Shadow in the Cloud: Totally demented

Shadow in the Cloud (2020) • View trailer

Three stars. Rated R, for violence, crude sexual comments and relentless profanity

By Derrick Bang

Director Roseanne Liang’s cheeky little thrill ride — available via Amazon Prime and other streaming services — is a tip of the aviator’s cap to an iconic Twilight Zone episode.

 

On steroids.

 

Flight officer Maude Garrett (Chloë Grace Moretz) expected a bumpy — but otherwise
uneventful — flight from Auckland to Samoa. Boy, does she get a surprise!

Back in the 1960s, this New Zealand import would have been relegated to the drive-in circuit. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, you’d have found it in Friday’s late-night pay-cable time slot. Even so, it won the People’s Choice Award for Midnight Madness at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival: an honor it richly deserves, and is a perfect indication of what you should expect.

 

The script, co-written by Liang and Max Landis — director John Landis’ son (also telling) — is defiantly whacked. Liang and Landis make no apologies for contrivance and the violation of all known laws of physics and aerodynamics; indeed, they gleefully revel in this stuff ’n’ nonsense.

 

That said, Liang and editor Tom Eagles deliver an impressive level of tension and momentum. This baby moves. 

 

Although … not right away.

 

The film opens with a WWII-era public service cartoon that parodies “Falling Hare,” the 1943 Warner Bros. classic that finds Bugs Bunny battling a little gremlin. This foreshadowing thus established, we meet Flight Officer Maude Garrett (Chloë Grace Moretz) on a military airfield in Auckland. It’s August 1943, late at night, and she’s scheduled to meet a B-17 bomber touching down only briefly, before resuming flight to Samoa with badly needed supplies.

 

The plane is christened The Fool’s Errand. (More foreshadowing.)

 

Maude’s left arm is in a sling, and she looks a bit worse for wear. She’s carrying a small dispatch case laden with top-secret papers.

 

Most of the seven-man crew is actively hostile to her presence, but her orders — verified by the plane’s pilot, Capt. Reeves (Callan Mulvey) — are emphatic: They’re to transport her and the case to Samoa. Lacking anything in the way of passenger space, the men get childish revenge by consigning her to the ball-shaped Sperry turret, fitted on the plane’s underbelly.

 

There’s no room for the dispatch case, which Maude insists can’t leave her custody. Quaid (Taylor John Smith), the top turret gunner — and the sole crew member treating her with kindness — promises to guard it.

 

So, into the turret she goes. We — along with cinematographer Kit Fraser’s camera — go with her. And stay with her.

Thank You for Your Service: Gratefully sincere

Thank You for Your Service (2017) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for strong violent content, relentless profanity, sensuality, drug use and fleeting nudity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.27.17

Some true-life stories wait patiently for big-screen exposure.

Others beg for attention. Repeatedly.

At first, being home is a happy relief for, from left, Solo (Beulah Koale), Will (Joe Cole)
and Adam (Miles Teller). Sadly, all three soon will fall prey to mounting anxiety and
other forms of severe psychological distress.

Hollywood long has addressed the challenges faced by returning military veterans, starting with 1946’s deeply moving The Best Years of Our Lives, an Academy Award-winning Best Picture made immediately in the wake of World War II. Since then, each war — and every generation — have been acknowledged by similarly earnest dramas: Coming Home, Gardens of Stone, Born on the Fourth of July, In the Valley of Elah and many others.

To that cinematic honor role we now add Thank You for Your Service, director/scripter Jason Hall’s heartfelt adaptation of Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post journalist David Finkel’s 2013 nonfiction book of the same title.

Hall’s approach is straightforward and bereft of typical war-film flash. The story has no nail-biting tension, in the manner of The Hurt Locker and Dunkirk, nor is this a senses-assaulting bloodbath akin to Saving Private Ryan and Hacksaw Ridge. The brief combat sequences linger just long enough to make their point. Such choices are consistent with Hall’s desire to tell an uncomplicated story about regular guys who struggle to regain their souls, after leaving Iraq behind.

The story, set in 2008, focuses on three members of the 2-16 Infantry Battalion in Baghdad, as they muster out and return to their Stateside lives in and around Topeka, Kan.

Sgt. Adam Schumann (Miles Teller), an instinctive “bomb sniffer,” has completed his third deployment and — honoring a promise to his wife Saskia (Haley Bennett) —agrees to stay home this time. Tausolo “Solo” Aeiti (Beulah Koale), in contrast, can’t wait to re-up ... much to the consternation of his wife, Alea (Keisha Castle-Hughes).

Will Waller (Joe Cole) has been counting the days until he can rejoin and marry his fiancée, Tracey (Erin Darke).

Schumann and Aeiti are actual individuals who figured prominently in Finkel’s book. Waller is a construct, inserted to convey one of the many other “homeward bound” sagas that Finkel gleaned during his extensive research and numerous interviews.