KWIF: Roofman (+3)

 KWIF=Kent's week in film. An odd drama, plus more Coens, more Nick and Nora and more teenagers foiling death's design.

This Week:
Roofman (2025, d. Derek Cianfrance - in theatre)
Inside Llewyn Davis (2013, d. Joel and Ethan Coen - Crave)
The Thin Man Goes Home (1941, d.  - DVD)
Final Destination 3 (2005, d. Glen Morgan - rental)

---

If one were to attend Roofman based on the trailer, or even the poster, one would think that Roofman was this year's Hit Man, a "based on a true story" film that turns real events into a sort of whimsical romantic comedy. The story of a down-on-his-luck veteran who turns to breaking into chain stores and fast food restaurants only to go on the lam by hiding out in a Toys R Us where he falls for one of the employees sounds like it should be an amusing, maybe even silly fun time at the movies.

But director Cianfrance, who co-writes the screenplay with Kurt Gunn, is much, much, much more interested in the human angle than finding much funny about the situation at all.  This is a true story of something that happened to a real person, and unlike Richard Linklater with Hit Man, Cianfrance isn't interested in sugar coating the story.

Channing Tatum has managed to get away from the meathead/pretty-boy perception that haunted his early career, despite still often playing meatheads and pretty boys. In between such roles he finds interesting projects that challenge him as an actor, and working with directors he likes, having clocked in time with Tarantino, the Coens, the Wachowskis and Soderbergh (so much Soderbergh). Still, in Jeffrey Manchester, the titular "Roofman", we find Tatum at his most vulnerable and soulful, walking a tightrope between sweet and sketchy with lots of fumbles to either side. 

Manchester is an Army vet, separated from his wife with alternate weekends with his kids. He's broke with no prospects and just can't seem to figure out how to get a leg up. His "super power", an exceptional innate skill, is observation. He sees patterns and details that are either invisible to the rest of us, or we take for granted. Someone with such a skill can be very effective in many situations, including crime, which is what Manchester turns to.  His series of break-ins in North Carolina become notorious over a two year span, but it's afforded Manchester a new house and won his family back...until he gets found out and goes to jail.

Tatum provides voice over throughout the film largely to give insight into how Manchester executes his crimes, the observations made and the patience needed accomplish the task, including describing how he broke out of prison, and eluded immediate capture by hiding out in a toy store. Unfortunately the narration doesn't extend to Manchester's thought process in entering a relationship with Leigh Wainscott (Kirstin Dunst), a store employee who he has been observing during store hours over baby cameras he set up. He meets her in person at her church and winds up on a date with her under a fake name and a government employee doing "undercover" work he can't discuss. But he's beefy and charming and soon they're a couple.  He meets Leigh's teenage daughters, showering the family with stolen goods, or goods bought with money from pawned video games from Toys R Us. 

Not too long ago, we would be made to feel sorry for Manchester. A film from, say, 2010, would paint him as a nice guy who went through hard times, and made the only decision he could. Such a film would root for Manchester to be free and stay free, root for the coupling of Leigh and "John Zorn", despite the cloud of deceit hanging over the whole proceedings (hell, Hit Man even did that...last year).  But this isn't that film. This film is all too aware that, as nice a guy as Manchester may seem, he's still being selfish even in his generosity. His attachment to Leigh and her family is, at least in part, a substitute for missing his own. While the film doesn't heighten or exacerbate the tension of it all, playing it pretty naturally, it's still exceptionally tense if you have any empathy for Leigh. Manchester's "victims" of his robberies all describe him as, really, a nice guy underneath, but there's nothing nice about deceit, and when Manchester is finally found out, it is a relief, more than anything.

Alongside exceptional performances from Tatum and Dunst, and Dinklage as the store manager, Ben Mendelsohn and Uzo Aduba play the pastor and his wife at the church, LaKeith Stanfield plays Manchester's army buddy while Juno Temple plays Stanfield's girlfriend while Tony Revolori and Jimmy O. Yang both have smaller cameos. These are quite some notable names for what amount to fairly nominal roles.

It's a good film, but certainly not what it was sold as. There's a few situational chuckles, but by and large it's all played very dramatically. Even the scene where Manchester is taking one of his "boys room" showers and is accidentally discovered by the store manager (Peter Dinklage), it could have been a really big comedic set pieces, but instead it's played exceptionally tense as Tatum, fully nude, tries to retreat to his hidey hole, and Dinklage is clearly traumatized by the encounter. It's the moment that spells the beginning of the end for Manchester's freedom and the new life he's deceptively built for himself. 

There's an exceptional coda to the film, though, that provides the audience with both resolution and even a little insight into the real Manchester. Interviews and news footage of the real "Roofman" and some of the people whose lives he touched play during the closing credits, and, again provide more context and a sense of closure to the story at hand.

---

I have been going through the films of the Coen Brothers week-by-week for the past three months now, and we've finally hit the point in their filmography where I've already done a review on this blog for the film that I've watched this week.

It's been over 11 years since I last watched Inside Llewyn Davis, and my memories of the film were mere flashes, out of context moments that told me nothing of the experience of watching the film. I didn't re-read my review until after watching the movie. Spelling mistakes aside, and maybe a bit of reassessing my Coen's preamble, I was surprised at how spot on my review from over a decade ago mirrored my repeat experience with the film, right down to the examination about whether it was a time loop film or not (it might be, but probably not).

In that review, I talked about how it was under-appreciated by critics. In the time since, it's been added to the Criteron Collection and has been held up as another of the Coens' many, many masterpieces. It gets into the director's interests of being behind the scenes of the performing arts, following this struggling musician as he tries to make space for himself and his interests in the world. There's shades of Barton Fink without the heightened reality, this is a very naturalistic experience.

Llewyn (Oscar Isaac), it was much clearer to me in this second viewing, is a traumatized man and his response to the world is to push it away, despite his best intentions. He's an asshole, and he knows it, but he doesn't know how to be any other way, because he's angry at the world. You would think the wake-up call would be taking a road trip with jazz musician Roland Turner (John Goodman) and his driver, beat poet Johnny Five (Garrett Hedlund...watching a lot of this guy of late). Turner is the vision of Llewyn 30 years in the future: a junkie who has an opinion on everything and hates pretty much all of it. 

Llewyn tries to abandon the life, the music, and just settle, but the music world proves that it isn't done with him, and karma gets him back on stage with a guitar in his hands.

My big realization watching this film, besides admiring how goddamned talented and appealing a performer Oscar Isaac is), is that I'm really, really not a folk music guy. I don't find a guy and his acoustic guitar or a trio harmonizing (with an acoustic guitar), or any of the folksy instruments and "traditional" songs terribly appealing. I appreciate them in the moment, but it's never something I'm going to put any effort into seeking out. There's a reason I haven't watched this film in over a decade (and it's been even longer since I saw A Mighty Wind) despite thinking it's a pretty great movie with phenomenal performances.

No Deakins' cinematography here, as Bruno Debonnel steps in with a very natural sensibility to the proceedings. There's no gloss here, and it's often all about the immediacy of the music. It's desaturated into greys and blues and browns, all feeling like very late fall or early winter in New York (and Chicago), cold and somewhat unforgiving. Also missing from the usual Coens production, Carter Burwell, as the music in the film is all performances, with frequent collaborator T-Bone Burnett working with Issac to arrange his performances, among others.  It's a standout film in the Coens filmography primarily because it feels so different, both musically and visually, but that said it feels like the proper extension to the shift the Coens had been making since The Ladykillers. You can definitely see, with No Country for Old Men, True Grit, and A Serious Man how this fits into this phase of their career.

---

It still kind of ruffles my feathers that the "Nick and Nora" movies are called The Thin Man series and the title of each film seems to be referencing Nick as the titular "Thin Man", when the thin man of the first movie was the suspect of the murder case.  Increasingly the titles of the series make less and less sense.

In The Thin Man Goes Home, Nick and Nora travel by train to Nick's hometown for a visit with his doting mother and disapproving father. Nick, a near 50-year-old man at this point, regresses somewhat upon returning home. His father thinks him lazy and hard-drinking, so, Nick decides to switch from his all-martini diet to drinking cider, but still runs afoul of situations that leads his father to think him tipsy off his ass.

Nick's arrival in town causes a stir. It's a tight community and, all told, a peaceful one. But as we know about America of the 1900's (especially through the works of David Lynch) beneath the placid normalcy of everyday America lies a deep, dark undercurrent that most just ignore is even there. To acknowledge it is to give it power, to summon it forth. Nick's mere arrival has Joe and Jane Normal thinking Nick's there on a case and it may involve them.  Nora, the muckraker she is, adds fuel to the fire and all but fabricates a case for Nick to work on. She really wants Nick to show off his detective skills to his father and finally impress him, like he constantly impresses her.

When a man is murdered by a sniper's rifle on Nick's parent's very doorstep, Nick can't help but get involved. Like all the "Think Man" movies, the cast expands and the actual crime spirals, leading to a gathering of all the possible suspects in one room where Nick sorts it all out. This film, so aware of its proceedings, gets downright meta as Nora explains to Nick's parents exactly how it will all shake out, including maybe a gunshot or two take at Nick.

Missing completely from this endeavour is Nick Jr. At first I thought the series was just outright abandoning him as if he never existed at all, but turns out he loves kindergarten so much that his parents couldn't dare to pull him from it to visit his grandparents (uh huh).

In prior Thin Man sequels there have been sit-com-esque set-ups or sequences that sometimes feel at odds with the murder and crime aspects of the film, but here, the tone remains pretty well balanced throughout. It never fully abandons its comedic elements for a more stone-faced approach to the investigation. If anything, it may go too far with the comedy as it tries to introduce physical comedy and slapstick, it turns out, it's not one of Willam Powell's strengths.

Still a fun time is always had in the company of Nick and Nora Charles.

---

With Final Destination 2, it felt like a step away from the intensity of the first film in favour of the delights of seeing annoying people get killed via incredibly elaborate cosmic jokes played on them. As well, FD2 really tried to figure out how to connect the first two films in wholly unnecessary and clumsy ways that just contributed to its delightful lunacy. I think my write-up last week didn't hit hard enough how damn entertaining the sequel was because of its ridiculousness, not in spite of it. As it lingered in my brain, I enjoyed it more and more.

I was excited to see than the makers of the first film were back, and I was keen to see what X-Files veterans James Wong and Glen Morgan had in store for a third entry of teenagers trying to escape death.

It's as if Wong and Morgan thought the ludicrousness of the second film was a flaw, with Final Destination 3 they really tried to bring back the ominousness, the foreboding dread of death and its designs. It doesn't work so well.

A young Mary Elizabeth Winstead leads the cast as Wedny, the one who has the vision of a Canadian roller coaster ride gone haywire. Next to the crazy highway chaos of the second film, a roller coaster malfunction isn't anywhere near as exciting, as wild as the deaths in Wendy's vision are.  The roller coaster accident itself is a tricky bit of filmmaking. Using a mix of practical shots of a roller coaster in motion as well as in-studio shots for the deaths, it's uneven and a bit janky-looking. The second film over-delivered on the opening calamity, and this pales in comparison.

Following Wendy and others getting off the roller coaster before its epic fail, Wendy starts to see in the photos she was taking for school yearbook signs that the survivors are going to die.  What happens often, though is Wendy and friends are looking at the wrong picture and thus the wrong signs.. the point being there's really no way to tell, no way to be certain what death's plan is for you.

While I like the vehicle for predicting the deaths much, much more than the repeated "visions" in FD2 (photos prognosticating deaths date back at least to The Omen), the deaths themselves are for the most part fairly straightforward, with no where near the level of fake-outs and surprises that the second film had, although there's a pretty decent sequence involving a drive-thru lineup, hills and a runaway delivery truck.

The finale of the film, taking place at a tricentennial fair, is pretty weak, all things considered, as the film seemed far more concerned with its three leads than anyone in the audience. There is a delightfully wicked 5-months-later coda, though, that seems so much more inspired than the rest of the film.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Ballad of Wallis Island

2025, James Griffiths (Cuban Fury) -- download

British "feel good" movies are a staple in our household, but I was left not sure if I wanted to consider this being about feeling good. Sure, it ends on a melancholy smile, but much of the movie is about feeling uncomfortable, and that is most often not my bag.

I can imagine that is going to be (a version of) the opening paragraph for pretty much every British Feel Good Movie we write about.

Charles Heath (Tim Key, Wicked Little Letters) is an eccentric young man living pretty much alone on an island off the coast of Wales. No, its not entirely empty, but its still glaringly remote. And much to the surprise of "past glory" folk singer Herb McGwyer (Tom Basden, Plebs) whom Heath has invited to the island to play a concert. A concert is too generous a word; he wants McGwyer is play for him, alone. He tosses 500k Herb's way to convince the incredulous man. 

And then Herb's ex, and ex music partner, arrives. You see, they were a folk music phenom sometime in the early 2000s and Charles was a super-fan. Then he won the lottery, twice, and after having spent the first fortune on traveling, he spent the second fortune to hide away here on Wallis Island. McGwyer Mortimer were his and his wife Marie's shared love, though you get the idea it was more her than him. Then she died, and he now consoles himself with everything McGwyer Mortimer. Except, the band broke up, contentiously. Herb, whose real name is Chris Pinner, is desperately trying to (re)create a career, while Nell (Carey Mulligan, Drive) is now a hippy in Portland, yes Oregon. She was told they were both coming, Herb was not.

The movie is a triad of discomfort. There is the locale, the remote rustic island, where there has to be other people, but we really only ever see Charles one neighbour, Amanda, who runs the island's "general store", and that is being generous. They are all staying in Charles run down country house, and even if they wanted to get off the island, they would have to wait for single boat that comes this way, on its own time schedule. Then there is the relationship between Herb and Nell. She has obviously moved on, bringing her tentatively friendly American husband along with her, but Herb is lost in the past, and still very much in love with Nell. And finally, there is Charles himself, who is painfully, terribly awkward both from being a man who lives alone on a lonely island, but also, he's quite the nerd. He's endearing in his own way, but...

I was fine with the movie, but for one thing -- the music. I am a fan of the last couple of decades of nouveaux pop folk music, much of it British, but the music in this movie, all written and played by Tom Basden, who is not a musician but a comedian, seems to reflect a nostalgia for 70s 80s folk instead of what it is now. It was less Damien Rice / Lisa Hannigan or Angus & Julia Stone (yes, they are Australian) and more Joanie Mitchell. But then again, maybe that's me, being on the peripheral and I never did see the original short this is based on. But, the music did not click for me, and that was supposed to be kind of the point.

But the cast is charming, and the filming is luscious and terribly isolated, which I am a fine of, so yes, some Feels Good. Its one of those movies where I am very much more fond of the pitch, than the execution.

Inside Llewyn Davis

2013, d. Joel and Ethan Coen - Netflix

The Coen Brothers are, without a doubt, two of the greatest filmmakers in cinema history.  I don't think anyone looking at their body of work could argue that.  Even when they're unsuccessful, they still manage to produce a film that engages and entertains differently than mostvother films.  For every outright critical and commercial success like Miller's Crossing, Fargo, or No Country For Old Men, there's a Hudsucker Proxy, a Ladykillers, or a Burn After Reading in their wake.  None of those latter three films are terrible movies, they're just not as tight, not as memorable, not as inviting or engrossing as the best of the best.  They can't all be cult smashes like The Big Lebowski.

Inside Llewyn Davis wasn't well reviewed, and despite my grand affection for the Coens, I let that sway me and keep me from the film in theatres.  It's a smaller Coen Bros. feature, with no big Clooney or Pitt-esque stars, nor does it explore broader scenery like True Grit or O' Brother Where Art Thou.  In the scale of their smaller work it's not as surprisingly good as A Serious Man, it's more in the vein of Barton Fink. 

Oscar Isaac is the titular character, an aspiring folk sing in the early 1960's.  He couch surfs and borrows money from friends and family and believes that his struggling is part of his art.  But he's also a sonofabitch with a flimsy filter for his emotions and true thoughts which get him in no end of trouble.  Llewyn is suffering from an aimlessness after the suicide of his recording partner, and there's a sense of loneliness he feels as a result.  He feels so abandoned, in his music that he thinks he's abandoned in life too, not realizing just how much support he's getting from his friends (even in the form of tough love from his sister).  He was abandoned in his music and music is his life.

The issues of abandonment leads Llewyn to go to rather extreme degrees to care for a friend's cat when it gets locked out of its home, a level of concern that seems well outside his character, it's pointed out.  At another point he's stranded in a car with no keys on the road to Chicago and he abandons the cat (a different cat, mind you) in the car, and it's obviously a painful decision for him, but he realizes he can't continue on with the cat in tow, that he has to accept he's solo now.  This is a revelation applied when he's given a offer to work as part of a group, which he turns down.

The revelation that he too is just as capable of leaving people behind (such as leaving a woman he impregnated to take care of the abortion on her own, only to learn that, two years later, it was never done) and that maybe he needs to change, take his sister's advice and become a resonsible adult. 

The final act concludes with Llewyn having the crap kicked out of him for his behaviour, in a scene that loops back in on the opening prologue, a curious trick from the Coens.  Is Llewyn stuck in a Groundhog's Day-like time loop?  No, it's literally just a deceptive opening cut.  But the intent is a curious one.  Is he really giving up on music or is it still  his job! as he tells the man in black in the alley?  And is the beat down accepted, even welcome compensation for his terrible behavior.  There are scenes of Llewn making good with his friends in that final act, paired right alongside scenes of him at his most prickishness.  Nobody can change their nature that quickly.

The songs of Inside Llewn Davis are an effective mish mash of dark, brooding folk, light kitsch ("Please, Mr. Kennedy", featuring Isaacs, Justin Timberlake and Adam Driver  is such delightfully catchy pablum), and overearnest treacle that it spans folk in its broadest context.  It's almost as if the Coen's were staging the scene for a follow-up mocumentary that has moden hipsters and music nloggers discovering Llewyn Davis' music 50 years later and heralding its above-mediocre nature as a lost gem of folk, much in the Searching For Sugarman mold.

It's certainly not the Coen's best feature but it's still more than worthy viewing.