad (Eric Balfour) who seems nice at first and has a campfire dinner with him: fresh fish. It's a sequence we have seen played out countless times. The stranger and our heroes laugh with each other, then the stranger turns rude, then aggressive. It's a trick used by suspense/thriller films as far back as any of use remember.

When they part ways, that specific threat is gone. Alex and Jenn only face the unknown of the wilderness.

Every time there is a small emergency, or the couple gets a fright, you expect them to turn around and go home like any of us would do. But of course, these guys are horror film protagonists and therefore, by definition, stupid. 

So they plow through the woods until they find their destination. But Alex doesn't seem to have the memory he used to. They can't find Alex' beloved lake. The're in the wrong place with no map, no cell phone, no food and no way out.

To put it simply, they're lost. At about the half-way point, the question of what is the most terrifying thing in the woods is answered: BEARS. Bears are the scariest things in the woods.

At the beginning of the "Backcountry," Alex teases Jenn about bringing bear spray with them. Turns out bear spray is no joke.

But if a bear is determined to drag you off somewhere into the woods, spray or no spray, he will most likely get his way.

It comes down to how fast can you run, how high can your crawl and how healthy is your will to live?

When "Backcountry" starts, you'll see some potential in the film.

Their interaction with Brad, the creepy stranger they came across in the first act, showed promise. That sequence was admittedly tight and menacing.

After that, all attempts at horror or suspense fall flat. We are left with a tedious exercise of a filmmaker trying in vain to build a successful suspense/thriller. But there is really no suspense here. We just sit there and to think to ourselves, "Could the bear just eat these two pricks so I can go make a sandwich?"

So skip the movie and you make that sandwich. You deserve.

I'm not sure why I took the energy to write about this, but I did, so the least you can do is skim it. Here you go.

Song to Song - Terence Malick (2017)

What is the difference between need and desire and how can you tell when you have switched from one to the other? There is an early part of the relationship when you want to be with someone. Then, with no warning, turns them into someone you can not live without?

Terence Malick's "Song to Song" is a film about love, (well, more desire than love) rejection, betrayal and other ugly creatures we've all had in the pits of our stomachs at one time or another. It is set against the backdrop of the Austin music scene.


The first thing we hear in "Song to Song" is Faye (Rooney Mara) telling us how she associates sex with violence. What does that say right off the bat about our heroine? Faye is the kind of person who will look anywhere, fly as high as she needs to, to find her place in life. The problem is she does not know what her place looks like.

From the start, her relationship with Cook (Michael Fassbender) is doubtful. Cook is presented as a chaser and an opportunist. A man who goes after pleasure, higher and higher without regard to the people around him. He is also wealthy as hell, so so he can search out pleasure to no end. As the movie progresses, we see how riches can sabotage what could have been romance, or at least friendship.

Cook is a sharp contrast to BV, (Ryan Gosling) a man clearly out to fulfill his wishes, but with self-awareness and complexity. Like Faye, he has an infatuation with Cook. He believes the man has the key to starting his music career for him. Meanwhile, Faye just sees Cook as an opportunity for love.

As the three of them spend time together, we get the idea that Faye and BV could be very happy together were it not for Cook's influence.

This is the first love triangle we're introduced to.

Now, as we work our way through the movie, the study of desire slowly turns to a story about obsession.

Then, there is betrayal, both in romance and in other, far more personal forms. And at one point, it comes down to simple jealousy.

Next, Cook encounters Rhonda, (Natalie Portman) a shy, young out-of-work kindergarten teacher.

After that, I have no idea what happened because this movie is such a chore to watch that I could not finish it.

My God what a terrible, terrible mess.

I mean, you get to see Iggy, Patti Smith and Lykke Li, but it is not worth it.

I do not even have to the energy left to tell you how bad.

I apologize for making you read all of the above, but I had already gone through the tedious chore of writing it and I did not want it to go to waste.

But if you're a fan of Malick, prepare to be very disappointed.

Very.

Passengers by Morten Tyldum (2016)

The concept of "Passengers" is a simple one: Robinson Caruso in Space (Or Gilligan's Island, whichever you like.)

What could possibly go wrong?  

Jim finds out exactly what could go wrong when his pod malfunctions and he wakes decades before the ship reaches its destination.

So Jim is stuck.

He'll die long before anyone else on the ship will wake up and his only source of help or conversation is a robotic bartender.

Then, it occurs to Jim that if he needs a companion, he'll have to deliberately sabotage a pod so a girl he's become enamored with can keep him company.

Yes, he's caught a touch of Space Madness after being alone for more than a year.

Still, his plan is the most cruel and selfish solution to his problem he could ever imagine.
So, he wakes Aurora and of course, the two bond.

Then, Aurora finds out that what happened to her pod was no accident.




As the Earth becomes more and more populated, the human race has turned to populating other planets.

Jim Preston is a passenger on a ship on its way to one of these planets.  

It's a 90-year trip and the passengers and crew are in hibernation until their arrival.

Jim had woken her.  And when he did, he robbed her of her life.


She wants nothing more to do with them, which is problematic seeing as how they're the only 2 conscious people on the ship.

"Passengers" tries to make a statement about isolation and self-service, but it falls short into a tedious, predictable plot with 2 characters who are simply not believable.

The only sequence one could enjoy is the tense minutes in which Aurora, taking a swim, is suddenly trapped inside a water bubble when the gravity shuts down.

It's a cool, tense sequence.

It's not convincing at all when Aurora decides to forgive Jim.

Just as I'm not sure whether or not I'll ever forget Tyldum for making me sit through a two-hour exercise in how to sit through two hours of torture.