We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
BETTER LUCK TOMORROW (2002)
Justin Lin is best known for directing five of the movies in the Fast and Furious franchise, taking a break from the car action to direct Star Trek Beyond along the way... and he got to go on all of these big budget studio movie adventures because of his independent drama Better Luck Tomorrow, which he made on a budget of $250,000. A budget he raised by maxing out ten credit cards, cracking into his life savings, and even managing to get an investment from M.C. Hammer. This is a movie I had seen a couple times before, and revisiting it now, more than twenty years after Lin made it, took me back to a different time. A time when I would regularly watch independent dramas that were shot on film. I admit that I don’t watch enough independent dramas these days – but even if I did, chances are they wouldn’t be shot on film like this was. Seeing the look of Better Luck Tomorrow and the film quality was like stepping into a time machine for 100 minutes.
Lin wrote the screenplay with Ernesto Foronda and Fabian Marquez, basing the story on a true crime case known as the Honor Roll Murders. In that case, a group of over-achieving high school students, most of whom were Asian American and aiming to get into Ivy League schools, hatched a scheme to steal some computer parts... and then murdered one of their associates because they thought he was going to alert the authorities. The film centers on a similar group of Asian American over-achievers: Parry Shen as Ben, Jason Tobin as his unhinged friend Virgil, Sung Kang as Virgil’s cool cousin Han, and Roger Fan as class valedictorian Daric. On their way to graduation and Ivy Leagues, these kids decide to get into criminal hobbies. They buy computer products, then get refunds while keeping the products. They sell cheat sheets. They steal and sell computer parts from school. And for a while, it seems unthinkable that their crimes could ever turn violent. But we know they’re going to eventually, because the opening scene is a “four months later” flashforward that shows Ben and Virgil unearthing a corpse.
When the group gets into drugs, the likelihood of violence seems to increase. While Ben develops a cocaine habit, he also pursues a relationship with cheerleader Stephanie (Karin Anna Cheung), even though she has a boyfriend. That’s Steve (John Cho), a private school kid who asks Ben to take Stephanie to a school dance for him because he’s not into that sort of thing. Then Steve asks Ben and his cohorts to rob his own parents – and he provides the group with guns so they can pull off the job. Then everything falls apart and the story gets quite disturbing.
Better Luck Tomorrow is a great movie, and it’s clear to see why Justin Lin caught Hollywood’s attention with it. After entering the studio system, Lin said he was hoping to balance bigger movies with more independent movies, and it’s a shame he hasn’t been able to do that. He’s been so caught up in blockbusters and TV work, he hasn’t returned to the indie world in a long time. I hope he’ll get back to it, because I want to see more of the grounded stories he has to tell, the smaller and more personal stories.
THE BLACK PHONE (2021)
After Sinister director Scott Derrickson chose to drop out of the sequel to his Marvel superhero movie Doctor Strange due to creative differences, he went right back to his horror roots with an adaptation of the short story The Black Phone, written by Joe Hill (who happens to be the son of Stephen King and played the kid from the wraparound segments of Creepshow). Those Doctor Strange sequel creative differences resulted in Sam Raimi taking the helm of that movie while we got a new Derrickson horror movie, so I’m very grateful those disagreements arose.
Derrickson and his frequent co-writer C. Robert Cargill only had about 30 pages of prose to work from when crafting the screenplay for The Black Phone, but they did a great job of building the story up so it could sustain a 103 minute running time. The short story is very simple: a young boy is abducted by a serial killer known as The Grabber, who holds children captive in his soundproofed basement before eventually killing them. There’s a black phone mounted on the wall of this basement cell, a phone that has been out of service for a long time... but while the kid is there, the phone rings. On the other end of the line are the spirits of the killer’s previous victims, who give the kid hints on how to escape. Derrickson and Cargill expand the story by adding in more character work and writing in more phone calls, allowing for more escape attempts throughout the film. We’re invested in the lead character from the start, we want to see him get away from the Grabber, and each time one of his escape attempts fails we get pulled further into the situation with him. Our desperation to see him escape rises as he gets more and more desperate to escape.
Mason Thames stars as protagonist Finney, and we get to spend about 30 minutes with him and his younger sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) before the abduction occurs, seeing that Finney has a bit of a rough time at school – he’s bullied, and it would be even worse if not for his badass friend Robin (Miguel Cazarez Mora), a cool kid who has even seen Enter the Dragon and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre at the drive-in – and Finney and Gwen both have a rough home life. Their mom is dead, their father Terrence (Jeremy Davies) is a drunk, and Terrence beats Gwen with a belt when she mentions she has visionary dreams just like her mom did. During that 30 minutes, The Grabber claims two victims: a kid Finney played a baseball game with, and Robin. Then it’s Finney’s turn.
Derrickson and Cargill set the story in 1978 to work in elements of Derrickson’s own childhood, and that setting enhances my enjoyment of the film because I’ve always liked ‘70s settings and ‘70s music. The cast assembled for the film put in some impressive work, with Madeleine McGraw really standing out as a star in the making. Her Gwen is awesome character. Derrickson cast one of his favorite actors (and one of mine) as The Grabber: Ethan Hawke. And Hawke does a pitch perfect job of making The Grabber a slimy creep. Derrickson also decided to have The Grabber wear a mask in the film, and had FX legend Tom Savini design a two-piece mask that comes with a few varieties of expressions, giving The Grabber different looks in different scenes.
The only issue I had with the movie was The Grabber’s goofball brother Max, played by James Ransone. When I first watched the movie, I thought Max was completely useless and had no reason to be in the movie; it seemed like he was written into the story just to have an excuse to put Ransone in it. But then I read the source material and found that the brother character was in there (to a lesser degree), so his presence in the movie wasn’t as arbitrary as it felt. I still could have done without him.
Despite a nitpick here and there, I thought The Black Phone was a great horror film, one of the best to be released in the last few years.
No comments:
Post a Comment