Welcome to The Morning After, where I share with you what I’ve seen over the past week either in film or television. On the film side, if I have written a full length review already, I will post a link to that review. Otherwise, I’ll give a brief snippet of my thoughts on the film with a full review to follow at some point later. For television shows, seasons and what not, I’ll post individual comments here about each of them as I see fit.

So, here is what I watched this past week:

Short Term 12

At a half-way house for troubled teens, Grace (Brie Larson), Mason (John Gallagher Jr) and a team of young adults struggle to make the lives of these children better while adhering to the strict rules of the short term care unit.

Writer/director Destin Cretton expands on his short film of the same name with a film that’s as forthright and honest as you would expect from an experienced filmmaker with the depth and emotional consistence of an independent film. Grace must cope with her own childhood demons as she struggles to help a wayward young girl named Jayden (Kaitlyn Dever) whose paternal relationship is rocky at best. As the truth begins to emerge from the Jayden’s slow opening up to Grace, her own insecurities begin to mount, threatening the secret relationship she and Mason are having, which is further complicated by her own pregnancy.

It would be a challenge for anyone to watch this movie and not tear up on more than one occasion. Cretton’s ability to engage his audience’s emotions without feeling manipulative make for an engaging and refreshing experience. There are a few moments that seem less genuine than they probably should be, but those are quickly smoothed over with richly moving portrayals of kids at odds with themselves and with each other. There isn’t a poor performance in the film and it’s easily one of the best films in recent years.

Dallas Buyers Club

When I first saw Matthew McConaughey, he was playing an annoying preacher in Contact. His performance was wooden and distracting, providing one of that film’s few weak elements. 16 years later, I’m surprised to say he’s turning in some of his finest work, of which Dallas Buyers Club can be counted among that number.

The film follows the efforts of a straight HIV-infected bull rider in the 1980’s to find a cure for his disease and if unable to do so, find a way to live peacefully and with little pain. As the new drug AZT enters clinical trials, he discovers that the high dosage generates side effects that ultimately decrease the longevity of patients and he embarks on a mission to import drugs not approved by the FDA and provide a service to fellow AIDS patients profiting in the process.

McConaughey makes the cowboy utterly dislikable in the beginning of the film and, as we always expect from patients of terminal illnesses, he eventually comes to represent everyman dealing with pain the only way he knows how and embracing those he once ridiculed and blasphemed. Jennifer Garner is much better than I’ve seen her as the conscientious doctor with whom he falls in love, but most impressive of all is Jared Leto as the cross-dressing AIDS-patient who partners with the homosexual-hating electrician to help as many men suffering from AIDS as possible.

The film has a lot of poignant moments and Jean-Marc Vallée knows just how to wring the most emotion with the least effort from his audience. The film is uneven in places and formulaic in spots, but you won’t find a better examination of hatred turning to compassion in a movie today.

The Place Beyond the Bines

Derek Cianfrance follows up his brilliant relationship drama Blue Valentine with the wildly uneven The Place Beyond the Pines, a film that spans 15 years and doesn’t feel much shorter.

The story revolves around a roustabout (Ryan Gosling) who returns to town a year after an affair with a young woman (Eva Mendes) leads to a son. He drops his travelling career to provide for the child, but doesn’t know how to make money. After robbing a handful of banks, but failing to work his way back into the woman’s life, a misstep leads him to a confrontation with a rookie cop (Bradley Cooper), as a lawyer-trained police officer battles his own demons, he must come to terms with what he’s done to the motorcycle stunt rider and also deal with corruption within the police department.

The convoluted plot comes full circle in the end, but not after drifting aimlessly from Gosling’s story to Cooper’s and then to their kids’ stories 15 years later. The structure is frustrating and slow without having the creativity of passion that would make the experience more exciting. Gosling isn’t at the top of his game, nor is Cooper in his early scenes. Mendes is strong as is Dane DeHaan as Gosling’s son, but the rest of the performances are largely one-note, never giving us much insight or a desire to learn more about them.

While it’s largely frustrating, the last 30 minutes almost redeem what comes before; proving that strong finales are possible in today’s cinema in spite of the prevailing recent evidence against it. Cianfrance may be better suited to small, intimate relationship dramas. Trying to tackle something more broad doesn’t play well into his toolbox. Special mention goes to the soundtrack, which is expertly put together.

100 Bloody Acres

It’s not surprising after the success of Tucker and Dave vs. Evil, that more humor-minded horror films would find their ways to audiences. 100 Bloody Acres is an Australian import about three hapless, concert-bound tourists picked up on the roadside by one-half of a pair of brothers whose organic fertilizer business uses bone and blood as a natural growth formula.

Where the brothers got their idea is best left to the viewer to discover, but as the trio of surprised victims try to talk and cajole their way out of being ground up into mulch, one brother falls in love and tries to decide whether he will help them or continue to be subservient to his brother. Apart from a few twists that are surprising, but not particularly well crafted, the film is a paint-by-numbers horror film that is far less funny than it wants to be and less bloody than it probably should be.

Co-directing brothers Cameron and Colin Cairnes are relatively inexperienced directors, so some of the failings of the film are partly forgivable. However, any student of horror would find their vain attempt to snark on the genre off-putting. What made Tucker and Dave vs. Evil different was that it deconstructed the genre and told it in a fresh new way, resulting in a surprisingly engaging and humorous film. The comedy here is frequently forced and shock moments are employed to try and goose interest without creating anything genuinely scary or intriguing as a result.

ABCs of Death

Twenty-six directors were given $5,000 and a letter of the alphabet with which to craft a short horror vignette with few limitations set by the producers. The results is ABCs of Death, a wildly uneven and bizarre series of short films that range from utterly banal to completely insane to totally loony.

Reviewing the film requires an analysis of each part, even if briefly, but that will take some time. So, pending my full review of the film, there are a handful of shorts in the film that are worth the effort, the rest are either too twisted to be watchable or are so poorly executed that you wonder how some were able to accomplish so much with such little money and why others were completely incapable of such.

The film prefaces itself with a warning to pregnant women and lovers of animals for they may find some segments too disturbing to watch and while that is a potential outcome, some of those segments are so poorly conceived that being disturbed by them is muted by how uninteresting they are. Fair warning to arachnophobes (I am one), there is one particular segment, and you’ll know it immediately when it starts, that is skin-crawling creepy, but it borrows too heavily from another horror master who managed to have his piece executed better in a completely different (and MUCH better) horror anthology.