Movie Review – Take Shelter

November 22, 2011 3 Comments

We have all had that feeling when we wake up in the middle of the night.  A cold sweat, labored breathing and panic.  We chalk it up to just being a bad dream and nothing more, but there is this lingering feeling that there is something real about we just felt.  Panic, fear, uncertainty and the unyielding tone of dread that makes us questions if what we were dreaming is real or not.  It feels real to us, but hard to explain and put into words.  Take Shelter is just like that feeling, one that stabs at us in the night makes us begin to question what is real and a dream.  Omens, premonition, signs, what does it all mean?  Take Shelter looks at one man’s dreams or visions and how they begin to affect his daily life.  The dreams bleed over to his conscious state and we aren’t certain if he is going insane or having a vision about an impending doom.

A sophmore release for director Jeff Nichols has him teaming up again with Michael Shannon (Boardwalk Empire) as the lead of the movie, Curits LaForche, and Jessica Chastain (The Tree of Life) as his wife Samantha LaForche.  Curtis has to struggle with these vivid dreams and conscious visions of storms, tornadoes and other phenomena that hail to him some kind of dangerous omen of things to come.  Curtis starts to plan for the worse, building and expanding a storm shelter for his wife and deaf daughter, stocking up on food, water, batteries and purchasing gas masks as if it was the height of the Cold War.  His visions grow increasingly violent where he stops trusting those around him, straining his relationship with his wife and losing his friends in the process.  He struggles with his grip on his mental state and questioning if what is happening to him a sign of something bigger, challenging his faith and family relationship.

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Kansas International Film Festival – Day 1

October 1, 2011 2 Comments

So this is going to be a different type of post for me, one of the main reasons is that I am attending our local 11th annual Kansas International Film Festival.  This is taking place at the Glenwood Arts Theater which is 5 minutes from my house.  So yay for convenience and yay for movies.  I purchased the festival pass this year and decided to give the festival more than a casual showing like I did last year.  I have a list of films I want to see and frankly, there are far too many good films making a showing at the festival to be able to see them all.  So I am being a bit choosey which is fine.  I am hoping to give a more truncated review of some of the movie I have seen, possibly breaking out the bigger movies into more full fledged reviews but we will have to see how this goes.  I am taking a break from the 2nd day of the festival for the afternoon and will hit up the remaining two shows of the evening tonight and then send out a recap of the 2nd day of the festival.

So this post covers the opening night of the KIFF, which I had two movies on the agenda.  I had to skip the first one which was entitled Project Happiness (click here for info), mainly because a work friend of mine was having his final going away happy hour before he took his new position working in San Francisco.  So beer and friends won over seeing a movie which dealt with happiness and I would rather experience it first hand.  The second movie is one that I didn’t want to miss which was called Take Shelter.  I posted about this movie on my weekly Trailers of the Week post, and was excited to see that this was going to get an evening showing at the Glenwood.  I have heard nothing but amazing reviews and praise for a movie that seemed like a slow burn with a powerful ending.  So with my nifty lanyard in hand, I flashed the pass, walked in and grabbed a seat for Take Shelter.

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Trailers of the Week – Take Shelter and The Descendants

June 11, 2011 Leave a comment

Two more trailers to grace your senses, one staring George Clooney (sooo dreamy, I mean awesome, AWESOME) and another trailer from a film that is getting nothing but huge critical buzz from most of the film sites I frequent.  Get excited and get both the movies on the your radar.

Take Shelter:

Plagued by a series of apocalyptic visions, a young husband and father questions whether to shelter his family from a coming storm, or from himself.

So far, Cinematical and Ain’t It Cool News are both giving this movie high marks and while it is only Jeff Nichol’s second movie, this looks spectacular.  Now some people might know about my affinity for apocalyptic movies and for those that don’t, this is right up my ally.  The trailer got me hooked into this story about a man preparing a for a disaster that might not even be there. I do enjoy Michael Shannon a lot for his numerous roles in Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, The Runaways, Tigerland and 13.  So this movie already has my money.

The Descendants:

Alexander Payne finally comes back with another full length feature.  While I did enjoy his segment in Paris, Je T’Aime and his work on the series Hung, I kind of miss his movies since Sideways was his last feature.  The story is about George Clooney’s character having to reconnect with his daughters after their mother died.  While the teens do their typical, condescending tone to their dad about his parenting, the matter is complicated further by the bombshell that their mother was having an affair.

I enjoy watching Clooney films.  You have to admire that he will do a big budget picture and then take that money to produce and director other small indie flicks.  He did the Ocean’s films and then goes off to do Syriana, Michael Clayton and The Good German.  Teamed with Alexander Payne, this looks to be strong emotional drama.

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