Demented Beauty in "A Cure for Wellness"

By Spencer Coile 

We have successfully reached that lull in the film year, where many of us are playing catch-up with the films we weren't able to see earlier in the year. It is both daunting and exciting. There is so much to see, but sometimes, a film will come along and take our breath away -- in scope, in storytelling, in its sheer visual spectacle. Perhaps it is a mix of everything. 

Gore Verbinski's A Cure for Wellness is not a perfect movie. Its characters are paper-thin, the twists and turns oftentimes feel haphazard, and the writing leaves much to be desired in the suspense department. However, as I caught up with the critically divided feature, I couldn't help but be swept up into this world that Verbinski created. In many ways, it is so different from anything I have seen this year that it was easy to forgive and forget some of the film's flaws, because it is so beautiful. And rather than dive into a critique about the movie and nitpick everything it does wrong, it might be more beneficial to share with you some of the film's most elegantly shot moments -- to demonstrate the sheer artistry taking place. 

Click to read more ...

Review: Depp & Tonto (and The Lone Ranger, Too)

This review was originally published in my weekly column at Towleroad

If Hollywood has its own wild wild west, a mythic frontier to tame, it is undoubtedly a time rather than a place: Next Summer. And the one after that. Release dates famously come before screenplays and the studios start laying down their tracks to get there: concept, screenplay, pre-production, casting, filming, editing, promotion, release though not usually quite in that sensible artistic order. Budgets often balloon on the way to the imagined gold at the end of the line. Or silver, as is the case with the name of a certain iconic horse, and the coveted metal driving the plot and the literal train tracks in the new version of THE LONE RANGER.

Hollywood hasn't revived this particular franchise in over 30 years, for what one assumes are three reasons: westerns have been notoriously difficult sells for modern mainstream audiences; the last time they attempted this franchise, it failed; and the Tonto character opens you up to charges of racism and cultural insensitivity in modern times. But if anyone could revive this dead franchise and skirt these issues, the thinking went, wouldn't it be director Gore Verbinski and his masses-beloved star Johnny Depp (rumored to have some sort of Cherokee heritage, and adopted into the Comanche Nation last year) who together did the impossible 10 years ago in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, making a well reviewed, Oscar-nominated, mega-blockbuster out of a famous amusement park ride while also navigating another even more notoriously pricey and difficult to sell outmoded genre: the pirate movie!

The director and star aren't so lucky this time around. [more]

Click to read more ...