TYRANNOSAUR: 4 STARS

“Tyrannosaur,” a new drama from actor-turned-director-and-writer Paddy Considine—best known for his work in films like “In America” and “24 Hour Party People”—is a grim but compelling look at a man hell bent on destruction, until he meets a woman who gives him a glimmer of hope.

I know, it sounds like the kind of thing we’ve seen a million times before, but Considine’s camera is so unflinching in showing the details of this man’s descent and devastating search for redemption that it makes the movie a singular experience.

It takes a special kind of movie to start with the killing of a dog… and then get harsher from there but “Tyrannosaur” does, and in doing so paints a harrowing portrait of the cycle of violence that has so stained its protagonist.

Joseph (Scottish character actor Peter Mullen, currently also on screen in “War Horse”) is a deeply damaged man. A widower and a drunk, he is the product of abuse, guilt ridden and prone to rages.  “I’m not a nice human being,” he says, which may be the understatement of the new century. By contrast, Hannah (Olivia Colman), a worker in a nearby charity shop who befriends Joseph, is sweetness and light, but hides a terrible secret; she is abused by her bully husband James (Eddie Marsan).

Considine, who based this screenplay on his award winning short film “Dog Altogether,” weaves their stories into one, creating a character study and a look at class in Britain—highlighting the differences and similarities of working class Joseph to James’s middle class life.

It’s a grim task, but the result is spectacular for viewers with the stomach for it. He cuts no corners, avoids easy sentiment or resolutions but is aided ably by his cast. Mullen’s tight grimace says more than most of the lines of dialogue about Joseph, while Marsden is an unsettling presence, but it is Colman who dominates.

Best known as a comic actress—her credits include “Hot Fuzz” and the Britcom “Beautiful People”—she is utterly authentic—desperate and heartbreaking— in every frame handing in one of the great under appreciated performances of the year.

“Tyrannosaur” is a tragically beautiful film It’s not a journey everyone is going to want to take, but it’s a rewarding one for those who go along for the ride.

Cronenberg's intellectual ménage à trois

A Dangerous Method, the new film from director David Cronenberg is a hard one to categorize.

“It’s sort of a love story,” he says. “It really is a triangle, but it has so much other stuff going on. I don’t even feel the need, myself, to characterize it, because to me that is a marketing problem, not a creative problem.”

The movie vividly recreates Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), the birth of psychoanalysis and the wedge a patient-turned-muse-turned-psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) drove between the two men.

“It’s a fantastic story,” says Cronenerg, “this sort of intellectual ménage à trois.”

Based on a true story, the movie is rich with details taken directly from the personal papers of the real-life characters.   

“For me, it’s a process of resurrection,” says the director. “I want to bring them back to life as accurately as possible.

“It’s pretty accurate in terms of what they said and what they felt,” he continues. “It was an era of copious letter writing and these people were very obsessive about the details of conversation and who said what, and the meaning of very subtle things, so we have very accurate ideas of what they actually said to one another and how they interacted.

“For both actors, this was the grist for our mill.”

Cronenberg repeatedly uses the word “charismatic” to describe his main characters. Jung was “charismatic but very forceful” while Freud, he says, was “handsome, masculine, charming, seductive, charismatic, funny, witty. When you think of it he had to be that kind of charismatic leader to forge this alliance of disparate characters to create the psychoanalytic movement.”

To cast these legendary characters Cronenberg used his always-unerring eye.

Michael Fassbender, (a likely Oscar nominee this year for his work in Shame) plays Jung as self-possessed and clinical. But, as Cronenberg points out, he also portrays the complete devastation of a man who was emotionally distant. “I love that aspect of Michael’s performance,” he says.

A Dangerous Method also sees the director reconnect with his frequent collaborator Viggo Mortensen.  
“Casting Viggo is not what you would expect,” he says. “Viggo Mortenson and Freud is not the most obvious casting choice, but we thought we were delivering the real Freud and in truth he was unusual in his time.”

SIDEBAR! VIGGO MORTENSEN on Cronenberg

“Most directors, even great directors, the subject mater and the sense that this is an  important story about important people in our culture would have weighed them down to the point where they would have made something heavy and dull. But David is brilliant. He’s so confident he went in the other direction. You can only do that if you know what you are doing.”

METRO MATH MOVIES
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: September 14, 2011

Two plus two equals four isn’t really a compelling idea for the plot of a movie, but filmmakers have often turned to mathematics as the basis for a story.

The Coen Brothers focused an entire film around the Uncertainty Principle in Quantum Mechanics. In A Serious Man Prof. Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) teaches his classes the principle, but desperately wants to believe, despite the equation, that life makes sense. It’s not a movie about wave-particle duality and the DeBroglie hypothesis—it’s a very human story about a man searching for answers—but the math is crucial to the story.
 
The same holds true for Moneyball, the new Brad Pitt movie opening this weekend. The story of a baseball team’s general manager who uses algorithms and computer-generated analysis called sabermetrics to draft his players isn’t strictly about the math, but the story wouldn’t be the same without it. 

A Beautiful Mind shows how mathematician John Nash, played by Russell Crowe in the role that won him an Oscar, would visualize math problems in order to identify patterns and solve equations.

The Hangover uses a similar trick. At a Las Vegas casino Alan (Zach Galifianakis) counts cards at a blackjack table as mathematical equations appear on the screen. In reality none of the equations—like the Fourier theory of additive synthesis—have anything to do with cheating at cards, but it’s a funny scene that inspired the facebook page “Alan from The Hangover makes math seem AWESOME.”

A love poem called The Square Root of Three appears in the raunchy comedy Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. “I fear that I will always be a lonely number, like root three,” writes the lovelorn Kumar (Kal Penn), “A three is all that's good and right. Why must my three keep out of sight?”

The Da Vinci Code famously uses the Fibonacci sequence—1 - 1 - 2 - 3 - 5 - 8 - 13 – 21— as a key to unlock the movie’s mystery and Cube sees people trapped in a giant cube with mathematic problems as clues to their salvation.  

The John Astin comedy Evil Roy Slade features some frontier math. Schoolteacher Betsy asks Roy, “If you had six apples and your neighbor took three of them what would you have?”

"A dead neighbor and all six apples," he replies.

Corman’s Creatures
By Richard Crouse

The man who gave us movies about humanoids from the deep, crab monsters and wasp women is at it again. The release of Dinoshark on DVD brings legendary producer Roger Corman full circle, right back to the creature feature movies that made him famous in the 1950s.

“There have been creature features since the inception of films,” said the 85-year-old Corman in a recent phone interview. “What we’re doing now with Dinoshark and Shartopus is we’re going father and farther and it intrigues the audience. I don’t want to use the word outlandish but certainly they are the farthest out type of creature we’ve seen.”

The films—Dinoshark and Sharktopus—were made for the SyFy Channel in the US, and feature all of Corman’s trademarks—a little bit of star power (Eric Roberts stars in Sharktopus), a sense of humor and, of course, a wild hybrid creature.  

“The creature comes first, then we try and figure out why the creature exists. That’s why the first picture we made of this group, was Dinocroc, which I made independently and sold to the SyFy Channel and it got a very big rating. So I then wet for Supergator and Dinoshark and the SyFy Channel called me and said, ‘Roger, you’ve come up with all the title, now we have a title, Sharktopus. Do you want to make it?’ 

“I said no and gave them my theory, which I still believe in, now with some modification, which is that you can go up to a certain level of insanity with these titles and the audience is with you because they want to see it. But if you go over a level, what I call the acceptable level of insanity, and the audience will say, ‘Oh you’ve got to be kidding,’ and they’ll turn against you.”

So far audiences haven’t turned against Corman and his outrageous creatures. His next feature for SyFy is Piranhaconda, a movie he says, doesn’t “up the level of insanity, but it maintains it.”

Corman, however, is a realist. He’s been in Hollywood since Eisenhower was president, so to say he understands the ups and down of the film business is an understatement akin to saying Sharktopus gets a little bitey sometimes. 

“I think [the business] is cyclical. You make a certain type of picture, it’s successful, other people make them too, you may remake or continue with that cycle, then the audience gets saturated with them. They grow tired and the cycle turns down. It never goes quite away. Then after a few years someone will make a good one with a slightly different point of view and the cycle will start all over again. I think we’re near the peak of that cycle now. My theory is that we can run another year or so but then the cycle will start to turn back down.”  

But when the creature cycle burns out, will he stop producing movies and take a well deserved break? After all, he has produced almost 400 films.

“I simply love the process of making films,” he says. “It is creative, interesting, fascinating and occasionally lucrative. I like the combination of all those. I never intend to retire.”