Tag Archives: Paul Schrader

Movie Review ~ Master Gardener

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by Movie Review • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Facts:

Synopsis: Narvel Roth is the meticulous horticulturist of Gracewood Gardens, a beautiful estate owned by wealthy dowager Mrs. Haverhill. When she orders Roth to take on her troubled great-niece Maya as his apprentice, his life is thrown into chaos, and dark secrets from his past emerge.
Stars: Joel Edgerton, Sigourney Weaver, Quintessa Swindell, Esai Morales, Victoria Hill, Eduardo Losan, Rick Cosnett, Amy Le, Erika Ashley, Jared Bankens, Cade Burk, DJames Jones, Matt Mercurio
Director: Paul Schrader
Rated: R
Running Length: 107 minutes
TMMM Score: (2/10)
Review: In his sixth decade working in motion pictures, writer/director Paul Schrader has seen his ups and downs in the movie business. From the early high of a one-two punch in 1976 of Taxi Driver and Obsession to the struggles in the early ‘90s to regain his voice, Schrader regained some traction in 2017, landing his only Oscar nomination with First Reformed. He followed that in 2021 with the well-received The Card Counter and has completed the triumvirate of stony-faced men giving major side eye in the posters with Master Gardener. 

To say that Schrader’s latest finds him in the weeds is both a cheap pun and a thorny bouquet way of stating that this drama fertilized with thriller elements is a withered mess. Dry and brittle, it features the director pandering to his worst, most self-indulgent instincts and bringing down a good cast with him. It’s the type of film where a supposedly respectable, eloquent woman utters the phrase ‘tit cancer’ in the same breath she waxes poetic about an old black lab she’s named ‘Porch Dog’ because, you know, he sits on the porch. I’m getting a bit ahead of myself, however…

The opening of Master Gardener suggests that Schrader is back to his First Reformed ways of internalizing the emotional arc of a troubled soul and inviting the audience to watch how repressed feelings seep out in small doses over two hours. Sadly, that blasted ‘tit cancer’/ ‘Porch Dog’ scene happens (lines only Schrader would dare to write), and the illusion is broken almost as soon as it has begun. By that time, we’ve established Joel Edgerton (Boy Erased) as Narvel Roth, an enigmatic horticulturist employed on the estate of Norma, a mannered woman (Sigourney Weaver, The Good House) who has invited Roth into her gardens and, as we find out awkwardly, her bed.

Roth lives on the massive acreage, all the better to stay close to the plants, and keeps detailed journals about the precise interaction between flora and fauna – some that will parallel the twisty entanglements to come. Norma asks Narvel to take on her orphaned grand-niece Maya (Quintessa Swindell, Black Adam) as a new apprentice, teaching the inexperienced teen how to make the garden grow. It isn’t long before the teacher becomes more than a little interested in the student, first taking on the role of protector from an abusive boyfriend, then an interventionist, and ultimately (cringe!) her savior.

The relationship between Narvel and Maya (as played by Edgerton and Swindell) is painfully chemistry-free, so when the script thrusts them together as lovers (not precisely a spoiler because you can see it coming a mile away) and tells you they have found a weird sort of affection you can’t fully accept it. Narvel is clearly the two decades older the actor Edgerton is over Swindell, and throw in some issues Narvel has with his absent teen daughter, and you have something gross to sort out on your own time. That’s the only fast-moving plot point in Schrader’s meandering film, which takes longer to get through than a stroll through an actual botanical garden.

Huge plot problems aside, the acting is disappointing too. Edgerton was on a roll with parts that allowed the Australian actor to push past the typical Hollywood leading action star mold and expand into something different. You can see where the appeal was to work with Schrader on a character with Narvel’s complexities (I’m deliberately leaving out a significant character detail that informs much of his actions). Still, it doesn’t fully come through in the execution. As a wealthy shrew who uses her money to control others, Weaver fares better because she’s adept at circumnavigating parts for women who tend to dismiss them outright. However, even she can’t acquit Norma from some very odd dialogue that sometimes makes her sound like she’s in 1920s Maryland and others as if she’s slumming it in 1997 Hoboken. 

Schrader gets fed up with the Hollywood machine every few years, throws his hands up, and goes silent. Perhaps it’s time to take a breather again and sort out some of the problematic elements of Master Gardener that take it so awry. The icky romance (for real, so gross), the non-starter thriller aspects, and the dull flashback drama told in pieces that never come together to form a complete picture. It’s nothing shocking considering that Schrader has gone back to this older man/younger woman concept now dozens of times. Still, it is staggering that the director keeps writing the same film over and over again but can’t ever validate it as a worthwhile idea. This comes across as a first draft that no story editor got to before filming began. Skip it and go plant a tree instead.

31 Days to Scare ~ Rolling Thunder (1977)

by 31 Days to Scare, Movie Review • Tags: , , , , , , , ,

The Facts:

Synopsis: A recently returned Vietnam POW loses his family and right hand during a violent home invasion and seeks retribution against those responsible.
Stars: William Devane, Tommy Lee Jones, Linda Haynes, James Best, Dabney Coleman, Luke Askew
Director: John Flynn
Rated: R
Running Length: 95 minutes
TMMM Score: (6/10)
Review:  When it was released in the summer of 1974, Death Wish became both a commercial hit and a hot-button topic of conversation in a country moving into the final year of the Vietnam War.  After years of being inundated with reports of death that hit close to home, where was the joy in going to the movies and seeing such unrestrained violence against the (then-normalized) nuclear family?  A counter-argument to that was why Death Wish earned such infamy; viewers flocked to the theater because there was a catharsis in seeing an ‘ordinary’ man (tough-as-nails and as handsome as one Charles Bronson) take the law into his own hands and get justice. 

Death Wish spawned a series of copycats (not to mention four sequels and a 2018 remake) that focused on crude vigilantism above all else, with the story and character development often relegated to the backseat.  These were quick, cheap pictures to make and get out to the local grindhouse or drive-ins for a fast buck, and every studio, from the most indie to respected production house, wanted to get in on the action somehow.  By 1977, the Vietnam War had been over for two years, but those returning from the battle were only beginning to see the effects PTSD would have on their daily lives for years to come.

Maybe I’m setting up Rolling Thunder to be more prestigious than it is, but I wanted to separate it from the other Death Wish wannabes because it aspires to be more.  An original script from Paul Schrader (who had Taxi Driver in theaters the year before), who wanted his friend John Milius to direct it, the film eventually landed with John Flynn.  While Flynn gives the picture an elevated feel, I can only imagine what Milius might have done with Schrader’s script (even with revisions from Heywood Gould) and a cast headed by William Devane and a young Tommy Lee Jones (Hope Springs) at the start of his illustrious career.

Former POW Major Charles Rane (Devane, Testament) returns to his Texas home to find life has changed dramatically while he was away.  His wife is seeing another man, and his son barely remembers the father that left for war when he was young.  Struggling to adjust to daily life, he regresses to his strict air force ways, which only ostracizes him further from loved ones.  Seen as a hometown hero, he’s awarded a new car and nearly $3,000 in silver dollars – a paltry compensation for the torture and years lost that put him far behind other men his age. 

Unfortunately for Rane, just because he’s home doesn’t mean he’s safe.  When four thieves arrive to steal the money they saw he was awarded, Rane is left disfigured and helpless to watch as his family is slain in front of him.  Broken and alone, Rane rejects the assistance of friends during a renewed time of pain and opts instead to track down those responsible and make them pay for their actions.  Now using a prosthetic hook that has replaced his mutilated hand, he fashions it as a raw weapon and begins to hunt down his assailants one by one. 

Compared to similar films, Rolling Thunder isn’t as sleazy or hair-raising as it could have been.  There’s ample violence on hand (pardon the pun), but Schrader/Gould and Flynn have helped to develop the characters and to set them well enough so that you know who they are and care what ultimately happens to them.  No one in the film feels out of place, and you could see Devane making a home with the woman playing his wife and being shell-shocked to find she’s hasn’t been faithful to him while he was suffering in a POW camp.  I also found the performance of Linda Haynes as a local girl that takes a shine to Devane to be rich with good moments.

It becomes more about Devane and Jones in the final act, and that’s when Rolling Thunder starts to feel more of the same and in line with the typical neo-vigilante films it shared a double bill with when it was released.  There’s nothing wrong with a take-no-prisoners ending; by that point, the film has likely earned its ability to go big. Still, it would have been interesting to see it handle the extreme violence with as much consideration as it did with how it treats the pain of its characters.

Movie Review ~ Clapboard Jungle: Surviving the Independent Film Business

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The Facts:  

Synopsis: Following five years in the life and career of an independent filmmaker, supported by dozens of interviews, posing one question: how does an indie filmmaker survive in the current film business? 

Stars:  Justin McConnell, Tim League, Guillermo del Toro, Michael Biehn, Jovanka Vuckovic, Sid Haig, Paul Schrader, Tom Savini, George A. Romero, Larry Fessenden, Lloyd Kaufman, Heather Buckley, Uwe Boll, Todd Brown, Jennifer Blanc, Zack Bernbaum, Justin Benson, Yazid Benfeghoul, Charles Band, Patricia Chica, Jessica Cameron, Larry Cohen, Dean Cundey, Elijah Drenner, John Fantasia, Avi Federgreen, Mitch Davis 

Director: Justin McConnell 

Rated: NR 

Running Length: 98 minutes 

TMMM Score: (5/10) 

Review:  Pulling back the curtain on the perils of the movie business isn’t anything new.  It’s been done in feature films such as The Player from 1992, Robert Altman’s scathing analysis of Hollywood wheeling and dealing and in real life tales of the struggle to get a production off the ground like 1999’s classic American Movie.  While most making-of docs included in the extras on your DVD/BluRay will detail how the film you’re watching was made, there’s still more to the whole process before the cameras roll that remains a fascinating (for the viewer) and frustrating (for the filmmaker) journey.  If you have the right subject, taking this trip is a no-brainer because you have someone to root for and would want to see get their golden ticket to success at the end.  Get saddled up on the wrong horse and you’ll become aware pretty quickly why they may be an undiscovered talent. 

For a filmmaker like Canadian Justin McConnell, there’s a bit of a dilemma. He’s both the director and subject of Clapboard Jungle: Surviving the Independent Film Business.  His IMDb credits read like a padded self-curated list of anytime his name has appeared associated with a film (two of this Thanks credits are for Indiegogo contributions) and most of his work has been as a cinematographer of unseen/little-seen short films and packaged interviews included as special features on home media releases.  The films he has spearheaded have made little waves, with the online reviews suggesting it’s more than the low budget that has sunk these small ships.  Self-producing a number of titles and always with an array of irons in the fire, McConnell, like many fledgling filmmakers, has ambitions of being in a higher class of directors and thinks opportunity is the only thing keeping him from getting there. 

What a viewer watching Clapboard Jungle gathers after watching the film which follows McConnell over five years is that while opportunity might play a factor some of the time, it’s McConnell’s projects themselves that are holding him back.  That and the impression given off from clips we’re shown that his work isn’t polished enough to inspire a producer to take a chance on him.  Listening in on several pitch meetings from McConnell, even as a dedicated horror fan I strained not only to follow his concept but muster much enthusiasm for seeing the finished product.  If an ordinary viewer was getting that vibe, what must a financier with deep (or even half full) pockets think?   

There’s something to be said for gumption though, and for all the apparent lack of self-reflection McConnell shows at times, you have to give it to the guy for pressing on even when thrown countless roadblocks on the way to securing the monies to make his movie.  Just when he thinks he’s got the green light, the tide changes and he’s back to square one.  Attending numerous networking events and festivals, attempting different approaches, McConnell is up for most anything to get himself in front of the right people.  This works up to a point, but you have to wonder if McConnell’s bullish attitude toward criticism doesn’t play a factor in some of this lack of forward momentum.  It’s more than hinted by his parents of all people that he takes feedback quite badly and instead of exploring that area further to dissect his limitations we’re plunged right back into the same rinse and repeat cycle of the festival networking circuit. 

Where the film finds a wealth of value are the numerous interviews McConnell has conducted with other indie filmmakers, producers, actors, and distributors that are either one step removed from where he is or far advanced in their career and willing to sit down with an up and comer.  At times, the advice given in the interviews seems to contradict with how McConnell is trying to get ahead and it’s never clear if this is meant show some dark irony or not.  If the documentary was helmed by an outsider that could be objective, I would say yes but with McConnell as director he never makes a definitive stance if he’s trying to find humor in the situation or not.  Several of the subjects even boil McConnell’s main problem down perfectly without him even knowing it.  Legendary low-budget schlock-meister Charles Band points out that anyone can point and shoot a film, copy it onto hundreds of discs, design a great cover, and have it distributed it to the masses.  People still need to see the film and like it, though.  That’s where McConnell still hasn’t found the right path yet – creating a high-quality product. 

Including a section that discusses critics and how much or little their opinions should be valued is a tricky wire to walk, especially as you prepare to release your film to a wider audience.  It’s just another way that McConnell doesn’t wind up being that compelling of a subject to watch during Clapboard Jungle’s span of time.  At one point near the conclusion, he says “You may hate everything I do but it doesn’t really matter, because I’m doing it.”  I get what he’s saying because we all know you can’t please everyone but on the other hand you don’t instantly earn the credit just by picking up a camera and doing the work.  That’s why the business is hard, why films take forever to develop, why certain people rise to the top, and others flounder. It is indeed a jungle out there so it’s best to come prepared for whatever is thrown your way and be ready to adapt.    

 

Clapboard Jungle is available to rent On Demand or you can purchase a copy of the BluRay at ArrowVideo.

The BluRay is packed with a wealth of extras, including numerous short films from McConnell, commentary tracks, and FIVE HOURS of extended interviews with the various artists McConnell met with, a number of whom didn’t appear in the final film.