Jim Mickle
24 connections found
View:
Connections, in both directions
A History of Violence (2005)
Directed by David Cronenberg
influenced Cold in July (2014)
Plot Themes
Suddenly, what started as a riff on A History Of Violence begins to look more like Cape Fear—and from there, the twists in tone and narrative agenda only get wilder.
(In this, “Cold in July” shares some connective tissue with David Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence,” in which a similar act of heroism unleashed the dark side of an unassuming family man.)
Finally arriving on screens after several years in the making, his fourth feature Cold in July is a gripping and stylish western noir that blends the small-town malevolence of David Cronenberg's A History of Violence with a sinewy B-movie efficiency that recalls other recent potboiler adaptations like The Lincoln Lawyer .
But instead of dwelling on the moral consequences of an ordinary joe taking a stand (a la A History Of Violence), the film takes a sharp left-turn into psycho-thriller territory when the intruder’s father (Sam Shepard) comes a-calling.
In some ways, the film forms a flipside companion piece to David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, another tale of a quiet man drawn into a world of comic-strip brutality, littered with broken-backed narrative left turns that wrong-foot the audience, leaving them wondering how much of this is but a bloody, fevered dream.
The mood at this point is reminiscent of A History of Violence , David Cronenberg 's excellent drama about a small-town family forced to reckon with the traumatic things that, in movies, seem to have no effect on people.
The movie’s title and basic premise echo 2009’s Zombieland , but the resemblance ends there: Where Zombieland deftly mixes horror and goofy, pop-culture humor, Stake Land is dead-serious, even when it’s dropping vampires out of helicopters into lockdowns (think medieval armies using trebuchets to lob plague-ridden corpses into enemy territory); George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead is a much more apt comparison.
The film mixes the procedural crime elements of David Fincher’s Zodiac with a time-travel conceit that nearly mirrors James Cameron’s The Terminator , all in a much lower-tech, ground- level way.
It mixes the procedural crime elements of David Fincher’s Zodiac with a time-travel story that follows the outlines of James Cameron’s The Terminator , and leaves us with tormented characters trying to survive and say something profound under the spell of the blood moon.
But when all that ambition is in service of a banal, ill-advised twist, I can’t appreciate it, no matter how much I want to love a Terminator / Zodiac mashup.
After the film’s Fantastic Fest premiere, director Jim Mickle said he wanted it to do for Philadelphia what David Fincher’s Zodiac did for San Francisco.
Merging a procedural about an obsession with a single case like “Zodiac” with sci-fi elements is a clever idea for a B-movie but “In the Shadow of the Moon” isn’t fun enough to qualify as that.
But Mickle and the film's screenwriters hold back the inevitable reveal for so long, aiming for a Zodiac -like scope and asking the viewer to be invested in Lockhart's personal journey, that you'll likely start to lose interest down the stretch.
It’s the trick that Fritz Lang pulled so memorably in “M,” and if Mickle doesn’t match him, that’s hardly a surprise.
For all the action (and there is plenty) in Cold in July, it’s really more of a psychological suspense movie, and the three principal actors are so good that I can forgive the derivative nature of the plot (The Big Sleep gets more than a nod, as does an urban legend about a particular type of “special interest” film) and the occasional improbability of the latter two-thirds of the film.
Memories of Murder (2003)
Directed by Bong Joon Ho
influenced In the Shadow of the Moon (2019)
Themes
In its best moments, In the Shadow of the Moon does occasionally bring to mind the genre-splicing work of Okja director Bong Joon-Ho, particularly his 2003 crime procedural Memories of Murder .
The similarity in the title of the indie vampire drama Stake Land (2010) and the 2009 comic zombie road movie horror Zombieland is coincidental but fitting, as much for the differences in the films as for the similarities.
The movie’s title and basic premise echo 2009’s Zombieland , but the resemblance ends there: Where Zombieland deftly mixes horror and goofy, pop-culture humor, Stake Land is dead-serious, even when it’s dropping vampires out of helicopters into lockdowns (think medieval armies using trebuchets to lob plague-ridden corpses into enemy territory); George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead is a much more apt comparison.
But if you can live with a different looking vampire threat, "Stake Land" is an above-average horror-thriller that gives us the same kind of engaging non-monster characters as we saw in "Zombieland."
The monsters here are powerful but not enough to where they pose a threat a la “Zombieland.”
There are echoes here of Zombieland (2009) and The Road (2009) but Stake Land seems most closely related to the films of George Romero, especially his recent outings such as Diary of the Dead (2007).
Otherwise, Stake Land starts off as a kind of very serious, dreary version of Zombieland .
Like the film version of Cormac McCarthy 's The Road, it has quasi-religious overtones and one very good scene, involving a horde of cannibalistic vampire zombie things being dropped on a town from a helicopter.
It's clear right from the get-go that filmmaker Jim Mickle has absolutely no interest in offering up bursts of either self-referential gimmickry or tension-relieving humor, as Stake Land boasts a consistently dark (literally and figuratively) sensibility that immediately establishes an atmosphere of palpable authenticity and realism (ie the movie comes off as a spin on The Road, except with vampires).
Writer-director Jim Mickle (2007's " Mulberry Street ") has a real artist's eye for detail and texture, and he displays this gift time and again during "Stake Land," a post-apocalyptic drama with the character nuance of 2009's " The Road " and the encroaching threat of 2003's " 28 Days Later ."
There are echoes here of Zombieland (2009) and The Road (2009) but Stake Land seems most closely related to the films of George Romero, especially his recent outings such as Diary of the Dead (2007).
Spare, mournful, and often inert, this vampire-flavored take on “The Road” is more admirable than fulfilling, expelling more effort with atmosphere than story, wasting time with stares when legitimate tension is desperately needed.
There are echoes here, less eloquent, of " The Road ."
As the movie progresses, it also becomes clear that Mickle is less concerned with recreating the ’80s than with recreating a certain kind of ’80s movie, specifically seedy dives into crime fiction like William Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A., John Frankenheimer's 52 Pick-Up and Michael Mann's Thief.
The film by director Jim Mickle (of the TV show Hap and Leonard and the fairly good thriller Cold in July, with Michael C. Hall and Sam Shepard, RIP) and writers Gregory Weidman and Geoffrey Tock (who worked on the TV show version of Bradley Cooper’s Limitless and the amazingly good-bad CBS show Zoo, about animals going wild!) begins in 2024, when we see the aftermath of a gigantic explosion in downtown Philadelphia.
In the Shadow of the Moon es una pelicula que funciona, pero no con las expectativas que se pronosticaban.El guión está firmado por Gregory Weidman y Geoffrey Tock, ambos procedentes del campo de las series de televisión (trabajaron juntos en “Limitless” y “Zoo”).
The clearest influence on “Cold in July” is John Carpenter — in addition to the “Assault on Precinct 13” style plot, there’s an ominous synth-heavy score that screams Carpenter.
Big Trouble in Little China (1986)
Directed by John Carpenter
influenced Cold in July (2014)
Visuals Plot
Even the credits are in “Big Trouble in Little China” font.
I don't see much resemblance beyond that except maybe to Big Trouble in Little China (ordinary guy dragged into underworld), but Mickle's interest in genre conventions is worth noting, especially as Cold in July is so different from his previous films, which have mostly been horror variations.
In some ways, We Are What We Are reminded me a bit of Giorgos Lanthimos’ 2009 twisted family tale Dogtooth; while it doesn’t quite hit that film’s watermark for shocking originality, it does explore similar ideas of what happens when children raised in religious isolation, with bizarre family rules replacing normalcy, the coming-of-age and teenage rebellion of children threatening the domination of the parents.
It might be the most searing, bizarre portrait of a household since the 2010 Greek masterpiece "Dogtooth."
He carries In the Shadow of the Moon capably, even when the narrative leaps forward years at a time and buries him under an insane hobo beard and Mickey Rourke-in- Barfly grease-mop.
The movie’s title and basic premise echo 2009’s Zombieland , but the resemblance ends there: Where Zombieland deftly mixes horror and goofy, pop-culture humor, Stake Land is dead-serious, even when it’s dropping vampires out of helicopters into lockdowns (think medieval armies using trebuchets to lob plague-ridden corpses into enemy territory); George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead is a much more apt comparison.
Apparently, Martin lives in a universe without Dawn of the Dead or any of its rehashes.
The press materials for Jim Mickle's Stake Land reference author Richard Matheson, but only insofar as it includes a kind of cross between vampires and zombies, as Matheson employed for his great novel I Am Legend.
Immediately upon finishing up with Jim Mickle’s Stake Land, I tweeted something nerdy like “It’s The Road meets The Dark Tower meets Blade meets I Am Legend.
Throw in the work of novelist Richard Matheson (especially I Am Legend) and you pretty much get Jim Mickle's Stake Land, a well-made, but generic and unimaginative horror thriller that does little to differentiate itself from the recent glut of vampire stories on film and television.
It’s sort of like the exploding-head scenes in David Cronenberg’s “Scanners” without the serious wow factor.
Assault on Precinct 13 (2005)
Directed by Jean-François Richet
influenced Cold in July (2014)
Plot Visuals
The clearest influence on “Cold in July” is John Carpenter — in addition to the “Assault on Precinct 13” style plot, there’s an ominous synth-heavy score that screams Carpenter.
Channeling John Carpenter (Assault on Precinct 13) and David Cronenberg (A History of Violence), director Jim Mickle expertly builds nerve-shattering tension into Cold in July.
While Kelly McGillis (“We Are What We Are”, “What Could Have Been”) doesn’t return as the love of Maverick’s life, Connelly now fills that role.
Written and directed by Jim Mickle and based on Joe R. Lansdale's novel, "Cold's" threatening mood puts it in some good company, including the Coen brothers ' "Blood Simple" (1984), Michael Winterbottom's "The Killer Inside Me" (2010) and Richard Linklater's "Bernie" (2011).