Year: 2018

Mulligan and Gyllenhaal shine in Dano’s ‘Wildlife’

Jeff Mitchell

“Wildlife” – “Do you know what they call trees in a forest fire?  Fuel.  Do you know what they call the trees when the fire goes by?  The standing dead.” – Jeanette Brinson (Carey Mulligan) Jeanette (Mulligan) and Jerry Brinson (Jake Gyllenhaal) and their teenage son Joe (Ed Oxenbould) look like an all-American family during a Montana autumn in 1960. Jerry and Ed toss the football around in front of their modest home, while Jeanette has dinner waiting for them.  Both parents show affection to each other, encourage Joe with…

31 Scary Movies: ‘Shadow of the Vampire’

Jeff Mitchell

“Shadow of the Vampire” (2000) – Director E. Elias Merhige’s movie is about a filmmaker (John Malkovich) making a movie with an eccentric star (Willem Dafoe).  Sounds simple enough and not out of the ordinary, because what movie actor or actress isn’t at least a little eccentric? Well, not so simple. Merhige’s eye-popping fantasy-biopic doubles as a horror film, because Malkovich plays director FW Murnau who attempts to make 1922’s “Nosferatu”, and Dafoe is actor Max Schreck who plays the chalky-white, long-nailed Count Orlok.  The rub?  Murnau claims that Schreck…

Hill’s ‘Mid90s’ avoids nostalgia and embraces timeless themes

Jeff Mitchell

“Mid90s” – Looking back at 1995, millions of Americans flocked to see “Braveheart” and “Toy Story” in theatres, listened to TLC’s “Waterfalls” on the radio, watched “ER”, “Seinfeld” and “Friends” on television, were fascinated by the O.J. Simpson trial, and loaded Windows95 on their personal computers.  Even though these cultural phenomenons (and many more) captured the public’s attention 23 years ago, they do not appear in writer/director Jonah Hill’s movie “Mid90s”, about a group of skateboarding kids in Los Angeles. This is by design. During a Sept. 2018 interview, Hill…