Movie Review ~ Do Revenge

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The Facts:

Synopsis: After a clandestine run-in, Drea (Alpha, fallen it girl) and Eleanor (beta, new alt girl) team up to go after each other’s tormentors, the scariest protagonists of all: teenage girls.
Stars: Camila Mendes, Maya Hawke, Austin Abrams, Rish Shah, Talia Ryder, Ava Capri, Jonathan Daviss, Maia Reficco, Paris Berelc, Alisha Boe, Sophie Turner
Director: Jennifer Kaytin Robinson
Rated: NR
Running Length: 118 minutes
TMMM Score: (8/10)
Review:  If you’re putting me in a locked room and asking me to scribble a list of my Top 3 favorite specialty movie genres on the wall, it would have to be these. 

1. The Shark Film 
2. The Creature in Space Film 
3. The Bitchy High School/College Film

So far this summer, I’ve had my fill of the shark film (see The Reef: Stalked and Maneater, or better yet, don’t and see JAWS if it’s still in IMAX near you), and I can watch Alien or its sequel anytime I want. I must admit that I’ve cycled through my favorite high school comedies more than a few times, knowing the beats and lines of the classics for most by heart. 

When I first heard about Do Revenge, I knew it was initially called Strangers. That could only mean one thing, like Amy Heckerling’s all-time hit Clueless, which derived inspiration from Jane Austen’s novel Emma, screenwriters Jennifer Kaytin Robinson and Celeste Ballard were borrowing from another master. The Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock. Very loosely based on 1951 Strangers on a Train (even less than 1987’s Throw Momma From the Train was), this wicked little zinger is a breath of fresh air as we move into the hottest part of the summer.

It’s spring at Rose Hill prep school, and junior Drea Torres (Camila Mendes, Palm Springs) is sitting on top of the world. She has a great group of friends, the most popular boy in school is hers, she’s in a video for Teen Vogue, and her #1 pick for college (Yale) is interested. Not bad for a girl that attends school on a scholarship and is surrounded by classmates who don’t understand the sacrifices she’s made to get where she is today. She seems to have forgotten a little of that humility, but now she’s ready to party and enjoy the end of the school year. Then she makes a classic blunder…she trusts the wrong guy.

Boyfriend Max (Austin Abrams, Chemical Hearts) leaks a raunchy video she sent to him, ruining her reputation overnight, jeopardizing her collegiate future, and seriously impacting plans for a perfect senior year. Working at a tennis camp over the summer to hide from all the eyes that have seen her online video, she meets Eleanor (Maya Hawke, Fear Street: Part One – 1994), a tomboy she bonds with over swapped stories of broken trust. Eleanor is transferring to Rose Hill in the fall, and, surprise, her bully also attends. When fall rolls around, the two stay out of sight in public, but behind closed doors, the summer friendship turns into a plot to destroy the tyrants that ran their names through the mud. How far is too far when the future, and high emotions, are on the line?

Nicely harnessing an air of surreal reality, Do Revenge sits comfortably on the shelf with Heathers (a live musical version debuts on Roku this weekend) and Jawbreaker. The buttery pastel uniforms worn at school (seriously, you’ll believe anyone looks good in a whipped lavender capelet and matching beret) are in pleasant contrast with the outlandish fashion designs created by Alana Morshead. The supporting cast members all sport impressive duds, but Morshead saves the most distinctive styles for Mendes and Hawke, who show up in several jaw-dropping outfits during the film. Coupled with a slight fantasy-like school setting and outdoor locations that feel a little outside of the natural world, you have a movie set now that definitely takes place on a different planet.

Everything can look great but without a solid cast to support it, what’s the point? Directing her screenplay, Robinson (a writer for Thor: Love and Thunder) nails it across the board. Precious few adults are present (one major cameo Netflix has asked us not to spoil, even though they recently released an ad featuring them), so the film primarily rests on the shoulders of Mendes and Hawke. Each actress has individual moments to carry the movie, but I give the slight edge to Hawke for blowing me away with a character that gets more complex as the story develops. There are no spoilers, but Robinson and Ballard’s screenplay has more up its sleeve than meets the eye at the outset. Hawke looks and sounds so much like her mother, Uma Thurman, that it’s eerie.

Like another release this week, The Woman King, Do Revenge stumbles when it includes a romantic subplot that feels squeezed in rather than organically grown. It only adds to the long run time, and a wildly careening third act doesn’t help. Some may think a slight detour featuring Sophie Turner (X-Men: Dark Phoenix) is dragging things, but Turner is so ferociously funny in just two scenes that I wouldn’t lose her presence for anything. Thankfully, I think Robinson has a noble end goal with Do Revenge that passes the right message on to the viewer, and it’s a message its target audience could hear more of now. With a soundtrack that has nothing but winning needle drops, eye candy clothes that don’t quit, and leading performances that hit their target like twin lighting bolts, this is worth skipping school to watch.

Movie Review ~ The Silent Twins

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The Facts:

Synopsis: Feeling isolated from an unwelcoming community, June and Jennifer Gibbons turn inward and reject communication with everyone but each other, retreating into their fantasy world of artistic inspiration and adolescent desires
Stars: Letitia Wright, Tamara Lawrance, Jodhi May, Michael Smiley, Jack Bandeira, Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn, Delcan Joyce, Tony Richardson, John Hyat
Director: Agnieszka Smoczyńska
Rated: R
Running Length: 113 minutes
TMMM Score: (6/10)
Review:  As an only child, I often wished I had a sibling. Mostly it was so I wouldn’t constantly be outvoted for what to do/where to go on family outings. Honestly, do you think I chose to see The Last of the Mohicans over The Mighty Ducks in 1992? No, though I know better now. A small part of me wanted to have a brother whom I could have the kind of bond with that I had seen in movies or through friends at school. Hey, a twin would be even better! I’ve always been fascinated with twins and the phenomenon of their sometimes near-psychic connection to one another.

The unique link between twins can have drawbacks, though, and that’s one of the areas explored in The Silent Twins. Based on Marjorie Wallace’s bestselling 1986 novel of the same name, it recounts the troubled life of June and Jennifer Gibbons, identical twins from Wales, and their struggle for independence even they can’t fully define. I’d never heard of these women before, so the film was an eye-opening glance back at history filtered through the creative lens of talented Polish director Agnieszka Smoczyńska, making her English-language debut.

Born in the early ’60s to parents that immigrated from Barbados,  June and Jennifer began communicating only with each other at an early age. Refusing to engage with family, teachers, or classmates, the girls lived in a world of their own and often spoke the language of their creation. They would mirror the movements of one another and become catatonic if separated, which was an early solution attempted by medical professionals to break their silence. 

Left to their own devices, the girls grew into young women who expressed themselves artistically through craft projects and, later, creative writing. Their inexperience with the outside world and lack of socializing led them to act out and make unwise choices, such as sharing first love with Wayne (Jack Bandeira, Gunpowder Milkshake), a popular boy from the neighborhood, a decision their jealous hearts would come to regret. Spurned on by changing emotions they couldn’t control, they found themselves in trouble with the law and in the first of several adult mental institutions that would define the next decade of their lives.

Smoczyńska’s film follows Andrea Seigel’s screenplay through the high points of the Gibbons twins, adding alluring flourishes along the way. There’s barely a creative stone that doesn’t get turned over here, from stop motion animation to choreographed musical numbers, cooing voiceovers, and then actual singing by Jennifer. It all makes the film a beautiful thing to soak in, even if much of it represents complicated developments in individuals that continually try the patience of all around them.

Having not read the source novel this is based on, I’m not sure how much the work wants us to sympathize with the twins or be exasperated by how they shut out the people trying to help them. Often in these movies of people struggling with mental illness, the patient is seen as needing something that’s missing. Still, the Gibbons twins have a supportive family that desperately wants to connect and see them succeed. We see the two make the conscious effort to shut everyone out. Why? 

In that regard, it’s hard to warm to either twin even though they’re performed brilliantly by a quartet of fine actresses. As the twins when they are younger, Leah Mondesir-Simmonds & Eva-Arianna Baxter are fantastic introductions to the world the girls have created. Their fantasy lives are sunny and soaring, while the reality they have for themselves is sullen and withdrawn. Their elder counterparts are played by Letitia Wright (The Commuter) and Tamara Lawrance (Kindred). They take over at the right moment when the twins begin to experience the first genuine cutting-off ties with close family that won’t stand for their silence.

Running nearly two hours, Smoczyńska lets The Silent Twins wander too much around the Wayne sequence. It’s not only the roughest in terms of content but filmmaking. I would have liked more time spent in the final third when the twins are older and dealing with life in the hospital. That might have involved making Marjorie Wallace (the author of the book) a more prominent character than she already is, but Jodhi May plays her with such compassion I don’t think anyone would have minded. It’s a tough watch because of your feelings toward the main characters, but the moments of beauty and central four performances are enough to encourage viewing.

Movie Review ~ Goodnight Mommy (2022)

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The Facts:

Synopsis: Twin brothers arrive at their mother’s country home and discover her face covered in bandages — the result, she explains, of recent cosmetic surgery — and immediately sense something doesn’t add up. As her behavior grows increasingly bizarre and erratic, there’s a horrifying suspicion that the woman beneath the gauze isn’t their mother at all.
Stars: Naomi Watts, Cameron Crovetti, Nicholas Crovetti, Peter Hermann, Crystal Lucas-Perry, Jeremy Bobb
Director: Matt Sobel
Rated: R
Running Length: 91 minutes
TMMM Score: (4.5/10)
Review:  It had been a minute since I had seen 2014’s Goodnight Mommy, the German horror film that serves as the basis for this English-language remake being released by Amazon Studios. Impressive enough to be recognized by its country as the official submission for the Best International Feature Oscar, perhaps its gruesome final act turned off the nominating committee enough that they forgot how well things started. I remember looking forward to the scare flick from Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala based on its freaky trailer but ultimately disappointed in how far they took things. There’s horror, and then there’s just plain gross, and directors stepped over that line too far.

Strangely, that’s the biggest problem with the remake starring Naomi Watts and a new pair of twins that doubt she’s their mother and tests her extensively in trying to prove it. It can see where the line is because it’s taken on the responsibilities of remaking a known property, but it never gets up the nerve to entirely go where it needs to meet the bloody footprints of its predecessor. That may sound a bit contradictory after what I said above but had new screenwriter Kyle Warren and director Matt Sobel found a way to improve upon the Franz/Fiala screenplay, I could excuse the wuss-out. They don’t, and so their remake feels underbaked.

Opening on a home video (well, a camera phone, this is the digital age, you know) footage of a mother singing a nighttime lullaby to twin boys, we notice the mother doesn’t like being on camera. We don’t even get a good look at her before we switch to the slightly older twins, Elias (Cameron Crovetti, The Gray Man) and Lucas (Nicholas Crovetti, Witch Hunt), arriving at a remote house smack dab in a beautiful stretch of open country. Deposited by their dad (Peter Hermann, Philomena), who doesn’t think he should accompany the boys inside, the twins eagerly await a reunion with their mother. Quickly, the excitement drains when they see Mother (Watts, Penguin Bloom) with her face covered with a bandage that looks like a ski mask, hiding most of her facial features.

A once famous actress that doesn’t work as much, Mother appears happy with this reunion but only just so. There’s trepidation in the welcome and nervous energy the boys pick up on. Moreover, she seems more closed off and unwilling to share the warmth she used to give freely. Lucas is the first to say out loud what both of them are thinking. “I don’t think that’s our mother.” From that planted seed grows a festering doubt in both, which sees them spy on the woman when she thinks she’s alone, dancing to “A Girl Like You” by Edwyn Collins in her underwear as she regards herself in a mirror and taking a bath with silicone pads over her face. 

The more they see, the more they doubt, and it all builds to a finale where multiple truths are revealed, and a final mask is removed. What’s going on will likely be easy to figure out for anyone that’s watched a thriller or two in their day, and while the 2014 film kept you guessing for a while, I think it’s even more evident from the start here. Warren has toned down a lot of the violence that arises in the third act, the violence I found unnecessary from the original but, as it turns out, when it is missing, was a critical piece that gave particular players more skin in the game. 

I liked everyone in the movie, even the twins, who are pretty good with increasingly tricky material, and I wish I could pick them up and put them all in a better movie. I’ve struggled with Watts lately because I’m unsure who is choosing the material for her or if she’s even interested in finding her way back to the A-List. She’s such a remarkable actress that you want to see her in a project capitalizing on her talents, and Goodnight Mommy comes closer than any recently. To convey the kind of emotion she does while covered almost head to toe in gauzy material or clothes is difficult, but she is always present. Even if she’s not who she says she is (I’m not telling), she’s an intense person to be around.

Bravery is the lesson to be learned from Goodnight Mommy for anyone considering a future remake. You must risk it all if you’re taking on this crucial task. Take the bull by the proverbial horns and take your shot at putting your stamp on the feature. Please don’t shy away from what made the movie famous in the first place but make it your own simultaneously. To water it down doesn’t serve anyone.