Be My Cat: A Film for Anne

How would you like Sonia to be your cat?

(2015) Horror (Artsploitation) Adrian Tofei, Sonia Teodoriu, Florentina Hariton, Alexandra Stroe, GiEmSi, Donna Tofei. Directed by Adrian Tofei

 

Love and obsession can be two sides of the same coin. What happens when one becomes the other can be frightening indeed, particularly when the obsessive is a psychopath.

Adrian (Tofei) is a budding filmmaker who lives in a small Romanian town, but that doesn’t preclude him from big dreams. He has an idea for a movie and only one actress will do – Anne Hathaway. To a sense, he’s somewhat pragmatic; he realizes that an actress of her stature isn’t going to give the time of day to just anyone. What he decides to do is make a kind of video pitch to her, showing her the film he intends to make with her using other actresses to fill in her role so she can get a sense of the movie he wants to make.

At first, Adrian seems a likable film dork. He lives with his mom (D. Tofei) and has rented out a pension to do his filming in. He has informed all and sundry around the area that he is making a horror film and not to be alarmed at shrieks and loud voices.

It seems pretty cinema verité to the actresses he hires. Sonia (Teodoriu) gets frustrated at Adrian’s barebones direction, telling her to find a solution to what appears to be contradictory directions. Finally, after Adrian stages an abduction scene, the actress isn’t aware that he’s using real chloroform, or that he’s planning a real murder with her as the star.

When the second actress, Flory (Hariton) arrives, Adrian is severely disappointed. For one thing, the actress has gained weight since she took the head shots and video that she submitted. For another thing, she seems more interested in having sex with Adrian than in acting in his film. Adrian is genuinely embarrassed by this and the results for Flory are fairly gruesome.

Finally there’s Alexandra (Stroe), the third actress. By this time, Adrian believes he’s ready for the real Anne Hathaway and that he doesn’t need to murder a third actress to play the part with his beloved Anne. That leaves the question; what to do with Alexandra? She certainly doesn’t want to die for her art.

This is a found footage-style horror film with a budget that is virtually non-existent and was raised by an Indie-Go-Go campaign. Tofei, who was inspired by a one-man stage show he performed as a similar character, does virtually everything from writing and directing to starring to editing to distributing to publicizing to producing and he probably made sandwiches for the cast and crew which was largely just him.

He does a pretty satisfactory job as the obsessed directorial wanna-be. The longer the film goes, the more manic and crazed Adrian becomes until he is clearly around the bend by the final act. There are some maniacal giggles that are a bit over-the-top but Adrian’s lunacy is completely believable, from the repetition of his dialogue to the disarming but sinister grin. That the actresses willingly put themselves in situations in which a monster like Adrian can do his dark deeds is also believable.

Most of the film is shot in Adrian’s actual home and on the street nearby. While the fictional Adrian is agoraphobic and refuses to leave his small town, the real Adrian actually lived in Bucharest and moved back home to make his movie. The first actress got so freaked out that she actually called the police for real; the footage of their arrival made it into the final film. More to the point, the third act is so intense, the second so bloody that the end credit disclaimer “No persons or animals were harmed in the making of this film” actually came as a relief to this reviewer who was beginning to wonder if what it was I was viewing wasn’t a Romanian snuff film. Also pictures of the alive and well actresses at the film’s festival debut were also quite reassuring. That’s impressive, especially for a first-time filmmaker.

The intensity level might be a drawback for some. Adrian is rather cruel to his actresses, calling one fat and another untalented. My understanding is that the actresses were not informed in advance of a lot of the things that happened in the film in order to make their reactions more believable. Each of the actresses are beautiful and talented; each one creates a distinct character – the mousy Sonia, the forward Flory and the quick-witted Alexandra.

This is a refreshing and new take on found footage (and incidentally the first found footage film produced in Romania) which is a headline in and of itself. While the issues that are problematic for that genre (i.e. shaky handheld camera inducing vertigo in the viewer, poor lighting) remain, the performances more than make up for the drawbacks. The last third of the film really held me spellbound and I literally had no idea how it would end. That’s the mark of a great filmmaker.

REASONS TO GO: A strong performance by Tofei and the three actresses as well. The blood-soaked second act and tense third act are worthy of much larger productions.
REASONS TO STAY: At times the low budget is pretty obvious. The handheld camera is on occasion nausea-inducing.
FAMILY VALUES:  Some very intense peril, strong violence and a bit of profanity.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT:  In order to maintain a feeling of realism, Tofei shot nearly all of the footage himself. This also helped with budget constraints.
BEYOND THE THEATERS: Vimeo (coming to Amazon Prime in January 2017)
CRITICAL MASS: As of 12/6/16: Rotten Tomatoes: No score yet. Metacritic: No score yet.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: My Date with Drew
FINAL RATING: 7.5/10
NEXT: Arrival

Inferno (2016)

Tom Hanks and Felicity Jones at least got their exercise regimens in.

(2016) Thriller (Columbia) Tom Hanks, Felicity Jones, Omar Sy, Irrfan Khan, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Ben Foster, Ana Ularu, Ida Darvish, Paolo Antonio Simioni, Fausto Maria Sciarappa, Alessandro Grimaldi, Robin Mugnaini, Paul Ritter, Vincenzo Tanassi, Alessandro Fabrizi, Simone Mariani, Gabor Urmai, Jon Donahue, Fortunato Cerlino, Attila Arpa, Kata Sorbo. Directed by Ron Howard

 

I don’t know if it’s fair to characterize the novels of Dan Brown as an acquired taste. After all, he’s sold millions of copies of his Robert Langdon novels starting with The DaVinci Code. His plots tend to be complicated and sometimes overly so. Still, they can be an entertaining read. Now, his fourth novel in the series has become the third filmed version of the franchise

Professor Robert Langdon (Hanks), one of the world’s leading minds, wakes up in an Italian hospital with no memory of how he got there. Dr. Sienna Brooks (Jones) is trying to establish how he was shot; there is a head wound where a bullet apparently grazed his skull which might account for his amnesia. Just then a remorseless assassin (Ularu) comes for him, forcing the professor and doctor to flee.

In fact, it turns out a lot of people are after Langdon. The World Health Organization, with Dr. Elizabeth Sinskey (Knudsen) and .investigator Christoph Bouchard (Sy) are chasing Langdon with an unknown agenda. The Italian police are after him after surveillance footage reveals that he stole the death mask of Dante Alighieri  whose Inferno holds clues to a mad billionaire’s (Foster) plan to “cull the human herd” by releasing a plague that will kill half the world’s population and immediately ease overpopulation concerns. A bit of a drastic cure, that.

In any case as Langdon’s memories begin to slowly return, he finds he is in a race against time to find the killer virus and stop this mass murder on a demonic scale. In order to do that he has to follow a chain of clues left behind by the billionaire who killed himself rather than reveal the location of the virus’s delivery system to the WHO. Who can Langdon trust? As it turns out, not the people he thinks.

I have to admit I found the first film in the series, The DaVinci Code, to be genuinely entertaining – the follow-up, Angels and Demons, less so but still acceptable. The third in the series is by far the least entertaining so far; the preposterous nature of the plot has become far too glaring to ignore and the payoff not enough to be worth the ride. Hanks looks a bit tired here; I suspect he’s given Langdon about all he can give him as an actor. There were rumors that both Howard and Hanks were leaving the series after Angels and Demons but apparently they were prevailed upon to do the third film after pre-production on a proposed film version of the third book in the series, The Lost Symbol, stalled.

Again, Howard utilizes an international cast that is largely better known in Europe than in the United States with the exception of the Oscar-nominated Jones who shines here, reinforcing my opinion that she is one of the best young actresses out there who is likely to be one of the most honored actresses of her generation when all is said and done. Khan, who plays the nefarious head of a shadowy security agency, also has some meat on the bones of his character that he can work with but his part is all too brief alas.

Seeing the sights of Florence, Cambridge and Istanbul (among other places) is pleasing, particularly to me personally as I was in Florence just this past May and can attest to the beauty of the city having seen the Ponte Vecchio and the Uffizi with my own eyes. It certainly ignited the tourist in my soul to see some of the sights that the movie highlights. If you have that tourist gene inside you, you’ll likely be pleased by this as much as I was, but it’s not really enough to recommend a movie just for the setting. It’s rough when every ten minutes or so you’re rolling your eyes at yet another plot turn that defies logic. Even Dan Brown’s most loyal fans will be shaking their heads at this one.

REASONS TO GO: Plenty of lovely tourist opportunities for places like Florence and Istanbul.
REASONS TO STAY: The plot is absolutely preposterous.
FAMILY VALUES:  Action and violence in plenty here, as well as a few disturbing images, brief sexuality, some disturbing thematic elements and brief foul language.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT:  This is the first Robert Langdon film not to be written by Akiva Goldsman.
CRITICAL MASS: As of 12/6/16: Rotten Tomatoes: 20% positive reviews. Metacritic: 42/100.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: Outbreak
FINAL RATING: 5/10
NEXT: Be My Cat: A Film for Anne