Your Friends Close (2012)
Directed by Jocelyn Kelvin
Written by Brock Wilbur
Starring Jocelyn Kelvin, Brock Wilbur, Kovar McClure, Heather Wood, Laura Nicole Harrison, Blake Silver, Rob Ondarza, Ricky House, Michael Eliopolous, Lisa Renee Foiles, Ramsay Robinson and Yahtzee Croshaw [as well as many others]
[Disclaimer: I know Brock, Jocelyn and some of the other cast members from college. I also read an early draft of the script and served as an extra in a scene or two. That being said, I do not profit from this film, except the sense of pride someone gets from knowing about an awesome thing before other people and knowing the people involved in it]
Video game movies are pretty common at this point. Good video game movies are very very rare. Even rarer are movies that eschew adapting a video game to focusing on the people that make and play video games. Your Friends Close is not Super Mario Brothers or House of the Dead or Tomb Raider. It's not even Tron. It's more like The Bad and the Beautiful or Contempt. It's about awful, backstabbing people who somehow create something, for better or worse. As always, the question is whether that something is worth it.
Becca (Jocelyn Kelvin) and Jason (Brock Wilbur) are two up-and-coming game designers who happen to be married. They've just created a revolutionary new video game called "Your Friends Close" that basically turns the Turing Test into a multi-player strategy game. Users are put into a chatroom and must discover who is a real person and who is a computer. The winner could win anything from a rain forest named for them to a night with a porn star, depending on who the sponsor of the competition is.
Thing is, the game still needs to be developed and tested and Becca and Jason are about to fly to France to work on it. They're throwing a going away party the night before they leave, and they've invited their best friends (a mix of family, friends, professional rivals, exes, current lovers and colleagues).
And the normal tension, regret and bitterness that crop up at any party are exacerbated by the fact that, just after the party starts, Randall Sconce (Michael Eliopolous), owner of the video game company developing YFC, wants Jason to stay in San Francisco to develop a tie-in TV show for YFC. Which means there's now a slot open for someone to fly to Paris with Becca and develop the game. It's the chance of a life-time, and Jason announces that the attendees are contestants who must convince him to give them the job.
Needless to say, this night will prove to be the end of relationships, maybe even Becca and Jason's.
The first thing to note is that Your Friends Close really understands that what makes a movie (or any story) interesting are interesting and complex characters. The script balances exposition and video game theory with the establishing of relationships and characterization while never breaking a sweat. This movie is extraordinarily quotable (there's a joke about Miles Davis and Secret of Monkey Island that cracks me up each time I think of it), but all the cleverness is in service of the characters and the story. The characters are mostly overly-intellectual nerds who delight in showing off their knowledge and their verbiage, and as the night drags on, it becomes apparent that even they cannot fend off disappointment, fear and despair with clever quips.
The direction by Jocelyn Kelvin (aided by DP Chad Nagel) is lively and restless, following the party from one corner of the house to another in extended Steadicam shots that impart a video game quality to the action. However, Kelvin knows when to pause on a moment, allowing us a tension-filled long take worthy of Rohmer when the story calls for it. Two long conversations between Becca and Kaylee (Jenni Melear), Jason's assistant and possibly his lover, unwind slowly and hypnotically, teasing us with violent resolution of the rivalry at any moment.
Of course, all of the technical skill would be for naught if the actors in front of the camera weren't equally skilled. Brock and Jocelyn each prove a match for their parts, with Brock slowly drawing out the childishness and fear underlying his manipulative ways and Jocelyn possessing a enigmatic and intelligent quality that reminds me of Lena Headey or Anna Karina. The rest of the cast is just as talented, with Blake Silver drawing out the nuances of a beta male trying to will himself into alpha male status, and Heather Anne Wood, as Jason's sister, slowly stripping away the disguise of a good girl with a secret life. Finally, Yahtzee Croshaw deserves special notice for his voice acting on the titular video game, crafting a mix of charm and malevolence that is utterly entertaining and chilling.
At one point in the movie, Jason talks about how big a jump movies made between the 1920s and the 1930s, from chase scenes and pie fights to meaning and romance, before saying that video games are about to make a similar jump. I can't speak to video games, but I can say that Your Friends Close shows that movies can still develop and advance even in the video game age.
Showing posts with label film log. Show all posts
Showing posts with label film log. Show all posts
Thursday, May 2, 2013
Thursday, March 7, 2013
In which JCVD kickboxes a giant penguin to death...
This weekend, I was watching Sudden Death, a really cheesy mid-90s action movie, where Jean Claude Van Damme is a firefighter who must rescue the Vice President from a scenery-chewing Powers Boothe during the 7th Game of the Stanley Cup. It's a master-class in cheap dramatic irony (Sudden Death refers to both the end of the game AND the situation Van Damme is in!), mainly notable for a sequence where JCVD must fight a woman in a giant penguin costume to the death. It makes Hard Target look even more eligible for a Criterion Collection edition.
It's very clear that the pitch for this must have been "Jean Claude Van Damme does Die Hard at a hockey rink". And while Die Hard has reached a level of relative acclaim (despite being a blockbuster and the birth of a franchise), there's a tendency to rope it off from the films it inspired (including some of its franchise). Die Hard 2, Under Siege 1 and 2, Sudden Death, and Air Force One (maybe even Speed and Con Air, if you squint a little) are some of the more notable successors.
It's pretty easy to state the formula: working class tough guy squares off against a highly-skilled, intellectual bad guy during a hostage situation in a contained setting, with the working class guy kicking the ass of the flamboyant/foreign/intellectual/wealthy bad guy.
But what I forgot, until I watched such a generic version of the formula as the JCVD version, are the differences from the action films that came before them and after them.
First of all, the 1980s action template is usually something like Cobra or Commando, where an over-muscled tough-guy guns down a million faceless bad guys. There's still occasionally a flamboyant bad guy, but the focus is on body-count and sheer destruction. The good guy might have a braying lieutenant or commanding officer, but there's no sense that that commander has any authority. The good guy(s) might even go vigilante at the end, with the authorities showing up and telling them good job. Michael Bay's films revived this trend, upping the superhero element, where the hero is basically invulnerable. The last two Die Hard movies have trended even further in this direction as well.
Whereas, in Die Hard and its descendents, the lesser villains are usually individualized. Even though they are usually two dimensional, multi-ethnic terrorists or Eurotrash, that's still one more dimension than Cobra or Bad Boys provides us. I still root for Theo to get knocked out, or the crazy earring guy in Sudden Death to get shot through a helicopter, but they're not just cannon fodder that feeds our blood-lust. On top of that, there's an emphasis of one on one combat. The bad guys have guns, but the good guys rarely start out with them, so there's usually a lot of very brutal hand-to-hand fighting. Our heroes are usually bruised and bloody at the end of each fight, even though they've won. Once again, compare this to Commando, where Ahnuld takes out an entire army and just gets a gnarly gash on his stomach.
Most importantly, the Die Hard template has a working class, if skilled, hero who faces off both against a corrupt or hidebound authority and the actual bad guys. While it's not that unusual to have a cop/secret agent having to take a dressing down from the boss, it's in the Die Hard template movies that the authority is actively working against the hero's goals. Agents Johnson and Johnson, for example, in Die Hard, or the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Under Siege cause almost as much destruction and death as the bad guys, even though they have good intentions.
Furthermore, this working class attitude extends to a nuts-and-bolts attitude towards work that has become rarer and rarer as cinema has progressed into the 21st Century and the focus of international capitalism has been turning everyone into interchangeable office temps. Die Hard takes place in a classy executive office building, but the environment that Bruce Willis mostly occupies is the blue-collar work-site of a building still under construction. In Under Siege, the kitchen and other living/working areas of the battleship are intimately explored and become sites of battle and conflict, not just the command center. And Sudden Death gives us a detailed look at the day-to-day, banal and prosaic operations of a hockey rink before blowing them up.
Perhaps that is what I find most unusual in this day and age in these films is this interest in establishing the prosaic and banal of day-to-day working life, an interest that is harder and harder to detect in more recent cinema. The protagonists of most blockbusters are either tech-savvy kids, specially-trained and well-to-do secret agents, or independently wealthy superheroes. Even when the protagonists are down-to-earth people like in Date Night (in which the bourgeois banality of the protagonists, contrasted with generic thriller trappings they are roped into, are played for laughs), we don't really see them at work. Perhaps the only notable exception, off the top of my head, is Machete, which intentionally politicized work and labor as elements of an ongoing class and ethnic struggle.
Die Hard and its followers, despite their faults and flaws, honored the idea of working class labor. The modern blockbuster now only honors the wealthy superhero, a demographic that is excluded from labor (teens/kids), specialized agents, or a combination of the three.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
"It was St. Sebastian I thought of, and his arrows..."
So jokes Nick Cave at one point in his darkly comic song about a psychopath killing all the patrons in a small-town bar, "O'Malley's Bar", off the classic album Murder Ballads.
It's an album about murder and death that deals with both man's drive towards destruction, while also examining the wreckage in the aftermath. For an album about murder, it never languishes in one mood for too long, while never shying away from the ugliness of man's inhumanity towards man.
I can't really say WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN ever hits that sweet spot. It's half of a great movie, with beautiful and evocative imagery, and a great central performance by Tilda Swinton as a woman who is first ambivalent about the joys of motherhood and then ambivalent towards her existence in toto.
But this movie is about Swinton's character's relationship with her psychopathic son, and, while Tilda is always very convincing and real, her son (played by Ezra Miller) comes off as a cross between a comic book super-villain and Hannibal Lecter. I should say, this is not totally Miller's fault. Sometimes he underplays the material quite well, and his final scene, where his defenses are stripped away and he's forced to confront his choices, is affecting.
It's that the script expects us to believe not only in Miller's escalating psychopathy, but that his boyish facade only ever slips for precisely one person, leaving the whole world fooled until the s**t hits the fan. The screenwriters seem to think that most psychopaths operate along the same rules as Snuffleupagus and the Great Gazoo.
WNTTAK is a film so unceasing in its miserabilism and so heavy-handed in way it drops s**t on Swinton's character, that it provokes an incredulous response. I spent a good portion of the film wanting to shout "Bullshit" at the screen.
Which is frustrating, because the few moments when Lynne Ramsay lets the leaden depression go for a moment, Swinton's plight becomes more tragic. There's a moment in a parking lot where Swinton runs into one of her son's victims, and the young man greets her with compassion and kindness. We can see the pain and guilt on Swinton's face, and it is so much harder to dismiss than the other victims' parents who act like bullies.
David Cairns and Tim Brayton have more in-depth reviews that are very perceptive and fascinating, but I just had to get those thoughts out there.
It's an album about murder and death that deals with both man's drive towards destruction, while also examining the wreckage in the aftermath. For an album about murder, it never languishes in one mood for too long, while never shying away from the ugliness of man's inhumanity towards man.
I can't really say WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN ever hits that sweet spot. It's half of a great movie, with beautiful and evocative imagery, and a great central performance by Tilda Swinton as a woman who is first ambivalent about the joys of motherhood and then ambivalent towards her existence in toto.
But this movie is about Swinton's character's relationship with her psychopathic son, and, while Tilda is always very convincing and real, her son (played by Ezra Miller) comes off as a cross between a comic book super-villain and Hannibal Lecter. I should say, this is not totally Miller's fault. Sometimes he underplays the material quite well, and his final scene, where his defenses are stripped away and he's forced to confront his choices, is affecting.
It's that the script expects us to believe not only in Miller's escalating psychopathy, but that his boyish facade only ever slips for precisely one person, leaving the whole world fooled until the s**t hits the fan. The screenwriters seem to think that most psychopaths operate along the same rules as Snuffleupagus and the Great Gazoo.
WNTTAK is a film so unceasing in its miserabilism and so heavy-handed in way it drops s**t on Swinton's character, that it provokes an incredulous response. I spent a good portion of the film wanting to shout "Bullshit" at the screen.
Which is frustrating, because the few moments when Lynne Ramsay lets the leaden depression go for a moment, Swinton's plight becomes more tragic. There's a moment in a parking lot where Swinton runs into one of her son's victims, and the young man greets her with compassion and kindness. We can see the pain and guilt on Swinton's face, and it is so much harder to dismiss than the other victims' parents who act like bullies.
David Cairns and Tim Brayton have more in-depth reviews that are very perceptive and fascinating, but I just had to get those thoughts out there.
Thursday, October 27, 2011
HALLOWEEN COUNTDOWN: Horror on a minimum wage
THE INNKEEPERS (2011)
Directed by Ti West
Starring Sara Paxton, Pat Healy and Kelly McGillis
If you had told me that the next movie from the guy behind House of the Devil was also going to be a throwback to an earlier style of horror, I certainly wouldn't have been surprised. But if you'd told me that he was making a slow-burn ghost story with very little gore, along the lines of the original The Haunting or Les Diaboliques, then I'd probably say you were crazy.
But that is, in fact, what writer/director/editor Ti West has given us, and it's pretty darn good.
The story concerns itself with the last weekend of business for an old inn called the Yankee Pedlar, in a declining town in the New England. It's clear that the owner is only interested in keeping the place from burning down, so the entire staff for the weekend is two young people working the front desk, trading off 12 hour shifts. Claire (Sara Paxton), the younger of the two, is an imaginative, sweet, and naive college drop-out still trying to figure out what she wants to do with her life. Luke (Pat Healy), several years older, is a burned-out cynic, unwilling to do even the minimum amount of work the inn's paltry two guests request. (One of the subtler running jokes is Luke's refusal to put towels in any of the rooms no matter how many times a guest asks).
Perhaps the only thing interesting about Luke (and the main topic of conversation between him and Claire) is that he is an amateur ghost-hunter, with a website (albeit one that makes old Geocities sites look professional) devoted to the hauntings at the inn. There's a rather generic legend about the place and a young woman who supposedly killed herself after being stood up at the altar, and Luke has convinced Claire that the young woman, named Madeleine O'Malley, still haunts the place These two working stiffs have decided that they're going to make the most of this long weekend by actually recording some manner of supernatural phenomenon.
At first, they have about the success you would expect from two amateur ghost-hunters, but when Claire is recording audio phenomenon alone, she records something that might be supernatural. And when she consults with one of their guests (as much out of loneliness and fear as for any credible reason), the guest (Kelly McGillis) turns out to be a faith healer, who makes contact with a ghost who may be Madeleine and warns her to stay out of the basement...
I know up above I compared this to a slow-burn horror movie like Les Diaboliques or The Haunting, but in the early parts, The Innkeepers plays like a low-key, quirky character study of two listless young people (a la Tiny Furniture or Ghost World or a Swanberg pic), with some laughs and the occasional jump-scares. In a slasher film, Luke would be the prank-happy annoying nerd who gets killed off quickly, but this is a film about three people and the body-count is actually very low.
If the idea of Tiny Furniture (Lena Dunham makes a brief cameo as an over-sharing barista) and The Haunting swapping DNA sounds to you like the worst thing ever, you aren't being fair to the film. The amount of time we spend getting to know the characters means that when they are threatened by the supernatural, we're genuinely concerned. And by then, we also know the tics and quirks that will cause them to react a certain way.
West and his cast deserve a lot of credit for the careful and credible way they build the relationship between Claire and Luke. It's clear that they've mainly become friends because they spend so much time with just each other for company. And while Claire is definitely the most sympathetic of the two, Luke rings very true. If you've ever worked a minimum-wage job, you've probably known a burn-out like Luke, not really as great as he thinks he is, but with one or two characteristics that, to a callow youth, make him seem cool. For Claire, it's Luke's ghost-hunting site. For me, it was that a co-worker's rock band.
But Claire is the protagonist , and she's a refreshingly complex female character. She's a little jumpy and nervous, but she also shows the most courage of any of the characters we encounter. Even though the thought of trash juice dripping on her as she throws garbage in the dumpster grosses her out, she's willing to risk life and limb to save the soul of a restless ghost. And Sara Paxton plays it all with a lack of self-consciousness that's very lived-in.
And the other nice thing about the slow build is that, by the time the spooky stuff starts, we know the inn very well. It's almost as much a character as Claire and Luke, and, despite being a real, functioning inn, is definitely a triumph of production design. It's picturesque and creepy, but never feels like a soundstage creation.
The other element I have to give West kudos for is the balance he strikes between what we know and what is left (often rather horrifyingly) unsaid. [Possible Spoilers] Our characters assume the ghost haunting the Inn is Madeleine O'Malley, but a lot of the other evidence and the words of McGillis' character suggests there are at least three ghosts haunting the inn, and it's never proven that O'Malley is one of the three. (There is an angry ghost bride, but I would suggest the events that unfold in the Honeymoon suite suggest there's an more than one possibility for that ghost). And yet, there's an internal coherence to the way the hauntings happen and the way they interact with the cast that suggests a logic and a backstory to what's happening, only our protagonists misunderstand it.
Much like the original The Haunting or the early parts of Hell House, what's so creepy and tragic about the events that unfold is that we don't even know why the ghosts selected the victim they did, or for what purpose.
Directed by Ti West
Starring Sara Paxton, Pat Healy and Kelly McGillis
If you had told me that the next movie from the guy behind House of the Devil was also going to be a throwback to an earlier style of horror, I certainly wouldn't have been surprised. But if you'd told me that he was making a slow-burn ghost story with very little gore, along the lines of the original The Haunting or Les Diaboliques, then I'd probably say you were crazy.
But that is, in fact, what writer/director/editor Ti West has given us, and it's pretty darn good.
The story concerns itself with the last weekend of business for an old inn called the Yankee Pedlar, in a declining town in the New England. It's clear that the owner is only interested in keeping the place from burning down, so the entire staff for the weekend is two young people working the front desk, trading off 12 hour shifts. Claire (Sara Paxton), the younger of the two, is an imaginative, sweet, and naive college drop-out still trying to figure out what she wants to do with her life. Luke (Pat Healy), several years older, is a burned-out cynic, unwilling to do even the minimum amount of work the inn's paltry two guests request. (One of the subtler running jokes is Luke's refusal to put towels in any of the rooms no matter how many times a guest asks).
Perhaps the only thing interesting about Luke (and the main topic of conversation between him and Claire) is that he is an amateur ghost-hunter, with a website (albeit one that makes old Geocities sites look professional) devoted to the hauntings at the inn. There's a rather generic legend about the place and a young woman who supposedly killed herself after being stood up at the altar, and Luke has convinced Claire that the young woman, named Madeleine O'Malley, still haunts the place These two working stiffs have decided that they're going to make the most of this long weekend by actually recording some manner of supernatural phenomenon.
At first, they have about the success you would expect from two amateur ghost-hunters, but when Claire is recording audio phenomenon alone, she records something that might be supernatural. And when she consults with one of their guests (as much out of loneliness and fear as for any credible reason), the guest (Kelly McGillis) turns out to be a faith healer, who makes contact with a ghost who may be Madeleine and warns her to stay out of the basement...
I know up above I compared this to a slow-burn horror movie like Les Diaboliques or The Haunting, but in the early parts, The Innkeepers plays like a low-key, quirky character study of two listless young people (a la Tiny Furniture or Ghost World or a Swanberg pic), with some laughs and the occasional jump-scares. In a slasher film, Luke would be the prank-happy annoying nerd who gets killed off quickly, but this is a film about three people and the body-count is actually very low.
If the idea of Tiny Furniture (Lena Dunham makes a brief cameo as an over-sharing barista) and The Haunting swapping DNA sounds to you like the worst thing ever, you aren't being fair to the film. The amount of time we spend getting to know the characters means that when they are threatened by the supernatural, we're genuinely concerned. And by then, we also know the tics and quirks that will cause them to react a certain way.
West and his cast deserve a lot of credit for the careful and credible way they build the relationship between Claire and Luke. It's clear that they've mainly become friends because they spend so much time with just each other for company. And while Claire is definitely the most sympathetic of the two, Luke rings very true. If you've ever worked a minimum-wage job, you've probably known a burn-out like Luke, not really as great as he thinks he is, but with one or two characteristics that, to a callow youth, make him seem cool. For Claire, it's Luke's ghost-hunting site. For me, it was that a co-worker's rock band.
But Claire is the protagonist , and she's a refreshingly complex female character. She's a little jumpy and nervous, but she also shows the most courage of any of the characters we encounter. Even though the thought of trash juice dripping on her as she throws garbage in the dumpster grosses her out, she's willing to risk life and limb to save the soul of a restless ghost. And Sara Paxton plays it all with a lack of self-consciousness that's very lived-in.
And the other nice thing about the slow build is that, by the time the spooky stuff starts, we know the inn very well. It's almost as much a character as Claire and Luke, and, despite being a real, functioning inn, is definitely a triumph of production design. It's picturesque and creepy, but never feels like a soundstage creation.
The other element I have to give West kudos for is the balance he strikes between what we know and what is left (often rather horrifyingly) unsaid. [Possible Spoilers] Our characters assume the ghost haunting the Inn is Madeleine O'Malley, but a lot of the other evidence and the words of McGillis' character suggests there are at least three ghosts haunting the inn, and it's never proven that O'Malley is one of the three. (There is an angry ghost bride, but I would suggest the events that unfold in the Honeymoon suite suggest there's an more than one possibility for that ghost). And yet, there's an internal coherence to the way the hauntings happen and the way they interact with the cast that suggests a logic and a backstory to what's happening, only our protagonists misunderstand it.
Much like the original The Haunting or the early parts of Hell House, what's so creepy and tragic about the events that unfold is that we don't even know why the ghosts selected the victim they did, or for what purpose.
Monday, October 17, 2011
Halloween countdown: He served a dark and a stupid god
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)
Directed by Tim Burton
Starring Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Sacha Baron Cohen, Alan Rickman and Timothy Spall
I know quite a few people I like and whose opinions I respect won't agree with what I'm about to write. Not just friends, but apparently even Mister Stephen Sondheim himself. But Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd just isn't good.
In all fairness, it's not bad, either. But that's the disappointment. Because what Burton turns in is the sort of cowardly pseudo-musical and pseudo-horror film that Hollywood churns out for respectable people these days. And that really is what disappoints from Burton, of all people, who, in the first half of his career, often put out off-kilter movies with only the slightest concessions to present popular culture. A parody of 50's alien invasion films cross-pollinated with '70s disaster films? An ode to a cult film-maker notorious for being awful, shot in black-and-white? A horror comedy about a ghost that exorcises living people and wants to abduct a teenage girl as his bride?
But the grotesque and strange taste that made these films wonderful has congealed into something more "bubblegum goth", giving us a movie afraid to fully leap into the campy and also terrifying. Burton is willing to give us a lot of blood and gore, but he's afraid to give us the sexual insanity of the Beggar Woman, Toby's final transformation into something as twisted as Sweeney, or Joanna murdering the insane asylum director. And of course, Mrs. Lovett has to feel bad about what she's doing, to some extent (missing the entire point of the character, but whatever). Our heroes have to be sympathetic, goshdarnit! And we have to have clear delineation between good and bad!
Heaven knows what Christopher Bond, the playwright whose work gave Sondheim the basis for Sweeney Todd by marrying the revenge motive to a more vicious Marxist reading of the story. After all, Bond rewrote King Lear to be less romantic and hopeful!
But this is really Burton giving into the most trite and cliche of his excesses: almost everything production designed to a somehow charming goth version of urban blight, cleavage-baring outfits for Helena Bonham Carter (regardless of appropriateness), and generic,ugly CGI that makes 18th Century London look like a video-game cutscene.
Burton really doesn't seem comfortable with the fact he's directing a musical, stripping the movie of almost every group chorus, shoving several songs off into dream sequences or fantasies, as if the audience will be hard-pressed to believe that people could just burst into song. It doesn't help that Carter's voice is a slight and mediocre one, and that Johnny Depp sounds like he's trying to channel either Anthony Newley or David Bowie.
There are some moments that hint at the better job Burton could have done. Alan Rickman and Timothy Spall, though underused, are both living embodiments of nightmares of authority figures, and Sacha Baron Cohen as the barber/mountebank Pirelli is an unnerving mix of oily charm and barely-restrained rage.
Even Depp, in a few moments, hits the mark, such as when he rushes about London in his mind, brandishing a razor at every person he meets.
But for every moment that works, there's a song chopped to bits, or another godawful bit with Helena Bonham Carter, and it just becomes a junk food film again, every bit as much a mish-mash as Mrs. Lovett's pies.
Directed by Tim Burton
Starring Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Sacha Baron Cohen, Alan Rickman and Timothy Spall
I know quite a few people I like and whose opinions I respect won't agree with what I'm about to write. Not just friends, but apparently even Mister Stephen Sondheim himself. But Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd just isn't good.
In all fairness, it's not bad, either. But that's the disappointment. Because what Burton turns in is the sort of cowardly pseudo-musical and pseudo-horror film that Hollywood churns out for respectable people these days. And that really is what disappoints from Burton, of all people, who, in the first half of his career, often put out off-kilter movies with only the slightest concessions to present popular culture. A parody of 50's alien invasion films cross-pollinated with '70s disaster films? An ode to a cult film-maker notorious for being awful, shot in black-and-white? A horror comedy about a ghost that exorcises living people and wants to abduct a teenage girl as his bride?
But the grotesque and strange taste that made these films wonderful has congealed into something more "bubblegum goth", giving us a movie afraid to fully leap into the campy and also terrifying. Burton is willing to give us a lot of blood and gore, but he's afraid to give us the sexual insanity of the Beggar Woman, Toby's final transformation into something as twisted as Sweeney, or Joanna murdering the insane asylum director. And of course, Mrs. Lovett has to feel bad about what she's doing, to some extent (missing the entire point of the character, but whatever). Our heroes have to be sympathetic, goshdarnit! And we have to have clear delineation between good and bad!
Heaven knows what Christopher Bond, the playwright whose work gave Sondheim the basis for Sweeney Todd by marrying the revenge motive to a more vicious Marxist reading of the story. After all, Bond rewrote King Lear to be less romantic and hopeful!
But this is really Burton giving into the most trite and cliche of his excesses: almost everything production designed to a somehow charming goth version of urban blight, cleavage-baring outfits for Helena Bonham Carter (regardless of appropriateness), and generic,ugly CGI that makes 18th Century London look like a video-game cutscene.
Burton really doesn't seem comfortable with the fact he's directing a musical, stripping the movie of almost every group chorus, shoving several songs off into dream sequences or fantasies, as if the audience will be hard-pressed to believe that people could just burst into song. It doesn't help that Carter's voice is a slight and mediocre one, and that Johnny Depp sounds like he's trying to channel either Anthony Newley or David Bowie.
There are some moments that hint at the better job Burton could have done. Alan Rickman and Timothy Spall, though underused, are both living embodiments of nightmares of authority figures, and Sacha Baron Cohen as the barber/mountebank Pirelli is an unnerving mix of oily charm and barely-restrained rage.
Even Depp, in a few moments, hits the mark, such as when he rushes about London in his mind, brandishing a razor at every person he meets.
But for every moment that works, there's a song chopped to bits, or another godawful bit with Helena Bonham Carter, and it just becomes a junk food film again, every bit as much a mish-mash as Mrs. Lovett's pies.
Friday, October 7, 2011
Halloween Countdown: I love Lucky McKee...
I love Lucky McKee. I've only seen two of his three and a half films (the half is his episode of Masters of Horror: Sick Girl), but I've loved both May and The Woods for the way they played around with the conventions of horror, while still finding the monster/villains sympathetic.
And the way he switched from the low-key "indie" style in May to a very lush '60's feel in The Woods showed he had a greater range than some horror film-makers.
So tonight I'm checking out a preview of his new film, The Woman, based on a Jack Ketchum novel, that is to be followed by a Q&A with the director himself. I hope to have a post up about the experience this weekend.
May
And the way he switched from the low-key "indie" style in May to a very lush '60's feel in The Woods showed he had a greater range than some horror film-makers.
So tonight I'm checking out a preview of his new film, The Woman, based on a Jack Ketchum novel, that is to be followed by a Q&A with the director himself. I hope to have a post up about the experience this weekend.
May
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
"I knew I'd never take him alive... I didn't try too hard neither."
Yet another half-written blog post I've discovered from a couple of months ago. Figured I might as well post it, because, though it isn't a full review, you should at least consider it a recommendation.
DILLINGER (1973)
d. John Milius
Starring Ben Johnson, Warren Oates, Harry Dean Stanton, Michelle Phillips, Richard Dreyfuss and Cloris Leachman
John Dillinger (Warren Oates) is a famous bankrobber, working the Midwest, who has formed a super-gang with "Pretty-Boy" Floyd (Steve Kanaly) and "Baby-face" Nelson (Richard Dreyfuss). Melvin Purvis (Ben Johnson) is the FBI agent tasked with taking them all down. Cue bloody shootouts.
... Whoah. This and the Don Siegel-directed Babyface Nelson are my must-see gangster films, so you can imagine my delight when Netflix Streaming added this to the queue. Unfortunately, it was a pan-and-scan version with occasionally poor picture quality. To be fair, for all I know, the DVD might be pan-and-scan. Not a lot of care is taken with AIP re-releases, and I'm sure we might wait in vain for Blu-ray versions of these films.
But even pan-and-scan couldn't sap this film of it's pungent hard-boiled flavor. And the visuals still retain their power. The opening of the film, viewed through a bank-teller's window, where we endure a fussy matron withdrawing her money, only to immediately have Warren Oates introducing himself as John Dillinger and then yelling at the viewer not to try anything foolish, packs a punch. The wit of Oates breaking the fourth wall to kick off the film just adds to the outlaw feel of this film. It's a daring start to a film that wants to prove it can match The Wild Bunch, Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands blow-for-blow.
Dillinger doesn't quite hit that heady goal, but it certainly comes close.
DILLINGER (1973)
d. John Milius
Starring Ben Johnson, Warren Oates, Harry Dean Stanton, Michelle Phillips, Richard Dreyfuss and Cloris Leachman
John Dillinger (Warren Oates) is a famous bankrobber, working the Midwest, who has formed a super-gang with "Pretty-Boy" Floyd (Steve Kanaly) and "Baby-face" Nelson (Richard Dreyfuss). Melvin Purvis (Ben Johnson) is the FBI agent tasked with taking them all down. Cue bloody shootouts.
... Whoah. This and the Don Siegel-directed Babyface Nelson are my must-see gangster films, so you can imagine my delight when Netflix Streaming added this to the queue. Unfortunately, it was a pan-and-scan version with occasionally poor picture quality. To be fair, for all I know, the DVD might be pan-and-scan. Not a lot of care is taken with AIP re-releases, and I'm sure we might wait in vain for Blu-ray versions of these films.
But even pan-and-scan couldn't sap this film of it's pungent hard-boiled flavor. And the visuals still retain their power. The opening of the film, viewed through a bank-teller's window, where we endure a fussy matron withdrawing her money, only to immediately have Warren Oates introducing himself as John Dillinger and then yelling at the viewer not to try anything foolish, packs a punch. The wit of Oates breaking the fourth wall to kick off the film just adds to the outlaw feel of this film. It's a daring start to a film that wants to prove it can match The Wild Bunch, Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands blow-for-blow.
Dillinger doesn't quite hit that heady goal, but it certainly comes close.
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Because Eve Tushnet always has such interesting posts...
Eve challenged her readers to think of Christian films and atheist films for hypothetical film festivals. Apparently, it's been easier for her readers to think of atheist films than Christian ones.
For the purpose of this post, she's talking about films that represent those worldviews, not necessarily films made by Christians or atheists.
Christian films
The Trial of Joan of Arc (d. Robert Bresson) - Not just because the subject is Joan, but because Bresson is focused on the suffering and humility of Joan, even her very human weaknesses, and her faith enables her to endure and transfigure those elements of her life. That transfiguration is the miracle we see in the film, not some fantastic magic trick (which is how film usually defines them).
Love Exposure (d. Shion Sono) - Actually, this film can probably be interpreted multiple ways. And while there is a fair amount anti-religious material here, it's notable that the worst behavior is of people who turn religion to their purposes. The hypocrites and those without humility are those that cause the most suffering, and it is love (both secular & religious) that gives the male protagonist the strength to struggle on against a world that is turned against him. It's also about the way that outcasts can find fellowship & express Christian brotherhood for each other. I'd love to see Eve's reaction to all the complex & weird ideas about religion, love, gender & sexual orientation that overflow this film.
Terri (d. Azazel Jacobs) - This film, focusing on an intelligent, perceptive but troubled boy & his attempts to reach out to the world, deals with the injustice and pain of engaging with a flawed world and the broken, foolish people who inhabit it. Despite all the heartache and pain that engagement brings, the movie shows us the need to reach out to our fellow sufferers and sinners, since only that outreach can shape our suffering and pain into something better.
That's all that I can think of, off the top of my head, at the moment. But there are two relatively recent films and one older film that promote a Christian humanist worldview, to balance out all those despairing films Tushnet & her readers have thought of so far.
For the purpose of this post, she's talking about films that represent those worldviews, not necessarily films made by Christians or atheists.
Christian films
The Trial of Joan of Arc (d. Robert Bresson) - Not just because the subject is Joan, but because Bresson is focused on the suffering and humility of Joan, even her very human weaknesses, and her faith enables her to endure and transfigure those elements of her life. That transfiguration is the miracle we see in the film, not some fantastic magic trick (which is how film usually defines them).
Love Exposure (d. Shion Sono) - Actually, this film can probably be interpreted multiple ways. And while there is a fair amount anti-religious material here, it's notable that the worst behavior is of people who turn religion to their purposes. The hypocrites and those without humility are those that cause the most suffering, and it is love (both secular & religious) that gives the male protagonist the strength to struggle on against a world that is turned against him. It's also about the way that outcasts can find fellowship & express Christian brotherhood for each other. I'd love to see Eve's reaction to all the complex & weird ideas about religion, love, gender & sexual orientation that overflow this film.
Terri (d. Azazel Jacobs) - This film, focusing on an intelligent, perceptive but troubled boy & his attempts to reach out to the world, deals with the injustice and pain of engaging with a flawed world and the broken, foolish people who inhabit it. Despite all the heartache and pain that engagement brings, the movie shows us the need to reach out to our fellow sufferers and sinners, since only that outreach can shape our suffering and pain into something better.
That's all that I can think of, off the top of my head, at the moment. But there are two relatively recent films and one older film that promote a Christian humanist worldview, to balance out all those despairing films Tushnet & her readers have thought of so far.
Friday, May 20, 2011
The best crime film to involve Beethoven's birthplace...
DEAD PIGEON ON BEETHOVEN STREET (1973)
d. Samuel Fuller
Starring Glenn Corbett, Christa Lang Fuller, Anton Diffring, Eric P Caspar & Stephane Audran
I had a chance to check this out thanks to a friend in UCLA's film archives graduate program who had it screened with Christa Fuller (the star and Fuller's wife) talking about it afterwards. This hard-to-find Fuller film was actually shot for German television in the 70s as a TV movie version of a German policier TV show. The effect is rather like finding out that von Trier directed an episode of Law and Order, with all the attendant weirdness.
Furthermore, Fuller, who had little familiarity with 70s West Germany, decided to that he'd throw the street-level "realism" of the TV series out the window and just have some fun.
To be fair, the people involved with this lark of a movie had great pedigrees. Jerzy Lipman, a Polish cinematographer who'd worked with Polanski on Knife in the Water, was Fuller's cinematographer, and art-rock band Can did the score.
The plot, about a call girl (Christa Lang Fuller) and a gang of extortionists taking incriminating photos of politicians and the American private eye (Glenn Corbett) who decides to take them down when they kill his partner, is fairly standard stuff. But Fuller displays a great deal of wit in the execution.
There's a fair number of meta-film jokes that liven up the film, like a brief detour where Corbett's character follows Lang into a movie theatre showing a German-dubbed version of Rio Bravo, so we can luxuriate both in the awesomeness of that film and the strangeness of a German-speaking Dean Martin imitator. For that matter, Claude Chabrol's wife Stephane Audran pops up in a small role as a former extortionist named Dr. Bogdanovich. Lang's own appearance in Godard's Alphaville is even excerpted as evidence of her character's failed film career!
Beyond the in-jokes, Fuller plays around with the conventions of movies and the policier/noir genre. A shootout takes place in the nursery of a hospital's maternity ward, images of the gunfight intercut with images of sleeping babies, mocking any pretensions of realism the viewer might approach the film with. As one blackmail victim examines his photo, the expected ominous sound cue appears, but the next shot reveals that the sound cue is coming from a band in the same room as the character.
In some moments, the absurdity of Fuller's approach to the story circles around and becomes ominously threatening. As the streets of Cologne fill with Carnival celebrations in the film, the events of the film become seriocomic like an Elizabethan mystery play. Eric P Caspar, as a clown-suited henchman, runs through the streets, confetti covering his lips, muttering drugged-out nonsense as he closes in on Corbett and Lang, and everything resolves into eerie surrealism. Much like in Losey's Modesty Blaise, where Amsterdam's Carnival offers a site where the funny becomes dangerous, Fuller's film develops an unresolved tension from the impossibility of predicting which mode (comedy or thriller) it will end in. As a result, the ending, which brings us back to the beginning and the title, has the gut punch of a particularly well-told sick joke.
d. Samuel Fuller
Starring Glenn Corbett, Christa Lang Fuller, Anton Diffring, Eric P Caspar & Stephane Audran
I had a chance to check this out thanks to a friend in UCLA's film archives graduate program who had it screened with Christa Fuller (the star and Fuller's wife) talking about it afterwards. This hard-to-find Fuller film was actually shot for German television in the 70s as a TV movie version of a German policier TV show. The effect is rather like finding out that von Trier directed an episode of Law and Order, with all the attendant weirdness.
Furthermore, Fuller, who had little familiarity with 70s West Germany, decided to that he'd throw the street-level "realism" of the TV series out the window and just have some fun.
To be fair, the people involved with this lark of a movie had great pedigrees. Jerzy Lipman, a Polish cinematographer who'd worked with Polanski on Knife in the Water, was Fuller's cinematographer, and art-rock band Can did the score.
The plot, about a call girl (Christa Lang Fuller) and a gang of extortionists taking incriminating photos of politicians and the American private eye (Glenn Corbett) who decides to take them down when they kill his partner, is fairly standard stuff. But Fuller displays a great deal of wit in the execution.
There's a fair number of meta-film jokes that liven up the film, like a brief detour where Corbett's character follows Lang into a movie theatre showing a German-dubbed version of Rio Bravo, so we can luxuriate both in the awesomeness of that film and the strangeness of a German-speaking Dean Martin imitator. For that matter, Claude Chabrol's wife Stephane Audran pops up in a small role as a former extortionist named Dr. Bogdanovich. Lang's own appearance in Godard's Alphaville is even excerpted as evidence of her character's failed film career!
Beyond the in-jokes, Fuller plays around with the conventions of movies and the policier/noir genre. A shootout takes place in the nursery of a hospital's maternity ward, images of the gunfight intercut with images of sleeping babies, mocking any pretensions of realism the viewer might approach the film with. As one blackmail victim examines his photo, the expected ominous sound cue appears, but the next shot reveals that the sound cue is coming from a band in the same room as the character.
In some moments, the absurdity of Fuller's approach to the story circles around and becomes ominously threatening. As the streets of Cologne fill with Carnival celebrations in the film, the events of the film become seriocomic like an Elizabethan mystery play. Eric P Caspar, as a clown-suited henchman, runs through the streets, confetti covering his lips, muttering drugged-out nonsense as he closes in on Corbett and Lang, and everything resolves into eerie surrealism. Much like in Losey's Modesty Blaise, where Amsterdam's Carnival offers a site where the funny becomes dangerous, Fuller's film develops an unresolved tension from the impossibility of predicting which mode (comedy or thriller) it will end in. As a result, the ending, which brings us back to the beginning and the title, has the gut punch of a particularly well-told sick joke.
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
"Watch the picture, then. And don't move."
The post below contains my thoughts on Edward Dmytryk's Crossfire. This was one of the films I considered posting about for the Film Noir blog-a-thon, but didn't have enough original thoughts to bring it to a full post.
However, Ed Howard did end up writing a wonderful post about Crossfire. And, luckily for me, one of his thoughts, regarding the fact we know the culprit for the inciting murder relatively early on, plays into some of my thoughts on the performances in the film.
As I argue below, the tension for the film comes not from the mystery of who the killer is, but whether our heroes will let him get away with his crime.
Thoughts below the break...
However, Ed Howard did end up writing a wonderful post about Crossfire. And, luckily for me, one of his thoughts, regarding the fact we know the culprit for the inciting murder relatively early on, plays into some of my thoughts on the performances in the film.
As I argue below, the tension for the film comes not from the mystery of who the killer is, but whether our heroes will let him get away with his crime.
Thoughts below the break...
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Spy versus spy (Joseph Losey division)
Modesty Blaise (1966)
d. Joseph Losey
Starring: Monica Vitti, Terrence Stamp, Dirk Bogarde, and Clive Revill
If there is one silver lining to wearying but banal illnesses like a cold or the flu, it is the way they justify catching up on one's movie viewing, especially lightweight cinematic confections. I might not be interested in watching Salo right now, but something like Modesty Blaise or a giallo or a minor '40's b-movie is right up my alley.
And Modesty Blaise is good. Not great, but definitely good. From the buzz (or lack of it), I expected to find something like the atrocious 1967 version of Casino Royale. Instead, it could sit comfortably alongside Mario Bava's Danger: Diabolik. Just like Bava's film, MB is a comic book caper that is definitely more style than substance, but that style...
d. Joseph Losey
Starring: Monica Vitti, Terrence Stamp, Dirk Bogarde, and Clive Revill
If there is one silver lining to wearying but banal illnesses like a cold or the flu, it is the way they justify catching up on one's movie viewing, especially lightweight cinematic confections. I might not be interested in watching Salo right now, but something like Modesty Blaise or a giallo or a minor '40's b-movie is right up my alley.
And Modesty Blaise is good. Not great, but definitely good. From the buzz (or lack of it), I expected to find something like the atrocious 1967 version of Casino Royale. Instead, it could sit comfortably alongside Mario Bava's Danger: Diabolik. Just like Bava's film, MB is a comic book caper that is definitely more style than substance, but that style...
Saturday, February 26, 2011
I'm listed MIA...
Whoah, thanks to everyone who checked out my post on Hangmen Also Die! as part of the For the Love of Film Noir Blog-a-thon.
I've got some follow-up posts in the works, but I spent last week in Chicago, and this week was spent with me drained by the twin demons of poor health and day jobs.
But on the positive side, I've now got a blu-ray player that is Wi-Fi enabled, so I'll be watching Netflix even more easily now. And I also ordered Warner Archive's version of The Outfit, so hopefully a review of that will be up soon.
In the meantime, I recommend my cinephile friends check out Walter Hill's little-remembered Extreme Prejudice (1987). Scripted by John Milius, starring Powers Boothe, Nick Nolte, Rip Torn, Clancy Brown, William Forsythe and Michael Ironsides, it really deserves to be better remembered. It's a very strange and uneven film, but it hangs together much better than you'd expect. It really strikes a fascinating balancing act between neo-western and action-thriller, with the tension between the two genres serving as a thematic emphasis on the way the American spirit/character has changed.
I've got some follow-up posts in the works, but I spent last week in Chicago, and this week was spent with me drained by the twin demons of poor health and day jobs.
But on the positive side, I've now got a blu-ray player that is Wi-Fi enabled, so I'll be watching Netflix even more easily now. And I also ordered Warner Archive's version of The Outfit, so hopefully a review of that will be up soon.
In the meantime, I recommend my cinephile friends check out Walter Hill's little-remembered Extreme Prejudice (1987). Scripted by John Milius, starring Powers Boothe, Nick Nolte, Rip Torn, Clancy Brown, William Forsythe and Michael Ironsides, it really deserves to be better remembered. It's a very strange and uneven film, but it hangs together much better than you'd expect. It really strikes a fascinating balancing act between neo-western and action-thriller, with the tension between the two genres serving as a thematic emphasis on the way the American spirit/character has changed.
Monday, February 14, 2011
"We do not make mistakes!" HANGMEN ALSO DIE (1943)
d. Fritz Lang
Starring Brian Donlevy, Walter Brennan, Anna Lee and Gene Lockhart
A while back, the talented David Cairns posted an excellent tribute to the obscure noir/WWII film THE DEVIL STRIKES AT NIGHT by the German transplant/film director Robert Siodmak. It's an amazing reversal of audience sentiment, drawing us in with a traditional procedural, then reversing our sympathies and expectations by having the procedural aspects conducted by the Gestapo. It ends up being a damning condemnation of Nazi Germany because of the way even the most normal and necessary elements of civilization get perverted in the name of racist ideology and a refusal to confess weakness.
By the end of Hangmen Also Die! (one of two Hollywood efforts to dramatize the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich) Lang's direction and Brecht's script accomplishes a similar feat. Instead of perversely wishing that the Gestapo actually succeed in their goal of catching a man, I find myself sympathizing with a Nazi collaborator and traitor who is being pursued and prosecuted for a crime he never committed. Even though this man is complicit in the regime's crimes, we see the ways in which an ideologically corrupt government ends up obliterating the one man who should offer them no threat.
Some credit should also go to Gene Lockhart, who portrays his Quisling brewer Emil Czaka in a way that makes us despise him when he is riding high on the Nazi bandwagon, but whose very childish selfishness makes him pitiful when the world stops making sense. He's certainly evil and we want him punished, but, like Kafka's narrator in The Trial, we remember that feeling of guilt and the worry that whatever we're being punished for, it's for that crime that no one knows.
The complicated element, however, is that this is the thing that sticks with us at the end, the Quisling, the monster, being hunted down by his own kind, reality turned against him.
There certainly are a lot of intentional echoes of M in the end.
[ Sidenote: Record shows that Brecht was quite dissatisfied with this film, the only film project of his Hollywood years to reach completion. He felt that the script was watered down and the film was buried. Certainly the imbalanced nature of the film suggests he was right. On the other hand, Brecht the theorist often contradicted the results of Brecht the author. We need merely look at Mother Courage and Her Children for an example of how they disagree. The theorist thinks Mother Courage is a ridiculous, even monstrous figure at the end of the play, but the author has created someone we pity and admire.
Looking at the picture as a piece of the Brecht canon, there certainly are a lot of elements that strike me as Brechtian. Ideologically, the film is obsessed with the importance of mutual cooperation and, more importantly, the way the needs of the many outweigh the desires and petty moralities of the few. Again and again, a character is forced to embrace a behavior that is normally wrong, such as Nasha faking unfaithfulness or Svodoba refusing to take responsibility for his actions, because of the greater need of the group.
Also, there is a keen insight into the way groups and hierarchies function that represent the Brechtian fascination with the street scene. The opening, in which a crowd of industrialists and bureaucrats argue as they wait for the Reichsprotector, for example, highlights the contradictory impulses and desires of the toadies in the corporatist fascist state in an efficient and telling way. The same in a street scene where Anna Lee's attempts to reach Gestapo headquarters is discussed by the community, which then bands together to ostracize her.]
That's not to say that the rest of the film is bad or uninteresting. Fritz Lang is directing with James Wong Howe as his DP! The whole film plays out in a real world played by people so varied and homely in appearance (even our leads, when they are good-looking, are of boys and girls next door type) that even the smallest part is given the lived-in feel of a sketch or a woodcut.
And there really is an amazing visual eye and design sense to the film, like in a Gestapo investigator's office that is filled with clearly looted furniture and art mingled with shabby office furniture, or a horrifying series of sequences in Gestapo headquarters that pave the way for Orwell's description of similar spaces in 1984.
One of several arresting images from the Gestapo HQ sequence.
There's so much to talk about here, from the daring and effective decision to have the Germans speak in German while the Czechs speak English, to the weird sense of dissonance brought on by Walter Brennan pretending to be an intellectual European when you want him to be croaking at John Wayne, to the way that Alexander Granach's Gestapo officer comes off as a perverse, sadistic but compelling version of Hercule Poirot.
But I'd rather encourage you to watch the film yourself and come back and leave your thoughts in the comments. It really is an amazing, under-rated film that deserves further exposure.
This blog post is part of the For the Love of Film (Noir) Blog-A-Thon, which is raising money to restore the influential but obscure noir The Sound of Fury. If you are interested in donating to this important cause, click here.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Okay, BADLANDS is a pretty awesome movie...
but why does everything I've ever heard about it focuses on the lyricism and ignores the dark humor pervading it? I don't see how you can hear Spacek's narration and not read into it some irony (on the behalf of the film, not of Spacek's character).
Also, it would make an interesting companion piece to the Coen Brothers' True Grit. Both feature female leads and narrators who are introduced into a world of violence starting with the murder of their father, then find themselves being dragged along by older men. And at the end, their efforts feel empty and leave them marked. The visual tone of the films is also similar, elegiac and beautiful while showing some really messed-up stuff happening.
Also, it would make an interesting companion piece to the Coen Brothers' True Grit. Both feature female leads and narrators who are introduced into a world of violence starting with the murder of their father, then find themselves being dragged along by older men. And at the end, their efforts feel empty and leave them marked. The visual tone of the films is also similar, elegiac and beautiful while showing some really messed-up stuff happening.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
"It's not a screenplay. It's my life." June Film-log
While I was going through and deleting old drafts that were no more than a half-written sentence, I came across these two entries from my June film-log that were in publishable shape.
Popcorn (1991, d. Mark Herrier/Alan Ormsby?) - The release date says '91, but almost every other aspect of this movie screams '80s. A bunch of college students holding a horror movie marathon at an old movie theatre find themselves getting killed by a face-changing maniac. Most of the murders are committed with props from '50s b-movies (think William Castle-themed murders). Reasonably inoffensive, but does nothing both Scream, Darkman and Waxwork did better, with better casts. Alan Ormsby, as screenwriter and possible co-director, proves that Bob Clark deserves most of the credit for their collaborations. I wasn't even interested in finishing it. D
Up (2009, d. Pete Docter) - Don't know what I can add. Great film about an old man & a little kid finding in each other the family they've lost. The first 15 minutes, which elapses with almost no dialogue, has to be the poignant depiction of love and loss I've seen in a while. Personally, I love how the dog henchmen are still dogs underneath it all, down to the suspicion of mailmen. A+
Popcorn (1991, d. Mark Herrier/Alan Ormsby?) - The release date says '91, but almost every other aspect of this movie screams '80s. A bunch of college students holding a horror movie marathon at an old movie theatre find themselves getting killed by a face-changing maniac. Most of the murders are committed with props from '50s b-movies (think William Castle-themed murders). Reasonably inoffensive, but does nothing both Scream, Darkman and Waxwork did better, with better casts. Alan Ormsby, as screenwriter and possible co-director, proves that Bob Clark deserves most of the credit for their collaborations. I wasn't even interested in finishing it. D
Up (2009, d. Pete Docter) - Don't know what I can add. Great film about an old man & a little kid finding in each other the family they've lost. The first 15 minutes, which elapses with almost no dialogue, has to be the poignant depiction of love and loss I've seen in a while. Personally, I love how the dog henchmen are still dogs underneath it all, down to the suspicion of mailmen. A+
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Film Log: October/Now I have a DVR Edition, Part 1
They Died With Their Boots On (d. Raoul Walsh, 1941) - An Errol Flynn/Olivia DeHavilland swashbuckler, except this one is about William Armstrong Custer. Some of the charm wears off the duo when they're serving a bipolar piece of historical whitewash that simultaneously glorifies the military while trying to be anti-imperialist and anti-big business. This must be the only Civil War film that has ever tried to turn Winfield Scott (played by Sydney Greenstreet) into a hero! The Little Big Horn sequence is well-paced and well-shot, making me wish for a Little Big Horn movie that embraced it as a horror film without dehumanizing the Native Americans. B-
The Prowler (d. Joseph Zito, 1981) - Not to be confused with the Joseph Losey film of the same name starring Van Heflin, this early 80's slasher film has only two things this film in its favor: Tom Savini effects and a striking costume for the killer. Neither of these are enough to make it worth the 90 minutes you'd spend watching it. And despite the way Farley Granger and Lawrence Tierney are billed, they're barely in it for 5 minutes. Steer clear. D
The Leopard Man (d. Jacques Tourneur, 1943) When a leopard gets loose in the wilderness around a New Mexican resort town, people blame it for a series of shocking murders that strike the town. A couple of wonderfully atmospheric scenes make good use of sound design and expressionist lighting. It really doesn't hold the imagination the way that I Walked With a Zombie does, and the serial killer plot is more notable as a footnote in the history of Hollywood's handling of the subject. Still, enjoyable and only about 75 minutes long. C+
Executive Suite (d. Robert Wise, 1954) - I have no idea how this film is virtually unknown. Fans of Mad Men would love this movie, which examines the power struggles of various executives after the main boss dies, while depicting the executive Man in the Gray Flannel Suit lifestyle in detail. Robert Wise is at his best, opening with a breathtaking long-take from a character's POV. On top of that, there are amazing performances by Walter Pidgeon, Frederic March, William Holden, Barbara Stanwyck, Shelley Winters and Louis Calhern. On top of that, it's got a smart script that's pro-capitalism but smart enough to recognize the problems in it. A film that deals with issues still relevant today but without ever preaching, and, on top of that, well put-together. A-
The Prowler (d. Joseph Zito, 1981) - Not to be confused with the Joseph Losey film of the same name starring Van Heflin, this early 80's slasher film has only two things this film in its favor: Tom Savini effects and a striking costume for the killer. Neither of these are enough to make it worth the 90 minutes you'd spend watching it. And despite the way Farley Granger and Lawrence Tierney are billed, they're barely in it for 5 minutes. Steer clear. D
The Leopard Man (d. Jacques Tourneur, 1943) When a leopard gets loose in the wilderness around a New Mexican resort town, people blame it for a series of shocking murders that strike the town. A couple of wonderfully atmospheric scenes make good use of sound design and expressionist lighting. It really doesn't hold the imagination the way that I Walked With a Zombie does, and the serial killer plot is more notable as a footnote in the history of Hollywood's handling of the subject. Still, enjoyable and only about 75 minutes long. C+
Executive Suite (d. Robert Wise, 1954) - I have no idea how this film is virtually unknown. Fans of Mad Men would love this movie, which examines the power struggles of various executives after the main boss dies, while depicting the executive Man in the Gray Flannel Suit lifestyle in detail. Robert Wise is at his best, opening with a breathtaking long-take from a character's POV. On top of that, there are amazing performances by Walter Pidgeon, Frederic March, William Holden, Barbara Stanwyck, Shelley Winters and Louis Calhern. On top of that, it's got a smart script that's pro-capitalism but smart enough to recognize the problems in it. A film that deals with issues still relevant today but without ever preaching, and, on top of that, well put-together. A-
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Jennifer Lynch's SURVEILLANCE (2008)
"You probably read the end of the book first."
"Yeah."
"That's no way to live"
SURVEILLANCE (2008)
Directed by Jennifer Lynch
Starring Bill Pullman, Julia Ormond, Michael Ironsides, Cheri Oteri, French Stewart, Kent Harper, Ryan Simpkins and Pell James
Synopsis: FBI Agents Sam Hallaway (Bill Pullman) and Elizabeth Anderson (Julia Ormond) come to a small Midwestern town to interrogate the 3 surviving victims of a brutal shoot-out.
This is a movie that is substantially less than the sum of its part.
Admittedly, Jennifer Lynch's directing career has hardly been fruitful. The last film she did was Boxing Helena about 15 years ago, and critics were less than kind to it. She broke her back and raised a kid, which took her out of the game for most of that time. She has had to suffer a lot of comparisons to her dad, heaven knows.
But the concept is strong (a series of interrogations where everyone on both sides of the table is holding something back) and Lynch pulled in a fascinating mix of has-beens, character actors and nobodies. And she manages to get strong performances from some of them, including a child actor who is actually surprisingly good.
But, oh, how Lynch squanders it all.
First of all, you might assume this concept offers at least a couple obvious but compelling ways of telling the narrative. Perhaps you go victim by victim, showing each person's distorted version of events in ways that call the other accounts into question. Or maybe you alternate between the accounts and the investigators' attempts to make sense of them.
Or maybe you just show exactly what happens to everyone with the exception of one or two pieces of information to hold back for a "shocking" twist? Because that's exactly what Jennifer Lynch does.
And there's little else to hold onto in the film. After a couple of evocative shots in the opening, there's little of visual interest. At one or two moment, she seems to realize the creepiness of the endless plains the Midwest holds, but not to worry, that only lasts for a moment before we're back to mediocre camerawork.
If this movie wasn't so disposable, there'd be so much to pick apart about the stupidity of its morality and conception of violence. But it doesn't even rise to some height of risible violence. It doesn't examine (or do) anything.
And to make it worse, somehow some of the actors (presumably under Lynch's direction) do manage to make the ciphers they're given compelling. Julia Ormond & Cheri Oteri are particularly noteworthy, and even Bill Pullman is decent.
I know it's easy to complain that Jennifer Lynch is just doing a sub par version of her dad's work. But this could have been a nasty, brutal piece of pulp exploitation, and she doesn't do that either. Whatever creative instincts she has, wherever she picked them up, she can't make them her own.
Grade: C-
"Yeah."
"That's no way to live"
SURVEILLANCE (2008)
Directed by Jennifer Lynch
Starring Bill Pullman, Julia Ormond, Michael Ironsides, Cheri Oteri, French Stewart, Kent Harper, Ryan Simpkins and Pell James
Synopsis: FBI Agents Sam Hallaway (Bill Pullman) and Elizabeth Anderson (Julia Ormond) come to a small Midwestern town to interrogate the 3 surviving victims of a brutal shoot-out.
This is a movie that is substantially less than the sum of its part.
Admittedly, Jennifer Lynch's directing career has hardly been fruitful. The last film she did was Boxing Helena about 15 years ago, and critics were less than kind to it. She broke her back and raised a kid, which took her out of the game for most of that time. She has had to suffer a lot of comparisons to her dad, heaven knows.
But the concept is strong (a series of interrogations where everyone on both sides of the table is holding something back) and Lynch pulled in a fascinating mix of has-beens, character actors and nobodies. And she manages to get strong performances from some of them, including a child actor who is actually surprisingly good.
But, oh, how Lynch squanders it all.
First of all, you might assume this concept offers at least a couple obvious but compelling ways of telling the narrative. Perhaps you go victim by victim, showing each person's distorted version of events in ways that call the other accounts into question. Or maybe you alternate between the accounts and the investigators' attempts to make sense of them.
Or maybe you just show exactly what happens to everyone with the exception of one or two pieces of information to hold back for a "shocking" twist? Because that's exactly what Jennifer Lynch does.
And there's little else to hold onto in the film. After a couple of evocative shots in the opening, there's little of visual interest. At one or two moment, she seems to realize the creepiness of the endless plains the Midwest holds, but not to worry, that only lasts for a moment before we're back to mediocre camerawork.
If this movie wasn't so disposable, there'd be so much to pick apart about the stupidity of its morality and conception of violence. But it doesn't even rise to some height of risible violence. It doesn't examine (or do) anything.
And to make it worse, somehow some of the actors (presumably under Lynch's direction) do manage to make the ciphers they're given compelling. Julia Ormond & Cheri Oteri are particularly noteworthy, and even Bill Pullman is decent.
I know it's easy to complain that Jennifer Lynch is just doing a sub par version of her dad's work. But this could have been a nasty, brutal piece of pulp exploitation, and she doesn't do that either. Whatever creative instincts she has, wherever she picked them up, she can't make them her own.
Grade: C-
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Screening Log: December - January
Le Corbeau (d. Henri-Georges Clouzot) - A series of poison pen letters nearly destroy a rural French village. I think this is basically the film Michel Haneke has wanted to make his entire life. Clouzot has a keen eye for small-town hypocrisy and the cruelty of children, both in his villains and his heroes. At the end, you realize the most hateful character is the most victimized person of all, while a friendly, charming man is actually a black-hearted, twisted human being. A-
Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (d. Terry Gilliam) - Dr. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) makes a deal with the Devil (Tom Waits) to win more souls to imagination than to earthly delights and... ? Visually stimulating and beautiful, with great moments of acid wit about wish-fulfillment. Too bad the plot is a jumble and Gilliam can't make up his mind who the main character. That said, Gilliam displays a fascinating amount of cynicism towards self-proclaimed prophets of imagination, which I never would have expected. C-
Jack Goes Boating (d. Phillip Seymour Hoffman) - A character piece about Jack (Hoffman), a man whose life seems stuck in neutral, finally getting his shit together, as his best friend (John Ortiz)'s life falls apart. Hoffman's got a great eye for color and visuals (rare in actors turned director), and his relationship with Amy Ryan is realistic yet incredibly sweet. The movie falters most when pushing the melodrama of Ortiz and Daphne Rubin Vega's relationship. C+
The Errand Boy (d. Jerry Lewis) - Jerry Lewis is an errand boy who is supposed to spy on movie productions, but mostly just messes them up. The promise of the high concept is mostly ignored, but for every stock piece of Lewis shtick, there's a sequence of absurdist wit, like Lewis continually sitting down to eat lunch in the action sequences of other films, or when a long shot out of an Minelli musical caps his ruining a musical sequence. B-
Hot Rod (d. Akiva Schaffer) - A dirt-bike riding stuntman wannabe (Andy Samberg) tries to raise money for his dad's heart operation. Story is secondary, and like Lewis's film, it's more about the comedic heights than a sustained comic genius, often defaulting to the view that the 80s are funny. With the Lonely Island crew, Will Arnett, Ian McShane, Danny McBride, Sissy Spacek and Isla Fisher, this has to be the most overqualified cast I've seen in a small comedy, and everyone outside of the Lonely Island crew is underutilized. That said, if you like SNL Digital Shorts, there are at least 4 or 5 sequences that could have made good ones. B-
UHF (d. Jay Levey , 2nd viewing) "Starring Weird Al Yankovic" is rarely a good sign, especially in the '80s, when the shrillness of his shtick often overrode whatever humor there was in his music. Moments like "Gandhi 2" or that involve Michael Richards and/or Kevin McCarthy work well. Would have been better if Frank Tashlin or Joe Dante could have directed it. Maybe. C-
Creepshow (d. George Romero) Hit-or-miss anthology mimicking old horror comics, but Romero probably gets the best overall cast he'd ever have (Leslie Nielsen, Hal Holbrook, Ed Harris, Ted Danson). "They're Creeping Up On You" and "Something to Tide You Over" hit that sweet spot of misanthropy, camp & dark humor that EC Comics stood for. A-
The Big Sleep (d. Howard Hawks) - It's the 40's Transformer: Revenge of the Fallen! In the sense that the whole story fails to hang together, & is more about individual cool scenes at the expense of the whole. However, what makes these scenes "cool" are dialogue, performance and mise-en-scene, not shakycam and incomprehensible action. Bogart and Bacall make it all go down smooth... B+
Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (d. Terry Gilliam) - Dr. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) makes a deal with the Devil (Tom Waits) to win more souls to imagination than to earthly delights and... ? Visually stimulating and beautiful, with great moments of acid wit about wish-fulfillment. Too bad the plot is a jumble and Gilliam can't make up his mind who the main character. That said, Gilliam displays a fascinating amount of cynicism towards self-proclaimed prophets of imagination, which I never would have expected. C-
Jack Goes Boating (d. Phillip Seymour Hoffman) - A character piece about Jack (Hoffman), a man whose life seems stuck in neutral, finally getting his shit together, as his best friend (John Ortiz)'s life falls apart. Hoffman's got a great eye for color and visuals (rare in actors turned director), and his relationship with Amy Ryan is realistic yet incredibly sweet. The movie falters most when pushing the melodrama of Ortiz and Daphne Rubin Vega's relationship. C+
The Errand Boy (d. Jerry Lewis) - Jerry Lewis is an errand boy who is supposed to spy on movie productions, but mostly just messes them up. The promise of the high concept is mostly ignored, but for every stock piece of Lewis shtick, there's a sequence of absurdist wit, like Lewis continually sitting down to eat lunch in the action sequences of other films, or when a long shot out of an Minelli musical caps his ruining a musical sequence. B-
Hot Rod (d. Akiva Schaffer) - A dirt-bike riding stuntman wannabe (Andy Samberg) tries to raise money for his dad's heart operation. Story is secondary, and like Lewis's film, it's more about the comedic heights than a sustained comic genius, often defaulting to the view that the 80s are funny. With the Lonely Island crew, Will Arnett, Ian McShane, Danny McBride, Sissy Spacek and Isla Fisher, this has to be the most overqualified cast I've seen in a small comedy, and everyone outside of the Lonely Island crew is underutilized. That said, if you like SNL Digital Shorts, there are at least 4 or 5 sequences that could have made good ones. B-
UHF (d. Jay Levey , 2nd viewing) "Starring Weird Al Yankovic" is rarely a good sign, especially in the '80s, when the shrillness of his shtick often overrode whatever humor there was in his music. Moments like "Gandhi 2" or that involve Michael Richards and/or Kevin McCarthy work well. Would have been better if Frank Tashlin or Joe Dante could have directed it. Maybe. C-
Creepshow (d. George Romero) Hit-or-miss anthology mimicking old horror comics, but Romero probably gets the best overall cast he'd ever have (Leslie Nielsen, Hal Holbrook, Ed Harris, Ted Danson). "They're Creeping Up On You" and "Something to Tide You Over" hit that sweet spot of misanthropy, camp & dark humor that EC Comics stood for. A-
The Big Sleep (d. Howard Hawks) - It's the 40's Transformer: Revenge of the Fallen! In the sense that the whole story fails to hang together, & is more about individual cool scenes at the expense of the whole. However, what makes these scenes "cool" are dialogue, performance and mise-en-scene, not shakycam and incomprehensible action. Bogart and Bacall make it all go down smooth... B+
Friday, June 26, 2009
Screening Log: June
Just to make sure I keep posting on a regular basis, I've decided to start recording the movies I've seen. I'm borrowing the format/idea from Forager Blog, who, if I remember it correctly, borrowed it from someone else (though I can't find the post). None of this is a comprehensive discussion of the movies I've seen, just things that struck me. Unlike him, I'm using a A through F grading scale. A is amazing (i.e. I'd put this on my list of favorite films), B is well-done (worthwhile viewing, no matter what your specific preferences), C is acceptable, with noteworthy elements, D is poorly done and boring, F is awful (but occasionally awful in a redeeming way).
So:
The Comfort of Strangers (d. Paul Schrader, 1990, DVD) - Adapted by Harold Pinter from a novel by Ian McEwan. Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson are English tourists visiting Venice, who run across a mysterious and charming couple played by Christopher Walken and Helen Mirren. Wonderful script that plays up the terrifying elements of the most banal, normal things, and the Venetian shooting locations really add both a menace and a thrill to everything. The cast is uniformly wonderful (between this and Cemetery Man, I really wish Rupert Everett did more horror). However, it's a sweet spot of Schrader and Pinter's hobby horses, and neither of them are doing everything that original, even though they do it well. Climax doesn't measure up the menace and weirdness established before. B-
The Man from Laramie (d. Anthony Mann, 1955, TV) Jimmy Stewart is hunting down the man who sold Apaches the rifles that killed his brother, and Donald Crisp is an aging cattle baron who might be responsible. It's the Duke of Gloucester plot from King Lear, set in the old West. Arthur Kennedy is particularly good as Crisp's hired hand and would-be adopted son, all competence and reason with an undercurrent of desperation. Beautifully shot, most of the violence is speedy and fascinatingly one-sided. As soon as things come to blows, the issue is usually decided. The tacked-on happy ending lets some of the air out of the balloon. And Stewart's romance with Cathy O'Donnell has no chemistry. A-
Punisher: War Zone (d. Lexi Alexander, 2008, DVD) - Third Punisher movie, third reboot, probably the one that comes closest to working. The Punisher (Ray Stevenson) is on a hunt for criminals, specifically Jigsaw (Dominic West) and his brother (Doug Hutchinson). No plot really beyond that. The screenwriter and director seem to understand that Punisher stories are about people doing nasty things to each other, in occasionally comic ways. Someone's face is literally pummeled into his skull. Another criminal is shot out of the sky with a rocket launcher as he jumps from building to building. The actors are mostly flailing around between cypher, hammy and wooden, with the exception of Stevenson and West. The plot doesn't even make sense. But the cinematography is both painstaking and hilariously over-the-top. The film's final shot is the best summation of the character I have ever seen. C -
The Tales of Hoffman (d. Powell & Pressburger, 1951, DVD) - Fairy tale writer ETA Hoffman (Robert Rounsenville) finds his attempts at romance blocked at every turn by the bureaucrat Lindorf (Robert Helpmann) or one of his stand-ins. A movie version of the Offenbach opera, but not a filmed opera performance. The libretto is okay, the music not to my taste. But all the actors are marvelous with great physical presence (Moira Shearer and Helpmann are the stand-outs) and the mise-en-scene in this film is a fore-runner to both the OCD perfection of P.T Anderson and the over-the-top fantastic of Frank Miller/Zach Snyder/Robert Rodriguez. Every fantasy/sci-fi/comic book artist in the world must wish they were that good. An optimistic fantasy-romance with one of the most brutal endings I've ever seen. A -
Death Walks at Midnight (d. Luciano Ercoli, 1972, DVD) - Nieves Navarro is a fashion model who remembers witnessing a murder while on drugs. Problem is, the murder was already solved by the police, but the crime doesn't fit her memories. Like most gialli, the acting is unconvincing (though better in Italian than in the English dub). Beautiful camera-work, with special attention paid to what is occurring in the edges of the frame. Extra credit to the screenwriters, who take what seems like a shaggy dog story and show that there is a rhyme and reason to what is happening. You will not be able to predict what happens next, but you don't feel as if the film-makers cheated. C+
Ransom (d. Ron Howard, 1996, Netflix Instant Viewing) - Mel Gibson and Rene Russo's kid is kidnapped, and the kidnapper's ringleader is a cop (Gary Sinise). This is the one where Gibson makes the ransom money into the bounty, remember? Ron Howard's direction is only competent, but the script and performances ground it and add tension up through the third act. At that point, the action movie cliches finally overwhelm careful detail and specifics. Gary Sinise deserves special credit for constructing such a perversely evil character which he never apologizes for. Case in point: an amazing monologue delivered over a voice-scrambled walkie talkie as he leads Gibson to the money-drop. Also the one sequence where Howard shines, as he uses shadows and lights on a NY expressway for all they are worth. B- for first 3 quarters, C- for the whole
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