Home-security expert James Sandin (Ethan Hawke) tries to protect his family from outside forces in THE PURGE
THE PURGE (James DeMonaco, 2013)
Opens Friday, June 7
www.blumhouse.com
Yes, the central plot is absurd and the plot twists are ridiculously stupid, but the home-invasion thriller The Purge still manages to keep things tense and exciting up to the very last minute. It’s 2022, and the New Founding Fathers have turned the night after the vernal equinox into twelve hours of murder and mayhem known as the Purge, when people can release their inner demons and get out all the rage that has built up inside them during the rest of the year, which is filled with peace and tranquillity. From 7:00 pm to 7:00 am, Americans are allowed to commit any crimes they want, without any consequences, which has been a boon for James Sandin (Ethan Hawke), who has done very well for himself and his family — wife Mary (Lena Headey, Cersei Lannister on Game of Thrones), teenage daughter Zoey (Adelaide Kane), and young tech wizard Charlie (Max Burkholder) — selling high-end security systems to his friends and neighbors who opt not to take part in the annual ritual, instead staying inside their well-protected expensive homes in their gated community and watching the events unfold on television. But things go terribly wrong when Zoe’s boyfriend, Henry (Tony Oller), sneaks into the house and Charlie decides to help out a troubled man running through the streets (Edwin Hodge as “Bloody Stranger”). The man is being chased by a group led by a crazy masked dude (Rhys Wakefield as “Polite Stranger”) who threatens to tear down the Sandins’ house and kill everyone inside if they don’t deliver the Bloody Stranger to them. Written and directed by James DeMonaco, The Purge works best when it doesn’t attempt to make any grand statements about racism, greed, justice, violence, and the haves and the have-nots, instead just concentrating on the intense action. It’s a combination of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, Bryan Bertino’s The Strangers, David Fincher’s Panic Room, and the 2005 remake of Assault on Precinct 13 —which was written by DeMonaco and starred Hawke as well. (The two also teamed up on DeMonaco’s feature debut, 2009’s Little New York.) And while The Purge might lack the depth of each of those films, it tends to hang in there; every time it is about to descend into complete and utter inanity, it does something that rescues it from the abyss opening beneath it — and the audience.
It is rather appropriate that Film Forum’s three-week, thirty-plus-film “Ozu” series, held in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of director Yasujirō Ozu’s death, kicks off with Late Spring. Not only is it late spring right now in New York, but the work marked a late spring of sorts in the Japanese auteur’s career as he moved into a new, post-WWII phase of his long exploration of Japanese family life and the middle class. Based on Kazuo Hirotsu’s novel Father and Daughter, the black-and-white film, written by Ozu with longtime collaborator Kogo Noda, tells the story of twenty-seven-year-old Noriko (Setsuko Hara), who lives at home with her widower father, Shukichi Somiya (Chishu Ryu), a university professor who has carved out a very simple existence for himself. Her aunt, Masa (Haruko Sugimura), thinks Noriko should get married, but she prefers caring for her father, who she believes would be lost without her. But when Somiya starts dropping hints that he might remarry, like his friend and colleague Jo Onodera (Masao Mishima) did — a deed that Noriko finds unbecoming and “filthy” — Noriko has to take another look at her future. Late Spring is a masterpiece of simplicity and economy while also being a complex, multilayered tale whose every moment offers unlimited rewards. From the placement and minimal movement of the camera to the design of the set to the carefully choreographed acting, Ozu infuses the work with meaning, examining not only the on-screen relationship between father and daughter but the intimate relationship between the film and the viewer. Ozu, who never married, has a firm grasp on the state of the Japanese family as some of the characters try to hold on to old-fashioned culture and tradition while recovering from the war’s devastation and facing the modernism that is taking over.
A British gangster on the run hides out with a psychedelic rock star in this strangely enticing film from Donald (The Demon Seed) Cammell and Nicolas Roeg (making his big-screen directorial debut). James Fox didn’t know what he was getting into when he signed on to play Chas, a mobster who finds sanctuary with mushroom-popping rock-diva has-been Turner, played with panache by Mick Jagger. Throw in Anita Pallenberg, a fab drug trip, and the great “Memo to Turner” scene and you have a film that some consider the real precursor to MTV, some think a work of pure demented genius, and others find to be one of the most pretentious and awful pieces of claptrap ever committed to celluloid. We fall somewhere in the middle of all of that. Performance is screening in a 35mm print June 3 at 8:00 as part of the IFC Center series “Queer/Art/Film” and will be followed by a discussion with artist, writer, documentarian, and activist Gregg Bordowitz. The monthly series, which consists of films selected by gay New York City artists, continues July 22 with Julia Loktev’s Day Night Day Night, chosen by Amadéus Leopold, and August 19 with Stephen Frears’s My Beautiful Laundrette, picked by Chitra Ganesh.
