‘Missing’ Delivers Yet Another Screenlife Winner

January 17, 2023

jmunney Cinema, Movie Reviews , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Not Pictured: The People Who Are Missing (CREDIT: Screen Gems)

Starring: Storm Reid, Nia Long, Ken Leung, Joaquim de Almeida, Amy Landecker, Daniel Henney, Tim Griffin, Megan Suri

Directors: Nick Johnson and Will Merrick

Running Time: 111 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for Over-the-Top Ragers and Implied Disturbing Violence

Release Date: January 20, 2023 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: 18-year-old June Allen (Storm Reid) sure is ready to make her way to college so that she doesn’t have to keep constantly rolling her eyes at her mom Grace (Nia Long). She’ll get to preview that independence for about a week as Mom goes on vacation to Colombia with her new boyfriend Kevin (Ken Leung, aka Miles from Lost). She proceeds to throw a nonstop, knockout rager but ultimately manages to schlep it over to LAX just in time to pick up Grace and Kevin upon their return back to the States. But then they’re nowhere to be found!

So to track them down, June enlists the help of an FBI agent (Daniel Henney), her mom’s lawyer (Amy Landecker), and a random guy on the ground in Colombia (Joaquim de Almeida). Over the course of the investigation, some rather surprising tidbits about Grace and Kevin’s pasts begin to emerge, and we see this all unfold on laptops, cell phones, and other modern Internet-connected screen devices.

What Made an Impression?: Is screenlife the best genre ever?!!! It’s a fairly young cinematic style, but it’s been producing hit after hit after hit. Unfriended was excellent! Unfriended: Dark Web took the scares to another level! Searching delivered the thrills in spades! And now we’ve got Missing serving as a standalone sequel to Searching, with a fresh story that maintains the same investigative approach and also the same gerund titling strategy. Neither Missing nor Searching has a plot that absolutely demands confining its action to screens, but that approach nevertheless keeps everything focused. And I think that’s a huge reason (perhaps even the hugest reason) why this subgenre has delivered so consistently. There are some cheats here and there in which the action spreads beyond the computer, but for the most part, the creative restraints fuel creative triumphs.

The undeniable fun of Missing is derived from its series of status quo-altering revelations, each one more gobsmacking than the rest. Pretty much everyone connected to the disappearance has their devastating secrets, and each one is calibrated for maximum audience satisfaction. I wonder if everything would still hang together on a repeat viewing, but even if the strings do start to show, that doesn’t change how effective the initial delivery is. This is a fine-tuned, well-oiled puzzle. You might be able to see greasy residue on some of the pieces, but that’s only evidence of all the essential attention to detail.

Missing is Recommended If You Like: Searching, Cable true crime docs, Online how-to guides

Grade: 4 out of 5 Windows

 

‘Profile’ Brings Timur Bekmambetov’s Screen Life to the World of Jihadi Recruitment

May 11, 2021

jmunney Cinema, Movie Reviews , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Profile (CREDIT: BEZELEVS and Focus Features)

Starring: Valene Kane, Shazad Latif, Christine Adams, Morgan Watkins, Amir Rahimzadeh, Emma Carter

Director: Timur Bekmambetov

Running Time: 105 Minutes

Rating: R for Language and Images of Violent ISIS Activity

Release Date: May 14, 2021 (Theaters)

I’m a sucker for a good gimmick, and Timur Bekmambetov has hit upon a pretty dang excellent one with his series of “Screen Life” films. With the likes of Unfriended, Unfriended: Dark Web, and Searching, he’s produced some weirdly irresistible flicks that are presented entirely within the confines of a computer screen. Now he’s stepped into the Screen Life Director’s Chair himself for Profile, based on the nonfiction book In The Skin of a Jihadist, which documents journalist Anna Erelle’s efforts to contact an ISIS recruiter via Facebook. I’ve watched these movies on the big screen and on the TV screen, but not once have I ever watched them in their entirety on a computer. They certainly don’t lose any effectiveness they might have had by playing out just a few inches away from my face. No matter what distance I watch them from, they’re thoroughly intimate and all-encompassing, and Profile is no different.

Profile‘s stand-in for Erelle is Amy Whittaker (Valene Kane), a constantly stressed-out London-based reporter with an assignment that promises a rewarding payday but at the expense of her emotional stability. Under the guise of “Melody,” a 20-year-old convert to Islam, she soon attracts the attraction of Bilel (Shazad Latif), an ISIS leader in the market for recruiting young European women to Syria to join the fight for the Islamic State. Both Amy and Bilel are making their cases through layers of dishonesty, as she concocts justifications for her investigates instincts and he underplays his organization’s propensity for violence and human trafficking. But the best undercover work is driven by honest emotions, and Amy and Bilel do appear to forge a genuine connection. Bilel also has roots in London, and they’re both disillusioned by a country that failed to take care of their families. Everyone has their vulnerabilities, and Profile makes it inescapably clear how they can be preyed upon.

I’ve been singing the praises of Screen Life from the beginning, and this might just be its best use yet. We’re entirely stuck within the point of view of Amy, someone who’s losing any outside perspective that could keep her from losing herself. She gradually merges with the Melody persona, and for an hour and a half, you just might as well. Our online lives are not our entire lives, and it is important to be regularly reminded of that. Profile‘s entire raison d’être may be that everything is always connected, but weirdly enough, it might also be one of the most effective tools to convince us to step away every once in a while. Indeed, this is a movie that has been made by people who have beheld modern society and wondered, “What have we wrought?”

Profile is Recommended If You Like: The Screen Life genre, Undercover work, Freeze frame detective skills

Grade: 4 out of 5 Winking Cat GIFs

This Is a Movie Review: ‘Searching’ Achieves Intimacy Through Screen-Based Storytelling

August 23, 2018

jmunney Cinema, Movie Reviews , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

CREDIT: Sebastian Baron/Screen Gems

This review was originally posted on News Cult in August 2018.

Starring: John Cho, Debra Messing, Michelle La, Joseph Lee

Director: Aneesh Chaganty

Running Time: 102 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for Angry Outbursts and References to Patterns of Illegal Behavior

Release Date: August 24, 2018 (Limited)/Expands Nationwide August 31, 2018

If a movie is going to have a form-busting structure, it is probably best if its story works on its own merits regardless of the filmmaking style, unless the format is so unusual that audiences don’t even know how to process it. Searching is not the first film to be told entirely on computer screens, nor is it even the first from producer Timur Bekmambetov. This is just the latest in his “Screenlife” series, following in the innovative footsteps of Unfriended and its sequel, Unfriended: Dark Web. Searching is the story of widowed father David Kim (John Cho) desperately looking for his missing teenage daughter Margot (Michelle La), and it is compelling enough on its own beyond its medium-within-a-medium approach. But its unique structure proves to be an ingenious method for plumbing characters’ psychology.

Much of Searching is about David coming to terms with the fact that he may not have known his daughter as well as he thought he did. This is a phenomenon that many, perhaps all, parents experience at some point, but rarely under such tragic circumstances. Talking him through much of this crisis is Rosemary Vick (Debra Messing), the case’s lead detective, who assures David that there are always secrets between even the closest of loved ones. It’s a lesson worth keeping in mind for any viewers trying to suss out the twist to come when the truth is revealed, and it also illuminates what the Screenlife form can achieve. In one early scene, before David knows for sure that Margot is truly missing, he composes an angry text message to her … and then deletes and replaces it with something much more civil. The intimacy granted to viewers by seeing David’s process is on the same level of that between the reader and narrator of a novel.

One of Searching‘s major charms is its heavy use of outdated technology, not in terms of fetishization but rather the stasis typical of suburban parents. The opening montage features David and his wife keeping track of Margot’s early years on their new Windows XP computer. Cut to the present day, and David is still using a now decade-and-a-half-old operating system. It still runs perfectly fine, so there is no reason to be a consumerist shill and insist that he make an upgrade. But sticking to this routine is indicative of how he goes about his personal life as well. The nature of his quality time spent with Margot has not changed much since his wife died. But their relationship needs to change, because she is almost an adult and they need to talk to each other about how the loss of Mom has affected both of them. Searching does not take a stance on whether the domination of screens in modern society is a net positive or negative, but by thoroughly examining how much we document on computers, it demonstrates how valuable it is to occasionally keep track of those records.

Searching is Recommended If You Like: The Fugitive, Law & Order, Organizing Photos on Your Computer

Grade: 4 out of 5 File Folders

This Is a Movie Review: Unfriended: Dark Web

July 21, 2018

jmunney Cinema, Movie Reviews , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

CREDIT: BH Tilt

Unfriended: Dark Web repeats the same format and many of the same methods as the first Unfriended, but the feelings it inspires are of a different breed. The original was a dark morality tale about some truly awful teenagers experiencing karmic justice. But the twenty-somethings in Dark Web all appear to be decent human beings, yet the fates they experience are even worse. It is a thoroughly cruel movie, though I hesitate to call it mean-spirited, as the type of sadistic evil it presents does exist in the real world, and it can therefore work as a bleak warning.

Once again, the action unspools via Skype conversation and other laptop applications. Instead of a vengeful ghost, the big bad this time is a network of criminal hackers. Their technical prowess strains credulity, though it might be a case of sufficiently advanced (fictional) technology appearing like magic to us. (It might have been a good idea to explain it a tad.) Standout features include the difficulty of communicating via sign language over a computer and a particularly fraught case of the dilemma of being forced to choose which of two loved ones gets to survive. Telling the entire story on a laptop screen is once again initially disorienting but then disarmingly natural. Overall, my reaction to Dark Web is much like my reaction to Phantom Thread: I appreciate how well-made it is, but the experience of watching it is just so unpleasant.

I give Unfriended: Dark Web 3 Trephinations out of 5 Facebook Messages.

This Is a (Quickie) Movie Review: Unfriended

April 17, 2015

jmunney Cinema, Movie Reviews , , 3 Comments

unfriended-horror-movie

Unfriended, at heart, is a typical one-by-one mystery killer story. Ergo, it is not particularly scary. So when a horror movie is not very scary, it needs to be interesting. And boy, is it interesting. Essentially the entire running time takes place on an Apple laptop. With all the Chrome tabs, Skype windows, Spotify’s, Messenger’s, Recycle Bins, and desktop icons, I at first thought it was going to be exhausting, but then I soon remembered that I am used to all that.

It succeeds at relentlessly exploiting its killer premise and withholding information until the most effective moments. While I very much enjoyed it, it is not something I would jump at watching again, as all the characters are just terrible friends to each other. The best word to describe this movie is “nasty.” It’s a cautionary tale, a nasty movie for nasty people.