Green Room

Jeremy Saulnier, 2016

IMDB

3/5

Jeremy Saulnier certainly creates an environment that viewers would not have any interest spending time in in real life. A rural white supremacist rock club where blaring punk rock is played to crowds of aggressive skinheads. But that’s one of the best things about cinema; that it can transport you to places you would otherwise never visit. And he transports you in the company of a group of young punk kids that are struggling to make ends meat, living out of their van. Scraping by, taking any gig willing to pay a meager wage. They find themselves driving into the backwoods of Oregon to take an ambiguous gig given to them by a shady promoter. After their set one of the bandmates forgets a cell phone in the green room. Upon opening the door to the green room, Pat (Anton Yelchin) quickly discovers there is a woman’s dead body on the floor. Realizing that a murder has just taken place, he panics and attempts to call for help. They are soon trapped inside this claustrophobic green room, as the club owner and his aides attempt to cover up the whole situation.

Saulnier carefully plays with stylism and tension in this limited storytelling thriller. Basically the entire film takes place in this rock club, which is a glorified industrial corrugated metal shed in Bigfoot country. Saulnier is committed to his environment his builds; the Neo-Nazi imagery is strewn across every nook and cranny in the building. Stickers, graffiti, Sharpie doodles. The tension sets in from the second they get out of their rinky dink van and are quickly escorted inside the building. What follows is a violent display of a group of rather innocent punk kids trying to escape the worst gig of their short-lived music career. Outside the building, club owner Darcy (Patrick Stewart playing one of the most unexpected roles of his career) attempts to delicately clean up the situation rather than kicking the doors down and massacring them. But you realize that Darcy is totally capable of this. The fact that he doesn’t do this almost makes him more frightening.

The movie ends and you will be happy to leave this horrible universe you spend 95 minutes in. But Saulnier creates some unforgettable images, very much like he did in his last film Blue Ruin. He finds new ways to shed blood. People will probably remember this film as being one of Anton Yelchin’s last projects, as he tragically died in 2016 after the film was released. He was good in this film, although he was guilty of doing something Stewart also did a little too much of, whispering. I don’t know if it was the audio track or just the hardware I was viewing the film on. At times it was so difficult to hear the dialogue. Yelchin was often mumbling to the others. Patrick Stewart spent a lot of time whispering orders to his cohorts, and it was also very difficult to make out what he was saying when he was on the other side of the metal green room door. But the technical complaints aside, this is a film that should be seen. And surprisingly, even with such disturbing imagery, it’s a film that I will want to rewatch sometime soon.

Blue Ruin

Jeremy Saulnier, 2014

Can I Stream It?

3/5
When homeless and broken Dwight (Macon Blair) receives news of a convicted killer's release, a killer who had killed people very close to him years before, he decides to take matters into his own hands.

Blue Ruin is a product of the world of crowd-funding, with the production costs funded by a Kickstarter campaign. A very nice looking film, albeit being a dark revenge piece about vigilante justice. Served by a man with nothing to lose. Blair plays that man, soliciting sympathy within minutes of being introduced to his Dwight character. He spends the first few minutes of the film simply gathering things to eat, picking garbage at a neighborhood carnival in coastal Delaware. As soon as he hears the news of Wade Cleland's release, he begins acting out a game-plan that was likely a worse case scenario for Dwight. It almost seems like if Wade was never released, Dwight would continue stumbling through the days like a lifeless zombie. He soon finds a sense of mild purpose, justice for his parents' cold-blooded slaying. What follows is a chain of events that is similar in tone to Jeff Nichol's Shotgun Stories in the sense that it explores family feuding, familial loyalty and unforgiving retribution.

One moderate criticism about the film is the source of anger for protagonist Dwight. His parents were murdered years back. Of course that would be enough to make anyone deeply angry, looking for some form of justice outside of the conventional prison system, which clearly went easy on Wade. But Dwight has basically shut himself off to the world, almost as if when his parents died he gave up on everything without ever attempting to move on with his life (like his sister). Would someone choose this path after their parents were killed? Not that anyone would take their parents' murder mildly, but at some point they would lick their wounds and move on with their life, right? Dwight turns out to be the anti-Bruce Wayne. He doesn’t use the tragedy as a motivator to rid the streets of crime. Instead once the killer is imprisoned he goes into complete isolation, taking a vow of silence. Living out of his car, dumpster diving. He doesn’t actually attempt to execute any reparation until the killer is released from prison early. Perhaps his story would have been more realistic if it were his wife and child that had been killed. The film could have flashed back to the happy moments in his life in his suburban home with the white picket fence, only to be stripped from him after a home invasion gone awry. That being said, the story isn't COMPLETELY unbelievable. It's actually quite the opposite. Just a well-made/complete revenge thriller.