Tag: amazonprimevideo

Val

Tasked with the immeasurable job of packaging over four decades worth of home movies into a two-hour documentary film, Ting Poo and Leo Scott told Val Kilmer’s story of his rollercoaster rise to fame and the depths that followed – Val’s way, in this first-person account of his life. Narrated by his son, Jack Kilmer, “Val” invites audiences to take an intimate look at Val’s life and career from his days growing up on a farm making movies with his two brothers, to his battle with pharyngeal cancer that left him with a hole in his throat and a voice box that he must plug to be able to communicate. “Val” gives audiences a look at the life of an actor – the good, the bad, and the ugly – like it’s a fireside chat with an old friend, reminiscing about the past.

Val tells his story through his decades of home video footage and his son’s voice, telling audiences that he was one of the first people he ever knew to own a video camera. The footage begins in Kilmer’s childhood where he and his two brothers created home movies on Super 8 film, directed by their youngest brother Wesley who would die at the age of 15 after having a seizure in the family’s jacuzzi and drowning. Kilmer attributed much of his successful career to the inspiration he gained from Wesley, who died just after Val left to attend Juilliard, where he would become one of the founders of the first stage acting program at the illustrious school.

The thousands of hours of footage amassed by Kilmer over the years served to give audiences an honest, behind-the-scenes look at the filming of many of Kilmer’s most famous projects from stage to silver screen; including his first major role, which would find him falling to third lead behind Kevin Bacon and Sean Penn in his 1983 Broadway debut in “Slab Boys.” The film dives into his breakthrough role in “Top Secret,” his budding friendship with Tom Cruise in “Top Gun,” one of his most famous and memorable roles as Huckleberry in “Tombstone” alongside Kurt Russell. Val even invites us into his world of method acting for his role as Jim Morrison in “The Doors”- which would play a major role in ending his marriage – his unsatisfying time as “Batman,” his tumultuous experience alongside his hero Marlon Brando in “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” and more. Before the film’s end, the audience is flashed with an image of Val in each of his soirees onto the silver screen, from “Top Secret” to James Franco’s indie film “Palo Alto.”

As much an in memoriam to Kilmer’s vast career as an explanation of who he is, “Val” pulls back the covers on what it truly means to be an artist and to live as unapologetically as possible. The film dives into the struggles he faced throughout his shiny career and the effects these things – the death of his brother, his divorce, his massive debts, the loss of his mother, and the loss of his voice – continue to have on him to this day. Through brutally open and honest monologues, Kilmer lets us into his head about the struggles of his career, his physical and mental health, and what it means to him to be selling the memory of his past to make ends meet. Filled with touching memories of when he fell in love, raising his children, and his successes and failures as an actor; “Val” offers an intimate look into the experiences that shaped Kilmer into the enigma that we’ve come to recognize.

The audience is also taken on a deep dive of Kilmer’s one-man show “Cinema Twain,” which was a passion-project stage production that Kilmer planned to take on a tour of the country. He was hoping he would use the success of this stage tour to finance his directorial debut and turn “Cinema Twain” into a feature length film. After having to postpone a show in Nashville for what Kilmer thought would be “a week or two,” this dream was cut short when Kilmer’s health began to decline. Having always wanted to morph his acting career into one of writing and directing, Kilmer’s dream of telling the story of what it truly means to be an actor took on a new shape and was brought to life through the decades of footage he’d been unknowingly collecting for this exact reason. His archives and the hard work and dedication of directors Ting Poo and Leo Scott came together to finally make these dreams a reality, despite insurmountable odds.

At the premiere of the film at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, Scott remarked that from day one of creating “Val,” Kilmer was adamant about the conditions of the film’s premiere and where it would be shown to audiences for the first time. A premiere at Cannes was the only option. Although Kilmer was unable to attend the festival in person, his children Jack and Mercedes were present to accept the well-deserved standing ovation as the credits began to roll.

To even try to begin to describe the impact of this film and Val Kilmer’s incredible career would be an absolute disservice. My favorite film of the festival, “Val” is not only a reminder that fame and fortune do not amount to happiness, but that the beauty of honesty and vulnerability are part of what makes life so meaningful. A magical, raw, and creative collection of mere moments in a man’s life, “Val” is just the medium Kilmer needed to be able to act as himself in the telling of his life story.

“Val” premiered at Festival de Cannes 2021 on July 7th and will be released in theaters by Amazon Studios on July 23rd. The documentary will be available for streaming on Amazon Prime Video on August 6th.

Beautiful Boy

Beautiful Boy tells a riveting and heartbreaking tale of a father and son duo, living out the tortures that come along with drug addiction. The film is based on two separate books written by David and Nic Sheff, detailing their lives while battling addiction and the struggles that come along with it.

David Sheff, played by Steve Carell, is a journalist in San Francisco. Divorced from his first wife, and the mother of his son Nic, David maintains custody of his son, played by Timothee Chalamet. The film begins as we see David seeking out help to better understand what his son is going through as a crystal meth addict. The story then embarks on a journey detailing the seemingly unbreakable bond between the father and son. Nic’s mother lives in Los Angeles while he lives with his father, step-mother, and two younger siblings from his fathers second marriage in San Francisco. We see flashbacks of Nic and David throughout the year, chronicling Nic’s childhood and the impending destruction of his relationship with his father, and have a front row seat to watch David try to grapple with the fact that he didn’t know his son as well as he previously believed.

We watch the relationship between David and Nic fall apart as Nic falls deeper into the throes of his addiction. David and his wife Karen play the loving caretakers, looking out for Nic’s best interest when he is admitted to rehab for the first time. Nic, with a history of running away from his problems rather than facing them, quickly enters the first of many relapses that will continue to test the boundaries of his father’s support.

As David reminisces on his time raising Nic, and tries to understand where he went wrong, or what lead to his son turning toward drugs, there seems to be no evidence as to why this has happened. David struggles to come to terms with the fact that his son has put himself into this dangerous situation and seems to want to try to understand why Nic continues to regress. Emotions are high and each time David tries to break new ground he is met with anger and opposition from Nic.

David goes as far as reaching out to doctors and continuously doing research on addiction to try to maintain hope, or find a way to better help his son, but each time we think Nic is finally in a position to pull himself out of the depths of addiction, he relapses, turning up again in worse shape than ever before.

Nic says the drugs have allowed him to feel a way nothing else ever has; saying it took his life “from black and white to technicolor.” Like many people, it takes Nic hitting his absolute lowest, and his father finally conceding that there is nothing else he can do for his son, to realize he has to make a change for himself to beat his addiction to drugs. After breaking into his fathers home, and promptly running away to avoid facing his father and the disappointment that he feels, Nic’s girlfriend overdoses and nearly loses her life. Nic calls his father begging to come home, saying that he’s ready to face and overcome his addiction, but that he can only do so on his own terms, at home, with the strength of his father, step-mom, and siblings by his side. David tells Nic that he loves him, but that would be impossible. He has decided that he can’t help him and that he can no longer handle the outbursts, relapses, and struggles that Nic continues to put him through. He tells him he loves him, wishes him the best and hangs up the phone.

The one thing missing from this film is the dark truth of how drugs and alcohol ravish the bodies of addicts. This story focuses on the mental and emotional pain and suffering of Nic and the people closest to him, while providing only a sprinkle of the imagery associated with the disease of drug addiction. Even after multiple instances of overdose, Nic appears as if he could easily hide the fact that he’s been addicted to crystal meth for years. There is only one scene in the film that even begins to show the severity of the toll that the drugs have taken on his body, in which we see him shooting up in the bathroom of the diner he often visited with his father as a child. The tracks on his arm are like an image straight out of Requiem for a Dream, but this imagery is really the only thing convincing the audience that Nic is a drug addict, rather than a feverishly ill teenager.

This film is a heartbreaking look into drug addiction and the effects that it has on not only the person suffering from addiction, but the people who care the most about them. It is a stark reminder of the seriousness of the condition, as well as the amount of work it takes to overcome. The film includes information about what drugs such as crystal meth do to the brain and how they damage the human body, and closes with information detailing Nic’s road to recovery over the last 8 years.

With striking and emotional performances by both Carell and Chalamet, it comes as no surprise that Chalamet received Golden Globe nods for his performance as Nic. Carell, seemingly out of his niche as a comedian, delves into his role in drama and gracefully delivers the emotion that conveys the pain that David Sheff felt as he watched his son slowly fall apart before his eyes.