Film

Hacksaw Ridge is violent enough to earn an NC-17 rating. So, there’s your warning.

War is Mel

Mel Gibson directs his first movie in a decade and—surprise—the sucker bleeds. It bleeds a lot.

As a director, Gibson stands alongside the likes of Sam Raimi, David Cronenberg and Peter Jackson as a master of body horror. Yes, I will go so far as to say his latest, Hacksaw Ridge, is an all out horror film in parts. His depiction of a World War II battle makes George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead look like Zootopia.

The movie tells the true story of Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield), a battlefield medic and the first of three conscientious objectors in U.S. warfare history to receive the Medal of Honor. The dude refused to pick up a gun, or any weapon for that matter, during his time served in Okinawa. That didn’t stop him from braving the battlefields with comrades, eventually saving the lives of 75 men during horrendously bloody battles.

Much of the film’s first half is devoted to Doss’s backstory, a troubled childhood with his alcoholic World War I veteran father (a good Hugo Weaving) and an eventual romance with future wife Dorothy Schutte (Teresa Palmer). The early goings in the film are handled well, although they are a little schmaltzy at times. Gibson isn’t at his best when he’s handling the romance stuff.

When Doss goes to boot camp and faces off against commanding officers like Captain Glover (Sam Worthington) and Sgt. Howell (Vince Vaughn), the film starts to get very interesting. Due to his Seventh Day Adventist beliefs, Doss refuses to pick up a rifle, and this gets him into all sorts of jams on the training field and in the barracks. After a detour for a court-martial hearing, Doss and his infantry mates are deployed to Japan.

When the action switches to the scaling of the Maeda Escarpment a.k.a. Hacksaw Ridge, the movie becomes perhaps the most grueling war movie experience ever made. Gibson, as he’s proven before with Braveheart, The Passion of the

Christ (a.k.a. When Jesus Got His Ass Kicked) and Apocalypto, doesn’t shy away from movie violence, and this one is a major splatterfest. Yes, it’s honorable and majestic in its treatment of the Doss character for the most part, but it’s not the easiest film to watch. I saw this with a matinee crowd filled with many folks who were alive at the time of Doss’s actual feats. I’ve never heard so many screams and audible measures of discomfort in a movie screening before. So, there’s your warning. Hacksaw Ridge is violent enough to earn an NC-17. Actually, I’m surprised it didn’t get that rating. Garfield does his best screen work to date as Doss, a man who deserves the almost saint-like portrayal he gets in this movie. Garfield is the total embodiment of goodness here, and he pulls off every moment he spends on screen, including the corny ones. Vince Vaughn has dabbled in dramatic departures from his usual comedies before, but never as effectively as Hacksaw Ridge he does here as a drill sergeant who can’t believe what he’s seeing and 12345 hearing in regards to Doss. Sam Worthington also does career-best work as Captain Glover, Director: Mel Gibson portrayed in the film as Doss’s Starring: Andrew Garfield, biggest foe within the military until Hugo Weaving, Teresa Palmer they share a battlefield together. Palmer gets a real chance to show her star power, and she capitalizes on that chance by also delivering a career-best performance. So, yes, it’s a testament to Gibson’s powers as a director that he gets a lot of career-best performances out of his cast. As for his staging of the battle scenes, they aren’t just bloody. They are absolutely terrifying. Gibson is trying to get across the message that Doss and soldiers like him went through the very worst hell on earth, and he succeeds in a colossal way. No doubt, Gibson is a full-blown nut and, as it turns out, the perfect director to tell this amazing story. Hacksaw Ridge isn’t a total masterpiece, but it has passages that qualify it as one of the more essential war films ever made. Not bad for a guy who took a 10-year break from the director’s chair after, well, you know. Ω

3The Accountant This plays out like a deranged Batmanwith-a-calculator action flick. Ben Affleck plays Christian Wolff, a high functioning autistic man who has managed to harness his extreme intelligence with numbers and physical tics down into the strangest of professions. By day, he’s your average accountant helping a farm owner find tax loopholes to save a few thousand bucks. At night, he’s some sort of accountant ninja who can take out a room full of mob guys with a dinner knife and some totally Batman forearm blasts to the face. Christian takes jobs laundering books for dirty folks all over the world and, while he does have a modest, sparsely decorated home, he also has a mobile man cave—or, should I say, Batcave— that keeps all the spoils of his riches—money, gold, Jackson Pollock paintings and, yes, collector’s items like Batman comic books. During one job, trying to find missing money for a prosthetics company led by John Lithgow, he takes a liking to fellow accountant Dana (the invaluable Anna Kendrick), and they conspire to find the missing money, which, of course, wasn’t really supposed to happen. Maybe I’m the only one who sees this movie as Batman doing taxes. Maybe that makes me some sort of amateurish idiot who likes movies that are actually a little on the bad side just because they play out in a weird way in his overreaching mind. If so, I say “Hooray!” to that.

3Chicken People This is a charming documentary about people who raise chickens for competition, and the people in this movie take their craft seriously. There’s the mom who got over a drinking problem by focusing on her chickens, resulting in a sense of career purpose and a few awards. There’s the singer with a gig in Branson, Missouri, who longs to be home with his family, taking care of his chickens and attending the major competitions. And then there’s the engineer who designs race car and tractor pull engines, but works obsessively on the side with chickens for show. If anything, the movie teaches a lot about the actual chickens, the many breeds, and their kind of adorable mannerisms. Let it be said, some of the chickens the folks raise in this movie are pretty impressive. Director Nicole Lucas Haimes has made a fun movie that leads up to a final competition where all those mentioned above are involved. I never thought I’d find a chicken beauty pageant interesting, but Haimes makes it so. (Available for rent on iTunes, Amazon.com and On Demand during a limited theatrical run.)

3Doctor Strange The latest Marvel movie is certainly one of the weirder ones, with Benedict Cumberbatch starring as the title character, a sorcerer who can cast spells and slip through passageways in time. It’s an origin story, showing how Strange loses his surgeon’s hands in an accident, travels to India, and learns about the mystical arts from The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton). I have to admit, I didn’t always follow exactly what was going on in this movie, and I found some stretches a little convoluted and boring. When the movie soars, it soars high, and Cumberbatch winds up being a decent choice for the role, even with his weird American accent. Director Scott Derrickson (Sinister), who looked like an odd choice for a Marvel movie with his horror film pedigree, acquits himself nicely. The movie often plays like a Matrix-Inceptionmashup with a little bit of CrouchingTiger,HiddenDragonthrown in for good measure. The special effects are first rate. DoctorStrangeis a bit of an oddball character, and he’s supposed to factor into future Avengersmovies. I’ll be curious to see how he fits into the mix with the likes of AntMan and Hawkeye.

3In a Valley of Violence Horror fans know director Ti West for his cult classic horror film Houseofthe Devil, and the horror films V/H/S, TheInnkeepersand TheSacrament. His latest, starring Ethan Hawke and John Travolta, is a major departure from his usual projects, a capable, full-on homage to Sergio Leone Westerns. Hawke plays Paul, a drifter who finds himself in a frontier ghost town with a few remaining inhabitants. He and his dog immediately get into some trouble with Gilly (James Ransome), the son of the town marshal (Travolta). Bad things transpire—this is sort of John Wick set in the old wild West—and Paul sets out for revenge. The resultant gunfights are nicely staged, accentuated by good work from Hawke, Travolta and Ransome. While Hawke is always reliable these days, Travolta’s film career has been on a bit of a downslide (one of a few his career has endured). His performance here as a semicrooked lawman with a small streak of decency is actually funny at times, and consists of his best work in a film in over five years. (He was also quite good as Robert Shapiro in ThePeople v.O.J.Simpson:AmericanCrimeStory.) The film’s biggest surprise is Taissa Farmiga, providing solid comic relief as a fast-talking hotel operator. Available for rent through iTunes, On Demand and Amazon.com during a limited theatrical release.)

1Inferno This is easily the worst of the Robert Langdon series, a series that was already pretty terrible in that both TheDaVinci Codeand Angels&Demonsblew ass. Ron Howard once again directs Tom Hanks as Langdon, and this series needed to be put down after the first installment. When Langdon wakes up in a hospital room, with a bullet scratch on his head and loss of memory, Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones) is there to help out. Then, somebody starts toward Langdon’s hospital room guns blazing, and the so-called adventure begins. Langdon is having hallucinations about something akin to Dante’s “Inferno” while trying to work his way through amnesia. He’s in Italy, and he doesn’t know why, but Sienna, for reasons unknown, is going to stay by his side until he works things out. Langdon must race against time (and solve puzzles!) in order to save the world. The main “puzzle” Langdon has to solve this time is where a doomsday bomb containing a virus that will wipe out the majority of the Earth’s population has been planted. If he doesn’t find the Make Everybody Sick bomb, it will be an apocalypse like no other. Gee, I wonder if he’ll find it? I wonder if the whole world will die in a Ron Howard movie? Talk about your total lack of suspense in a film.

3Ouija: Origin of Evil How bad was 2014’s Ouija? It was so piss poor and forgettable that I had to actually look into my archives for a review to confirm I had actually seen the damn thing. I wasn’t sure. In short, Ouijawas a deplorable shitshow. Ouija:OriginofEvilis a bona fide movie miracle in many ways. Ouijawas awful, but it was enough of a hit to warrant a sequel. Still, it shocked me to see the sequel had actually made it to movie screens rather than some direct-to-digital platform. The fact that Mike Flanagan, the director of the crappy Oculus, was at the helm did little to quash my skepticism. After about 30 seconds of watching young Lulu Wilson as Doris Zander, I realized that Flanagan might to be onto something with this casting. This kid, with her authentic 1960s haircut and mature-for-her-years delivery, crafts one of the great horror film performances of all time. Yes, I’m bestowing that honor on a performance that occurs in a sequel to one of the worst horror films ever made. The film, set convincingly in 1965, follows right along with Wilson as truly inspired and creepy. The Doris character plays with a Ouija board, and soon has some pleasant conversations with her dead father. Then, very bad things start to happen. Is it one of the best horror films ever made? No. A few missteps in the final act take it down a notch. Is it one of the best horror sequels ever made? You bet it is.

RN&R’s FAMILY gu I de

on st A nds no V. 17

NOVEMBER 19, 2016 – JANUARY 22, 2017

LEAD SPONSOR The Bretzlaff Foundation

MAJOR SPONSORS Clark/Sullivan Construction; Eldorado Resorts; Sandy Raffealli, Porsche of Reno

OPENING TALK Neither Common nor Everyday: The Barbara R. Gordon Folk Art Collection

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 19 / 2 PM

$12/$8 MEMBER Tickets at NevadaArt.org

This exhibition is drawn from the Barbara L. Gordon Collection and is organized and circulated by Art Services International, Alexandria, Virginia.