I Care a Lot: Deviously nasty fun

I Care a Lot (2020) • View trailer

Four stars. Rated R, for profanity and violence

By Derrick Bang

In this Netflix original’s initial 20 minutes, writer/director J Blakeson and star Rosamund Pike craft one of cinema’s all-time, audaciously evil characters.

 

Dragged from her home by the force of a court order, Jennifer (Dianne Wiest, center)
becomes increasingly suspicious of the "benevolent" attitude displayed by Fran
(Eiza González, left) and Marla (Rosamund Pike).

Pike’s Marla Grayson isn’t merely malevolent; she’s smug, self-satisfied, shark-like and insufferably condescending. Think Louise Fletcher’s Nurse Ratched, from 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but with naked avarice and ambition added to the mix.

 

Marla’s plastic smile is so insincere, so unbearably patronizing, that you want to reach into the screen and throttle her.

 

She’s one of the best-scripted villains ever concocted, and Pike brings her to terrifying life. Every little detail — every nuanced bit of dialogue, every self-righteous smirk — is exquisitely calculated.

 

Marla’s behavior — her very existence — is nightmarish. We pray never to encounter her like, in real life.

 

She unapologetically reveals her moral bankruptcy early on, via voice-over. “There are two kinds of people in this world,” she insists, matter-of-factly, “those who take … and those who get took.”

 

Marla has built an appallingly successful career as a professional, court-appointed guardian for dozens of elderly wards deemed “incapable of caring for themselves,” and therefore railroaded into managed-care facilities. Once barricaded and helpless behind locked glass doors, Marla and her business partner/lover Fran (Eiza González) seize, strip and sell each victim’s assets via dubious but wholly legal means.

 

As the film begins, the son of one such casualty — Macon Blair, as the hapless and frustrated Feldstrom — understandably goes berserk when he’s refused access to his elderly mother. It’s a disastrous move, which the oh-so-cool-and-collected Marla later references before court Judge Lomax (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), since it proves that Feldstrom poses a “clear and present danger” to his mother.

 

It only gets worse.

 

Marla has two additional key players on her corrupt payroll: smarmy Sam Rice (Damian Young), director of her favorite managed-care prison, who’ll adjust meds and treatment to her desires; and chirpy Dr. Amos (Alicia Witt), who proposes likely candidates from her patient roster.

 

Her newest suggestion is Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Wiest), a wealthy retiree who lives alone and is without family: therefore a “cherry,” in Marla’s cold analysis.

Green Room: Viciously suspenseful

Green Room (2016) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated R, for brutal graphic violence, gory images, profanity and drug content
By Derrick Bang

This is a nasty little chiller ... in the best possible way.

That said, writer/director Jeremy Saulnier’s gory survival saga definitely isn’t for the faint of heart. The unsettling premise is reasonable enough to be quite scary on its own, and the vicious, suspenseful execution is the stuff of nightmares. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here...

As Amber (Imogen Poots, far left) looks on with grim satisfaction, Reece (Joe Cole) attempts
to persuade a trapped skinhead into explaining what the hell is going on; the rest of Reece's
friends — from left, Tiger (Callum Turner), Sam (Alia Shawkat) and Pat (Anton Yelchin) —
wait to see what will happen next.

Saulnier burst onto the scene with 2007’s high-camp gore-fest, Murder Party, which evoked pleasant memories of 1992’s Dead Alive, Peter Jackson’s early-career exercise in similar bad taste. (Well ... pleasant memories for those who go for such things, anyway.)

Saulnier got a lot more serious with his second outing, 2013’s Blue Ruin, which made respectable noise at Cannes and numerous other film festivals. Clearly, he was a filmmaker to watch, and Green Room — his newest exercise in nail-biting tension — is further proof. It belongs in the grand tradition of Straw Dogs, Assault on Precinct 13 and even Night of the Living Dead, all of which trap small groups of people in enclosed spaces, vastly outnumbered by evil forces determined not to let them escape alive.

Things begin quietly enough, as we meet the scruffy members of a hardscrabble punk band dubbed The Ain’t Rights: vocalist Tiger (Callum Turner), guitarist Sam (Alia Shawkat), bassist Pat (Anton Yelchin) and drummer Reece (Joe Cole). They’re nearing the end of a road trip/tour that has netted some artistic satisfaction but little in the way of cold, hard cash; they’re tired and discouraged.

This introduction is handled economically by Saulnier, who in a few quick scenes tells us everything we need to know about these twentysomethings. Pat is the philosopher; Sam keeps everybody in line; Tiger and Reece are the hardcore punkers. Minor larceny aside — clandestinely siphoning gas, when they lack the funds to fill up their van — they’re reasonably decent folks: just another enthusiastic quartet of musicians trying to get noticed.

After a potentially lucrative gig falls through, they accept a replacement booking, to play an afternoon set at an isolated, rundown club deep in the Oregon backwoods. Their arrival is greeted with quiet suspicion by the locals, many obviously of the skinhead/white supremacist persuasion, but the club manager — Macon Blair, as Gabe — seems friendly enough.